Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices Message Board

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

Public Reply Prvt Reply Mark as Last Read File

Previous 10 Next 10 Previous Next

To: Yougang Xiao who wrote (47877)	1/29/1999 11:08:00 PM
From: RDM	Read Replies (3) of 1571200

"Would like to hear your interpretation of the significance concerning the above news." I believe that the above state of AMDs interest in Alpha ownership is true. However, I do not have a feel for exactly what they want. If they purchase the Alpha I presume that they will get: 1. Designs of Alpha chips. 2. Patents (lots of them) 3. Technology rights free of royalty. (They would not have to pay royalty on Alpha bus use.) 4. Talented Engineers ( I believe there are some very good ones). The questions I have are (if they went ahead): 1. Will they would produce a pure Alpha chip? 2. Will they would produce an X86 enhanced Alpha (more speed running X86 apps)? 3. How much will they pay? 4. How much will it add to the current annual expenditures? 5. Will Compaq purchase anything in exchange for the deal? If they pay $100 Million and Compaq guarantees to buy 10,000,000 CPU chips this year then it is a no brainer. However, supply and demand have a way of making a buy/sell deal with those terms unlikely. Personally I wonder about the prospects for the Intel Merced and successors. The Intel 64 bit chips may not be the fastest X86 processors when they arrive. The current Alphas run X86 apps by emulation and are not going to be super fast at running x86 apps. The first applications of 64 bit machines that do not offer top performance with x86 applications may be large database and scientific applications. Neither is a high volume application on the scale of the Pentium. One million chips per year may be a lot for this market. Even at $2,000 per chip the early 64 bit CPU market may not be a big growth market for either AMD or Intel. Super X86 chips with 64 bit extensions may offer a larger market. The Xeon is an early example of an X86 chip with extended addressing beyond 4 GB. Servers with 1,000 Gigabytes of disk (1 TB) are becoming more common as the price drops (<$250,000). For best database performance it is attractive to have a RAM size of 10 GB for a 1,000 GB database. Thus computers more addressing than standard X86 machines is becoming desirable. I believe that there will be extensions to Windows NT 5 that will allow the Xeon to use more than 4 GB. Probably AMD wants the K8 to extend the addressing of the K7. Perhaps the Alpha people and patents may help with this. Perhaps AMD wants a killer FPU for the K8. Perhaps AMD wants only elemental technology and patents from the Alpha and not the whole thing. I my opinion the Alpha is an awesome chip and a real contender for being one of the most powerful processors on the planet. Does it make sense for a mass production chip maker to produce it? That depends upon lots of things, including the price. Sorry for such a long opinion.

Report TOU Violation

Share This Post

Public Reply Prvt Reply Mark as Last Read File

Previous 10 Next 10 Previous Next