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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Jackson who wrote (19803)	11/20/2000 12:38:18 PM
From: TechieGuy-alt	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

<snip>..am not sure to what degree AMD can recode those SSI 1 and 2 extensions by the use of chinese wall methods that generate workalike code that does not infringe and intel copyrights or patents Let's just get this clear one more time (this this just keeps coming back like a bad internet joke). The courts have already decided this issue in the 80's: "Features like SSE, MMX, SSE2 are neither patentable or copywritable." Not patentable, because only an implementation is patentable. Not copywritable because, as the microcode is never published, is cannot be copied, hence a clean room design is always ok. This is how NEC, SGSThompson, Cyrix managed to make x86 clones (AMD has a license for x86 code for perpetuity). The above may not stand up tosome technical legal scrutiny, but in essence I believe it to be correct (But I am no legal expert- so all this is JMHO). TG

To: Bill Jackson who wrote (19803)	11/20/2000 12:47:17 PM
From: niceguy767	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Bill: I like AMD's price/performance strategy...In one year they knocked the PWeeiii off the top perch across all MHz ranges...So far, as a new architecture, the P4 does not look like a serious threat to the Athy on a price/performance basis, notwithstanding the loss leader P4 promotions of today...I'm just not convinced based upon today's benchmarks that the P4 can withstand any long term Athy competition...P4 MHz leaps will be required to keep from getting lapped by the Athy's probable performance increments over the next year and I, for one, am not convinced that the P4 will scale easily...To garner general market support, the P4 will have to demonstrate superior performance over its competitors...No indication of that happening based on what I see today!!!

To: Bill Jackson who wrote (19803)	11/20/2000 3:12:34 PM
From: Petz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Bill, I believe the performance gain realizable for SSE2 will be very limited compared to SSE performance gain, which is already in most applications. There are a few apps that really love bandwidth, either to cache (Quake 3) or to main memory (Linpack with large data sizes, SPECfp, and certain streaming encoders that don't require much floating point.) These apps are optimized for SSE already with pre-fetching to maximize the bandwidth. SSE2 only really adds double precision floating point to SSE. The problem is that the P4 FPU is too weak to take advantage of multiple operations on each clock cycle, so SSE2 doesn't buy your much. Because of the limited improvement in SSE2 vs. SSE, and the fact that even the Athlon will outsell the P4 until 0.13 micron, I don't see developers embracing SSE2. Petz