It was bound to happen eventually, and AMD's Opteron is scheduled to soon be released with a top speed of 3GHz. Extremely fast for an Opteron, and both the Opteron 256 and 856 will offer this speed using 1MB of L2 cache. These won't, however, be dual core - and the top speed for dual core Opterons will peak currently at 2.8GHz, on par with the FX. According to the article these new Opterons will not support DDR2, unlike the A64 series slated for this year, and that server builders will need to wait for Socket F. Details like TDP for the Troy core aren't yet fully available, so it will be interesting to see how they compare to like-clocked and like-performing Xeons.