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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: milo_morai who wrote (165666)	6/3/2002 12:58:51 PM
From: Monica Detwiler	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Milo - Here's somethin that's new: AMD limits CrawlHammer to 800MHz Locked so folk can't overclock it - Heye By Mike Magee, 03/06/2002 10:43:34 BST AFTER AMD HAD its press conference this morning, we dashed off to chat to some of the board makers to see how their own performance tests were shaping up. As mobo makers have axes to grind aplenty against the CPU makers, we weren't surprised to find one or two mainboard makers who felt that AMD was giving people over expectations. They don't want to be named of course, if they were, how could they ever deal face-to-face with AMD again? One said to us that he was a little concerned about the performance of the Clawhammer (in December it will be an Athlon) chip, and that the demos AMD was showing were with chips that hovered around the 900MHz. We had a one to one interview with Richard Heye later in the morning. He's AMD's mastermind on the Clawhammer and Sledgehammer products. You probably won't be surprised to learn that he worked on the DEC (Compaq, Intel) Alpha too. Heye provided some guidance on the performance of the Clawhammer. Although the final speed in high performance systems which will be sold in December of this year is top secret, he said that sample CPUs in the hands of the mainboard makers are all locked at 800MHz. The reason for this, he said, was that he didn't want his partners overclocking chips and so providing "great expectations" which AMD probably couldn't meet. Heye – who some of you might remember appeared in an INQwell leaked Microsoft memo some weeks back, was pretty forthcoming about AMD's plans for the Hammer family as we obstinately still call it. He said: "We're trying to tune for performance and not just frequency." When the first Clawhammathlons appear in December, they will be the performance leader and, he claimed, Intel had nothing to match it. "The ball's in our court," he said. AMD, we already know, will migrate the Hammerish design to mobiles, to desktops and to servers, and he claimed that the introduction of two way, four way and then more processor based systems would fundamentally change the rules in the server market. "It's clear that Intel architected servers from PC designs," he said. "The Hammer was architected by the Alpha guys." What that will mean he said that after we see uniprocessor Clawhammerish systems in December, we'll start to see two way Opterons – he was suggesting that the Chinese and Taiwanese motherboard makers are already working on some such boards. He said he and AMD wanted to fundamentally change the 2/4 market place. "People are going to use the 64-bit for Hammers," he said. No one, a year ago, would have considered a $1,000 64-bit system possible, he added. "By late 2004/2005, we'll have a good chance to change the workstation and cluster market," he said. "Four way boards wouldn't be $20,000 boards. Heye also said that whether Intel is developing a "Yamhill" processor or not, based on AMD designs, it would have a tough time positioning it in the marketplace. He estimated that Intel's IA-64 account had already soaked up $700 million, and he couldn't begin to estimate what the Itanium project had cost Chipzilla in total. He said that Microsoft had realised that AMD's X86-64 business "was real, and a real business". Microsoft wasn't interested in the Hammer family because it thought Jerry Sanders III was handsome, he suggested. Although he does of course think Jerry is handsome. The two PR scribes up back woke up when Jerry was mentioned, so we thought we'd compound it a bit and mention Jerry, Pierre and the yachts. But we don't think any of that will be in the report to General Headquarters Richard, so don't worry.