The demo today was a Thunderbird core according here:
dailynews.yahoo.com
Also says *ntel will demo a Willy next week.
Monday February 07 09:30 PM EST
AMD fires up its 1.1GHz Athlon demo
By John G. Spooner, ZDNet News
AMD holds the chip demo speed crown for now, after showcasing its 1.1-gig, next-gen Athlon
processor ... one week before Intel pulls the wraps off Willamette.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on Wednesday one-upped rival Intel Corp. in the chip demo wars,
showing off an upcoming 1GHz-plus Athlon processor.
AMD (NYSE:AMD - news) pulled the wraps off a 1.1GHz version of the next-generation Athlon processor with its
forthcoming Thunderbird processor core at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuit Conference in San Francisco.
AMD showed the 1.1GHz Athlon chip in response to Intel's (Nasdaq:INTC - news)
discussion of a forthcoming 1GHz Pentium III chip.
Talking some chip smack
AMD officials took the opportunity, too, to say they're not lagging in this chip speed race.
"To our customers, it's a further indication that we're executing to the plan that (AMD
Chairman and CEO Jerry) Sanders has laid out for us," said Steve Lapinski, director of
product marketing for AMD's Computational Products Group. "We felt it quite appropriate
to make sure people understood (AMD) is well along with production and manufacturing
goals, (including) the Dresden (Germany) facility."
The 1.1GHz Athlon chip was demonstrated in a system built by AMD with off-the-shelf parts, including its AMD 750
chip set, with a 200MHz system bus. AMD ran a utility called MyCPU, which showed how fast the chip was running.
The processor was produced at AMD's Fab 30 manufacturing plant. It included two new features that are due in
future Athlon chips. Those include copper interconnects and integrated Level 2 cache.
The two new features will help AMD raise the performance of the Athlon. The current 800MHz and forthcoming
850MHz chips utilize aluminum interconnects and an external 512KB cache. The 850MHz Athlon is expected next
week.
It's all in the cache
At the outset, copper will offer end users "little performance difference," Lapinski said. "The performance difference
comes in L2 cache."
The Athlon chip's next major improvement is expected to be the integration of level 2 cache, which helps increase
performance by allowing for faster access to data by storing it on a chip, where it can be accessed at full clock speed.
The copper interconnects will show gains farther down the road, Lapinski said.
AMD would not say when the 1.1GHz chip would ship, though the company has said it will have a 1GHz Athlon by
the fourth quarter of this year.
The first shipments of Thunderbird-based Athlons are expected in the second quarter. The first revenue shipments of
copper-based Athlons are expected at the end of the second quarter, which means end users will not get them until
sometime in the third quarter.
It is not likely that integrated L2 and copper will be combined, initially. They will be used in the same Athlon chip over
time, however.
While AMD holds the faster-gigahertz demo speed crown for now, Intel has been saving up a demo of its own
1-gig-plus chip, code-named Willamette, for its Intel Developer Forum, next week. |
