20 April
2001
Upcoming
Processors
As you would expected at any manufacturer's showcase, there
was pimpin' going on. Naturally, AMD was excited by their
upcoming processors. The Duron will be replaced by Morgan;
a processor designed to be faster, smaller and cooler, but
still be built upon the 0.18 micron process. The Thunderbird
will be followed by a processor code-named Palomino. Like
Morgan, the Palomino is built upon a 0.18 micron die.
In the first half of next year, we should see the siblings
of Morgan and Palomino; Thoroughbred and Appaloosa respectively.
They will be built upon the cutting-edge 0.13 micron process.
The
Best of the Rest
AMD also touched a little on their HyperTransport technology;
"The I/O Accelerator". They showed how it could
be used anywhere in the I/O chain from webservers and TCP-switches
all the way to desktop PC's to speed up data transfers.
The
little slot where ISA slots used to be, the ACR, was also
discussed. The Audio Communications Riser allows a cost-effective
(but with a significant hit on the CPU) approach to combining
modems, soundcards and network cards into one slot. The open
standard ACR was contrasted with the Intel backed and proprietary
CNR.
For
many in the audience, the X86-64 technology presentation didn't
mean much to their business. But the Hammer series of processors
could open up a fourth battlefront with Intel when 64-bit
computing takes center stage. The benefit of Hammer over Itanium
is that Hammer processors will run 32-bit code and the Itanium
won't. In other words, you probably won't have to purchase
all new software.
AMD
concluded the tech presentation with a discussion of their
PowerNow technology for mobile applications. Where Intel's
SpeedStep technology automatically drops CPU speed when the
notebook is running on battery, PowerNow is supposed to sense
the task running and adjust the CPU speed accordingly. If
you are just doing basic word processing, you don't need to
be running the CPU at full speed. It will drop CPU speed to
conserve the battery, but resume if a task requires extra
CPU speed.
Being
a recent convert to AMD, I found much of their presentation
to be informative. As mentioned earlier, Part 2 of this feature
will take a look at what their partners brought to the show.
The letters "DDR" could be seen everywhere ;-)
