K7 Benchmarking

Quite a number of people have written in with the word about more specs on the K7, and its performance versus the PIII. Here's a little teaser: the spec K7 FPU performance is 40% faster then the PII. Check out Ace's Hardware for more information.

Comments

Jpeg compression is part of SPEC

[Erik Corry]

Actually, JPEG compression is already part of the SPEC suite so when the real SPEC results are released you just have to look at the breakdown. Another of the SPEC marks is a run of gcc (v 1.38 I think).

Unfortunately the SPEC marks are never compiled with gcc because it isn't as fast as Intel's compilers, which I presume AMD will use :-). I hope this list will be updated when the K7 is out, since it is probably a good indicator of Linux integer performance.

Actually...

[cdipierr]

Since it's slashdotted, I'll post some more correct info here.

According to Ace's page a 550 MHz K7 /w 512kb L2 cache running at 1/2 speed is compared to a 550 MHz PIII Xeon (not sure the cache size) /w SSE enhancements. Using that, the results are as follows:

SpecFP - 36% faster
SpecInt - 6% faster

The 600 MHz K7 is of course faster, turning in something like 43% and 15% respectively, but a fair comparison is of like speeds.

PRICE???

[St.Fudd]

great news, I just read over the site and apperantly (if this information is legit) the K7 is a kick-butt chip and well worth the wait and quite possible all the hype its been recieving. but one question still lingers....
HOW MUCH IS IT GOING TO COST
there are rumors going around from as low as 200 all the way up to 900 dollars, I want to know exactly the price range for this chip. AMD says that it is aiming this chip towards High end server buisness, what like a XEON I say? some xeon's sell for more than 3000 dollars, how much is this chip going to cost, can I possible afford one for my system?

Re:PRICE???

[JCholewa]

The K7 is going to be priced comparatively to the Pentium III, not the Pentium III Xeon, from what I've been told. The estimates among my local group are:

$400 or slightly above for 500MHz

$550-ish for 550MHz

$700 or so for the 600MHz version, though they may want a more respectable (eg: high) premium for the fastest x86 process of all time

These prices are slightly higher, mostly, than our extrapolations of PIII pricing around late July, where K7 will start to pick up volume. Despite the performance delta, AMD will likely make the part available to high end consumers in pricing, plus they want to pummel down Intel's high end ASP so they choke on their own Celerons.

AMD's DDR L2 "Viper" version of the K7, in Slot-B, will compete against Xeon. It will also happen to destroy Xeon in spec -- even more utterly than regular K7 does. Cascades looks like it'll be toasted a bit, too, unless Intel puts up a surprise and gives it 1MB L1 on-die.

BTW: K7's integer score beats out HP's mighty PA-8500 (which has 1.5MB L1 on die), I'm told. It may be the 2nd or third highest specint95 core out there.

Also, K7 kicks ass at rc5 -- pass it along!

-JC
PC News'n'Links

Re:Some real-world benchmarks

[Darth Maul]

I think a lot of your "real-world" questions
pertain more to the disk I/O performance
than chip performance... I don't think those
are necessarily good tests for a CPU...
You need some hard-core computationally
intensive tests... The SETI@home one was
a great suggestion. I remember a few years
ago using those encryption-breaking
blocks as a great benchmark (RC5, etc).

-Mike

Post on Absolutepc.net

[Ellis-D]

Well it appears that the info we had was correct as AMD did show a presentation including bencmarks at the dinner it hosted tonight. I got a little snippet of info from a usenet posting that JC posted and I thought should be posted here as well. Check it out:
hi,
I've just returned the dinner meeting at which Dirk Meyer (VP of Eng.
AMD) had a presentation. My first impression is that K7 looks very promising.
Mr. Meyer told us that AMD was indeed announcing K7 this month (June
'99) at 500, 550 and 600 Mhz. It has 22 Million transistors on a 184
mm square die at .25 micron process.

The first release of K7 will have 512K of L2 cache at half-speed.
At 600 MHz, K7 is %115 faster in SpecInt95 than a PIII Xeon 550Mhz
with 512K full speed cache. At 550 K7 is %106 faster in SpecInt.
At 600MHz, K7 is %143 faster than the same PIII Xeon at SpecFPBase.
At 550Mhz, K7 is %136 faster (these numbers are interpolated visually
from a slide which means 143 was closer to 140 than 150).
At 3D Winbench 99 V1.2 (null driver) on win98, K7 600 is at %146
faster than the said PIII Xeon using SSE optimizations.

There are new Integer SIMD instructions, DSP type instructions for
MP3, AC (audio) etc. and cache prefetch instructions. Microsoft will
support 3DNow in an upcoming Visual Studio release.

At initial launch, there won't be any MP systems. All motherboards
(from Asus, Biostar, Gigabyte, FIC and one other I couldn't catch)
will use AMD chipset. Via, ALI and SIS are designing their own
chipsets to be released before the end of this year.

These are most of my notes during the one hour presentation and Q&A
afterwards. All errors are my own. I speak only for myself etc., etc.
muzo
What a great day for x86! hehe at least if you arn't Intel. This post was posted at 12:50 AM on June 11th.

I ate my tag line.

K7 clock speed

[z1lch]

And more facts as they come to hand as all other sites seem to be suffering /. effect...

K7 apparently will be released at a clock speed of at least 500 MHz. However, there is speculation, for a number of reasons, that it might be released as high as 600 MHz. The first justification I've seen cited for this is that the K7's L2 cache is planned to run at an initial speed of 1/3 of the processor's speed, and when the bus will be at 200 MHz, it is illogical for the L2 cache to have a slower clock speed than the FSB. At this stage however there is no definite evidence to say that the K7 will be released above 500 MHz.

An alt. site to check out for up to speed info is CMP net. They carry an article [albeit a little dateded] article on the specs from a competitive Intel perspective. Makes interesting reading.