You're going psycho over a trivial matter, boy.
Not sure I agree there, Tench. I agree that Pete is going Psycho... but I don't think it's over a trivial matter. He isn't, however, going psycho over the surface issue...
AMD is in trouble. The Palomino core has clearly not clocked where AMD thought it would. The 1GHz Morgan, which still doesn't appear to be available in volume, runs at a 0.15V higher than the 900MHz Spitfire core. AMD's 0.13 micron process is MIA... Latest roadmaps show Q2'02.
I want to pull a couple of interesting quotes from Anand's IDF review: ( anandtech.com )
"The 3.0GHz demo that was run involved the machine running Quake III Arena in a window while serving as a video management server for other computers in the same household. The digital video feeds encoded and sent out by the 3.0GHz system combined with the run of Quake III Arena kept the CPU utilization at 100%. The fact that the demo system did not crash while running at 3GHz with 100% utilization indicates that the yield on the CPU being used was very high."
Translation: Intel using 0.13 micron can push the frequency on the P4 just as hard as they want to in order to maintain competitive advantage.
Anand also says:
"With a 512KB L2 cache, AMD will find it very difficult to compete with very high clock speeds with their current line of Athlon processors. Luckily for AMD, the Pentium 4 will only hit 2.2GHz this year with the Northwood core."
... at least according to current roadmaps. I'd expect the P4 2.2GHz release to be in solid volume, along with 512K P4's at lower speed grades to round out the high performance bins. Given the typical 1 year lag between "demo air cooled at IDF" and production, I would expect to see the 3.0GHz P4 in Q3 to very early Q4 next year... maybe the following roadmap?
Q4'01: 2.2GHz
Q1'02: 2.4-2.5GHz
Q2'02: 2.6-2.7GYz
Q3'02: 2.8-3.0GHz?
Q4'02: 3.0GHz+?
In short, what Pete is going ballistic over is the relegation of AMD to the value PC ranks once again. At release, the K7 gave AMD a big shot in the arm in that they finally had a true "tier 1" processor. Design wins and increased credibility followed. Market share inched up. The AMD supporters bought into the hype of AMD as the "giant killer." The nimble and pure Luke Skywalker defeating the vast monolithic evil galactic empire. As many said then, it makes good fiction, but reality is often quite different.
Now, the P4 is starting to outpace the K7, and with the Palomino core nowhere in sight, the K7 becomes just another value processor. The price points for the K7 back-up that argument. Intel therefore "can't" have a 2.0GHz P4 or greater as it destroys that dream of the x86 market being 30%+ AMD... turn the page... |
