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

To: Dan3 who wrote (75450)	10/13/1999 11:41:00 PM
From: Process Boy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572777

Dan3 - <In 3 months: Athlon moves to 200 and 266MHZ ram 1/2 speed L2 (why put a full speed cache brick wall in your way if you don't need it?) Faster chipsets and multiprocessor chipsets.> I thought AMD said "sometime in '00". I understand in 3 months we'll be 2 weeks into '00. Do you expect the Ultra in January? PB

To: Dan3 who wrote (75450)	10/13/1999 11:57:00 PM
From: Windsock	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572777

Danny Boy - Re:"The new year is going to be a challenge for Intel, and AMD is going to be able to make money" AMD lost $105 million on the sale of 200 K Athlon processors in Q3. This means that AMD sent about $500 out the door for each Athlon shipped. More, if you factor the profits from the flash business. How is AMD going to make money doing that? DaJerk has an answer for that, I am sure, but I doubt that you do. Perhaps AMD can send $100 to everyone that does not buy an Athlon.

To: Dan3 who wrote (75450)	10/14/1999
From: vince doran	Respond to of 1572777

Hi Dan - Re: benchmark mess... My understanding is that Athlon is running 1/2 speed cache now, have you seen something different? In any case, as I said in an earlier post on the Intel thread, I think Intel will have played all their trump (at least on the hardware front) when CUmine is running on i820/RDRAM, while AMD still has the obvious ram speed improvement available. Judging by the numbers that the overclockers are seeing, speeding up the bus relatively small amounts can really help, it seems as if the Athlon is really being held back by its current chipsets and mobos. And I should note that all the test sites I cited seemed to be using the standard Futuremark test suite, without the AMD "Athlon.dll"; that change provides the numbers that Jim referred to when he pointed out that an Athlon 650 scores higher than that oc'd CUmine 800, so as usual, we can't really know if the standard code favored the PIII. Also, the usually knowledgable Johan at Ace's points out that the CPU-Mark bench really favors fast L2. It will be really interesting to see the more real-world benchmarks when someone makes them available. That said, I still think it is going to blunt Athlon's momentum if Intel can ship systems in October that roughly equal Athlon performance at the top speed-grades then available. Vince

To: Dan3 who wrote (75450)	10/14/1999 2:01:00 AM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572777

Dan, first of all, Athlon isn't running 1/3 L2 cache speed yet. Second, Coppermine's full-speed L2 cache is definitely not "a brick wall in the way of clock increases." On the contrary, the on-die L2 cache is more scalable in frequency than an off-chip version. And I don't believe Coppermine's L2 cache is hampering its potential clock speeds. The worst that can happen is perhaps one (maybe two) additional clocks of latency as Coppermine hits speeds beyond 800 MHz. Third, Athlon's off-chip L2 cache will definitely become a liability as it moves from 1/2 speed to 1/3 speed. They'll have to move the L2 cache onto the chip sooner or later. To be sure, the L2 cache isn't the end-all-be-all of performance. And Coppermine is definitely not going to blaze far ahead of Athlon. But if I were you, I wouldn't be knocking on Coppermine's L2 cache, especially since it's one of the factors that allows Intel to pump even more life into a 4-5 year old core. Tenchusatsu