Palomino becomes Athlon 4
Re-branding to compete with Intel's Pentium 4 line?
AMD is set to launch the first of its Palomino Athlon processors next week, and according to an anonymous source quoted by Ace's Hardware, the real name of the processor will actually be Athlon 4. Ace has a theory on the name change, too. Back in the day, K6-2 was positioned against Pentium II, and its successor, the K6-III was aimed at Pentium III. The name Athlon 4 is, in the interests of maintaining some level of marketing condescendence, a way of demonstrating that Palomino is to compete directly with Pentium 4. A logical step. Incidentally, Palomino isn't the same processor as Barton, which we spoke about earlier this week. Barton is set for a Q2 2002 release. Palomino could turn up next week. Related Feature - AMD Athlon using DDR SDRAM