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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (70307)	8/30/1999 1:31:00 PM
From: Pravin Kamdar	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573433

Scumbria, What about architectural enhancements? Is there anything left at 32 bits that AMD can do to enhance the K7 architecture, so that we might see a better Willamette competitor in an Athlon II by the end of next year? I guess they can add a large L2 cache and pump the processor-chipset bus up to 400 Mhz, but what about the core? Pravin.

To: Scumbria who wrote (70307)	8/30/1999 2:41:00 PM
From: THE WATSONYOUTH	Respond to of 1573433

<How do you know what clock speeds K7 can attain? It is a brand new design, with lots of speed work left to be done. Most designs at this chronological stage have lots of low-hanging MHz fruit left to be picked.> That may be. But AMD better pick that fruit before it rots on the vine. The window of opportunity is not that large. Assuming 700MHz Coppermine in VOLUME in late Oct, can AMD do VOLUME 700MHz Athlon in .25um at or before then. I'm not so sure. They don't seem to be doing VOLUME 650MHz yet. I don't think this race plays out until AMD gets to .18um. If there is any delay moving to .18um, the window will shrink further. If Intel pulls in Willamette to 4th quarter 2000, the window could be as small as 6 months. And, Willamette will be moving into a fully tweaked .18um process, running full out after considerable yield learning (albeit with a new design) So, I don't think the architectural advantage (in itself) will be enough. Timely execution is also required. Good luck to all the AMD longs. THE WATSONYOUTH