Re: AMD's K5 at the uP Forum

[David Farber <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>]

Date: Mon, 24 Oct 94 00:55:53 -0400
From: shap@viper.cis.upenn.edu (Jonathan Shapiro)


Dave:


Bruce Koball's comments on the AMD K5 missed something important:
AMD's lead should be sustainable.


Once you have designed the hardware to translate x86 instructions to a
RISC core, you can devote your subsequent attentions to making the
risc core fast and forget about the usual x86 stuff.  The instruction
set isn't likely to change out from under you.


After taking an initial industry lead on superscalar tecnhology with
the i960CA, Intel failed to follow up.  If AMD has a good team, they
should be able to stay ahead of Intel indefinitely by iterating on
their RISC core.




Jonathan