As we expected on Monday, today AMD revealed its new Athlon XP 2400+ and 2600+ processors. According to the official statement, the release is timed to coincide with the third anniversary of Athlon processor. To tell you the truth, I am not sure, what exactly the company wants to celebrate: the announcement of K7 or its actual appearance in stores: the Athlon family of CPUs was formally announced on June 23rd, 1999, while on August 9th the same year, AMD unveiled its 650MHz processor and started to retail the whole line in late August. Anyway, beginning from today and up to Monday, August 26th, when Intel launches its Pentium 4 2.8GHz, Sunnyvale-based semiconductor-maker will hold the crown of the fastest CPU produced.

All the information presented by us earlier appeared to be correct. The newcomers will be clocked at 2GHz and 2.133GHz for Athlon XP 2400+ and 2600+ accordingly. Luckily for the owners of current motherboards as well as the manufacturers of mobos, CPUs mentioned above utilise 133MHz bus. The new microprocessors are made using 0.13 micron technology and are based on the new version of Thoroughbred core with CPUID 681 (the CPUID number of the previous Thoroughbred revision is 680). The changes performed in the new stepping detached thermal and electrical specs, consequently, the new processors now runs with admissible heat dissipation on much higher core-clocks compared to the predecessors.

Accompanied by the announcement, price reduction has also took place. The new price-list on AMD Athlon XP and Mobile Duron processors looks as follows:

Athlon XP 2600+ - $297
Athlon XP 2400+ - $193
Athlon XP 2200+ - $183
Athlon XP 2100+ - $174
Athlon XP 2000+ - $155
Athlon XP 1900+ - $139
Athlon XP 1800+ - $130
Athlon XP 1700+ - $114
Mobile Athlon XP 1800+ - $301;
Mobile Athlon XP 1700+ - $205;
Mobile Athlon XP 1600+ - $180;
Mobile Athlon XP 1500+ - $169;
Mobile Athlon XP 1400+ - $150;
Mobile Duron 1.3GHz - $89;
Mobile Duron 1.2GHz - $69;
Mobile Duron 1.1GHz - $59;

As we may notice, the former fastest Athlon XP 2200+ have fallen down about 21%, while its lower clocked companions have lost from 5% to 10% of their previous cost. I doubt that this price decrease can be considered as significant, nevertheless, I should point out that this should be enough for the company to have the best price/performance ratio in the industry after Intel will cut their prices on the 1st of September. In order to proof this statement, I will remind you the prices for Intel Pentium 4 CPUs after they are reduced on the date claimed:

Pentium 4 2.8GHz - $508;
Pentium 4 2.66GHz - $401;
Pentium 4 2.53GHz - $243;
Pentium 4 2.4GHz and 2.26GHz - $193;
Pentium4 2.0GHz - $163.

Although AMD is the first in formal introducing the new processors, they seem not to be able to start widely selling their latest products until September, meanwhile Intel already supplies its partners with Pentium 4 running at 2.8GHz (see this news-story).

To learn more details about AMD Athlon 2600+ CPU, please turn to our article dedicated to this processor.