Re: Info/Analysis on Tualatin (from motley fool thread).
They ran Quake and 3Dmark, against the old thunderbird core, not the current palomino core. It will be interesting to see the standard benchmarks (sysmark2000, sysmark2001, siSoft Sandra, etc.) It may be that they got a performance gain similar to what AMD got from a re-layout of its core.
anandtech.com
Nice job by both companies.
The 1.48GHZ overclock was impressive and encouraging. But not overwhelming for two such a dramatic changes as copper and a major shrink.
AMD may have spent as much as $100 million dollars to redo its .18 Athlon. In return, it got a 20%+ reduction in power, a substantial increase in IPC, and, most important by far, back into the mobile market and a first ever entry into the server market.
Intel spent $3,500 million dollars to be able to produce the tualatin. In return, it got a 20%+ reduction in power, a substantial increase in IPC, and, most important, it can at least slow AMD's entry into the mobile market.
It looks like it would be a nice server chip, but Intel doesn't want to embarass P4 any more than is already being done by Athlon MP, so they seem to be trying hard to keep tualatin out of the server market.
I'm not sure his power analysis is correct. Vcc core amps alone (powering core and cache) are listed at 19.4. At typical (1.45) voltage that's 28 watts. At the listed high end of the spec (1.75 volts is within spec) that would be 34 watts. A few more watts are used by the bus drivers, as well. I'm not comfortable reading that sheet, and would be interested in other summaries.
Most interesting of all is: Where the heck are they? When breaking into a brand new market, especially during a drastic downturn, AMD still managed to have Compaq and Sony partners shipping at the launch. They even had something of a publicity stunt in which the first few thousand Compaq mobile Athlons were sold on HSN the weekend before the release .
For its SMP launch, AMD had only smaller manufacturers on board - but they still had systems available for sale.
Intel said the chips have been shipping in full production quantities since May...
investor.cnet.com
So - what's up with Tualatin? Next week, maybe? They aren't having yield and/or binsplit problems, are they?
Dan |
