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

To: Elmer who wrote (114054)	6/4/2000 12:47:00 AM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573215

Elmer, If Timna is marketed as a Celeron product line, you will have a very competitive product with the onboard memory controller, graphics processor and a memory to CPU/Graphics bandwidth that has not yet been fully discussed publicly. The onboard memory controller will provide minor performance improvement. The onboard graphics will be mediocre, and the unified memory architecture will guarantee contention between the CPU and graphics. Timna will be an entry level product. BTW: Where is that flood of high speed Coppermines that you and PB promised us about 4 or 5 months ago? I was in Circuit City today, and still nothing faster than 750MHz. This is quite funny, given that folks on the thread are complaining about the existence of a 700 MHz T-Bird. If AMD wanted to, they could trump Intel's entire product line! Scumbria

To: Elmer who wrote (114054)	6/4/2000 1:03:00 AM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573215

Elmer, If Timna is marketed as a Celeron product line, you will have a very competitive product with the onboard memory controller, graphics processor and a memory to CPU/Graphics bandwidth that has not yet been fully discussed publicly. Current assumptions may not be completely accurate. We can only speculate, but I would assume that bandwidth between memory and CPU/Graphics will be shared. The graphics subsystem is bandwidth hungry, because you have to constantly read from the video buffer and feed the information to RAMDAC. Let's say you have resolution of 1024x768x32bits with refresh rate of 85 Hz. I get 267 MB per second. If Timna uses PC-100, that's 1/3 of the bandwidth. I recall that Cyrix MediaGx used (or planned to use) compression for the buffer, resulting in about 1/10 of memory usage on average, and than decompression to feed the RAMDAC. Anyway, the announced Sis chipset will have (as an option) local graphics memory, up to 64 MB, which should result in much better performance (but some additional cost compared to Timna). My initial impression of the Sis chipset could best be described as 810 on steroids, probably slightly above 815 which again is a similar product. Anyway, we will see how the sub-600 marketplace (where Timna should sell) looks like, but lately, it has not been pretty. The companies that want to make money are fleeing this segment. The main obstacle is that there are some fixed costs per machine sold that may be as high as $200 to $300 to cover support etc (my guesstimate). The companies that want so sell a $600 computer will need to have a cost hardware well below $200 to be competitive. Joe