Re: "There are lies, damn lies and Intel roadmaps."
Why don't you tell me what a lie most of this AMD roadmap was:
aceshardware.com
Ace's Hardware
AMD's roadmap
By Johan De Gelas
Monday, February 28, 2000
AMD's Athlon roadmap.
At AMD's booth I talked with Scott Carol (US Senior PR) and Achille Venditti (Marketing Manager Europe). Achille and Scott explained AMD's roadmap in great detail. Thanks guys!
Squeezed between AMD reps...
While the CPU roadmap is pretty vague, the chipset and motherboard roadmap is very detailed. For example, while the CPU roadmap simply indicate mid 2000 for the Thunderbird launch, the motherboard roadmap says that production boards, with a VIA KX133 Socket A chipset should be available around april/may.
Achille confirmed that this means that the Thunderbird should be there around april/may, as motherboard won't be produced if here are no CPU's available. The table below is based on AMD's official documents:
April/May 2000 July - August 2000 September/October
2000 December
2000 Q1 2001 Q1 2001
CPU Thunderbird
Socket A Spitfire Socket A,
Thunder bird Slot A Mustang, Thunderbird Mustang, Thunderbird Mustang, Thunderbird Sledgehammer,
aka K8
CPU details 256 KB full speed L2-cache Spitfire: 64 or 128 KB L2-cache Mustang: an improved Athlon core. 512 KB or 1 MB cache 770 will allow dual configs. Hotrail enables massive SMP config. New enhanced architecture, CMP (2 cores)
64 bit instructions.
Chipset VIA KX133/ Socket A VIA, SIS AMD 760 AMD 770 AMD 770, hotrail Not known
Chipset details AGP 4X, PC133 SDRAM AGP 4X override,
UMA,
PC133 AGP 4X,
266 MHZ FSB,
DDR200/266 SDRAM Two way AMD 760
(SMP) Several Dual CPU (up to 16) connected with LDT Not known
As you can see the Thunderbird socket A version will ship before the slot A version, and before the Spitfire, which will only be available in a socket A version. In september or october, boards with 266 MHz FSB based on the AMD 760 chipset (EV6 bus at 133 MHz, DDR), will be available. These boards will be able to accept 200 and 266 MHZ DDR RAM (100/133 MHz at DDR).
AMD is also working on the 770 chipset, and the first Dual Athlon boards should appear around December 2000. Chipsets of ALI will be available too, with the same features like the 760 and 770.
The Spitfire will launch between the end of june (most optimistic roadmap) and August (pessimistic), so right after the Thunderbird launch. Right now, AMD thinks that there should be no problem to get it out in early July. Of course, a lot will depend on VIA. Oh yes, the Spitfire will not be called "Athlon", the name Athlon will only be used for the high end CPU's.
In august, VIA should be ready with a very low cost version of socket A chipset. Boards based on this chipset (AGP 4x override feature) will let you choose between UMA (Unified Memory Architecture) and videocard memory. These boards will allow you to allocate up to 64 MB from the main memory as video memory. Of course UMA decreases the overall performance of your system. If you want maximum performance, you will still be able to disable UMA.
We got even more for you, but the following information comes from our inside sources, and is not confirmed by AMD marketing:
The Socket A reference board is already ready, and is called "Belhaven". AMD's engineering teams are confident that some new advances in process technology (more later) and of course the copper interconnect technology will allow the Thunderbird to compete with the Willamette at the very high end. All Athlon cores are ahead or on schedule.
Athlon with copper interconnects are now produced in Dresden using the new process with copper interconnects, called Hip6L. Below you see a small overview of AMD's production processes:
AMD's process technology 1998 1999 2000
Technology CS44E6/7 CS50 Hip6L
Design Rule (µm) 0.25 0.18 0.18
Gate Width 0.17 0.12 0.10
Metal Layers 5 layers, Al 6 layers, Al 6 layers, Cu
The Dresden fab and the collaboration with Motorola seems to pay off. Well, prepare for an unbelievable fight at the high end in December. What about a 1.33 GHz Thunderbird going head to head with a 1.5 GHz Willamette ? Just speculating...
The high end: Mustang and K8
The Mustang will boost a big on die, 16-way associative, L2 cache (realistically 0.5-1MB), to take on Intel's foster. This improved Athlon core will be pretty expensive, and target the high end workstation and server market. The first systems will be single CPU systems, but around december, with the appearance of the AMD 770, the first dual Mustangs systems should be available.
Hotrail and LDT technology will allow massive SMP because several AMD 770 northbridges, each with two CPUs, can be chained together with AMD's wide LDT bus. The LDT bus, or Lighting Data transport bus is the bus between de North and South bridge, and boosts no less than 6.4 GB/sec on a 16 bit upstream, and a 16 bit downstream dataflow. The bus can be as wide as 32 bit in both directions.
Each CPU in a HotRail-based system is connected to either memory or I/O, by a the point to point EV6 bus via a cache-coherent switched fabric. Initially, The first HotRail based system will be 4- and 8-way AMD-Athlon servers.
AMD said that it only costs 5% more die space to add 64 bit instructions to their 32 bit core. But that doesn't mean that one of the two cores of the K8 will be only 5% bigger than the Athlon of course. The K8 is a new CPU, a new architecture.
The 32-bit performance of the K8 core will be better than the K7 core and will be critical to the success of this CPU, which will also be targeted at the 32-bit workstation market. When I asked about Compiler and OS for x86- 64 bit support, Achille pointed out that the K8 will be a strong CPU even without x86-64 bit support.
It seems that there will be no x86-64-bit OS ready when Sledgehammer will launch. AMD is confident that it will reach its 30% marketshare (currently 17% and rising) to leverage the necessary 64 bit compiler and OS support later in 2001. The 64-bit 'RISC alike' FPU instructions should boost the FPU performance of AMD's next generation CPU to the typical high RISC levels (like the Alpha's).
What about the Low end ?
You probably heard that the K6-2+ will only be available as a mobile chip. When our inside sources reported that the K6-2+ for the desktop would be coming out soon, I reported it as "the last upgrade for Super 7" and I can understand that some people are a bit disappointed now.
However you should understand that our inside sources are people who don't make the decisions and they can not predict future yields. The K6-2+ (desktop) was produced (and samples do exist) but yielded pretty low: the first (desktop) samples only reached 450 MHz, while the engineers successfully squeezed more speed out of the normal K6-2: the fastest K6-2 has now 550 MHz on the counter.
Combine the slow initial clockspeeds of the K6-2+, the strong (OEM) demand for the Athlon and fastest K6-2 (OEM's are still selling K6-2's based system like hotcakes!), and you understand why AMD decided to can the K6-2+ desktop project. While the Athlon roadmap has been executed flawlessly, the K6-2+ project didn't meet the deadlines. So I am sorry to say that the K6-2+ will not be available for the desktop. AMD is experimenting with new production techniques (more about that later) and there is still a chance that the K6-2 will hit 600 MHz, which should be the real last upgrade for super 7. The K6-2 550 (and maybe 600) and the normal Athlon (with 512 KB off die cache) will be produced throughout 2000.
VIA
Due to time constraints (got only one day) my visit at VIA was rather short.
Shane Dennison explained me some of VIA's CPU's would use a 124 MHz FSB, others would use a 133 MHz FSB. PCI and memory will always be working at respectively 33 and 100 MHz, as the Appolo pro133A allows the FSB and Memory bus to work asynchronously. The Cyrix III PR 500 works at 3x133 MHz (400 MHz), while the Cyrix III PR 533 works at 3.5x124 (434 MHz).
I hope to test a final version soon, which should perform better than the reports we heard about the Cyrix III beta silicon.
That is it for now, I update this article with more videocard news soon. |
