EL_Panzon asks: Will the Athlon get much benefit from DDR as it ramps in speed or are you planning to 'tweak'/¡¦redesign¡¦ so it can get a real advantage from the extra bandwidth (something the P4 has indeed got).

AMD: Not sure I get the question, the addition of DDR memory subsystem has increased the performance of the AMD Athlon platform, to the point where our 1.2GHz AMD Athlon processor consistently beats a P4/1.5GHz on the majority of benchmarks. As we increase the frequency of the processor, the benefits of the faster memory bus will become increasingly more important as the potential bottleneck presented by the memory subsystem will have the additional bandwidth that DDR can deliver over PC133 SDRAM.

Amish-Chief asks: Intel could be slaughtered on this one, due to the different slots of the P3 vs. P4. Will Socket A have any life beyond the current TBird or not?

AMD: Great question, and you are right to point out that Socket A holds many benefits over our competitors' infrastructure strategy since we can have a common platform across our products. Really, we are still at the beginning of the Socket A life cycle. Socket A represents a stable platform for AMD¡¦s 7th generation processors for a long time to come. We haven¡¦t gone into details on the interface/bus for any CPUs beyond the AMD Athlon processor family, but we have said that Palomino/Morgan will be Socket A CPUs and that we will have .13 micron versions of Athlon and Duron available in 2002. So yes, Socket A should have a long life in front of it and (when compared with our competitor¡¦s platforms) should represent the stable high-performance platform.

Casket Asks: What affect on AMD do you think Microsofts .NET strategy will play. Apparently .Net uses a Microsoft Intermediary Language(kinda like JVM). Will this open the door for new instruction sets like 3dNow or x86-64... Only needing to optimize one program (this Common Language Runtime thingy) to take advantage of New Instruction Architectures?

AMD: Unfortunately, I don¡¦t know enough about Microsoft¡¦s .net strategy to comment on this one. We do work very closely with Microsoft. An example of this would be the adoption of 3Dnow! technology support in DirectX.