<font color=blue>We spoke with AMD about its latest plans for desktop processors now that the mobile Athlon 4 is out.
E3 isn't just about games; it's also about the PC hardware they run on. We caught up with AMD at the show to get an update on the company's processor roadmap for this year. The next big revision to AMD's flagship processor is the Athlon 4, code-named Palomino, which just last week started shipping in its 1GHz notebook version. As we reported in March, AMD decided to delay the desktop Palomino launch and first start it out for mobile systems, primarily because the current Athlon Thunderbird core has some life left in it. Before the introduction of the Athlon 4 for the desktop this fall, the current Thunderbird design will get one or two more steps up in speed, likely to 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz. And from the sound of it, 1.4GHz is right around the corner.
The difference between the Athlon Thunderbird and the Athlon 4 is optimization. The new chip is only slightly larger, but it reduces the amount of power necessary and introduces a new look-ahead cache that anticipates the data the CPU needs in repetitive takes. AMD's own tests show that between chips at the same speed there's a 6 percent to 14 percent performance advantage with the new design, depending on the type of application. Gaming falls at the lower end of this improvement, while video encoding and multimedia tasks get the most benefit.
Also before the Athlon 4 desktop launch will come the first multiprocessor Athlon systems. Aimed at the workstation and server markets, AMD's multiprocessor CPUs use a new bus design that gives each processor its own dedicated bandwidth and lets the processors read from each other's L2 cache. This point-to-point bus design is a major distinction from Intel's current shared bus architecture, which prevents both CPUs from accessing the chipset functions or memory at the same time. AMD has not announced the speed range for these chips but demonstrated a 1.2GHz dual CPU system and noted that extreme stability is more important than high speeds for the target markets.
AMD will move the Athlon to a smaller .13 micron chip, code-named Thoroughbred, early next year. Later in 2002, AMD plans to start using silicon on insulator (SOI) technology in a chip called Barton. This technology will greatly reduce heat issues, and we'll likely see speeds in excess of 2GHz at that time. All Athlon processors will use the Socket A interface until the end of 2002, and current motherboards can accept the future desktop Athlons.
By Sam Parker, GameSpot PC [UPDATED: 05/18/01]
gamespot.com
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