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

To: Joe NYC who wrote (96381)	3/2/2000 6:21:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572129

Joe, we don't know what AMD has planned for Sledgehammer in addition to the x86-64 extensions and the RISC-like FPU. I do know that if AMD plans on just extending the Athlon core with these two features alone, the 32-bit performance will fall behind Willamette and its follow-on, Northwood. And that makes for a very poor product, especially coming from a company which declared that they won't "relegate x86 to 2nd-class status." On the other hand, I don't think AMD would continue working on a chip which they know won't be competitive against Willamette. Now that Intel revealed Willamette's features like the 20-stage pipeline, the 2x ALU, etc., AMD will now know whether Sledgehammer's 32-bit performance will match up, or whether they'll have to go back to the drawing board (and slip the project beyond even late 2001). My guess is the latter, given the rumors that Sledgehammer would have been nothing more than an extended Athlon core. But I could be wrong. Tenchusatsu

To: Joe NYC who wrote (96381)	3/2/2000 6:27:00 PM
From: d[-_-]b	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572129

Joe, RE: Even if Sledgehammer never runs it's native 64 bit instructions, it can still be a success. All that development effort, time and money for no good reason. Without a commitment from Microsoft I can't see a future for this chip. The extra transistors just sucking up die space, increasing AMD's costs, lowering the "potential" profits. You're really convincing me about this CPU and AMD's future.