See? I told you. They are just Athlon XPs with a facelift...

'"There is overlap between the two product lines," said Bahr Mahony, a mobile marketing manager with AMD, who conceded that, in some cases, the Sempron processors could be the same die as Athlon XPs, specified at different clock frequencies.' - eetimes.

OK, maybe I am exaggerating a little: the on-chip cache sizes are different, as well as some other differences in quality. Still, don't expect anything radical from this chip. But then, its not meant to be...

The thing is that the Althon XPs won't support PCI Express. I'm not too miffed if the new Althon's aren't some super-duper revolution in technology...so long as they work and will support what's comming down the pipe, long live the budget processor!

Besides, I think we've seen what happens when you try to out-do your product. You have to recall it due to bugs, cancel it because it's too hot or can't create a stable proto-type, or various other things.

The Sempron is aimed at systems that use onboard video 90% of the time. They almost never have AGP slots so let's not even wonder about PCI-e.

I'm sure they had some leftover Thoroughbreds & just decided to sell them without hurting sales from AthlonXP CPUs based on the Barton core.

Long live the Pentium !

{Joke, please, let's not start that... }