I always write the title last...

So, I used to do this all the time during the "early days" of AnandTech. Many of you will remember the old "Site News" section which featured everything from insider industry information to movie recommendations. I got mixed responses from my old, more personal posts; some of you liked em and enjoyed them, while others felt they had no business being on the website.

Life got busier, the site has grown tremendously as did the number of praises and complaints for the updates - so I was put in a situation I put myself in everytime I write anything, trying to please everyone :)

The idea of a weblog came up a few months ago in an internal meeting and I liked the idea, but I wouldn't commit to it until I felt that all the new editors I'd been working towards bringing onboard were ready. That time has come and today, the evening of the launch of AMD's Athlon 64 - I bring you my first blog update.

The blog section has been purposefully kept off of the frontpage, so if you don't want to read them you won't have to be bothered by them. The link will remain on the left nav and I plan on posting to them regularly, bringing you everything from little tidbits of information from the industry to a quick note before I head out to see a movie. Agree, disagree, love them or hate them, they're here because I got enough requests for them and because I always enjoyed sharing more with you all. All too often writers will talk down to their audience, but with you all I want to make it clear that we're all on the same level - just a bunch of folks talking shop online.

With all of that said, let's get to the topic of the day - AMD's Athlon 64. I'm hoping that by now you've read my review and interestingly enough I've seen mixed responses to AMD's launch. Whereas the Athlon XP was an overwhelmingly positive launch for AMD, the Athlon 64 and the Athlon 64 FX are more of a mixed bag. While I think the Athlon 64 is definitely a promising solution, I'm more cautious about recommending the FX. The issues I have with the Athlon 64 FX are mainly related to AMD's insistance that the chip is an "enthusiast's chip" while very few "enthusiasts" would be too happy about tossing their 512MB - 1GB of DDR400 to upgrade to AMD's "enthusiast" processor. Interestingly enough, AMD may have put a bit more enthusiast flair in the Athlon FX than is apparent at first glance.

It seems as if the Athlon 64 is shipping with its multiplier locked (how difficult/possible it is to unlock, we will have to wait and see), while the Athlon 64 FX ships with an unlocked multiplier. This unlocked multiplier is actually the number one request I received when I posted about the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, so it's interesting that AMD would actually have the foresight to include such a feature without first being asked - AMD may not have lost touch with the community after all.

Currently an unlocked Athlon 64 FX multiplier doesn't mean much as the chips that we have don't overclock all that well, but things may change in the coming weeks as process improvements begin to trickle down. Socket-940 motherboards will begin shipping with multiplier adjustment support in the very near future, so stay tuned to see if the FX does end up being a true enthusiast chip.

There's much more to talk about, but I'll leave it at this for now. I hope you all enjoy this section, if not, I'm sure we've got much more interesting pages for you to read :)

Take care,
Anand

(yes I still do sign everything like that)