Chip News To Crunch On

kupolu writes: "According to this article at Techweb, AMD announced last Friday that it is dropping its plans for the Mustang processor in favor of the new AMD-760 DDR-Enabled chipset. The Mustang was going to be AMD's entry into the server market, with it's amazing up-to 2MB L2 Cache." (Actually, from this article it's hard to tell if even AMD knows what's going on; tweezing apart the code names from the capabilities of particular products to be offered is complicated.) But on the coming-out instead of dropping-off front, proxima writes: "This story on Yahoo describes that Intel is releasing two new Celeron chips on Monday. One, a 733 Mhz model, will cost $112 per chip in bulk. A 766 Mhz model will cost $170 per chip."

Comments

Where do these Names Come From?

[vergil]

I'm hardly a hardware expert ... actually, I was an English major. So pardon my ignorance.

As I read over the aforementioned article, one question lodged in my brain:
Where do the names for these chips come from?

The following monikers were mentioned in the article:

Morgan
Mustang
Athlon
Palomino
Clawhammer

I suppose the typical focus groups were convened, and chose names that connote speed, agility, and -- in the case of "Clawhammer" -- driving, forceful impact.

'Else someone at AMD has a severe horse fetish.

Sincerely,
Vergil

On Topic!!! AMD "not knowing what they're doing"

[fatphil]

The way I have interpreted several of the articles regarding AMD "dropping" musthang (just made that up!) is as follows.

"We have decided that we don't want it in the _marketplace_, but if we need it, we could probably roll it out without too much delay".

It's probably because they don't want to have a smooth transition to their next generation chips (the 64 bit ones, my what a novel concept*). If they try to flood the high end market with Xeon-bashers, then they'll not have any market for the 64 bit chips. Better to wait and then ship Xeon-anihilators, so there's no confusion about what to by and when to upgrade.

Rant rant rant, all I want from them is SMP, rant rant rant!

FP
(* Alpha owner for _years_)

Re:766 not a big difference over 733

[Nagash]

This is a classic statement/argument that reminds me of the Lottery Paradox.

Take n people who have bought tickets for a lottery. Look at the first person. The chances are so remote that they will win that you can almost say with certainty they won't win. Same for the second person, third and so forth up to n. Well, you've covered all the people saying that they will not win, but you know for a fact that someone will win.

Another thing this reminds me of is the pile of sand problem. You have a pile of sand up to your head and take away a single grain. It's still a pile. Keep doing that. When is it not a pile?

Same goes for processor speeds. 766 is not a big difference over 733. 733 is not a big difference over 700, etc. However, 766 is a big difference over 333 and that is why they keep pushing the envelope. Not to make recent developments seem worthy of an upgrade but rather, older developments.

So while it seems every small processor upgrade is not a big difference, there is, at some point a big difference and that pile of sand is eventually not a pile.

Woz

That's not what they said.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, AMD said they were dropping the Mustang from their roadmap...

...But not in favor of the AMD 760 chipset. The 760 DDR chipset has already been announced and will
probably ship sometime late this month/early next month.

What they said is the 760 MP (their SMP version of the DDR chipset) will fill that niche.

The reason that probably prompted this is that AMD is short on fab space, and since they're selling out all the processors they can make, why divert capacity to an expensive low-volume chip.

What it says is that the SMP 760MP is on track.

This was a good move by AMD.

What is Intel Thinking?

[dgb2n]

$170 for a 766 Celeron in bulk? Even if they plan to release the chip on a 100 MHz bus, the price is way out of bounds. Take a look at the current lowest pricewatch numbers on processors:

AMD Duron - 750 $74, 800 $97
AMD Thunderbird 850 $142, 900 $165, 950 $222
Intel Celeron 700 $76
Intel - Pentium III 667 $149, 733 $173,750 $181, 800 $181

I'm not trying to start an AMD vs. Intel war but Intel's current release and price point doesn't even fit into their own chip lines let alone compete with AMD. Get real. You can get a 900 MHz Thunderbird for less money.