AMD Shows Off K7 Chip, Motherboard

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November 19, 1998 (12:00 AM EST)

LAS VEGAS -- Advanced Micro Devices allowed some of the first sneak peeks at its new K7 processor and motherboard design here at Comdex/Fall '98 this week.

The K7 uses a 200-MHz bus technology pioneered by the high-end Alpha processor but fitted to be "mechanically compatible" with Intel's Slot 1 CPU interface. Using this design, AMD officials said, manufacturers can use parts already available on the market to build K7 motherboards, though the new motherboards won't be able to support Intel CPUs.

AMD showed off a new motherboard that had a design similar to a traditional Slot 1 motherboard for Intel processors. The K7 will be housed on a CPU module, just like the current Pentium II chips, with Level 2 cache resident on the same board. AMD will also use PII-like plastic casings to cover the board.

At the show, AMD announced Acer and Via Systems will produce chips sets that will work with the new processors.

Officials at Comdex showed the K7 running several productivity applications, but the real horsepower of the processor was demonstrated while playing back a DVD movie. The system ran software decompression without any assistance from added hardware. Many systems today can run software-DVD while relying on the graphics card to handle some of the MPEG-2 decode process. AMD officials said the K7 won't need any hardware assist, even for such a CPU-intensive task.

AMD said engineers are on schedule to deliver the K7 in the first half of next year at clock speeds starting at 500 MHz. In addition to the 200-MHz bus, the chip will contain 128 kilobytes of Level 1, or core, cache; 512 KB to 1 megabyte of L2, or secondary, cache; and an improved floating-point unit -- the area of the processor that handles complex mathematical calculations for most 3-D and multimedia applications.

Dana Krelle, vice president of marketing at AMD, said the K7's new floating-point design should out-produce the K6 family and other X86 designs by a factor of 2x when the product hits the market. Like the K6-2, the K7 will support 3DNow instruction sets to further enhance 3-D and multimedia processing.

AMD also formally announced three new K6- 2 processors at the show. The company is shipping the K6-2 400 MHz, K6-2 380 MHz, and K6-2 366 MHz, priced in quantities of 1,000 at $283, $213, and $187, respectively.