Do not make the mistake of thinking that because my conclusion is the same as another person's that my reasoning is the same
SAN FRANCISCO—Advanced Micro Devices Inc. later today will lay down the second half of its bet on 64-bit computing.
The Sunnyvale, Calif., company will introduce new chips at an event here. The much-touted Athlon 64 and mobile Athlon 64 chips for PCs and notebooks feature the same capabilities as AMD's Opteron counterpart for servers and workstations, which the company released in April, in particular the ability to run 32-bit and 64-bit applications equally well.
AMD is launching the more mainstream chips, the Athlon 64 3200+ for desktops and the Athlon 64 +3000 for notebooks. Those processors will run at 2GHz, and come with 1MB of Level 2 cache.
In addition, AMD is launching AMD 64 FX-51, a chip running at 2.2GHz that includes a 128-bit dual-channel memory controller for maximum bandwidth and 1MB of Level 2 cache. John Crank, Athlon product manager for AMD, said the company is positioning the chip to compete primarily against Prescott, Intel Corp.'s upcoming next-generation Pentium chip. The AMD 64 FX-51 will target high-end gamers and PC enthusiasts, which he called "prosumers." The processor will sell for $733 in 1,000 quantity shipments.
Coming from a background in IT, I am for this. It may create headaches for programmers to rewrite applications and programs to accomodate the new architecture. This story is a double header: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/22/technology/22SUN.html