The Athlon 64 processor family will fully transition to 939-pin, AMD has told its vendors. Last orders are expected until June and will be delivered until December. Good news for everyone who wants PCI-e, or wants to snap up a bargain 754 Athlon 64 & motherboard. Another reason for this change is the X2 (dual core Athlon 64), AMD seems to be trying to rapidly ramp up production for the new chip. Leaving no room for the older design. There is no word yet on whether the Sempron will also go exclusively 939 as well. For the consumer AMD spelled out the advantages of this move: Performance: A higher system I/O bandwidth of 14.4GB/s compared to 9.6GB/s delivered by the AMD Athlon 64 processor in Socket 754 Low Power: Ideal for use in smaller form factor enclosures, digital home and entertainment solutions and commercial desktop PCs. AMD's Cool'n'Quiet(tm) Technology: Cool'n'Quiet technology is supported as standard on Socket 939 mainboards, reducing processor power, heat and system noise even further! PCI Express(tm) Infrastructure: Huge selection and availability of Socket 939 PCI-Express mainboards: discrete graphics or integrated graphics solutions, ATX and uATX. Ready for dual-core processor: Socket 939 offers a single architecture for both the single and dual-core AMD processors. Source: Neowin.net
Yeah, makes sence really, it's been a while since a new skt 754 Athlon came out hasn't it. Good news for us all though.
