KryoTech, Inc, the Columbia, South Carolina-based chip cooling specialist, has announced a 500-MHz PC using the new K6-III/400 processor from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. As usual, KryoTech has boosted the clock speed by 100-MHz by using its cooling technology to freeze the silicon to minus 40 degrees Celsius. As a result, claims KryoTech, the Cool K6-III will outperform Intel Corp’s 500-MHz Pentium III by up to 30% using industry benchmarks. Using Winstone 99, for instance, the Cool K6-II achieved a 25.2 score compared with the Pentium III’s 23.3 (an 8% difference), and using CPUmark32 it scored 1,560 compared with the Pentium III’s 1,250 (a 24% difference). The 30% gain came from running the Quake 2 Crusher game at 67 frames per second rather than 51.2 using the Pentium-III. The K6-III uses AMD’s 3DNow! graphics instruction set as an alternative to Intel’s new Katmai instructions. Intel currently relies on external air- cooling for the Pentium III, though it did using super-cooling technology for its demonstration of 1-GHz clock speed for the Pentium III on Tuesday (CI No 3,605). It’s not clear if Intel was using KryoTech’s vapor phase refrigeration system technology for that demonstration. AMD is shipping limited quantities of its 450-MHz K6-III to OEMs, but has not worked on a non-cooled 500- MHz part, while Intel is promising clock speeds of above 600-MHz for the Pentium III in the second half of this year as it moves to 0.18 micron technology. The AMD/KryoTech combination, including 64Kb of integrated Level 1 cache and 256Kb of integrated Level 2 cache, costs $1,250 in a barebones configuration, and is available immediately.
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