The Athlon brand will stay on the market for a while. This is what we learned this week at Cebit and we already wrote that Propus will end up branded as Athlon X4 rather than Phenom II X4.

AMD wants to separate high end and entry level markets with other brands as since Athlon was very successful it will stay with us for a while. Phenom II is doing really well and it is establishing itself as a high end brand for AMD. The funny thing is that since Phenom II picked up a lot of positive comments, the original K10, Phenom Agena 65nm started selling better.

So, the Athlon brand will target the mainstream and sub-mainstream market, while Phenom will be sort of a high end brand with Phenom Black Edition targeting the overclockers and ultra enthusiasts.