There's been so much information made public about AMD's new desktop parts over the last year and a half, that we intend to make our reiteration of the specs short and sweet and cut right to the info you really want to see. Please do review the specifications, as they will show you the similarities as well as the differences between all of the CPUs. All things considered, AMD and Intel are sharing a couple of strategies today with their flagship CPUs. For one, they are both "simply" remarking a server grade CPU and calling it a desktop unit. They are also asking for many hundreds of dollars for the privilege of owning one.
AMD's Athlon 64 CPUs
AMD has been promoting their K8 CPU, better known as the Hammer series, for well over a year now. These desktop parts were postponed for about ten months while AMD's strategy changed a bit and began to focus on their Opteron server-class CPUs. Today, AMD is announcing their Athlon 64 3200+ CPU and their Athlon 64 FX 51. From this point on, we will refer to them as the Athlon64 and the AthlonFX to avoid confusion. The "64" in their name comes from the ability of these new CPUs to run the AMD64 instruction set that will be supported by the upcoming Windows XP 64-Bit Edition operating system. Moving to a 64-bit operating system with a 64-bit CPU will have some obvious advantages, although it's clear that you will not be seeing many of them right away. A 64-bit computing experience means that our PCs will no longer be limited to addressing only 4GB of RAM.
News source: [H}ard|OCP
