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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: Paul Engel who wrote (36692)	9/3/1998 7:08:00 AM
From: Maxwell	Read Replies (2) of 1571240

Dr. Engel: <<Without the K6-3, AMD's K6 and K6-2 will not get commensurate system speed improvements as their internal CPU clock speed increases - BECAUSE THE EXTERNAL L2 CACHE IS DEADLOCKED at a FIXED 100 MHz !>> What you said is very true and that is the advantage of the PII over the K6-2. However the K6-2 3DNow! FPU will SCALES BETTER at higher frequency than the PII when it comes to FPU 3D graphic rendering. K6-2 is capable of 4FLOPS per clock cycle. At 400MHz K6-2 will do 1.6GFLOPs peak versus 0.4GLOPs peak for PII. Although you may never see a K6-2 outrun the PII at the theoretically rate, you can however write game softwares that add MORE REALISM to it. The K6-2 will do very well compared to the PII. The bottom line is that softwares that utilize heavy in the cache will be faster in the PII and softwares that do 3D rendering and special effects using 3DNow will be faster on the K6-2. <<And, since Intel's Mendocino Celeron is out in FULL PRODUCTION, it's internal L2 cache tracks at FULL CPU SPEED - 300 MHz or 333 MHz for the L2 cache - same as the CPU clock speed.>> Intel never wanted to take this path this quickly. It will take 2 Megafabs fully ramp from Intel to produce what AMD is pumping out. From what I heard there is a shortage of CeleronA. Thus Intel is not fully ramped or production is not fully meeting demand. Ouch! <<Too bad AMD is delaying the Sharptooth (K6-3) introduction until early 1999 - the K6-2 will continue to suffer and not benefit much from any clock speed improvements.>> I am glad that AMD delayed the K6-3. Producing the K6-3 is a losing proposition. AMD has only 1 fab and if AMD eats Intel bait of producing the K6-3 AMD will lose the market share very quickly due to the K6-3 large die size. The reason people are using AMD is because of price advantage. It will be difficult for AMD to charge OEMs an ASP of $200+. Had AMD produced K6-3 they would have killed the K6-2 sales and probably get an ASP of less than the CeleronA. AMD POSITIONED the K6-2 of 80mm^2 to compete with both the CeleronA and PII and so far it is doing an excellent job in the retail market. Upcoming 3DNow! games will reinforced 3DNow! FPU as the superior architecture to Intel slot 1. That is a COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE in this competitive market. Maxwell

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