Thank goodness for that. I really wasn't looking forward to owning an "Opteron" system in the future. As they state "The 'AMD Athlon 64' brand name builds on the familiarity and reputation of the AMD Athlon processor". I'm glad they realised this and opted to use this name rather than another reject from "Transformers" robots in disguise!

Yeah that's a bit more like it

At Comdex, AMD today announced it has selected “AMD Athlon 64” as the brand name for its next-generation processor for desktop and mobile PCs, formerly code named “Clawhammer.”

The upcoming AMD Athlon™ 64 processor is expected to be the industry’s first and only 64-bit, x86 PC processor for desktop and mobile computing. Desktop and mobile PCs built on the AMD Athlon 64 processor will be able to run 64-bit applications at full performance and simultaneously run 32-bit software applications with no performance penalty.

Athlon 64 processors are planned to be available in late first quarter 2003 or early second quarter 2003; now, in a very interesting bit of news just wait you read this quote from anAnandtech Comdex article regarding some hands-on experiences with the processor at the show:

The performance of the Athlon XP 64 at 1.4GHz was around the speed of a 2.2GHz Pentium 4 or Athlon XP 2200+, at least in the 3DMark tests we ran. Obviously this isn't an indication of final performance but it does give you an idea of where AMD is headed. If they can reach the 2.0GHz clock speeds they are shooting for then the Athlon XP 64 could be quite a competitive part. Judging by the stability of the system we played with, AMD's only issue right now is getting clock speeds up. Coming from 800MHz at Computex to 1.4GHz today, AMD is getting there but they've still got a long road ahead.

Nice name. How original

I think I liked *hammer better.

I'm still not too impressed, I do like the name Athlon 64 better than Hammer, or Opteron, but I doubt anything is going to knock my socks off when it comes to CPUs until something drastic changes.

I've seen everyone swooning everytime we see a 100MHz jump in CPU speed ever since they hit 1GHz. That mark was significant and doubling that was a good mark but everything else is just building on that and has all been dictated by Moore's Law, which basically says that the number of transistors will double every 18 months(and pretty much double CPU speed) Nothing new there as long as that holds true, which according to Moore, should until at least 10GHz. The only thing that would really impress me is a change in technology, a move away from x86 to something new.

Sure, 64 bit CPUs are going to be great, but not as great as a new architecture, x86 is ancient technology and has long overstayed it's welcome. Look at the things which came before it, the 8085, 8088 and others, they weren't around very long before they went the way of the dinosaur and were replaced with something better, then along came 8086, then they just kept building upon it rather than looking for something better. Still, they have no plans to move to anything better until they milk x86 for every cycle they can.