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

To: Dan3 who wrote (74222)	10/6/1999 9:16:00 AM
From: Process Boy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572942

Dan and Thread - ZDN Report on AMD's MPF presentation. If the details in this article are true, I believe my speculation that the MHz race between Intel and AMD is going to be very close for the next year or so is going to be pretty close to reality. Also, this article indicates the Ultra, outlined at MPF, is due 2H '00. Hmph. Something else is rumored to be out by then at Intel... As a side note, the only reports I can find to this point on Intel's CuMine presentation is The Register article, and my blurb linked at JC's. Sheesh. PB ====================================================================== zdnet.com AMD readies faster Athlons How much faster? How about a chip that runs at 1 gigahertz? SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is laying plans to push its Athlon processor into the corporate market next year. AMD (NYSE:AMD), in Sunnyvale, Calif., will leverage a new 0.18 micron manufacturing process to increase performance of the chip. Moving to the new process will shrink the distance between transistors inside the chip from 0.25 micron to 0.18 micron, which creates improvements in clock speed and allows for a smaller processor size, making for the integration of Level 2 cache, another performance boosting feature. The performance boost is significant. AMD said it expects to ship a chip that runs at 1 gigahertz in the second half of next year. AMD Tuesday demonstrated an 800MHz version of the chip here at the Microprocessor Forum. The company plans to ship that chip early next year. AMD is likely to offer one more megahertz increase, a 750MHz Athlon, on its current 0.25 micron process. The new process will ultimately help AMD reduce its packaging costs. AMD is sampling Athlon on 0.18 micron process now. Boosting chip performance is one thing. AMD also has plans to boost overall system performance in order to help make Athlon more attractive to corporate buyers. New features will be aimed at processors for workstations and servers sold under the Athlon Ultra brand. Next year, for example, the company will up its EV6 bus system bus speed to 266MHz from 200MHz. To go along with the faster bus speed, AMD will support 266MHz data rate dynamic RAM (DDR RAM), according to Fred Weber, AMD's vice president of engineering. In addition, AMD will increase the amount of Level 2 cache available with the chip to 1MB and 2MB. AGP and lightening strike The company plans support for 4X AGP PRO, which improves bandwidth over the current implementation of accelerated graphics port, or AGP, a bus that allows a PC's graphics subsystem to tap main memory for use in graphics rendering. Along with upping the bus speed, AMD will introduce a new input/output bus, called Lightning Data Transfer (LDT), which will connect the EV6 to I/O subsystems, such as 64-bit PCI. LDT will be important in maintaining system performance in multiple processor settings, AMD said today at the Microprocessor Forum. The company will begin offering error correcting code protection for its Level 2 cache, system memory and system bus, Weber said. The company also is working with motherboard makers API and Hotrail to develop motherboards for multiprocessor systems.