The latest on AMD. I read yesterday that dual motherboards supporting Palominos (the next rev of the Athlon core) will be released June 4. These will be server-oriented boards, and thus very pricey. It's an interesting strategy, because I would think Dual-AMD configurations would be more popular in the enthusiast market and the pointy-haired bosses are leery of putting anything but Intel CPUs in their server closets (better not tell 'em their Sun, SGI, and IBM RS/6000 servers ain't Intel-powered, huh?). More on that in a second. The rumor I heard (and most of this should probably only be counted as rumor) said the boards will require 450W power supplies with a special supplemental connector, similar to the P4's extra connector. No idea if it's the same as the P4's supplemental connector, but that would have made a lot of sense.

Obviously, if the boards will be out and use Palominos, that means the Palomino will have to be out on or before that date if there's to be any hope of selling these boards.

The only part of this that I would bet my life on is the 450W power supply requirement. AMD probably could release it in that time frame, but they're selling every CPU they can make, in spite of the slowdown in the PC market. So why the server play? Easy. AMD owns the enthusiast market and can pretty much count on owning that for a while yet. But AMD wants a piece of the server market, because that's a slower-moving, higher-margin market. To get that, they have to have industrial-strength boards from top-tier makers and a solid chipset. AMD doesn't have a lot of chipset experience, let alone SMP experience, so they want to make sure they get this right. That, I think, is the reason this has been so long in coming. They'd rather miss some target dates and deliver a solid product than come in right on time with something that's still buggy.

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