Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[neye_eve]

Don't want to miss out on the party

So, my general thoughts...

1) The benchmarks have clearly shown what a good architecture this has w/r/t per clock performance.

2) The benchmarks have also clearly shown that more Mhz is really needed, especially for the workstation apps.

3) So, these two together lead me, at this point, to agree with Elmer that SOI really does look like a very costly mistake.

With all the potential found in the uArch in the chip, it's rather sad for it to be constrained by the actual frequency, especially since it has the extra stages, uses SOI, yet fails to meet the frequency of other highly-overclockable AXP chips.

I guess over the next few months it will be a good sign if they can crank up the clock 400 - 600 Mhz. With prescott coming out, I'd think that the A64's would really need to be running at 2.6 Ghz to keep up. It may sound high, but because of:

1) prescott's improvements
2) the benchies we saw today
3) the fact that the A64 will have 1/4 the cache and 1/2 the bandwidth of the chip in the benchmarks today

... it's going to be a tough road for the A64 to hoe. Hopefully for AMD the team that got the tbreds from the A's to the B's can work some similar magic with the speedpaths constraining the hammers.

neye