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AMD Delays Hammer
TeJarz writes "C|Net reports that their next processor (Hammer) has been rescheduled from its original Q4 release to Q1 2003. To quote C|Net: 'The delays are occurring to accommodate the release of a new version of Athlon with a 333MHz bus, said Crank. Current Athlons come with a 200MHz bus and 256KB of secondary cache.' Let's hope this doesn't get moved again."
I, for one, am hoping to replace our Alphas with cpus from the AMD Hammer series. We're about to buy a bunch of P4-based machines despite the problems we've had with certain tight loops in scientific code performing 80 times slower than a similarly clocked Athlon (according to Athlon advertised "speed", not actual clock). No, I'm not exaggerating, and this has been verified independently -- the P4 cpu has some huge weak spots that really suck if you hit them. If Hammer were out and working properly, we probably wouldn't buy the P4 machines to hold us over.
We need 64 bit machines to accomodate massive memory for our research. I'm really hoping the Hammer can provide a relatively inexpensive and *commoditized* 64 bit platform for us to work on, compared to existing 64 bit (workstation/server) platforms. And I want it yesterday. Actually, I want it last year.
I have no idea what the editors or submitter meant, of course.
-Paul Komarek