AMD has been completely absent from hyping the K7. Haven't you noticed? It's the *absence* from hype that's been causing all this speculation.
However, losing your head over this silly "preview" isn't the way to go, you know that. Remember that Tom's Hardware Guide posted up benchmarks of the PII shortly before it came out, and it was *annihilated* in benchmark comparisons with the Pentium MMX. Of course, the final version turned out far, far better than that. What you have to understand is that in the bugfix (no I don't know what it's really called, either) phase of a processor's design life, entire swaths of the product are turned off or tuned out to avoid major bugs in the current revision. Although the current C3 revision of the K7 is generally free of bugs (all processors out there have bugs, but production versions just don't have damning ones), earlier versions were wracked with self-destructive errors and problems of all sorts. So, basically, you have to take measures to get around those bugs for those revisions -- actions like this could severely cripple the processor and make benchmark results totally, completely unreliable compared to final revision.
On a more personal note, I've looked at the microarchitecture and there is no way that a PIII's x87 can outperform the x87 on a fully formed K7. Not a chance in all the universe.
Hey, I seem to recall that there was *something* different in how the P6 did the microcode, or at least the later versions of the Pentium II. Like, perhaps, there was some very small extended functionality, or something of that type. I could very well be totally fantisizing this, so I wanted to ask you to make sure.
-JC PC News'n'Links http://www.chiptech.com/jc (ouch, my server!)
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AMD has been completely absent from hyping the K7. Haven't you noticed? It's the *absence* from hype that's been causing all this speculation.
However, losing your head over this silly "preview" isn't the way to go, you know that. Remember that Tom's Hardware Guide posted up benchmarks of the PII shortly before it came out, and it was *annihilated* in benchmark comparisons with the Pentium MMX. Of course, the final version turned out far, far better than that. What you have to understand is that in the bugfix (no I don't know what it's really called, either) phase of a processor's design life, entire swaths of the product are turned off or tuned out to avoid major bugs in the current revision. Although the current C3 revision of the K7 is generally free of bugs (all processors out there have bugs, but production versions just don't have damning ones), earlier versions were wracked with self-destructive errors and problems of all sorts. So, basically, you have to take measures to get around those bugs for those revisions -- actions like this could severely cripple the processor and make benchmark results totally, completely unreliable compared to final revision.
On a more personal note, I've looked at the microarchitecture and there is no way that a PIII's x87 can outperform the x87 on a fully formed K7. Not a chance in all the universe.
And, yes, I do admit I'm biased. Do you?
-JC
PC News'n'Links
http://www.jc-news.com/pc
Hey, I seem to recall that there was *something* different in how the P6 did the microcode, or at least the later versions of the Pentium II. Like, perhaps, there was some very small extended functionality, or something of that type. I could very well be totally fantisizing this, so I wanted to ask you to make sure.
-JC
PC News'n'Links
http://www.chiptech.com/jc
(ouch, my server!)