Not long after the release of Intel's Pentium Extreme Edition 955, AMD has begun shipping its first dual-core Athlon 64 FX gaming processor. Clocked at 2.6GHz, the FX-60 is fabricated at 90nm and uses AMD's Socket 939 pin-out. It supports 400MHz DDR SDRAM in dual-channel configuration, and has 233m transistors.

Having to date maintained that dual-core CPUs brought no special benefit to gamers, AMD said it now believes there are sufficient multi-threaded titles coming to warrant the upgrade. It also pointed to better dual-core support in key driver software, such as that supporting the latest graphics cards.