Palomino When?

There’s a newsblurb over at c’t magazine

I tried figuring out what they said after a Babelfish translation, but some of their apparent comments made no sense at all, and others contradicted the roadmap. Maybe it was convoluted German.

The roadmap was in English, though, and it indicates the following:

Palomino
Desktop, >1.4Ghz
Samples 2Q ’01
Production 3Q ’01 July

We have another very recent roadmap that is a very official, very public roadmap from AMD here.

This one was presented by AMD at the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Semiconductor and Systems Conference last Tuesday. The roadmap is slide 20.

It says the following about Palomino:

Palomino
Desktop, >1.2Ghz
Samples 12/00
Production 1Q ’01

This is what AMD told the world a whole four days ago. It said samples were out. It said production would start this quarter, and if they haven’t already started, they don’t exactly have too much time left.

If the c’t roadmap is correct, that AMD roadmap presented last week contains a lot of lies.

I don’t think so.

What does make sense?

The internal evidence of the c’t roadmap indicates this is an outdated one. Maybe it was accurate last October or November, but Jerry Sanders indicated in the 4Q conference call that a number of items had been moved up. The c’t roadmap doesn’t indicate that, but the Morgan Stanley roadmap does.

The Morgan Stanley roadmap consistently follows recent AMD comments, the only new twist is Palomino at 1.2Ghz+ (earlier, Mr. Sanders had definitely indicated 1.4Ghz was a Palomino, but was unclear about the 1.3Ghz). This may or may not mean the 1.3Ghz or 1.33Ghz chips are Palominos; we could well have 1.3Ghz TBirds and Palominos.

Looks like AMD is bringing up Palomino a bit earlier and starting at a lower speed than expected late last year.

When Can We Get Real Proof?

CeBit in two weeks. If Palomino is showing up any time soon, AMD will show it, and say when we can expect it. If it doesn’t show up, then we know there’s something wrong.

Email Ed