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

To: brushwud who wrote (185243)	1/25/2006 10:06:26 PM
From: grimes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

"...the availability of a dual-core Turion 64...". Given that AMD has delivered DC Athlons and Opterons, is a DC Turion that difficult. Is the lag in producing this part inherent in its nature, or are there other factors at work here, for example limited fab capacity,? Is it plausible that DC Turions are to be the first products from Fab 36? Thanks

To: brushwud who wrote (185243)	1/25/2006 10:31:20 PM
From: dougSF30	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Here's what Charlie said last month. CeBIT is perfect timing for a demo, from a PR point of view. Intel introduces Dempsey, says, "we're not as far behind anymore" -- then AMD demos a QC part and it's "Yes you are, you're twice as slow all over again." theinquirer.net This euphoria will last a few short weeks, because AMD will come out with the F-Step (FS) Opterons in early Q2. We already mentioned that they will be lower power and have DDR2 in the desktop articles, both of these will play a big role on the server front. Lower power comes from a tweaked core, not a smaller process. The FS cores won't set any records for lower power, but it will be a noticeable decrease. How much? Current cores are not near the family TDP numbers for power consumed, and there is enough yield headroom to put out a line of 68W parts at real volumes. Picture the peak of the current yield curve a bit above the 68W limit. FS will probably move that down to the point where the 68W parts could become the largest bin, so think more towards 5W of savings rather than 20. DDR2 is also interesting, it lowers power use dramatically, which is where the FS probably makes a good chunk of the savings. It also increases bandwidth, a good thing, while increasing latency, a bad thing. To top it off, it allows AMD to add precious DIMM slots to the server mobos, coupled with increased density of the memory itself, you can potentially have much larger memory configurations. As icing on the cake, the voltage differential between the memory controller and the rest of the chip will be lessened, easing one of AMDs worst frequency scaling headaches. The other FS features are the things that server people care about. 1400MHz HT will be a big one that is useful across the board, from 2 to 8 sockets. It will ease the scaling problems AMD faces between 4 and 8 sockets, and help a lot on non-local memory accesses. There is nothing really bad to say here. The next big one is a revamped crossbar with 4 CPU ports, can you say quad core? I knew you could. They have been shown behind closed doors for a while, but look for a public debut at CeBit with 90nm parts, but I don't think they will productize it until 65nm after mid-year. In fact, they probably will sit on it until needed in the real world rather than pulling a Paxville. Unfair comparison really, AMD QC parts will be the real thing, Paxville wasn't. If Woodcrest lives up to the hype, look for earlier QC parts from AMD, it is a finance choice, not a technical one, do they want to burn the wafer area when they are capacity constrained ?