AMD has informed its partners that a number of old 45nm Phenom II processors will receive the 'end-of-life' status later this year. The list contains five Phenom II dual-cores and quad-cores that will ship until December this year. The fastest of models to be discontinued is the Phenom II X4 965, based on a 'Deneb' core. The 965 has a 3.4 GHz clock frequency, 125 W TDP and an 8 MB cache. This quad-core will be available until September. The slightly slower Phenom II X4 955, which is clocked at 3.2 GHz, will be phased out in December.
Three dual-cores of the old Phenom II architecture will also be abandoned. All three of those are based on the 45nm 'Callisto' core, which is a chip with four physical cores, two of which are disabled in software. In the past, these processors were quite popular because they could often be 'upgraded' to quad-cores. The affected models are the Phenom II X2 565 (3.4 GHz), the 560 (3.3 GHz) and AMD's Phenom II X2 555 (3.2 GHz). These chips have a DDR3-1333 dual-channel memory controller, 80W TDP and 7 MB of cache memory. Like the Phenom II X4 955, these CPUs will be discontinued in December.
The end of an era, AMD discontinues Phenom II series
