To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (76392 ) 10/21/1999 5:05:00 PM From: Tenchusatsu Read Replies (2) | Respond to
And now for some comments from Tom which aren't painted red by an anti-Intel bias:www6.tomshardware.com However, the next Athlon processors, starting with the Athlon 750, will clock the second level cache at only 2/5 of the core clock, not at 1/2 as Athlon 500-650. This will worsen the performance-scaling, especially once the multiplier shrinks down to 1/3 in Athlons beyond 800 MHz. Coppermine will continue to run it's L2-cache at 1/1, regardless how high the clock speed. It's a matter of fact that AMD needs to get their .18 micron Athlons with on-die L2-cache ready as soon as possible, because once i820 does run, Intel only needs to increase Coppermine's clock and it will overtake Athlon. This could be the end of AMD. AMD's other problem is the delay of i820. You may wonder why that would be; it should really be an advantage to AMD. Unfortunately it isn't really. Due to i820's delay VIA sees it's chance of a lifetime. If Coppermine gets released without i820, the only sensible 133 MHz FSB & AGP4x platform will be the VIA 640 chipset. Thus all efforts at VIA are directed towards this chipset. At the same time resources are taken away from the development of VIA's upcoming Athlon-chipset that's supposed to support PC133 and AGP4x. This chipset could possibly change the mood of the Taiwanese motherboard industry, but for the time being the only Athlon chipset is AMD's Irongate and that might stay this way for quite a while.
