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Athlon 64 Pushed Back to September

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hold-your-breath dept.

Orion writes "AMD confirmed today that their new Athlon 64 will indeed be pushed back to September. Originally planned to be released in April or May, AMD has decided to put all of its brainpower into the launch of the 64-bit Opteron, which is still scheduled to be released on April 22. This article explains that AMD is still going to try to get a few more Athlon XP processors out before the Athlon 64 hits stores. The 3000+ has a planned February 10 release date, and the 3200+ should be out by the middle of the year according to the article."

2 of 340 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Another... by Dastardly · · Score: 5, Informative

    Also that AMD will not release until M$ is ready. The should release for Linux, but want to keep us hanging on as Intel's grip on the market tightens.

    Did you even read the article?? Opteron is still scheduled for April 22. It is the release for Linux.

  2. Re:Why rush for a 64 bit processor? by SWPadnos · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, there are several applications, albeit specialized ones:

    1) Databases - a lot of databases are too big for a pointer offset to fit into 32 bits. Ever notice that the 120Gig hard drive you just bought has more than 2^32 bytes on it? (yes - I know that the hard drive is split into 512-byte sectors, and that you won't overflow 32 bits until you get drives larger than 2 TB, but how long will that take :)

    2) Video (editing, encoding, etc) - a single layer of a single side of a DVD is more than can be addressed by a 32-bit pointer. The amount of source data used to create the highly compressed DVD data is mind-boggling. (A high quality transfer from film is about 100M per frame. A 2-hour film has 172800 frames [assuming it's not IMax - that's higer resolution and more frames per second] - that's 17 terabytes of raw data!)

    3) High dynamic range images (including photographs and extrme high color video games) - the data types being used by the GeForce FX (similar to the EXR format released by ILM) have 16 bits of data per channel - this totals 64 bits for each RGBA pixel.

    I'm sure there are more - these few just jumped into mind quickly.

    Of course, for those who use Windows, you'll need 64-bit CPU's to be able to load those Word XP-2004.Net documents :)

    --
    - The Sigless Wonder