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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (61507)	6/11/1999 4:22:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575624

SCUMbria - AMD's Extended 3DNOW instructions for the K7 confirm the inadequacies of the original 3DNOW. With 45 instructions, the expanded 3DNow instruction set will more than match the performance of the 71 instructions which Intel Corp. has recently added to its MMX instruction set, Meyer said. Clearly, AMD is now trying to play "catch up" to Intel's SSE instructions. Paul {==================================} K7 to feature expanded instruction set By David Lammers, EE Times Jun 11, 1999 (7:37 AM) URL: eetimes.com SAN JOSE, Calif. — The new K7 microprocessor that Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will ship later this month will include 25 additional instructions that the company has added to the 3DNow instruction set. Dirk Meyer, vice president of AMD and chief architect of the K7, said that 19 single instruction multiple data (SIMD) integer instructions and five new DSP control function instructions have been added to the previous 21 instructions of the 3DNow instruction set. With 45 instructions, the expanded 3DNow instruction set will more than match the performance of the 71 instructions which Intel Corp. has recently added to its MMX instruction set, Meyer said. The extended 3DNow ISA, combined with the K7's more powerful floating-point hardware, will more than match Intel's streaming SIMD extension (SSE) implementation on its Pentium III processors, he said. The K7's DSP instructions will improve performance on applications such as MP3, AC-3, soft modems and soft DSL functions, he said. Meyer made his comments Thursday (June 10) at a dinner sponsored by MicroDesign Resources (Sebastopol, Calif.). However, Keith Diefendorff, a senior analyst at MicroDesign Resources, predicted that AMD would implement the SSE instruction set next year. Changing the K7 architecture to support SSE would not be particularly difficult, and both Intel and AMD would benefit from the larger universe of software that would support SSE, Diefendorff said. AMD will introduce the K7 at 500-, 550-, and 600-MHz clock speeds, and Meyer said the K7 will deliver about a 40 percent performance improvement over the equivalent-speed Pentium III MPUs, as measured on the WinBench benchmark. AMD plans to move to a 0.18-micron process technology later this year that will enable the K7 to reach gigahertz clock frequencies in 2000. Plans also call for the design to be altered slightly to run on a copper interconnect process at AMD's Fab 30, now being constructed at Dresden, Germany.