AMD tilts to PC133 – 1Ghz Athlon, SMP by 2000

AMD may be poised to jump onto the PC133 bandwagon, company exec Drew Prairie seems to hint in an interview last week. Speaking to CPUReview editor William Henning Prairie commented: "DDR SDRAM seems to make more sense than RAMBUS." That puts flesh on our earlier scoop: K7 to get PC-133 support from Via Although Prairie made no firm commitment on AMD's behalf, and Henning stresses that this is his personal view rather than a company policy, it does suggest that the company may go with support for the Via-Cyrix camp instead. Henning himself comments: "In general I expect RAMBUS to be a flop; currently the price is ridiculously high compared to SDRAM, the latency for accessing the first word is higher than with SDRAM and as a cost cutting measure memory bus width of only eight or sixteen bits are proposed. That would be moving backwards! RAMBUS would look good with a sixty four bit wide bus if they can get the latency down... until then my money is on DDR SDRAM - PC133 DDR SDRAM would currently be significantly faster than RAMBUS memory!" Prairie is non-committal about many things throughout the interview, but there are a few other nuggets. He says he expects AMD to get to 1GHz Athlon in 2000, following on from 650Mhz in this quarter and 700MHz in Q4. Hundreds of thousands of Athlons will ship in Q3, and the aggregate level will top 1 million by year end. And there'll be SMP motherboards "before the middle of next year." ®