Re: $70 3.0 GHz chips are just a year away. Not much time to capitalize on the laptop market either perhaps. High power 2.0 GHz will be low end very soon. Need high ASPs to come from somewhere. But where??
Intel will be pushing hyperthreading chips as a reason to spend a little more, while AMD will be pushing 64-bit chips as a reason to spend a little more.
Whether either strategy can keep CPU's from becoming sub $100 commodities remains to be seen.
PS - it's interesting that AMD's architecture, with 9 available pipelines and a 20-way cache, would probably benefit more from hyperthreading than the P4, which has 6 pipelines and an 8-way cache. And, IIRC, some of P4's pipelines are actually siamesed 16-bit pipes, meaning that the resource difference is greater than 3 to 2. The basic concept of hyperthreading is to run multiple, concurrent threads on the chip so that there is something to keep the pipelines busy even when one thread is stalled waiting for data from main memory, or the results of a previous instruction. With 9 pipelines, Athlon is more likely to have some unused, at any given time, than the 6 pipeline P4. Dirk Meyer was working on hyperthreading at DEC before he moved to AMD, and there has been speculation that the follow-on to Hammer will support hyperthreading. |
