Looks like AMD's DooDooWrong and AthWipers are not keeping up to Intel's advances !!
xbitlabs.com
Sunday, December 16, 2001
AMD's Nearest Plans [9:23 am] Rat
The situation in the processor market, which has been changing pretty fast and unexpectedly lately, pushed CPU manufacturers to revise their plans for the near future. And this time, bearing in mind Intel’s very aggressive policy, AMD had to introduce some changes in their roadmap. As we have recently told you, Intel undertook a set of measures to make its budget Celeron CPU family more attractive for customers. Among them there is the shift to 0.13micron Tualatin core and a significant increase in their core clock frequency. As a result, AMD had to think about the possibility to increase the Duron working frequencies in return. However, we shouldn’t forget that the imperfection of the Morgan core used in the today’s Duron CPUs will not let the company increase the core clock that much. Morgan is made with 0.18micron aluminum interconnect technology. And although its potential is not that high, AMD is nevertheless going to squeeze all juices out of it. Unfortunately, the shift of the Duron family to a new 0.13micron Appaloosa core is still impossible because of the limited 0.13micron production capacities on AMD’s Dresden fab, which will be completely loaded with Thoroughbred manufacturing.
As a result, the new AMD roadmap, available here implies that the new Duron processors on Morgan core will come out somewhat earlier than it has been initially planned. In Q1’02 we will see Duron 1.3GHz, and in Q2’02 – Duron 1.4GHz. However, even speeding up the Duron schedule will not let AMD retain the parity with Intel’s Celeron family: according to the available info, in H1’02 the eldest Celeron models will be at least 100MHz faster than the eldest Duron models. As for the introduction of the new Appaloosa budget core, it seems to take place only in Q3’02. That is why we suppose that AMD may resort to some price drops reducing the cost of its younger Athlon CPUs on Thunderbird core, so that they could compete with Intel Celeron in the Value PC market.
As for the high-performance Athlon XP processors, AMD’s plans here have undergone considerably smaller changes. As we have actually expected, the first AMD CPU based on the new 0.13micron Thoroughbred core will appear in the market in the end of Q1’02. However, it turned out that AMD overestimated the potential of its current Palomino core, so the CPUs on this core with the rating 2100+ and 1.733GHz core clock will never come out. The last Palomino to be announced on January 7 2002 will work at 1.667GHz and be marked as 2000+. The first Thoroughbred based processor will also be marked as 2000+ and will also work at 1.667GHz core clock, which implies that there will be no architectural differences between Palomino and Thoroughbred and both will perform equally fast at the same core frequency and will use the same 266MHz processor bus. Despite the fact that there will be a lot of new chipsets supporting DDR333 next year, AMD is not planning to move its Athlon XP to faster processor bus in the near future.
Then, in Q2’02 we will welcome Athlon XP on Thoroughbred core with 2200+ performance rating and 1.8Ghz core clock frequency.
In the second half of next year AMD will introduce an even newer Barton core into its Athlon XP family. This core will be manufactured with 0.13micron SOI technology. We expect AMD to make some improvements to this core, which will lead to significant performance increase. |
