AMD K6
David and Goliath: the AMD K6
Some of the most exciting news in technology this year is still going unnoticed by sim fans. The K6 by AMD, the company that made mediocre 386 and 486 knockoffs some years ago, is poised to take the head off the giant: Intel.
What will this mean for sim fans? If you are ready to upgrade or are about to buy your first PC compatible, take notice! With a state of the art chip operating at a speed equal or higher than a Pentium MMX chip of the same clock speed at HALF the price, the K6 is ready to roar! PLUS, initial findings indicate that the K6 with its newer fabricating process and design than the older pentium technology, will be able to better stand overclocking. This means that for LESS money and a bit of overclocking, you may be able to run 15-25% faster than a comparable Intel investment!
David
AMD plans to introduce its first K6 in three clock speeds: 166-, 200- and 233MHz. A 266MHz version should be out by Christmas, with a 300MHz K6 coming out in very early 1998. The K6 is NOT simply an Intel knock-off; it's a sophisticated sixth-generation x86 hybrid that seems to have successfully managed design problems that have plagued the Pentium line for years. It's already MMX-enabled (Intel and AMD signed a technology-sharing agreement in January 1996)
The chip for the masses! In fact, the K6's principal advantage to manufacturers comes from its much lower-cost PC design and assembly. Where the Pentium Pro and its offspring are forcing costly new design changes to existing PC motherboards, the K6 processor is designed to slot into existing motherboards with a small modifications.
The K6 is slated to sell to manufacturers for a fraction of the cost of today's fastest Pentium Pro 200. The 233MHz K6 will sell in 1,000-unit lots for $469 apiece; right now a 200MHz Pentium Pro is as much as $1,000 in the same quantities, though these prices will drop as the next group of Intel chips appears.
Viva la Difference!
Despite the similarities in performance AMD has chosen a number of different approaches to the design of the K6 compared to the P Pro. The chip uses larger level 1 caches than its competitor, 32KB for data and 32KB for instructions, for a 64KB total. In comparison the P Pro uses twin 8KB caches, and the upcoming Pentium II processor will still have two 16KB caches for a total of only 32KB.
The AMD processor has seven parallel execution units (including the floating-point and MMX units), and it uses the latest branch prediction, speculative execution and out-of-order execution technologies. It also has a unique 8,192-entry branch history table, which combines with return address stack to deliver a branch prediction accuracy of more than 95 percent-the Pentium Pro averages 90 percent branch prediction accuracy.
The K6 also offers easy integration into existing component designs. The 5.5-million transistor Pentium Pro must fight power and heat problems that weren't a consideration in the early days of lower clock speeds. The 8.8 million transistor K6 design is free of these restraints; the chip has avoided major heat and power-management problems. Note: the one likely weakness of this chip is the floating point unit. Until more benchmarks exist, be aware that FPU intensive operations will not be as strong as in the PPro.
And to the future? What about AGP? AMD is committed to new techology, such as Intel's Accelerated Graphics Port, and is intending to provide chipsets that will work with little modification in inexpensive Socket 7 motherboards already used in today's Pentium PCs. The Pentium Pro, on the other hand, requires a special socket. That, too, will serve to lower the commercial price of a high-performance K6 computer.
Sounds cool! Take me to a chart that outlines these features:
3D Benchmark and Features Comparison
Orchid Technology: Righteous 3d
Main Page
© 1997 - 2000 COMBATSIM.COM, Inc. All Rights Reserved.