Comdex 2002 Wrapup - AMD, NVIDIA & Transmeta

Athlon 64 - Motherboard Prices

We've been talking all this week about how the only thing the industry is waiting on with Athlon 64 are the CPUs from AMD; everything else, chipsets, motherboards and even OEMs are in place. There is much truth to this as virtually all of the motherboard manufacturers we visited had their Athlon 64 solutions up and running. AMD was imposing NDAs on them, not allowing them to show the systems running but the NDAs were not very strict. As you can tell from our coverage earlier this week, we were able to benchmark one setup and others were simply masked by hiding the name of the processor. This is usually the case at Comdex, an AMD or Intel will have a product but won't let their partners show it - inevitably the product is shown, it just requires a bit of finesse, both on the part of the manufacturer and on us as well.

We brought up the issue of CPU cost, but now let's talk motherboard prices. One of the benefits of AMD's Hammer architecture is that there is no on-board North Bridge, which significantly reduces the complexity of motherboard design. The area around the CPU and North Bridge is by far the most difficult part of the motherboard to design, and the most expensive. By eliminating the external CPU-North Bridge connection, AMD has effectively made motherboard design much easier.

The end result is that all Athlon 64 boards (at least all that you see here) are 4-layer designs and should be fairly cheap. In terms of chipset costs, there's only a South Bridge and AGP controller to pay for unless you have a solution with on-board/integrated video. The AGP controller is noticeably cheaper than a full North Bridge, so chipset cost is reduced a bit. As we mentioned before, board design is simplified and manufacturing costs are kept to a minimum thanks to AMD's 4-layer reference design (remember that the Athlon launched with a 6-layer board initially, while Athlon 64 is able to come to market on a 4-layer design immediately). If you add all of those factors up, we would expect initial board prices to be cheaper than current nForce2 & 845PE motherboards.