Advanced Micro Designs (AMD) announced today that it would be releasing its 64-bit processor, code-named Sledgehammer, as the Opteron, when it goes on sale later this year. Unlike Intel's 64-bit offering, the Itanium, the AMD Opteron offering 100 percent backwards compatibility with today's 32-bit x86 processors and is an extension of AMD's Athlon chips, rather than a whole new platform. The company also announced that it is dropping its low-end Duron chips.
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