Why Reinvent The Wheel?

The reality is AMD has two perfectly good architectures capable of handling their respective tasks without any engineering reworking at all.

So why reinvent the wheel, especially if the only reason to do so is the "need" in the minds of some for semantic consistency?

Where does it say that a company has to use a single architecture for a product line? After all, we've had Intel budget CPUs based on the PII, PIII and PIV cores, but they're all called Celerons.

Keep in mind that it won't cost AMD a dime to leave the necessary socket A manufacturing lines alone to continue making socket A Athlon XPs Semprons. Anything else will cost them money to no good purpose.

It doesn't make technical, marketing, or financial sense for AMD to do anything more than slap a new name onto its cheapest socket A chips and keep cranking them out. It's simple, easy and fits the bill. If they do anything to these chips, it will be to make them worse, not better, but even there, the simple passage of time will do that.

Thinking that AMD is going to make a better socket A when it's going to need to get Hammer sales going is wishful thinking, and wanting something to happen is no reason at all to believe that something is going to happen. That only works in Disney films.

I can't say I'm 100% certain this will be the case; AMD does some strange things, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that this is what this will boil down to.

We'll see August 17.

Ed