Slashdot Mirror
AMD K7 550 Hands-on Preview
Kenn Hwang wrote in with the review to the new K7. Click below for a snippet-suffice it to say that these things /move/.
Winmark: In this particular synthetic test, the K7 continues to shine down on the
Intel competition. Here, we see it leap ahead by almost 25% over both the
Pentium III and the P3 Xeon. Note that as above, the hard drives differed
from system to system, though fact that the P3 systems were using
dedicated 7,200RPM Fast/Wide SCSI drives don't seem to help their case
much. Very impressive showing on the part of the K7.
Perhaps the 512k cache at 1/3 CPU speed is
too meager to keep the FPU unit fed with
data? It can handle up to 8 meg(!) of L2
cache up to full CPU speed, so perhaps future
versions of the K7 will have better floating
point performance.
I imagine it's being released in its current
config because it will be affordable for us
and profitable for them. Expect future versions
to be waaay more pricy.
First, I must agree with your comments on the cache. I am much more curious about how the K7s with half and full speed caches will perform compared with PIIIs and cooled K6-IIIs. On the issue of video cards, I'm not even sure why high end 3d cards are used when benchmarking these machines. I suspect a more useful Q2 benchmark would software render to a tried-and-true old card, like a Millennium II. Benchmarking a processor-and-coprocessor combination appears to horribly complicate the system, and hide what the processor itself is doing. (If you're benchmarking the busses on the various machines though, it makes more sense to use very intelligent cards which utilize all of the capabilities of the various busses.) On the issue of MMX/3dNow!, my belief is that the benchmarking code should be utterly un-optimized for either of these. Maybe this is unrealistic... perhaps the usual C compilers optimize for MMX naturally. In that case, if it's really that standard, go ahead and let the compiler do it, but don't go out of your way to optimize for a specific instruction set. I'd personally prefer to see how the FPU cores compare on the same playing field, with software I have now. If some new chip gets games to run faster because of new instructions, that'll be a special treat, but I'd rather not see it in mainstream benchmarks until that instruction set is common in compiled code. I tend to do scientific simulations, so I'd like to know how well hardcore floating point code, compiled with standard compiler options, works on various processors. I don't want to know how it could perform, if I went out of my way to optimize the assembly. :) Granted, my needs are different from those of people who primarily use precompiled games, since the coders there can spend the effort tweaking the details. What I need is probably close to what a lot of other free OS users need, though, since most of our binaries are optimized solely by the compiler. One last thing... Most of the benchmarks I've seen have compared different clock speed chips on the same graph! What's the deal with this? I'd a least prefer it if the benchmarkers divided the score by the clock speed, for instance, to give a more meaningful measure of the efficiency of the chip itself! (Sure, I do this in my head already, but its a pain, and just seems like sloppy plot making.) I'd love to see what a K7 does with the full speed cache installed... hopeful we won't have to wait to long before they start to appear! John
I know that this review is a review of non-production hardware. I still have to say that I'm very disappointed. Not so much in the numbers, but in the configuration of the system. Two points in particular:
(1) The L2 cache is only running at 1/3 speed. I don't care about the size of the cache, but to me this is a step backwards. The PIII 550 has 1/2 speed L2 cache. The Kryotech Kool K6-III 550 (a thermally accelerated K6-III 450) romps the both the PIII and the K7 in some benchmarks. Why? L2 cache - the Kool K6-III 550 has full speed, on die L2.
(2) An Ultra TNT2 video card was used, with older nVidia drivers. Near the end of the review, it's mentioned that there are newer drivers available with better 3dNow! optimizations. I think that either a 3dfx V2 SLI or V3 should have been used, since their 3dNow! drivers are better, or at the very least the newer nVidia drivers.
I still think that the K7 has potential. It had very high Business Disk and High-End Disk Winmark scores. This leads me to believe that the hardware _is_ capable. Don't write the K7 off until a shipping processor has been reviewed (and hopefully one with at least 1/2 speed L2 cache).