AMD's Clawhammer - Its Got Teeth!

At COMDEX yesterday AMD once again turned up the heat on rival Intel by announcing in 2002 its new processor, the ClawHammer, will slam into the market at 2GHz...and that's just for starters. The ClawHammer is just the first in the new Hammer processor family which brings a newer, faster architecture and 64-bit processing to the table.

John Spooner over at ZDNet reports "the chip will include extensions to the X86 processor instruction set that will take it from 32-bit addressing to 64-bit addressing."

The new processor will come in small, medium, and large as it will be found in high-end desktops, mobile computers, servers, and workstations. Its followup, the still heavier-hitting SledgeHammer will be used in four- and eight-way servers.

On top of the new family of high power processors AMD also announced that over the course of the next 8 months or so it plans to release a whopping 8 new processors, including new Durons. These will be based on the Mustang core.

Consumers will also see the Palomino, offspring of the Mustang core, reving up to 1.2 and 1.33GHz the first quarter of next year. By the second half of 2001 the Palomino is expected to reach 1.7GHz according to Spooner's report.

To read the rest of the lengthy Spooner report on AMD and the future of its processors, visit ZDNet. It is packed with excellent information if you are interested.