AMD is spinning up the sales story for its bifurcated 64-bit chip brands, the Opteron and the Athlon (as its uniprocessor version is to be called).

It'll be several months before any of the damn things reach the public, but that won't stop AMD's PR bunnies from teasing out the announcements.

Today, for example is graphics support day, and what a list we have: 3DLabs ATI, Matrox and SiS say they will develop graphics cards for AMD's 64-bit platform(s). So where is Nvidia, then? Always the bridesmaid and never the bride in the press releases of CPU makers, it is beginning to appear. But we thought Nvidia and AMD were friends.

AMD timed its announcement for E3, the world's biggest games expo. And why not? AMD reckons it can exert high enough manufacturing volumes for K8s to drive down prices low enough eventually, to make 64-bit computing on desktops a reality. Eventually.

In the meantime it's picked a bunch of graphics droids to heap praise upon Hypertransport, AMD's bottleneck-bashing CPU architecture, and AGP-8X, both incorporated in Opteron/Athlon/Hammer/Clawhammer/Sledgehammer/K8.

You can read their efforts here. ®