First-year Graduate Design Students Learn to Quickly Evaluate Complicated

0272-1732/00/$10.00  2000 IEEE On 15 April 1999, people around the world sent thousands of e-mails to our group at Stanford University inquiring about the “secret” performance report of the AMD K7 and Intel Coppermine chips. According to The Register Web site in the United Kingdom, there were rumors that some students at Stanford University had tested and compared the two chips using SPEC’s test suite. At that time, the AMD K7 (now known as Athlon) and the Intel Coppermine (now known as Pentium III) were not available to the general public, and it is easy to understand the excitement about this news. The real story was simpler. The students in our processor design class did not test the real chips. They estimated the cost and performance of the two chips as part of a case study. This study was based on information available from various public sources. As the chip implementation details had not been released to the public, the instructors assumed the hardware designs were similar to the simulator default configurations. After comparing the performance and the costs, the students used the simulator tools to design improvements to each chip.