AMD Delays Clawhammer and Barton

[Eric Portelance]

Reuters reported on September 13 that Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will not launch its next-generation K8-core desktop processors in the fourth quarter of 2002 as scheduled.

The new K8-based Athlon will instead be available in 2003, either late in the first quarter or early in the second quarter. However, the timetable for the company’s server-use K8 processor Opteron remains the same, according to an AMD executive.

AMD also said it will delay the commercial release of its Barton-core Athlon processor from the second half of this year to the first quarter of 2003.

In case you haven't been reading the site and haven't heard me ramble on about Clawhammer and Barton, let me bring you up to speed. Barton is the next-gen K7 core which will have a 333mhz FSB and 512k L2 cache. Clawhammer is AMD's x86-64 architechture, which will replace the K7 Athlon line that we currently have. It will debut around a 3400+ PR.

Now, since Reuters, who reported this, isn't exactly technologically knowledgable, let me speculate and inform here. First of all, since Opteron is still on schedule, we can assume that it is not a problem with any of the cores/chips, but rather AMD is trying to max out the current T-Bred core.

AMD recently was able to tweak the T-Bred core and release a revision B, which is a much better overclocker and dissipates less heat. When the 2200+ was released, it showed little improvement over the 2100+, and many people thought they would hurry up with Barton because the architecture was maxed out and would require a FSB bump in order to stay competitive with Intel. However, they addressed the issues, and it now appears that they will be able to reach 2800+ on the current revision B T-Bred core.

It has been confirmed that the 2800+ will also have a 333mhz FSB, and there was speculation that this would be a Barton core. We have information, however, that says it will still be a T-Bred core.

So, for those who are thinking AMD is having yield issues or whatnot, that's incorrect. They're just trying to max out the technology that they have. In the long run, I doubt this will hurt them anyway, because the previous roadmap indicated that Barton would be out around the same time as Clawhammer, so they would be pumping out new chips for both architectures, however with the new roadmap, we will see a smoother speed transition between the two architectures.

Feel free to debate this or throw in your opinions in the forums.

 

[muckshifter]

Keeping us well informed as usual Eric, thank you.

 

[Eric Portelance]

I aim to serve. Glad to hear I'm helping, though.