First Benchmarks of Hammer Prototype

First prototypes of the future 64-bit Athlon - code name ClawHammer - have reached the developers. Exclusively tecCHANNEL has tested a sample of AMD's eighth CPU generation.

"Discover performance - discover AMD", that was the slogan which adorned every single AMD PR kit at Computex 2002 in Taiwan. And there really were several things to be discovered - in the end even the Hammer itself.

AMD had already shown its CPU called "Hammer" on the fringes of Intel's IDF at the end of 2001. It shall be launched as desktop processor (code name ClawHammer) and as well as server version (product name Opteron), ClawHammer will be launched at first at the end of 2002.

Apart from AMD (8000 series) also Ali (M1687), NVIDIA (nForce2), SiS (755) and VIA (K8 series) are producing chipsets for this CPU. But the Northbridge has not a great deal to do because the memory controller is integrated into the processor. Thanks to this widespread support for ClawHammer AMD did not manage to prevent a hardware manufacturer from allowing tecCHANNEL to take a look at the processor.