We all know that Conroe, Intel's up and coming desktop chip is going to give the current generation Athlon processors a good kicking. We've heard that one of the 'middle range' processor will outperform the FX-60 by about thirty percent. But what have AMD done to counter this?

I'm not talking about Socket AM2, the very up-and-coming new socket from AMD that enables DDR2 support. But rather a modification of the K8 architecture. Anandtech originally predicted that the K8 core would need to undergo some large changes in order to compete with Conroe to a reasonable degree... and AMD have come up with K8L!

K8L seems to have been floating around the web for a while now, with people speculating that it is just a small revision on the K8 core. Those people are wrong! AMD's Chuck Moore went through the whole techy speccy details earlier today.. and you can find all the details on [url=http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=31761]this here page[/url]. It's a jolly good read, and you'll feel comfortable knowing that I had an erection whilst reading this because it mentions the AMD quad-core!

As for AM2, for those who don't know:

* It's going to be released on the 23rd May 2006
* It is AMD's new socket supporting DDR2
* There is obviously a revised memory controller
* No new socket 939 processors will be manufactured
* The Athlon FX-62 will be the new king of the castle
* The 5000 series processors will come to market!
* Nvidia are officially releasing Nforce 5 (Nforce 590) chipset
* Kingston are releasing low latency high capacity DDR2 memory modules
* Other memory manufacturers are expected to release more low latency DDR2 memory modules

I tell you, it's all going on!

We might even see the official release of the Nvidia 7950GX2 (v1.1 of Quad-SLI, a [url=http://www.xtrempc.ro/images/articole/330025/GeForce_7950_GX2.jpg]much shorter card[/url] than the [url=http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/05/02/nvidia_goes_for_four/top.jpg]old one[/url]) ......

So, to Intel: [b:b56bb59faa]ROFL PWNED!!!!1[/b:b56bb59faa]

OK, so Conroe has now been released and it's officially the pwnage in the processor market right now. The Extreme Edition, clocked at 2.93GHz is kicking the FX-62 down to the ground in almost every benchmark. It has 4MB of cache, SSE4, and lots of prefetch style instructions added to it. It puts Pentium 4 to shame -- although everybody knew it was crap when it first came out.

Overclockers UK are the first vendor to stock the Core 2 Duo (Conroe) X6800, and have already shipped preorders out with 'ample stock' ready for more orders. It costs ?666 exc. VAT at the moment.

Just thought I'd let you know that [b:96a78a39a7]AMD were going to cut their prices on the Athlon X2 range by up to 44%.[/b:96a78a39a7] They have since changed that figure, so you will soon be able to get [size=20:96a78a39a7][b:96a78a39a7]up to 55% off AMD Athlon X2 processor's[/b:96a78a39a7][/size:96a78a39a7], possibly as soon as next week.

You know what that means? You can double up your Athlon X2 processors ready for Socket 4X4, for less than the Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 ;)