For me, the most interesting technology of the AMD Athlon64 processor is not the 64-bit processing power. 64-bit desktop processors are bound to be made sooner or later. What I found interesting was the fact that AMD decided to have the memory controller on the CPU itself. This certainly raises a lot of eyebrows. Normally the motherboard Northbridge chipset is the memory controller, providing the transition between CPU processing and memory fetching. This is no longer the case. Compatibility will no longer be between motherboard and memory, but rather CPU and memory. The on-die memory controller has a lot of little secrets that not many people are aware of.