Labs tests show that AMD's Athlon 64 chip is far faster than Intel's Pentium 4 on today's 32bit software, while also offering a bridge to 64bit computing.

Released last week, the Athlon 64 family is the first range of 64bit chips for mainstream Windows client systems and may be the best reason yet for corporates to evaluate non-Intel desktops and laptops.

Tests show that the first Athlon 64 desktop chips speed past Intel's current Pentium 4 desktop processors on business software, and should have an even greater advantage for video-editing and other applications that need the broader data path and huge memory space made available by 64bit chips.

We tested both the Athlon 64, which is designed to handle a broad array of tasks, and the Athlon 64 FX desktop chip, which is designed for games and multimedia work. A mobile Athlon 64 is also available.

Prices for the chip start from $417 (£250), which means systems could cost about £1,000, making them more affordable than current high-performance desktops.

Like AMD's Opteron chips for workstations and servers, the Athlon 64 is a development of the firm's 32bit architecture. This approach is very different from Intel's rival Itanium processor family, which focuses on 64bit software and only offers 32bit support at relatively slow speed.

It is not yet possible to assess the relative performance of the Athlon 64 running 64bit software, due to a lack of driver support in the pre-release version of Microsoft's Windows XP for 64-Bit Extended Systems. But even if it proves superior, it is unlikely to trigger a stampede away from Intel.

Risk-averse firms will want to evaluate systems with the new chips; and large systems makers may not be keen to disrupt their relationship with Intel, a company about 10 times bigger than AMD by most indicators. However, Adrian Horne, marketing specialist at IBM, said, "IBM continues to investigate alternative processor and chipset combinations and while IBM Personal Computing Division has no current plans to adopt the Athlon 64 chip, we are in ongoing negotiations with AMD."

HP will put the Athlon 64 in configure-to-order desktops this year, then launch selected HP Pavilion and Compaq Presario notebooks with the chip in the second and third quarters of 2004.

In response to AMD, Intel is likely to cut prices and add capabilities to its chips. The firm has already launched a pre-emptive strike by announcing plans for the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, a 3.2GHz chip with an extra 2MB of cache.

Microsoft last week upgraded the 64bit version of Windows XP for AMD 64 to full beta status, but said a commercial release will not be available until next year. Windows Server 2003 for 64-Bit Extended Systems is also now available in beta and the final release product is expected in the first half of 2004.