The Hammer family, AMD has said, will offer higher clock speeds and overall performance than the Athlon line. A major new feature for the chips will be 64-bit addressing, which AMD has dubbed x86-64. The x86-64 technology works by adding several new instructions to the current x86 processor architecture so that it can address 64 bits of data, making for enhanced performance, though mostly for servers. It allows a chip to address much larger amounts of memory than current AMD Athlon and Intel Pentium x86-based chips, which address 32 bits of data, meaning that a server can use a much larger amount of RAM, improving access times by minimising its need to seek out data on a hard drive. X86-64 allows AMD chips to support both 32- and 64-bit addressing. Intel's work on getting software developers to port their wares to Itanium, its 64-bit chip, is likely to be helping AMD because it has taught developers how to accomplish the task. "Some of the memory management arithmetic breaks down when you go from 32- to 64-bit chips," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at consulting firm Insight 64. Although Microsoft's endorsement is significant, AMD still faces an uphill road in this market and will have to convince hardware manufacturers, software developers and corporate customers to invest time and energy into using Hammer as a 64-bit chip. "Even if they get the support of Microsoft, will they be able to line up suppliers of enterprise servers to carry Hammer?" asked Brookwood. "IBM, HP, Compaq, Unisys, Fujitsu, Sun -- it's a short list." AMD executives could not immediately be reached for comment. ZDNet UK's Matt Loney contributed to this report.
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