AMD Showcased Hammer

by Anna Filatova
03/01/2002 | 11:21 PM

Well, the endless stream of info about Intel coming from the IDF seems to be interrupted by some cool news from AMD. During the forum, AMD arranged a press-briefing where they for the first time showcased a working system built on ClawHammer processors and using a mainboard on the recently announced AMD-8000 chipset.

Although the showcased ClawHammer featured A0 core stepping, the system built on it could not only boot but also worked stably in 32bit Windows XP operation system and 64bit ported Linux. Though the hero of the day worked at lower core frequency and the system was equipped with a PCI graphics card, because of some problems.<%BANNER[article]%>

At the same time, the journalists also had the opportunity to see a server Hammer processor aka SledgeHammer.

During the demonstration some very interesting details about Hammer based platforms cropped up:

• ClawHammer CPUs feature 754 pins while SledgeHammer CPUs – 940 pins. Both processors are sized as 4cm x 4cm.
• ClawHammer and SledgeHammer cores are really covered with metallic lids: IHS.
• The reference mainboard for ClawHammer is called SOLO 2. It has AMD-8151 chip for the North Bridge and AMD-8111 chip for the South Bridge. The board is built on the four-layer PCB and boasts pretty reasonable production cost.
• SOLO 2 specs look as follows: ATX form-factor, Socket754, 2 DIMM slots for PC2700/PC2100/PC1600 DDR SDRAM, AGP 8x, 4 PCI slots and 1 CNR slot, AC’97 sound. The mainboard requires ATX 2.03 compatible PSU.
• ClawHammer features one DDR SDRAM channel with the maximum bandwidth of 2.7GB/sec. SledgeHammer will support two DDR SDRAM channels with the maximum bandwidth of 5.4GB/sec.
• The first ClawHammer samples are manufactured on Fab30 with 0.13micron SOI technology.
• The initial core clock of the ClawHammer CPUs, which will be officially launched in Q4’02 should be equal to "around 2GHz".