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| Top Stories for January 26, 2001 (details below) | |
| Electronic Buyers' News | AMD to drop EV6 bus in upcoming Hammer microprocessors |
| Electronic Buyers' News | Rambus exec says Intel DDR chipset not a big threat |
| C/Net | Transmeta-based servers boast power-saving chips |
| C/Net | AMD finds takers for mobile Athlon |
|
The Register Files |
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| The Register | Benchmarks - Itanic 32bit emulation is 'unusable' |
| The Register | AMD okays Samsung PC1600, PC2100 DDR |
| Microprocessor
Headline News Collected By Robert R. Collins |
Week of January 21, 2001 |
Older News |
| January 26, 2001 | |
AMD to drop EV6 bus in upcoming Hammer microprocessorsBy Jack Robertson January 24, 2001 |
Advanced Micro Devices will drop its current Athlon and Duron EV6 bus architecture for its upcoming 64-bit Hammer-series processors to allow for connecting large multiprocessing arrays, the Platform Conference was told Monday.
Bob Mitton, AMD marketing manager for workstations and servers, told the meeting here that the 64-bit processors will use a new NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) bus which can link eight-way or more MPUs for high performance multiprocessing. NUMA uses AMD's projected LDT (Lightning Data Transport) controller to handle both the Northbridge memory and Southbridge I/O buses in an array of processors, he said. |
Rambus exec says Intel DDR chipset not a big threatBy Jack Robertson January 25, 2001 |
Avo Kanadjian, vice president of worldwide marketing for Rambus Inc., said he isn't worried about Intel Corp. providing a Pentium 4 chipset this year as a rival to Direct Rambus DRAM. He said he believed it would be 2002 before Intel brought its own DDR chipset to market, "and by that time RDRAM would
have ramped up so strongly for Pentium 4 that a DDR chipset won't be able to compete."
Interviewed at the Platform Conference here this week, Kanadjian said for most of this year the Pentium 4 will only be shipping with Direct RDRAM, providing it with a commanding lead. He said the production ramp will drive Rambus costs down, making the chip highly competitive against DDR by the time Intel unveils its double data rate version of its chipset, code-named Brookdale. |
Transmeta-based servers boast power-saving chipsBy Michael Kanellos January 25, 2001 |
The cost of real estate and electricity are two of the major problems of doing business in Silicon Valley--a situation that several companies coming out with Transmeta-based servers hope to exploit.
RLX Technologies, Rebel.com and two other server start-ups, FiberCycle and Amphus, will release Web servers in the near future that contain Crusoe processors from Transmeta, among other architectural enhancements, rather than chips from Intel or Sun Microsystems. |
AMD finds takers for mobile AthlonBy John G. Spooner January 25, 2001 |
Advanced Micro Devices will turn up the competitive heat on Intel in March, when major computer makers release notebooks containing a mobile version of AMD's Athlon processor.
Hewlett-Packard is expected to incorporate AMD's new mobile Athlon into its notebook PCs. The processor will be released around March 19, according to sources familiar with the chipmaker's plans. Compaq Computer is also working on an Athlon-based notebook. |
The Register Files |
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Benchmarks - Itanic 32bit emulation is 'unusable'By Andrew Orlowski January 23, 2001 |
The Itanium may prove to be more than just one awful chip. It could be two awful chips, in one integrated flip-chip package.
That's if benchmarks run by Tweakers.net are to be believed. Tweakers has run code on the 32bit portion of Itanic, and finds performance to be a little more than disappointing. So bad, in fact, that even software emulation would be faster. Using the distributed.net client, MPEG and STREAM, and Tom Kerrigan's Simple Chess Program, Tweakers finds that the 32bit hardware portion of a 667Mhz Itanic wheezes along at the speed of a 75Mhz Pentium. Although in some benchmarks, it races up to match a 100Mhz Pentium. Tweakers used a beta of Whistler Advanced Server, and 512Mb of memory. |
AMD okays Samsung PC1600, PC2100 DDRBy Tony Smith January 23, 2001 |
Samsung may be having a tough time meeting Intel's high demand for RDRAM chips, but it's happy to churn out DDR parts for Chipzilla's arch-rival, AMD.
Yesterday, the Korean conglomerate proudly announced that Chimpzilla has given the thumbs-up to ten of its DDR memory modules, ranging from 64MB to 256MB, in PC1600 and PC2100. AMD, Samsung said, has validated the modules for use with its 760 chipset, itself designed to support AMD's Athlon CPU. |
| January 23, 2001 | |
AMD chips power new supercomputerBy John G. Spooner January 22, 2001 |
Advanced Micro Devices on Monday added another Athlon-based supercomputer to its resume.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker announced that the University of Delaware has installed a 128-processor supercomputer based on 1GHz AMD Athlon processors and the Linux operating system. The new supercomputer at the university's Bartol Research Institute is AMD's fifth supercomputer. It joins others at the University of Kentucky, the University of Utah and a pair of private companies. |
Via hits the road to boost Cyrix processorsBy John G. Spooner January 22, 2001 |
Via Technologies is taking to the road.
The chip and chipset maker is out to talk up its low-cost Cyrix III chip to chip sellers across the United States. Via canvassed distributors and PC equipment retailers in the Midwest earlier this month and spent last week on the West Coast, in an attempt to raise awareness for Cyrix III. This week, it's off to East Coast locales, including New York and Miami. |
AMD names Meyer to head MPU groupJanuary 22, 2001 |
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. today announced the appointment of Dirk Meyer as group vice president of its Computation Products Group
(CPG).
Meyer, 39, has been with AMD since 1996, most recently serving as vice president of engineering for CPG. In this capacity, Meyer led the team that designed and developed the Athlonprocessor. Meyer will report directly to AMD President and Chief Operating Officer Hector de J. Ruiz. |
The Register Files |
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Intel samples BrookdaleBy Tony Smith January 22, 2001 |
At least five Taiwanese mobo makers have received samples of Intel's upcoming Brookdale chipset.
Brookdale is designed to hook up Chipzilla's Pentium 4 to regular SDRAM. The current P4-supporting chipset, the 850, only works with Rambus' pricey RDRAM. The new chipset is due in the third quarter. However, Asustek, Gigabyte, Microstar and others have begun testing an early version of Brookdale, a Chipzilla spokeswoman said, according to EBN, which reckons it's all a sign that Intel is "aiming to introduce" DDR SDRAM. |
| January 22, 2001 | |
Intel had $2.6B operating loss outside of MPU groupBy Jack Robertson January 19, 2001 |
Intel Corp. had a $2.6 billion operating loss outside its microprocessor group, according to financial data released by the company this week.
The MPU group had a $13 billion operating profit, Intel reported. Financial analysts said the Intel catchall "all other operations" category is so broad that it is hard to interpret exactly what the operating loss means, although it was 50 percent higher than the $1.7 billion operating loss in 1999 in the same category. |
Could Via rescue Intel's Pentium 4?January 20, 2001 |
Via Technologies Inc. is reportedly set to roll out a PC chip set that supports Intel Corp.'s Pentium 4 microprocessor. The chip set is expected to be launched around the second quarter of this year, and it will support double-data-rate (DDR) SDRAMs. The product is expected to become the first DDR-enabled chip set for the Pentium 4. |
AMD-based supercomputer debuts next weekBy Mark Hachman January 19, 2001 |
The University of Delaware on Jan. 22 will announce the first clustered supercomputer based upon the Athlon microprocessor from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Code-named Samson, the supercomputer will initially include 132 1-GHz Athlon CPUs mounted inside chassis manufactured by RackSaver Inc., with an interconnect provided by Dolphin Interconnect Solutions Inc., RackSaver executives said. |
Intel licenses Pentium 4-based chip set technology to ATIBy Mark Hachman January 19, 2001 |
Intel Corp. officials confirmed that they have granted ATI Technologies Inc. a license to manufacture Pentium 4-compliant chip sets, sounding the starting gun for other manufacturers.
For now, ATI has a nominal advantage over leading chip set makers Via Technologies Inc. and Acer Laboratories Inc., which lack their own licenses. But that fact has not stopped Via in the past, which has used the terms of current licensing agreements to its own advantage. |
VIA Ships 700MHz Cyrix III ProcessorJanuary 19, 2001 |
VIA Technologies Inc launched the latest in its line of Cyrix III processors on Thursday. The 700MHz Cyrix III processor is part of VIA’s (tse: 2388) line of chips aimed at the low-end or value PC market.
The VIA Cyrix III processor comes with 128KB Level 1 cache, 100/133MHz front side bus, and MMX and 3DNow! support. It is compatible with industry standard socket 370, meaning the chip can be dropped directly into an Intel Corp. (nasdaq: INTC) Celeron motherboard. |
Intel's Brookdale chipset arrives in TaiwanBy Faith Hung January 19, 2001 |
Intel Corp. is working with Taiwan's motherboard makers to facilitate the development of its
SDRAM-enabled Brookdale chipset to support the Pentium 4 processor.
Asustek Computer Inc., Gigabyte Technology Co., Microstar International Corp. and several others have received samples of the Brookdale chipset from the CPU giant, according to Kelly Wu, country manager of the Taiwan branch of Intel Microelectronics Asia Ltd. The companies are in the process of testing the chipset on their motherboards, said a spokesman for Gigabyte. |
The Register Files |
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Microprocessor Report analysts love AMD's AthlonBy Drew Cullen January 19, 2001 |
Microprocessor Report analysts love the AMD Athlon so much that they've named it their PC processor of the year - for the second year in a row.
Why? It appears to come down to balance, according to Kevin Krewell, a senior analyst at Micro Design Resources (the Cahners-owned outfit which publishes the top dollar newsletter). He contributed the following quote to the AMD press release announcing its win. |
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