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

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (47589)1/27/1999 5:21:00 PM
From: Kevin K. Spurway  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1581332
 
Re: "Then what benefit will 3DNow provide for the K7, considering that the K7 will have three separate FPU execution units?"

My guess is not much. Just like KNI for the PII, I'd imagine, but with even a smaller benefit. Unless AMD pipelines it, of course. But I don't think they'll bother.

It does appear that KNI has been designed to scale better when set against a powerful FPU than 3DNow. Of course, the tradeoff is that it's harder to patch software to effectively support KNI. I expect that a future version of K7 will support KNI as well as 3dNow, once there is some real KNI-enhanced software out there (maybe 18-24 months from now).

Kevin



To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (47589)1/27/1999 5:45:00 PM
From: Petz  Respond to of 1581332
 
>>>what benefit will 3DNow provide for the K7, considering that the K7 will have three separate FPU execution units?<<< good question
1. one of the K7's FPU execution units is load/store only
2. the peak mflops rate for 3DNOW single precision will still be double the raw FPU max, which presumably is 2 flops/cycle.
3. the single precision 3DNow instructions have lower latency than the FPU, allowing much faster operation for recursive computations

Petz


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