Re: One thing that would be nice if the socket of SledgeHammer was just a superset of Clawhammer. Meaning, a Clawhammer could be plugged into a sledgehammer socket
That's a great idea, and I hope some of the motherboards will support that.
I think a lot of people are missing that AMD is working very hard to be able to quickly establish X86-64, with DDR memory and Hypertransport I/O as the standard hardware platform. To do this, they have to be able to offer sub $999 PC's using that technology 12 months from now. That will require them to have an inexpensive platform available for the low end.
AMD's plan is to offer a 64-bit chip to compete with Intel's 32-bit chip. It's how Intel came to dominate this market in the mid 80's (32-bit vs. 16-bit), now AMD is using that strategy against Intel.
P4 offers only a miserable 32-bits, and Itanium is too big, too slow, and runs like crap unless the software is two pass compiled with the data.
I don't want to re-compile office for each new document... do you? Will anybody?
As soon as UMC can start shipping Athlons, AMD will go to 100% 64-bit parts at Dresden. With a little luck, they'll ship 20 to 30 million by the end of next year.
How many Itanics will have sailed by then? 1 million?
Then, in 2004, AMD moves to .09 at Dresden and 64 bits at UMC and ships 75 to 100 million parts.
In 2005, the UMC joint venture plant opens, and AMD hopes to have capacity for 200 million parts (a run rate that wouldn't be established until the end of the year).
That's the plan, let's see how they execute. The past 6 months haven't been the best, but they've been competing against Intel burning $5 Billion in accumulated assets to deny AMD $500 million in revenue for the year (look at Intel's CAPEX over time, you'll see the huge surge, and it's $5 billion they will never get back). |
