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

To: pgerassi who wrote (93432)	2/21/2003 9:09:53 AM
From: Charles Gryba	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Pete, I disagree. I think we were all too quick to dismiss the P4 as a dud but as it turns out the P4 was dramatically crippled when it first came out but with each revision there are enough changes to boost its performance. There's something to be said for a cpu that clocks 50% higher than its competitor. Once you remove enough bottlenecks it becomes a very good cpu. We saw what a big difference going from 256k to 512k cache made for the P4 while Barton did not benefit as much. What I am saying is that the P4 was so crippled that these incremental improvements are rather large while the Athlon core being so well done from the beginning is not showing as big an improvement. Still, from # of transistors and from a cost perspective it seems that AMD made the better choice for themselves but I am sure that if the had the fab space they would have come with something else. C

To: pgerassi who wrote (93432)	2/21/2003 1:41:45 PM
From: Petz	Respond to of 275872

Pete, good post & I agree with most of what you said about the weakness of the Northwood to Prescott transition. But someone showed evidence that they are finally upgrading the FPU, which was underpowered compared to the Athlon. And I think caching decoded instructions is an excellent idea that may finally show its power with an expanded trace cache. And the power-wasting high-GHz-IPC-be-damned design may be redeemed by active power management. These 3 things combined will make Prescott a formidable competitor. Financially, I'm betting that a more balanced AMD design and eventual success of the SOI 0.13u process will allow AMD to get a half generation ahead in performance, even as they remain a half generation behind in process technology dimensions. Petz