The Hindu : National : AMD brings `ultimate' chip for Indian `prosumer'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 26, 2006

National

National

AMD brings `ultimate' chip for Indian `prosumer'

Anand Parthasarathy

World's first dual-core 64-bit processor for PC desktop

EQUAL TO THE TASK: The new chip optimised for graphics and gaming.

Bangalore: Dual-core, or two processors-on-a-chip, both crunching numbers, in chunks of 64 rather than 32 bits, becomes available to the Indian PC buyer this week.

The U.S.-based AMD launched the first desktop offering for personal computer to take users into a new enhanced environment, that may soon be the standard for graphics-rich applications such as digital games, animation and video handling.

The Athlon 64 FX-60 is the first such product to hit Indian shelves, from an industry that has been saying for months, that 32-bits-at-a-time processing and just one processor per slab of silicon, is so `yesterday'.

With mass consumers, especially the young, demanding `ultimate entertainment': ultra realistic 2-D and 3-D graphical games — and often editing their own digital photos and videos — today's generation of single core chips are often unequal to the computational challenge: it's like trying to drive a bullock cart in a race for Formula One cars.

AMD's Executive Vice-President and Chief Marketing Officer Henri Richard, on a visit to India to launch the product here, told The Hindu on Friday that the FX-60 could turbo-charge most digital-intensive applications, not just for entertainment but for content creation... in fact it was aimed at a newly emerging `prosumer' market, consisting of professional consumers.

The price of the chip — just over $ 1000 — clearly ruled it out the budget PC sector.

It was being launched in good time for PC makers to build systems that could fully exploit Microsoft's MediaCenter software and the upcoming new version of Windows known as ``Vista.''

``You cannot optimally do this with a 32-bit machine,'' Mr. Richard said.

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