But even though he believes Intel is playing "catch-up" with AMD64, he thinks that because of its far better OEM contacts and platform designs that by the end of this year, Intel's 64-bit X86 chips will outsell AMD.

These are socket 939 versions of the Athlon 64-bit chips, and the roadmaps indicate further speeds on Athlon 64s of 3500+ in May, 3800+ in May, 4000+ in the first quarter of 2005, and 4200+ in the first half of 2005.

AMD CPU's account for almost half of the entire install base of steam. Not bad...

Our look at the AMD Athlon XP-M Barton 2500+ yielded a number of positive results. It fits straight into a desktop S462 board without modification (uPGA XP-Ms excepted), is fully unlocked for multiplier selection, defaults to only 1.45v at 1.83GHz, and overclocks prodigiously. Perusing forums across the web, it appears that our results are firmly in line, and even below, what others are managing. We've mentioned that the Barton architecture was a potent one, so a ~2.4GHz Barton was expected to do well in most benchmarks.