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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."
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"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.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoo m/0,,51_104_608,00.html
That link includes a pretty roadmap graphic. It also shows the Barton design following the Thoroughbred release.
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If the decisions were made on a strict technical basis, what would keep Intel alive?
Lower cost bundling to the OEM's
Fewer customer returns
Faster turn around to OEM's with replacement parts
High power processors ready for laptops today
Mind you, I run 2 Athlon machines at home, and 1 at work. On all of these machines I have been extremely pleased with stability and performance of the AMD processors. I always build my own PC's, and I am not an OEM. I don't have the same kinds of concerns they do.
Mabye the free market rules are not applied to computers?
The free market works just peachy. Athlons are doing quite well with folks such as myself purchasing individual components. It's the OEM space that AMD is hurting in, and for a variety of reasons.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
I've said it once, I'll say it again... No one ever wants to flat out say that the motherboards for AMD chips are a lot less well supported than the motherboards for Intel chips because they're so busy cheering for the underdog.
s p4-15.html [tomshardware.com])
But if you dig deep into, say, Tom's Hardware Guide: Another factor is the stability and product quality of a system: while all Athlon processors suffered from occasional instability in our tests, the Pentium 4 platform ran without a glitch. (http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q4/011031/xpv
Now, for me and I'm guessing a lot of people, system stability is far more important than a few percent performance increase. Since these machines are so closely matched and overpowered anyway, I'd like to see more emphasis on other factors like stability. More than a single sentence buried in one review, anyway. If these things are crashing during the tests, I want to know about it with a big red X on the graph...
Or just the chance to stop having to download freakin' 4-in-1 drivers for my KT7A... if I had known about the KT7A Faq (http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kt7/kt7faq.htm) before buying one, I probably would've passed... but all the "review" sites just a good things to say about it...
These new processors actually do consume heat as they operate, turning it into valuable CPU cycles. These processors require the use of a whole new CPU packaging technology that pumps heat into, rather than out of, the CPU core. Initial tests in laptop configurations have proven uncomfortable to use, due to the fact that the laptop begins to condense water out of the air, and eventually frost over as it runs. AMD expects that these problems will be solved by the time these processors reach the marketplace.
They will no doubt use this new technology to bury Intel, Microsoft, AOL Time Warner and the Soviet Union. Having vanquished these foes, they will split their company into a half dozzen competing CPU manufacturers that compete fairly with one another. Each of these new chip makers will pour billions of dollars into Linux development. Their executives and directors will use their extra income to feed starving children and help build a better public education system.
Oh, wait. That would break the laws of thermodynamics. Never mind.
In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
The best case for VLIW (Intel calls it EPIC, because VLIW has a bad rep, but it's VLIW) is inner number-crunching loops. Think rendering, audio/video compression and decompression, and similar stuff. But most computing isn't about tightly coded inner loops any more. Least of all on servers. Mostly, it's about calling lots of little subroutines that call more little subroutines. That's the worst case for explicit parallelism. Unless the compiler optimizes over subroutine call boundaries (which typically means very heavy inlining), explicit concurrency stalls at each subroutine call. Not good. The HP compiler guys working on the Itanium compiler admitted a few years back that it was going to take a major breakthrough to generate good Itanium code.
Three times in the past, Intel has tried to move away from the x86 architecture to a new, more modern one. The iAPX 432, the i860, and the i960 were all moves in that direction. All three were dismal flops. In Andy Grove's book, Only the Paranoid Survive, he takes this as a lesson that Intel should't try to force an architecture change on its customers.
I would have expected Intel to come up with the Sledgehammer and somebody else to be pushing the Itanium.