The coming summer promises to be a truly hot season. From the meteorological prospective this forecast may turn out wrong, if some unexpected cyclones kick in. However the situation in the processor market has long been determined and goes as planned. Both leading processor manufacturers, AMD and Intel, selected summer time for the renewal of their high-performance line-ups. In the middle of this summer Intel is going to introduce processors with principally new Core micro-architecture, while AMD will be pushing the new AM2 platforms with DDR2 SDRAM support throughout the entire summer season.

Although everyone impatiently awaits the new Intel Core 2 Duo solutions that are also known as Conroe, AMD once again managed to get ahead of their competitor, just like all those previous years. Their new Socket AM2 solutions will start shipping in mass quantities on June 1 already. Therefore, today we are going to introduce to you the new AMD processors in all detail, and those who are dying to find out more about the Core 2 Duo solutions from Intel, will have to wait until the launch date.

Despite the upcoming announcement of pretty promising Intel CPUs, Socket AM2 platform from AMD attracted a lot of attention. AMD has been postponing the introduction of DDR2 SDRAM until the very end, because the K8 processor micro-architecture including the integrated memory controller benefits mostly from the low memory latency rather than its high bandwidth. And the currently existing DDR2 SDRAM cannot boast very low latencies just yet. Nevertheless, the speed of today's DDR2 SDRAM has grown up enough to ensure that Athlon 64 processors will benefit from shifting to the new memory type. Although the very first tests of the engineering samples of the new AMD platform didn't really reveal any significant performance improvement from using the DDR2 memory, now we are talking about the mass mainboards and CPUs, which is a totally different story. And this is the major intrigue of our today's test session: most AMD fans want to believe that the new Socket AM2 processors will prove worthy rivals to the upcoming Intel Core 2 Duo.

Moreover, the new AMD CPUs will acquire a new core revision that can not only support new type of memory but has also undergone some minor modifications to make Athlon 64 processors even more attractive to the users. Of course, once the new Intel processors with Core micro-architecture hit the streets, AMD may lose some of its adherents. However, it is still too early to make any final conclusions especially since some of the improvements and modifications of the K8 core may turn out pretty useful in certain cases.

So, let's meet the new AMD processors for Socket AM2 in person now and try to forecast what the future prepares for them.