CHIP FIRM AMD appears to be making blizzards of announcements this Comdex. The latest today is that it demonstrated a 64-bit version of Unreal Tournament 2003 on its Athlon 64 (Clawhammer) processor.As AMD says, the Unreal Engine is used for other award winning games, and Mark Rein, VP at Epic Games, said it will ship a 64-bit version of Unreal Tournament when the Athlon 64 chip "show up on retail shelves".
As for AMD itself, it says that gaming enthusiasts will be the catalyst that "bring 64-bit computing to mainstream PC users".
Intel"s Itanium is not now, and quite probably never will be positioned as a games machine. The only question is when we"ll see Athlon 64s show up on retail shelves. Official dates are talking about the first quarter next year. Chipset firms at Computex in Taiwan were talking about the end of Q1 next year.
So will it be even later than that before we see the Clawhammer in shops? AMD has raised a heap of expectations about the Clawhammer-Athlon 64 so has to ensure that it now ships the chip in a timely fashion, and not just press releases about the microprocessor