Replies to post #14926 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[blauboad]

sgolds, Given your three options, you're probably right, but..

If yourbankruptcy's comment has something to it, and AMD does plan to contract out k7 productions, then the scenario makes more sense to me. They can't contract out A64 to anyone but IBM, but some version of K7 should be produceable by one of the Tawainese foundries by now. Maybe even UMC--there was never an official break up. That would free up Dresden for 100% AMD64 production. If demand cranks up, they go to IBM. With all the money they make, they build a new fab or two and everyone is happy but Intel.

My major worry about AMD going forward is capacity, this seems to be a way they could manage it. Demand and supply are not independent. If the OEMs don't think AMD can supply, they will not demand...

[Petz]

There's no reason to totally degrade the 64-bit capabilities of Athlon 64. A chip can still be AMD64-compatible even if it can't be connected to more than 4 GB of memory. The logical address space is still 48 bits (or whatver AMD64 says), while physically there's only enough address pins for 4G of memory.

This kind of "castrated Athlon 64" makes eminent sense to me. It would still run Windows 64 in 64-bit mode!
It would still be 2x faster in benchmarks like DivX!
The extra registers will still speed up code by 10-20% for software that uses them.


Petz