<Tenchusatsu, By all fronts I expect that AMD will be able to field fast units that will be capable of competing with the Xeons on a single CPU system. As for double or quad??>
Given that the K7 isn't going to be available in large quantities for the first two quarters after its release, it's unknown which market AMD will attack first. My guess is single-processor workstations, especially graphics workstations. But it's also obvious that AMD will want to jump into the high-margin server market sooner or later and offer solutions which features two, four, or even eight K7 CPUs in a single server. When? It's up to AMD, I suppose.
<One hopes that AMD's better yield as well as a smaller die size will help in this area to offset the lower ASP. What is the die size with the cache on the chip?>
According to Microprocessor Report, the K7 die weighs in at a whopping 184 mm2. In comparison, the K6-2 is 81 mm2 and the Deschutes (Pentium II) is 118 mm2. This is for the 0.25 micron process, and none of these chips have on-die L2 caches. The Mendocino die (Celeron with 128K on-chip L2 cache) is 154 mm2.
Of course, once the K7 moves to the 0.18 micron process, AMD will have more room to add on-die L2 cache. But because of that oversized 128K L1 cache, AMD will have to add at least 512K of L2 cache onto the die, which can quite possibly double the die size and put it in the same league as Intel's upcoming Cascades (0.18 micron Xeon w/ 1 MB of on-die L2 cache).
Believe me, K7 looks great, but that power can't come without a price.
Tenchusatsu |
