Intel Developer Forum Spring 2003 - Technology Showcase

AMD, Not much to Show

AMD almost never fails to make it to IDF; obviously not as an exhibitor at the Technology Showcase, but as a guest in one of the hotels around the convention center. This year it was the Fairmont hotel where we found AMD with their suite of Hammer and Barton demos, the most interesting of which was the proof of concept Mobile Athlon 64 notebook:

The Mobile Athlon 64 processor is basically the desktop Athlon 64 but with PowerNow enabled; the processor uses the same 754-pin packaging and this proof of concept notebook was running VIA's K8 chipset.

From talking to AMD we've gathered that the Athlon 64 package could be shrunk in theory for use in thin form factor applications. Whenever you have a brand new CPU, especially in the case of AMD's overly delayed Athlon 64, there are a number of power and ground pins that are excessive simply because the design isn't optimized in its first revision. The ~40 or so pins that could be eliminated in the 754-pin Athlon 64 design could aid in reducing the size of the Mobile Athlon 64, but with the release of the part not scheduled until September of this year, it's entirely too early to start talking about future revisions of the chip.

AMD's proof of concept is nice but at this point we're growing weary of seeing Hammer demonstrations without product availability. Remember, it was exactly one year ago that we first saw Hammer in action at IDF; a full year has gone by and it will be another several months before we see retail availability of desktop parts.

AMD had an updated version of Epic's 64-bit Unreal Tournament 2003 running on Athlon 64 hardware, similar to what we've seen in the past. Epic has been a strong supporter of x86-64 and AMD's Athlon 64, mainly because of the dead-end they see with Itanium and the upside to 64-bit memory addressability in the desktop/workstation sectors - thus it's no surprise that we see continued support from them for Athlon 64.