AMD Blurbs

No x86-64 for some Athlon64s??!!??

That’s what this says.

Excuse the language, but WTF? I’m not easily stunned, but I’m stunned, and not in a good way.

With all due respect to XBit Labs, I’m not buying this one yet for the very simple reason that this kills any chance of x86-64 being anything other than a niche OS. This would be extraordinarily stupid given the little extra silicon x86-64 takes up.

If true, it seems like AMD will do whatever it takes to protect a relative handful of Opteron sales. This rather reminds me of IBM in the eighties not pushing their PCs too much for fear of cannibalizing minicomputer sales. You know what happened then.

It would also remove the last decent reason why somebody might want to lay out considerably more money for a first-generation socket 754 system.

For now, let us hope this isn’t true, because if it is, the odds on a certain company going down just jumped up.

In the meantime, let’s see how the AMDroids try to spin this one as something good. This I have to see.

AMD Downgrades PR Ratings On Athlon64s?

So says this. Some others have sort of disagreed.

If true, this is actually good news, though it may not seem that way at first glance.

All the benchmarking done so far with Opterons have indicated that Hammer just couldn’t justify the expected PR ratings given it. We’ve said that from the beginning, and it looks like AMD finally agrees with us. 🙂

The OCWorkbench article says that the 1.8GHz processor will be downshifted from an expected 3100+ to a 2900+. While that still seems a bit too high (2800+ seems more like this); this does get rid of most of the bloat and leaves little more than a quibble.

Had AMD kept to bloated PR ratings, the story when Athlon64s were released wouldn’t have been “Wow, Hammer is great,” but rather “AMD is bloating their CPU’s performance.” That is not the reaction you want when you launch a make-or-break product line.

It is far better to bite the bullet, maybe lose a few sales, but retain your credibility, rather than get the reputation as desperate BS artists like Cyrix did, and lose a lot more.

On a perhaps brighter note, this “downgrade” may be an additional indicator that AMD thinks it can crank up first-generation Hammers a bit more than they thought a few months ago.

The New Duron

AMD So says this confirmed the existence of their Appalbred Applebred New Duron.

AMD essentially called it a Third World CPU, though when you can buy ThoroughbredBs for $50 in the US; the cost savings seems pretty small.

However, since the cheapest of these cheap processors cost less than a cheap date; they could be very entertaining in two ways: