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Some remarks from Tom Pabst on the K7:
By Tom Pabst
Platform News B - AMD K7
Information about AMD's K7 and especially K7-platforms was not quite as easy to come by, but that's not due to any non-disclosure issues, but rather due to the way AMD is planning to release K7 and its platform this month. The majority of you may expect that there will be a wide variety of K7-platforms available at the launch date of K7. This is what we are used to from Intel. When Intel releases a new CPU plus a new platform, you can buy this very CPU as well as the according motherboard all over the place, the latest at launch day. The story has always been a bit different with AMD. When AMD releases a CPU, it's usually only available to OEMs at launch date and even for those OEMs there are only small numbers available initially. The retail market has to wait for quite some time, particularly the fastest AMD CPUs are only available in very small quantities. With K7 the story is becoming even more complicated.
Once K7 is released you will again have to face the fact that you won't find a whole lot of K7-processors in the retail market, since the majority will ship to OEMs and turn up in your shop inside complete systems. For the few K7-CPUs from retail, you will need a motherboard though, and this is where AMD's second problem kicks in. AMD's new K7-chipset is available in pretty small quantities. This is why AMD chose only a few motherboard makers for the initial K7-platform launch. Asus, Gigabyte, FIC and MSI are the only motherboard makers that are able to supply K7-platforms at K7-launch. All the other board makers will have to wait until a third party chipset maker (e.g. VIA, ALi, SiS) will supply them with a K7-chipset, which is not supposed to be before September 1999. One of the 'left-out' board makers, a very well known one actually, seems to be particularly upset with AMD and told me that " for us K7 is still vaporware ..."
So far about logistical problems of K7, let's talk about the performance. AMD thanked me for not trying to get a pre-release K7 from some motherboard vendor or anybody else, because the performance of those early samples doesn't seem to have much to do with the latest version of K7. What I can tell you right now, before I will have to go under NDA for the evaluation system is that: K7 Revision C seems to be a clear winner. Someone who is supposed to know told me the following, "I'll give you 100 bucks for each benchmark or application that runs faster on a PIII than on a K7 at the same clock speed." I heard very similar comments from motherboard vendors at Computex. K7 will most likely be released as 500, 550 and 600 MHz version and that should be enough to give it a clear lead for the time being, until Intel launches its first Coppermine PIII processors. After that it will depend on who is going to make the clock speed race, Coppermine or K7. It will be a close race, where Intel has got a huge advantage when it comes to availability though. So far, K7 seems to have a slight edge in integer performance, floating point performance seems to be some 20-30 % higher than PIII's though. This will turn around the past, when Intel was the FPU-leader in the x86-world. The K7-platform based on the AMD-chipset uses a 100 MHz front side bus, working at '2x'. This means that data can be delivered at the rising and the falling edge of the clock, making the FSB perform as if it runs at 200 MHz. The current memory seems to be PC100 SDRAM only, but that shouldn't bother us too much now. Memory speed is still hardly an issue when it comes to overall performance, only some more exotic software can really take advantage of a higher memory bandwidth, the CPU-performance is much more important. The AMD-chipset seems to also lack AGP 4x and ATA-66 support. Both will probably included into the third party vendor chipsets though and thus be available once Camino ships and proper AGP 4x-products become available. All in all it doesn't look bad at all for AMD and K7, let's only hope that AMD will be able to deliver product.
Jens |
