The announcements related to the new generation of consoles has made many wonder whether the time of the PC to step back as a playing machine for FPSs, RPGs or any other kind of games is at hand.

A possible answer is given by AMD who has launched today the Athlon 64 FX-57, which at 2.8 GHz is faster than its Athlon FX-55 predecessor, which can still be found in the company's offer.

Athlon 64 FX-57 is built on a 90-nanometers technology and includes 1MB L2 cache. It will be integrated especially by the manufacturers of game-dedicated systems, as for example Alienware, Voodoo PC and Velocity Micro, already loyal followers of this solution.

The fact that AMD is betting on the games' industry might seem a bit strange at first glance, considering that the studies in this field point out to the fact that the sales have dropped with 11%. Upon closer inspection, one might notice that these studies refer only to the offline games while for the online games, which are growing more popular lately, no statistical results are yet available.

With a game-oriented processor, which can be combined with the latest NVIDIA graphics solution, the GeForce 7800, AMD and its Athlon FX-57 could gain an important position in an industry whose potential hasn't yet been fully exploited.

With Turion and Athlon FX-57 in its holster, AMD keeps winning battle after battle in its ongoing war against Intel.