Athlon with SSE2 support?

[White Widow]

I recently read an interview with AMD at Temple of Technology where it is confirmed that the Athlon is destined for .13u production, just like the ClawHammer. Since the ClawHammer is known to feature SSE2 support, I was wondering if it is possible that the .13u Athlons will also have this feature included since they will obviously become the low-end counterpart. Does anyone know how easy or difficult adding SSE2 support would be? It seems like it would be a smart move, since AMD could capitalize on Intel's software development efforts and give the Athlon a speed boost where it will need it most: against the P4. To have a .13u SSE2-enabled Athlon in production that could perform at least somewhat competitively with the P4 (at a much lower price, though), and a ClawHammer that just dominated in at least 32-bit code (I have faith...) then AMD would be in a very sweet position. Keeping the Athlon competitive is definately a concern, until the low-end ClawHammer chips are introduced sometime in...mid-2002? Anyway, am I on crack? Let me know.

-Aaron

 

[Noriaki]

well the .13um die shrink is more like P3 Katmai to P3 Coppermine....
no instruction set changes....

However it's possible...the only difference between a P3 Katmai 450 and a P2 450 is SSE1...so it's not impossible..I don't think it's terribly likely though.

 

[Adul]

One can only wish.

 

[White Widow]

I suppose it's not really the same as giving the Celeron-II SSE support, since it was probably always there, just disabled, huh? So is the real problem that SSE units take up a lot of transistors, or would it just be that the technology would be very difficult to integrate into the Athlon core? Once a core is set is is really difficult to make ANY functional changes, or not always so? I just don't know about this stuff.

Thanks,
Aaron