There have been hundreds, if not thousands of posts about the K7 on this and the AMD thread. You could go back and read some of them. I'll say a few things. The K7 is supposed to be an elegant architecture and design. Still, comparing it with existing Intel products, the only benchmarks that have come out on the K7 so far have it in the same ballpark as the PIII. These benchmarks could be too preliminary, on not production K7's, no-one knows. The overwhelming question, as always with AMD, is can they build it. That is, even if it as fast as or faster than comparable Intel MPUs, can they get sufficiently high yields in manufacturing it to get the quantities, in the millions, and the reliability to stand up to and compete with comparable Intel products. And, will businesses, who may be the major customers for PCs built around it, sign up for it, knowing AMD's history of second rate manufacturing, which has fallen down at critical junctures on all of their microprocessor products to date.
That's as honest an assessment as I can write.
Tony |
