Advanced Micro Devices' new processor for personal computers could give the company its first performance edge over chip kingpin Intel.
New features in the K7 chip, unveiled Tuesday at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, California, enable it to outperform Intel's Pentium II chip in certain areas.
"It's a pretty aggressive design in terms of its performance characteristics," said Keith Diefendorff, editor in chief of the Microprocessor Report, host of the Silicon Valley conference. "It should perform as well or better than anything Intel has coming up in the near future."
The processor serves a computer's central nervous system, carrying out the millions of instructions that run software applications from Web browsers to word processors. AMD hasn't released the K7's specifications, but it is reportedly up to 20 percent faster than the Pentium II chip.
Among the K7's features is the industry's first mainstream 200 MHz system bus and what AMD's chief technical officer S. Atiq Raza calls "the most architecturally advanced floating point capability ever delivered in an x86 microprocessor."
Diefendorff expects the high-end, desktop PC market to feel the effects of K7's arrival first, with prices and performance rising later for mainstream PC models.
The chip also has the ability to execute incoming instructions faster than current designs and holds larger amounts of on-chip "cache" -- a kind of way station inside chips for frequently executed software code.
The K7's "bus" -- the connection between the chip and the rest of the circuitry on a PC's motherboard -- also gives the chip more room to play. But the bus, as Diefendorff notes, is also an obstacle for the company. AMD will have to get motherboard manufacturers to alter their designs to accomodate the non-standard bus.
More significant than the chip's performance gains, Diefendorff said, is that one of Intel's competitors has, at least for the moment, usurped the chip giant's performance standard. As a result, AMD may find manufacturers interested in building their PCs with the new AMD chip for the first time.
While the technology probably lets AMD name a higher price for the chip, thereby increasing its revenues, it is not likely to cause dramatic shifts in market share, Diefendorff said.
"It's just that window of time that AMD will be ahead," he said. "They've always been a little bit behind and this could put them ahead for some period of time. For how long I don't know."
The K7 is expected to run at a speed of 500 MHz when it is released in the first half of 1999, and could surpass the performance of Intel's Katmai, a chip with an instruction set that supersedes its MMX multimedia technology. Katmai is also due out in the first half of 1999.
The company will begin manufacturing the K7 using current aluminum connector technology, then gradually move to faster copper wiring, enabling the K7 to reach a speed of one gigahertz by 2000.
Diefendorff said AMD has been around long enough to make inroads against Intel in the conservative corporate market.
"Intel is the safest bet and businesses have to go with the safest bet," he said. "But now AMD has demonstrated that it knows how to buld a compatible processor.... Once that sense is out there, then I think that we'll see more and more large [PC manufacturers] silently putting [AMD chips] into PCs that they will sell into the business market."
