Advanced Micro Devices announced two new desktop chips Tuesday, but customers won't see them until November because of lingering problems in getting its high-end chips to market.
The Athlon XP 2800+ and 2700+ will likely narrow the performance gap with Intel's Pentium 4. AMD's model numbers roughly correspond to the gigahertz speeds of the Pentium 4, which currently tops out at 2.8GHz.
Among the improvements, the new AMD chips will come with a system bus--the data path between the processor and main memory--running at 333MHz. A faster bus increases performance; current Athlons come with a 266MHz bus.
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