The Palominos are comming!

[Pneumatic]

WOO HOO! THe Palominos are almost here!

AMD Palominos to ship 9 October
By Robert Blincoe
Posted: 28/09/2001 at 15:47 GMT


AMD's Palomino processors will launch on 9 October.

Now called the Athlon XP, it will come in 4 speeds - the XP 1500 plus, XP 1600 plus, XP 1700 plus and XP 1800 plus.

Prices to OEMs are $115, $124, $152 and $210 respectively, but may vary depending on volume.

The clock speeds of the chips are:
XP 1500 - 1.33GHz

XP 1600 - 1.4GHz

XP 1700 - 1.47GHz

XP 1800 - 1.53GHz


AMD has given the Palominos their 1500 plus etc. names, and not used the clock speeds of the processors, to move away from direct comparisons with Intel processor speeds. Or to be more precise, it's given them names to suggest faster clock speeds than they've got, based on their rule of thumb that AMD processors match or beat the performance of Intel processors which are 300MHz faster.

For example, AMD says an XP 1800 plus, which runs at 1.53GHz, would perform as well as a 1.83GHz Intel chip - hence, that's why it's called an 1800 plus.

To get this idea across, the Athlon XPs will be sold using the marketing jargon - quantispeed technology. System builders have been warned not to mention the actual clock speeds of the chips, but to talk of quantispeed processors, to suggest they're turbocharged. ®

/me can't wait. That is when my new system gets started.

[Nuno]

Yes. I think that XP 1600 - 1.4GHz will do the XP1800 - 1.53 Ghz dance (at least) and it´ll be a nice upgrade from that TB900@1000.

Still using SDRAM with a A7V133 thought. Well, I got the money for either a Palomino or a DDR board+Ram

Speaking of it, anyone tried already a Palomino (MP) on a A7V133?

[Kosh Naranek]

Just wondering ......

Will AMD change their 1500+ numbers if the 0.13um P4 with NorthWood Core turns out to perform better than the current 0.18um P4's with Willamatte core ?

I.E
If a 0.13 um P4NW@1.5GHz performs like a 0.18um P4W@1.8 GHz
- not saying it will ... but ....

If this happens all I can say is TOTAL CONFUSION

[Novdid]

I really hope they won't label the cpu's that way.

It's as silly as it can ever get.

[Greebe]

Or better yet, if the 0.13u P4 cores are capable of hitting much greater speeds than everyone is currently aware of!

If that's true then AMD will not only be hit hard by the mHz vs mHz but their PR rating will be a completely meaningless maneuver.

[windigo]

i agree that performance rating is a bad idea since they tried it before against the original pentium's. now im in a conumdrum on what kind of system to build in the future:
northwood + rdram?
athlon palomino + sis? via? ali?!?!!?!?!? + ddram
im leaning toward the northwood which leaves one question what graphics card to put in it

just when things were starting to settle down

[Indiana]

Kosh, why should the 0.13 P4s be faster (at the same clock, of course), when the necessary (and possible and, btw, existing in the original P4 papers before the marketing sh*theads apparently rushed its release) design changes were not made?

I'm sure we WILL see further P4 revisions that if those things are corrected will indeed be interesting. The questions however are 1. "when?" and 2. "what will the competition have at that time?".

Greebes argument is much more threatening to AMD. When Intel can produce >3GHz P4s at an affordable cost AMD will be in BIG trouble.....

[GT98]

Well to give some AMD some credit, I've heard rumors on other sites that the new Hammer Chips will be able to offer 3x the performance of the current Athlon chips and they are going to be sampling in November sometime, plus they offer 64-bit performance...should be an interesting 6 months....just wish Matrox would offer something...SOON


Scott

[isochar]

Originally posted by GT98
Well to give some AMD some credit, I've heard rumors on other sites that the new Hammer Chips will be able to offer 3x the performance of the current Athlon chips and they are going to be sampling in November sometime, plus they offer 64-bit performance...should be an interesting 6 months....just wish Matrox would offer something...SOON


Scott

False rumors. The hammer will have to utilize a pipeline similar in length to the P4 if they'll want to clock it as high. If that's the case, Hammer will run slower clock for clock than the Athlon.

I really doubt that they didn't bump up the pipeline, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. (Lower clock speed = less sales)

As for the 64 bit performance, it's only useful if there are OSs to support it. MS doesn't even have plans of making a XP 64 bit version for AMDs architecture. On the other hand, one or two redhat distributions supposedly will...

[superfly]

According to some,the northwood p4 will have a 512k L2 cache and some other tweaks(stronger FPU) that ultimately make it about 20~25% faster than the existing P4 when both chips are running at the same speed.


This pretty much means that the new p4 will have about the same performance as the palomino athlon when BOTH chips are running at the same clock speed,but with the advantage that the p4 can be clocked much higher since it's at 0.13 micron and uses copper interconnects.

Intel already showed northwood cpu's last month at IDF and they even had one system already running at 3 ghz,air cooled,and another one using more extreme cooling methods running at 3.5 ghz.


I firmly believe that AMD may only make a comeback when they release the clawhammer/sledgehammer series of chips

[Wombat]

iso:

False rumors. The hammer will have to utilize a pipeline similar in length to the P4 if they'll want to clock it as high.

We'll see. Athlon's are currently doing 1.5GHz. And we can be pretty sure AMD is going for high yield on that.

Drop the yield, switch to 130 or 125nm, maybe throw in SOI or some other techs, and you're in the low 2GHz. Accept a lower yield (for what will probably start as a high-end server chip), and you're somewhere in 2.5 - 3GHz land.

[Wombat]

I forgot to mention, AMD seems to have a pretty nice understanding of architecture. All those DEC engineers paid off.
The clock-for-clock fight is something AMD has been winning since they got their FPUs right. And I don't think the K7 was the end of that.

AMD has my respect as a design house.

[isochar]

Originally posted by Wombat
We'll see. Athlon's are currently doing 1.5GHz. And we can be pretty sure AMD is going for high yield on that.

Drop the yield, switch to 130 or 125nm, maybe throw in SOI or some other techs, and you're in the low 2GHz. Accept a lower yield (for what will probably start as a high-end server chip), and you're somewhere in 2.5 - 3GHz land.

Hmmm... accept a lower yield twice? You sure AMD is a financial position to do that?

Don't forget that even Apple's G5 increased its pipeline by 40% to get a higher clock. Expect AMD to do the same. Perhaps their PR rating is the new clock for clock expectation for the Hammer in comparison to Athlon?

[Wombat]

I said "drop the yield twice". Whoops.

The server world is a different place. AMD can charge premium prices for a premium product. Right now, they're selling every CPU they put out, so high yield matters.

[isochar]

No large corporation in their right mind would choose an AMD based desktop or server. Hammer will be a niche server chip for smaller companies that cannot afford to shell out the money to implement an Itanium-based server cluster.

Hammer's biggest target market is still the consumer desktops. They need to prove themselves there before corporations will even consider "AMD Inside".