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

To: Kevin K. Spurway who wrote (42880)	12/6/1998 8:43:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572630

<And for some reason KNI will be exempt from this theoretical vs. real world law of performance difference? I doubt it.> I intentionally omitted KNI from the theoretical vs. real-world phenomenon. You are right, KNI will also suffer from this discrepancy. But then again, KNI features eight new 128-bit registers, while 3D-Now has to make do with aliased MMX registers. KNI also features more explicit cache-streaming instructions, while 3D-Now only has a single Prefetch instruction. Given the greater robustness of KNI, I would guess that KNI will come closer to the theoretical throughput than 3D-Now could ever achieve. <This has got to be one of the funnier things I've read on this thread. Are you kidding me? Believe me, without Microsoft/Windows support, there will be more PowerPC (or, for that matter, MIPS) chips sold than Merced chips.> My statement was just as outlandish as the suggestion that Microsoft can hurt KNI by intentionally delaying the release of DirectX 7.0. (Well, on second thought, maybe my statement was more outlandish, but hey, this is the AMD thread, where outlandish statements are par for the course.) Consider this. If Microsoft intentionally delays the release of DirectX 7.0 for KNI, they risk losing control over the software API as developers start writing their own in order to get the most out of KNI. And according to C-Net, Microsoft's control over software API is the key to their stranglehold on the software industry: news.com Tenchusatsu