AMD Roadmap for Coming Year and Beyond

nexex writes: "With a new year comes new products, and AMD certainly has some new toys for us to drool over. The first of 2002 will see the release of "Thoroughbred," a version of the Athlon XP chip made on the more advanced 130-nanometer manufacturing process. The chip will cover 80 square millimeters in area, or 65 percent of the space of the "Northwood" Pentium 4 coming from Intel in early January. That chip measures 116 square millimeters, according to AMD estimates. For more, including info on Clawhammer, Sledgehammer, and all the Intel bashing you can handle, see here." I hope they don't really mean that "these new chips will also consume less heat than current AMD notebooks chips."

Comments

fear in their eyes

[Frothy Walrus]

"My biggest fear is that Intel will come out with a 32-bit processor with 64-bit extensions because it is the right thing to do," Sanders said. "The Itanium it turns out is a niche product...We are going to have a role in the industry because we better fulfill Microsoft's needs."

the Itanium is a niche product now. in a few years i expect its time will come. 64-bit is not cool now but eventually OEMs are going to lean that way for upward compatibility. remember that the PowerPC existed in relative obscurity for a while too, and now it's the basis for what are probably the best UNIX machines on the market.

Re:fear in their eyes

[Yokaze]

The reason, why Itanium is considered as niche product by AMD is not because it's 64-bit (as AMD upcoming Hammer is too), but it's new instruction-set and architecture (in contrast to AMDs Hammer)

The Itanium-architecture currently seem to have some problems.
A group surounding Professor Wen-mei Hwu from the University Illinois is developing a compiler called IMPACT which should take advantage of the EPIC architecture. He made some observations concerning the Itanium.
Theoretically, the Itanium is capable of issuing 6 instructions simultanously. But on a SPEC benchmark, called mcf, the processor achieves only 0.15 IPC. Throughout the SPECint2000 benchmark the CPU calculates only 10% of the time. Most of the time the CPU idles because of memory accesses or pipeline-flushs.

Currently, the Itanium leads in certain benchmarks (Floating Point, IRC), but lags in other areas.

> the Itanium is a niche product now. in a few years i expect its time will come

You're probably right, but only time will tell.
Maybe EPIC is the wrong way, maybe not.

Re:Itanium is a big gamble

[Waffle Iron]

In fact, I think that the trend for the future is for CPUs to contain their own code generators, like Transmeta (code morphing) and the P4 (trace cache). The legacy X86 instruction set (plus maybe AMD's 64-bit extensions) become nothing but a compact byte code to drive the new designs.

That way, the underlynig hardware architecture can be changed at will with little or no impact on OSes or apps. I think that it was a mistake for Itanium to expose strange hardware features to the software compilers. It's too inflexible.