 SU.HARDW.PC.CPU (2:5020/299)  SU.HARDW.PC.CPU 
 From : Alexander Pivovar                   2:5020/677.3    Thu 03 Apr 97 11:01 
 Subj : K6 !                                                               

C⫨  ⥡, All!

subj.   review  Tomasa Pubsta:)
IMHO   ᥣ ᠬ ꥪ⨢ .


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                    Intel's Enemy No. 1 - The AMD K6 CPU

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For quite a long while we didn't hear too much from the Texan CPU
manufacturer, that used to give Intel so much trouble in the days of the
386 and 486. The AMD K5 CPU took too long to get ready and when it was
released it was too late and too slow to compete against Intel's fast
Pentium CPUs. In the last three years AMD had a tough time, but they were
planning smartly when they bought the CPU manufacturer NexGen two years
ago. The power of NexGen was meant to be the mother of AMD's upcoming K6
CPU and now the day has come to show the world how well this new CPU can
compete with Intel's latest processors.

For quite a while the atmosphere at AMD was getting better every day. The
expectations into the K6 are high and the computer market wouldn't wish
anything more than a real tough competitor to the more and more increasing
giant Intel. Intel has lately shown that its practices of ruling the
computer industry aren't exactly enjoyable. AMD and Cyrix had already
several fights with Intel, but even normal people like Robert Collins or
even myself had to face the strong arm tactics of this almost completely
ruthless company. Intel is taking over the computer industry bit by bit and
it will take more than some hopeful promises to fight off this threat.
AMD's K6 could be a serious problem for Intel's sovereignty on the computer
market and I am here now to tell you how well the K6 is prepared to take on
Intel.

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The Architecture of the AMD K6

Sorry, this part is unfortunately still under construction.

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The Performance of the AMD K6

Well this is what really everyone wants to know. Will the K6 be faster than
Intel's Pentium MMX or Pentium Pro? What are its strengths and what its
weaknesses?

I've tested the K6 for complete nine days. That's certainly longer than any
other computer journalist on the planet. 9 days and 9 nights I tried
everything I could do with this CPU, several OS's, several motherboards and
of course several clock speeds. I've got hundreds of results and I'll try
to make them as clear to you as possible.

  1. The Windows 95 Performance of the K6

     Let's say it loud and clear. Under Windows 95 the K6 is the fastest
     CPU currently available. The K6 233 reaches a Windows 95 performance
     that's higher than of a Pentium MMX, still higher than of an
     overclocked Pentium MMX 225, higher than of a PPro 200 and equal to an
     overclocked PPro 233. Overclocked to 250 MHz (3x83 MHz) and 262.5 MHz
     (3.5x75 MHz) it's faster than anything else under Windows 95 and even
     the upcoming Pentium II will have its problems with it.

     The K6 166 is almost as fast as an Intel Pentium MMX 200, the K6 200
     is already faster than this Intel CPU and the K6 233 shows a distance
     of even 4 Winstone 97 points to the Pentium MMX 200.

      WINDOWS 95          K6 233  K6 200  K6 166 Pentium MMX  Pentium Pro
                                                 200          200

      Business Winstone
      97                  54.4    51.9    48.6   50.2         52.4

      Highend Winstone
      97                  23.6    22.2    20.1   22.4         24.8

      Business Winmark
      97                  98.1    89.7    78.5   91.4         84.2

      WinQuake 1.09
      Timedemo2 640x480   15.5    13.9    12.6   15.9         23.4

     As you can see, the Highend Winstone performance of the K6 is at the
     same level as the Pentium and definitely lower than the Highend
     Winstone performance of the Pentium Pro. The difference in WinQuake is
     even bigger. This shows that the FPU performance of the K6 is lower
     than the FPU performance of the Intel CPUs.

     The importance of the FPU in normal applications is still very
     questionable. Even Quake players should have got the message by now,
     that you rather save some money purchasing a CPU and buy a Diamond
     Monster 3D instead. This enables you to play GLQuake, which is faster
     than any 'only CPU driven' normal Quake and it is looking 100000 times
     better.

     In terms of the normal business applications under Windows 95 the K6
     is the absolute winner. The Pentium II CPU at 233 MHz will probably be
     just as fast or maybe slightly faster, but for a much higher price.

  2. The Windows NT Performance of the K6

     Under Windows NT, the K6 is still making a good figure, although the
     distance to its competitors from Intel isn't big at all. The K6 233 is
     under Windows NT exactly as fast as a Pentium Pro 200, it's much
     faster than a Pentium MMX 200, but it's considerably slower than an
     overclocked Pentium Pro 233 and will most likely be slower than the
     Pentium II at the same clock speed as well.

      WINDOWS NT 4.0     K6 233 K6 200  K6 166 Pentium MMX   Pentium Pro
                                               200           200

      Business
      Winstone 97        71     67.6    63.3   64.3          71.2

      Highend Winstone
      97                 26.9   24.5    22     24.2          29.2

      Business Winmark
      97                 104    93.5    83.6   87.5          104

      Winbench 97 CPU
      Mark16             465    414     362    423           360

      Winbench 97 CPU
      Mark32             559    513     466    420           554

     You can see again, that the K6 166 is giving the Pentium MMX 200 a
     very good run for its money. The Pentium Pro 200 can still show his
     muscles with his internal L2 cache and the faster FPU in the Highend
     Winstone. However, considering that the K6 has to run with slow 66 MHz
     clocked L2 cache, it's performing quite well.

     Lots of us would have loved to see the K6 performing even better under
     NT, because that's the old domain of the Pentium Pro and will be the
     play ground of the upcoming Pentium II, which is at least as fast as a
     Pentium Pro at the same clock speed. Hence the K6 will not be faster
     than a Pentium II under Windows NT at the same clock speed, but it
     will be much cheaper than the Pentium II as well.

  3. The DOS Performance of the K6

     Today the DOS performance of a computer system is most likely the
     least important one. Hardly anybody is still using DOS for any
     business applications, but there are still several computer games,
     that mainly run under DOS. For me DOS is really nothing else than a
     gaming OS anymore and that's the reason why I'm only doing game
     benchmarks for DOS.

     In this environment the K6 doesn't really look exactly good. Quake is
     not one of the K6's favorites and in other 3D applications under DOS
     it doesn't look well against the PPro at all.

      DOS                 K6 233 K6 200  K6 166  Pentium MMX  Pentium Pro
                                                 200          200

      Quake 1.06
      Timedemo2 640x480   14.2   13.4    12.2    15.7         21.9

      PC Player DOS 3D
      Benchmark           26.4   25.1    23.1    23.1         31

      3DBench             250    250     200     166.6        333.3

      Chris Dial's 3D
      Bench               38.4   35.3    31.7    40.7         49.6

     I can only stress again, that I personally wouldn't give anything
     about the Quake issue, because there's a Monster 3D and GLQuake, which
     is faster and much nicer. However the K6 is compared to the Pentium
     Pro definitely the worse DOS gaming CPU.

  4. The MMX Performance of the K6

     I have to admit it, that because of the lack of decent MMX benchmarks,
     I had to use the Intel Media Bench, which of course is written by
     Intel and hence produced to show off Intel CPUs best. However the K6
     MMX performance doesn't even under this benchmark look bad at all. The
     video and image processing performance of the K6 is better than of the
     Pentium MMX, which I would currently consider as the most important of
     all these mystical MMX topics and the video performance will most
     likely even be better than of a Pentium II.

      Intel Media                               Pentium MMX   Pentium Pro
      Benchmark          K6 233  K6 200  K6 166 200           200

      Overall            246.52  214.46  181.58 246.57        194

      Video              308.54  269.14  228.71 252.07        160.22

      Image Processing   697.16  605.07  527.55 684.98        219.7

      3D                 141.07  122.15  102.77 159.78        211.55

      Audio              273.22  238.11  200.79 326.58        232.32

     It is obvious, that the MMX performance of the K6 is much better than
     of the Pentium Pro, which doesn't have the MMX instructions. It's
     funny that the K6 233 has the same overall performance in IMB, but a
     better video and image processing performance on the cost of a worse
     3D and audio performance. Well, which ones would you consider as more
     important?

  5. The Performance of an overclocked K6 compared to its overclocked
     competitors

     I'm currently a little late, so I will load this page up now and
     continue working on this paragraph. I can tell you already now that
     the K6 is very overclockable and it's showing a most impressive
     performance then.

     Currently still under construction.

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The Compatibility of the K6

Don't worry about this subject ... :)

Under Construction!!

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Summary

The first thing I'd like to say is that one thing is for sure: The Pentium
MMX is now a completely obsolete CPU ! The K6 233 will be priced lower than
the Pentium MMX 200 and it's faster than this CPU in almost every respect.
Compared to the Pentium Pro and to the upcoming Pentium II you will have to
make up your mind. If you should be a Windows 95 user the answer should be
clear. The K6 is faster than any current CPU under Windows 95 and will
probably be just as fast as the Pentium II at the same clock speed . Under
Windows NT the K6 233 is still at least as fast as the Pentium Pro 200, but
it will most likely be considerably slower than the Pentium II at the same
clock speed. Hence the NT user will have to know what he really wants. If
he just wants the best performance, regardless for what price, he should
wait for the Pentium II. If price is of importance, consider what you are
doing with your system. The K6's weakness is the FPU. If a lot of rendering
power is needed, the Pentium Pro and the Pentium II are the much better
choice. The K6 is also unable to run in multi CPU systems, so this will
stay a domain for Intel as well for now. If you are only doing business
applications however, the K6 is a very attractive alternative. There will
very soon be a K6 266 and it will be much cheaper than a Pentium II. For
the money you save you can get other hardware, which could make your system
even faster than the Pentium II system for this price.

If you should be worried about compatibility issues, you can relax. Unlike
the problems with the Cyrix/IBM 6x86, the AMD K6 is running even on boards
that don't recognize it. As long as your board is supporting dual voltage,
the K6 runs on it. BIOS upgrades either now or very soon available to
enable the special features of the K6 to give it maximum performance.
Although the K6 233 is officially asking for 3.2 V, which is not available
on the most current boards, it was running flawlessly at 2.9 V on every
board I've tested it on.

For 'Tom's Overclocker Community' this CPU is an El Dorado as well. The K6
233 runs great at 250 or even 262.5 MHz and is able to beat even
overclocked PPros or Pentium II 233 at these clock speeds. This is
something you get for free, so why not be happy about it? I can't wait to
test the K6 266 at 291 MHz and I'm sure that the K6 at this speed can even
compare to a Pentium II 300.

All in all I'm sure that this CPU will be very successful. The current
mainstream market still is the Pentium market. Whoever is contemplating the
purchase of an Intel Pentium or Pentium MMX CPU can forget about this now.
The AMD K6 is faster and cheaper. As long as the Pentium II isn't
officially available, the K6 is even a serious alternative to the high end
system market. So tell me, what keeps you from buying a K6?

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    This page has been visited 3429 times since April 2, 1997, 18:00 GMT
=== Cut ===


                                   With Best Regards, Alexander Pivovar
2:5020/677.3 /554.14@FIDONET.ORG 963:1/466@VIWANET.RU

--- GoldED/386 3.00.Alpha2+
 * Origin: Me@Home (2:5020/677.3)

 SU.HARDW.PC.CPU (2:5020/299)  SU.HARDW.PC.CPU 
 From : Alexander Pivovar                   2:5020/677.3    Thu 03 Apr 97 11:03 
 Subj : K6                                                                   

C⫨  ⥡, All!


=== Cut ===
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Back to the K6 Page

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K6 Processor Benchmarks

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Graphics Tests

All units are in Mpixels/second

     Test       K6 at    Intel at   K6 at    Intel at   K6 at    Intel at
                 66x3      66x3      75x3      75x3     83x2.5    83x2.5

 BitBlt S-S
 Copy           64.697    64.691    64.697    64.697    64.697    64.697
 BitBlt M-S
 Copy           5.193     5.098     6.018     5.792     6.344      6.410
 Filled
 Rectangle     283.343   284.145   284.120   284.145   284.145    284.145
 Pattern Fill  284.186   284.750   283.343   284.750   284.750    284.120
 Vertical
 Lines          5.958     5.941     5.982     5.982     5.999      5.995
 Horizontal
 Lines          25.866    25.805    26.814    26.360    26.738    26.339
 Diagonal
 Lines          11.081    11.128    11.126    11.272    11.253    11.264
 Text Render    23.051    22.583    24.045    23.170    23.539    23.053

 Total in
 PM-marks       82.285    82.345    82.709    82.617    82.799    82.645

     Test       K6 at    Intel at   K6 at    Intel at   K6 at    Intel at
                 66x3      66x3      75x3      75x3     83x2.5    83x2.5

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CPU Integer Tests

       Test         K6 at   Intel at   K6 at  Intel at   K6 at    Intel at
                     66x3     66x3     75x3     75x3     83x2.5    83x2.5

 Dhrystones in VAX
 11/780 MIPS       220.757  159.148   248.367  179.295  230.895   170.327
 Tower of Hanoi in
 moves/25 usec     157.677  147.955   177.106  164.103  164.391   154.118
 Heapsort in MIPS   96.113   93.378   109.984  105.455  102.870    99.923
 Sieve of
 Erastothenes in   162.345  177.696   183.210  195.684  173.570   187.607
 MIPS

 Total in
 CPUint-marks      172.008  147.448   193.969  164.789  181.080   156.541

       Test         K6 at   Intel at   K6 at  Intel at   K6 at    Intel at
                     66x3     66x3     75x3     75x3     83x2.5    83x2.5

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Cpu Floating Point Tests

         Test          K6 at   Intel    K6 at   Intel    K6 at    Intel at
                       66x3   at 66x3   75x3   at 75x3   83x2.5    83x2.5

 Linpack in MFLOPS    30.091   14.088  33.285  16.055    30.945    14.447
 Flops in MFLOPS      33.448   32.039  37.693  36.042    34.872    33.402
 Fast Fourier
 Transform in VAX     18.522   17.932  20.005  18.296    20.743    21.231
 FFT's

 Total in
 CPUfloat-marks       29.143   24.181  32.481  26.822    30.605    25.733

         Test          K6 at   Intel    K6 at   Intel    K6 at    Intel at
                       66x3   at 66x3   75x3   at 75x3   83x2.5    83x2.5

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Direct Interface to Video Extensions (DIVE)

       Test         K6 at  Intel at   K6 at   Intel at   K6 at   Intel at
                    66x3     66x3      75x3     75x3    83x2.5    83x2.5

 Video Bus
 Bandwidth in      36.242   54.545    40.658   52.364   45.131    68.238
 MB/sec
 DIVE function,
 fps at            132.181  201.887  148.009   200.253  163.308   248.175
 640x480x256
 Memory to
 Screen, Direct    124.045  186.182  139.097   179.764  154.968   234.319
 1.00:1

 Total in
 DIVE-marks        46.907   70.684    52.589   68.546   58.434    88.447

       Test         K6 at  Intel at   K6 at   Intel at   K6 at   Intel at
                    66x3     66x3      75x3     75x3    83x2.5    83x2.5

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><skip>  ᪮ ࠡ HDD த ⨬ 栬.


Memory in MB/sec

     Test        K6 at   Intel at   K6 at   Intel at    K6 at    Intel at
                 66x3      66x3      75x3     75x3     83x2.5     83x2.5

 5Kb Copy       735.129  733.595   826.776   824.556   765.931    763.957
 10Kb Copy      748.145  746.298   842.300   817.421   781.250    761.390
> 20Kb Copy      627.622  137.833   707.332   157.075   670.585    169.850
> 40Kb Copy      127.545   69.861   145.404   78.610    151.625    81.385
>   ⥫  64KB built-in cache
80Kb Copy      84.297    69.969    95.164   73.968    94.221     87.642
 160Kb Copy     80.612    63.830    94.029   69.528    100.304    87.427
 320Kb Copy     58.521    64.862    83.549   61.698    86.022     68.281
 640Kb Copy     55.521    52.688    57.840   49.135    71.222     71.406
 1280Kb Copy    39.481    43.918    42.196   42.500    48.750     56.520
 5Kb Read       423.451  250.598   477.817   281.667   443.892    261.113
 10Kb Read      433.492  250.642   487.706   281.701   453.864    260.417
 20Kb Read      427.597  155.447   481.166   174.981   447.073    158.321
 40Kb Read      265.383  155.847   298.274   175.582   293.921    149.206
 80Kb Read      196.836  156.106   205.015   175.734   241.448    144.113
 160Kb Read     196.576  149.061   221.066   137.149   217.206    142.005
 320Kb Read     164.114  140.136   159.621   116.033   189.843    133.306
 640Kb Read     139.745  120.160   168.862   125.976   167.983    131.856
 1280Kb Read    117.224  105.481   131.451   90.833    141.987    119.581
 5Kb Write      623.378   89.125   703.778   98.050    653.743    109.222
 10Kb Write     655.045   87.847   738.945   96.739    683.359    107.046
 20Kb Write     578.323   85.871   650.274   95.924    614.426    106.354
 40Kb Write     180.247   85.191   202.832   95.683    214.348    105.992
 80Kb Write     126.888   84.813   142.845   95.298    154.175    106.100
 160Kb Write    87.206    84.877   137.539   95.301    153.841    106.238
 320Kb Write    98.611    84.431   110.807   95.039    153.736    105.426
 640Kb Write    70.426    84.211    80.955   94.520    107.090    105.208
 1280Kb Write   62.019    83.984    70.474   94.227    76.875     105.208

 Total in
 Mem-marks      235.859  128.889   266.208   141.237   256.901    138.898

     Test        K6 at   Intel at   K6 at   Intel at    K6 at    Intel at
                 66x3      66x3      75x3     75x3     83x2.5     83x2.5

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Back to the K6 Page
=== Cut ===



                                   With Best Regards, Alexander Pivovar
2:5020/677.3 /554.14@FIDONET.ORG 963:1/466@VIWANET.RU

--- GoldED/386 3.00.Alpha2+
 * Origin: Me@Home (2:5020/677.3)


