Goutama and Thread,
I was gone at the end of last week and had 800+ messages to read.....so I guess I'm saying I don't know if the following has been posted <g>.
From AMDzone, a sledgehammer preview; the following is an excerpt.
amdzone.com
Sledgehammer preview
Judging from the current state of processors and following today?s trends, this is an idea of what the Sledgehammer will look like when it ships. It should be produced with 0.18-micron transistor gates (possibly 0.15) and copper-interconnects. It will more than likely be produced alongside ?Mustang? Athlons at the Dresden Fab 30. The chip should have on-die L2 cache, running at full speed, with size ranging from 512K to a possible 2MB. This will definitely add size and cost to the processor, but these specs are pure speculation. With AMD migrating from the Slot A to a Socket A connector, the Sledgehammer should be released in a PPGA format. Clock speeds for the release version will approach 2Ghz with a FSB of 266Mhz.
The Sledgehammer is AMD?s flagship into the 64-bit realm. It is the first product that AMD has developed that doesn?t totally follow Intel?s lead. The K5, K6 and Athlon were created to compete with equivalent Intel products: The 486, Pentium and Pentium Pro/II/III. The road is now diverging between these two silicon giants. Intel has gone the ?RISC-y? path while AMD has chosen a different route. Instead of developing a new RISC processor, AMD has extended the 32-bit chip of today into the 64-bit chip of tomorrow. The true advantage of this is the Sledgehammer?s ability to run both 32 and 64-bit applications without using any sort of software emulation. Preliminary reports on the Itanium point out that it will barely compete with today?s Athlon/PIII systems when running 32-bit applications. This sort of performance loss due to software emulation is unacceptable, and AMD has planned accordingly. By having 32-bit capability inherent in the processor, AMD is placing the Sledgehammer to act as a solid bridge between 32-bit and 64-bit computing. Intel has said that it does not think 64-bit will become a standard until at least 2005; this is a 4-year window for AMD to move to the forefront of consumer computing.
But, you may say, if AMD has only extended the x86 instruction set architecture (ISA), then what about that slow x87 FPU? AMD has addressed this issue by implementing a flat floating point unit. It is an FPU that doesn?t use the ungainly stack method of the x87. This method saves processing cycles by not having to shuffle data around in the stack before performing operations. AMD has not said how many FP registers the Sledgehammer will contain, but guesses range from 16 to 32. This FPU should place the Sledgehammer on par with other RISC offering from Sun and Alpha. |
