AMD has firmly entrenched itself in the mid-range performance and value segments of the processor market. It's roadmap for development over the next year signals their new attack on the top-end server and workstation market, while including new versions of the Athlon technology to handle the mid-range, as well as a reworking of their K6 chips for mobile systems.

Both the K6-2 and the K6-III will move to the .18 micron manufacturing process this year and the new K6-2+ and K6-III+ will be geared solely for mobile applications. The K6-2+ will gain an on-chip L2 cache and Gemini power management. The K6-III's L2 will remain unchanged, but the chip will gain Gemini power management and run at higher speeds than today's 0.25-micron version.

Less is known about AMD's new technologies than the competing Intel chips, but here's what can be gleaned about AMD's plans. Starting with an enhanced Athlon called the Athlon Ultra, and progressing to the high-powered SledgeHammer, Athlon is ready to continue the battle for brand dominance with Intel on more fronts than ever before.

THUNDERBIRD (Athlon Ultra)
At the CeBit show in Germany recently, AMD demonstrated the Athlon Ultra (Thunderbird), an updated Athlon core aimed at performance users. Due to debut around mid-2000, the Athlon Ultra will be available in Socket A and Slot A versions with 256K of on-die L2 cache. The demo system was running air-cooled at 1.1GHz, and it is generally thought that AMD could produce 1.1GHz processors right now in volume if they so desired. By 2001, AMD can be expected to produce the Athlon Ultra with up to 2MB of L2 cache, on-chip.

Designed to run in multiprocessor configurations the Athlon Ultra may also use a 266MHz system bus, as opposed to the current Athlon 200MHz system bus and may boast an enhanced processor core. Initial AMD Athlon Ultra chipsets are expected to support 66MHz/64-bit PCI slots, PC2100 DDR DRAM, and 4x AGP Pro. Production boards, with a VIA KX133 Socket A chipset should be available around April or May, 2000.

SPITFIRE
A second chip to be introduced mid-year with on-chip level-two cache is the code-named Spitfire processor for the value segment. It will likely have a smaller or slower L2 cache and will fit into a 462-pin socket A interface. The Spitfire will most likely launch after the Thunderbird, in summer 2000. The chip will probably not be called "Athlon", since AMD would like to keep that name for their high end CPUs.

MUSTANG (Athlon 2)
Sometime in the second half of 2000, AMD plans to introduce new processors based on an enhanced core, code-named Mustang. This chip will be optimized for the copper process and will run at around 1GHz to start. The Mustang processor will be available in Socket A and Slot A/Socket A packages, as well as in mobile versions. It will have up to 2MB of 16-way associative L2 cache on-chip. Relatively expensive, the Mustang will be geared to take on Intel's Foster and Willamette in the high end workstation and server market. The first systems will be single CPU systems, but by the end of the year, with the appearance of the AMD 770 chipset, dual Mustang systems should also be available. AMD will beat Intel by about a year in introducing copper process chips, if their plans go as expected.

SLEDGEHAMMER (K8)
As the most direct attempt to compete with Intel in the high-end server-processor market, in 2001 AMD will release SledgeHammer (the former K8), a 64-bit extension to the the x86 instruction set. SledgeHammer will include a new floating-point instruction set that uses RISC-like features to achieve top-end performance on a par with Alpha RISC chips. Unlike Intel's new Itanium, applications that don't need 64-bit addressing or high floating point performance can remain in pure x86 mode and still achieve strong performance.

The die size of the Sledgehammer should be only 5% larger than the die size of AMD's Athlon processor due to the support for the x86-64 instruction set. The 32-bit performance of the SledgeHammer core will be better than the K7 Athlon core - a critical factor in the success of this CPU technology since it will also be targeted at the 32-bit workstation market.

Initial SledgeHammer chips will likely run at over 1GHz, and be produced with the .18 micron process. Production would then eventually move to .13 micron. Sledgehammer will use a Lightning Data Transport (LDT) bus to connect the various I/O ports such as PCI 64/66 and System I/O. AMD is working with their partner, Alpha Processor (API), to develop chip sets supporting two processors on a single north bridge. LDT will connect north bridges to build systems with up to eight processors or even more.

SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) on a grand scale will be possible with the SledgeHammer because several AMD 770 north bridges, each with two CPUs, can be chained together with the wide LDT bus between the north and south bridges, at a speed of 6.4GB/sec on a 16 bit upstream/downstream dataflow.