Screw the Idiot List(tm). Talk about this! (pt 2)
techweb.com
In the commercial desktop market, for example, AMD has yet to land a real design
win with a PC designed for business, according to David Somo, AMD's newly
appointed vice-president of marketing for the Computation Products Group in
Sunnyvale, Calif.
Yet he also pointed out that K6-based notebooks have been sold by IBM (stock:
IBM) and Compaq (stock: CPQ) for business customers, and customers have been
carefully watching AMD's roadmap and its ability to hit predetermined targets.
"We have a very high confidence level" that in the second half AMD will move
into the U.S. commercial space, Ruiz said.
Likewise, AMD's notebook products have, to date, been restricted to the K6 and
K6-2 generation of products. On the other hand, the next-generation Mustang
core, and the Corvette derivative for notebook PCs, have also been designed from
the ground up with AMD's PowerNow power-saving technology.
While the PowerNow technology has been announced and is shipping inside AMD's
current K6-2+ products, the power-savings algorithms have required a BIOS
change.
On Monday, AMD announced two new 550- and 533-MHz versions of the K6-2+ product
series, which are featured in PowerNow-enabled Pavilion N3300 notebooks from
Hewlett-Packard (stock: HWP). The chips cost $99 and $85, respectively.
"The original Athlon core was not designed with a huge amount of efficient power
management," said Dean McCarron, analyst with Mercury Research in Scottsdale,
Ariz.
To date, AMD has simply said that the Mustang will offer significant power
savings, based upon a redesign of the transistors upon which the chip is
manufactured.
AMD's Sledgehammer 64-bit processor is expected to sample early next year and
challenge Intel's own 64-bit offering, Itanium. The successor to the AMD
Mustang, an unnamed 32-bit core, will begin life at 2-GHz.
Manufacturing, especially within AMD's "superfab" in Dresden, Germany, will also
continue to be one of AMD's top priorities, Ruiz said.
AMD is no longer seeking a manufacturing partner for Dresden's excess capacity,
Ruiz said. Instead, the plant could potentially be expanded, as well as the
associated design center.
"Copper [interconnects]are step 1, low-K dielectrics are step 2, and copper plus
low-K is step 3," he said. While copper interconnects are already a staple of
the AMD manufacturing process, both low-K dielectric materials and SOI
technologies are being researched.
"In the long run, we believe copper to be less costly than aluminum," Ruiz said. |
