P4 EE/HT/Multiprocessing

FiringSquad: What are your thoughts on Intel’s Pentium 4 Extreme Edition? Do you feel it was a knee-jerk reaction by Intel to Athlon 64 FX?

Henri Richard: I think that uh, [laughs] I think that imitation is a great form of flattery and it’s very clear that this is a part that they basically put together in a hurry to respond to Athlon FX and it’s very clear that it was not on their roadmap and I think we caught them by surprise and like usual when it’s a reaction that’s not planned you come out with a pretty unappealing solution and I think that’s the general consensus in the marketplace that the ugh, that product is not a great product.

FiringSquad: Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology has lots of promise, but very few applications support it directly. What is your take on this new feature?

Henri Richard: Well I believe that, you know again it’s a software issue here. I don’t recall [inaudible] 64-bit in Hyper-Threading, not that they’re exclusive to each other. But we’ve chosen the path of 64-bit and that’s the path we’re going to push. I also believe that, well I’m always concerned when marketing comes on top of you know some sort of feature and it confuses people.

I think that representing Hyper-Threading as buying two processors for the price of one is deceiving customers, and that’s not AMD’s strategy.

I believe that the future of desktop computing will go with the future of server, which is multi-core processors. There you will have multiple core processors and when you say you have dual processors you really will have two processors and you’ll get much better scalability of performance than Hyper-Threading.

Now this being said, you know like any technology we’re looking at it, and it’s not that complex of a technology to implement. If customers, if the marketplace finally endorse that technology over multi-core processors then we’ll deliver what the customer wants us to do. But at this point in time I’m a believer that 64-bit on one side and multi-core CPUs are approachable relevant to the future of our industry more so than Hyper-Threading.

FiringSquad: So you acknowledge that AMD has looked into multi-core CPUs?

Henri Richard: Well, we’ve announced it, but I’m not telling you that tomorrow morning on the desktop that [we’ll have it] but we have stated clearly that we are working on multi-core CPUs on Opteron and as you know Opteron, the natural destination of Opteron ends up in the FX range. So it’s easy to assess that AMD will announce the official you know, Opteron multi-core product. Sometime down the line later you’ll find a multi-core desktop product because it’s the same core.