Advanced Micro Devices may have a yet another trump in its hands to fight low-cost Intel"s Pentium 4 "Prescott" microprocessors – an extremely affordable 64-bit Athlon 64 chip that still delivers respectable performance as well as something loads of customers are impatient to bite: 64-bit capability.
In late March 2004, Sunnyvale, California-based chipmaker AMD added the Athlon 64 2800+ processor for desktops into its price-list. The 2800+ chips run at 1.80GHz, incorporate 512KB of L2 cache and feature single-channel memory controller. Thermal and electrical specifications of the Athlon 64 2800+ are the same as those of other PGA754 chips from AMD. The company quotes the new microprocessor at $178 price-point in for business quantities, the same price tag as the least expensive Intel Pentium 4 with 800MHz QPB and HT technology.