As expected, Advanced Micro Devices, on Tuesday officially released its new microprocessors aimed at high-end desktop computers. The new chips set the new records in a variety of industrial benchmarks and solidify AMD’s position as a leading maker of high-end chips for personal computers.

“Since the introduction of the AMD Athlon 64 FX processor over a year ago, we have consistently delivered on our promise to provide the absolute best overall PC processor you can get. Now in our third release, the AMD Athlon 64 FX processor is simply the best and remains unmatched in the industry,” said Marty Seyer, corporate vice president and general manager, Microprocessor Business Unit, Computation Products Group, AMD.

AMD’s two new top chips – AMD Athlon 64 4000+ and AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 – are designed for the Socket 939 infrastructure. The FX-55 product operates at 2.60GHz, has dual-channel memory controller, 1MB of L2 cache, bringing new performance heights to Sunnyvale, California-based AMD. The model 4000+ processor is clocked at 2.40GHz, contain 1MB of L2 cache and sport dual-channel memory controller, fully copying specs of the previous top chip AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 processor for Socket 939 infrastructure.

“Despite the fact that the new processors from Intel have been slightly delayed AMD still continues the race and keeps announcing the new CPU models. However, it would be still incorrect to say that AMD has finally become the leader in the CPU market. Even Athlon 64 FX-55 doesn’t provide the maximum performance in most applications. Therefore the users can find quite a bit of tasks where either Intel or AMD CPUs are preferable. Thus in games our preferences stay with Athlon 64, in media encoding tasks – with Pentium 4, in computational packages Athlon 64 is the leader, and in general tests Pentium 4 is ahead more frequently. In fact, we could continue this list more and more,” said X-bit labs processors and platforms analyst Ilya Gavrichenkov in his latest article covering the performance of AMD’s latest central processing units.

Even though AMD started to transit its product line to 90nm silicon-on-insulator manufacturing technology, AMD’s new premier microprocessors are made using proven 130nm fabrication process.

Intel Corporation is expected to respond to the new ‘FX’ chip with a new ‘Extreme Edition’ microprocessor clocked at 3.46GHz and featuring 1066MHz Quad Pumped Bus along with 2MB L3 cache. Besides, the company will release a new core-logic that sports the new processors, allowing mainboard makers and system builders to offer top-of-of-the-range “Intel Inside” PCs. Additionally, Intel has plans to introduce Intel Pentium 4 570 processor with 800MHz processor system bus and 3.80GHz clock-speed.

The AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 processor is priced at $827. The AMD Athlon 64 processor 4000+ is priced at $729. AMD’s new chips are available immediately worldwide as actual processors, or in systems shipping from world’s leading makers of PCs.