Slashdot Mirror
AMD Interview
Brandon Bell
writes "As a follow-up to our K7 Preview we've just
conducted an interview with AMD. Topics discussed include
the K7, 3DNow!, overclocking, and AMD's future plans. "
Its mostly marketroid stuff, but there are a few bits worth
reading.
Looks like the FSB is going to actually be around 100MHz vs. 200MHz. The 200MHz bus people talk about is to chipset and other processors. This will certainly improve the efficiency of dual processor systems, but the motherboard still connects to the RAM at ~100MHz and the PCI bus at 33 or 66MHz. One thing i am wondering about is overclocking the motherboard bus speed. If you OC the memory bus to 133, this will also affect the PCI bus, OCing it to either 44.4MHz with a 3X multiplier or, if you can adjust the multiplier (many motherboards cannot), perhaps 33.3MHz with a 4X multiplier. This has been one major problem with OCing the bus, and inturn, the PCI bus. It messes with PCI cards and can cause instability.
;)
I would assume that the 200MHz bus to the CPU would be affected also by the main bus overclock. This would result in complications and most likely an unstable system.
But, I'm sure Abit will work around this.
BTW: the G4 bus will perform a similar trick by doubling the bus width between processors and memory instead of MHz speed. Its called the MaxBus and will transfer data at 128 bits instead of 64. I'm not sure SDRAM will be used, though.
It's far easier to forgive your enemy after you get even with him.
It's far easier to forgive your enemy after you get even with him.
According to this article a company called Poseidon Technology is working on an up to 8-way K7 chipset. I submitted this article to Slashdot a while back, but it never got posted. Oh well.
Right now OEM's are sellng the K6 systems to provide cheaper systems. Sad thing is, these systems are so underpowered, the chips power is never seen. Gateway for example, has all AMD systems shipping on a mini tower setup, with a 90w power supply, and an integrated motherboard with no ISA, 3 PCI (one usually taken by a modem), and no AGP. I asked the AMD representitive when OEM's will take AMD seriosuly, and he hoped when the K7 comes out, as the K6 is still only seen as a cheap chip, not something that peforms well.
One thing that should help multiple K7's be more powerful then multiple Xeons is that all will be on their own bus, unlike the shared bus method Intel uses.
And for the home market, the K7 will have 3dnow!, and it has already been supported by many games out there. Also is more efficient then Intels KNI. (Or SSE, or whatever you want to call it).