AMD caught Intel on hop with Clawhammer delay

That's because Intel's own desktop strategy was largely posited on the Athlon64 being available earlier rather than later.

The delay may not matter too much, as long as Microsoft remembers to get the X86-64 OS for it out of the door in September.

Early reports from people who have samples of Barton, claim that the Barton chips, which are scheduled to appear soon at PR speeds of 3000+, will manage to give Intel's desktop CPUs a run for their money for a while longer.

As we reported yesterday, the 3200+ is currently slated to appear in Q3 of this year too - this could just be a mistake on the roadmap we saw. Or maybe AMD feels that the 3.20GHz Pentium 4 will not necessarily bash its chances on the desktop too much.

We have a few more details about the chip's packaging. Each CPU will have a bar code, and that will be visible through the packaging of the boxed processors AMD will sell.

The S2K bus disconnect - a way of reducing power consumption, is pretty interesting. This feature needs BIOS support from makers of Barton motherboards. But AMD is telling its system integrators that validated S2K Disconnect mobos will work when used with earlier XP and Duron cores.

There's some background to S2K Disconnect. The feature has been present in Athlon chipsets and CPUs right from the start - the idea being that when the OS becomes idle, the microprocessor disconnects from the chipset and goes into a low power mode.

But it's been kept disabled in the past as Spitfire Durons and Thunderbird Athlons sometimes would not reconnect - errata numbered 11 and 14. But AMD is asking mobo makers to enable the feature because, presumably, Barton doesn't have that nasty habit.

Motherboards supporting the 333FSB Barton at 48 amps include the Abit KD7 (KT400 chipset), the Asus A7S333 (SiS 745), the Asus A7V333v1.04 (KT333), the Biostar M7VIP, the Epox EP-8K5A2, the Gigabyte GA-64R v20.0, the V333DA from Jetway, the MSI KT4 Ultra (KT400), the MS-6596 (KT400) and the MS-6712 (KT400).

There will be others soon. µ

See Also
AMD stretches out Athlon XP life with Barton plans