Although Advanced Micro Devices shined the brightest spotlight on its dual-core Opteron server chips at an event Thursday evening in New York, the company also revealed several details about its plans for dual-core desktop chips.
Starting in June, PCs will be available from AMD's partners with the Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor. Four different performance grades of the chip will be available. The 4800+ and 4600+ X2 processors will run at 2.4 GHz, but the 4800+ will feature 1MB of Level 2 cache dedicated to each core, while the 4600+ will have 512KB of cache attached to each core. The 4400+ and 4200+ each will run at 2.2 GHz with cache allocated in the same proportions as in the 4800+ and 4600+.
The X2 processors are designed for sophisticated PC users who run several demanding applications simultaneously, AMD says. The company will continue to push its single-core Athlon FX series processors for gamers, because most gaming software uses only a single thread, the company says. However, a dual-core Athlon FX chip will be available when the gaming industry releases more multithreaded titles, AMD says.
Price Points
One of the X2 chips will be more expensive than Intel's recently introduced dual-core desktop Pentium Extreme Edition 840 processor, which costs $999 in quantities of 1000 units. The 4800+ will cost $1001, the 4600+ will cost $803, the 4400+ will cost $581, and the 4200+ will cost $531, all in quantities of 1000 units, AMD says.
The 4400+ and 4200+ processors are actually cheaper than AMD's most powerful single-core desktop Athlon 64 processor, the 4000+, which costs $643 as of Thursday.
This pricing difference is only temporary, says Teresa deOnis, product marketing manager with AMD. By the time the Athlon 64 X2 chips are released on June 1, the price of the $643 Athlon 64 4000+ processor will have dropped below the dual-core prices, she says.
"We now have two high-end processors, the FX for games and the X2 for media and power-user multitasking," deOnis says. "We want the dual-core to have a premium [price] because of the performance."
AMD is trying to manage demand for the faster chips and get as much money as possible for the dual-core products in the early going, says Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst with Insight 64, in Saratoga, California. As with most new high-end processor launches, the primary users who will be interested in such high-priced chips are already willing to pay whatever it takes to get more performance, he says.
Some time next year, as AMD introduces more dual-core desktop chips and moves to its 65-nanometer manufacturing technology, the prices of these chips will come down to levels suitable for mass-market PCs, Brookwood says.
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