The L2-cache Story Of Future Athlons

AMD plays its own part to worsen the situation. Dana Krelle admitted to me that the motherboard situation is currently the worst thing for them. However, the next Athlon processors, starting with the Athlon 750, will clock the second level cache at only 2/5 of the core clock, not at 1/2 as Athlon 500-650. This will worsen the performance-scaling, especially once the multiplier shrinks down to 1/3 in Athlons beyond 800 MHz. Coppermine will continue to run it's L2-cache at 1/1, regardless how high the clock speed. It's a matter of fact that AMD needs to get their .18 micron Athlons with on-die L2-cache ready as soon as possible, because once i820 does run, Intel only needs to increase Coppermine's clock and it will overtake Athlon. This could be the end of AMD. AMD's other problem is the delay of i820. You may wonder why that would be; it should really be an advantage to AMD. Unfortunately it isn't really. Due to i820's delay VIA sees it's chance of a lifetime. If Coppermine gets released without i820, the only sensible 133 MHz FSB & AGP4x platform will be the VIA 640 chipset. Thus all efforts at VIA are directed towards this chipset. At the same time resources are taken away from the development of VIA's upcoming Athlon-chipset that's supposed to support PC133 and AGP4x. This chipset could possibly change the mood of the Taiwanese motherboard industry, but for the time being the only Athlon chipset is AMD's Irongate and that might stay this way for quite a while.

Shall We Let Cold War Tactics Rule The IT - Industry?

I suggest that we all do something against the ridiculous Athlon-motherboard situation. Intel may scare Taiwanese motherboard makers, but we, their actual customers, should be able to scare them even more. I suggest something more drastic than writing a petition; we've got to scare them really badly, more than chipzilla was able to scare them so far. At the same time we should question every move of Intel. It cannot possibly be that Intel gets away with this. AMD supplies the superior product, it's able to supply this product and then mafia-style threats from some dubious source keep motherboard makers from supplying an actual platform.

It's this story that I missed at Microprocessor Forum 1999. You can decide for yourself if the sad situation of AMD's Athlon and the Taiwanese board makers is worthy enough to be mentioned. It could turn out to be crucial for AMD as well as Intel.