AMD - Desktop Palomino Slipping ?
AMD hedging bets on SludgePumper and ClamHamster Server availability ?
xbitlabs.com
Tuesday, July 03, 2001
New Official AMD Roadmap [7:17 pm] Rat
Although tomorrow will be the Independence Day and the news will be not that numerous, today there are still a couple of things worth mentioning. Today AMD has updated its official processor roadmap, so that its new version looks as follows now:
We should point out that compared to the previous roadmap version, the new roadmap has undergone a number of significant changes. In the first place these changes touch upon the server processors, however, the other two, desktop and mobile sectors, also have a couple of new things to boast.
The first thing that is of interest to all of you is the future of the upcoming desktop Palomino. It is evident that AMD isn’t hurrying to introduce this solution for the desktop market. Now we can see that it seems to be scheduled exactly for the middle of H2’01. [ IT SLIPPED AGAIN !] If you remember, this CPU could be seen a bit closer to early H2’01 in the previous company processor roadmap. That is why now it appears more correct to expect this solution in September-October instead of August-September, as we have thought before. If you remember, AMD was going to launch the first desktop Palomino with the working frequency equal to 1.53GHz and smaller. However, now that Intel announced Pentium 4 1.8GHz and is planning to release 1.9GHz and 2GHz models in September, it seems quite logical to expect the new Palomino to come out with higher working frequencies. Besides, we won’t also be surprised to see AMD launch one more Athlon based on old Thunderbird core and supporting 1.5GHz working frequency this summer. This fact seems to be true because you can now see Athlon 1.5GHz in the price lists of few hardware distributors. Moreover, many recently manufactured Athlon CPUs allow easy overclocking up to 1.5GHz.
Also as you can see in the new roadmap, AMD has officially confirmed that the company will be offering Low-End server solutions based on Duron MP CPUs based on Morgan core. We have already told you that server Duron CPUs on Morgan core, which officially support dual-processor configurations, will be launched almost at the same time as the desktop Palomino and will work at the initial frequency of 900MHz. From the roadmap above you can see that AMD is going to continue developing Low-End server solutions later on as well since server Duron MP processors will be later on transferred to a new 0.13micron core aka Appaloosa.
New AMD roadmap reflects the company’s intention to keep developing its Athlon MP processor family. According to the older roadmap, Athlon MP processors were based only on Palomino core. However, now AMD showed that they would design Athlon MP CPUs on 0.13mcron Thoroughbred and Barton cores. If they used to believe that they would need to push forward Athlon MP as a server solution while Hammer is not there, now the situation seems to have changed. Athlon MP family has every chance to live a much longer life. From now on AMD is going to promote its Athlon MP as an independent server solution even after Hammer CPUs arrive.
As for the Hammer family, it is divided into three main parts instead of two, as we saw it on the previous roadmap. Now, besides SledgeHammer targeted for 4-8-way SMP servers and ClawHammer targeted for 2-4 way AMP servers, AMD is also going to develop a desktop version of the ClawHammer. If we take the roadmap for granted, then ClawHammer won’t support multi-processor configurations, however, due to the 8th generation architecture and x86-64 technology support, it will be possible to use this processor in High-End desktop systems as well. |
