Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[chipguy]

So Opteron will be behind Madison this summer, as we don't expect anything above 2 Ghz.

Keep in mind that Madison will also be scaling up in clock rate over its life time too and
a 9.0 MB version is expected next year.

But please pay attention that Madison has 6Mb L3 cache. It's not a big shame to loose
to such a monster. Intel won't be able to make it in volume, while Opteron may be (not enough
info to claim, but anyway) quite popular. At least die size is much smaller.

The Madison is a large chips (about 2x bigger than Opteron) but most of the area is L3
cache (~60% IIRC) and is protected by redundancy. And it is manufactured in a mature
130 nm bulk CMOS process so I have little doubt that Intel can turn these puppies out
with good yield and in whatever quantities the market will absorb. OTOH, the Opteron is
made with a SOI process with more layers of interconnect so I think the question of
manufacturability is more of an issue for AMD. The slip of A64 to the fall and the purchase
of process help from IBM suggests it is an issue which hasn't been completely resolved yet.