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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (101210)3/31/2000 2:48:00 AM
From: Joe NYC  Read Replies (1) of 1572781
 
Tenchusatsu

Well, that brings up a good question. Where exactly is Spitfire targeted? Can't be low-end; Spitfire just can't compete against Celeron price-wise.

It is still unclear where Spitfire will come in performance-wise. AMD has been fairly good at enforcing NDAs this time. There is no agreement on cache configuration, size or latency.

I wish someone would test cacheless Athlon vs. Celeron. That might give us some indication on performance potential. If the L2 is smaller than 128K, with not so great latency / datapath width, the performance will be lower than Athlon. But it may still be better than Celeron (which happens to be crippled by 66MHz bus - for marketing reasons)

I don't think it is far fetched to assume that Spitfire will outperform Celeron at the same clock speed.

Considering price, what makes you think that Spitfire can't compete with Celeron price-wise? There are rumors out there that Spitfire die size is 99mm^2. Isn't it about the same as Celeron?

But what may be decisive is how well will both of these chips scale to higher clock speeds. Celeron is at 600 MHz. I don't think there is any reason to expect Spitfire to be worse than Athlon, where 600 MHz is the low end.

If high end Celeron chips compete with low end of Spitfire chips, there is no reason to expect parity at clock-speeds where the 2 overlap. Intel may be forced to stop crippling their chips (with 66 MHz FSB) to stop Intel chips from being the slowest commercially available CPUs.

I guess the question may be what segment is Intel targeting with Culeron? Isn't the lowest end where Intel wants to position Timna? Maybe the real market segmentation will be: Timna for the lowest end, Celeron above that, than Spitfire for economy PCs, Coppermine/Athlon for mainstream, Thunderbird / Willamette for high end.

I wonder if the Intel marketing guy who positioned Culeron against Athlon is still employed at Intel.

Joe

PS: I forgot to thank you for your summary of Rambus vs. SDRAM / DDR from while ago. It is still in the academic category due to the price difference between the memory types.
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