AMD Introduces 1.33GHz Athlon
By Jayant Mathew, Electronic News
Mar 22, 2001 --- Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) today will introduce a 1.33GHz Athlon and 1.3GHz Athlon based on the Thunderbird core. In addition, the company said it will postpone the introduction of the Palomino and Morgan desktop cores to the third quarter of this year.
AMD’s (nyse: AMD) 1.33GHz Athlon comes fitted with a 266MHz front side bus, while the 1.3GHz Athlon has a 200MHz front side bus. Both chips are powered by direct data rate (DDR) memory, said John Crank, product marketing engineer at AMD. AMD has endorsed DDR memory for the higher-end Athlon and today analysts believe this platform offers the best price/performance value to consumers.
AMD was slated to introduce chips based on the Palomino and Morgan core in the first quarter of this year, but AMD believes the Thunderbird core of the present Athlon has enough room for a speed bump. The Palomino core, which is targeted at the high-end Athlon segment will enable AMD to increase the speed of the chip past 1.5GHz, while the Morgan core will enable AMD to increase speeds past 900MHz in the value segment.
These products are AMD’s first major introductions after nearly five months, and reflect AMD’s response to the Pentium 4 marketing campaign.
“Five months is a long time in the PC industry and some are asking what’s going on?,” said Kevin Krewell, senior analyst at MicroDesign Resources. “It seems they are almost forced to do this.”
Athlon has got high marks in performance but faces challenges from Intel Corp.’s P4 which will get another speed bump to 1.7GHz sometime in the second quarter. AMD is taking a similar approach to Intel’s (nasdaq: INTC) P4 strategy and stressing on PCs ability to use and create rich content.
AMD claims the 1.33GHz is 44 percent better than a 1.5Ghz P4 in SysMark 2000, which is a Internet benchmark test. The 1.33GHz also claims to be about 39 percent better than the 1.5GHz in gaming benchmarks, 42 percent better in video encoding benchmarks, and 87 percent better in audio, video and image editing benchmarks, AMD’s Crank said.
It fares better than the P4 by 36 percent in productivity benchmarks, including Winstone 2001, and SysMark 2000- office productivity. “They are very solid in the performance point of view even the 1.2GHz [Athlon],” Krewell said.
AMD, however, will use the Palomino core to crack the multiprocessing market. This is primarily because the Thunderbird core has some power dissipation issues that will only be rectified with the Palomino. “ It is designed to be a lower power chip than the Athlon,” Krewell said. “If you put two Thunderbirds on a motherboard it’s going to cook. But two Palomino’s on a board doesn’t stress the thermals of the system.”
AMD is slated to use the 760MP chipset for multiprocessing systems and this will give the company a chance to offer a better product for the corporate market. But this is a niche market and is not expected to significantly increase Athlon’s volumes.
Intel is slated to shrink the P4 to 0.13-micron process later this year, allowing it to increase margins and in effect have greater flexibility in pricing. AMD’s response to this will be the Thoroughbred, a 0.13-micron shrink of the Palomino that is slated for the first quarter of next year. The Appaloosa, a 0.13-micron shrink of the Morgan is expected a quarter later. |
