Processors

AMD has an excellent vision for its future processors and it's very difficult to gauge how Intel plans to keep abreast of AMD with its technical prowess with the planned forthcoming processors. We know about the Intel Pentium 4 and the others that are to follow, but in Intel's case it's when, how and whether it will be enough to compete with AMD. AMD have three major announcements to come between now and Q1 2001 the processors are codenamed as "Mustang", "Corvette" and "SledgeHammer".
(See Figure 7 for AMD Roadmap)

Mustang as it's currently known, will have 1Mbyte of integrated L2 cache, and will yield desktop, workstation, server and mobile processors. The desktop variants will be in both Athlon and Duron flavours, whilst the server processors will probably be branded under the Athlon Ultra name. The mobile version of the Mustang core is codenamed "Corvette".

SledgeHammer is AMD's 64-bit processor and is seen as a successor to the Athlon and will come late next year, offering speeds in access of 2GHz with 64-bit memory addressing. The processor will also have the unique ability to recognise and switch between 32-bit and 64-bit applications. AMD is likely to implement new manufacturing techniques to increase performance before they actually go into production.

Note: the Under Development section contains forward-looking statements and as such One2Surf does not accept any responsibility arising from the use of any of its material in any form whatsoever.

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