AMD Fires Up Its 1.1 GHz Athlon Demo

By Sushuma February 8, 2000 10:49 AM

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Advanced Micro Devices Inc.?on Wednesday one-upped rival Intel Corp.?in the chip demo wars, showing off an upcoming 1GHz-plus Athlon processor.?AMD pulled the wraps off a 1.1GHz version of the next-generation Athlon processor with its forthcoming Thunderbird processor core at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuit Conference in San Francisco.?AMD showed the 1.1GHz Athlon chip in response to Intel's (Nasdaq: INTC) discussion of a forthcoming 1GHz Pentium III chip.?"To our customers, it's a further indication that we're executing to the plan that (AMD Chairman and CEO Jerry) Sanders has laid out for us," said Steve Lapinski, director of product marketing for AMD's Computational Products Group.?"We felt it quite appropriate to make sure people understood (AMD) is well along with production and manufacturing goals, (including) the Dresden (Germany) facility." The 1.1GHz Athlon chip was demonstrated in a system built by AMD with off-the-shelf parts, including its AMD 750 chip set, with a 200MHz system bus.?AMD ran a utility called MyCPU, which showed how fast the chip was running.?The processor was produced at AMD's Fab 30 manufacturing plant.?It included two new features that are due in future Athlon chips.?Those include copper interconnects and integrated Level 2 cache.?The two new features will help AMD raise the performance of the Athlon.?The current 800MHz and forthcoming 850MHz chips utilize aluminum interconnects and an external 512KB cache.?The 850MHz Athlon is expected next week.?Read more ...?

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