Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Petz who wrote (129308)	12/6/2000 3:51:09 AM
From: ptanner	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570481

From Aces: AMD to Launch Mobile Duron This Month Just a brief news item from CTech Taiwan... aceshardware.com Highlights: all of the top 5 Taiwan notebook manufacturers have finished designs; may be an "into and then release." -PT ps: Just installed the Super Orb heatsink. And am browsing the web for a "light load" data point. Basically so far I have learned that if you scrape off the crummy thermal pad you should absolutely replace it with any thermal compound (but compound was better than the stock pad, IIRC).

To: Petz who wrote (129308)	12/6/2000 11:34:27 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 1570481

ptnewell is entertaining on any number of topics. His astrophysics research has given him incredible insight into all areas of interest to the bus people. Legal, technical, ethical, engineering, business- his deep understanding of the parallel universe is impressively comprehensive. Cheers, Dan.

To: Petz who wrote (129308)	12/7/2000 3:28:43 PM
From: richard surckla	Respond to of 1570481

Petzinger... Since you're in such a jolly mode, here is some more for you to get a laugh at. I found this post on YAHOO! In Tom's own words... by: mwills98 12/7/00 2:22 pm Msg: 199713 of 199730 Granted he has proven himself to be biased, unreliable, and an outright liar. You gotta love these qoutes. He's already eating crow and the P4w/RDRAM is just getting started!!! “In case of MPEG4-encoding Pentium 4's fast quad-pumped 100 MHz bus plus the dual-Rambus channel memory access of i850 seems superior to Athlon's dual-pumped 133 MHz bus and the 133 MHz DDR-SDRAM memory solution of AMD760. That's why even the best optimizations can't give Athlon enough of a boost to overtake Pentium 4.” “Pentium 4 beats Athlon by quite a long shot.” “Athlon is extremely far behind Pentium 4.” “Therefore I would say that we have to respect the high scores of Pentium 4” “AMD has started to run into trouble as well. While I am being bold enough supplying you with benchmark data of Athlon 1200/133 on an AMD760-platform, you are utterly unable to get your hands on one. It is currently unknown how long it will take until AMD760 motherboards will become available and the alternative ALi Magik1 platforms have so far shown significant lower performance than AMD760.”

To: Petz who wrote (129308)	12/7/2000 7:29:19 PM
From: richard surckla	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570481

Petzinger... Here's another post from ptnewell. It'll crack you up!!! From PTNEWEL on the FOOL Some opinions on recent "news": (1) MRAM. Yawn. Magnetic storage is actually the way RAM was done in the early days. The current capacitor/transitor DRAM storage made it obsolete. The article says that IBM has been working on this since 1974. I doubt that. I think they never stopped working on it. Plasma fusion has been a few years away since the early 50s, but I'm not losing any sleep waiting for it to arrive. I doubt the future of RAM is returning to the past. Anyway, I think I have seen similar announcements every few years or so. I'd say more, but the topic just doesn't warrant it. (2) EMC hopping on the bus. Mildly positive, but not near as big as some hope. Basically this is a use of the i840 chipset in the storage sector. There has been a surprising amount of the i840 making it into communication and storage areas. It is good, in that the i840 has actually been a solid winner for Intel (unlike the i820 for desktops). Having Intel make money off a Rambus design in new areas is good for Intel and good for Rambus. But the dollar amounts involved are comparatively small. And to some extent it is not "new" money. (3) Thanks to Cor, for giving us actual numbers for the engineers at RMBS. To complete his table, there are currently 175 RMBS employees (per Rick Brown, who talked to one at Comdex). Thus RMBS is currently 60% engineers, a startlingly high number. The power of the IP model is that expenses do not rise proportionally to revenue. So Rambus should not expand its work force willy nilly. I notice they are advertising for more engineers though. Thanks again Cor. I love hard data. (4) The Rambus-Zuken PCB design announcement. Very mildly positive. It shows some company out there is convinced enough of the future of RDRAM to spend millions designing software that lets other companies build RDRAM systems. This does not count as a win per se for RMBS. It just shows how one company is betting. (5) Micron and RDRAM. Definitely a non-story. Micron justs updates this same material once every few months as the previous deadline passes. Every few months someone "discovers" this on Micron's site and a stir is raised. Hyundai is showing some tenative signs of plunging into RDRAM production. For example, they recently qualified a new die shrink part (using the Toshiba process). I don't think Micron is doing squat about RDRAM. They won't either, until it is obvious that RDRAM will hit at least 20% of the market. (Micron has already conceeded that RDRAM might reach 10%, which will likely happen in Q101. 10% does not seem to interest them). The earliest Micron might hop on board is Spring, and only if the P4 ramp up really is aggressive. (A lot of people in the industry don't believe Intel, because of the size of the P4). (6) Not really news, but I can't resist this item: heise.de Speaking of the Via's KM133 for the Athlon: "In Germany, neither the boards nor the chipsets are available; and nobody can give any definite date. This follows the recent trend of AMD and Via for "virtual product releases". Likewise, neither the AMD systems with DDR, announced several weeks ago, nor the supposedly "easy, problem free" DDR modules themselves are anywhere to be seen." MicronPc won a "PC World" award for the 266 Mhz DDR Athlon. Is this the first time a company has won for a product that has never shipped, and may or may not ever ship, months in the future? AMD/Micron got some good press by "beating" the P4/RDRAM to market. The way they did so may end up haunting them...