Sealed Section? On a CD? Have we finally lost the plot? John Gillooly lapses back into sanity for long enough to explain.
AMD's Athlon 64 launch has been one of the most highly anticipated events in computing for several years now. It is of major significance not only for us end users but also for the industry as a whole. Until now 64 bit computing has been restricted to the most rarefied levels of data crunching, powering the sort of servers that drive the world's financial industry.
Earlier this year AMD released its Opteron chip, based upon the same AMD64 architecture that the consumer level Athlon 64 has. This brought 64-bit computing for everyday servers and workstations, and now it is the Desktop PC's turn as AMD prepares to unleash the Athlon 64 upon the world on the 24th of September at Computex in Taipei.
The Athlon 64 is designed as a desktop chip and comes in a new form factor known as Socket 754. There will also be some models of Athlon 64 that come in the same Socket 940 form factor as the Opteron chips, although these are rumoured to be scheduled to migrate to a different Socket 939 form factor. Thanks to the long delays experienced in the lead up to the launch, there will be a wide complement of motherboards available soon afterwards, with NVIDIA, VIA, AMD, SiS and ALi all fighting for the chipset business.
We have had one of the Athlon 64 chips in the labs to give it a thorough previewing in advance of the launch and compare performance with a 3GHz Pentium 4 CPU, however as you may notice this single page is strangely devoid of the technical detail and benchmark results one would usually associate with an Atomic feature, and you may have also spotted a certain caginess about exactly what we tested and which benchmarks we used.
Rest assured though, you already have our four page Athlon 64 feature in your possession, and on the 24th of September at midday Eastern Standard Time, a time we like to think of as 64-bit Christmas, you will be able to read away to your hearts content.
Think of it as a special bonus dose of excitement and anticipation waiting for digital Santa to slide down the double width pipeline.
No, we haven't trained up our army of flying monkeys to deliver brochures to the home address of people who the CIA tells us have bought Atomic. And neither have we pushed the boundaries of printing in invisible ink. The feature is on the cover CD in our sealed section. To unlock the sealed section you will need to go to the Atomic website www.atomicmpc.com.au/athlon64 from midday September 24th and follow our simple instructions to unlock the secrets!
Issue: 133 | February, 2012