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

To: fyodor_ who wrote (74815)	3/18/2002 9:05:07 AM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: If your point is that AMD will have to provide more mhz per quantispeed increase, then I agree 100%, but that's rather obvious and expected I agree, it's not exactly surprising, but your previous comments quite clearly expressed the opposite. If AMD were able to keep Athlon IPC high - or at least have it fall of slower than P4 - they could stick with their current quantispeed rating formula forever. That's a bit silly. You're asking them to go from 1.11 times frequency to 1.5 times frequency. That's the quantispeed factor the most recent set of introductions has been asymptotically approaching. This is not the case, however: While Athlon's IPC certainly is higher than even Northwoods (in most cases) right now, the rate of change is not in AMD's favor Even with the focus on the second derivative, I don't see Northwood doing better than Athlon, but it is close. There are relatively few data points, and a lot of noise in the data. Interpreting data like this isn't straightforward. As the chips run at higher multiples to a given memory speed, the Dp/Df drops. And these two parts are being measured at different points along their curves. Northwood 2000 is running 5 times the speed of its memory, while XP 2000+ is running at 6.5 times the speed of its memory. You are comparing scaling factors at substantially different points on the curve - this is significant. OTOH, latency for Rambus is higher, and some benefit accrues to XP because of that, particularly in terms of total performance achieved with a given memory bandwidth, though it may have little affect on the "location on the curve" factor. An analysis like this with both chips on a single SDRAM channel or both on a single DDR channel motherboard, with memory timings set the same, would be a lot more informative. Athlon would have to give up its lower-latency advantage, and be clocked higher to achieve a given level of performance, while Northwood would have to work with the same multiple and bandwidth as Athlon - and it's the level of total performance on a given memory technology that I was speculating about in the first place. The level of totatl performance on a given memory technology is what is at issue. Regards, Dan