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K7 Renews AMD Hope Of Challenging Intel
(06/18/99, 6:48 p.m. ET)
By David Lammers, EE Times
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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