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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: TigerPaw who wrote (142151)1/25/2002 3:18:04 PM
From: combjelly  Read Replies (1) of 1583406
 
"I would also like to think that AMD is working on scalability."

That's a different issue. It looks as if they added two extra stages to the pipeline. They also rebalanced it, things got merged, moved around and in general reworked along almost the whole pipeline. Bandwidth to the L2 cache seems to have been significantly improved. Dunno at this point what was done to the critical paths, that is something we won't find out this year. The memory controller is so tightly coupled to the whole architecture that I really wonder what kind of north bridge VIA plans on providing for it. Maybe it is a nort bridge because it handles AGP?...

So what does it all mean? Roughly speaking, adding two stages to a 10 stage pipeline should increase your frequency scaling by 20%, maybe a little less, maybe a little more. The current Athlon cores seem to be pretty balanced, they are usually capped in frequency due to thermal reasons. It may be that they can pick up a little more frequency scaling when they shuffled the pipeline around, but who knows? Ok, the architects do, but they ain't talking right now. I suspect that with the higher bandwidth to the L2 and the two extra stages and the better branch prediction and the much, much lower latency to main memory, the Hammers are going to be plenty fast. I doubt seriously if they will be introduced at 2GHz, although I suppose it possible they may have a low end one...
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