AMD

The one company I looked forward visiting most was certainly AMD. I knew they would have K7 and Sharptooth running there, the chips that scare the pants off Intel. When I entered the booth I had the nerve of interrupting Dana Krelle, AMD's vice president marketing, who was busy playing Viper Racing. Well, I guess Dana has forgiven me that I screwed up his race, as far as I know he was only training anyway.

Dana and the K7 500 in AMD's first Slot A board with AMD chipset

AMD had two demo rooms. In the first room I could inspect the first Slot A motherboard with AMD's own chipset and K7 itself. The K7 was equipped with 512 kB of L2 cache, running at 1/3 of the CPU core speed, thus 500 MHz / 3 = 166 MHz.

This is it, the mysterious K7, the possible Intel killer chip.

The front of the K7-PCB, after removing the cartridge.

And the back of the K7-PCB, you can see the huge amounts of pins that K7 has compared with Pentium II.

There was of course a working K7-system in that room too, which ran a mixture of Winstone98 and 3D games at really high speed. I could not see any benchmark numbers, but the benchmark part ran faster than anything I've seen yet, definitely faster than a Pentium II 504.

The second room showed two systems next to each other. The left one was a system equipped with AMD's Sharptooth, the upcoming K6-3 (if the name won't be changed), at 400 MHz. Sharptooth is nothing but K6-2's new CXT core with an on die L2 cache of 256 kB running at CPU core clock. The system to the right was a Pentium II 450 MHz system, equipped with the same peripherals. Again a mixture of business and high-end Winstone98 was ran, starting both systems at the same time. The Sharptooth finished those benchmarks significantly earlier than the Pentium II 450, proving that Sharptooth or K6-3 will be extremely fast in business applications, even faster than Pentium II at 50 MHz higher clock rate.

All in all I wasn't really too surprised, since the demonstrations only showed that I was right with my estimate published around Micropocessor Forum time 5 weeks before Comdex. AMD has some really strong products lined up for the future, as you can see in this comparison.