Motherboard Vendors Support Athlon 64 FX

They only thing standing between them and production, however, are some questions about the new chip's availability and specifications.

Several motherboard vendors told CRN at the Computex show in Taipei, Taiwan, that AMD's processor availability is so tight that the company is actually charging for sample processors, in contrast to the normal practice of offering a bunch of processors free of charge for test purposes. Two vendors, who asked to remain anonymous, said they worry that the shortage of samples is a result of low yield rates for the company's processor production.

For the vendors, the other issue is the final specification for the new processors. Most vendors are readying motherboards built to work with the 940-pin and the 754-pin versions.

Al Peng, worldwide sales and marketing director at AOpen, San Jose, Calif., said such confusion is very common with new processors. CPU vendors are never sure how well the heat will be dissipated, so they hedge their bets by initially building both larger and smaller processors in order to make sure the right version is ready.

Steve Sung, field engineer at Asus Computer International, Fremont, Calif., said his company expects the CPUs to be available in quantity within the next two to three weeks. Asus plans to offer motherboards with VIA chipsets for the desktop space and nVidia chipsets for workstations.

Fremont, Calif.-based Elitegroup Computer Systems has three different motherboards for the new AMD processor ready to be shipped, said Sam Tsai, the company's president. About half Elitegroup's boards now offer an 800MHz front-side bus for high-speed internal connections.

Gigabyte Technology is also rolling out Via- and nVidia-based motherboards for both the 754-pin and 940-pin processors, said Brian Chen, manager of the company's Taiwan-based product technology development. The company expects to have seven to eight models available, he said.

Gigabyte is adding two in-house-developed technologies to its new motherboards going forward, said Chen. The first, the company's CPU Intelligent Accelerator, allows motherboards to be overclocked by the user for a 3 percent, a 5 percent, or a 10 percent boost in performance. The CPU processing speed can be set to change automatically based on the processor's workload, he said. The second, Memory Intelligence Booster, is code within the BIOS that boosts memory performance, Chen said.

Grandy Chen, general manager of Albatron, a Cypress, Calif.-based vendor, said his company plans to start shipping its motherboards bundled with the processor at a cost to distributors of $570 to $600.

The company has multiple motherboards ready for distribution. Several of the boards feature FireWire, dual-channel SATA, and SATA RAID levels 0 and 1 on-board, said Chen.

Except for minor revisions of their products or the addition of features from the new AMD motherboards, several vendors at Computex said that in general, they aren't busy pushing new Intel-based models. Instead, they are awaiting the release by late this year or early next year the new Intel processors.