from eetimes...note comments on Willie at bottom re: pricing
AMD adds on-die cache to latest Athlon
By Will Wade , EE Times
Jun 5, 2000 (9:05 AM)
URL: eetimes.com
SAN MATEO, Calif. ? Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has integrated a Level 2 cache in the latest incarnation of its Athlon microprocessor but will not charge a premium for the improved device. The pricing strategy is part of the company's continued battle for an increasing share of the processor market. For the moment AMD is neck-and-neck with Intel Corp. in terms of raw processor performance, but analysts said the new class of Athlon chips may fall behind in the performance race when Intel brings out its Willamette device later this year.
AMD is introducing the newest Athlon design in both the Slot A format and a new, socket-based form factor called Socket A. Both are available now in speeds ranging from 750 MHz to 1 GHz, and all versions feature 256 kbits of on-die L2 cache. In addition to the new Athlons, which were designed under the code-name Thunderbird, the company has started its first volume shipments of its new Duron processor, a low-cost device positioned against Intel's Celeron. And AMD has shipped its first volume batch of products from its new fab in Dresden, Germany.
"I think we have had near-flawless execution in the past year," said Mark Bode, division marketing manager for the company's Athlon unit, based in Austin, Texas. "AMD today is very different from the AMD of a year ago."
Putting the past behind
A year ago, AMD was poised to unveil its first Athlon device, which was considered a make-or-break product. The company was losing money nearly every quarter and had been consistently plagued by an inability to deliver enough of its fastest processors to remain profitable.
The Athlon rollout has since proved successful, with hardly any of the manufacturing glitches that had seemed part and parcel of the preceding K6 line. AMD is now seen as running alongside industry leader Intel in processor performance.
Besides integrating the L2, AMD has shifted the cache architecture to an exclusive cache design. Many of the current generation of processors with on-die L2, including those from Intel, use an inclusive cache architecture, in which the entire contents of the Level 1 cache is mirrored in the L2. AMD's approach does not duplicate the L1, so there is more space to store information in the L2, the company said.
"This is an improvement," said Dean McCarron, principal analyst for Mercury Research (Scottsdale, Ariz.). While he characterized the use of the exclusive cache architecture as a small step forward, McCarron said it is more significant than a simple bump up in speed grades. "This translates to better use of the cache memory."
Another performance boost will come from increasing the frequency of the secondary cache. The integrated cache runs at the same speed as the processor core. The off-die Athlon cache was originally intended to run at half the speed of the processor. But Bode said off-die cache speeds have reached a ceiling in the mid-300-MHz range. Chips with processor cores exceeding 700 MHz have suffered a performance hit because the L2 cache runs at less than half the speed of the processor core. McCarron said one recently produced 1-GHz Athlon featured a 350-MHz cache ? just a bit better than one-third the speed of the core.
Although analysts consider the Athlon and Pentium III roughly comparable at equivalent speed grades, depending on which benchmarks are compared, Intel may pull ahead in the performance race before year's end with its upcoming Willamette chip. That processor will feature a front-side bus that reaches speeds of up to 400 MHz and interfaces only with Rambus DRAM. The current Athlon bus runs at 200 MHz, but the road map calls for a chip set later this year that will support both a 260-MHz bus and the use of double-data-rate DRAM.
Pricing plays
Last year, as AMD struggled to deliver chips that were still not as fast as Intel's best offering, Intel devised a marketing strategy of undercutting AMD on pricing for any chip for which AMD offered the same speed grade. Intel maintained high prices in areas where AMD was not a threat, thereby keeping average margins up and the revenue stream healthy. To remain competitive, AMD was forced to cut prices on its leading products, and it posted significant losses as a result.
Analysts are now questioning whether Intel can follow the same strategy with the Willamette. Market demand has been tepid thus far for systems based on the very fast but very expensive Rambus memory platform. If demand for Willamette-based systems is weak, it may not matter whether the device outperforms the Athlon, and the front lines in the microprocessor marketing battle will continue to pit the Athlon against the Pentium III. |
