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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Craig Freeman who wrote (53630)3/30/1999 1:29:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu  Read Replies (2) of 1572644
 
<I picture a $150 mobo with four CPU sockets, 2MB of shared 100MHz L2 and a double-wide (but otherwise conventional) memory bus. VIA provides the custom memory/cache manager that is optimized for CPU pairs/quads.>

First of all, such a motherboard will definitely not cost a mere $150. More likely than not, it will cost much more.

Second, even if you are using K6-III CPU's in that sort of setup, the processor bus will be hopelessly flooded with transactions coming from four CPU's from AMD. The 256K of backside L2 cache on the K6-III is just too small to be used in a four-way setup. I'll bet that the performance of a conceptual four-way K6-III server is about 10% above a two-way K6-III server because of the bus utilization. That probably means that a dual Pentium III server can beat a four-way K6-III server. (You can solve this problem by giving each K6-III a dedicated point-to-point connection, a la K7, but this will greatly increase the complexity of the motherboard.)

And third, you'll probably need more than 2 MB of motherboard L3 cache on such a system anyway. Something like 8 MB would be the minimum. And I'll guarantee you that 8 MB of SRAM itself will cost close to $150, not to mention the additional infrastructure necessary on the motherboard to support that large of an L3 cache.

As usual, people think that the dynamics of the high-end server market reflect that of the el cheapo retail market. Nothing can be further from the truth. AMD better keep this in mind when they try to make inroads into servers with the K7, lest they want to continue with losses and shareholder suits.

Tenchusatsu
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