It's up.

We only had one board and one set of processors from AMD for this article, so of course they first went up to Jason in Canada for the server tests. He had them for about a week then sent them down to me for the desktop tests. I struggled with some board issues and eventually got the hardware down to Derek for his workstation look. Unfortunately he had some issues getting his Intel workstation platform up and running so the workstation performance numbers will have to wait for another article.

At the end of the day I was very impressed with the performance of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 as well as the Opteron dual core solutions, my main issue is price. Intel is really playing the role of driving the market here, since developers won't multithread their applications unless a large installed user base of multi-core/multiprocessor systems exist and Intel's pricing is the only thing that will drive that sort of mass adoption of dual core. So while we always criticize Intel and haven't been happy with their architecture in years, the industry needs Intel to make sure that by the time '06 and '07 roll around - we'll be playing multithreaded games in a more multi-core friendly OS with tons of multithreaded applications running in the background.

I do sincerely hope that the X2 4200+ and 4400+ will be available in reasonable quantities by the end of the year because they are the only hope for getting any sort of somewhat reasonably priced dual core CPUs out of AMD.