Advanced Micro Devices Inc has set a date for the 3D version of its K6 chip, which will be launched on May 28th, eleven months after the introduction of the original K6 Intel compatible. The date was made public last Thursday by AMD CEO Jerry Sanders at the company’s annual shareholders’ conference. The 9.3m transistor K6-2, originally codenamed Chompers after the cartoon dinosaur in the film Land Before Time, will be pitched against the Pentium II, and will run at clock speeds of 266MHz and 300MHz initially. Future ramp-ups to 400MHz are expected in the future, with lower speed options as well, and the chip will support Intel’s AGP Advanced Graphics Port and a 100MHz system buses through third party chipsets. AMD has had functional silicon of the AMD-K6-2 since last October, and has been issuing samples to its partners since then. There is no official comment on availability, but the word is that AMD hopes to have K6-2 systems in retail and maybe direct channels on or around the launch date. Included in the chip will be the newly named 3Dnow! 3D instructions (CI No 3,401), focused towards SIMD (single instruction multiple data) floating point operations rather than the integer-oriented MMX instructions. AMD says the 21 instructions (whittled down from an original 24) are complementary to MMX, and work in conjunction with graphics accelerators, making them more efficient. Cyrix Corp and Integrated Device Technology Inc’s Centaur Technology Inc were in on the development, and plan to use the instructions in their own devices, and Microsoft Corp will support the instructions through the next release of its DirectX graphics application programming interface, due out in July. Developers have the choice of hard coding, using Direct X or using 3Dnow!-compatible drivers currently under development. AMD says it expects office productivity applications to support the new instructions in the future as well as games and graphics programs – but isn’t currently giving away any details. This is the first time AMD has offered feature differentiation from Intel, and the company believes it’s at least one year ahead of Intel’s planned launch of 70 new second generation MMX2 instructions, also known as Katmai (CI No 3,327). In that time it must establish enough of a foothold in the market for its alternative to survive against Intel’s huge marketplace dominance. By then, AMD should be ready with its K7 chip, also using 3Dnow!, and with a module using a single edge connector mechanically similar to Intel’s Slot 1. That chip will feature Digital Equipment Corp’s Alpha 21264 bus.
