AMD to Ship Dual-Core Athlon 64 Chip by Year’s End

“Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices plans to ship a dual-core version of its 64-bit Athlon 64 microprocessor for desktop and mobile PCs during the second half of this year–but the chips won’t be targeted at the high end of the market, the company says.

AMD will demonstrate the dual-core Athlon 64 chip at its Sunnyvale, California, headquarters later Wednesday, it says.

Dual-core microprocessors contain two processor cores on a single piece of silicon, giving desktop and mobile PCs improved multitasking and multimedia capabilities compared to PCs based on single-core processors, AMD says in a statement. This means users can burn a DVD on their PC while simultaneously encoding high-resolution videos and running a security application in the background, it says.”