Our tour of AMD's fab in Dresden

EVEN WHEN YOU LIVE in Vienna and so close to the heart -- or at least the ear of the European Union -- you can still get caught by heavy snow and stuck in Munich. So that's all I can say about day one of the Dresden workshop organised by AMD earlier this week. Dresden, Germany - or as Jerry Sanders III rather grandiloquently called it, Fab 30, is home to all Athlons that have recently been produced, whether you are talking about 0.18µ (micron) or 0.13 micron chips and for the fabled future upcoming Athlons 64 that we still call Hammer.

AMD invited around 60 journalists from all over the world including at least two Americans --- such as Anand Lal Shimpi -- but we could not escape the feeling that only a few people came from online publication. The rest of the guys [no gals? Ed.] were covering most of the Western Europe dominated by Germans and UK lads and they all worked for old fashioned printed magazines.

As always, the informal talks were much more interesting than the set pieces, and we learned a thing or two.

and so need to be "educated" and briefed more about benchmarketing. No wonder. The PR rating is still not clear to many people and one rather interesting, revolutionary processor - Athlon 64 is about to come along and confuse the people one more time.

Since I am by nature a benchmarketeer, I was part of the rabble that needed educashun, but I cannot say that I learned a hell of a lot from the official workshop more than I already knew about testing CPUs - the so called "brains" of a computer. Anyway you can always learn nice stuff at these kind of events.

AMD taught us what to turn on and what to turn off [computers? Ed.] when we benchmark and they spoke about some specific benchmarks such as 3Dmark 2001 and PC mark 2003 and if we didn't know how to use it before we sure as heck know it now.

The first part that I missed while I was snowed in, in Munich was described by my distinguished colleagues mainly by two words "boring" and "insulting". Say no more.

I could not shake off the impression that the session could be compared to teaching a plumber how to fix your toilet. Of course we need to exclude the pre-introduction of Athlon 64 benchmarking.

(See Captain Kirk meets Intel in quest to understand toilets.)

The "lab" tour though the Dresden laboratory was quite amazing and to see the big machinery that you need to analyse your wafers and to make all runs correctly before you start the production.

But unless you have an extraordinary knowledge of chemistry and an even better knowledge of physics down to the atomic level, and know about spectroscopy and electron microscopes you won't understand a lot of it.

I learned that there is a lot more to a CPU than just transistors/gates, that they are actually built and connected through something called "marchitecture". Unfortunately no pictures were allowed since the process is a "big secret" so we cannot reveal our enthusiasm at seeing the multi million dollar machines that end up bringing you the Athlons. µ