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

To: Scumbria who wrote (64600)	7/9/1999 11:46:00 PM
From: fyo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583879

Thread, Tim Sweeney, another major player in the 3D gaming industry (programmer/Unreal) makes some interesting comments as to the performance of his new Athlon 550: unreal.epicgames.com -------------------------------------- The AMD Athlon Rocks! My new 550 MHz AMD Athlon (K7) just clocked a jaw-dropping 68.5 Unreal timedemo at 1024x768, running on a Voodoo3 3000 card. Even more telling, at no point did the frame rate ever drop below 38.0 fps. That's astounding, considering the intense lightmap and geometry usage in the timedemo level. Even while playing Unreal Tournament's most texture and polygon intensive level (Shane Caudle's DmGothic), the frame rate hardly ever went below 60 fps. The Athlon's 128K L1 cache is awesome for memory-intensive games like Unreal. Operations like visibility determination, which thrash on the Pentium III's 32K cache, now run at full speed on the Athlon. This CPU truly shows a generational performance improvement, like going from my old 486 to my first Pentium. When I saw AMD's K7 spec, I was pretty skeptical. The K6 had been hyped up, but in reality it was slower for Unreal than a Pentium II of comparable clock rate, due to its poor non-SIMD floating point performance. The K7 claimed to fix all of that, and debut a new architecture with 3 execution pipelines. I decided to wait and see, without getting my hopes up. Bottom line: I waited, and now I have seen! The Athlon is clearly the fastest x86 CPU at any clock speed. Congratulations go to AMD. My wish list: - I want to be able to buy dual-processor Athlon workstations from major manufacturers like Dell and Gateway. - I want MMX, 3DNow! and SSE code generation support in Visual C++, with native SIMD C/C++ datatypes like float2, float4, and short4, making the compiler manage all register allocation and code generation. - I want one of these! 8-) [ed: link to Kryotech 1GHz Athlon] -Tim

To: Scumbria who wrote (64600)	7/10/1999 12:16:00 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1583879

Scumbria Gamers clearly like the K7 and its speed. Do you know what is the size of this portion of the chip business? Would sales to this group be equal to say 20% of total PC chips sales? The demographics may not exist or be broken down into this kind of detail but I thought I would ask anyway. ted