At WinHEC, AMD demonstrated a 600MHz K7 with a 200MHz memory bus, along with a chip set of its own design.
Intel, AMD girding for high-end CPU duel
By John G. Spooner, PC Week Online
April 19, 1999 9:00 AM ET
IT managers evaluating new high-end desktop PCs will soon have a new feature: choice.
At Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference two weeks ago, Intel Corp. walked hardware vendors through its vision of the next performance desktop, while Advanced Micro Devices Inc. demonstrated its forthcoming K7 CPU, including a 600MHz version.
By September, OEMs will be shipping PCs with a 500MHz or faster Pentium III chip, a four-speed Accelerated Graphics Port and Rambus Direct RAM, which requires Intel's forthcoming 820 chip set with a 133MHz front-side bus. The PCs also will feature a hard drive that supports ATA66, a recently introduced disk drive interface that transfers 66MB per second, according to Pat Gelsinger, vice president and general manager of Intel's Desktop Products Group, in Santa Clara, Calif.
Intel plans to deliver 550MHz Pentium IIIs this quarter and 600MHz and faster Pentium IIIs in the second half, company officials said.
The faster processor speeds are inevitable, but some of the new complementary technologies, such as Rambus Direct RAM, may do more to loosen some of the performance bottlenecks associated with PC memory and graphics performance.
Challenging Intel
AMD plans to challenge Intel on the high end with its new K7 chip, due in June. The K7 will come in a cartridge-style package called slot A, begin at 500MHz and support 512KB to 8MB of Level 2 cache, AMD officials said. It will use the EV6 system bus, licensed from Digital Equipment Corp., which comes in 200MHz and faster memory bandwidth.
At WinHEC, AMD demonstrated a 600MHz K7 with a 200MHz memory bus, along with a chip set of its own design.
The success of the K7 chip will hinge on whether it is adopted by brand-name PC makers for business systems.
"It's definitely our target to be in those business SKUs [stock-keeping units] from those top-tier OEMs," said Byran Longmire, product marketing manager for AMD.
AMD plans to build a family of K7 chips, including server chips, that would support multiprocessing, as well as mobile device chips.
AMD officials would not say when K7 will be available for use in servers; however, a mobile version of the chip will be available after AMD starts using an 0.18-micron manufacturing process early next year. In addition, the company plans a shift from aluminum to copper for interconnections in the middle of next year.
While AMD expects to contend for the high end this summer, National Semiconductor Corp.'s Cyrix division is working to reinforce its position in the sub-$1,000 PC market.
The chip maker is boosting speeds for its MII chip. A 366MHz MII is due in the next few weeks, said Ajay Misra, senior marketing manager for Cyrix's stand-alone processors. Misra added that the company also will ship versions of its MII processor at 400MHz and 433MHz this quarter and at 466MHz in the fourth quarter.
"Our goal is to have a competitive position in the sub-$1,000, even sub-$800, market," Misra said.
Intel can be reached at (800) 628-8686 or www.intel.com. AMD, in Sunnyvale, Calif., is at (800) 538-8450 or www.amd.com. Cyrix, in Richardson, Texas, is at (800) 340-7501 or www.cyrix.com.
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