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AMD Demos 1Gigahertz cooled K7

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the stuff-to-see dept.

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.

3 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Benchmarks by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 3
    Quake will not run much faster unless you cool your fav 3D card as well or unless you use only software renderer (absent in Quake3Arena).
    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.

  2. A couple of points. by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 3
    First of all, performance won't be terribly stellar for applications that thrash the K7's cache. Main memory isn't cooled, and still has a _latency_ in the 6-10ns range (bus speed notwithstanding).


    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.

  3. Re:How to get Linux on it? by Grandpa_Spaz · · Score: 3

    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.