As you know, the Athlon 64 processor is slated to launch on September 23rd. You may recall what I suggested as prerequisites for the Athlon 64"s success a while back. Now it looks like AMD may just deliver on those things and give Intel"s "Prescott" Pentium 4 chip a real run for its money.
Mike at the gang at The Inquirer have been serving up regular, tasty morsels of AMD info, including this bit about AMD"s plans for 940-pin (and later 939-pin) variants of the Athlon 64. The original plan for the Athlon 64 was to use a 754-pin socket and a single-channel memory connection. Now it looks like AMD may use the 940-pin socket for some top-end Athlon 64 chips. (Apparently the 939-pin socket will come into play so AMD can maintain the divide between Opterons and Athlons and so protect the Opteron"s much healthier margins.) The move to the Opteron-style socket means, quite likely, that some Athlon 64 chips will arrive with dual-channel memory support.
Based on the proportion of Athlon 64s likely to be 940-pin chips versus 754-pin chips (reportedly a 9:1 initial ratio in favor of the 754-pin chips), it"s sounding like the dual-channel Athlon 64 will be a fairly rare, fairly expensive beast—much like the first T-bred Athlon XP 2800+ or maybe the current Athlon XP 3200+. Taking into account Hammer"s 12-stage pipeline, its more advanced but more difficult SOI fab process, current Opteron speeds, and the power of pure speculation, my best guesstimate is that this first high-end Athlon 64 will run at 2.2GHz and be rated at 3400+.