Slashdot Mirror
A Triplet Of AMD Goodies
Michael Baumann writes: "Look out Intel, AMD's at it again! Check it out!" According to the usual "Sources close to," "[a] 1.2Ghz Athlon chip should appear sometime near the end of this month." That would mean all my computers have been officially lapped, which is great. Ryan Shrout writes: "It looks like the rumor circulating on the Web recently that AMD would be removing the pins on the socket A CPUs to stop multiplier adjustments via the motherboard may be false. This post at the Athlonmb.com forums (Scroll down to the post by OptiX) states 'the simplest way to put it is that the multiplier lock seems to be part of the chip package rather than the core, and short of a new processor stepping and a complete revision of the processsor interface there's no way the FID pins can be removed, unless the multiplier becomes a purely DIP switch set function, which would defeat the object of the exercise!!'" Secondly, and probably of interest to far more people, this page discusses the expected price drops on AMD chips in the near future, and says that "the official date for the change is Oct. 30th, but [that] many larger distributors will be taking advantage of the lower costs as soon as the 15th." I hope so -- heat up, market, heat up!
No SMP chipset for the Athlon has been released yet. The AMD 760MP chipset, which supports SMP and DDR memory, should be released in late 2000, according to AMD. Motherboards will probably follow soon after.