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IDF Fall 2004: AMD hijacks the journos

by David Ross on 9 September 2004, 00:00

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), AMD (NYSE:AMD)

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AMD hijacks the journos

Every year at IDF, you can be assured that a number of companies will take advantage of the entire world’s journalists being in the same place at the same time. For AMD, it’s a popular tactic, hijacking IDF journalists for some effectively free AMD press coverage.

AMD have enjoyed a great success with the Athlon 64 architecture, which has seen them move out of the red each quarter. This must not only please the company but the share holders. Another thing to please the shareholders will be the announcement last week, where AMD demonstrated dual core Opteron, crucially before Intel announced their dual and multi-core products at IDF. The demo of 8 physical cores on 4 sockets shows AMD is also committed to heavily increasing the performance per socket of a computing system, while at the same time reducing costs for that new performance.

AMD had always planned to have dual core support since the K8 was conceived, and in 1999 were talking about this whilst specifying what they expected to see from the chip. Today was no different and they reminded us of 1999 and told us that they could always do it, but were waiting for successful migration to 90nm before the price factor became reasonable. A single core Opteron on 130nm is the same size as a dual-core on 90nm.

AMD state that in 2005 we will see the 100, 200, and 800 series launching with dual core support, but they think that it will be a slow migration; people have to have the need for the performance. The pricing of the CPUs will be at the same sort of price points as we are seeing now. They believe that corporate customers will buy servers with just one CPU within it but have the ability to put in a second CPU, just like what happens currently.

The advantage of the dual core is not just a silicon-saving density matter, but also a performance matter. Whilst we don’t expect to see a massive difference due to the performance of hyper transport, there is a chance to lower the latency between these two cores on the die.

They also believe that they will be able to do multi-core as soon as they shift to a 65nm process, and until then they don’t believe there is a market need for it due to the price implications. However, it’s a while off with AMD not having top to bottom 90nm parts until the end of 2004.

Of course the continued support for AMD’s power management features will still be in the new dual core Opterons, as well as the security features of the NX bit. AMD have the intention of making 8 socket, 16 way servers available in 2005.

They will also have top to bottom dual core in place by the end of 2005, however the Athlon FX may not have dual core support, depends on how the market moves - if it moves towards to multi threaded it will support it. The FX will of course carry on being a higher clock, speed than dual or single core CPUs. This is due to most games not being multi-threaded. Look to Athlon FX for AMD’s clock frequency limits in the future.

AMD will have DDR2 support at the mid point in 2006, with the price point of 667 and 800 becoming more realistic, however they did not deny they were thinking about going straight to DDR3 since the Athlon 64 series of CPUs enjoys the very low latencies of current DDR. However, they do not have any intention of releasing memory recommendations which does not conform to JEDEC standards (www.jedec.org). They believe we will see PCI-Express on AMD chipsets before the close of play 2005, if not sooner.


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