Aimed at desktop-replacement notebooks, the AMD Athlon 64 processor 3700+ boasts itself as the "most advanced PC processor designed for notebook computing", which of course probably is supposed to come from its ability to run 64-bit code in addition to 32-bit.

When used in conjunction with Windows XP Service Pack 2 (that is, if you dare to install it) the chip will activate "Enhanced Virus Protection security features" designed to better detect and deal with viruses and other nasty stuff.

HP and VoodooPC have already snapped the new chip up for their forthcoming product lines, and systems using these processors are available from these vendors now.

Would you like to know more?

yeah but, which socket does it go in?

There's the desktop Athlon64 3700+ (2.4GHz / 1MB of L2 cache) which is on the Socket-754.

I'm not sure if the mobile versions use the same socket, I doubt it.

Why buy anything in socket 754? It's a dead end product, due to be discontinued this fall. I also think the socket 754 boards doin't support dual channel, but I could be wrong. Thanks AMD for keeping everyone so confused. I think I'll wait another year before I decide on what to buy.

Well the 3700+ is the last Athlon64 on the Socket-754 but Sempron will be moving on that platform. The Sempron 3100+ is the same as other Athlon64 as it has SSE2, it has the HyperTransport links & the ondie memory controller, it just lacks AMD64 (not much use right now) & the cache is at 256kb instead of 1024kb.

As for DualChannel, it only amounts up to 5/10% performance increase when you compare chips at the same speed/cache size.

I do agree though that it's a complete mess & AMD should streamline their offers.