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Constantine, Re: Do you think that if the only features that the Hammer series has over the Athlon series is the integrated memory controller and 64-bits it would have taken AMD this long to release?

All the features inside Hammer have already been disclosed, so don't expect anything new at this point. Besides the IMC and x86-64, I don't expect a huge net increase in performance with the minor changes they made to the core. The longer pipeline may very well negate any advantage that the improved TLB and branch predictor would have given. By using memory off of Hypertransport, performance may even decrease, despite the greater bandwidth. Compared to Athlon, the Hammer with an external memory interface may only gain a 5-10% improvement due to the extra bandwidth.

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