From Ace's
"Thanks to WaterCooler for giving us these infos. :)
So from the actual C't Magazine they have the following infos on K7s aviliable. First there will be an SP6 for NT4 which will contain a K7 kernel, this is said to be aviliable from AMD's website at release as well, so just note that most the benchmark scores from the review sites with AMD's review system will be based on NT with this Kernel. As for those who remember the 3dnow patching nightmares with K6-2/3, for K7 to enable write combining with Win98, you will need to download a chipset drivers to take care of this. Also for people who use 3dmark99, there will be a K7mark.dll for K7 special optimizations. However AMD lovers who are armed with K6-x experiences should found patching for K7 a great educational experience again. Of course OEM systems should come with all the patches applied and is the recommended rout for regular users from AMD."
FWIW, I was at Best Buy today, and there happened to be an Intel rep there. I asked what he thought about the Athlon and he said something reasonable like I don't know what to think because it isn't out yet. I said there have been preliminary benchmarks which showed the Athlon would be faster than the PIII, and he said he hadn't seen them, but then he said something like "remember, this chip came out (or was announced) July last year, who knows when it will be here. Obviously, I didn't agree with what this guy said. I told him that it was announced in June and that systems would be available in about 2 weeks. Then he said, I work for Intel, don't you think we know what is going on? We would know
what our competitors are doing. I obviously thought this guy was a moron so I riled him up quite a bit by being rude and eventually walked away. Anyways, what in the world does Intel tell their reps? In my opinion, it was an interesting encounter.
If anyone cares, I didn't go in the PC section so I don't know what was there (such as how many PIII 600s) or anything like that. |
