Computex 2002 Day 2: ATI's R300, nForce2 & XScale PDAs

Working ClawHammer Samples at Computex

This first appeared on the AnandTech Newsletter. Click Here to Subscribe.

Although there are a number of mechanical samples of the 754-pin ClawHammer CPU, there are a few working engineering samples at Computex. We were able to get a bit of information about these CPUs. The samples are indeed running at 800MHz but interestingly enough they have a 1MB L2 cache. We're not expecting the desktop ClawHammer CPUs to have a 1MB L2 cache but are very curious in AMD's reasoning behind providing samples with such a large L2 cache.

The low clock speed is worrying some motherboard manufacturers but there is still a lot of confidence that AMD will hit their ~2GHz clock speed estimate by the end of the year. If AMD were able to hit it today they would obviously be touting the success so the real question is what clock speed they are currently able to hit. As a first attempt at 0.13-micron SOI as well as an extremely complicated 754-pin package it would be beyond amazing if AMD could hit 2GHz today.