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

To: Maxwell who wrote (36439)	8/28/1998 7:48:00 AM
From: gnuman	Respond to of 1572369

Japan PC prices head for $1000, 40% AMD based/(Japanese consumer PC's under $1400)http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,25802,00.html?st.ne.ni.pfv

To: Maxwell who wrote (36439)	8/28/1998 10:03:00 AM
From: Ali Chen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572369

Maxwell, [<You can assume that all it takes to port 3D-Now drivers over to KNI will be a recompile.> Sorry to disappoint you. It ain't that easy] I think Ten wanted to say that once a 3-D pipeline algorithms are properly structured for use of SIMD instructions like 3DNow!, is might be relatively easy to replace the 3DNow! opcodes with KNI later. Of course, "just recompile" is a big exaggeration on his part. Ten also mentioned that the KNI "will unarguably be better than 3D-Now." I think that any claims of superiority or inferiority should be measured against the range of applications the particular technology is targeting. Even more, from economical standpoint, some extra functionality may be not a plus whatsoever. The hypothetical ability of KNI to operate with double precision numbers is of no use for the 3-D transform engines. Therefore, the KNI "superiority" is very "arguable" under given economical constraints. Best regards, - Ali

To: Maxwell who wrote (36439)	8/28/1998 1:25:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572369

Exaggerated? You must be wishing. Go check out the 3D benchmark on AMD homepage. Well, I stand corrected, but not because of AMD's homepage, but because of Dr. Tom's tests. My original argument was that DirectX support alone isn't going to contribute a 50% performance increase. But it seems that 3D driver support will, and native support within the game itself will contribute even more. The next cool game out is Trespasser. It will show you why K6-2 is better than PII. Um, never heard of that game, and I'm a big games freak. Seems like Quake II and Unreal are better examples of K6-2's competitiveness. I haven't seen Unreal yet, but I was personally less than impressed with Quake II's graphics. KNI will probably end up as a dead bead just like MMX. Care to put money on that? It can be assumed that KNI will support single-precision SIMD just like 3D-Now. As for MMX being a dead bead, it's funny how AMD and Cyrix both chose to support MMX in their latest processors, eh? Whether or not you think MMX does any good is irrelevant. In fact, it shows just how well Intel can market such a technology which isn't as useful as it originally seemed. Imagine how well Intel can market MMX2 whose usefulness far outshines MMX. In semiconductor, life and death is depended on the yield and die size. And you think AMD has a better yield than Intel? But to be fair, AMD's yields will likely be more than half that of Intel's. Like I said before, AMD doesn't enjoy the economies of scale that Intel does, so it needs that smaller die size. How many installed units must there be for you to consider critical mass? Enough to overcome the marketing muscle of Intel. At the very worst, we'll have a standards war, where each company will be pushing their instruction set as the standard, much like a VHS vs. Beta war. AMD has the headstart, but Intel has the sheer size. It will be an interesting race, but either way, it's kind of dumb to assume that KNI will just wither away. [useless "Intel sucks" drivel snipped] Tenchusatsu