Jim, Re: "Can you explain this "Mr. AMD has shot their wad on .13u"?"
Looks like it cost them a little to get this improvement. Not much, just an extra metal layer and 4mm^2 more of die size, so those who believed that AMD had more megahertz left were generally correct. Still, availability of these parts seems to be nil. When was the last time that AMD had ZERO availability of a CPU? There is absolutely nothing on pricewatch, and this article seems to confirm a vapor launch.
biz.yahoo.com
"AMD has begun shipping samples of the AMD Athlon XP processors 2600+ and 2400+ to major computer manufacturers worldwide with expected system availability in September."
Unfortunately, the added megahertz doesn't even allow them to outperform the Pentium 4 2.53GHz on the majority of benchmarks and applications. According to Tom's Hardware overclocking results, I don't see the 333MHz bus interface helping much, either.
Message 17901400
Unfortunately, AMD has to get to Barton, at least, for the extra L2 cache, but more realistically, and given the headroom that Intel has left in the Pentium 4, AMD needs to "get to Hammer". Other than that, I don't see any short term advantage for AMD.
wbmw |
