Date: 06/18 19:16 EST
K7 Renews AMD Hope Of Challenging Intel
Jun 18, 1999 (Tech Web - CMP via COMTEX) -- Maybe it's because the
design team's leader and many of its members hail from Digital
Equipment's Alpha team, where technical derring-do prevailed. Maybe
it's the culture at Advanced Micro Devices, where nearly irrational
perseverance in the face of Intel's far larger resources is a way of
life. Or maybe it's the simple fact that people like an underdog -- and
a little price competition.
Whatever the reason, many say they are openly hoping that AMD's K7
processor, due to be formally unveiled later this month, will be a
blockbuster.
"The K7 will be a success; it will become AMD's bread and butter," said
Donny Chien, a manager at motherboard giant First International
Computer, in Taipei, Taiwan.
But analysts and battle-hardened competitors are less sanguine, warning
that even though the K7 processor itselfmay be a technical success,
creating the surrounding infrastructure to support the MPU could be a
challenging task, particularly in the commercial market.
The K7 is the company's most powerful and complex assault on Intel's
X86 juggernaut yet. The 120-person K7 team completed the design in 17
months, said Dirk Meyer, chief architect of the K7 and a veteran of MPU
designs at Intel and Digital Semiconductor. With 500-, 550- and 600-MHz
versions already being sampled to many personal computer OEMs, the K7
appears set to move into the real world. And AMD has a system bus,
licensed from Digital, which adds to the technical merits of the
processor.
At a recent dinner sponsored by MicroDesign Resources, in Sebastopol,
Calif., Meyer said that the K7 outperforms Intel's Pentium III in a
variety of benchmarks, and runs 40 percent faster on floating-point
tasks.
"We've had sample K7s along with reference boards since April," said an
engineer at a major Taiwan motherboard manufacturer, who asked not to
be identified. "Currently, we have both 550- and 600-MHz sample CPUs.
We are now on our fourth revision of K7 mainboards, and we expect to go
into mass production in August."
AMD and U.S. OEM customers have provided help to the Taiwanese in the
design of what is the first high-performance, non-Intel board in recent
history. "We are getting good support from both AMD and our OEM
customers in dealing with the new bus and CPU," said the engineer. "We
also have ex-Digital employees who are familiar with the EV6 bus
architecture. And we Taiwanese are no slouches when it comes to
mainboard design."
AMD's own Iron Gate chip set is now sampling, but third-party parts
have yet to show up for OEMs to test-drive, said an R&D manager at a
U.S. PC maker. When those chip sets emerge, it is believed all the
first-generation ones will support the existing mainstream PC-100
synchronous DRAM, later migrating to 133-MHz SDRAM. Acer Labs has
discussed plans for a highly integrated K7 chip set, aimed at low-cost
business PCs, but so far has not given OEMs spec sheets on the product.
In Taiwan, several core-logic design houses have alternatives to the
AMD core logic in the works. "We will sample a K7 core-logic product at
the end of June," said an executive at Via Technologies. "We will offer
a mass production product about two months later. We are definitely
working on it, but it is not our first priority."
A Pentium III chip set is, but that may change if Intel keeps turning
the thumbscrews on Taiwan's core-logic vendors. Intel recently forced
Via to withdraw samples of a PC133 chip.
Also, the K7 alternative emerges as Intel is pressuring OEMs to build
systems using the Direct Rambus memory architecture for the fourth
quarter -- traditionally the biggest selling quarter, thanks to both
Christmas buyers and commercial IT managers expending their year-end
budgets. However, Intel's Camino chip set, its first to support Rambus,
has been delayed and Intel has had to roll out a reduced-speed 600-MHz
version before it will be able to field a full-speed 800-MHz version.
"I have to do a Camino system to stay on Intel's good side and to
protect myself from competitors that will also have the design," said
one PC R&D manager. "As for K7, I need to have a program on the back
burner just in case it really takes off."
A marketing manager at the up-for-sale Cyrix division of National
Semiconductor said it is all too easy to underestimate what it takes to
launch an entire platform, with chip sets and motherboards that differ
from the mainstream Intel design. Not all of the Taiwanese companies
have the engineering depth required to design multiple chip sets and
motherboards, this source said.
An engineer at a U.S-based PC manufacturer said he believes the board
layout will be challenging, partly because of the faster EV6 bus.
Socket 370 For AMD? As attractive as the 200-MHz EV6 bus may be, with
its point-to-point connections and synchronous source clocking, it does
not have the volumes Intel's Socket 370 approach enjoys for the
consumer market. And that raises the question of whether AMD will try
to field a Socket 370 version of the K7, despite apparent legal
barriers.
AMD recently settled two historic legal disputes with Intel. One gave
it the right to make compatible X86 processors, but the other --
involving AMD's right to clone the MMX instruction set -- limited AMD's
ability to field parts that used the Pentium's P6 bus, and that could
plug into Intel-standard motherboards.
For the consumer market, Intel has turned to Socket 370, which is
electrically compatible with the P6 bus. Many expect that AMD will be
forced to put a Socket 370 part on the market, partly to take advantage
of the far larger volumes, and lower costs, associated with the Socket
370 infrastructure.
AMD's official position is that it has no need to do a slower P6-based
bus when it has a 200-MHz bus in hand. "Why would we want to go
backwards, to the P6 bus?" said an AMD executive.
Mike Feibus, a principal at Mercury Research, in Scottsdale, Ariz.,
said the EV6 bus "is out there and shipping ahead of the K7. It is a
proven bus. But there is no doubt that developing a Socket 370 version
of the K7 would be a smart thing to do. There doesn't seem to be any
design activity in that area that we know of, and it may be that AMD is
not willing to take a chance, given the two cross-licensing agreements
with Intel.
"They might go ahead and take a shot, and hope the Federal Trade
Commission backs them up. It would be a lot easier to sell a chip that
just plugs in [to a P6 motherboard]," Feibus said. "But the 'thou shalt
not' [in the Intel-AMD agreement] must be very strong."
Going in a different direction from Intel brings "risks as well as
rewards," Feibus said. But this time around, AMD is far from alone.
When Intel was forced to respond to the aggressive pricing of the K6
processor, many PC OEMs realized that keeping AMD healthy was to their
own advantage. Feibus recalled that in the first quarter of 1998,
Hewlett-Packard fielded a 200-MHz Pentium-based system to the consumer
market, while Compaq Computer put a 233-MHz-based K6 box on the market
at the same time. The Compaq machine won in the consumer market,
proving that "megahertz, not the brand of the processor, is the main
selling point. That had a profound effect," he said, "and I think some
PC OEMs will belly up to a similar challenge by taking the K7 into the
commercial space."
Meanwhile, one of AMD's partners, the Alpha Processor (API) subsidiary
of Samsung, will detail plans on Monday at PC Expo in New York to use
the core-logic AMD has built for its K7 in new low-cost motherboards
built around the Alpha 21264 processor. API will also tip word of an
upcoming merchant chip set, of its own design, that will support either
K7 or Alpha in single- and dual-processor servers that use a high-end,
133-MHz double-data-rate SDRAM memory subsystem.
"People take for granted the infrastructure Intel has created - the
sheer amount of technology they have put out that enhances their CPU
sales," said Gerry Talbot, chief technology officer for Alpha
Processor. "There are unique things like chip sets, cache interfaces,
and power supplies that we have to nurture together. AMD is our partner
in a big way."
API will roll out a Slot B processor-module interface in the next week
that is mechanically similar to Intel's Slot 2 server interface but
uses the K7/Alpha EV6 processor bus. The company also plans to launch
chip sets supporting K7 and Alpha for four- and eight-way servers a
year from now.
The API chip sets will sport a unique interconnect design that allows
users to plug multiple interfaces into their high-end memory subsystem,
opening a door for uses in high-end routers and switches where API is
already beginning to court design wins. That effort could ultimately
take both the Alpha and K7 chips into networking and telecom
territories.
API is not alone in laying a high-end path for the K7. Startup Poseidon
Technology, in San Jose, Calif., led by Apple and Exponential veteran
Rick Shriner, is developing eight-way multiprocessing chip sets for K7
due to ship by year's end.
The commercial market has long been a nonstarter for AMD, filled with
end users who played it safe with an Intel-only purchasing policy.
Hewlett-Packard, for example, canceled a line of AMD-based commercial
desktops more than two years ago when it found it faced an uphill
battle selling the machines to IT managers.
One manager said "AMD has never had a server chip before, so there's a
question hanging over them there," the PC engineer said. "And we always
have doubts about whether AMD can really manufacture their latest
processor in the volumes we need."
Indeed, the company's historic manufacturing problems, and questions of
whether AMD has the resources to keep its momentum going forward, hang
over the K7.
Keith Diefendorff, an analyst at MicroDesign Resources, noted that the
die size of the K7 is a relatively large 184 square millimeters at
0.25-micron process rules.
Despite the cost pressures in the consumer market, Intel has managed to
keep its overall average selling price relatively stable in recent
months. The ASP difference -- $227 for Intel's overall line of MPUs,
and only $78 for AMD -- means that Intel has plenty of financial
resources to pour into its upcoming Katmai and Willamette processors.
Feibus cited an equally daunting statistic from Mercury Research's
quarterly report on PC processors. In the fourth quarter of 1998, AMD
had 16.1 percent of the microprocessor market, but that fell to 13.6
percent as Intel lowered the prices on its Celeron and AMD's
manufacturing stumbled.
Will the K7 reverse that slide? Feibus said "the personal computer OEMs
see AMD as the last bastion of competition to Intel, and I think they
will support the K7 partly for that reason. For AMD, it's theirs to
lose."
Additional reporting by Mark Carroll and Rick Merritt
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Copyright (C) 1999 CMP Media Inc.
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