AMD Chairman Jerry Sanders revealed at the Merrill Lynch "Hardware Heaven" conference yesterday that the new Hammer (Opteron for those in the know) will debut at 2GHz, or 3400+ in AMD speak.

If this is true, it'll put AMD ahead of Intel's new Itanium II (McKinley) processor, which the chip giant has only said will out perform its current Itanium I by a factor 1.5 to 2 times.