An outdated AMD Athlon K7 Easter egg has a revolver and map of Texas etched onto the chip. They do not make em like that anymore, eh?
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 very least insofar as they’d 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 beautiful pictures of CPU and GPU dies. In the event you zoom into one nook of the highest steel layer you may apparently see a revolver firing a bullet, proper subsequent to a map of Texas.
The Texas bit could be a reference to AMD’s amenities in Austin Texas. The gun and dashing 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 best CPUs.
Because it occurs, it is not an enormous shock to be taught that none apart from Jim Keller, broadly considered one of many main chip architects of current a long time and the man behind AMD’s current series 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 may try the Quake III benchmark numbers in Anandtech’s original review 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 up to now on the time, additional underlining that K7 wasn’t simply there to snag some low-end price range PC gross sales however was supposed to make AMD an actual contender for premium efficiency for the primary time.
At present, AMD produces CPUs on 5nm and 4nm TSMC nodes and its Phoenix APU incorporates 25 billion transistors. AMD additionally overtook Intel in terms of market cap, or the general worth of an organization in keeping with its share value, in June 2022.
At present, AMD is price about $270 billion to Intel’s $180 billion, an eventuality that may have been very, very exhausting to imagine again in 1999, particularly when you think about that Intel had the same market cap in 1999 to that which is has immediately however AMD was solely price a few billion.