Windsock:
Don't know if this has been posted.
Adam
techweb.com
AMD To Add On-Chip Cache To Athlon
(01/21/00, 9:51 a.m. ET) By Will Wade, EE Times
Advanced Micro Devices will expand its Athlon microprocessor product line this year by integrating Level 2 cache onto the chip's die and by repackaging it into a lower-cost, socket version for the value-PC market. The company also has reported record sales and income figures for the past quarter, primarily on the strength of its Athlon products.
"We intend to integrate the L2 cache onto an improved version of the Athlon, which will be called Thunderbird," said W.J. Sanders III, AMD's chairman and CEO. "And we will also have a version of that product that uses a socket infrastructure for the value-PC segment, which will be the Spitfire."
After major missteps with manufacturing the K6 processor line, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD seems to have finally hit its stride with the K6's successor, the Athlon. Sanders said AMD manufactured nearly a million Athlon processors last quarter and sold about 800,000 of them, at an average price of nearly $250. He has frequently said his business model depends on an average selling price for microprocessor products that tops $100. While the overall ASP for processors in the fourth quarter of 1999 was $80, that is up from previous quarters, where it had dipped as low as $65.
Total revenue for the quarter ending Dec. 26, 1999, was $968.7 million, with net income of $65.1 million. Sales for all of 1999 reached $2.9 billion, up 12 percent from 1998, but the company posted a net loss for the year of $88.9 million. More than half of the total sales growth last quarter came from the Athlon line.
Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst for market research firm Insight 64, in Saratoga, Calif., said expanding the Athlon line is a logical way to increase revenue and improve market share asAMD continues to gain credibility in its marketing battle with Intel.
"AMD has a very coherent road map, and they are executing it beautifully," he said.
The upcoming Thunderbird device will boost performance by transforming the Athlon's current 512 kilobytes of off-chip L2 cache into 256 KB of on-die L2 cache. Brookwood said Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel used the same strategy to turn its Katmai chip into the Coppermine, with cache sizes in the same ranges as the Athlon and Thunderbird designs.
Performance Gain
"Intel gained about a 10 percent increase in performance, and I would expect AMD to do about the same," he said. "The cartridges with separate SRAM cache chips should disappear once the Thunderbird is ready to roll."
The Spitfire, meanwhile, will feature a 128-KB on-die L2 cache along with its new socket infrastructure. The current Athlon chips use a cartridge packaging scheme, and Dean McCarron, principal analyst for Mercury Research, in Scottsdale, Ariz., said switching to a socket-based design could save $10 to $15 on every part.
McCarron said AMD is continuing to gain market share, and that its chips are now found in about 17 percent of all Windows-based computers. CEO Sanders said his long-term goal is to capture 30 percent of that market by 2002. He also expects to roll out the first K8 chips, code-named "Sledgehammer," at about the same time.
Although the Sledgehammer will be a 64-bit processor, like Intel's forthcoming Itanium, AMD's device will use the same X86 instruction set as the current generation of processors. Sanders said it initially will target the high-end desktop PC market, not the workstation and server space where many analysts expect to see the first Itanium chips.
The first Spitfire chips are expected to ship next quarter, and will ramp up throughout the rest of the year. The Thunderbird will be slightly behind that schedule, according to Brookwood, likely appearing early in the third quarter.
Later this year or early in 2001, AMD will also roll out the Mustang, which uses the same Athlon core but features a jumbo-size on-die L2 cache. Brookwood said he predicted the cache on that device could be as large as a megabyte. The Mustang will be expected to compete with Intel's upcoming Cascade processor, which will merge a Coppermine core with an L2 cache that could be as large as 2 megabytes. |
