Athlon III Speculation - Let's move on!

[blckgrffn]

Let's start anticipating something else, which is more fun than talking about what we have in hand... 😉

Really, when Phenom came out, I was griping to a coworker that "what most people needed was the Phenom IPC/Core improvements in the Athlon X2's and double the L2 on the new process. It should clock pretty well and not use a lot of power." A few weeks/months later Athlon II came out and, well, I was close and it actually fit the bill as a very workable CPU for quite some time in the Sub-$100 space. Of course, this was a conversation in passing and without any written proof, I can't take any credit for guiding AMD 😉

If/when there is a Bulldozer/Piledriver based Athlon 3, I predict the initial model will be:

A 2M/4T part with no L3 cache.

It's tiny die size will let it live @ or below 65W, it's base frequency on the high end will be north of 4Ghz with Turbo into the 5Ghz range.

~100mm die size will make it smaller/cheaper than SB Core i3 parts.

Throw in your wild speculation here! 🙂

 

[nanaki333]

maybe we'll see 1.5M/3C athlon 3!

 

[Arachnotronic]

Great post.

Honestly, I think such chips would do *fantastically*, and I'd be more than willing to use them in builds I do for people. And if they're unlocked, then overclocking adds more value (the reason I use AMD for budget builds and not Intel is because the Intel stuff is unlocked...gr)

 

[Tuna-Fish]

I think a lot of the market that used to be Athlon will be covered by fusion products in the future. For a lot of low-end products, the integrated GPU makes a whole lot of sense, so low-end versions of Llano and trinity should cover that niche.

If there is going to be a new product under the Athlon brand, I'd say there's a good chance it's a salvaged fusion part without a working GPU.

 

[purefun1965]

If there is going to be a new product under the Athlon brand, I'd say there's a good chance it's a salvaged fusion part without a working GPU.

you mean something like this. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103945

 

[sangyup81]

I can't see them putting in turbo on an Athlon part

 

[blckgrffn]

I think a lot of the market that used to be Athlon will be covered by fusion products in the future. For a lot of low-end products, the integrated GPU makes a whole lot of sense, so low-end versions of Llano and trinity should cover that niche.

If there is going to be a new product under the Athlon brand, I'd say there's a good chance it's a salvaged fusion part without a working GPU.

That stands reasonably good chance of happening, I think, but it seems like AM3+ and FM2 are the sockets that AMD really intends to focus on over the next couple of years.

Although if OEMs are the focus for the Athlon line then perhaps the socket mishmash is no big deal, not a lot of CPU upgrades go into Dells and such, I bet.

BD based Athlon III would just be moar awsum though 🙂 The larger the BD install base the more likely optimization becomes...

I can't see them putting in turbo on an Athlon part

Seems like they need to 1up Intel somehow, across the board Turbo seems reasonable to me.

 

[podspi]

Let's start anticipating something else, which is more fun than talking about what we have in hand... 😉

Really, when Phenom came out, I was griping to a coworker that "what most people needed was the Phenom IPC/Core improvements in the Athlon X2's and double the L2 on the new process. It should clock pretty well and not use a lot of power." A few weeks/months later Athlon II came out and, well, I was close and it actually fit the bill as a very workable CPU for quite some time in the Sub-$100 space. Of course, this was a conversation in passing and without any written proof, I can't take any credit for guiding AMD 😉

If/when there is a Bulldozer/Piledriver based Athlon 3, I predict the initial model will be:

A 2M/4T part with no L3 cache.

It's tiny die size will let it live @ or below 65W, it's base frequency on the high end will be north of 4Ghz with Turbo into the 5Ghz range.

~100mm die size will make it smaller/cheaper than SB Core i3 parts.

Throw in your wild speculation here! 🙂

I dunno, ripping out the L3 won't do any favors to IPC... Leading to IPC lower than the Athlon II! D:


I'm thinking if PD ends up being what BD should have been (ignoring all the unreasonable expectations) -- maybe that would be workable.

 

[blckgrffn]

I dunno, ripping out the L3 won't do any favors to IPC... Leading to IPC lower than the Athlon II! D:


I'm thinking if PD ends up being what BD should have been (ignoring all the unreasonable expectations) -- maybe that would be workable.

Hmm, depends on cache hits/misses. The L3 on BD doesn't strike me as particularly impressive. We'd all likely be better off if they spent some resources on more L1/lower latency higher bandwidth L2 - to me this seems like the logical outcome of PD tweaks.

Lower IPC is why we have more mhz and more threads! Long live NetBurst... I mean BD! 😀

 

[Vdubchaos]

Next CPU will just be called AMD, that's it.

As in Another Mistake Delivered.

 

[formulav8]

Anand made it clear that AMD made it clear to him that there is NO Chance of being able to unlock Cores on BD. Which means they will probably zap the unused portions.

 

[podspi]

Hasn't AMD said the same thing before about unlocking? When the 8xx series boards came out they said unlocking was done, and it never happened.

My guess, if they said this, is that all FX-4 series CPUs are actually just defective dies, and not just binning to meet demand. Let's face it, there is no way AMD actually wants to sell a 2billion transistor processor for $120.