AMD K6-3
I spoke to Dana Krelle, AMD’s vice president of marketing, and he gave me the latest scoop on AMD’s plans. K6-3 is supposed to ship very close to Intel’s Pentium III launch. AMD is trying to release this new CPU with 256 kB on-die L2 cache already prior to Intel’s Pentium III release. Most of you know that K6-3 will run on the same Socket7-motherboards that currently host K6-2 CPUs, you may only require a BIOS update. The performance of K6-3 will be high enough to make it very competitive to Intel’s Pentium III, the K6-3 version at 450 MHz will most likely outperform the new Pentium III 500 in many benchmarks. The highly official version says that K6-3 will definitely ship in Q1/1999, but we know that Q1 ends on March 31. Let’s hope K6-3 will be available earlier than this.
K7
K7 is also still on track, planned release time is Q2/1999. This seems surprising, because the delay of K6-3, which was expected in January 1999. K7 will be running in a new unique platform using a slot called ‘SlotA’, which is mechanically identical to Slot1, but using a completely different bus protocol. Thus K7 will not run in Slot1-boards and no Intel CPU will run in SlotA-boards. K7 will require its own new chipset and AMD will be the first supplier of one. The bus protocol used by K7 is called ‘EV6’, known from Digital’s Alpha CPUs. The EV6-bus of K7 is supposed to run at 200 MHz, offering a significantly higher bandwidth than the 100 or later 133 MHz bus clock used by Intel’s Pentium II and Pentium III CPUs. The performance of K7 is expected to be significantly above Pentium II or Pentium III level, in office, multimedia, 3D as well as floating point intensive applications. For more information about K7 please look at ‘Why AMD’s K7 will be Intel’s toughest competitor ever‘.
K6-2 Pricing
I also asked about the K6-2 pricing. You may remember that Intel’s Celeron 366 for Socket370 is currently cheaper than a K6-2 400, although it is faster than its competitor from AMD. So far K6-2’s pricing was adjusted to Intel’s Pentium II pricing, but Intel’s new Celerons provide very similar performance to a Pentium II at the same clock at a significantly lower price. Thus one would expect that AMD would now adjust the prices to Celeron to stay competitive. Mr. Krelle denied that AMD is having any actual planes to do so. “K6-2 is selling extremely well and we don’t see any actual reason to lower K6-2-pricing. We will respond if the market should force us into price changes, but so far we cannot see that.”
K6-2 AFR66
Dana could also give me some more information about the K6-2 AFR66, the batch of K6-2-CPUs that is only supposed to run at 66 MHz system bus clock. The vast majority of this batch of several hundred thousand CPUs went to OEMs and thus into complete systems that automatically use the correct bus clock. Mr. Krelle stated that only a very small minority should have gone into the retail market for single CPUs. This might be the reason why I only received very few emails of people who bought an AFR66-version. I would still like to remind you though, that a K6-2 300 AFR66 is not the same as a normal K6-2 300, since it does not run reliably at 100 MHz bus speed in all the Super7-boards out there. Make sure that you don’t find the marking ‘AFR66’ on a K6-2 CPU that you buy, unless you are aware that you have to run it at 66 MHz bus clock.
Intel
Implementation of New Identification Number into Upcoming Intel CPUs
There is quite a bit wind about Pat Gelsinger’s announcement at the RSA Data Security Conference and Expo ’99 of Intel’s new strategy of implementing an identification number into every CPU, which is supposed to be transferred over the Internet for security reasons. This identification number will come along with a very effective random number generator that’s using “the thermal noise of a semiconductor resistor to generate high-quality random and nondeterministic numbers“. The idea behind this identification number, which will only be implemented into Pentium III and later Intel CPUs, is to ensure the “trusted connected computer“. The identification number, coded with the random number, is supposed to improve Internet security, which is of highest importance for any kind of e-commerce. With this new number, your CPU and thus your system can be clearly identified, which may be an easy way of fighting fraud over the Internet. The negative thing about this number is the fact that it endangers your privacy on the Internet, with the system identification you can possibly be tracked, whatever you do on the Internet. This is why the transfer of the CPU serial number can be turned off by you, and since security reasons kept Intel from implementing a command that can turn it back on again, you need to reboot your system to access e-commerce websites that require your identification number.
This is a listing of Intel’s ideas behind the new feature:
Intel’s Platform Security Plans
- The near future of a billion connected PCs means PC security will become increasingly important.
- Intel believe the industry needs to work together to develop the Trusted, Connected PC, enhancing today’s PCs, servers, and workstations with security capabilities that will allow users to access/send/ buy/sell anything across the Net with privacy and without fear of theft, viruses, or other attack
- Intel is planning on developing a hardware foundation for platform security by including a number of security features in its processors and chipsets in the coming years
- Intel will begin adding security features to its platforms in 1999:
- The focus of the 1999 platform will be on establishing identity for the platform and laying the foundation for additional security capabilities in 2000.
- Among the technologies planned for 1999 are a processor serial number on the Pentium III processor, a hardware random number generator (RNG), boot integrity services (BIS) for client/server networks.
Processor serial number
- The Intel® processor serial number serves as an identifier for the processor, and by association its system
- Processor serial number will be used in applications that benefit from stronger forms of system and user identification:
- Applications using security capabilities
- Manageability
- Information Management
- Available on Pentium(r) III processor and future Intel processors
Privacy
- Intel cares about an individual’s privacy, check out: http://www.intel.com/sites/corporate/privacy.htm
- Intel is working with the industry to reinforce responsible use of users’ personal information:
- Providing and promoting guidelines for responsible usage
- Exploring industry certification programs
- In our own on-line practices
- In our products and services
CDSA
- The Common Data Security Architecture, or CDSA, is an open, interoperable, extensible, cross-platform software framework developed by Intel and adopted by The Open Group. CDSA provides fundamental APIs that developers can use to incorporate security features in their applications.
- Intel is an industry leader in evolving and promoting open, interoperable solutions for Internet security. Intel recognizes that a strong security infrastructure is essential to enable rapid growth of the Internet for e-commerce, secure communications, and for the consumption of high-value content on the PC.
- Adoption of the CDSA open specification will improve the interoperability of security-enabled applications, a key challenge in improving Internet security and utility for business and consumer use.
- Intel is committed to working with the industry so that ISVs will be able to gain access to Intel’s core security features through the architecture/software stack of their choice: including CAPI, CDSA and RSA’s BSafe toolkit
The new identification number is not targeted against processor remarking and Intel is not planning to provide a list where each identification numbers refers to the proper CPU speed. This number is not meant to fight overclocking, it’s only meant to improve network security.
I personally wonder if it will be very difficult for hackers trying to fish out identification numbers from users that have the feature turned on, as done by default. Then the hackers would only need to send those stolen identification numbers to the e-commerce business and they can act as if they were this very user. We will have to see if the encoding of the identification number will be sufficient enough. Another problem appears for people that are using several different systems or people who upgrade their CPU. You can see that there are quite a few open questions still, which will certainly be addressed by Intel today. I guess that AMD will have to jump on the identification number train as well, unless they want to be marked as providing ‘insecure CPUs’.
Overclock Protection
Intel told me today that the current Celeron processors are not bus clock locked and that there are currently no plans to implement this on Celeron. This means that you can continue to overclock Celeron CPUs, but please remember that the clock multiplier is locked and will stay locked. The same is valid for Pentium II CPUs. You will understand that there was no official comment on Pentium III and later Intel CPUs. Those may be completely overclock protected. We will find out as soon as final Pentium III CPUs become available at the end of February.
