The Preview

The cosy world of PC's being dominated by the Intel P6 family is about to get the biggest shock since the launch of the AMD K6 back in 1997. AMD is set to release its all new 7th generation "x86" processor design, the K7. This chip is set to overturn many of the constants that have always held true in the PC world. It includes possibly the biggest constant we have known, that Intel always makes the fastest "x86" processors on the planet. "How could this happen?" we hear you scream, well we will tell all...

Will the real K7 please stand up!

For the best part of a year, the mere thought of the AMD K7 has caused great outbursts or hyperbole and general hysteria amongst the hardware community. What we will try to do here is to settle some of this down and outline the facts which surround possibly one of the most pre-hyped chips ever. The K7 when it appears will feature:

• 128 Kb Level 1 cache.
• 512 Kb to 8 Mb of level 2 cache running at 1/3 to full clock speed.
• 0.25 micron technology (moving to 0.18 micron technology in October 1999).
• Slot A motherboard interface.
• Clock speeds starting at 500 MHz. AMD recently announced 1 GHz by the Year 2000!
• AGP 4X support.
• Alpha EV6 bus.
• 200 MHz Front side bus speed.
• Seven issue superscalar architechture.
• Three issue pipelined floating point math unit.
• Improved "3D now!" support.

An impressive list indeed! The K7 offers to be the fastest processor at the time of its release. Its seven issue superscalar architechture builds upon proven techniques in the K6, and the Three issue Floating Point Unit will offer simply phenominal Floating Point performance, something that has always been lacking up till now in the AMD range. Of course its high clock speeds will deliver stunning performance, but that's not all to the K7 story.

What the K7 marks is AMD's first full move out of Intel's shadow, in a number of ways. First the use of the Alpha EV6 bus removes AMD's dependence upon Intel bus technology. This coupled to a phenomimal 200 MHz bus speed will truly begin to show the benefits of increased bus speed. There will also of course be features such as AGP 4X support built into the chipset.

The K7 also sees AMD's adoption of the Slot connector to the motherboard at exactly the time when Intel is moving away from it and back to Sockets. The reason AMD claims this is necessary is simply to house module based cache RAM (like the Pentium II) and also as a measure to achieve higher clock speeds. AMD claims that higher clock speeds can only be attained by moving to Slot based architechture, although Intel appears to disagree. Only time will tell whether this will be the case. Slot A physically is identical to Intel's Slot 1, but is electronically different due to the use of the EV6 bus.

What does all of this change mean though? Well to find out, read on...

Page 2.

Other AMD Processors at:

• AMD K5 page
• AMD K6 page
• AMD K6-2 page
• AMD K6-3 page