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To: Paul Engel who wrote (5779)	4/25/1998 2:29:00 AM
From: Yousef	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6843

Paul, Re: "I'm sure prospective K6-3D buyers are JUST DYING to buy a K6-3D with a crippled 66 MHz board so that they can open up their systems at a later date ..." This seems like a scenario for disaster ... This article posted by Francis: news.com Points out the same issues --> "New AMD chip to wait for fast bus The K6 3D processor, Advanced Micro Devices' next great hope for market share, will debut at the E3 conference May 28, but the chip's full potential may be delayed because of part problems ... The K6 3D--which will be introduced at speeds of 266 MHz and 300 MHz ... The Aladdin 5 chipset from Acer Laboratories, which will house the 100-MHz bus, is still not complete and won't be available for "a month or two," said a source at that company. This likely means motherboards with the Aladdin 5 won't come out until the third quarter. A chipset works in tandem with the main processor and incorporates many of the critical functions related to the bus. Motherboards using the 100-MHz chipset from Via Technologies will be available, but the chipset needs "another turn of silicon" before it will be commercially viable, said Kumar." The K6-3D will only be available (initially) at 266mhz and 300mhz and the 100mhz bus isn't ready to go. AMD isn't getting much for their .25um investment. Make It So, Yousef

To: Paul Engel who wrote (5779)	4/27/1998 12:13:00 AM
From: Adrian Wu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6843

Paul: Re <And I'm sure prospective K6-3D buyers are JUST DYING to buy a K6-3D with a crippled 66 MHz board so that they can open up their systems at a later date, pull out the motherboard, unplug the K6-3D, and THROW THE MOTHERBOARD AND MEMORY away and spend another $100 on a brand new Motherboard, stick the K6-3D chip in it, and pray to the Almighty Above that the system works when it is reassembled and powered up.> First of all, the K6-3D will be priced to compete against the PII-300 and PII-333, and both chips use the 66MHz bus. Talking about upgrading; those poor souls who paid BIG BUCKs on a PII-233 system when it was first released now have to throw away their motherboard, RAM and processor in order to upgrade to a PII-350 or 400. And the fact is, the 100MHz system bus doesn't make much of a difference in a PII system since the L2 cache runs at 1/2 processor speed anyway. However, there is No Way these poor people can run those processors at full speed using their FX or LX boards, although some of those boards have clock multipliers going as high as 8x. Isn't this wicked? Why force consumers to buy brand new motherboards and memory when the actual performance difference is negligible? (Check out the objective tests at Tom's Hardware. In fact, a Klamath is slightly faster than a Deschutes at the same bus speed/clock speed). And what about those poor souls who can't afford a PII-350 now but settles for a PII-300 or 266? And looking beyond the PII-400, will there be any worthwhile upgrade for those BX boards? Intel is now talking about 200MHz SDRAM and Slot 2. The currently slot 1 will probably go as high as 500MHz, and that's it. The BX chipset doesn't even support DDR-SDRAM (SDRAMII), but the mVP3 does. You see, the BX boards are not designed to be upgraded, an Intel plot to make people keep buying their ridiculously high-priced logic chipsets. As for the K6-3D with the mVP3 chipset, you can choose the speed of the L2 cache and the memory bus separately. This means you DON"T HAVE TO THROW AWAY YOUR OLD RAM. Simply buy a new motherboard and new processor, plug in you old 66MHz SDRAM and it works. Better still, with 1024kB of L2 cache, the performance difference between standard SDRAM and PC100 SDRAM is only a few percentage points (akin to the EDO to SDRAM upgrade in the early days). Some of the later Pentium motherboards can also accomodate the K6-3D, so you can throw away the old K6-200 and run the k6-3D until you have the money to buy a 100MHz motherboard, and then upgrade your RAM even later. This makes more sense.