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

To: Petz who wrote (32757)	5/21/1998 7:11:00 PM
From: Maverick	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571811

The split in the instruction-set architecture that will occur this year is unprecedented, however. Whereas competitors had followed closely in Intel's footsteps, AMD, Cyrix, and IDT all plan to introduce processors with instruction set extensions designed to speed up 3-D geometry and lighting calculations. All three chip makers had initially planned to implement their own proprietary extensions but have now agreed on a common standard. Intel will introduce its own 3-D instruction set extensions in 1999 as part of the processor code-named Katmai. In the meantime, competitors will have their biggest feature advantage ever over Intel. But this advantage will benefit users who care only about certain high-end 3-D games. After Intel discloses the Katmai new instructions, competitors will race to include Intel's instructions in their chips. The non-Intel extensions may persist as an option, but their use is likely to be relatively short-lived. Still, supporting both may be relatively easy, depending on market share at the time. Several PC microprocessor makers will introduce another round of processors in 1999. Intel's Katmai will be based on the Deschutes CPU core but will add the Katmai new instructions and probably have larger on-chip Level 1 caches. Others, such as the AMD K7 and the Cyrix Jalapeo, will be entirely new CPUs. AMD's K7 will depart from the Intel-defined buses, using neither the Socket 7 bus nor the Slot 1 bus. Instead, the company plans to use a bus design licensed from Digital Equipment Corp. that was originally created for the 21264 Alpha processor. AMD plans to use the same physical module size and connector as Intel's Slot 1, minimizing the mechanical changes, but the signals on the connector will be different. AMD calls this design "Slot A." Although the Alpha bus is fast and appears to be a good technical solution, it will present a new challenge for AMD. For the first time, AMD will not be riding on the infrastructure created for Intel processors; chip sets and motherboards will have to be created explicitly for the K7. In October 1997, Cyrix revealed the internal architecture of its next processor core, code-named Cayenne. With 15 new multimedia floating-point instructions, Cayenne will enable high-performance 3-D graphics, DVD, and 3-D audio. Processors based on this core should start production during the second half of this year, with the PR300 (performance rating comparable to an Intel Pentium II/300).By PC Week.