AMD Archive

"AMD signed an agreement with MIPS Technologies Inc. for 64-bit technology, complementing the Alchemy design team already in place at AMD. AMD, Sunnyvale, Calif. said it will license the MIPS64 architecture for an undisclosed period of time, allowing the processor company a growth path for embedded devices. AMD already owns a 32-bit MIPS license through the Alchemy Semiconductor design group AMD acquired in February." Read the rest of the report at ExtremeTech.

"Microsoft Corp. is finally expected to formally announce that it will support AMD's 64-bit "Hammer" line in future operating systems, sources said Tuesday. Sources within AMD, Sunnyvale, Calif., said that the company will announce the Hammer support in a press conference tomorrow at 4:30 PM, after the market closes. In a notice sent to press and analysts, AMD described the press conference as one where the company 'answers the 64-bit question'." Read the rest of the report at ExtremeTech. Update: Read more for a leaked memo. Update 2 AMD has renamed its "Hammer" 64-bit server line with the "Opteron" brand name.

"AMD made public some of its details regarding its 64-bit Hammer chipsets, now to be known as the 8000 series of products. The initial members of the 8000 series will feature an I/O hub, a graphics tunnel, and a PCI-X tunnel. The components will use the HyperTransport I/O protocol developed by AMD and are due in the fourth quarter of 2002, AMD said." Read the rest of the report at ExtremeTech.

Two slides of an AMD presentation were leaked to a Czech web site and they show the SPECInt 2000 CPU benchmark performance results of the upcoming AMD 64-bit CPU, Hammer. In the two charts you will see the Hammer scoring best performance among Intel, HP, IBM, Alpha and other CPUs. The Hammer CPU is expected to be released at the end of 2002, after slipping the original release date of March 2002.

AMD and Nvidia will make a show of nForce next week, News.com reports. The new Nvidia nForce chipset for AMD Athlon/Duron, announced in June, will make its debut next week in motherboards and desktop PCs, an Nvidia representative said. nForce takes risks in that it aims to create a market niche where none existed before, a middle-of-the-road between high-end chipsets with no graphics and low-price chipsets with integrated graphics. Past integrated graphics chipsets, whether for Intel or AMD, have been aimed mainly at the low end of the PC market, where reducing costs is the primary goal and performance is only a secondary consideration.

"Judging a book by its cover alone would mean that AMD's Hammer architecture would be used in the first 64-bit x86 microprocessors. We already know that Intel has taken a route away from x86 for their 64-bit solution, Itanium which uses a new instruction set architecture (ISA) called EPIC. The point of this article is to not only examine the pros and cons of AMD's extension of the 32-bit x86 ISA but also the rest of the story when it comes to Hammer since there is a lot more to this architecture than a few more registers and greater memory addressability." Anandtech explains it all for you.