Ultimate Gaming Processor Meets Mainstream Mobile CPU

Excel and Outlook are not what AMD calls "intense applications," so office multitaskers won't be interested in the new Athlon 64 FX-57 processor. But 3D gamers seeking unmatched speed for their single-threaded software will crave what AMD calls the fastest single-core PC processor on the market, even if its 1,000-unit OEM price is a supercolossal $1,031.

Built on AMD's 90-nanometer silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process, the Athlon 64 FX-57 combines a clock speed of 2.8GHz (200MHz faster than the 130-nanometer FX-55) with 64K apiece of Level 1 data and instruction and 1MB of Level 2 cache. Like its predecessor -- and AMD's general-purpose, single-core Athlon 64 and dual-core Athlon 64 X2 CPUs -- the Socket 939 chip combines a built-in DDR memory controller with HyperTransport bus and AMD64 technology for a smooth transition from 32- to 64-bit x86 operating systems and applications. It also adds support for SSE3 as well as SSE2 and 3DNow multimedia instructions and a thermal design power of 104 watts.

High-performance desktop vendors including ABS, Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Monarch, Velocity Micro, and VoodooPC are expected to introduce PCs based on the Athlon 64 FX-57. AMD says it plans to introduce a dual-core Athlon 64 FX processor when multithreaded games are available to take advantage of the architecture.