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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Scumbria who wrote (120890)7/25/2000 2:30:12 PM
From: Gopher Broke  Read Replies (2) of 1572138
 
Scumbria,

As I understand it the Athlon x86 core is implemented as microcode on top of a small fast risc core. (Apologies for my laymans terminology here)

Presumably it was known when Dirk started on Athlon that AMD would need to produce a 64 bit system, and he was a 64 bit guy before. So I would be very surprised if he did not design the Athlon at the outset to be enabled for a painless migration to 64 bit, at least at the level of the risc core.

Also, given that Sledge is an evolution of Athlon, I see no reason why AMD cannot produce interim silicon that is operational as far as external interfaces but does not necessarily have all 64 bit codepaths in place yet. Maybe even a processor that will only run 32 bit code but uses the Sledge bus architecture? This would allow for parallelism of CPU core development and system infrastructure would help in time to market, which has been AMD's real problem with Athlon and SocketA launches.

After all 286 to 386 was simply a question of renaming AX to EAX so presumably Sledghammer just introduces EEAX :^) Seriously, the specification of the instruction set can probably leverage a lot of prior experience of the 16->32 bit migration which should help the design enormously.

Sod it. We all know it is fantasy don't we :(
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