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The German site Planet 3DNow! managed to talk to Jan Guetter, AMD Public Relations Manager Central Europe, who disclosed some really interesting details on Palomino and Hammer processors. Here they are:
Thunderbird core, which is currently used in all AMD CPUs will reach the frequency of 1.5GHz. So, it means that there will be two more processor models announced: 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz.
Palomino, which will debut at 1.533GHz in Q3 2001, will really have some new architectural enhancements. It will support enhanced branch-prediction unit and hardware-prefetching. As for the rumors about a longer pipeline, they got no confirmation so far. Therefore, Palomino will be slightly faster than Thunderbird working at the given frequencies.
Morgan, a new Duron CPUs core, will differ from Palomino not only by a smaller L2 cache. Unlike Palomino, which will be produced in Dresden with the copper interconnect technology, all Morgan processors will be made in Austin, where aluminum interconnect technology is used.
AMD isn?t planning to change the physical interface of their CPUs, and Socket A will remain acute within the next 2-3 years. The CPUs with the Palomino core will work in Socket A mainboards, which support 266MHz EV6 bus.
The 64bit processor family aka Hammer will be based on the good old K7 architecture with 64bit registers and an extra instruction set for work with these registers. Besides, there will be some specific server functions added.
Summing up all these facts, we could say that AMD?s policy is based on enhancing the available K7 core and not on developing some fresh new solutions. We should say that this approach is quite acceptable currently since the competing Intel Willamette core isn?t a powerful rival so far. However, as soon as Northwood comes out, the situation may change for the worse for AMD. In order to succeed in the semiconductor industry, the company should innovate something quite often, so that to retain the leading positions. The situation in the semiconductor market is subject to immediate changes. In fact, we have already seen what happens to those companies, which fail to react quickly enough. The best example here is the sad story of 3dfx Company. We sincerely hope that AMD will avoid this misfortune, since many of us are dedicated Athlon admirers.
Thunderbird core, which is currently used in all AMD CPUs will reach the frequency of 1.5GHz. So, it means that there will be two more processor models announced: 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz.
Palomino, which will debut at 1.533GHz in Q3 2001, will really have some new architectural enhancements. It will support enhanced branch-prediction unit and hardware-prefetching. As for the rumors about a longer pipeline, they got no confirmation so far. Therefore, Palomino will be slightly faster than Thunderbird working at the given frequencies.
Morgan, a new Duron CPUs core, will differ from Palomino not only by a smaller L2 cache. Unlike Palomino, which will be produced in Dresden with the copper interconnect technology, all Morgan processors will be made in Austin, where aluminum interconnect technology is used.
AMD isn?t planning to change the physical interface of their CPUs, and Socket A will remain acute within the next 2-3 years. The CPUs with the Palomino core will work in Socket A mainboards, which support 266MHz EV6 bus.
The 64bit processor family aka Hammer will be based on the good old K7 architecture with 64bit registers and an extra instruction set for work with these registers. Besides, there will be some specific server functions added.
Summing up all these facts, we could say that AMD?s policy is based on enhancing the available K7 core and not on developing some fresh new solutions. We should say that this approach is quite acceptable currently since the competing Intel Willamette core isn?t a powerful rival so far. However, as soon as Northwood comes out, the situation may change for the worse for AMD. In order to succeed in the semiconductor industry, the company should innovate something quite often, so that to retain the leading positions. The situation in the semiconductor market is subject to immediate changes. In fact, we have already seen what happens to those companies, which fail to react quickly enough. The best example here is the sad story of 3dfx Company. We sincerely hope that AMD will avoid this misfortune, since many of us are dedicated Athlon admirers.
