AMD pooh-poohs 'Atom smasher' cancellation claim So farewell then, Bobcat, AMD's answer to Intel's 'Silverthorne' Atom processor family? AMD's denying it, but at least one analyst is tolling the low-power chip's death knell. Avi Cohen, managing partner at US investment house Avian Securities, this week told clients: "There are reports that AMD has decided to cancel its …
As Melchet once said:"Well, I hope so, Blackadder. You know, if there's one thing I've learnt from being in the Army, it's never ignore a pooh-pooh. I knew a Major, who got pooh-poohed, made the mistake of ignoring the pooh-pooh. He pooh-poohed it! Fatal error! 'Cos it turned out all along that the soldier who pooh-poohed him had been pooh-poohing a lot of other officers who pooh-poohed their pooh-poohs. In the end, we had to disband the regiment. Morale totally destroyed... by pooh-pooh!"
I have 3 recent 1GHz GeoDes my AMD used in experiments for my work and around the house (videosystem clients). They report as genuine Athlons on linux cpuinfo and run nearly as good as genuine Athlon (3-4 times faster than Via at same frequency as measured by MPEG encode/decode benchmarks). In fact as far as performance they smash Atom into sub-atomic particles as it is. They do not need anything extra for that.
What AMD needs is low-power chipset for them. The only chipset to fit into SCC envelope for these at the moment is from SYS and even that eats 3-4 times more than the CPU. On top of that it is a desktop chipset without most of the bells and whistles required for laptops. As a matter of fact Intel is not faring much better. It is in the same idiotic situation when it has to fit a fan on the chipset while leaving the CPU with passive cooling.
So does it drop BobCat or not is of little relevance. What is relevant is: "Will it finally have a chipset to match its low-power GeoDe offerings".
Remember Cyrix CPU from IDT and National Semi Conductor as well as IBM's power PC CPU?
All are part of the history. AMD future will be the same. The Phenom is clearly a sign of technology failure, especially the power consumption by the CPU is a joke.
"""Remember...IBM's power PC CPU"""
As far as I can tell IBM still makes some pretty beastly CPUs. And I'm reasonably sure they make a lot of money off them too. And Power7 should be even more ridiculous. Oh and IBM PPC chips are the basis for the Xbox360 and Wii, plus the technology in there was extensively used in the Cell.
But obviously since Apple dropped them for a cheaper, lower performance alternative, they're dead right?
Too bad AMD has jerked us around so much with the Barcelona and related cores. K10 needed to be released about 18 months before it finally showed up, and with fewer bugs.
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