Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brian Hutcheson who wrote (32321)	5/2/1998 1:29:00 AM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1571808

Brian - Re: Double Bad News for AMD 1. Centaur/IDT may ship their WinCHIP2 with 3DNOW technology/100 MHz bus right after the K6-2...cutting in to AMD's business and profits! 2. HP drops AMD chips (I never knew they used them!) in favor of Celeron - customers prefer the Real Deal - Intel Inside. Check out the details! Paul {=======================} techweb.cmp.com Centaur sports AMD's bus, 3-D in WinChip CPU By Rick Boyd-Merritt AUSTIN, Texas - Centaur Technology has started to sample a new version of its WinChip C6 Pentium-clone processor. The chip uses the floating-point instruction-set enhancements for 3-D graphics as well as the 100-MHz Super 7 processor bus, which is defined by and licensed from Advanced Micro Devices, and geared to compete with Intel's MMX instruction-set extensions and 100-MHz processor bus of the Pentium II. Centaur plans to officially announce in late May its new version of the C6 as the WinChip 2. The chip should hit volume production by early July, just a few weeks after AMD's own processor using the new instructions and 100-MHz bus is slated to hit volume production. The 300-MHz AMD K6-2 will officially roll out on May 28. Turning point Centaur's WinChip 2 is being made in a 0.35-micron process in which it is expected to hit speeds of 240 to 266 MHz and be priced at less than $100. Beyond adopting AMD's bus and instruction-set technologies, the WinChip 2 also sports a new floating-point unit, a second MMX pipeline and a four-way set-associative data cache. Branch prediction has also been added to the processor. "We did a lot of fine-tuning of the initial design," said G. Glenn Henry, president of Centaur. Henry said this year could be a crucial turning point for clone X86 chip makers in their struggles to penetrate the consumer-PC market. "The next six months are very important," said Henry. "AMD now has a 100-MHz systems bus and 3-D instruction-set extensions. The question is will good technology or Intel's marketing win. We will have to wait and see." A PC product manager for Hewlett-Packard last week noted the company had discontinued its first sub-$1,000 business system using an AMD processor and launched in its place a system using the new Intel Celeron chip, even though that CPU has received relatively poor benchmarks. HP concluded that its AMD-based system sold poorly because business buyers are reluctant to specify systems without an Intel processor.