AMD Palomino, Morgan slide back on schedule

AMD Roadmap Update AMD may not have delayed Palomino, ClawHammer and co. after all. The updated AMD desktop processor roadmap published yesterday by Germany's c't magazine doesn't appear to be quite as up-to-date as we had first supposed.

That, at least, is what a presentation AMD's president and COO, Hector Ruiz, made to the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Semiconductor and Systems Conference on 6 March suggests. Along with much pro-AMD fluff, the presentation contains a processor roadmap which pretty much matches the one we saw last December.

According to both, Palomino, the Athlon design that will succeed the current core, Thunderbird, will ship Q1 2001 at speeds of over 1.2GHz, and not next July at 1.4GHz as indicated by the c't roadmap.

Here's what the 6 March roadmap looks like:

Looking back at the c't roadmap, which you can view here, it's perhaps telling that T'Bird - AMD's internal codename - is mentioned on the roadmap, but the name does not appear on our December roadmap or the 6 March presentation. That suggests that once T'Bird shipped as the Athlon, AMD dropped the codename, and so no longer needs to mention it in documents such as these. In turn, that implies the c't roadmap is indeed much older than the others are.

The lack of even broad dates for AMD's 64-bit ClawHammer (for uni- and dual-processor systems) and Sledgehammer (aimed at four- and eight-way multi-processing boxes) CPU tends to confirm that view.

Update

A note from our chums over at c't suggests a reconciliation: their roadmap comes not from AMD but from a mobo maker. "Our experience is that those third-party roadmaps are ofen more precise... wait'n see."

And it occurs to us that the two versions are not entirely incompatible. Palomino going into volume production this quarter at over 1.2GHz doesn't mean that the 1.4GHz version isn't going to ship in June (as per the c't article) or July (as per the mysterious roadmap). ®

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