AMD Hammer Microarchitecture Preview

[KvHagedorn]

http://www.chip-architect.com/news/2001_10_02_Hammer_microarchitecture.html

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[Technoid]

That thing wont only kill the P4, it will masacre it

[isochar]

Quoted from Sharky Forums:

It looked to me like Hans de Vries took several AMD patents, and speculated about what a Hammer processor might look like if it applied all those patents. A more realistic view would be cautious of this, since issued patents aren't necessarily implemented right away. These patents may not be used in the K8 generation, or they may not be used at all, depending on how easy they are to implement, what the costs are versus the benefits, and what support would be required to use them.
The picture that Hans paints is quite impressive, so I am skeptical that AMD (or any other company) can pull this off given their current time frame and known constraints. On the other hand, if the actual product has even half of these features, it would make a very nice micro-architecture.

Edit: Make sure you read the end of the article, labelled "Some background info behind this article".

Arcadian

[KvHagedorn]

Alright, here's the scoop, directly from AMD. Fred Weber presented this at the Microprocessor Forum Oct 15.

Some comments from MPF:

Analysts believe that AMD's Hammer is a showstopper. "Hammer is the highlight of the Microprocessor Forum," declared Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight64 of Saratoga, Calif. "It leapfrogs everything in the market by a factor of two [in terms of performance], including IBM's Power4," Brookwood said.

... when AMD ships the Hammer in the market, the processor could also leapfrog Intel Corp.'s Itanium family of 64-bit processors and Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Sparc devices, according to analysts...


...processor has an overall bandwidth performance of 8-gigabytes-per-second--or roughly four times faster than competitive devices. "The [Hammer] combines the advantage of CISC and RISC," said Fred Weber...

here's the whole article about Hammer's unveiling at MPF from Silicon Strategies.

[Wombat]

I have no idea who that analyst is, but I don't give him very much credit.

Let's combine "It leapfrogs everything in the market by a factor of two [in terms of performance], including IBM's Power4" with "AMD did not provide the exact clock speeds of Hammer". Hmmm. I wonder how exactly he made that judgement? Oh, here they are again: http://www.idg.net/idgns/1999/08/04/...ategyFor.shtml and again: http://www.siliconstrategies.com/story/OEG20010904S0092
They aren't all that insightful after all. They seem to just be the company that everyone can get instant quotes from.

Other than that, being twice as powerful as a Power4? That would be damn impressive, especially from a dark horse like AMD.

Other concerns are: I respect AMD, but I've never seen them do anything even *remotely* resembling a HA server. Crossbars? Aggressive snooping? RAS-M? We'll see.

I'll wait for the guys at work to get back from the conference. They will actually understand what's going on.