A READER who tuned into the Webcast AMD and Microsoft held yesterday evening tells us that the Athlon 64 will be launched in September, and not in August as Digitimes suggested yesterday. Of course, if it is launching in September then there will be samples already with the manufacturers and we know that there are some of these floating about already.
The AMD suit also claimed that the release speed of the Athlon 64 would best any Pentium 4 speeds around at the time. Our Intel roadmaps show a 3.20GHz will be the last of the Pentium 4s before Prescott begins appearing in the third to fourth quarters this year. Of course, there are also Prescott samples flying about but right now our mobo insiders tell us that a certain amount of heat problems are creating difficulties at the beginning. It"s early days.
What about Windows 2003 Server for AMD processors? It will only support 64-bittiness in the enterprise edition, and the standard editions will be 32-bit.