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K8 Details
Urban Dragon writes "Cnet has a story on how AMD will be giving details of it's K8 chip next week. The K8 will be competing with Intel's Merced chip. It should be interesting to see which comes out first.
" Maybe it won't run as hot, either. I mean, I'll want one regardless, but...
This is just pure speculation, but if the K8 is going to be a 64bit chip it'll need a new instruction set. Isn't the Alpha a pretty damn good 64bit chip with and instruction set that's already supported by Linux, NT 4.0, VMS, and Tru64? Why doesn't AMD either use the same instruction set or start making Alphas (or RISC chips that can also run x86 binaries)? Basically, we have x86, RISC (and many RISC platforms, by the way), and Merced/McKinley. Why are we going to need another instruction set? Maybe AMD will just highly optimize their x86 processors. I'd rather see that than yet another platform.
By the way, wouldn't it be nice if an EV7 motherboard could handle either a K7 or Alpha? We could buy one motherboard and choose between CISC or RISC. Imagine upgrading from an Athlon to an Alpha. There are so many cool things AMD could be doing right now. I just wish we could see some action.
Following its architectural triumph with the Athlon chip, Advanced Micro Devices next week will detail the K8, a 64-bit chip that will compete against Intel's Merced.
Very nice, unfortunateley it's not a question of having a good CPU architecture, but to a much larger degree a marketing question. I don't doubt that AMD can design a good K8 chip, but in order to do that, they first have to make the K7 a success. They are pretty strapped for cash and unless they can stop bleeding red ink, they might not even be around long enough to see the introduction of the K8. So they can design decent CPUs. This is good, but hardly news. In the past they had good chip designs falter due to manufacturing problems. Lets hope they can ramp up K7 production fast enough so they have a product to sell.
Having said that with a light undertone of sarcasm, I should probably note that I am/was a satisfied AMD customer. I wish them well because Intel deserves some competition, but they need to be careful not to repeat past mistakes. They have to become profitable soon, which is no easy task when you face a giant like Intel.
Just a quick comment on that, AMD doesn't have a problem with finance management, at least not any more than your typical company. Their problems largely rooted in the following two factors:
1) AMD's sixth generation processor design was put together decently, but with a very shallow pipeline. This means that with your typical ramping schema, it should be at about the same MHz level as the Cyrix chips (300MHz) or the WinChips (250MHz). As it is, AMD has an immensely aggressive ramping team which has managed to bring AMD's K6 family to just under Intel's P6 family in MHz, which has a couple effects:
(a) Because the K6 family has been historically about two clock bins lower than the P6 family, and because Intel's pricing schema involves tremendous gulfs between the top two clock bins and all below it, AMD's cpu Average Selling Prices could not help but drop lower and lower as time progressed.
(b) Due to the K6's low pipeline and the fab team's uncomparable (and absolutely necessary) aggressiveness, the bin split of the K6 family parts are HORRENDOUS. Before AMD's recent jump to their cs44e7 hybrid process (quarter micron with some 180nm features), the top bin being produced was 475MHz and the bottom bin was still way down at 333MHz or so, with over half the parts still binning below 400MHz. This added more shame to their ASPs, as anything below 400MHz was under a hundred bucks, which means something like only fifty dollars profit per chip, at best.
(c) As a result of the aggressive ramping they needed (to compete with Intel's more easily rampable design), yields were kept lower than comparable Intel parts (though for the most part not horrendous, save for the little "incident" in February). This means that they get lower quantity to sell than they could have gotten otherwise, which means that, in addition to ASPs, they're making very low amounts of revenue.
2) There really is no way to get past problem 1a without making a newer cpu core with a deeper instruction pipeline. And to get past the problem in 1b, while that newer cpu core will help, it'd really be the wiser choice to expand your capacity, so AMD has forced themselves to spend a whopping, Intel-like amount of money (in R&D and in building a whole new megafab) so that, while they hurt in current quarters, they can thrive in future quarters. Would this strategy work? It's not guaranteed, but it's a hell of a lot cooler than the old "play it safe" mentality. If AMD had played it safe and not done all this fab or R&D stuff, then they'd have easily made profits (I believe) off the K6 series in every quarter of 1998 and 1999. The only problem is that they'd be lagging in clock speed at this point and they'd have no real future technology with which to compete. In effect, though they'd be profiting, they would be writing their own tombstone. The way they're doing it now, they've lost lots of money but they *finally* have superior technology to work with. Even without that newer fab, as soon as they ramp K7 to at least 60% capacity, they'd be making a pretty solid profit. With the newer fab, they'll be able to profit very nicely and retroactively fund these projects that they so unharmoniously dumped cash into all these years. They'd also be able to afford their future plans, which is a nice byproduct.
-JC
PC News'n'Links
http://www.jc-news.com/pc
PS: This stuff is largely my opinion, though I believe it to be largely based on fact. It isn't merely a pipe dream that leads me to believe that the K7 is the first design since the 486 that offers everything AMD needs to absolutely thrive in the market.
A year and a half ago, all we heard was "K7 is going to put Intel out of business. They are going to be for sale signs on all of Intel's fabs and they stock is going to tumble".
A year and a half later AMD losses are at an all time high, K7 hasn't made any dent in sales, and I can't even see one at Best Buy.
This is largely due to the pre-announcement effect: everybody heard about K7 and delays purchases of AMD chips(when they would have bought a K6).
Now they announce the K8 when the K7 is barely ready for production. This is going to have the same effect. Consumers are going to say, "Why should I buy K7 now when K8 is coming out Really Soon Now?" They'll probably just buy Intel.
Willamette/Foster will be out by the time K8 is. What has the world heard about that? Very little. Almost no details have been made public.
Intel never makes the details of a processor public to the industry until it it ready for VOLUME production. Often their published figures are lower than expected, so the compeititors feel comfortable and slack off, then they grab the crown from out of nowhere (P6 is the prime example, and Willlamette/Foster will do the same).
This is the reason Intel is more successful than AMD - they don't preannounce, so they can sell chips they can fab in volume NOW, and not tell customers "don't buy what we have now just wait a little while longer and we'll have this whiz-bang part" (OK, they didn't do this with Merced, but they have with everything else)