AMD fails to capitalise on technology wins

CHIP ANALYST Nathan Brookwood from Insight 64 has sent a note to his clients suggesting that AMD is behaving like a shy bride when really it should be peddling its wares like a brazen harlot.

That's our interpretation of his interesting note about AMD failing to shout from the rooftops that its desktop technology is continuing to progress well.

Last week we reported that AMD had released a new roadmap to the world, here.

But, said Brookwood in the note, AMD's plans for the 90 nanometre "Winchester" cores, aimed at notebooks and desktops, appears to be missing in inaction.

While AMD announced Oakville in August, renaming it to the unwieldy Mobile AMD Athlon 64, Winchester stays unannounced and is nowhere found on the roadmap it released last week.

Instead, some more codenames to conjure with, including San Diego, Venice and Palermo are slated for the first half of next year.

Brookwood said he contacted AMD to let it know its "deceitful scheme" had not gone undetected. But AMD said the Athlon 64 90 nanometre SOI is the missing Winchester design, and had shipped since the middle of September.

But, as Brookwood points out, AMD hasn't announced publicly any 90 nanometre products for three months. AMD's explanation is that the products perform "exactly like the 130 nanometre processors they replace" and go in the same sockets, so an announcement wasn't important.

But Brookwood said that Insight 64 thinks this is a "very big deal". Intel's Prescott at 90 nanometres runs slower and needs up to 25% more power than the Northwood it replaced.

But the AMD Winchester is 84 square millimetres compared to the 130 nanometre 145 square millimetre "Newcastle" core, and consumes only 67 watts compared to 89 watts. The Prescott, on the other hand, is 112 square millimetres for a chip that can consume 103 watts.

As Brookwood points out, in the old days AMD announced products it couldn't deliver but now it's delivering products it hasn't announced.

He thinks AMD is being a little too conservative.

We can add that what's even odder is that while we're flooded with announcements from AMD's PR about awards it's won, or motor car components that use an AMD PC to be designed, when it comes to hard information about its processor plans, it's never been quieter. Compared to its brazen hussiness about Ferrari, obscure Italian motor car designs, et al. µ

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Insight 64