We hoped that AMD has by now figured out that the days of K8 glory are long gone. This doesn’t seem to be the case, as the new Atom counterpart platform, codenamed Conesus, is K8 architecture based.

Luckily for all of us, the K8 architecture is much more advanced than Atom, but Atom will always have uber-dominant sub 4W power consumtion, something that a K8 Athlon can only dream of. This is a 65nm CPU, not 45nm as we previously believed, and this dual-core will come with a total of 1MB L2 cache and DDR2 memory support. It will come in a BGA package, something that will fit nicely in ultraportable / mini notebook designs.

We’ve tested the latest energy efficient K8 Athlon, the 3400e here, and we’ve proved that this sub-25W part is faster than a single-core Atom and this is the road that AMD wants to take. The way we understand things AMD promised 25W TDP envelope for chipset + CPU and since Conesus is dual-core, you can bet that Atom dual-cores for notebooks will launch in 2009.

We hope to see these designs before Computex, early June 2009, but at this time we are not aware of any fixed introduction plans.