It's nothing new that the Athlon 64 offers at least the same performance as the Pentium 4 while running at a far slower speed. That said, in the last two years power loss values have risen to such levels with Intel devices that the manufacturer is now vulnerable on two fronts.

With the introduction and progressive optimization of 90 nm manufacturing technology, AMD will now also be able to push the envelope beyond the psychologically important 3 GHz real clock speed mark. That is a mark that Intel can only just beat with its latest dual-core Pentium D.

Even though manufacturers now use alternative model names to describe additional features , the clock rate remains a key metric, of course-even if speed differences now matter less compared to a few years ago. This is why we decided to test the 2.8 GHz Athlon 64 FX-57's limits, and we were able to achieve a stable clock speed of 3.05 GHz. We also limited ourselves to 3.0 GHz for this project since this clock rate should show up when the FX-59 is launched by the end of the year.

Read about the Athlon 64 FX-57 .