Interview: AMD's Simon Solotko and the Third Core

Iria · Sep 18, 2007, 10:51 AM

Source: BetaNews
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It actually didn't seem mathematically possible. Three is not a multiple of two, and the computer industry rarely does anything that can't be bundled as a power of two. But AMD's Triple-Core Phenom processor, which will hit desktops at the beginning of next year, may be the oddball that the CPU market never expected.

Even folks inside of AMD will admit Intel has stepped up to the plate in the last 16 months, and that AMD has ground to make up in several departments. When Intel was planning its comeback two years ago, it introduced a controversial technique called hyperthreading that enabled a single-core processor to run two threads concurrently. But after tests revealed minimal performance gains - and in some categories, performance losses - many perceived Intel's move as a kind of stopgap, to buy it some time before it could launch its first dual-core series with Core Microarchitecture.

With quad-core processors being rolled out already, could AMD be buying some time for itself while retooling its fabs for the 45 nm process and for DDR3 memory support? BetaNews posed that question, among others, to Simon Solotko, AMD's brand manager for the Desktop Division. You'll note that, throughout this interview, Solotko tried to elicit some information from us about what we thought about Triple-Core Phenom, at the same time we were eliciting information from him.

Sep 18, 2007, 10:51 AM	#1
Iria DriverHeaven Extreme Member Join Date: Apr 2004 Posts: 7,275 Rep Power: 74	Interview: AMD's Simon Solotko and the Third Core Source: BetaNews ________ It actually didn't seem mathematically possible. Three is not a multiple of two, and the computer industry rarely does anything that can't be bundled as a power of two. But AMD's Triple-Core Phenom processor, which will hit desktops at the beginning of next year, may be the oddball that the CPU market never expected. Even folks inside of AMD will admit Intel has stepped up to the plate in the last 16 months, and that AMD has ground to make up in several departments. When Intel was planning its comeback two years ago, it introduced a controversial technique called hyperthreading that enabled a single-core processor to run two threads concurrently. But after tests revealed minimal performance gains - and in some categories, performance losses - many perceived Intel's move as a kind of stopgap, to buy it some time before it could launch its first dual-core series with Core Microarchitecture. With quad-core processors being rolled out already, could AMD be buying some time for itself while retooling its fabs for the 45 nm process and for DDR3 memory support? BetaNews posed that question, among others, to Simon Solotko, AMD's brand manager for the Desktop Division. You'll note that, throughout this interview, Solotko tried to elicit some information from us about what we thought about Triple-Core Phenom, at the same time we were eliciting information from him.