EARLIER THIS YEAR some AMD partners believed that a September date for the Athlon64 was too optimistic, prompting some of them to suggest it might be pushed into the first quarter of next year.
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Motherboard manufacturers have told us that higher clock speeds are something of a problem still for AMD, and cranking it much above 1.8GHz or 2GHz is still something of a problem.
Naturally, AMD would want the first Athlon64s to work at over 2GHz to compete with Intel's Pentium 3GHz and more microprocessors and the 800MHz front side bus they'll use. The Prescott successor to the Pentium 4, you'll remember, is now slated for a Q4 launch, although it was Q3 until quite recently.
The chipsets are mainly ready and the Athlon 64 is not that different from the Opteron apart from the latter's ability to work with eight CPUs.
AMD also wants to prolong the life of the Athlon XP for more time.
But a further delay, while it might not make a great deal of impact on revenues in the early days, would be a PR blow too far for AMD.
Via : Inquirer
