AMD Opteron 246 processor, functioning at 2.0GHz and announced a couple of weeks ago, appeared for sale in Japan. The pricing of the new AMD64 processor, however, is definitely very regrettable: it costs a little bit less than $1000, local sources, such as Akiba PC Hotline, report.

AMD Opteron 246 processor is designed to work in 1- or 2-way servers or workstation computers and incorporates 1MB of L2 cache, 128KB of L1 cache as well as two Hyper-Transport links for connecting to another CPU as well as to Hyper-Transport tunnels. All Opteron processors integrate dual-channel PC2700 memory controller that can address up to 1TB of memory.

Japanese retailers now sell the first 2.0GHz 64-bit processor from AMD for $920 - $935, what just seems to be too high price even for Japan and even for this kind of novelty. At this point there is no information when the new server and workstation CPUs from AMD appear for sale in different parts of the world and the estimated retail pricing in different markets. The chips will hardly leverage quickly provided that their pricing is higher than the cost of comparable Intel Xeon CPUs.