AMD cautious about committing to DDR2

@ 2004/03/18
AMD APPEARS to be showing few signs of joining the headlong rush to implement DDR2, it has emerged from discussions with the firm here at the Hannover fair.
The firm has an extensive suit on the second floor of Halle 2 here at the Fairground, and we had a discussion about the strategy with Ryan Crouch, who runs elements of desktop marketing at AMD US.

AMD would not be drawn on whether it would launch an FX53 at its press conference at 5PM German time, but as there was an FX53 machine out the back, we would say it is a racing certainty.

Crouch said that while AMD was excited about DDR2, it will only implement it when it makes the most sense.

The sense will be likely to kick in when the price and the premium are right.

He said AMD had a good idea of when that point might be, but would not confirm that could happen in 2005. Plus, AMD believes that it is already getting a burst of speed because of the integration of memory technology in its 64 bit chips.

AMD also showed off an implementation of its data security NX flag, which will be included in SP2 of Windows XP. This essentially prevents that nasty cruddy trojan stuff from messing up our existences which no doubt are filled with light and music.

An extra window appears in the Control Panel under properties, advanced, performance, offering data execution protection. When a nasty bit of code is loaded into memory, this kicks in and closes the application. Users can switch it off, but then why would anyone want to.

The AMD executives said that firms such as Sophos, Macafee and Symantec had generally welcomed the introduction of this bit of CPU wizardry. Intel must be able to do this too. It might be a good idea if that was sooner rather than later.


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