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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (37220)	9/19/1998 7:22:00 PM
From: Maverick	Respond to of 1571903

SUN uses AMD chip to give PC capability on SUN workstations & servers MCNEALY: No. We have a PCI add-on board with an [Advanced Micro Devices Inc.] chip to give you PC capabilities on our workstations and servers. We think the world needs a company that's not doing an Intel [Corp.] and Microsoft computer. There are better answers than just Wintel at every step along the way. I suppose there's a time and a place for a Wintel machine-we're trying to figure out where and when. We will do NT when Microsoft does Solaris, and we will do Intel when Intel does SPARC-maybe. dailynews.yahoo.com

To: Paul Engel who wrote (37220)	9/19/1998 7:29:00 PM
From: Maverick	Respond to of 1571903

AMD unveils telecom chip set Sunnyvale, Calif. - A family of semiconductor products for the telecommunications infrastructure industry has been introduced by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The AQSLAC/ HVASLIC advanced linecard chip set is the first in a proposed family of next-generation semiconductors designed to help lower the costs of provisioning and servicing subscriber lines. It implements a four-channel universal telephone-line interface and integrates test, monitoring and ringing functions, eliminating the need for external hardware to handle those tasks. The AQSLAC (Am79Q224x) is available in PLCC and TQFP packages. The HVASLIC (Am79R2xx) comes in a PLCC. Per-line pricing starts at $9.30 in 10,000-unit quantities.

To: Paul Engel who wrote (37220)	9/19/1998 7:32:00 PM
From: Maverick	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571903

AMD will introduce a new K6 for under-$2,000 mobile computing/notebook AMD turns crank on K6 MPU Advanced Micro Devices tomorrow will introduce a new member of the K6 processor family for mobile computers. It will create new business for AMD in the under-$2,000 mobile computing/notebook market. Piper Jaffray analyst Ashok Kumar said AMD has a design win with Compaq, which he said is significant because notebook wins have a longer shelf life than design wins for desktops. techweb.com

To: Paul Engel who wrote (37220)	9/19/1998 7:49:00 PM
From: Maverick	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571903

3DNoW! outperforms MMX Floating Point SIMD vs. Brute FPU Power AMD saw this development taking place already a year ago, when they decided to improve the K6 CPU by specifically increasing the 3D performance. Whilst Pentium II CPUs are taking their great 3D performance from their brute FPU power, AMD decided to go a more elegant way of approaching 3D performance. The FPU of a CPU can do an amazing amount of complicated floating point calculations, but for 3D games only some of the FPU calculations are needed. Picking these special '3D' calculations and enabling the CPU to do them on several single numbers at the same time was what AMD did. Grabbing and then processing several data packets at the same time is called 'SIMD' or 'single instruction multiple data'. This does not say that only one instruction is needed to work on multiple data, but this means that you do this instruction on multiple data of the same sort at the same time. 3D processing and rendering is using an incredible number of matrix operations. Huge amounts of data has to be processed all the same, usually done one after the other. SIMD can improve this significantly, because grabbing for example, four words and processing them at the same time is obviously faster than grabbing one word four times. The first time SIMD was implemented into a x86 CPU was when the Pentium w/MMX was released. Intel did a lot of work convincing us that MMX would accelerate any kind of multi media, including 3D. Today Intel admits that MMX is mainly good for image processing, MMX2 or 'KNI'='Katmai New Instructions' is supposed to change that significantly though. The difference of the K6-2's new instruction set '3DNow!' and what we know from MMx already is that '3DNow!' as well as KNI are able to do SIMD with floating point numbers (MMX could do this only with integers). Here's where the 3D acceleration takes place. If anyone wants to take advantage of the new K6-2 and 3DNow!, there are three possible options on how that can be done. Either the 3D game is taking advantage of DirectX 6 by using the geometry engine of Direct3D 6, or the game has got its own geometry engine which is using 3DNow! directly. Games that are only written for DirectX 5 or which don't use 3DNow! in their own engine will show only small or no improvements at all with the K6-2. The third option is a 3D chip/card driver that is optimized for 3DNow!. NVIDIA is the first 3D chip manufacturer who supplies a special driver for 3DNow!. It would be sensible to assume that AMD prefers game developers to use 3DNow! directly in their games, but if this should not be an option, it's still of advantage if the game is at least programmed for DirectX 6. It will be up to us consumers to push 3D chip makers into providing drivers that are optimized for 3DNow!. 3Dfx has announced that it supported 3DNow! from www.tomshardware.com

To: Paul Engel who wrote (37220)	9/20/1998 10:46:00 AM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571903

Compared to Barrett, Halla is a kindergarten kid. Paul, I made a gracious comment about Barrett's leadership, and you came back with a nasty comment about Halla. Very typical. The verdict on Halla is still about a year away. He leads a company which specializes in commodity products, and he is attempting to commoditize the computer. If he can deliver a complete CPU+motherboard on a chip for under $100, the $300 PC will become a reality. Time will tell. Scumbria