AMD Tech Tour 2002, Boston. Some of your questions, some observations, and is any of it real news?
sgolds - RB
1. Will there be any increase in Athlon FSB (front side bus) speed before Hammer?
No, upcoming models (particularly 512-L2 Barton) will keep us competitive until Hammer.
2. Will there be significant new mobile designs for the back to school season from major companies like HPQ?
Yes
3. Will there be corporate mobile designs from a major US OEM this year?
Yes
Comb_jelly
1) Are there any Opteron prototypes with more than 2 processors?
Yes (emphatically) Up to 8 ways
2) When will Barton sample? It's getting pretty close to H202...
Q3, ship Q4
rsi_boy
Which current and past sockets a chipsets support thoroughbred? All of them or only some?
T-bred has a new CPU-ID 680h and requires a bios update only to recognize new speeds up to 2ghz (yes he said ghz not models and was asked about and reiterated ghz) along with new voltages as follows:
1.5v models 1700 – 1900
1.6v models 2000 and 2100
1.65 models 2200 and up (45 amps to the core)
They would not get “granular” wrt chipsets or specific mobos and again referred to bios and mobo manufacturer.
will they be publishing a list of compatible/validated thoroughbred-supporting motherboards?
Not really your question answered here, but related:AMD assured motherboards; as of today there is only one: Asus A7V266-E/AA
When will we see DDR in notebooks? (Why don't we see it already?)
Here’s a shocker, none of these guys seemed to realize until I asked that there aren’t any! They said, yeah there’s …. No wait, that’s 133 …. Hmmm.
When will we see small form factor Athlons for notebooks?
This was covered during the presentation by Doug Kerns (who was the most technically adept and up to date of the AMD’rs) Unfortunately I didn’t jot down enough specifics except that SFF cpus will run 4 speeds behind the big brothers and be rolling out (I believe) Q3.
Mirror bit, what went wrong?
Sampling now out of Dresden, and shipping this quarter for revenue
Yousef
2) Which CPUs @ .13um (if any) will be outsourced to UMC ??
Hammers. “You are going to do SOI at UMC?” Yes
Elmer
Seeing as AMD is falling farther and father behind Intel in performance and at a faster and faster rate, and considering that you have always said that Quanithurtz is meant to compare AMD processors to AMD processors, not Intel, why should we think that a 3400+ Hammer will be competitive with a 3GHz+ Northwood, much less an even faster Prescott? Please define what you mean by faster. Compared to what? By what measure? Please be specific.
Admittedly, I did not pose this question as eloquently as you. I believe the answer would be the same either way. I said the current models are rated against thunderbirds, will thee hammers be rated against thunderbirds? The gist is, they wouldn’t say! There is a quite a bit they are not saying from a marketing perspective wrt hammer, including what the models numbers will relate to.
That’s it for specific questions you all asked that I ask, that I did ask!
You’ve all probably read a few of the hardware site replays of these events, so I’ll skip those details.
Interesting technology from other than AMD:
A FIC motherboard scheduled to ship in June with the ATI A3 chipset (radeon 7000 video)
Biostar’s “9th Touch” You hit F9 during startup and select your boot device. Not necessary to change bios settings.
AMD tidbits
You will be able to wake on xmas morning with a hammer under the tree. Not just oem systems, broad motherboard support. (Nvidia rep said they’d be out with the launch too)
Marketechture: They don’t know what the claw-athlon will be called except that it will likely be an Athlon –?? (Roll your own suffix here)
By Q403 expect a 50-50% split between Hammer and Athlon chip sales
SOI and 90nm with Hammer technology will allow some models to run with passive cooling
AMD Chipsets for Hammer will include: 8151 – AGP 3.0 Tunnel (1-8x), 8131 – For those desiring a PCI-X bridge, 8111 – I/O Hub
Q401 AMD owned 20% of the “system builder” MP server market.
1H03 Barton MP
Largest cache Hammers will be 1 meg L2
No big L3 cache
Best question from the crowd: Lacking even larger caches, and given the longer pipelines, what will the cache-miss penalty be?
There is no penalty (emphatically), architectural improvements including improved hardware pre-fetching will more than overcome the longer pipelines.
I was left with the impression that for all the hype, these guys are still sandbagging wrt hammer. |
