AMD shakes up x86 CPU world with two new designs

Interview with AMD's Fred Weber - The Future of AMD Microprocessors (March 31st, 2005)

How about a Hyper Threaded Athlon?

When Intel announced Hyper Threading, AMD wasn't (publicly) paying any attention at all to TLP as a means to increase overall performance. But now that AMD is much more interested and more public about their TLP direction, we wondered if there was any room for SMT a la Hyper Threading in future AMD processors, potentially working within multi-core designs.

Fred's response to this question was thankfully straightforward; he isn't a fan of Intel's Hyper Threading in the sense that the entire pipeline is shared between multiple threads. In Fred's words, "it's a misuse of resources." However, Weber did mention that there's interest in sharing parts of multiple cores, such as two cores sharing a FPU to improve efficiency and reduce design complexity. But things like sharing simple units just didn't make sense in Weber's world, and given the architecture with which he's working, we tend to agree.

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