Thunderbird Is Go For AMD In New Year Tussle
By Darren Yates
11/23/1999
Sydney Morning Herald
Page 1
Copyright of John Fairfax Group Pty Ltd
CHIP vendor AMD looks set to continue the war with arch rival Intel next year, with plans to tackle the complete PC market from budget through to business and corporate. In a recent announcement, AMD chief executive Jerry Sanders said the company would release a 750MHz Athlon chip this quarter and an 800MHz chip in the new year.
Sanders also said he believes the company will break even this quarter, expecting fourth-quarter revenues to top previous AMD records.
The news comes after recent reports that vendors are struggling to find enough quantities of Intel's latest 733MHz Pentium III processors.
The 733MHz chip saw the light of day at Comdex last week as Intel partners showed off new systems based on the troubled Vancouver (VC820) chipset that includes new RAMBUS memory.
Intel pulled the VC820 motherboard from production two days before launch when it was discovered a problem with RAMBUS memory architecture could result in possible data loss if all three memory slots were used.
The new systems reportedly only come with two memory slots, but they will not be available until next month.
AMD plans to continue improving its consumer product with the release of a 533MHz K6-2 processor to compete head on with Intel's 500MHz Celeron chip. In a further attempt to expand its markets next year, AMD will announce three new chips codenamed Mustang, Spitfire and Thunderbird.
Mustang will be a 2Mb on-die cache version of the Athlon produced at 0.18-micron; Spitfire is expected to be an on-die cached chip aimed at Intel's Celeron market; and Thunderbird will be a 0.18-micron Athlon with on-die cache.
A spokesman for AMD Australia would not comment on future chip designs.
AMD claims to have already manufactured a 900MHz Athlon part using high-speed copper interconnect technology and believes it is on track to release a 1GHz Athlon chip in the second half of next year.
However, rumours from within AMD suggest the company could be ready to produce a 1GHz chip as early as January, although this could not be confirmed.
Kryotech, the company that uses cryogenic cooling to create higher-performing computers, showcased an Athlon processor running at 1GHz (1,000MHz) at Comdex in the US last week.
What is likely to cause Intel the most headaches is AMD's plan to launch a symmetrical multi-processing (SMP) version of Athlon to compete against Intel's Pentium III Xeon in the lucrative enterprise server market some time next year.
While details are sketchy, AMD is keenly working on two- to eight-way SMP Athlon chips.
On a price performance basis, AMD's Athlon is giving Intel's Pentium III a serious run for its money, but few of the major vendors appear to be offering Athlon-based systems to the corporate market despite better performance and lower costs. |
