When AMD’s Athlon K7 CPU was launched manner again in 1999, it turned out to be one thing of an Intel-killer, smashing the heavyweight’s Pentium III CPU. Now it seems these K7 chips have been precise gun slingers, at the least insofar as that they had bullet-blasting weapons etched proper into their silicon dies.
That is the invention made by X poster Fritzchens Fritz, who has one thing of a sideline in attractive pictures of CPU and GPU dies. When you zoom into one nook of the highest metallic layer you’ll be able to apparently see a revolver firing a bullet, proper subsequent to a map of Texas.
The Texas bit could be a reference to AMD’s services in Austin Texas. The gun and rushing bullet? Nicely, that is anybody’s guess.
No matter, it was the Athlon K7 that arguably first shot AMD onto an equal footing with Intel for efficiency. Not solely did it launch with the identical 600MHz peak clockspeeds because the Pentium III of the day, it really provided superior efficiency in some benchmarks. And that is together with the purposes that majored on floating level efficiency, which have been beforehand the protect of Intel’s most interesting CPUs.
Because it occurs, it isn’t an enormous shock to study that none aside from Jim Keller, broadly thought to be one of many main chip architects of latest a long time and the person behind AMD’s present collection of Zen CPU architectures, had a hand in K7’s design. Anyway, lengthy story brief, K7 proved to be quicker than Pentium III in Quake III, and that is actually all that issues, proper?
For enjoyable, you’ll be able to try the Quake III benchmark numbers in Anandtech’s unique overview with the Athlon K7 clocking up just below 120fps whereas the Pentium III lumbers alongside under 100fps. Ouch!
Simply to offer some context and an thought of how far we have come because the K7, it was constructed on a 0.25 micron course of, which primarily means 250nm, and contained 22 million transistors.
The latter was really the very best so far on the time, additional underlining that K7 wasn’t simply there to snag some low-end funds PC gross sales however was meant to make AMD an actual contender for premium efficiency for the primary time.
Immediately, AMD produces CPUs on 5nm and 4nm TSMC nodes and its Phoenix APU accommodates 25 billion transistors. AMD additionally overtook Intel relating to market cap, or the general worth of an organization in keeping with its share worth, in June 2022.
Immediately, AMD is value about $270 billion to Intel’s $180 billion, an eventuality that will have been very, very arduous to consider again in 1999, particularly when you think about that Intel had an analogous market cap in 1999 to that which is has immediately however AMD was solely value a few billion.
