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

To: Elmer who wrote (47758)	1/29/1999 12:23:00 AM
From: RDM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1571433

Won't a 1 GHz require 2.5 times the bus bandwidth to scale directly from the 400 Mhz case? It seems to me that you may be waiving your hands just a little in stating that 133 Mhz is fast enough for 800 Mhz? No K7 is here yet but it would be outrageous to not consider this problem. The timelines for these speeds are not far off. I am afraid that I do not think that 2MB at 133 Mhz is all that anyone needs for bandwidth. You can never: 1. be too thin 2. be too rich 3. have too much cache 4. have too much bus bandwidth A response might be that bus bandwidth is expensive and will cost too much. I think that you do make a good point about the cost of the K7 bus approach in multiprocessor applications may be a disadvantage. However, if the competition is $2000 Xeon chips I bet the cost of any extra pins my not seem so expensive. My sense is that the K7 will be a $500-1000 chip for the higher performance parts. Thus the pin costs of support chips may not be significant. The 200-400 Mhz speed of the Alpha bus sounds good to me. I think, Intel appologists aside, that it doesn't hurt to have this enormous bug speed. There may be some question as to whether dynamic RAM is available that fast enough to effectively utilize the speed.