[Mike heard from a little birdie that AMD was expected to ship its 64-bit microprocessor, codenamed Sledgehammer as early as next month. He also heard that OEMs would introduced Sledgehammer servers in Q4 of this year. However the next day, he awoke to find a torrent of emails informing him he was totally wrong. Mike was then approached by the PR boys at AMD, unprompted. Of course, he wrote about that too. Here are just a few of those replies]

AMD's Kludgehammer we haven't accelerated it
Compaq to intro AMD Sledgehammer servers
AMD Sledgehammer samples ship
AMD Sledgehammer Apocalyptic

Your sources must be confused with the Mustang for servers. It would make sense for those samples to be ready or shipping. Mustang is supposed to come out around Q4 and is meant for servers.

I don't think "The Hammer" has even taped out yet let alone have first silicon ready.

Take care,

Mike

There has been much discussion on the SI AMD thread about your story on Compaq and Sledgehammer. Most there tend to believe wires were crossed and that the Compaq machines are going to be with the Mustang and not the Sledgehammer. From what I have seen about the Sledgehammer, they have been talking about sometime in 2001 for first silicon. So my question to you, is this really the Mustang that Compaq will be featuring or is the Sledgehammer actually sampling to OEMs?

Regards
Ed Placencio

Are you certain that you haven't made a colossal error with your claims that Sledgehammer will ship this year? This all sounds like Mustang on the 760 SMP chipset, which is supposed to ship this year, and not Sledgehammer which is not supposed to ship until next year. I predict that you are making a mistake similar to

's claims earlier this year that Willamette would be shipping, when in fact, it was just faster PIIIs.

Steve

This is from Brian Neal in his opening page news section:

Update: Thanks to Lars, who posted the link to this latest Register article that claims Compaq will introduce Sledgehammer-based servers as early as the fourth quarter of this year. This seems far too early for a Sledgehammer introduction, considering it would potentially be pushing the next generation chip ahead of Mustang and its derivatives. Though we can't say for sure, it seems likely that AMD or The Register has used the Sledgehammer codename in reference to Mustang. I'd also like to add that it may be the case that Mustang has more architectural changes than we initially thought. We are looking to clarify this issue, and as always, any reader insight is appreciated.

Wanna confirm or deny his hypothesis? <grin>

Are you sure that Compaq/etc are going to introduce SLEDGEHAMMER servers in Q4 of this year?

AMD's schedule has Mustang (the server version of Athlon with Corvette core and large L2 cache) being introduced by Q4, along with AMD's 770 (aka 760-MP) 2-way SMP chipset. This is meant to be AMD's first ever server offering.

The schedule for Sledgehammer (at least until your story broke) had the chip sampling in Q1 2001, with availability in LATE 2001.

Are you sure that the AMD server chip being talked about isn't Mustang rather than Sledgehammer? For AMD to be a full year ahead of schedule (much as I would like to believe it) seems inconceivable!

Ben Bridgwater

I've been following you for some years, and while over that time I have been warned to take your news with a grain of salt, however your clairvoyance is too remarkable for me to ignore, and if a mistake is made, than that's what happens, it's the IT industry and Merced was suppose to be out in 1998, everyone makes mistakes :), as for Intel doing 64-bit x86, that is hard to swallow, giving all there troubles trying to push EPIC as a viable platform, however if push came to shove I do believe Chipzilla would do it. Willy was also suppose to be their last IA-32 processor, but we all know that's not going to be the case. U-turns all the time.

Mark

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