AMD Interview of July 1, 1999

by William Henning
Editor, CPUReview
Copyright July 1, 1999
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Before I begin, I wish to thank AMD's Drew Prairie for giving me the opportunity to interview him about AMD and the new Athlon processor. He was kind enough to agree to be interviewed on short notice.

Even though Drew was unable to answer some of my questions as he is only allowed to talk about information that has already been released he tried to be helpful as he could be.

I do not have a word-for-word transcript of my telephone interview; I scribbled notes on my sheet of questions as we talked; I've re-assembled the conversation from my notes, hopefully accurately. I hope you find the information below useful.

Please note:

Paragraphs prefixed with [CPUReview] show the question I asked; [AMD] indicates the answer I received. [Editor: ...] indicates an editorial comment about the answer.

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[CPUReview] There have been nasty rumors of clock locking being implemented on the Athlon. Can you comment?

[AMD] There have been no announcements made on clock locking.

[Editor: During SystemLogic's interview (p.2) (You can find a link to that interview at the end of this one) Drew stated "I don’t know of any plans to lock the clock multiplier on any of our upcoming CPUs."]

[Update: I just found out that JC's has a new item claiming that Athlons will need an external gadget to set their multiplier and L2 cache speed settings.]

[CPUReview] Can you comment on the "Alereon"? Would I be correct in guessing that it will be a L2-less socketed K7? Or would it be a new name for a K6-3?

[AMD] There have been no announcements about the Alereon.

[Editor: basically a no comment, not that I expected Drew to be able to comment about unannounced products; but I had to try :-) I really think that the Alereon will be a socketed K7]

[CPUReview] Do you have any reaction to the purchase of Cyrix by VIA?

[AMD] I have not been following the purchase closely - we have been busy - and I have no reaction to the news. IP (Intellectual Property) issues probably played part in the purchase.

Continue with the interview...

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