I just came from the shareholders' meeting. I came there a little late, so I don't know what I missed. It came to somewhat abrupt end, at least in my opinion, since I expected Hector to take over and take questions.
Anyway, is the Powerpoint presentation online anywhere? There were some slides that just flashed too quickly, before I was able to absorb them.
After the meeting, I looked at the systems presented. They had a couple of notebooks, one of them was Compaq Evo, and I should have gone back to look at the other, which was a smaller form factor, but since my dislike of notebooks in general, I headed to the Hammer systems.
They had 2 Sledgehammer servers running there, running 64bit version of Windows Server. They had 2 Clawhammer clients connected to them. The Sledgehammer - Opteron servers were fairly big boxes, housing a new motherboard they call Melody. The boxes were closed, so I couldn't see inside. The guy presenting these said these were just development versions (these boxes) and they are largely empty). He said the production boxes will be more like the ones in the rack he pointed to (which was a full rack of 1U systems, each with 2 Athlon MP CPUs).
The guy did not want to talk about speeds and Microsoft release schedule. The systems were running 64 bit versions of IIS and Terminal Server on the server side, and 64 bit version of Internet Explorer on the client side. There were also some other apps (32 bit) that were running using Terminal Server, which means that they run on the server silicon.
I asked him about Clawhammer DP vs. Sledgehammer, and while not wanting to reveal more than has been revealed, I got the impression that both Clawhammer DP and Sledgehammer would share the same Socket (the 900+ socket), they would both have 3 HT links. I asked about the presentation showing the dual system with only 3.2 GB/s bandwidth. He said that it would be up to the vendors how they want to implement their system. They could reduce the HT links to 8 bit or reduce the frequency of HT. But Clawhammer DP would have a fully functional HT links.
I asked him about what it would take to go from 2 processors to 4, since the 2 way system is running, and there is no chipset support needed to go to say 4. He said that as far he can tell if 2 way is proven to work, 4 way just has needs the traces to connect additional HT links. But he admitted that it was not his area of expertise.
I asked him why Sledgehammer is scheduled for 1H 2003 and Clawhammer for Q4 2002, since the silicon seems to be emerging in paralell. He said that it will take a lot of effort to support their customers with the Clawhammer release itself, and that's the main reason for the staggered release.
Then I spoke to another gentleman about my pet peeve, which is the lack of PowerNow in desktops. He said that nothing is disabled in the chips itself. The desktop CPUs are capable of all the PowerNow features. Power now just needs more engineering resources committed to the design, and since the current EnergyStar logo requirements do not need this feature, they just don't spend the resources.
PowerNow has 2 levels of support: changing just frequency + changing voltage as well. The second one yields more power savings, but requires some interaction with the voltage regulators on the motherboard, and there are really 2 things that need to happen during the steps. First frequency has to be cut at current voltage, next, voltage has to be cut. This is to assure that the CPU never runs out of spec.
There was a low profile PC on display, made by Fujitsu, which implemented only partial PowerNow functionality, which is changing the frequency. This is something that is simpler to do.
What I wonder about is why have none of the motherboard makers offers this support. I would definitely prefer a motherboard which implements these features over one that does not, and I would be willing to pay premium for it.
On the topic of Tbred, he heavily hinted that Tbred has some enhancements, which he did not want to get into, which will enable it to work faster than Palomino. So it is not just a shrink. He said that the desktop version has been qualified, and it is now up to marketing people when the public release will happen.
Joe |
