November 2002 - AMD Day

From the Hard Edge:

A huge brown box, about 3x2x2 feet, showed up at the Basement of Doom and Pepsi Cola. So huge was it that it could have contained several small animals had their been breathing holes. There weren’t any so that left Bill with one of two possibilities. He was wrong with his choice. On opening the box, Bill found an AMD CPU “kit.” Now you’re thinking that a 3x2x2 foot box is a bit large for a 0.13micron CPU and you’re right. It’s even a bit large for the Epox 8K3A+ motherboard and memory that was included with the CPU. Large quantities of foam protected everything and well it should. The box contained AMD’s newest salvo in its conflict with Intel –the Athlon XP 2700+. Yeehaw! Time is back again.

The 2700+ is really part of a pair of new CPUs, the other being the 2800+, running at 2.17GHz and 2.25GHz, respectively. Both run 333MHz frontside buses and both are, literally, Christmas presents. The 2700+ will be available in real quantities for the holiday season (the more PC term for Christmas) while the 2800+ will be out in smaller quantities to a select few vendors.

Bill’s kit came with some restrictions. AMD made clear that it was a pre-production kit and, as such, recommended that none of the motherboard settings be changed and the CPU not be removed and re-installed because the heatsink retaining straps might break. Luckily, Bill knows about these things called tie-wraps that seem to work just as well as straps. As for changing motherboard settings, well, let’s just say that, while Bill pours over manuals, he doesn’t always read everything that’s included with a product.

The truth is that the 2700+ is much faster than the 2400+ it replaced in Bill’s BofD&PC network. It should be. It’s clocked higher and it uses PC2700 memory (333MHz) rather than 266MHz devices supported by the older CPU/motherboard combo. (AMD really needs to increase the L2 cache size!! -Bill) It’s actually made Ulead Video Studio usable, which is a good thing because Premiere 6.0 apparently hates the mpeg format in which Compro Personal Cinema saves its video clips. How is it against a Pentium 4? Who knows. Unlike some other folk, Bill refuses to do real testing with a pre-production product. That can be very misleading. However, seat of the pants says it’s going to make the 2.6GHz and 2.8GHz Pentium 4s sweat a little, both because of its competitive performance and because of its lower pricing. (In quantities of 1,000, the 2700+ is only $349 and the 2800+ is $397. That’s amazing for new technology. Don’t miss the fact that the rest of AMD’s line is dropping in price as well. This is what Intel used to do.) Will it overclock? The motherboard is certainly equipped to allow that to happen. Unfortunately, even the slightest hint of bumping things up, Bill was sent running to the ‘Clear CMOS’ jumper to but things back the way they were. Such is the life of pre-production.

It was obvious during the webcasted briefing that AMD is taking aim at the gaming crowd. That’s why there’ll be a limited number of 2800+ CPUs available this year instead of waiting until next. Okay.