Microprocessor Report: October 26, 1998
There is a big section in this issue discussing the new AMD K7. I will quote a few paragraphs here and will post an entire article later.
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K7 Challenges Intel
New AMD Processor Could Beat Intel's Katmai
By Keith Diefendorff
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"The K7's three-issue superscalar design, which reorders instructions across a 72-instruction window, is the most aggressive of any x86 design yet announced. Despite this high degree of instruction-level parallelism (ILP), the K7's 10-stage pipeline should allow it to achieve high clock rates. With silicon in hand, AMD is confident the processor will exceed 500MHz in its first incarnation, which the company expects to deliver in the first half of 1999 (an industry euphemism for June)."
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"The K7 could hold the performance lead until 2H00 when Intel delivers Willamette at speeds of up to 1GHz."
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"The K7 is, in many ways, an excellent mix of technology. It is evolutionary, not revolutionary, making it a low-risk design. The long pipelines should leave little frequency on the table. It exploits its large transistor budget wisely, with powerful symmetric decoders and a large complement of execution units. The deep instruction reordering window desensitizes K7 to the compiler-an important attribute to AMD. The aggressive load/store unit, large dual-ported L1, backside L2, and high-speed bus reduce memory bandwidth as an issue."
"THe K7's superscalar FP pipe should give it impressive floating-point
performance compared with that of the P6.........."
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"Delivering its seventh-generation processor only 2.5 years after its sixth-generation device will be an impressive accomplishment for AMD, especially considering that Intel may take five years to do the same. The K7 will, for the first time, put AMD solidly in the high-end PC business and could enable a play in the midrange server/workstation games. Its fate hinges to a large extent on how aggressively Intel drives Katmai, KNI, and 0.18um technology across its product line. Regardless of Intel's efforts, however, the K7 should improve AMD's position, allowing it to increase both prices and profit margins-maybe significantly."
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Maxwell |
