This Czech site shared some very interesting news with the world today. The guys posted two slides from an AMD presentation or something like that. By the way, the remarkable thing is that the info displayed on these slides is in a very interesting way connected with the rumors, which were spreading in the web in September already, when not a single soul knew anything about the Athlon XP rating.
Take a look at the first slide:

This slide gives you a more or less clear idea of the performance of SledgeHammer with 3400+ rating in SpecInt 2000 benchmark. If we take AMD’s info for granted, then its performance makes 1350 points, while the today’s eldest Athlon XP 2000+ gets only 730 points at the most. The same slide shows the performance of some hypothetic Pentium 4 (Northwood) with 3GHz core clock (and 1000 points performance), which is not even on Intel’s roadmap yet ;-)
As is known, the first 64bit AMD processor (SledgeHammer without the dual-CPU configurations support) is expected to appear in Q4 2002 (see this news story), which is proven by the second slide. Please, have a look:

One more interesting thing, which is given away by this slide: the performance of Hammer processor family (read: clock frequency) will be increased four times within three quarters. Unfortunately, the real clock frequencies of these CPUs aren’t known exactly yet. According to some preliminary data, they will start from 2GHz, though there is no evidence that this fact is true...