AMD

AMD's upcoming Athlon 64 low-end variants, codenamed 'Paris' and 'Victoria', will not be offered as 64-bit processors but as 32-bit upgrades to the current Athlon XP line.

So claims Xbit Labs, having glanced at the chip maker's latest roadmaps.

Paris and Victoria emerged earlier this year, when they were revealed to be cut-down versions of the Athlon 64. At the time, it was assumed that was simply a matter of their smaller, 256KB L2 cache. Paris will be fabbed at 130nm, and is due to ship sometime during Q4 2003. Victoria will debut late Q2 or early Q3 2004.

AMD Athlon 64 processors are going to be hard to come by in the months following the chips launch on 23 September.

So claim unnamed Taiwanese mobo-maker sources cited by a DigiTimes story on chipsets today. Said sources claim the chip will be made available in limited quantities but should enter volume production early next year.

AS THE LIST of dual Opteron motherboards with AGP grows, a pattern has formed. Where are the motherboards that allow both Opteron memory controllers to be used with AGP? The Tyan K8W, using AMD's chipset, has appeared in their summer catalog, the first hint of a "good" design, but only as a CAD drawing. So what is the problem?
There is, however, a most beautiful K8W mobo from Tyan over at this Korean page, with many detailed shots and specifications.

Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices cut prices on many of its microprocessors on Monday night, including the first cuts to its Opteron chip line.
AMD reserved its cuts for its server and mobile processors, including the Opteron, Athlon MP processor, and all three flavors of the Athlon XP-M chip. AMD left the prices of its desktop AMD Athlon chips untouched.

COME THE 22nd of this month, Opteron will have been with us for three months. Even though Opteron's launch was essentially a server product launch, one would have expected workstation motherboards to have followed fast on the heels of its server siblings. Tyan, RioWorks, MSI, Iwill, Newisys, and AMD via Celestica have successfully launched their Opteron server board and system-based products, but there is still a dearth of workstation motherboards.

IF AND WHEN AMD'S new AthlonFX "Thorton" goes on sale - and it's not yet certain if that name is anything other than a marketing doodle, it's unclear where the chip wil fit in the pricing scheme of things.
The story is that the "Thorton" will be available at speed grades between 2000+ and 2600+ model ratings.

In terms of its performance, the chip should be identical or just slightly slower because of lower cache-associativity than Thoroughbred, but how AMD intends to make any money on this new chip remains a mystery.

Source: The Inquirer

Source: CNet News

Advanced Micro Devices is combing through the scientific cookbook in its quest to improve its chips.
The Sunnyvale, Calif-.based chipmaker is examining how to incorporate a wide variety of cutting-edge concepts--strained silicon, multi-gate transistors, replacing silicon with metal in key transistor components--to boost the performance of chips that will hit the market in the second half of the decade.

Source: The Inquirer

Why the outcry on warranties being voided with using thermal paste? If you want the three year warranty you have to use the supplied heatsink, thermal interface and all. If you use anything else it removes the assurance that your thermal solution will work. It really isn't that much worse since the interface melts into the processor and makes good contact too. BUT, it only works once, which sucks. I also out of 20+ installs/moves of AMD processors I never once broke a core, even with Thermaltake orbs.

Source: PCWorld

Advanced Micro Devices is trying to steal some of Intel's Centrino thunder by announcing 12 new notebook processors, including five low-voltage chips designed for thin-and-light notebooks and higher-wattage chips for larger notebooks.