Tuesday morning at an event in Manhattan, AMD launched its long-awaited Opteron processor, a chip for servers and workstations that marks the debut of the company's 64-bit instruction set, AMD64. The three CPUs currently available are designed for dual-processor machines. Additional flavors for one- and eight-way systems will go on sale before the middle of the year. Though all are designed for use with a new breed of 64-bit software, they can also run existing 32-bit applications.

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