AMD Athlon FX-53 to counter Intel P4EE?

Straight from the source's mouth

AMD will hit back against yesterday's release of the Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition with a 2.4GHz Athlon 64 chip, the FX-53. The part will launch before the end of the year.

So claim a variety of unnamed sources cited by Xbit Labs. The site also notes that it has heard, whispered on the wind, that AMD will ship an Athlon 64 3400+ part in time for the Christmas sales period.

The FX-53, if it exists, will follow the FX-51 launched last September at 2.2GHz. Both 64-bit parts offer on-board dual-channel DDR 400 memory controllers that required registered DIMMs.

The 3400+ is a logical successor to the currently shipping 3200+. Certainly past roadmaps have pegged a 3400+ down for a late 2003 release. However, with the delays to the AMD64 version of Windows XP, we wonder what the real value of ramping up the Athlon 64 line just yet would be. Yes, there's SuSE Linux, but for the vast majority end users, Windows is the OS of choice. ®