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

To: wanna_bmw who wrote (81454)	6/3/2002 12:33:07 PM
From: Elmer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

As I've been saying all along, regardless of what the true performance of Hammer is, AMD has no choice now but to hype hype hype. EP siliconstrategies.com AMD concedes poor performance of early Hammer processors By Mike Clendenin EE Times (06/03/02 10:39 a.m. EST) TAIPEI, Taiwan — After several months of hyping the performance of its 64-bit Hammer chips in multiprocessor servers, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. acknowledged Monday (June 3) the assessment of an e-mail circulated last week that said early performance results don't look good. During its first demo of a four-way multiprocessing server at Taiwan's Computex trade show, AMD officials tried to pooh-pooh the damage done by an inadvertent e-mail sent last week describing the Hammer's performance as poor. In the company e-mail, an unattributed passage said: "The demos we're currently showing are anything but high-performance. They're pretty low-performance right now and we don't want to invite questions about just how fast they are running." On Monday, after once again extolling the future benefits of the Hammer, now officially named Opteron, an AMD executive stressed that the chip's hardware is running well but that many tweaks must still be made to the BIOS and operating system to optimize performance. "The [multiprocessing] systems today have lots of knobs and lots of dials and it really takes a lot to get them to perform well," said Richard Heye, vice president of platform engineering and infrastructure at AMD (Sunnyvale, Calif.). "We're in the early processes of tuning," Heye said. "If I give you performance data right now, I would have to give you two pages of caveats. If I give you the machine right now, you'd say the performance isn't that great. I'd have to say here's why it's not that great and we just want to avoid that whole conversation." AMD has already shown single- and dual-processor configurations of the eighth-generation processor, which can run X86 instruction sets for new 64-bit applications as well as today's standard 32-bit applications. Rival Intel Corp's initial approach with its 64-bit processor was to implement a pure 64-bit architecture without legacy support. But Intel's 64-bit Itanium processors can emulate 32-bit processing. The problems associated with introducing and scaling 64-bit architectures is not new. Intel faced difficulty when developing the Itanium, which suffered repeated delays and spawned plenty of doubt. In the past, AMD's chairman and then chief executive officer W.J. Sanders III vilified the Itanium and promised that AMD's offering would be the choice of workstation and server designers. That remains to be seen. AMD plans to ship the Opteron in the first half of 2003. Despite the lackluster early results, AMD's vice president of worldwide sales, Henri Richard, said, "The customers that we've engaged are awaiting the current solution and are happy with what they've seen so far and are encouraged to continue their evolution. That's all I'm concerned about."