San Francisco, May 28: Advanced Micro Devices is talking with Hewlett-Packard, Gateway Inc. and others about developing media-center style personal computers based on AMD's Athlon 64 chips, an AMD official said on Thursday. While no products are ready to be announced and there is no guarantee that such products will be produced, AMD wants to see its Athlon 64 chips become the heart a new generation of PCs that can play and distribute audio and video through the home. "We are working with people like HP and eMachines on these types of solutions," John Crank, AMD's product manager for Athlon 64, said in an interview. Gateway announced the acquisition of eMachines in January. So-called 64-bit computing has been promoted by AMD as a major advancement for computing, allowing PC's to churn through doubly large chunks of data at once. Crank said AMD was also working with software vendors to create software "bundles" that could be preloaded onto personal computers to demonstrate the power of the chip's 64-bit computing capability.
Microsoft Corp. is expected to release a 64-bit version of Windows XP by year-end, on which most 64-bit desktop computer software would run. Bureau Report