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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (36692)	9/3/1998 12:30:00 AM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571177

Engel, To: Maxwell (36687 ) From: Paul Engel Thursday, Sep 3 1998 12:16AM ET Reply # of 36694 Maxwell - Re: " Intel better release their 500MHz by February or else AMD will be at par with Intel and drive Intel out of business by selling the 450MHz for $200. " You are neglecting a VERY IMPORTANT TECHNICAL DETAIL ! Without the K6-3, AMD's K6 and K6-2 will not get commensurate system speed improvements as their internal CPU clock speed increases - BECAUSE THE EXTERNAL L2 CACHE IS DEADLOCKED at a FIXED 100 MHz !" A very good point! One we have already discussed. But remember that MHz sells...the first thing Joe consumer looks at when buying a computer is MHz...In the past Intel has jacked up MHz without much of an increase in speed and sold this for a premium. AMD will do the same thing. Jim

To: Paul Engel who wrote (36692)	9/3/1998 2:24:00 AM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1571177

Paul 'n all: Without the K6-3, AMD's K6 and K6-2 will not get commensurate system speed improvements as their internal CPU clock speed increases - BECAUSE THE EXTERNAL L2 CACHE IS DEADLOCKED at a FIXED 100 MHz ! Good point. Very good point. AMD isn't just developing Sharptooth because they think on-chip cache is hip. They practically need it in order to get any meaningful performance benefits above 350 MHz. The timing of Sharptooth's release is very key, since Intel is as usual a moving target. My estimates (and OEM estimates, I think) is that a Sharptooth will be the equivalent of a Pentium II which is 50 MHz faster, i.e. a 400 MHz Sharptooth will be equal in performance to the 450 MHz Pentium II. I forgot what the initial speed of Sharptooth will be, but if they can release it at 450 MHz, Intel may have some serious problems in Q1 1999. Kind of makes you wonder whether AMD will go back to that PR rating again if Sharptooth is indeed faster than an equivalently-clocked Pentium II. But of course, if you listened to Jim's words, "People don't care about performance; they care about MHz!" (quote taken severely out of context.) On the other hand, it's not like Intel is sitting on its hands or anything. Just recently, Microprocessor Report said this about the "whirlwind development effort" of Mendocino, "Originally expected to ship late this year, the product was pulled into an August release. Although most processors take two or three tries before they can be shipped, the first silicon of Mendocino was so clean that Intel is using it to begin volume shipments." Wow. Tenchusatsu

To: Paul Engel who wrote (36692)	9/3/1998 7:08:00 AM
From: Maxwell	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1571177

Dr. Engel: <<Without the K6-3, AMD's K6 and K6-2 will not get commensurate system speed improvements as their internal CPU clock speed increases - BECAUSE THE EXTERNAL L2 CACHE IS DEADLOCKED at a FIXED 100 MHz !>> What you said is very true and that is the advantage of the PII over the K6-2. However the K6-2 3DNow! FPU will SCALES BETTER at higher frequency than the PII when it comes to FPU 3D graphic rendering. K6-2 is capable of 4FLOPS per clock cycle. At 400MHz K6-2 will do 1.6GFLOPs peak versus 0.4GLOPs peak for PII. Although you may never see a K6-2 outrun the PII at the theoretically rate, you can however write game softwares that add MORE REALISM to it. The K6-2 will do very well compared to the PII. The bottom line is that softwares that utilize heavy in the cache will be faster in the PII and softwares that do 3D rendering and special effects using 3DNow will be faster on the K6-2. <<And, since Intel's Mendocino Celeron is out in FULL PRODUCTION, it's internal L2 cache tracks at FULL CPU SPEED - 300 MHz or 333 MHz for the L2 cache - same as the CPU clock speed.>> Intel never wanted to take this path this quickly. It will take 2 Megafabs fully ramp from Intel to produce what AMD is pumping out. From what I heard there is a shortage of CeleronA. Thus Intel is not fully ramped or production is not fully meeting demand. Ouch! <<Too bad AMD is delaying the Sharptooth (K6-3) introduction until early 1999 - the K6-2 will continue to suffer and not benefit much from any clock speed improvements.>> I am glad that AMD delayed the K6-3. Producing the K6-3 is a losing proposition. AMD has only 1 fab and if AMD eats Intel bait of producing the K6-3 AMD will lose the market share very quickly due to the K6-3 large die size. The reason people are using AMD is because of price advantage. It will be difficult for AMD to charge OEMs an ASP of $200+. Had AMD produced K6-3 they would have killed the K6-2 sales and probably get an ASP of less than the CeleronA. AMD POSITIONED the K6-2 of 80mm^2 to compete with both the CeleronA and PII and so far it is doing an excellent job in the retail market. Upcoming 3DNow! games will reinforced 3DNow! FPU as the superior architecture to Intel slot 1. That is a COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE in this competitive market. Maxwell