Hammering away at AMD's future chips

HAMMER, HAMMER, HAMMER. Geeks and techie hacks continue to assiduously paw over AMD emissions on the subject of the chips expected to be built around this code-named slice of technology from the Intel wannabeat.

Why don't we just wait and see, you ask? Well, we could. But what of all those dudes trying to figure out whether they should buy - or keep - AMD shares? What if the chip turns out to be a right Stinqua™ and AMD is lost up the Swannee, confined to marking time as a flash memory company?

Well, in the greater scheme of things, that would hardly matter either, right? Investors get burned all the time. It comes with the territory. Hector would surely find gainful employment elsewhere, should he need it - though we doubt Motorola would have him back. And the rest of of the good ol' AMD folk in Hector's House? Well, plenty of them are sweating about their futures already, as the workforce is trimmed to please these very stockholders. The only other loser might be Intel, should any powers-that-might-be-interested then decide the chipmaker was a monopoly and seek to break it up - not , of course, that such things happen in the real world, where wonga walks, talks and wears the trousers.

Anyhow, enough larking aboot. And on with the hot Hammer topic of the day... Cache sizes.

Now, AMD documents that we reported on here, include a briefing by AMD's Mr Technology Richard Heye, that outlined three basic Hammer families.

The Desktop Hammer -- which, as we know, will be labelled the Athlon 64 (and not the Athlon DT, as some doughnut suggested here) -- will come in two flavours. As the Mageek stated back here, "The simple Athlon 64 will come in 256K and 1MB integrated L2 cache versions, while the Sludgehammer will have 1MB integrated L2 cache."

Right. Now, according to Heye's presentation at the AMD developers symposium, right smack between the Athlon64 and the Slugehammer (Opteron) sits this beastie currently codenamed the Athlon DP. This, says AMD, is an "entry-level server chip". It sports two 8-bit Hyped-up-transport links, where the Athlon 64 has a single 16-bit HT lead. And this baby will have 512Kb of level 2 cache according to Heye's presentation - somewhere between the amount the pair of Athlon 64 offerings will boast. The DP - or whatever it ends up being called - will come in the same 752-pin mPGA packaging as the desktop Athlon 64.

And sitting above this pair, of course, is Opteron (codenamed Sledgehammer) which will have three Hypertransport links and 1Mb of level 2 cache in a 940-pin package.

Ok so far.

Now, Charlie over at Ace's Hardware forum here, spanners this little schematic a tad, by coughing to a conversation he's had with an AMD dude, who said the DP is dead.

He says 'new' AMD roadmaps "show Athlon-64s as single processors, and Opterons as 1-8 CPU devices, with no differentiation between the MP and the DP."

Of course, AMD won't confirm nor indeed deny this assertion, because it's all conjecture anyhow right now. They will point to the published material, like Heye's pdf here.

But we should add that we have heard from Charlie before and he doesn't make it up.

So, maybe since we've posted the conjecture, AMD will decide to spill the beans to us on the morrow. Stranger things have been known to happen. µ