Fred Weber, AMD vice president and chief technology officer, told the JEDEC-sponsored IC meeting that a new processor core with on-die memory controller will be developed to support DDR-II. The initial Opteron Hammer chip for servers and the desktop Claw Hammer version have on-die controllers supporting only the present DDR generation.

The AMD executive also clarified confusion on when the first systems using the desktop Hammer processor will come to market. Two weeks ago in an AMD conference call with financial analysts, officials had claimed the initial market push would be on the Opteron server version with systems available in the first half of 2003.

Even so, Weber said some systems with desktop Hammer processors will also come to market in the same time frame.

"But AMD has Barton (the next member of the Athlon XP series) coming up with greater on-die cache and higher performance that will meet the demands of the desktop market for much of 2003," he added.

Weber disclosed that both the desktop and server Hammer processors will have up to 1Mbit of L2 on-die cache. Opteron will support up to 8Gbytes of single channel memory or 16Mbytes dual channel. A special version can support 32Gbytes memory.

AMD hasn't yet disclosed the clock frequency of Hammer. However, Weber described benchmark tests of an Opteron chip that he said showed 2GHz frequency. He said the benchmark results showed Opteron achieved the highest SPECint results of any server processor.