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AMD Demos 1Gigahertz cooled K7
An anonymous reader wrote in to say that "At the
AMD shareholder's meeting today, AMD and KyroTech demonstrated
a K7 system running at a cool 1 GHz! " Update: 04/29 10:26 by J : An article at news.com
discusses AMD's plans for the chip, including pricing and initial speeds.
And because each cpu has it's own bus instead of sharing one like Intel's P-II's and P-III's... the K7 will actually scale above 4 cpu's without bus contention.
Intel ought to be very worried
Life is like an egg better scrambled than fried. -- Ken Sawatari
Go to Tom's Hardware read. -Be enlightened.
Its a clamshell refrigerator with a compressor which encloses the CPU... -And yes you might say that it is overclocked. But then again, if AMD doesn't "call" it overclocking... then it ain't.
Life is like an egg better scrambled than fried. -- Ken Sawatari
Sort of that, but the main thing was not that they couldn't put out the chips fast enough. They made money on the processors anyway, though they could have made more if they had better production. It was the fallout in the prices of RAM (AMD makes RAM too) and the Asian crisis (they like AMD stuff, aparently) which made them actually lose money.
Well, x86 performance has always been measured in Mhz (of course, everything has been measured like that; it's just with x86 that's about all people care about). I remember seeing on a gaming page one of the maintainers saying something to the effect of, "SGI came out with a new processor today. But it's only 300mhz! Hah! I'll keep my Celeron!" Gamers and business people don't understand the more arcane measures of performance. At best they know that a K6 has worse FP performance than a comparable Intel. But I doubt they could quantify that. So, don't blame just AMD. It's the whole x86 market. Why else would Cyrix and IDT (I think the two of them) be puting out PR-200mhz for something that actually runs at 180mhz (just an example; I don't remember the numbers) but performs like 200mhz (but not really, after all)? Because mhz are all people undrestand. I still cringe at hearing a salesman try to sell my friend a computer and after he said mhz (which he said a whole lot) he would say "millions of cycles per second" really fast, to make him look extra smart.
Looks like not even Kryotech can get a hold of a dual K7 (and you know that if they could make a dual GHz machine, they would -- wouldn't you?). At least if they had a demo of a cooled SMP K7, we'd know if such a thing even exists. I personally can't wait to get a K7, and I'll probably get one the day they come out. But if AMD will have dual CPU setups coming out later, I'll have to wait. Does anyone have any info about a the dual K7 rumors? I haven't been able to find out anything.
Also, you might want to get Kryotech into the next century and tell them to ship with Linux pre-installed. I already mailed them about it and you can to. Kathy Hemby is the person you want to talk to. Maybe if we /. them, they'll wake up.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
If it started out as a 500MHz chip, and they O/C it to one GHz, then it's no different than what Intel did, except it will be for sale. There have also been reports on Ars Technica that someone has gotten a Celeron 300a to 633 MHz.
Personally, I would only buy one of these if they had SMP machines like this. mmmm 2GHz. drooooool
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I run BeOS. The rules don't apply.
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I run BeOS. The rules don't apply.
Okay I hear a lot of people really excited here about the K7. Put a few things into perspective. First AMD said about the same thing about the K6 among other chips... We all know they didnt come through as strong as they wanted or they would not have reported such huge losses. Now I hear all this talk about the K7 and SMP and 2,000 MHZ processors. Im more weary than excited about the K7. And possibly a little fearful that the only real competition INTEL has seen on the PC market is going to die out. And what about the SMP all anyone talks about or ever says to the press are these obfuscated riddles. Nothing concrete has yet to come from AMD. Yet people want the chips even if they are not as great as said? AMD has showed stockholders a overclocked chip thats all. Ugh I can see this being just like the K6-2
Jeremy Allen
knights@hom.net
the K7 because of the bus system used (the same one in fact as the newest alphas) can support up to 16 processors on one board if someone felt like making a motherboard like that. A little more power & I think Kyrotech might be able to cool them all even....
Just think a 16 Ghz system (for only ~14,000 probably), that would be fun...
Since 1 GHz is in the microwave domain, I can imagine it being mind blowingly incredibly expensive. And I don't want my computer to sterlize me either. (makes me nervous to think of holding a laptop radiating those frequencies)
Somehow I think wider busses and more parallelism is more realistic.
Hence, your example of "benchmark" is not relevant.
Geometry acceleration is still done by the processor for the time being. AI and physics for your game will always be. Go to Tom's Hardware Guide and check out figures for the same game on the same card using different processors.
Any game that performs better on a PII-400 than on a K6-2-400 is CPU-bound.
Any game that performs better on a PII-450 than on a Celeron "450A" is cache-bound.
Any game that performs equally well on most processors, differing only with the video card, is bus-limited or fill-rate limited.
OTOH, things like Quake that fit within the cache will run more quickly.
Secondly, 0.18 micron fabrication should start some time this summer, and should have decent yields for high clock speeds by the end of the year. You should be able to pick up a chip in the 800 MHz - 1 GHz range *without* cooling around then. Drool over what will come out of AMD/Kryotech then, as opposed to now (at the tail end of 0.25 micron)
Anything bought now will depreciate rapidly in value over the next few months, as 0.18 micron fabs are almost due to come online.
According to the Dirk Meyer's presentation given at the Microprocessor Forum last October (and this is the only extensive dicussion about the K7 AMD has given that I can find), the K7 does use Alpha's EV6 bus technology to run the bus at 200 mhz, but the chip itself utilizes many x86 technologies, including 3 parallel x86 instruction decoders and the support for up to 8 MB of L2 cache (not mention SMP). All of this will utilize a x86 structure as far as the software is concern; Win98 (just an example) and Linux should run fine out of the box; you'll just have to worry about the hardware. I seriously suggest you read the about link; it gives a good bit of information about the chip itself (although, remember this was in Oct. of 1998, and it could be different, hopefully better).
-G.