[H-GEN] AMD K6 thingys

[Nickolas Kwiatkowski]

On Tue, 7 Jul 1998, Rob Kearey wrote:

> What be the difference between the K6 and the K6-2, anyways?
> 

/*snipped from the beowulf mailing list*/


>From eugene at liposome.genebee.msu.su Tue Jul  7 09:30:38 1998
Date: Wed, 24 Jun 1998 17:46:47 +0400 (MSD)
From: Eugene Leitl <eugene at liposome.genebee.msu.su>
To: "Beowulf (E-mail)" <beowulf at cesdis1.gsfc.nasa.gov>
Subject: new AMD K6-2 ; questions about a very large archive 


http://www.amd.com/news/prodpr/9849.html

"[...]
High Performance Supported by the Super7(TM) Platform
The AMD-K6-2 processor supports the 100-MHz bus specification of the
Super7(TM) platform. The 100-MHz local bus interface speeds up access to the
level 2 (L2) cache and main memory by 50 percent over the 66-MHz Socket 7
bus interface, resulting in a maximum bus bandwidth of 800 megabytes per
second and an increase in system performance of as much as two processor
speed grades.

Super7 infrastructure solutions supporting the 100-MHz bus and the
Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) specification are available now for the
AMD-K6-2 processor. Super7 chipsets are available from VIA Technologies
and ALI, and motherboard suppliers supporting the AMD-K6-2 include
Biostar, FIC, Microstar and many others.
[...]
Pricing and Availability
The AMD-K6-2 processor is available now. The AMD-K6-2/333 is priced at
$369; the AMD-K6-2/300 at $281; and the AMD-K6-2/266 at $185, each in
1,000-unit quantities. AMD expects to offer a 350-MHz version in the third
quarter and a 400-MHz version in the fourth quarter of 1998.
[...]
With its SIMD-style instructions and dual register execution pipelines, the
AMD-K6-2 processor can deliver up to four floating point results per clock
cycle. The AMD-K6-2/333 has a peak floating point performance of 1.333
Gigaflops, significantly greater than the 0.333-Gigaflop peak performance of a
Pentium II 333, or the 0.4-Gigaflop peak performance of a Pentium II 400. The
AMD-K6-2/300 has a peak floating point performance of 1.2 Gigaflops, or four
times the 3D processing power of a Pentium II 300, rated at peak performance of
0.3 Gigaflops."

So I guess we'll need to wait for the gas release supporting the new
instructions, and use inline before gcc or egcs will be able to
optimize for K6-2. Nevertheless, this new CPU looks extremely
interesting imo.


/*... rest of article/e-mail unrelated ...*/

Nik