AMD says Athlon64 is a waterfall, Opteron is a snowball

MIKE KANELLOS at news.com has interviewed AMD director Dirk Meyer today and there's some reading to do between the lines, the similes, the analogies and the metaphors.

Posed in a Q&A dialogue, Kanellos pitches some fine open ended questions of Meyer and so the gaps are filled in as the chip architect is forced to fill the void. Everyone+dog knows that nature hates a vacuum, except valve and CRT manufacturers, of course.

To a question Mike K asks about Opteron, Meyer volunteers there's no problem on the manufacturing front, although we don't think Mr Kanellos was putting any kind of wicked googly spin (the English spinner's "wrong'un") on that question.

Meyer uses the phrase "Opterons Everywhere" to another question from Mike but doesn't fall into the obvious trap of which OEMs will use it in their servers.

Meyer asks Kanellos to "step back a bit" and says that regiments of folk will be marching to the Opteron Hymn, with Fortune 500 being one battalion, and software developers with 64-bit applications the next.

The AMD director of biz development also claims people want to know if his firm wants to make the chip, although Mike K didn't actually ask that question. But Meyer answers his own question by saying yes, and yes again.

Meyer says he's very happy with Microsoft's collaboration and he claims that Intel must be developing an X86-64 bit chip. Further, and here it gets a bit confused, Mike Kanellos describes the Itanium as a historical anomaly, Meyer describes the Opteron as a snowball turning into an avalanche and says that hypertransport had nothing to do with the Alpha chip, although AMD did talk to API - which of course was subsumed by AMD anyway.

(Believe it or not, API owed the INQ some money and when it went bust left us with a bad debt to write off in the first year - so much for that old nonsense, eh?)

IBM will manufacture AMD's Alpha Opteron and Athlon64 chips, that much is clear from the interview. But the Athlon64 is a waterfall, unlike the snowball that the Opteron is.

Read all about it here. µ

* MEANWHILE CHRIS TOM at AMD Zone has noticed that Microsoft has X86-64 beanz to spill, and they're just here.