To: Brian Hutcheson who wrote (2918 ) 12/16/1997 6:20:00 PM From: Petz Read Replies (2) | Respond to
Summary of Interview with Atiq Raza (AMD Chief Technology Officer), BOOT magazine, January '98AMD's multimedia assassin says don't believe Intel's hype Its an extension of single instruction/multiple data, which is required to deal with things like picture composition forom its elemental triangular building blocks, the creation of lighing effects, the creation of 3D effects and textures in a picture. (translation: no context switching overhead, rather, parallel operation between regular instructions, MMX instructions and 3D extensions) Well, there are several kinds of 3D accelerators. Some accelerate geometry. Some accelerate rendering or set up. We still need the rendering and the set-up function because that is the process of the virtual dots in the frame buffer. That process is most appropriate as close to the frame buffer as possible, and that's where the accelerators are going to excel. Take a Pentium II today -- which is a pretty damn good system -- and compare it with a K6-3D, you will see performance improvement between 50% and as much as four to six times with the AMD part. Strictly the processor level. I do not have an exact number. My expectation is that it would perform as well as 3Dfx, potentially better. Or better. (note, a review of the P2-300 Compaq Presario 4850 in the same issue shows a frame rate of 24.5 using integrated ATI Rage Pro AGP graphics.)Yes. We are being rather aggressive about making sure their graphics algorithms used in Immediate Mode are optimized.defining our product. This product wasn't defined in a vacuum. The 1st time we defined it, we went to the game guys -- they threw us out! So we started all over again and took all the things they said were wrong, incorporated them, then looked around again. It took about three rounds before they started saying, "We like this. We want this." ...I can't give information that is not shared across the industry. No, we're doing a whole lot better than that. Expect K6-3D in volume in the first half of the year. Expect a wider smapling in early second quarter, late first quarter of the year. You should also expect a new version of the K6-3D with on-chip Level 2 cache (K6+3D), which will be a one-chip alternative to the entire Intel module, allowing the bus to run extremely fast.
