AMD/Intel War Rumbles On

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It is said that quiet usually precedes a storm. In the CPU world any quiet spell is rare, so here’s a roundup of the inevitable tornado has blasted in behind it.

First up, fans of AMDs Mobile Athlon 64 processor range will be pleased to hear that there is a brand new arrival. Skipping 3500+ and 3600+ ratings is a 90nm, 754pin 3700+ which is likely to nestle itself into a number of desktop replacement laptops in the coming months.

The chip itself is clocked at 2.4GHz and shares the same 1MB of L2 cache as the rest of the Mobile Athlon64 range. Shipping immediately, the price is $336 each when sold in batches of 1,000.

Swinging over to Intel is news that its 840 Pentium 4 Extreme Edition dual core processor (that we reviewed here) will launch on 18 April. Getting one over AMD seems to be Intel’s main aim with this strategy, as AMD had previously announced it will debut its dual core Opterons on the 21st. Relax children.

Joining the 840 will be a compatible 955X chipset, but owners of the 945 or recently announced nForce 4 for Intel will find they are already compatible.

Looking to the future, details are beginning to slip out regarding AMD’s next processor revisions. Dubbed “Manila”, “Orleans” and “Windsor”, they are said to be dual core Semprons, Athlon 64s and Athlon 64FXs respectively and will be the first to adopt the upcoming M2 1207 pin socket (that’s more mobo changes then). Unconfirmed speeds for these processors suggest they will be clocked to 4800+ and above.

We finish with news of the first 65nm Pentium D fabbed chips from Intel. Expected to appear around the first quarter next year, “Presler” will come with 2x 2MB of cache and clock around the 3.4GHz mark. This may seem low, but Intel will be looking to draw attention away from gigahertz and more towards chip features, which is sure to lead to some name calling from AMD who has adopted this policy for years.

Looks like fun aplenty continues to be had in the processor playground, but – then again – would we want it any other way?

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