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

To: Elmer who wrote (123684)	9/11/2000 11:23:53 AM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1580050

Elmer, I believe that the SMP chipset was intentionally postponed. My personal feeling, with no real supporting evidence, is that is was done for the following reasons: The concept for the LDT was developed well before the tapeout was done for the SMP chipset. A decision was made that since it would take some time to get sufficiently established before there would be much of a corporate market for the Athlon, it would be better to delay the SMP chipset until there was a compelling reason for corporations to use Athlons. LDT and DDR are two really good compelling reasons. Another possibility is that when they started to actually model Athlons in SMP configurations, there was just too big of a performance hit when PC100 or PC133 memory is used, and that either DDR or significantly larger caches were required to get adequate performance. I doubt seriously if there are any design problems that hamper SMP with the Athlon, the EV6 bus makes this easy from the processor point of view because it puts most of the burden on the chipset. Of course, the chipset control logic is more complex, but it is a problem that has been solved with the 21264 already... This still doesn't answer the previous posters question, which is what product(s) has AMD (or Intel for that matter) postponed because of weakening demand.

To: Elmer who wrote (123684)	9/11/2000 9:06:39 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580050

Re: They either postponed it intentionally (why?) or they still can't get it to work (why?). In what must seem to be utterly bizarre behavior to anyone associated with Intel, it was both. Merely because, at the first attempt, they couldn't get it to work perfectly, they postponed it intentionally. Now I know that goes against everything Intel has come to stand for, but there it is. As long as the testing continues to demonstrate that the chipset is now flawless, it will be released early next quarter. :-) Dan