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

To: fyo who wrote (66184)	7/20/1999 9:18:00 AM
From: Ali Chen	Respond to of 1578510

Fyo, <What I meant to ask, was what kind of performance hit one could expect> We all understand your question, from the very beginning. I was just goofing around a bit. Seriously, you are assuming that there could be a hypothetical 800MHz - 1GHz "full speed" SRAM on K7, but AMD would rather use a DDR. First, the 1-ns "true" SRAM is not going to happen soon, if ever. And certainly not for free. And AMD has currently no resources (and no intentions) to waste their fabs on SRAM. Second, there is no need to. Especially for a monster like K7 with all speculative and out-of-order execution. As you might remember, AMD K7 has a programmable option to run the L2 cache at 1/2, 1/3,1/4...etc. of the core speed. I would guess they did figure this out fairly quickly as what impact has the L2 cache speed on their design. Third, even with 1/2 cache to core speed, K7 outperforms Xeons at the same core frequency, so - why bother? Fourth, if someone will mass-produce the "true-speed" SRAM of 0.8-1GHz grades at reasonable prices, AMD would have no difficulty accomodating it into Athlon (-II, -III, ... :) cards. Of course, Intel has to push further their proprietary SRAM because they have no other options with "underpowered 4-cylinder" PPro design to attain AMD-level of performance.