AMD to ship Athlon 64s as Athlon XPs

AMD's upcoming Athlon 64 low-end variants, codenamed 'Paris' and 'Victoria', will not be offered as 64-bit processors but as 32-bit upgrades to the current Athlon XP line.

So claims Xbit Labs, having glanced at the chip maker's latest roadmaps.

Paris and Victoria emerged earlier this year, when they were revealed to be cut-down versions of the Athlon 64. At the time, it was assumed that was simply a matter of their smaller, 256KB L2 cache. Paris will be fabbed at 130nm, and is due to ship sometime during Q4 2003. Victoria will debut late Q2 or early Q3 2004.

However, it now appears that the chips will not operate in 64-bit mode. The Athlon 64 supports three modes of operation: 32-bit 'legacy' mode, dual 32/64-bit 'compatibility' mode and pure 64-bit mode. The last two require a 64-bit OS, and are essentially sub-modes of the chip's 64-bit 'long' mode.