Micron interview
Author: Vidar Langberget.
Posted : 2000-11-29 00:00:00.0
Category : Hardware
Reports on Micron chipsets began about a year ago, when the Samurai chipset was shown in several demonstratons. IIRC someone had some preview benchmarks as well. But it never made it to the market.
In the last few weeks, there have been reports on several chipsets in development. Most known is the Mamba which was presented at the Microprocessor Forum in October, a chipset with embedded DRAM, or eCache as Micron like to call it. The eCache is expected to significantly improve overall system performance with up to 15%.
So I sent some questions to the Integrated Products Group at Micron. I would like to thank Echo Sarlya for making sure that someone answered the questions, and Leslie Petty for answering them.
1.) Reports about the Mamba, Scimitar and Shogun chipsets have been a hot topic of discussion on the internet in the last few weeks. Can you give short introduction to the different chipsets, like release dates, CPU's supported etc? Which of the versions will have eCache?
Micron has not introduced information on any chipsets except the
Samurai and Mamba. We anticipate releasing the Mamba in Q3 of 2001. The Mamba supports AMD Athlon processors, and will contain 8Mb of embedded DRAM (eDRAM).
2.) The former Rendition team is now a part of the Micron Integrated Products Group. Are there many of Rendition engineers left at Micron, or have they moved on to other companies? Since you haven't released any graphics chips in the last few years, many of them might be very frustrated?
Micron views its employee base as a competitive advantage, so will
not directly answer questions regarding our employees. Micron is no longer producing integrated graphics devices. Currently, we do not see the demand, so will not continue our 3-D efforts. Our plan is to refocus these efforts and the people working on these projects.
3.) NVIDIA have plans to enter the integrated chipset business. How do you think the Shogun will be able to compete?
Micron has not announced a Shogun chipset and cannot speculate on
other companies products or product plans.
4.) Will the integrated graphics engine in the Shogun use tile-based rendering? According to Tom's Hardware, the Shogun will support DDR memory. NVIDIA will have a 128-bit DDR bus. Will memory bandwidth be the main bottleneck for the Shogun?
As mentioned above, Micron has not announced a Shogun chipset.
5.) The biggest news about the new chipsets is the eCache. Can you describe how this works? Do the CPU have to support it, or is it transparent to the CPU and just acts as a cache for the memory controller? It is claimed that it will give a 15% performance boost to the system. Is it that radical, or is that in special situations?
Please refer to the attached document to view a presentation given
by Dean Klein at the Microprocessor Forum. This will provide information on
Micron's Mamba chipset.
[editor's note:link to the presentation at the end]