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By: Daniel and Jose
Date: 5/7/02
Provided By: AMD |
AMD Tech Tour Spring
2002
This is the sign that we saw when we entered the
show. A little small, don't you think?
As you walk in to the show, you will first pick up
your identification badge, light up AMD pen and your "goodie bag."
The goodie bag is black with a shiny silver "AMD" logo on it, very
professional. Inside the goodie bag is a AMD Notepad, a Tech Tour
T-Shirt and some information packets. Walking further into the
show, we saw MSI showing off their latest motherboards with the VIA
KT266A and KT333 chips, they looked pretty interesting. MSI was
giving away free pins and posters. They also had a GeForce 2 GTS and
a GeForce 4 MX cards, which was a little weird because other
companies had GeForce 4 cards on their tables. We entered the
raffle that they had on the table to win a KT333 motherboard, but
lost :(
Next, we moved to the AMD booth. They had the
typical but still informative brochures on the "Megahertz" myth,
which José will explain later in this article. AMD also had AMD
Athlon MP brochures explaining the performance of the Athlon MP and
how much strength it has over the Intel Itanium and Xeon
processors. We picked up some brochures, free AMD pens and yo-yo's
and moved on.
The third booth that we saw was nVIDIA's booth,
obviously they were showing their Twin-View technology. The demo
ran a bit slow even on a GeForce 4 Ti 4600, but we can see why. It
was running on two screens with 4x FSAA, and the desktop showing a
bit at the same time. Also at the nVIDIA booth is the nFORCE
motherboard which only works on AMD Athlon and Duron processors. We
picked up some information packets about the nFORCE, GeForce 4
family of video cards and pens and moved on. During the move, they
opened the dining hall and we got some refreshments.
As you
can see I couldn't resist on getting a picture of the system running
the Twin-View demo. It was a standard Inwin case, with a Sparkle
SPI 350 watt power supply, Toshiba DVD-ROM drive and a floppy drive.
This
is Seagate's booth. They were showing their Cheetah brand of Hard
Drives. Both of these pictured have a SCSI Ultra 320 interface and
spin at 15,000 rpm. You can tell that these drives were meant for
performance computers and the Athlon line of processors. We
received some cool compressed T-Shirts, which say Seagate Barracuda
on the front.
Next
we moved to Biostar's booth which had some nFORCE and KT333
motherboards. They also had some GeForce 4 Ti 4600 boards on
display. I thought these were fascinating because they had gold
heatsinks along with a core heatsink. The fan on the cores heatsink
was gold! Very interesting. Now, I must note that Biostar gives
you the highest quality pens. :)
After
a bit of walking and looking at other companies, it was time for the
Team AMD meeting in the Dance Hall.
When
we were entering, we saw two projector screens playing a AMD
commercial. I wonder why they don't play these on the T.V. They
would kick Intel away if they did. This is the part where they don't
let us use cameras.
When
the presentations started they talked about the AMD Athlon desktop
processors, Mobile processors, and MP processors. They also showed
the revised "roadmap" of their processors. Indicating that the
Clawhammer and Opteron were on the way. After AMD's presentation,
nVIDIA, VIA, MSI and a few others presented and talked about their
latest hardware.
The
screen suddenly flashed "dinner" and everybody at the show went to
go get dinner. After everybody was settled down they talked about
X86-64 technology, which will be explained later on.
Then
finally was the end of the show. They gave away many prizes. Our
favorites were the Athlon MP and XP, along with the GeForce 4 Ti
4400.
Jose
will now explain the Megahertz Myth and the X86-64 technology on the
next page.
Hammer x86-64 bit technology
AMD plans to introduce in to the
market the awaited “Clawhammer” line of processors. This will be the
new line of CPU’s, named K8. The previous line, K7, of Athlon and
Duron processors will eventually be discontinued, starting in fall,
where AMD plans to have 10 % sales of the K8, and 90% of the K7
line. Starting 2003, there will be less K7 produced and more
“Clawhammer” in to the market. The K8 line of CPU’s is 64 bit,
supporting the upcoming Windows 64 bit. The core is much larger,
like that of a Pentium 4 Northwood, and therefore there will be more
heat dissipated. The CPU will be an “SOI” Silicon On Insulator,
which is the process of how the core is to be built. The x86-64 bit
line has no launch date yet, but planned around late fall, after a
failure to connect the north-bridge to the AGP 8x. it will start as
a “Clawhammer” 3400+, which means it is comparable with a Pentium 4,
3.4 Ghz.
(The Opteron "sledgehammer" K8, on the left and on the right the
“clawhammer” K8)
These processors seem to
run cooler and to compete more intensively with the Pentium 4
series, which will not introduce a new family of processors. The
clawhammer has had some push backs, and so did the Athlon XP
thoroughbred processors, which will be into the market this June,
with .13 Micron technology. The AMD motherboard chipset, the “Solo”
will support AGP 8x, USB 2.0, 5.1 sound, Ethernet, PS/2 and will not
support legacy devices. It will use DDR 333, 366, 400 and the QDR,
Quadro Data Rate Memory in the future. The clawhammer is predicted
up to the 4400+ Pentium 4 rating.
“The Megahertz Mythology”
Average computer users don’t know
about the truth behind “the Mhz”. They think that an Athlon 1.4 Ghz
is slower than of a 1.5 Ghz Pentium 4. This is wrong. The Athlon 1.4
Ghz can beat even the P4 1.8 Ghz in tests. The Athlon/Duron
processors use a 9 elongated pipeline design, which is much more
than of a Pentium 4, having only 4 pipelines. First of all, the Mhz
means “Millions of cycles per second”, and the Pentium 4 can process
more cycles but less data is in each “packet”, therefore the Athlon
is faster and gets more hotter than a Pentium 4. So totally, more
data is processed by an Athlon 1.4 Ghz than of a Pentium 4, 1.4 Ghz.
Therefore, in the release of the Athlon xp, the rating is compared
to a Penium 4, from 1500+ to 2100+ and beyond. The clock speeds are
from 1.33 Ghz to 1.67 Ghz. The 2100+ beats the Pentium 4 2.2-2.4 Ghz
in most test except memory. The price is also very low compared to
400-dollar Pentium 4, you can get for 180 dollars, an Athlon XP
2000+. The presenters at the show were really trying to say “AMD is
the way to go!”.
(Testing a Duron 600 Mhz, P4 rating of about
800 Mhz, and more important you can see how an Athlon 1600+ compares
with a Pentium 4 1.6 Ghz.)
Have you ever bought a car because it had an 8,000-rpm engine? No,
you haven't. So why would you ever buy a PC because it has a 2GHz
CPU?
"Clock Speed is Not Output”
By Peter Coffee, eWEEK, September 5, 2001
The only measure of performance that really matters is the amount of
time it takes to execute a given application. Contrary to popular
misconception, it is not clock frequency (MHz) alone or the number
of instructions executed per clock (IPC) alone that equates to
performance. True performance is a combination of both clock
frequency (MHz) and IPC.
-Intel’s View
of Performance
What Determines True Processor Performance?
“Inside the NetBurst” Micro-Architecture of the Intel® Pentium® 4
Processor," revision 1.0”, Intel Corp., Nov. 2000
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