After the debacle of last year's Comdex for AMD, in which there were too few representatives for the company to hold up to their massive appointment list needs, this year's show found a literal army of AMD technical people meeting in a dozen small conference rooms.
During our own sit down with AMD we were informed of their timeline (roadmap) for 2000. It was surprising to see the company so publicly forthcoming about the next twelve months, but as you'll see readers of Sharky Extreme have already known most of what the now public timeline contains as we've been reporting on it for over six months.
Here are the major highlights:
1. The Athlon 750 CPU will be released in December.
AMD had not planned on this course of action originally, preferring to debut the first .18um Athlon 750 in January, but major OEM builder Compaq requested that AMD bump up the introduction by four weeks, and hence we'll see Athlon 750-based PCs next month.
2. As reported previously, the first generation .18um Athlons will not include copper interconnects.
AMD confirmed to us that their first generation .18um Athlon cores will not be utilizing copper interconnects and will instead stay with the aluminum based technology that has been part of the Athlon core design since its introduction.
AMD remains dedicated to a summer 2000 launch time period for their second-generation .18um cores, which WILL feature copper-based technology.
3. All first generation .18um Athlon cores will not offer integrated on-die L2 cache.
We were somewhat disappointed to learn that along with no copper internals, the first generation .18um Athlon cores will not integrate the 512KB of L2 cache that all Athlon CPUs currently ship with off-die. This is also a change that will occur only when the second-generation .18um Athlon copper products debut in summer 2000.