The Athlon 64 processors will come more than a year later than originally expected and AMD does not want its customers to wait even a day more than determined earlier this year. Japanese web-site Akiba PC Hotline reports about AMD’s first batch of Athlon 64 for Socket 754 processors that will be supplied to distributors in Tokyo on the 19^th of September. In addition to the microprocessors, MSI K8T NEO FIS2R mainboards will be available right after the launch of the AMD64 CPUs for desktops.

The processors in the picture were made on the 30^th week of the year 2003, in late July. The chips are clocked at 2.0GHz, have 1MB of L2 cache and are rated at 3200+ suggesting that they are intended to compete with Pentium 4 processors with 512KB of L2.

Surprisingly, AMD Athlon 64 3200+ will be sold together with MSI K8T NEO FIS2R mainboard for about $650 in Japan. This is definitely not an affordable price, but given that the mainboard itself costs roughly $150, the chip’s retail price will be about $500, a lot cheaper compared to Intel Pentium 4 3.20GHz which is quoted at $613 at PriceWatch.com.

All-in-all, you will be able to get AMD Athlon 64 for Socket 754 right after the formal announcement on the 39^th week. Unfortunately, there is no information about availability of higher performance AMD Athlon 64 FX processors and supporting mainboards.