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Post to SlashdotAt CeBIT Shanghai AMD again demonstrated their eight generation Athlon processor (the code-named ClawHammer) based personal computer, once again alluding that they have the CPU ready. It was confirmed that the company will start supplying its newcomers to their primary partners by the end of this year. Despite of rather early start, AMD will announce the wide availability of its eight generation Athlon CPUs in the first quarter 2003. However, the CPUs will not become mainstream at that time, even though they receive the great support from the industry.
Some VIA representatives who preferred to remain unnamed told that x86-64 processor’s market share will not be significant during the first half of next year. The most popular products from AMD in the course of the specified timeframe are going to be Athlon XP CPUs with Barton core that will feature 512KB of L2 and 333MHz system bus. As for ClawHammer chips, according to the VIA guys, the novelties will only become widely available in the third quarter 2003. Provided that there are very few processors and mainboards on the market, the prices will stay on the relatively high level.
Presently VIA Technologies is the main supplier of Socket A chipsets for AMD processors. Since their position on the Pentium 4 market becomes weaker from day to day, they will make serious efforts in order to expand their presence on the K7 and K8 markets. As VIA is widely recognised and has loads of sales-channels, they will have no obstacles to remain the number one core-logic vendor for AMD platforms.
The Taiwan-based chipset-maker disclosed its plans regarding ClawHammer CPUs at Computex Taipei earlier this year. According to them, they will launch three core-logic devices for x86-64 systems in 2003: VIA K8T400, VIA K8T400M and VIA K8M400. The first one is already sampling and TSMC will start to produce it in volumes this quarter. The chipset provides AGP 8x support, 8x V-Link andVT8235 South Bridge. A little bit later the company will reveal its K8T400M that will be a little bit better than the predecessor and pin to pin compatible with the K8M400, the first integrated chipset from VIA for the ClawHammer platform.
