AMD's Dual Core Athlon 64 X2 Strikes Hard
Tom's Hardware By: Patrick Schmid 
Beware, Intel! AMD's desktop dual core comes in with clock speeds unreduced from those of its single core chips, ready to strike a devastating blow at the very playground Intel had prepared with Hyper Threading. Read on to find out why the Athlon 64 X2 will be king of the ring. May 31 is going to be interesting day, as it brings the launch of dual core processors on the desktop. Of course the hyper-threaded Pentium Extreme Edition 840 is sparsely available today - for example, it can be found at Dell - while the volume model Pentium D won't be around before June. Meanwhile, AMD managed to beat Intel in the profitable workstation/server space by shipping the dual core Opteron models x65/x70/x75. The second step of AMD's 2005 strategy is a desktop dual core product, freely adapted from what Intel arranged a month ago. That's what this preview is about. The first surprise here is that unlike Intel, thermal issues did not force AMD to reduce average clock speeds to operate two processor cores on one physical chip. This means that AMD dual core processors should run exactly as fast as their single core versions running at the same clock speed. In contrast, the fastest Intel dual core will remain at 3.2 GHz, while the fastest single core clocks in at 3.8 GHz. read more...
Beware, Intel! AMD's desktop dual core comes in with clock speeds unreduced from those of its single core chips, ready to strike a devastating blow at the very playground Intel had prepared with Hyper Threading. Read on to find out why the Athlon 64 X2 will be king of the ring. May 31 is going to be interesting day, as it brings the launch of dual core processors on the desktop. Of course the hyper-threaded Pentium Extreme Edition 840 is sparsely available today - for example, it can be found at Dell - while the volume model Pentium D won't be around before June. Meanwhile, AMD managed to beat Intel in the profitable workstation/server space by shipping the dual core Opteron models x65/x70/x75. The second step of AMD's 2005 strategy is a desktop dual core product, freely adapted from what Intel arranged a month ago. That's what this preview is about. The first surprise here is that unlike Intel, thermal issues did not force AMD to reduce average clock speeds to operate two processor cores on one physical chip. This means that AMD dual core processors should run exactly as fast as their single core versions running at the same clock speed. In contrast, the fastest Intel dual core will remain at 3.2 GHz, while the fastest single core clocks in at 3.8 GHz. read more...
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