Applications that support multithreading, be it Hyperthreading or Windows' own API, will show an immediate 40-45% performance increase: Maya renders, Mainconcept encodes and Photoshop operations will take half the time they used to, and the brute force speed increase alone will seriously leave many users wondering how they ever managed on their single core machines, and brute force is not all the X2 has to offer either: AMD took the time to make their Athlon64 core even faster, improving memory management and implementing the latest CPU special instruction specifications, so that even single core applications will run faster than they did before.

As well as application-specific acceleration for the software that supports it, the X2 will enable multimedia professionals to run two full-sized applications at once, greatly simplifying workloads, and opening interesting scenarios for real-time video manipulation on dual-screen setups.

All that power can be anyone's, for the cost of just under two comparable Athlon64 processors, with no special motherboard, RAM, software or patience requirements. Users with existing 939 motherboards only need patch their BIOS chips to the latest version, and plug an X2 in - it's a little boxful of dynamite, twice.