And other news bits
LOOKS LIKE AMD is going to slip a bit on power with Rev F parts. If you read the story on
ITJungle, it seems that AMD is saying about a third of what we told you
a few weeks ago. Most of the stuff is old news, but there are a few bits that are new, and they are not particularly good for AMD.
The biggest problems is that the HE parts go from 55W to 68W - about a 20% increase in TDP. AMD has done a brisk trade in 68W parts for the last year or so, but they are not 'official', OEM only and well hidden at that. Everything I heard said the F parts dropped real world power use by about 5W, so this new revelation is either very bad or marketing. I wonder if there is a difference?
The very bad part is obvious, more power is more power. The marketing is possibly good, it is doing a lot of business in the grey area, why not legitimise it? The long shot possibility is that the yield curve changed enough so that 55W parts were pretty thin but overall TDP dropped. Either way, I would put my money on marketing.
Speaking of marketing, it seems Pacifica is called AVT or AMD Virtualisation Technology now. Yay, time to party. Three, two, one, OK, I am over the ecstasy now. It will be interesting to see what happens when there is a head to head fight between AVT and VT. Will the extra letter make the difference, or will it weigh the parts down?
Last up, something that we heard in Germany last week, the Rev F Opterons will trail the Rev F A64s by about two months. No launch dates yet, but they are not coming on 6/6/6. The pomp and ceremony over the consumer parts will be just that, and we will have to wait a bit for the pomp and ceremony for the server parts. Either way, AMD has a tough job ahead of it in the lower socket counts. The Merom clan really is that good, and topping it will be one heck of a challenge. 2007 is going to be an interesting year for benchmarkers.
The INQuirer
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