The Athlon II X2 260U will work at 1.8GHz and will have 2MB of total cache. Like other Regors, it fits Socket AM3 and supports DDR3 1066.

Although AMD and Intel both plan to launch their six-core desktop processors only in Q2 2010, it doesn’t mean that you can’t put together a six-core desktop system today if you want to. AMD has been offering Opteron processors with six cores from Istanbul family for about 6 months already. That is why if you find a CPU like that and a single-CPU Socket F mainboard, you will have a six-core platform that may become a great solution for a desktop. This is exactly what we have done today during our test session.

So far we know of three Rana CPUs, Athlon II X3 425 at 2.7GHz, 435 at 2.9GHz and 445 at 3.1GHz. They all feature 3x512kB of L2 cache, but like Propus quads, they have no L3 cache at all. This should have a very positive effect on the price, and it seems prices will start at just over €50 for the cheapest 2.7GHz version. This sounds like pretty good value for money, and the only thing to complain about is the rather high, 95W TDP. If power consumption is a big issue for you, at some point AMD will launch 400e and 405e versions, clocked at 2.2GHz and 2.3GHz.

Although AMD has not yet announced the Congo platform, Hewlett-Packard (HP) has already launched s 12.1-inch ultra-thin notebook (DV2-1113AX) in Taiwan at a price at NT$25,000 (US$776.24) that features an Athlon Neo MV-40 CPU (that will be used in the Congo platform) combined with the RS690E chipset from the Yukon platform.