More news regarding Intel's Pentium III and AMD's K-7. As noted in the article, emphasis is high on floating-point; good for LGPT.
Intel trumpets Pentium III as AMD prepares K7
By Mark Hachman and Sandy Chen
Electronic Buyers' News
(01/12/99, 8:56 a.m. EDT)
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Intel Corp. has confirmed it is keeping the
Pentium name for its next generation of microprocessors that it plans to launch in March, nearly three months ahead of the launch of K7 by rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Formerly code-named Katmai, Intel's Pentium III microprocessors will
include the Katmai New Instructions, plus additional features such as
memory streaming enhancements and Intel's Single Instruction Multiple
Data (SIMD) technology, applied to floating-point instructions.
The combined features will offer additional performance enhancements
beyond simple increases in clock speed. A spokesman for Intel confirmed that the chips would be released at initial clock speeds of 450 and 500 MHz. The “Tanner” chip for workstations and servers will be known as the Pentium III Xeon, and will initially run at 500 MHz, he said.
AMD, meanwhile, was unable to confirm the launch date of its own
next-generation chip-the K7-which is scheduled to take place on June 23, according to industry and OEM sources. A spokesman for AMD (Sunnyvale, Calif.) said that date didn't sound right, and would check on it. Other sources close to AMD said that date was under consideration, but had yet to be finalized.
To date, industry sources have not learned the speeds or prices of the K7 chips. However, they have said that the K7 will ship with either 512 kilobytes or 1 megabyte of off-chip level 2 cache, running at either half or a third the speed of the microprocessor.
Confidential AMD documentation shows that the K7 will move from an “enhanced” 0.25-micron manufacturing process to a finer 0.18-micron linewidth in the second half of 1999. AMD's roadmap says that the die size for the K7 is expected to be under 200 square millimeters, and drop to under 125 square millimeters after the process shrink to 0.18-micron technology. Both versions of the chip will probably still be larger and cost more to manufacture than the K6-3 and K6-2, which measure 119 square millimeters and 81 square millimeters, respectively.
AMD sees its K7 competing with one of Intel's chips that is even further down its roadmap - the 32-bit Willamette. According to AMD's
documentation, the AMD “Sharptooth”-a K6 microprocessor enhanced
with 256 kilobytes of on-chip level 2 cache dubbed K6-3-will take on the forthcoming Pentium III, which industry sources believe will be formally launched in March.
In the first half of the year 2000, the K7 will also be produced in a “socket” form, designed to reduce the chip's manufacturing cost and allow it to move into cheaper PCs, according to the roadmap. AMD representatives have previously confirmed that the K7 would be manufactured in a low-cost version. |
