Carl and thread,
Here's a little more on process issues from Sharky's:
-Scot
sharkyextreme.com
AMD: Ready For Their Close Up
After the debacle of last year's Comdex for AMD, in which there were too few representatives for the company to hold up to their massive appointment list needs, this year's show found a literal army of AMD technical people meeting in a dozen small conference rooms.
During our own sit down with AMD we were informed of their timeline (roadmap) for 2000. It was surprising to see the company so publicly forthcoming about the next twelve months, but as you'll see readers of Sharky Extreme have already known most of what the now public timeline contains as we've been reporting on it for over six months.
Here are the major highlights:
1. The Athlon 750 CPU will be released in December.
AMD had not planned on this course of action originally, preferring to debut the first .18um Athlon 750 in January, but major OEM builder Compaq requested that AMD bump up the introduction by four weeks, and hence we'll see Athlon 750-based PCs next month.
2. As reported previously, the first generation .18um Athlons will not include copper interconnects.
AMD confirmed to us that their first generation .18um Athlon cores will not be utilizing copper interconnects and will instead stay with the aluminum based technology that has been part of the Athlon core design since its introduction.
AMD remains dedicated to a summer 2000 launch time period for their second-generation .18um cores, which WILL feature copper-based technology.
3. All first generation .18um Athlon cores will not offer integrated on-die L2 cache.
We were somewhat disappointed to learn that along with no copper internals, the first generation .18um Athlon cores will not integrate the 512KB of L2 cache that all Athlon CPUs currently ship with on-die. This is also a change that will occur only when the second-generation .18um Athlon copper products debut in summer 2000.
4. 800MHz Athlons in January/February, 1GHz Athlons by June/July.
As originally reported by our staff last month, AMD will achieve and ship an 800MHz Athlon CPU in late January, early February, and will continue to ramp up speeds until the 1GHz barrier falls in summer 2000 (second gen. 18um process).
Readers should not confuse the air-cooled 1GHz Athlon CPU in AMD's timeline with the specially overclocked Athlon 700 CPU KryoTech uses in their 1GHz Athlon PC. Unlike the new KryoTech unit, the Athlon 1GHz CPU will offer 512KB of integrated, on-die L2 cache running at full core speed, as well as copper interconnects.
There were a host of other, farther away Athlon models that were illustrated to us by AMD reps, and we'll cover these 2H/2000 parts in a stand-alone article that offers more depth.
For now readers should know that AMD's mindset at Comdex was both very positive, and very confident, which is in direct contrast to the "beaten like a dog" attitude we've seen from them over the years at past shows.
AMD will clearly continue to offer incredible products throughout 2000, Intel likely has a bigger problem on their hands than was first thought when the Athlon debuted in August. |
