SCUMbria - Additional reporting from the Dirk Meyer - K7 presentation
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AMD says K7 outperforms Intel's Xeon
By Mark Hachman, Electronic Buyers' News
Jun 11, 1999 (6:49 AM)
URL: ebnews.com
In a technical presentation held Thursday night, Advanced Micro Devices said its forthcoming K7 desktop microprocessor would outperform Intel Corp.'s Xeon workstation processor, running at the same frequency. Dirk Meyer, vice-president of engineering for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD, offered the first performance estimates for the final K7 silicon, although the tests were run by AMD and not a neutral third party. At a dinner sponsored by analyst firm MicroDesign Resources, Meyer added that he was confident that AMD would be able to satisfy the expected K7 demand when the chip launches later this month.
As expected, the K7 will be produced at 600 MHz at the launch; although Meyer did not elaborate further, AMD representatives have said previously that 550-MHz and 500-MHz versions would also ship. The K7's 8-byte-wide bus will run at 200 MHz, although 266-MHz and 400-MHz speeds may follow, Meyer said.
"When I came here... I was convinced that we needed to do X86 microprocessors, and that AMD was the place to be," said Meyer, also the K7's chief architect.
Meyer compared 550-MHz and 600-MHz versions of its K7 microprocessor with 512 Kbytes of level 2 cache running at half of the microprocessor's frequency, with Intel's 550-MHz Pentium III Xeon also equipped with 512 Kbytes of cache, but running at the full speed of the microprocessor. Meyer presented test results, displayed as a percentage of the Xeon's performance. Both chips were optimized for their respective instruction sets: Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) for Intel's chips, and the enhanced 3DNow! instruction set for AMD.
The two K7s produced processed integers 5% and 15% faster than the Xeon, using the SPECint benchmark. In floating point calculations, used extensively in multimedia applications -- an area where competitors have had difficulty keeping up with Intel -- the 550-MHz and 600-MHz K7 outperformed the Xeon by 35% and 40%, respectively, using the SPECfp measurement.
AMD also tested its parts using the 3DWinBench benchmark, the most clean-cut evaluation of multimedia performance. To set its chips directly against the competition, AMD substituted a 550-MHz Pentium III for the Xeon. According to AMD's results, however, both the 550- and 600-MHz K7 chips were at least 40% faster than the Pentium III.
Meyer revealed that AMD has enhanced the 3DNow! instruction set, similar to the improvements Intel made in designing its SSE instructions. Nineteen new Single-Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) instructions were added, allowing the K7 to process more data in a given amount of time. Those instructions will enhance the K7's integer and cache performance. Moreover, five new DSP extensions were added, allowing the K7 to more efficiently decode multimedia files like MP3 audio files, or do software processing of communications algorithms like ADSL, Meyer said.
Initially, the K7 will be supported only though chipsets from AMD itself, which has decided to concentrate solely upon designing single-processor chipsets for the chip's launch. Multiprocessor configurations are running in AMD's labs, Meyer said, and would be supported in the future. Chipsets will support PC100 and PC133 SDRAM, Direct Rambus DRAM, plus Double Data Rate (DDR) DRAM and DDR-2 DRAM in the future. AMD will ship a north bridge next year with DDR support, Meyer said.
The K7 will be supported by five motherboard vendors, Meyer said, including Asus, FIC, Biostar, and others.
Although the quality of AMD's designs have won the company praise, its labors in manufacturing sufficient quantities of useable product have been questioned. "I have every confidence that we'll able to produce the volumes required by the market," he said. "But the proof will be in the pudding."
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