In a bid to boost sales of its mobile CPUs, Advanced Micro Devices has quietly returned Athlon 64-branded chips into its mobile family. AMD Athlon 64 X2 TK processors are specifically designed for notebooks, as they feature the S1 form-factor, have thermal design power of just 31W and are produced using the 65nm process technology. The chips have 512KB of secondary-level cache (256KB per core), two times less compared to currently available AMD Turion 64 X2 processors, but still feature two processing engines and thus cannot be sold under the AMD Sempron trade-mark.
It is not clear whether the new chips are just custom-design for select clients, or if AMD is preparing a low-cost dual-core lineup for mobile computers and, perhaps, desktops. Currently the TK-53 (1700MHz, 512KB L2 cache) and TK-55 (1800MHz, 512KB L2 cache) have been confirmed, one of which is listed in AMD"s database of notebook processors and another is used in Toshiba Satellite P205D-S7438 laptop announced recently.