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AMD's Spitfire and other plans revealed

Firm outlines strategies to American resellers

A reseller of AMD products has revealed information about aggressive pricing changes the firm will make on the 24th of April next, and has also included details of Spitfire pricing the firm will announce on the same date. AMD held a reseller seminar overview in Toronto last week, intended to update its major North American partners. Rob Guella a reseller whose site is RB Computing, and who also attended the seminar, has disclosed some of these details on his web site, and has also provided The Register with some additional information. His site also provides further pricing details, suggesting that after the major Q2 movements below, there will be price cuts on the 12th of June. According to Guella's site, a Spitfire 550MHz will cost $79, a 600MHz $99, a 650MHz $140, and a 700MHz $175. On the same date, the K6-2 will cost $50, and while there will be changes to the 533MHz and 550MHz K6-2s, no details of those have yet been disclosed. Athlon prices, as we have reported here in the past, will be aggressively pitched against Intel's offerings. The 1GHz will drop to $1071, the 950MHz will cost $722, the 900MHz will cost $589, the 850MHz will cost $429, the 800MHz will cost $323, the 750MHz will cost $242, the 700MHz will cost $187, the 650MHz will cost $163, and the 600MHz Athlon will also cost $163 as it is shuffled out of the equation. Guella says that motherboard support for the Socket A processors will be quite limited at launch, and now says that the K6-2+ for the desktop is confirmed as dead. He said indications were that the Thunderbird, at launch, would start shipping with 256K of level two cache on die, and 128K of level one cache. AMD suggested that it would spend more on both newspaper and television ads during the coming year, aimed at presenting the chip technology as targeting the productivity, and not just the games and consumer market. AMD has .15µ and .13µ micron processors under development. The firm also has a goal of 30 per cent market share by the end of the year, although it admits that nearly one third of large corporations surveyed will not, at present, accept AMD chips as a business platform, with Intel still preferred. Six per cent of the 30 per cent market share will be at the business market. At the end of this year, there will be new multimedia extensions called SIMB, which will handle double precision FP numbers, and beat the current floating point scores. AMD is working closely with Microsoft to produce compliant OS and application software for the 64-bit Sledgehammer platform, when it arrives. AMD is also introducing its own faster IO bus called Lightning Data Transport (LDT), moving data at around 1.6GBps. At the same time, AMD will shortly introduce a so-called "gold class" motherboard programme aiming at selecting around three third party companies to support a standard platform, which again will assist it in its aim of cracking the corporate platform. The AMD bandwagon, then, appears to roll on. Over at K7 Core, there's an analysis of motherboards and overclocking devices being used with the Athlon. And, meanwhile, in other Spitfire news, AMD Zone quotes a German hardware site, Hartware as saying the Spitfires will use 64K integrated cache, while AMD is still toying with releasing a K6-III+. ®

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