Four 64-bit chips with fast cache join Athlon family.

Advanced Micro Devices is preceding rival Intel's midyear product launches with four new Athlon 64 processors, expected to be introduced at the Computex exhibition in Taipei this week. The Athlon 64 3800+, 3700+, and 3500+ are faster versions of the mainstream Athlon 64 product family. The Athlon FX-53 is a specialized Athlon 64 chip that caters to a small group of PC users who demand the most performance available. AMD has changed the packaging technology for the Athlon 64 3800+, the 3500+ and the Athlon FX-53. Those processors now use 939 pins, unlike previous versions of the Athlon 64 family that used 754 pins. Also, previous FX chips used 940 pins. The pins on a processor connect the chip to the wiring of the motherboard. In order for the Athlon 64 processors to take advantage of dual-channel DDR memory modules, AMD needed to increase the number of pins to accommodate the wider memory channels. It did so in earlier versions of the Athlon FX-51 and FX-53 that used 940 pins with dual-channel memory controllers, the same design as the Opteron server chip. This design, however, requires expensive registered memory chips normally used in servers because of their performance and reliability attributes. They use registers, or temporary holding places for data, to store data for one clock cycle before moving it along.