AMD has been here before. Yes, back in May of 2003 over 4 years ago they were in trouble against Intel. The Athlon XP was showing its age. The Pentium 4 was clocking up, and taking back share for Intel. K8 was around the corner with Opterons just weeks away, and until we benched it first with an AGP card no one knew how the new architecture would do for gamers. As a last gasp for the old architecture AMD released the Athlon XP 3200+ running at 2.2GHz. It was the highest clocked part that was widely available if you forget the short lived XP 2800+ that ran 50MHz higher.

This past week AMD echoed a move from the past. The K8 is now past its prime just as the K7 was over 4 years ago. AMD is having trouble battling Intel's Core architecture, and Barcelona is around the corner, but not here yet. No one knows quite what to expect. So what is AMD to do? Instead of a 3200+, the last 32 bit XP from AMD, we have the Athlon 64 X2 6400+, the last dual core Athlon 64 based on the aging 90nm process. The ratings game has now reached twice that of the clock. Back then it was a 1GHz gap.



Link: AMD Zone