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Hardware

AMD K6-III released 62

Posted by CmdrTaco from the competing-with-chipzilla dept.
Several folks wrote in to announce that AMD has officially announced the K6-III. Thats a link to the official product release if you're interesting in reading it direct from the horse's mouth.
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AMD K6-III released More

AMD K6-III released

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  • I hope to review the K6-3 and P-3 at my site RSN.
    For now, I've just posted a K6-2 400 review.

    The K6-3 looks like a winner, I believe it is the first non-Alpha based micro with a three level cache architecture.
  • I rather doubt he meant x86 compatible, seeing as he mentioned alpha.. grin
  • Posted by Skip Franklin:

    Anyone seen any 3rd-party K6-III reviews? I know of some that disliked the PIII - I'm interested to see what people have to say about the K6-III.
  • Just curious ... I always thought that selling at a loss to drive a competitor out of the market was a monopolistic practice and, in the context of antitrust law, illegal. Isn't it?

    I've always wondered how AMD or Intel (or any company that loses money quarter after quarter because they were selling at a loss in order to eliminate competition) could escape antitrust action ... I know that Intel is the target of an antitrust suit but do these issues facter into it?
  • I doubt very much that anything but the most synthetic of benchmarks will get anything like the 12.5% gain implied by the clock speed. On the other hand, a 75% increase in CPU cost does not translate to a 75% increase in system cost, so the effects partially cancel each other out.

    But it's really silly, anyhow; just get a Celeron 300A and clock it at 450, and you're probably within 10% of any of these puppies, unless you have an application that specifically takes advantage of the larger cache (i. e. blows the Celeron cache but fits in the K6-III cache). That saves another $200, so you can buy another Celeron or two in case the first one goes bad.

    Of course, in a server context things are a bit different...but then again, most "servers" these days need I/O more than cycles.

  • The AMD-K6-III/450 processor is priced at $476, and the AMD-K6-III/400 processor is priced at $284, each in 1,000-unit quantities.

    $476 / 450MHz = $1.06/MHz
    $284 / 400MHz = $0.71/MHz

    That seems a pretty big gap, for a ~10% speed increase.

  • As long as it's not the MS ODBC "Jet engine"!
  • OpenPIC, a SMP technology developed by Cyrix and AMD, supports up to 32 processors (theoretically), and all scheduling hardware is off-chip, so any x86 CPU can be used. If you were a masochist, it would bentirely possible to build a 32-processor SMP 8086 box!!! It looked farily easy to port to other CPU architectures, so other 'non-SMP' CPUs may have worked with OpenPIC (i.e. StrongARM).

    It needed specific SMP support in the OS, and although several chipsets included full OpenPIC support, no board manufacturers included multiple sockets on their boards (can you say Intel and monopolistic pressures??). Since there wasn't any hardware support, it was kindof difficult for anyone to put the support into any OS.

    *sigh* Sometimes I just hate the computer industry.
  • I'm interested in how it compares to the P3. Pricing aside, when it comes to pure performance, AMD has always been the loser when compared to Intel. Anyone have experience with em?

    asinus sum et eo superbio

  • Yep, AMD chips, Cyrix chips, and IDT chips (Winchips) are all x86 chips.
  • I was browsing the processor listings over at http://infopad.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIC/summary/local /. My k6-200 gets about a 6.5 int95 and a 3.5 fp95. Pretty poor, compared to a Pmmx-200. So here's what i'm wondering, and I mean raw FP, not just the 3DNow stuff:

    How much better is the k6-2 in FP? I was under the impression the FPU was just a k6 clocked up appropriately. If the k6-3 is still the same FPU, with all due respect I'm not interested. Here's how I make the numbers

    k6-200: int95 6.5 fp95 3.5
    pII-400: int95 18 fp95 18
    (some people say your milage may vary...perhaps by as much as 50% less)
    pIII-400: same
    k6-2? k6-3?

    I'd appreciate if someone could fill this in
  • Isn't the best bang/buck ratio right now still an overclocked Celery^Hon?
  • Now if they had only made it (and the K6-2) able
    to do SMP... Imagine if you will a quad CPU system
    running K6-III 400Mhz chips... (400 because the
    450s are still a little steep in price)...

    Ah well, I can dream while I save up for a K-7
    system when they come out ;-)
  • As far as I've been able to tell, they are going to officially release the chip itself next monday, to coincide with the big PentiumIII release the same day. That's probably why you (and I) aren't seeing any prices at online reseller pages. Today's announcement was just the "official" announcement of the chip, like Intel's announcement of the PIII a couple weeks ago.
  • And the intel PII 400's going for ~$300 (US) vs the PII 450's going for ~$480 (US) isn't almost a $200 price gap (source: 3rd lowest price on pricewatch.com). Also looking at most places on a singular basis (memory-man.com and paragoncomp.com among others) most vendors have the PII-450 about $210 over their price for the PII-400... CPU pricing is usualy exponential with clock rate, not linear.. the top few MHz of a particular CPU line often doubles the price of the CPU, while increasing speed by 10%
  • There's a review [anandtech.com] on Anandtech [anandtech.com], and there was another over on SharkyExtreme [sharkyextreme.com]. They were both pretty positive.

  • Reviews? (Score:1)

    by Fozz ( 9037 )

    Tom's Hardware Guide loves the K6-3!

    Go to Tom's Hardware Guide [tomshardware.com]


  • Anyone know what the status is with regards to Linux kernel support for this beastie? Is it even an issue?

    What about support for 3DNow in XFree86 or one of the commercial Xservers?

    Macka
  • $200 difference between a 400 and a 450? Surely a typo...
  • Can anyone with a K6-3, the spec benchmark code, and a good compiler give me Int and FP performance figures for the K6-3, and for an equivalently clocked P-II (2, not 3) with the same OS and compiler? AMD has historically had bad floating-point performance, and I'm curious to see whether this has changed with the K6-3. The article primarily hyped the cache architecture, which suggests that no other significant improvements were made.


    I'm also curious to see how a K6-3 FP benchmark optimized for 3D-Now stacks up against a P-III (3) FP benchmark optimized for KNI. KNI has higher potential calculation ability, but it's open to question how effectively it can be used. However, these benchmarks will probably have to wait until Intel and AMD perform their own tests and submit them to spec.org.

  • It's only illegal if they are already a monopoly.

    Pricing below a competitor and below cost if you're not a monopoloy is not a problem.

    Jeff
  • Does anyone out there have a pure statistcal (Read: no "AMD RULES" or "INTEL SUCKS") review of the K-6? I'm building a new box soon, and I want to know whether to go with a K6-2, K6-3, Celery, or wait for the K7. Being a student, I just can't do the PIII. Any factual input would be greatly appreciated.

    -Dave
  • 1) I don't game. So, paying for a good FPU is a waste for me.
    2) AMD doesn't limit overclocking in any shape or form.
    3) AMD chips are cheaper than intel and now perform just as well, if not better mhz for mhz.

    I'm an AMD-Linux fan... K6-2 333 @ 375mhz with nothing but a cheapo MB/Heatsink/Fan. (what's not to like?)

    I'm quite interested to see if anyone can overclock the K6-3's past that 500mhz barrier people keep talking about for AMD chips.

    $300 for 450mhz?? and it beats the P-III 500mhz? Sounds great to me. :P


    just ramblin
  • SMP willl be in the K7 to be released later this year,June or July I think. The K6-3 only has had the cache improved which help it greatly but the FP unit is the same as the K6-2. For a new FP unit you'll have to wait for the K7. I beleive the K7 will be AMD's first intel killer(if there is such a thing!!

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