Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s K7 CPU is getting rave reviews in the expectation that it will outperform Intel Corp’s Pentium II Deschutes and Katmai processors. But Microprocessor Report thinks AMD should give up on its own 3DNow multimedia extensions and adopt Intel’s KNI or do something more radical like adopting the more powerful Motorola Inc AltiVec instructions. Why? Because AMD cannot match investment in KNI compilers, libraries, development tools and applications. As KNI proliferates, AMD will be forced to adopt it, at which point 3DNow becomes redundant and is sure to lose the attention of software developers. The problem is that Microsoft will have to support the changes in Windows, the report says. Moreover, although K7’s Alpha 21264- derived 200MHz bus system improves upon Intel Corp’s Slot 1 design by a modest margin, AMD’s problem is going to be creating an infrastructure to support logic chips, motherboards to match Slot 1’s. AMD has adopted Pentiums II’s Slot 1 physical form, calling it Slot A because it’s mechanically identical it can use existing card guides and PC chassis, the report says. However because it’s very different electrically AMD has to deliver – on the same schedule as Intel – advanced memory systems, UMA graphics or AGP 4x, PCI, Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel and IEEE-1394 firewire. Going on its experience with K6’s Socket 7 bus, AMD thinks that if the chip is good enough the infrastructure problem will solve itself. It’s licensing some chip sets royalty-free to some six companies. The bus is theoretically compatible with Alpha 21264 though the report suggests that it’s unlikely to amount to much in practice.
