Introduction

AMD dropped the bomb on the x86 world in the late spring last year with the introduction of their first 64-bit chip, the Opteron, which was aimed at the server market. The Opteron featured a new architecture for AMD moving away from their arguably most succesful architecture, the K7 series. Exceptional x86 performance as well as a set of x86-64 extentions developed by AMD were a couple of the key selling points of the Opteron, making it the ideal package for the server market as applications could maintain x86 compatibility but could also run 64-bit applications.

The desktop variants, the Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64, were not introduced till this last fall. This did not come too soon as the Athlon XP series were falling behind their Intel P4 equivalent since Intel had aggressively ramped clockspeeds in that year while AMD had a couple of paper launches. With the brisk sales, a high price tag and a seemingly limited supply of Athlon 64's, we were pleasantly surprised when an unexpected package arrived from AMD in late December. We were flabbergasted when we noticed that it was a 3400+ and quickly rushed to the nearest computer to see if we forgot about the release of this particular chip. Relief and excitement set in quickly as it turned out that it was yet unreleased and mum has been the word till now due to a NDA. But that having passed, without further ado, here is the Athlon 64 - cue trumpets.