If the ClmmHamster is really a 2003 product, and the "industry ramp" (Muthaboards, chip sets, debugged MutheBoards and debugged chip sets) doesn't get going until Q2 2003 - or even Q3 2003 - the ClamHamster will not be going up against Northwood - it will go up against Intel's new 32 bitter at that time - Prescott.
>Thus, Hamster vs Prescott will be the proper comparison.
Now, besides being smaller amd cheaper and faster, my sense is that Prescott will contain a few other goodies - such as enlarged caches (L1, L2) as well as Hyperthreading.
As Fyodor's data shows, these improved caches will give Prescott an additional performance kicker.<
You are absolutely correct. Hyperthreading appears to be a non-issue, since it does not work without an MP capable OS, and can even degrade MP performance if the number of threads is greater than two per processor, but it does appear that Prescott will have 1MB of L2 cache, and I am sure Intel will make sure all benchmarks are optimized for 1MB of L2 cache.
One potential for AMD would be to reposition Clawhammer as a value segment processor, versus Celeron P4, while disabling the extra HTT link(s) of Sledgehammer to create a new desktop processor for the high end at 90nm. Such a processor, with 1MB of L2 cache and dual DDR SDRAM memory controllers, would be quite a match for Prescott. |
