Nearly right after the announcement, AMD’s Athlon 64 FX-51 and Athlon 64 3200+ microprocessors are available for sale in the USA and Japan. As expected, both 64-bit chips cost a very high price that is probably not acceptable for the most of end-users. Nevertheless, instant availability of the high-end CPU parts is a big win for AMD over its rival Intel who is not planning to ship its Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor immediately.

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor with 1MB of L2 for Socket 754 clocked at 2.0GHz is available now from $450 and $480 in the USA and Japan respectively. The wicked AMD Athlon 64 FX-51 with 1MB L2, dual-channel memory controller, 2.20GHz clock-speed for Socket 940 is for sale for $760 - $850 in the US and for roughly $890 in the land of the rising sun.

Those, who plan to acquire an AMD Athlon 64 FX-51-based system, should not forget to get registered PC3200 memory modules for such PCs, as the processor requires memory typically used in server applications.

Mainboards for Socket 754 AMD Athlon 64 3200+ CPUs are available now worldwide, even though there are not a lot of them. Socket 940 mainboards from ASUS and some other companies are also available, but most of them were designed for AMD Opteron 100-series processors used in workstation applications and some do not have an AGP port.

Obviously, since AMD does not plan to supply more than 300 thousands of its AMD64 processors for desktops this year, the company does not really have to care much about other system components’ availability: there will be enough platforms and memory chips for all AMD Athlon 64 processors anyway. Moreover, in a couple of weeks time there will be a lot of new Socket 754 and Socket 940 mainboards in the market.