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

To: Scumbria who wrote (45556)	1/12/1999 2:02:00 AM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573433

Scumbria - Re: " Celery is a pretty lightweight handicap. I think they might shake this one off " For a lightweight Handicap, the Celery is sure putting the SCREWS to AMD ! Celery outsold the K6-2 last quarter - 8 Million to 4.5 or 5.5 million. Celery dropped AMD's 400 MHz flagship K6-2 from $254 to $153 in just a few weeks. The Celery outperforms AMD's fastest K6-2's in most benchmarks. Of course - AMD will attempt to counter this with an "authorized" overclocked/overvoltaged K6-2. Paul

To: Scumbria who wrote (45556)	1/12/1999 2:36:00 AM
From: Petz	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1573433

Maximum PC Mag 2/99 issue: "A Chip Called Katmai - Intel's 3D CPU doesn't reach its full potential" "KNI Vs. 3DNow! Inevitably, people will compare KNI to 3DNow! The competing extensions have three things in common: ~ Both speed up 3D graphics and multimedia by using a technique called SIMD... ~ Both extensions focus on floating-point data -- specifically the single-precision (32 bit) floating point that's so critical for 3D. This is an important distinction from MMX, an earlier extension that speeds up integer processing. ~ Both extensions do nothing unless you're running optimized software. For KNI, this means either an optimized version of DirecX (6.1 or later), optimized videocard drivers, or, in a best-case scenario, optimized game or application code. Although Maximum PC hasn't benchmarked a Katmai system with final drivers yet, on paper it appears KNI is technically superior to 3DNow! KNI's 70 instructions are much more comprehensive than 3DNow!'s 21 instructions, and KNI registers are twice as wide as 3DNow!'s." "Notice that we say that KNI is technically superior to 3DNow!. In practice, it's a different story. The Katmai CPU doesn't fully exploit the potential of the KNI extensions. To take full advantage of KNI, Intel would have to redesign the CPU's floating-point unit (FPU) to double the width of its pipelines [to 128 bits], and that would delay the chip's debut. So Intel compromised: Katmai has the same FPU as any other P6 chip and uses only half the capacity of KNI." [an oversimplification, but essentially true] ..."A critical part of 3D is a mathematical process known as geometry transformatioin, which requires a CPU to multiply and add thousands of numbers. At identical clock speeds (say, 500 MHz) Katmai and a K6-2, K6-3, or K7 [not true, the K7 has two 64 bit pipelines] will crunch those numbers at the same rate." The article then explains that the OS must be modified to save the new wide registers on every context switch... "Stay posted for information on which OSes fully support KNI's new registers." ..."All told, Katmia is a worthy addition to the P6 family, and KNI opens the door to even greater performance in the future. Let's just hope software developers embrace KNI as they did 3DNow! -- not the way they did MMX. --Tom R. Halfhill"