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To: Charles Gryba who wrote (169720)	8/21/2002 1:25:09 PM
From: Joey Smith	Respond to of 186894

Charles, re:Wasn't that the big risk for AMD? That their .13 wouldn't do anything for the Athlon and that Hammer would have been limited in clockspeed because of that? I think those doubts can be put to rest now. I think you're assuming a lot. The last public demo of Hammer (last week, wasnt it) was running at only 800Mhz. Hammer is at a huge risk, imo, of slipping the Q4 ship date to OEMs. Of course, AMD is always capable of hitting the late inning home run, but even a great hitter like Bonds strikes out more often than he hits one out of the park! Joey

To: Charles Gryba who wrote (169720)	8/21/2002 2:09:56 PM
From: fingolfen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Wasn't that the big risk for AMD? That their .13 wouldn't do anything for the Athlon and that Hammer would have been limited in clockspeed because of that? I think those doubts can be put to rest now. I think that you're talking about two different topics here. The first risk was that the AMD 0.13 micron bulk process would be a dud and that SOI would be needed to get any speed out of anything. Initial indications bore out that view with the very limited overclocking potential of the first 0.13 micron K7's. This new release, however, is quite different. AMD has clearly changed something, and unlike in the days of the K6-3, this change has worked. I'm personally quite impressed with the turnaround in process headroom and am anxious to discover what exactly is different with this batch of K7's. A second problem was the scalability of the K7 architecture. Ignoring all of the tired protestations of Intel "buying" the benchmarks, the K7 even clock for clock is starting to look a bit weary next to the P4. The K8 is allegedly a new architecture, so one would expect it to scale better than the K7, but some reports seem to indicate that there is a lot of "K7" in the "K8", and much of the performance boost will actually come from the integrated memory controller rather than other factors. In short, there are still significant challenges for AMD in the days ahead. They've made a diving catch and pulled out high frequency K7's. They still need to demonstrate the ability to produce them in volume. They also need to update the K7 core with a higher FSB and more cache to have any hopes of remaining competitive until the K8 arrives in volume. They also still need to get 0.13 micron SOI online and at production speed before the K8 can be introduced.