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

To: Cirruslvr who wrote (80377)	11/18/1999 1:38:00 PM
From: Charles R	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1572098

Here is something from Sharky's: sharkyextreme.com All the pieces are falling into place. I was speculating couple of days back that AMD couldn't be doing core modifications for K6-2+ for the laptop/low-end PC market alone and this has possibly to do with SOC stuff. Since Timna=Celeron+Whitney, not having SSE and having a second rate graphic unit (low-end stuff from Whitney) probably hurt in X-box design. Specially since PSII was already spec'ed much better than that. And, AMD probably offered Microsoft with core enhancements and mating with a super graphics engine to go with it to win the design. At the same time some big OEMs appear to have seriously resisted Timna. All this lends more credence to Timna possibly being killed (from the rumor-mill, re-targetted may be the more accurate way to put it). I am also hearing that Pinecrest is in serious disarray because of the PIII/CuMine scaling problems. If the rumors are true, things are looking up big-time for AMD - more than most people realize. **** Begin clip **** "X-Box: the Sequel Here's a little Comdex update on the X-Box (Microsoft's worst kept secret), which we first covered in the last issue of the Private Eye. Bearing in mind the cost of the unit needs to be under $300, we were told that it's still a neck and neck for the choice of both CPU and graphics processor. The emphasis, as we stated last time, looks to be more on the graphics sub system as opposed to the CPU itself. We were told that Microsoft is targeting a geometry performance level that rivals that of Sony's PlayStation2, which has (depending on who you ask and how the wind is blowing) geometry performance of 30 million to 66 million polygon transforms per second. A 3D Chip Capable of 2 Gigapixels Per Second? Microsoft should be looking at the bottom end of the CPU scale in terms of price (how else are they to keep the unit at $299?). Thus we think that the lowest possible speed 'bin' will be sought after, whether that be from Intel or AMD. Just like last time, if we had to bet on it and based on a few more conversations at Comdex, we'd predict the CPU as being an AMD K6-2/3E (Microsoft seems to be leaning more towards AMD than Intel at this time). This low-cost, .18micron solution would be what's required when coupled with a graphics subsystem capable of some 2 Gigapixels per second (yes you read that right). We've heard that Microsoft wants a performance level that's even greater than the just announced Voodoo5 6000's paper specs of 1.3 Gigapixels/second. " *************