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To: Paul Engel who wrote (119176)	11/25/2000 12:39:02 AM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 186894

AMD Athlon Chips Shipped from Fab30 Reach 2 Million Units November 24, 2000 (DRESDEN, Germany) -- Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) said cumulative shipments of the AMD Athlon processor made at its most advanced factory "Fab 30," run by German AMD Saxony Manufacturing GmbH in Dresden, Germany, have reached two million units. AMD started construction of the Fab 30 factory in October 1996, and completed it in 1999, on the company's 30th anniversary. It started production of the AMD Athlon microprocessor with an operating frequency of 1GHz in June 2000. Because AMD adopted the manufacturing process technology of copper wiring for the first time, it succeeded in making 1GHz microprocessors, and then started making 1.1GHz and 1.2GHz Athlon microprocessors. The number of cumulative shipments reached a million in September. AMD plans to mass-produce microprocessors in two factories, Fab 30 in Dresden and Fab 25 in Austin, Texas. Its Fab 30 has a manufacturing capability equivalent to 5,000 wafers a week of 200mm wafers. That plant is expected to operate at a utilization rate of 50 percent by the end of 2000. "The production capacity of the two factories will fully meet demand by 2003, while taking aim at achieving a 30 percent share in the x86 processor market," according to Jim Doran, vice president of AMD and general manager of German Saxony Manufacturing. The view is backed by the fact that two-thirds of the entire 430,000m2 plant premises is now unused. Moreover, the company is building an extension of the clean room that occupies a 9,000m2 area, allowing for a future production increase. Also, AMD is pursuing the development of the leading-edge 0.13-micron process technology in Fab 30. And it plans to start using production lines based on the 0.13-micron technology in December, so as to deliver microprocessors in 2001. Related story:PCs with 1.2GHz Athlon Chips to Be Highest Models at Year-End (BizTech News Dept.)

To: Paul Engel who wrote (119176)	11/25/2000 3:45:49 AM
From: dybdahl	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

SSE2 or Floating Point? There are many types of calculations out there, where you can choose between a very precise Floating Point version and an approximate SSE2 version. Toms Hardware chose a DVD encoding benchmark for testing P4 against Athlon, and chose an SSE2 method to do this first, but after some external input he changed his mind to use Floating Point, because the results were better. There is no doubt, that SSE2 will be used for games and not-so-serious stuff, but in all the places where people are willing to pay $3000 for a computer, will people choose an SSE2 algorithm or floating point algorithm? If they choose the latter, they will buy AMD. Tom thinks that nobody can justify to buy a P4, because no market needs extreme SSE2 performance on an otherwise slow processor. Has anybody examples that shows he is wrong?

To: Paul Engel who wrote (119176)	11/25/2000 5:49:08 AM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 186894

Re: a P4 system took a glacial 19 hours Terriffic, now instead of being one fourth as fast as a Thunderbird, it's half as fast when rubbersheeting a raster image. (The process of manipulating a scanned raster image or tablet digitized set of vectors from a set of control points is the GIS technique of rubber sheeting). A tweaked version of the code, on the identical processor, can halve the time necessary to complete a run. You are really stretching here. Dan

To: Paul Engel who wrote (119176)	11/25/2000 7:09:31 AM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Paul, <<<"It's too bad Intel did not keep X87 FPU performance as a prime goal and improve it as well as SSE2 as it would have really helped out with legacy code that can't easily be optimised. By not doing this the P4 is a processor for 'new' applications and not a good solution for legacy applications." >>> It is now quite understandable (for me) why Intel made the design decisions and trade offs it made for the P4 processor and the decisions AMD made for the Athlon. If you have 15% of the low end market, that is the market you have to protect and optimize your design decisions for legacy applications and hope you can buy some time as developers take longer time than anticipated when developing new applications using newer instruction set. In the meantime you also get the additional benefit of some good press from pundits who are focused on legacy applications and games. BTW, do you know if anyone has benchmarked that game from years ago (Pong) on the P4? I'll bet Pong really screams on the Athlon. Regards, Mary