Following on from our workstation comparo, we saw that the AMD Opteron was a promising workstation chip in need of a few more MHz. It's time now to turn up the clock speed. The Opteron 146 processor launched just last week, aimed at single-processor workstations. This new chip, based on AMD's "Hammer" or K8 core, runs at 2GHz, and has all the architectural enhancements of its Opteron brethren. Unlike the 24x and 84x Opteron models, though, the 146 is not intended for use in multiprocessor configurations. That means, interestingly enough, that the Opteron 146's most direct competition is Intel's single-processor workstation setup, the Pentium 4 3.2GHz with the 875P chipset. Yes, that's right, one week before the Athlon 64 processor is due for its introduction to the public, we have a 2GHz K8 chip ready to take on a Pentium 4 3.2GHz. One might think this could be an enlightening preview of things to come. And one might be right?