Ed wrote:
> Sad we won't see anything worth buying till March, and even then I would
> probably want to wait another 3 months to make sure the boards and bios
> have ALL the bugs worked out like I always do before upgrading.
>
> Intel's 45nm chips will be out for 3 months by March and may be the
> better bang for the buck though from what I've read their boards won't
> have much of a future upgrade path compared to AMD's AM2/AM2+ socket
> boards.
>
> Comments?
It may sound strange, but I don't think it really matters how late
Phenom comes out. AMD has rediscovered its roots as the cheaper
processor maker. Over the last year, it has been regaining market share
over Intel, despite overwhelming technical superiority from Intel. It's
now clawed back almost all of the market share that it lost to Intel
with its initial misstep from last year. It had 25% market share last
year, it went down to 18% after the disastrous misstep, and now it's
already back upto 23% again. The disastrous misstep was to become a
supplier for Dell and ignore the Channel, but it was not the lack of
performance against Core 2 as most people think; Dell overestimated how
much it could sell, and end up dumping its unsold inventory back to AMD.
I don't think AMD will be so accomodating to Dell's forecasts anymore.
During all of this time it's had some financial issues due to the ATI
acquisition. But even ATI is on the comeback, and it's now contributing
positive cashflow to AMD.
Also I saw a roadmap today from AMD which talks about a "Large L3 cache"
coming in 2008. That may be Z-RAM. Separately, there was even a rumour
that any Z-RAM cache could be upto 100MB!!!
Check page 30 of this PDF, where the roadmap stuff starts:
http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/dir/CAS2K7/Presentations/torricelli.pdf
Next Generation CPUs Could Have 100MB of Cache - Z-Ram technology might
enlarge the cache memory by a factor of 10 - Softpedia
"The company also said that the actual Z-RAM can store "significantly
more charge in the memory bitcell," which translates into lower read and
write cycles. According to Innovative Silicon, Z-RAM can surpass the 1
GHz barrier. The firm said that the memory can store 5 Mb per mm2 when
using 65 nm process and more than 10 Mb per mm2 using 45 nm
manufacturing process. That could easily translate into L2 cache sizes
of about 50 to 100 MB if applied to the die-sizes of actual CPUs.
"
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Next-Generation-CPUs-Could-Have-100MB-of-Cache-41830.shtml
Yousuf Khan
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