Despite its $600 million losses registered in the previous fiscal year, AMD has found enough resources to develop a new high end CPU, according to industry insiders.

The Sunnyvale, CA-based chips manufacturer is apparently readying a new dual core CPU targeted at enthusiasts, which will be the last of the successful Athlon series. According to sources from Taiwanese motherboard makers, AMD’s new product will be Athlon X2 6400+, the successor of Athlon 6000+, and it will be set to function at 3.2GHz, with 2MB of cache memory.

The main target for Athlon 6400+ is Intel’s Core 2 Duo E6850, and although it cannot yet beat the performance of the latter, AMD’s chip is quite near but is limited by its restraint overclocking capabilities. According to the aforementioned sources, the price tag for Athlon 6400+ will be somewhere between $220 and $248, also not far from E6850’s price.

According to DigiTimes, in testing, performance of the 6400+ is 10-15% below the E6850, and we should expect it “shortly” on the market.

AMD’s Phenom platform will not enjoy the same fate however, with the company’s COO and president Dirk Meyer saying that "we’ll be shipping the Phenom variance of the new product in Q4 [2007] but frankly, that’s going to be late enough in Q4 that while there’ll be some contribution to the bottom line, it won’t be substantial". That means that an optimistic ETA for Phenom is actually Q1 2008.