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

To: Joe NYC who wrote (93481)	2/22/2003 11:44:42 AM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 275872

"I think Intel may want this to be the answer to Opteron," Sure. Just like in the PIII days, the Celeron was the true competitor for the Athlon. Not that I think the Opteron as it stands is much of a threat to the Itanium as the markets stand right now. But Opteron could potentially commoditize everything up to 4 way SMP. If they (or someone else) makes a switch fabric that has does directory-based routing and snooping with HTT links to 4P nodes, then everything but FP at all costs would become available. Not necessarily likely, though... The only potential market that Deerfield has over Intel's own 32 bit line is being able to address more than 4 GB and for those who want a cheaper workstation to develop Itanium code for. I guess it's possible for Intel to try to make a full court press on the 64 bit market with Deerfield. IIRC, Madison has a die size of more than 415mm^2 (I think it is right at 450, but I am not sure). Oh, what the heck, let's say it's 400 with a 6 megabyte cache. Hmm, apparently it is around 380mm^2 and Deerfield is around 180mm^2, according to here siliconstrategies.com The point of this exercise is that Intel could conceivably position Deerfield as a Celeron equivalent and price it very low. Now it would also have to develop a much lower cost chipset if they did that, but it could be done. So potentially, if Intel can sell the idea that 64 bits is twice as good as 32 bits even at a much lower clock rate and somewhat lower performance on everything but pure floating point, they might have a shot. But it is a dangerous game right now, Opteron/Athlon64 has the same cards, in addition they can claim full performance re-use of the 32 bit code and they can easily do 2 and 4 way. 8 if you really push it...