AMD's new naming scheme explained

As you might have noticed, AMD has moved to a new naming scheme with the latest Athlon X2 BE-2xxx processors. So what does the new letters and numbers mean? Well, it's not as hard as you think and AMD has given it some thought.

The first letter will be G, B or L, G being a premium product, B an intermediate product and finally L is for entry level value processors. The second letter is related to power consumption. P is for processors over 65W, S for parts around 65W and finally E for those under 65W. It wouldn't have hurt to have a few more categories, but it seems like AMD is trying to keep it simple.

AMD will have four families once the Phenom launches, although the Athlon and Sempron brands will be kept for a little while longer. This means that a 1000-series CPU will be a single core Athlon or Sempron, the 2000-series is a dual core Athlon, then there's a jump to the 6000-series which is the dual-core Phenom and this is followed by the 7000-series which is the quad-core Phenom.

Apparently the second digit represents a relative core frequency within the product family, although it's not quite clear how this works, especially when you consider the BE-2350 and BE-2300, the first one is clocked at 2.1GHz with the latter being a 1.9GHz part. It makes even less sense when AMD states that the final two digits are for use with future upgrade functions. The soon to launch BE-2400 part is clocked at 2.3GHz and the speed difference between these three parts doesn't seem to agree with AMD's new naming scheme. Oh well.

You can read more over at Digitimes