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Atiq Raza wasn’t an original AMDer. A holdover from the buyout of NexGen (which AMD bought when the K5 flopped), Raza became AMD’s Chief Technology Officer.
Boot had a forthright, frank discussion with Raza in the January of 1998 to discuss K6+3D (later renamed K6-2 3DNow!) AMD’s intentions to leapfrog Intel in performance, his feelings on Intel domination and whether the Slot 1 design that Intel had switched to would kill everyone. While the K6-2 didn’t slam the door on the vaunted Pentium II, it gave AMD a cachet the company had never had before. In fact, some would alter credit the K6-2 and its 3D gaming prowess as the saving grace for AMD.
Among the gems from the Raza: “…I bought (a Slot 1 Pentium II system), brought it to my lab in my car, and it had flopped out of the slot. And I had been very careful.”
“Take a Pentium II today — which is a pretty damned good system — and compare it with a K6+3D, you will performance improvement between 50 percent and as much as four to six times with the AMD part…”
Boot: “Ever fantasize about toppling Intel?”
Raza: “Absolutely. With K6, if we had infinite manufacturing and good yields, you would have seen some fun in this company.”
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n0b0dykn0ws
April 18, 2011 at 9:20pm
I think it is hilarious how he claimed you would see 50+ FPS in Quake on the CPU.
AMD is just now releasing a true GPU/CPU part.
n0b0dykn0ws
knexkid
April 18, 2011 at 5:17pm
Oh man, I laughed quite hard on Raza's comment on how he hates ppl over overclock. Now I feel like that's one of the bigger features of CPUs is how overclockable they are.
d3v
April 19, 2011 at 8:43am
Times have changed. It took Intel until sandy bridge 2011 to make chips specifically to milk overclockers. Of course motherboard makers have been doing it for a lot longer than that.
I have to say I took a double take when reading Atiq's name. I live in Pakistan so it was interesting to learn that he's a Pakistani immigrant. Pretty cool to see how far he rose in the coorporate hierarchy.
