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The board I have again with a real html link.

This is merely more evidence supporting my theory that Microsoft are paying companies sizeable -- and very illegal -- cash bribes to actively not support other operating systems.

Riiight... AMD and Intel don't support Linux at all. I mean, just look at all the evidence! There's this and this, and this. All these developer tools and documents are just fakes! They secretly install Windows in the background!

Anybody want to start retailing these? I'd bet you could ask DT (pretty please) to not install CE on them, or even put a CF adapter on them.

Heck I bet you could even get AMD to put in a good word with DT if you were going to put up some kind of "community site" to support them.

These PCs are part of the 50x15 initiative. They're intended for poor countries. Any of these machines that get eaten up by rich people looking to play is as ridiculous as me washing my car in blood plasma.

You mean like this? http://www.amd.com/us-en/0,,3715_10757,00.html?red ir=CPB062

I would prefer systems that are quiet enough to be in the same room with a TV, for example.

So what you want is an AMD64 system implementing Cool'n'Quiet?

I have to agree with Intel that 64-bit desktops don't make a lot of sense right now.

You were saying? :-P

A bit too little, a bit too late for Intel.

For much much cheaper, you could get an AMD motherbaord that supports Cool 'n Quiet: the CPU is underclocked to 800Mhz for things like web surfing and watching DVD's. There's also an option to have all the fan stop if the case is cool enough.

For a list of supported motherbaords clickhere

For the price of the Pentium M CPU alone, you could get a faster motherboard, a mid range AMD 64 bit COU and maybe some ram.

already got one

I'm not convinced it is true. I went to a lecture given by an AMD engineer, and he said the processor rating really was based on the equivalent speed Intel product.

Your key mistake here is your use of the word "needs". The data I've seen indicates that the G5 draws an equivalent amount of power as comparable Intel and AMD systems. Also, the G5's in the x-servs are air cooled. I think they mostly liquid cool the dual 2.5 Ghz G5 just to keep the noise down.

You are wrong.

For those that don't know, Intel's current dual-Xeon chipsets (E7520 and E7525) share a single 800MHz front side bus between both CPUs. AMD's Athlon MP platform has had dual, independent front side buses since 2001.

And I'm also certian that the US didn't just complete the first non-government manned space flight and doesn't have billions of dollars going to develop private space flight.

Give me a break.

China is emerging as an ecenomic powerhouse, and it looks like it will continue down that path, provided their government doesn't screw up. However please don't pretend like all good things come from China. I gave just a small list of the US companies that produce advanced hardware, including what drives almost all the devices you listed. Your MP3 player may be built in China but it's usually using TI DSPs and AD opamps.

You know it's perfectly possible for China AND the US to be economic powers, and for both to benefit from trade with each other.

Indeed; having a big radiator sitting around is kind of unsightly. An alternative would be to just buy a new processor. AMD Athlon(TM) 64 Processor: Now Available in Models 4000+.

One might claim that cost is a factor, with the 4000+ at $729--fully $566 more than the Athlon 64 3000+. But you must consider maintenance costs: You need to have your radiator flushed every two years or 24,000 gigabytes, whichever comes first, which will easily run you $150 or $200. And if the antifreeze boils over, you're going to have one heck of a mess on your carpet (not to mention one fried processor)....

They're not proprietary anymore, but MIT'd and integrated in XFree430 on the AMD website here with a few friends.

This is a completely unrelated anecdote that doesn't even mention what product you're whining about. Also, your sig quote is incorrectly attributed. Something more on topic: as far as low power processors go, AMD has its Geode family http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/Pro ductInformation/0,,50_2330_9863_10837,00.html purchased from some other company. I think these will do quite well, assuming they get mainstream support, because as we all know AMD fanboys inhabit the "enthusiast" market pretty solidly (myself included).

First off power consumption for a processor = .5*C*V^2*F where c is capacitance, V is voltage, and F is frequency. So if you can find capacitance you can get a pretty good estimate of the processor's power needs.
From Intel's datasheets: P4 90 nm (prescott) 520-550 models 84 W of design power (what Intel recommends the heatsink be able to pull).
550-560 models 115 W of design power.

From AMD's datasheets: design power (measured with max amplitude and nominal voltage) is 89 watts for all power ratings 3000+ to 3700+.

I couldn't find a PPC 970 data sheet at IBM but ee times claims it pulls 97 watts, but speed was not specified. That seems consistent with the water cooling on the G5, my air cooled P4 is plenty loud.

Neither MediaGX nor Athlon. It looks to be using the GX just like this

Neither MediaGX nor Athlon. It looks to be using the GX just like this

Perhaps this might help. http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma tion/0,,30_118_9485_9487%5E10272,00.html AMD Cool'n'Quiet(TM) Technology Overview

Actually this Geode doesn't appear to be the same as the Cyrix core. For one thing the GX-1 (Cyrix) core is 6-stage, and the GX (nee GX-2) is 8-stage. Compare: GX vs. GX-1

Actually this Geode doesn't appear to be the same as the Cyrix core. For one thing the GX-1 (Cyrix) core is 6-stage, and the GX (nee GX-2) is 8-stage. Compare: GX vs. GX-1

I'll bet dollars to donuts that the ad guy who came up with the new naming system owns a BMW.

Either that, or he owns an Opteron server and AMD already took all the even numbers...

Windows at present is mostly based on the 32-bit Intel architecture. Microsoft did its worst dirty tricks in the last dying days of the segmented 16-bit architecture, using DOS dominance to get market share for its 32-bit attempt. It's going to have to chose between AMD-64 and Intel-64 anyway, or support both, and binary application developers will need to make the same choice, so I guess the submitter would argue that PPC-64 (which has been around longer) is a viable option. However, there's a big movement away from software that's tied down to one platform or another, which is good for Linux, Java, and all the other OS, hardware and software vendors, programmers, and users.

The limited adoption and big troubles implementing Wine suggests to me that there would be little interest in a Microsoft port of Windows to yet another architecture. Windows 95 was probably the most-memorable MS-Windows version ever, and yet Microsoft has had to fragment even that identity to keep up its sales, starting with that crazy desktop in XP. The claim that Windows has excellent backward compatibility is bogus, too; for instance, the copy of TeraTerm that I carry around on a floppy has never worked on any NT2k or later system I've touched, and the default installation of Microsoft Word can't read files created by any version of Microsoft Works. I could contiue this rant...

So, when do I get my full-pentium-PC-on-a-chip so I can play X-Com on my watch?

I hear the pipeline on the P5 is going to be so long that Halliburton want to license it for reconstruction work in Iraq.

Well, you must have heard wrong. The Pentium only has 5 stages. Or did you mean whatever comes after the P4?

How on earth anyone ever came to these conclusions (you're hardly the first person to say that), I'll never know.

Western Digital quotes nearly power consumption for their drives, when reading or idle, although that figure drops to about 1/20 if the drive is in sleep mode:

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products .asp?DriveID=59

AMD quotes a power consumption about 50% below peak, when idle, although again that drops to 1/20 when halted:

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white _papers_and_tech_docs/30430.pdf

However, your GPU is likely to be the biggest problem, as I'm unaware of them having a sleep mode (although maybe they do, anyone know?), leaving their consumption at half peak:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/ati -vs-nv-power_9.html

What this all means is that it's worth turning your computer off for any period of time longer than your start-up time, instead of letting it idle. If you put it to sleep, that figure becomes twenty times the startup time. For me, that's less than 20 minutes, not the 8+ hours I sleep for.

You?

Cool'n'Quiet, baby.

Here is AMD's PR about this game. Here is Firing Squad's review with ATI cards and mentions Athlon 64 briefly.

There are also Pentium M motherboards, but they are hard to find and expensive. The VIA C3 1 GHz runs very cold, but runs slower than a ~500mhz P3. Also, the mini-itx board version has a rather loud fan - but it also comes in a socket 370 version, so you can put a big socket A heatsink on it and run it fanless - if you don't mind the lack of speed. I did this for a while, but it drove me nuts. So I put in a cheap Celeron 1.3 GHz (which has 256k cache, unlike the slower versions) and plugged in the cpu fan with a Zalman fan speed controller set to minimum. With a Zalman PSU and a Seagate hard drive, the system is barely audible if there is no other noise in the room. If I were to go totally fanless, I'd put in a laptop hard drive instead. (These guys had fanless PSUs in for $145 Canadian, which isn't all that bad, but they're sold out.)

They don't, however, they run the 32-bit instructions of their precursor instruction sets at native speed with no performace pentalty. Their 64-bit "modes" are extensions of the "32-bit" modes of their predecessors. AMD realised this was the way to go and did exactly that with AMD64.

Note that the exception to the above is Alpha. It was designed to replace the VAX (and to a lesser extent 32-bit MIPS). It does not run MIPS or VAX code, but it does have a 32-bit "mode" to make porting legacy software easier.

itanic doesn't have this. There aren't "32-bit" itanic instructions. It used to have a pentium emulator in hardware, but it was apallingly slow. IIRC benchmarking was forbidden, but some results leaked out onto a German website a while back. It was running Petium code at about 10-20% of the speed of a similarly clocked Pentium III.

Once again, the big iron people lead the way and the PeeCee world catches up 10 years later.

90nm Athlon64s 939 soon to be available!
90nm A64s seem to draw much less power than 130nm A64s.

There is also Transmeta which produces the Efficeon CPU and VIA which makes EPIA.
You may also get an AMD Geode :)

There's no trick involved in Windows, as long as your motherboard supports Cool N' Quiet. Just download the Athlon64 drivers and use the Minimal Power Management power scheme. The processor should run at 800Mhz when idle.

AMD64's aren't just better at dissipating heat, they're better at not generating it in the first place; for most simple tasks, they'll stick to a low power mode that pumps out at most around 35W of heat (about the same as a 500MHz Celeron).

AMD Cool'n'Quiet.

Question for the Kernel coders, what perctage of drivers are reverse engineered?? 60-70%

The percentage would be near 0% if not 0%. Plenty of hardware manufacturers have released open or open-enough programming specifications for their hardware. Intel, AMD and National Semiconductor are a few examples.

For example, here are the programming specifications for my network card, a Netgear FA312 - DP83815 10 100 Mb s Integrated PCI Ethernet Media Access Controller and Physical Layer (MacPhyter)

Companies like NVidia and ATi are the exception, not the rule.

True, there is not a hard limit of 8 cores for an Opteron system, but that limit does seem to apply to -glueless- systems. I have not yet seen an Opteron system with greater than 8 cores without extra logic processors for inter-chip communication. The recently announced Newisis systems (16 and 32 core) use clusters of 4 CPUs. Furthermore, the AMD presentation for multi-core Opterons only mentions 2- and 4- way systems. This is not good news for AMD.

And yes, I do admit the HT is not a physical spec nor does the committee plan to develop one. I just wish that they would. It makes no sense to make a socket interface spec since CPUs have different power pin needs (and number of HT connections for that matter) and chipsets have an arbitrary number of pins to peripherals. However, a slot interface would make perfect sense if you wanted to treat select devices like GPUs as peers to the CPU, cutting latency and increasing effective bandwidth to them. PCI-Express was designed explicitly to cut the number of pins/traces needed for a device, and in that regard, HT is not quite as efficient.

Warning : Acronym Collision

The correct moderation to apply to the parent post is either "Offtopic" or "Funny", the latter being more my choice

Quick karma whoring :
- AMD NX : No Execute, prevention of buffer overflow (stupid webpage here, search google for AMD NX)
- nomachine NX technology (website), which is, functionnality-wise, the sucessor of VNC

Uh, that article was pre-release, and was for an AMD64 FX overclocked by about 15%. In fact, that was the power draw at the highest stable speed they could achieve with a -10C cooling system.

According to this, the AMD64 processors have a thermal design of 89W.

According to this the comparable P4 has a thermal design of 115W.

AMD has nothing to gain by recommending to OEMs that they be able to supply less power than the system requires, and to dissipate less heat. I purchased an AMD64 and find that it runs quite cool without any help besides the retail heat sink and fan (nothing special).

FYI - half of the CPUs in my home are Intel-based. I'm hardly biased for the sake of being biased. However, when I went to build my computer I checked the specs and the prices and found that AMD64 was the best bang for the buck. And in the 64-bit world it is essentially uncontested at this point if you care at all about x86-compatibility. (Granted, that will change, and I look forward to whatever Intel comes out with to compete.)

But I guess their total disspated heat will melt computer case :(

The low power versions only dissipate 30W of power.

Almost every Opteron block diagram shows the crossbar switch. For example, AMD's 8th-Generation Processor Architecture document from 2001 shows how the SRQ and crossbar are used in a dual-core Opteron (figure 5).

... double the FLOPS of an Opteron ...

A couple months after AMD said they had taped out their dual core Opteron, Cray and others said they would be upgrading to that in 2005. Putting two Opterons next to each other with their hypertransports talking to each other is so easy that I suspect AMD's first silicon worked. I suspect dual-core Opterons will be in production way ahead of dual-core Itanics, since they are so much smaller. And we will see 8-core Opterons before we see 4-core Itanics. A number of people have working 8-way Opteron motherboards and I have not heard of anyone getting more than 2 Itanics on a motherboard. All the while AMD production volumes will be far higher than Itanic volumes.

If SGI wants to stop loosing money, they should come out with an Opteron CPU-brick fast.

"Won't be safe for long" means Itanic is sinking. Really.

...and now I finally understand that there are disadvantages to decent battery life. If only their battery had a Thermtrip feature like Opteron...

BTW, Here's the link parent forgot to mention/link to. /* basically it`s just a bunch of PR Spin/BuzzWord, as it's a rename of 'PowerNow' that has been in the Mobile cpu's ... I know, I know - why rename/rebrand it and sell it as it where something new? ... what can you do, every Corp. (as we know them) *just* got to show to the world they got a bigger 'DICK" then their competitor(s) ... */

... and in all fairness /* even as an AMD zealot */ how does Intels' line stack up to this feature? .. anyone?

Guess your next system will be an AMD64.

Intel, EE = Extreme Edition.
AMD, EE = Energy Effecient.

I like AMD's better.

It's pretty astounding that major jump from 32-bit to 64-bit processing isn't even mentioned by Intel.

Not really. They are actually embarassed by it. They had to abandon their 64-bit Itanium processor and instead make their processors compatible with AMD's 64-bit processors.

You'll probably find little "64-bit enabled" stickers on the computers and logos like that in the ads, but aside from that they're going to be as quiet about this as they can. When the 64-bit version of XP starts shipping, they'll say something like how their processors have been compatible with it since August 2004, and how all their current processors are compatible, and leave it at that.

Did someone just say that the DMA implementations are different enough that device drivers will not be compatible? Tell me more about that.

Tell me, is EM64T truly identical to AMD64 or are there small differences? I'm curious.

I've just upgraded two of my boxes to the 3500+ and 3800+ S939 chips and couldn't be happier with the results. Both Linux (FC2 x86_64 on the 3500+) and Windows (XP on the 3800+) motor along far faster than I was expecting, and I have that dual core upgrade to fall back on when games require that much grunt. As far as I'm concerned it's "Intel Inside" alright - "Inside the store, covered in dust on the shelf". :)

Simply put, the Megahertz Myth is the belief that clock frequency (MHz/GHz) is the only true measure of real processor performance. In reality, processor performance should be measured by how quickly an application completes an assigned task.