Why should AMD break the convention of numbering CPU by its working frequency, and make AMD Athlon XP 1.53GHz, 1.47GHz, 1.4GHz, 1.33GHz into "1800+" and ". In the words of W.J.Sanders, chairman and CEO of AMD, "For most of the 20 years of computer development, frequency has been the standard to measure the performance of computer processors. This is because major manufacturers adopt the same structure in product design, and clock speed has become a representative of good or bad performance. But this is no longer the case. Our award-winning seventh-generation AMD Athlon processor architecture proves that clock speed is only one of the criteria for measuring performance. "
Originally, in the new microprocessor market, whether Intel or AMD released two or three new CPUs was not worth making a fuss about. But this time AMD's Athlon XP is really unusual. Not only did the serial number of the product change, but also it was stamped with Microsoft's Windows XP, and a new type of "palomino" was adopted. The significance of this change goes far beyond the serial number itself.
First, the "alliance at the gates" kills two birds with one stone
In the past two years, the CPU market has been dominated by two players, and AMD and vendors other than Intel have basically withdrawn from the competition in this field. However, it is this AMD that makes Intel look down upon at first and grow stronger in this fierce competition. By the time Intel was alert, AMD had gained a firm foothold in the market, and the CPU cost performance was recognized to be higher than Intel's, and it was widely supported. Intel caught fire in its backyard. In the CPU frequency war in 2000, P Ⅲ1.13G recovered with major defects, and the highest frequency crown was actually occupied by AMD. At the same time, due to the high price of RDRAM and the problem that MCH (Memory Control Hub) supports SDRAM, the i820 chipset is difficult to produce, and it is also difficult for Intel for a while. However, Intel is Intel after all. After a short adjustment, P4 was released at the beginning of 200 1, regaining the crown of the highest frequency in one fell swoop. In 200 1 year, the price of P4 was drastically reduced, which forced P4 to become the mainstream, and the main frequency of P4 also made great strides, reaching 2GHz. As for the chipset, while giving RAMBUS a small stove, Intel further lowered the price of RDRAM, which made the i850 chipset open up the market. At the same time, Intel paid RAMBUS an expensive patent fee to obtain the authorization to produce the i845 chipset, put the i845 motherboard supporting SDRAM on the market, and planned to release the i845 chipset supporting DDR in early 2002.
These actions of Intel have a great impact. P4 seems to become famous overnight, which suddenly reversed the unfavorable situation in the retail market. Faced with Intel's aggressive offensive, AMD realized that if it continued to fight alone, it would probably be eaten by Intel. On the one hand, AMD further cooperates with its close partner VIA, on the other hand, it decisively forms an alliance with Microsoft. 200 1 10 10, AMD announced that they had reached a formal cooperation agreement with Microsoft to expand the Athlon XP and Windows XP markets. This market cooperation plan includes: selecting retailers, small-scale business user plan, system construction plan and sales promotion. You know, Microsoft is the dominant computer operating system in the world, and Windows occupies more than 95% of personal computer desktops. Windows XP is its latest operating system +0+65438 released on October 25th, 2006. All the involvement of AMD has also made the WINTEL (Microsoft and Intel) alliance that created Intel's leading position in the chip industry a thing of the past.
Forming an alliance with Microsoft and playing the trump card of Windows XP can be said to be AMD's magic weapon against Intel. At the Athlon XP conference, AMD said that the new CPU should be named "XP" because it is tailor-made for WIndows XP and "most suitable for Windows XP". Whether it is a business application or a personal application such as photo editing, AMD's Athlon XP will maximize the performance of Windows XP.
Windows XP operating system includes new versions of Windows Media Encoder and Direct X. In the whole development stage of the operating system, AMD has been cooperating with Microsoft and providing system and technical support for special processor optimization functions, ensuring that Microsoft's operating system can give full play to digital multimedia functions and let end users enjoy the fun provided by multimedia by using systems equipped with AMD Athlon and AMD Duron processors. John Frederiksen, general manager of Microsoft's personal computer application department, said, "AMD Athlon and AMD Duron processors can give Windows XP excellent multimedia processing performance and ensure users enjoy digital multimedia fun. Just as Windows XP is about to be launched, AMD joined us and we are very excited. "
The cooperation between AMD and Microsoft can give full play to the complementary advantages of both sides, which is a good thing for people who appreciate AMD processors, at least so that they don't have to worry about the compatibility between AMD processors and operating systems in the future. AMD's confrontation with Intel is of special significance, because not only the operating system, but also the compatibility of AMD CPU in application software has been criticized by users. With the cooperation with Microsoft, it is believed that more application software will be designed and optimized specifically for AMD CPU.
Second, "surprise" and come straight to the point.
The CPU kernel of Athlon XP adopts the improved K7 "Palomino" based on the K7 (development code) listed in 1999. Legend has it that palomino is a flying horse with a light brown body, white mane and tail, which is very magical. Since Palomino was applied to Athlon4, AMD's market influence has expanded a lot. According to the data of Mercury Research, AMD's x86 processor market share (in terms of sales volume) has reached more than 22% in the second quarter of 200/kloc-0. Palomino is AMD's sharp arrow at IntelP4. This time, the core technology is optimized and applied to XP, and the command execution technology named "QuantiSpeed" is used. It means that its kernel provides extra performance, which is different from the past. It mainly improves the performance in three aspects:
1. The built-in cache adds the function of hard disk prefetching, and the number of commands that can be issued at the same time is 9;
2. Add 52 fully compatible Intel SSE (Internet Streaming SIMD Extension) and SSE registration (collectively referred to as 3DNow! Professional conductor);
3. 128KB 1 level cache and 256KB 2 level cache are integrated on 1 chip. In addition, low-power operation functions are added, such as the transistor structure of CPU core and the low-power design of circuit, and the thermal diode that can measure the temperature of CPU core and control the working frequency.
So, how does AMD deal with the most sensitive numbering problem in this Athlon XP release? You know, since the birth of CPU, its performance standard is measured by frequency, and AMD's new numbering method of 1 is equivalent to redefining the performance standard of processor. According to the classic definition, the performance of microprocessor is defined as IPC (number of operations per clock cycle) ×MHz (clock speed), while AMD thinks that the end user is concerned about how fast the application software can run, and the new numbering standard is also based on this. It can be said that benchmarking is the basis of Athlon XP performance positioning. The tests conducted by AMD are based on industry standards. Through these tests, the performance of (1) office efficiency, (2) digital media, (3)3D games and other user environments are calculated respectively, and the benchmark tests of each category are weighted on average, and each category is also weighted to calculate the comprehensive performance score.
Specifically, the benchmark test of office efficiency includes (1) business winstone 200 1 and (2)sysmark 2006 54 38+0- office efficiency; Digital media testing includes (1) content creation Winstone 200 1 and (2)Symark 200 1- internet content creation. In terms of SysMark 200 1, Microsft Windows Media Encoder 7 for benchmark testing has already supported AMD's 3D Now! Instruction, two tests are not supported; The 3D game test includes (1) half-life Smokin, (2) consumables, (3) Thor's Hammer 3 Demo2, (4)AquaMark, (5) Dronez General, (6) unreal tournament, and (7) Evolution A. (8) 9 kinds of games such as Lonely Hero 2(MDK2), (9) Hero Sam and (1) 3D Winbench 2000 (hardware T & ampl), (4) 3dmark200 1 (d3d software) 4 benchmark software, * * */kloc-0.
Overall performance is the average of three different environments. According to AMD's performance evaluation, the performance of Athlon XP running at 1.33GHz is about 5% lower than that of Athlon running at 1.40GHz, but the performance is improved by 3%. Athlon XP( 1800+) running at 1.53GHz is about 15% lower than Pentium 4 running at 1.8GHz, but its performance is about 12% higher. For the performance comparison between them, please refer to Figure 3 and Figure 4.
The performance evaluation of AMD Athlon XP is conducted under the supervision of the third party: Andersen of the United States. Andersen will review the test results of AMD Athlon XP processor, including independent observation and test system configuration, benchmark test steps and results records, and publish the results of 65,438+0 comprehensive and detailed audit report on AMD's website.
So, what is the result of the test? Let's take a look at the relevant information. Of course, AMD naturally compares Athlon XP with Intel. Let's take a look at the comparative test results of office efficiency and 3D game performance, as shown in Figure 5. The histogram from left to right represents P4 1.5GHz, AMD Athlon XP 1500+, P4 1.6GHz, AMD Athlon XP 1600+, P4 1.7GHz and AMD Athlon XP/kloc-respectively. The comparative test results of digital media are shown in Figure 6, and the legend indicates the same meaning as Figure 3. The dotted line of Athlon XP is the test result after upgrading to Media Ecncoder 7.0. If the published results are correct, as can be seen from Figures 5 and 6, under Windows XP, Athlon XP has obvious advantages compared with P4 processor with the same frequency after adopting the new TPI sample number.
However, problems also follow. Users used to compare various performance indicators with CPU working frequency, but now it has suddenly changed, and users will not be able to compare CPU performance with working frequency. What is AMD's intention? About this problem, we can roughly understand it from the actual performance factors of CPU: the fewer instructions necessary for processing applications, the more instructions that can be executed at the same time, and the higher the working frequency.
1. There is basically no difference in the number of instructions among Athlon, Athlon XP and Pentium 4 with the same computer structure (386 architecture). However, because AMD enabled Athlon XP to execute Intel's SSE instruction, the processing performance was improved accordingly.
2. The number of instructions that can be executed at the same time is determined by the super-scaler technology, which embeds multiple arithmetic units in the CPU and executes multiple instructions at the same time. The number of instructions executed at the same time is in IPC (number of instructions per clock cycle) and the reciprocal is CPI (number of clock cycles per instruction). The smaller the CPI value, the higher the performance. According to the different CPU, the number of built-in arithmetic units and instruction execution pipelines is different, and the corresponding number of instructions executed at the same time is also different.
3. Because the running frequency is determined by the interval of instruction execution, the smaller the interval, the higher the running frequency and the higher the performance.
When comparing the performance of the same product, such as Athlon XP, because 1 is the same as 2, we only need to consider the working frequency of 3; When comparing different products of the same architecture, such as Athlon XP and Pentium 4, we should not only consider 3, but also consider the CPI value of 2. AMD has been insisting on this comparison standard since it independently designed CPU after manufacturing 486. However, the working frequency is the easiest indicator for users to understand, so the CPI value has not been mentioned for a long time.
After continuous development, AMD's technical strength has caught up with Intel, and the performance of Athlon and Duron microprocessors is not inferior to Intel's Celeron, Pentium III and P4. At present, although Athlon is not as fast as Pentium 4, in many tests, the relatively slow Athlon performs as well as P4, and even surpasses Pentium 4 in some cases. The newly launched Athlon XP pays more attention to strengthening the kernel, and the module size is expanded from 120mm2 to 128mm2, which significantly improves the performance and continues to maintain AMD's consistent cost performance advantage.
Thirdly, it is meaningful to introduce new performance indicators.
In fact, when AMD launched AMD K5 against Pentium, it challenged the above trend by introducing a "P-rating" index to represent the actual performance. However, AMD K6 followed Intel and continued to compete on the working frequency, thus giving up P-rating. Now AMD once again puts forward the idea of not pursuing working frequency, but focusing on actual performance, which is just a big strategy for Intel. Friends who are concerned about AMD's CPU trends may have noticed that AMD has been planning to rename Athlon series processors for some time in response to Intel's killing. In order to achieve the established TPI goal, AMD also agreed with computer manufacturers not to use the name "1.5GHz Athlon". It is said that different products within AMD have been called by models. For example, Athlon MP for workstations has been renamed Model 6.
AMD originally planned to introduce such new performance indicators in 2002, but before the release of Athlon XP, it couldn't wait to throw out TPI samples. Although the actual performance displayed according to the standard test value is the standard for positioning new products, the style number like Athlon XP may not necessarily represent the actual performance, but we can at least learn from AMD's two intentions: (1) All products from the previous Athlon to Athlon XP will be expressed in a relative order, so that there will be no contradiction in performance; (2) Compared with competitor Intel Pentium 4, Athlon XP has a clearer positioning.
In the past, AMD has been competing fiercely with Intel in terms of speed and price. Now AMD is trying to compete with Intel by improving all aspects of CPU performance. Introducing new performance indicators and renaming CPU is a concrete manifestation of the drastic changes in AMD's market competition strategy. Compared with Pentium 4, the positioning of Athlon XP is determined by the price, that is to say, Athlon XP 1500 ++ running at 1.33GHz is almost the same as Pentium 4 running at 1.5GHz, and the higher the number, the higher the performance. In order to facilitate dealers and consumers to understand the actual meaning of the new logo, AMD recently released a conversion formula for calculating the nominal frequency and actual frequency of Athlon XP processor:
Nominal frequency =3× actual frequency /2-500
Actual frequency =2× nominal frequency /3+333
According to this formula, the actual frequencies of Athlon XP 1900+ and Athlon XP 2000+ released in the first quarter of next year are 1.6GHz and 1.67GHz, while the actual frequencies of Athlon XP 2 100+ released in March are1.
After Athlon XP, AMD will switch to pure core with 0. 13 micron technology next year, and the frequency nominal mode may continue to adopt Athlon+. It is reported that the model of AMD Athlon may be changed to model 1800+ or model 1900+ in the future. No matter which frequency nominal method is adopted, the calculation formula will change.
AMD said that the most scientific way to judge processor performance is to multiply the main frequency speed by the number of instructions that can be executed at the same time. AMD's idea is good, but can ordinary consumers accept it? It seems that an adaptation process is needed. Some analysts around the world worry that this move will not convince consumers.
Four. abstract
Shopping malls are like battlefields, and the winner is king. Generally speaking, AMD still lags behind Intel in the research and development of core technologies, so Intel can always release newer and more advanced processors one step ahead of AMD, and easily raise the main frequency to a new height. It should be said that AMD's release of Athlon XP and the implementation of new numbering are expedient measures and the product of market competition. Because AMD's CPU has better performance and lower price than Intel's CPU with the same frequency and location for a period of time, Athlon XP only further developed this advantage and became more prominent. Based on this consideration, it seems that the new number promoted by AMD is still difficult to be recognized by the public. Moreover, although AMD uses the independent audit of a third-party organization, it should be said that there is no absolutely authoritative evaluation organization in the world to evaluate a system, so users are still skeptical about the test results. In addition, AMD also needs to work hard on market activities and influence. In my opinion, in order to avoid Intel's sharp edge, AMD might as well completely abandon the traditional CPU performance index (which still needs to be converted in traditional units) and create its own "user performance index". If this indicator is finally recognized, AMD can fully take the initiative.
AMD and Intel have been fighting in the market. When the competition reaches a certain level, price becomes the most powerful weapon. The price war between AMD and Intel has never stopped since 200 1. As a result, AMD's market share increased from 17% to 2 1% in the first quarter, which is the biggest increase since 1999. Intel began to sell Pentium 4 at a reduced price in April, regaining a certain market share from AMD. But price reduction is undoubtedly painful for manufacturers, because it will inevitably involve their economic interests. Although AMD and Intel have repeatedly cut prices to sell chips, they are still struggling in the shadow of the downturn in the PC market. AMD's net loss in the third quarter was $65.438+$90 million, while Intel's chip revenue in the third quarter also dropped from $2.89 billion to $655 million. But from the user's point of view, they can sit still and watch the tiger fight, whether for technology or industrial development, the longer this competition lasts, the better.