Computex 2002 Day 1 - Hammer & Opteron Galore

Final Words

This onslaught of Hammer chipsets leaves us with a few important points:

- Pretty much every single chipset manufacturer is throwing their weight behind Hammer. The only one that's not is Intel and that's for obvious reasons. Compare this to the launch of the Athlon processor and you'll see that the AMD of today is much more confidence inspiring than the AMD of 1999.

- In spite of the public showing of many of these boards, most of them are not working samples. We know for a fact that the SiS 755 board was simply a mechanical sample and we'd assume the same for the ALi, NVIDIA and VIA boards.

- Because of Hammer's integrated memory controller these chipsets should all perform very similarly. The design Hypertransport connect between the AGP controller and the CPU will determine stability while the South Bridge will mostly determine features (e.g. integrated USB 2.0, Serial ATA, Firewire). Also the absence or presence of on-board frame buffer will have a huge impact on integrated graphics performance.

There's much more of the show to cover and much more to write about. We've already seen the first non-Intel RDRAM solution for the Pentium 4 and much more. Be sure to sign up to the AnandTech Newsletter if you haven't already to be the first to get access to this information.