AMD gears up for 3.2GHz Athlon

IT SEEMS THAT the era of the Athlon 64 X2 will end with a product with numbered 6400+.

The company is obviously battling out leakage issues with K10 processors, as Charlie reports.

So it makes perfect sense to tweak up the existing line-up as high as possible.

A guinea-pig processor to try to sort out the problems is sampling right now to various partners, preparing for a launch designed ot coincide with the end of the summer holidays.

The highest-numbered model you can buy today is the 6000+. The 200MHz clock bump will yield a 400 PR mark increase, in line with AMD's policy of, um, exaggerated calibration.

This processor is expected to go up against Intel's Core 2 Duo E6850, which is nothing but a first Core 2 Extreme with a faster FSB - 1.33GHz instead of the 1.06GHz of yesteryear.

Preliminary benchmarks put the 3.2GHz Athlon above the 2.66GHz C2D E6700, but it comes a bit late, and performance is likely to be lower than that of the E6850. µ