Haddock re: My thinking is that they would do better to have different names for different chips
That is what my gut says as well. Plus, it groans, it does not like the 256-KB product at all.
But methinks AMD is exactly right to to it like they intend to:
Halo worked for 386 (SX), it worked for MHz and it is very likely that people will continue desiring to buy a noble label with an affordable price-tag on it.
Now, introducing a 256KB-L2 Athlon64 could be considered as another paradigm-change at AMD from the Jerry to the Hector Era; i.e. stepping away from offering the best feasible price-performance ratio and educating the world about it to just meet customers demand.
First hand, that seems to conflict somewhat with Hectors "Value proposition" statements. In fact, in a more sophisticated view it does not at all. It just depends on the understanding of Value:
In a technical sense, a 256KB L2-CPU is nothing less than a step back (or two) and not really a value proposition at all.
But why that is so is nothing short of impossible to educate the very very vast majority of potential buyers of PCs, would you agree?
In a broader view, satisfaction is a value as well. So if you just satisfy people by fulfilling their desires it sure is a value proposition. No need to educate people as well, which AMD tried in many many attempts not only unsuccessfully, but worse than that, confused people with it. Confused people buy the biggest brand.
A propos biggest brand: As we know already, Intel is able to manufacture incredible dense cache. Guess what next year's benchmarks are skewed to. Guess what you will read in next years reviews about the model-ratings for 256-KB Cache-Athlon64s. Interesting to see how this will work out....
K.
Facts are irrelevant to the emotional brain
