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

To: Maxwell who wrote (42962)	12/8/1998 12:49:00 AM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572502

Maxwell - Re: "And you think going from Pentium to PentiumPro to Pentium II to Katmai is a breakthrough? Experts weren't impressed. " 100,000,000 customers were impressed. Those are the EXPERTS that count - the ones that pony up their money for CPUs. Paul

To: Maxwell who wrote (42962)	12/8/1998 1:05:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572502

<And you think going from Pentium to PentiumPro to Pentium II to Katmai is a breakthrough?> The transition from Pentium to Pentium Pro is a breakthrough. Out of order execution, register renaming, backside L2 cache, three-issue superscalar design, 12-stage pipeline, GTL+ processor bus, etc., etc. All these are features not present in the Pentium, and all of them helped contribute to a 30% increase in speed at the same clock speed for 32-bit applications. Its weakness, however, was 16-bit apps, which was addressed by core changes within the Pentium II. Meanwhile, I still don't see anything different in the K7 over the P6, except for the 3D-Now instructions, the Slot A EV6 bus, and a symmetric (as opposed to asymmetric) three-issue decoder. In effect, the K7 is more like a P6 plus. That's still enough to leapfrog Intel, given that AMD can match Intel's frequencies, but it's not what I call 7th generation technology. Meanwhile, Intel is working on some wacko technologies for the Willamette processor. One such technology was already mentioned, an instruction trace cache. I must admit that I don't know how an ITC will benefit x86 code, but I'm willing to guess that the K8 team will be looking at it very closely, among other things. Tenchusatsu