Advanced Micro Devices Inc claims that it will have a stronger fourth quarter this year, predicting revenues of around $800m and saying that it will produce five million processors this quarter. Break-even point for the company will be around the $850m mark. The company has laid out its processor roadmap for the next year, it is continuing to try and take on Intel Corp is the high performance desktop processor market with the Athlon, but will also start to introduce server and ‘value’ versions of the design over the next year. And AMD has grander plans in longer term, with the introduction of its K8/’Sledgehammer’ 64-bit CPU in latter half of 2001, intended to rival Intel’s Itanium and other high-end server chips.
AMD once again expects to take the lead in the processor clockspeed race with a 750MHz Athlon in PCs by the end of this year. Intel recently launched a 733MHz Pentium III, though supplies of the processor are still scare. Early in 2000, AMD expects to be offering an 800MHz part to its PC OEM customer. The company has 900MHz prototypes running now using both copper and aluminum wiring.
By the second quarter of next year, AMD expects to be offering an Athlon running at up to 1GHz, code-named ‘Thunderbird’. The chip will feature level 2 cache memory integrated on the chip – like the new Pentium III – which should further increase performance over previous Athlons, which had off-chip L2 caches. The chip will use a slot connection to the motherboard. A ‘value’ version of this chip, code-named ‘Spitfire’ will arrive at the same time. It will have less cache memory and user a cheaper socket connection.
In the second half of 2000, AMD is intending to introduce a rival to Intel’s Xeon server chip family, with a part, code-named ‘Mustang’ This will be based around an enhanced Athlon core, with 2Mb of on-chip L2 cache and use a ‘slot A’ connection. The value version will have less cache and use a ‘socket a’ connection.
By the second half of 2001, AMD expects to introduce its most ambitious new chip design, the ‘Sledgehammer’ or K8. The 64-bit design will be taking on Intel, Alpha and the latest PA RISC chips in the high-end server market
AMD has been trying to distance itself recently from its roots as a manufacturer of cheap x86 processor. However, the move to the 0.18-micron process should allow it crank a few more turns out of its low-end K6 family. A 533MHz version of the K6-2 will come out this quarter. Then in 2000 AMD will release the K6-2+ and K6-3+.
