[geeks] Interesting ATI/AMD news

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sun, 30 Jul 2006 @ 01:20 +0300, Geoffrey S. Mendelson said:

> When I tried to get information on their chips, I was never able to.
> In fact the only information I was able to get at all was a quantity
> 1200 price, which was useless. Design specs, software information,
> evaluation boards, etc where nonexistant.

Same here.

I was just curious and they went out of their way to speak in riddles
and avoid communicating.

I could not even get them to send an "information kit".  You know, a
nice colorful book of lies about how their product was better than sex,
like all other companies produce.

They were amazingly secretive, and in the end I can't really see what
they were being so secretive about.

> TM's other problem was that they did not build an X86 compatible chip. Their
> chip was a RISC chip that had built in X86 emulation. While this strategy
> works for Intel and their Pentium 4, it's not a widely known fact.

AMD CPUs have been that way for quite some time.  I think that started
with the Athlon (K7) CPU.  The primary goal of the K7 was to emulate an
Intel 686 and do so faster than the real hardware, and in that they
succeeded.

The thing is, it all makes you wonder what Intel and AMD could do if
they dumped the X86 ISA and put a usable face on their RISC cores.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["We have nothing to prove" -- Alan Dawkins]