Chips such as the Athlon 64 FX and Intel's Pentium 4 Extreme Edition populate the very top of the desktop market, appearing mainly in game machines fitted with the latest graphics cards and high-performance storage systems to render games with the greatest speed. PC makers generally don't sell game machines, which often cost well more than $2,000, in large numbers. But the market segment is one of the more profitable of the desktop PC business, both for manufacturers and for AMD and Intel.
The high-performance game PCs can also create a so-called halo effect that elevates manufacturers' more pedestrian desktops, not unlike the way General Motors uses its Chevy Corvette sports car to elevate the image of its sedans. Indeed, performance information posted on AMD's Web site Friday reveals that the Athlon 64 FX-55 offers an overall performance improvement of 8.7 percent over the Athlon 64 4000+.
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As in the past, Intel will respond to the new Athlon 64 FX chip with a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor. Intel is expected to deliver a 3.46GHz Extreme Edition chip next month as well. Although the Extreme Edition chip runs at lower clock speed than Intel's mainstream Pentium 4, the chipmaker added other performance enhancements that it says gives the Extreme Edition better performance capability.
The chipmaker aims to bring out a 3.46GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition in early November. Besides a slight bump in clock speed from the 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, the newer chip incorporates an extra 2MB of cache, enlarging the pool of memory that stores data near its processor core in order to boost performance. The chip will also feature a speedier, 1,066MHz front-side bus, which will speed up the movement of data back and forth from the chip to memory. Mainstream Pentium 4s have 1MB of main cache and an 800MHz bus.
Starting next year, Pentium 4s will have 2MB of cache as a way to boost performance. For more, click here.
