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

To: wily who wrote (51708)	3/5/1999 7:27:00 AM
From: Bruce A. Thompson	Respond to of 1572888

AMD EUROPE $18.53 <eom>

To: wily who wrote (51708)	3/5/1999 10:58:00 AM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572888

wily, the K7 was designed as a "short-tick" processor, unlike many processors until recently, and also that the K7 has an unusually low number of gates (12-14) in critical paths that need to execute in one clock. Can anyone who actually has experience designing high-speed ICs write back and tell me how this might affect things? I have no idea what a "short-tick" processor is. The number of gates in the critical path is the most important design factor in determining clock speed. It is simply a measure of the largest amount of logic traversed in a single clock cycle. If K7 really has a 14 gate critical path, it should scale to 1GHz in a .18 process rather nicely. Scumbria

To: wily who wrote (51708)	3/5/1999 7:43:00 PM
From: wily	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572888

A few interesting items from ars technica: ars-technica.com Linux to get better support than a high school athlete's crotch Corporate respect for Linux probably jumped a number of notches yesterday with two surprising announcements: First of all, IBM officially pledged to provide "complete solutions of hardware, software and technical support for Linux"! Read their official announcement. Then, Corel announced that they plan to not only support Linux in their applications, but also to release their own Linux distribution! Wonder what Red Hat thinks of that second announcement? -Ator **************************** PlayStation mania [Updated 4:30 EST] I'm definitely not a console gamer--I do all my gaming solely on the PC--but I ran across an EETimes article on the upcoming PlayStation II that really blew me away. Dig this juicy bit: The Playstation II's CPU, jointly developed by Toshiba and SCE, is an enhanced version of the device described at ISSCC. The device has floating-point performance of 6.2 Gflops and a bus bandwidth of 3.2 Gbytes per second that's achieved through the use of Direct Rambus DRAM in two channels. Running at 300 MHz, SCE said the CPU's performance surpasses that of any personal computer. People, 6.2 gigaflop floating-point performance is faster than what Merced is expected to deliver. Needless to say, my interest was thoroughly piqued. While I was reading this, I spotted Caesar on ICQ. I ICQ'd him and mentioned it that I was going to do a news blurb on the PlayStation II, and he replied that he had some anonymous info on it from a guy at Sony that had been sitting in his inbox for a few days. (He stays behind on his mail.) He sent the docs over to me, and when I got them, I was really blown away. This little box is going to spank the @#$% out more than just Merced--it could really affect the entire PC gaming industry. The docs we got from this person are chock full of specs-graphs, benchmarks, die sizes, core voltages, cache sizes, memory bandwidth, transistor count, fill rates, and everything else you'd ever want to know. So we're posting them for you to dig on. I haven't seen some of this info anywhere else, so even if you think you've seen it all, it pays to check these out. [Update: Our source asked to be anonymous because this info was only officially released to Europe and Japan (not yet in the US), and not because these documents were "leaked." We've also been informed that this info is available sites as well...but you guys still think we're special, right?] Here they are: -I/O capabilities -Graphics synthesizer -CPU -Press release ***************** K7 Preview Reviewed: "A swanky K7 preview ..can be found at Storm3D.com. This preview is a nice collection of AMD K7 information and specifications, and the author does good job of addressing issues of scaling in the competing sixth-gen designs the K7 is likely to trounce. -Damage" *************** (This is kind of old) Merced milestone According to this EETimes article, Intel has reached an in important milestone in the development of Merced by getting Unix up and running on a software simulation of a four-processor Merced system. Supposedly this means Intel can start sending samples to OEMs by mid-year. The EETimes mentioned that there are seven other operating systems up and running on this simulation, and that Linux should be cooking on it soon. The article also gives a peek at possible Merced performance by saying that Intel is claiming 3 Gflops extended-precision floating-point performance and 6 Gflops single-precision floating point performance. While these numbers are impressive, I wouldn't get too excited just yet. Like I said in my recent IA-64 preview, Merced won't get here for a while, and when it does it's going to cost some serious $$$$. By the time you can afford this bad-boy, you'll have already upgraded at least once, if not twice. Thanks to Spiderius for the link. -Hellazon