Earlier this year AMD released an awesome CPU that went head to head with the Pentium Pro and Pentium II CPUs made by Intel. For information on the AMD K6 in use see our earlier Review.
Now AMD is poised to take a second shot at the giant with an even more powerful chip and a new bus design. The K6-3d is in test systems in AMD labs already and will be seen this year at Comdex. So whats the good news?
The K6 is 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 have forced costly new design changes to existing PC motherboards, the K6 processor is designed to slot into existing motherboards with small modifications.
This year the K6 will shrink from 0.35 microns to 0.25 microns which will reduce the die size from 162 mm2 down to 68 mm2. This will offer higher clock speeds and the chip will require less power. This means that 300 MHz and more will become possible. But the bigger news is the K6-3d!!
The AMD K6 3D CPU
The 'K6 3D' will sample in the first quarter of 1998. The K6-3D's features will be the following:
- AMD 3D Technology
- Instruction set extensions to accelerate 3D graphics, audio and other multimedia applications
- Superscalar MMX Unit
- Dual decode and dual execution pipelines
- Maintains the K6 advantage of low execution latencies
- No decode pairing restrictions Only one cycle misalignment penalty on memory accesses
- 100 MHz Local Bus
- Local bus and L2 cache bandwidth increased by 50%
- Redesigned I/O timing to allow for low cost 100 MHz motherboard
- 9.3 Million Transistors on a Die of 81 mm2
The only real weakness of the first K6 was in the floating point unit, but in the K6-3d the 3D instructions will accelerate floating point computations, and multiple floating point instructions can be executed per clock! The instructions were defined and implemented in collaboration with leading ISV's.
There will actually be 24 completely new instructions in a dual MMX register. The units are capable of handling 4 32-bit or 8 16-bit FP calculations at a time. While not all FP calculations are supported, the main types that are used for 3D processing are supported with some restrictions as to rounding, etc.
Although the instructions will be proprietary to AMD, DirectX next release (6) will support these instructions making them transparently available to applications. AMD estimates up to a 4x increase in FP operations that use the MMX FP routines and also double the MMX performance since there is an additional MMX unit and pipeline.
This is good news in itself, but the 100MHz local bus and AGP support is also good news. The limitation of the 66MHz bus has been eroding this year, with many mainboards offering the ability to set the bus to 75 and even 83 MHz. The move to 100MHz bus will increased bandwidth over the old 66 MHz bus by 50%, reducing the bottleneck that had impacted information flow to the CPU and main memory.
The power savings on the K6 will also go down dramatically as AMD moves to .25 micron. The current .35 micron 233MHz chip dissipates over 32W maximum power... average power consumption is much lower. In contrast, the .25 300MHz chip will dissipate 9W-10W maximum power. There is no official info on the power consumption for K6-3D and K6+3D but even with the 256K on chip cache on the K6+3D, its likely that at 300MHz power consumption would be 10.5W-11.5W.
The first K6-3d chips will likely ship at 300MHz, scaling up to 350MHz quickly. But there is even MORE news....
The AMD K6+ 3D CPU
AMD is working on another chip called the K6+ 3D. This chip will sample around the second half of 1998. Incorporating the dual MMX register of the first K6-3d, this cpu will increase the on-chip L2 cache to 256 kB running at full CPU speed! This is a great improvement over the Intel design of the Pentium Pro. This on-chip L2 cache will make cache to an L3 cache simmilar in conception to Digital's Alpha CPU. The K6+ 3D will likely ship at 350 MHz ramping up quickly to 400 MHz and beyond. With more than twice the transistors of the K6-3d (21.3 Million Transistors on a Die of 135 mm2), this should be an absolute screamer.
Obviously, Intel has cause to worry. AMD has set themselves squarely in the path of success, and if I had some extra bucks I think I'd be buying shares! If you are in the market for a new system this year, take a look at AMD. You can find them on the web at:
AMD Website
Take me to a chart that outlines the features of the K6 CPU:
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Last Updated August 30th, 1997