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Um, no. And I'm not even talking about Q3 640x480. ;-)

Try the SPEC website, and look at CPU2000 results.

And, you know what? Within a week, we all sigh with relief, because the old units never worked anyway!

Disagree again. What do you find wrong with SPEC? Its a very useful tool for measuring CPU and memory subsystem performance (bearing in mind that for many applications other factors are important as well - which is why application benchmarks are necessary).

When was the last time you heard the MIPS or FLOPS rating for a processor? When the RISC processors came out, and scored 100 x the nearest CISC chip, we suddenly started hearing how worthless those ratings really were. (Which was true, only the people saying it had been using them to crush the competition under their feet, the previous week.)

Coincidentally, I looked at Dell's 800 Mhz. Itanimum SPECint and SPECfp numbers this morning, along with Athlon and P4. Quite interesting. The integer performance of Itanium has been pretty abysmal so far (Athlon and P4 are both about twice as fast on average)- I can't wait for the Hammer processors myself...

What's the FLOPS rating for a Pentium IV? Anyone seen it listed on any of Intel's adverts? Curious, that.

Athlon 1.4, DDR: CINT2000 495, CFP2000 426

Pentium 4 1.8, RDRAM: CINT2000 596, CFP2000 618

Before screaming about how non-representative these scores are, you should read about the SPEC2000 methodology. It's fairly rigorous, and the benchmarks are actual real-world programs.

The benchmark scores reflect the ratio of the tested system to a Sun Ultra5_10 with a 300MHz processor. This means the P4 is (on average) 6.18 times faster at running the SPECfp benchmark suite.

Nothing is perfect, but SPEC is a useful CPU/memory benchmark.

186,282 mi/s...not just a good idea, its the law!

Specifically, let's use their Investor Relations e-mail address since anyone who owns an AMD processor is, technically, an investor :-)

They still claim the fastest multimedia experience on x86.

Too bad. I'm still an AMD purist.

Technical specs aside, and interesting they are, it would be nice to see a list of vendors for those feebleminded souls (e.g., moi) who don't plan on building a machine by molding their own tower and smithing the wires. IBM just dropped AMD chips and Dell doesn't sell them. That leaves Compaq (ick) and, I think, HP in the heavyweight category. Also Gateway and Micron. AMD maintains what looks like an outdated list of where to buy AMD systems here: http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/bguide.html

Everyone is talking major CPU price war in the upcoming months, so I'm thinking October for my monster-mega-dual-mp3 player. ("2GHz, because Word just doesn't open fast enough on a P3.") Cheap dual Athlon 1.4 by then?

Saludos, Mig

http://www.kasparovchess.com

Even though Intel says they don't want you to use VIA, they do. Intel wants people to use Via chipsets, even if they don't claim that they do. Right now, market share for the Pentium 4 is constantly losing ground to the Athlon, partially due to the fact that the memory / motherboard solutions are expensive, without any hope of redemption within the near future.

Why? The Rambus deal, which doesn't expire until 2002! Once the contract between Intel and Rambus expires, Intel is going to pull out all stops on making DDR motherboards. But they can't do that just yet.

The solution? Enter VIA. If there's no licensing from Intel, there's no fear of retaliation from Rambus (namely backing out of all the stock options Intel has in them). All Intel is doing is clearly telling Rambus that they aren't abandoning them... yes.

Honestly, what does Intel care? Chipsets aren't Intel's bread and butter, processors are. Why does Intel make chipsets? To assure that third party manufacturers don't cripple board speeds.

They don't mind VIA all that much. Consider the alternative .

Time to boycott Intel.

Agreed. And in this case, it's actually possible to boycott them without sawing off one's own nose to spite one's face :)

AMD have consistently made cheaper products than Intel, and for the past few years, they've made better products than Intel as well. When you can buy a CPU that performs better than Intel's offerings and costs less, it's hard not to boycott Intel.

I've owned AMD-based PCs and I've seen plenty of benchmarks. I know benchmarks get skewed in whichever direction the reviewer wants them to go, but my own experience tells me the K7 (Athlon, if you insist on brand names :) is faster clock-for-clock than Intel's best, and it's always cheaper.

Here is a link to a FAQ about AMD's HyperTransport technology.
It works at 6.4GB/sec and looks to me like a direct competitor.

The 64-bit AMD processor will be fully backward compatible.

An analyst asked the same question at the AMD earning conference call and Jerry Sanders gave a firm reply that the Bus license is solid. BTW the CC is worth a listen just to here Jerry slagging of the P4:

" A: I think the the P4 is a dud. The P4 is a lousy product and they have to price it cheap and made a lot of noise that they wouldn't give up any market share in a marketplace that wants lower cost solutions. AMD is in a very good position with the Duron to do that, with the Athlon to do that. Pentium 4 is a loser. Intel is spending tremendous amuont of money in 130nm so that they can be marginally competitive. &quot

I believe AMD will be transitioning to their own hypertransport bus which Sun is also planning on using. If anything this will only accelerate the transition.

obtw- Intel does not own the Athlon core, only the Alpha EV6 bus it runs on.

How is the Intel-compatible platform a monopoly? There are other companies producing x86 compatible chips, aren't there? (Just as it's not the Windows platform that's the monopoly but the product-- that's why WINE isn't collusion with the "enemy".)
my plan

No they won't, because of one word, hypertransport.

AMD has a solution, its called hypertransport, more info can be found here. Sun has already said they will use it in their systems as well.

Well, it seem these days, most of the power user just care to get something like 200fps in Quake III. Why ? Beat's me ! I'm not on a quest to get the ultimate frame rate, I just want my box to be quiet as possibly can be.

To help you understand my take on the subject, here is the background :
My PC has the following components :

• A OEM case
• A 235W OEM power supply
• ASUS P3B-F
• Intel Pentium II rated 400Mhz @ 400Mhz
• A cheap OEM SECC2 Heat-Sink made of aluminum
• A 128MB CAS2 no-name DIMM
• Two 32MB CAS3 Samsung DIMM slowing down my memory timing, but preventing the appearance of the all mighty evil SwaP
• A ATI All-In-Wonder Rage128 16MB
• A Creative SoundBlaster Live! Value
• A Realtek 8139 Ethernet NIC
• My beloved USR 56Kbps ISA Real Modem. Sorry but to me a component that uses CPU power to do it's processing instead of taking the load off is not worthy of being in my computer. Not to mention the M$ Win part...
• A Creative 48x CD-ROM drive. It's the loudest damned thing in my computer when it's spinning
• A Quantum Fireball AS PLUS 40GB (7200RPM) in a removable tray
• A Quantum Fireball CX1 10GB (5400RPM) mounted inside the case
• Of course the stupid old 1.44 MB floppy drive only used for booting Tomsbrt in case of emergency

Soon to be :

• A Adaptec 2940UW
• A Diamond Monster 3D II for Glide games

It turn out that the Quantum Fireball AS makes less noise than the Quantum Fireball CX1. I still have to figure it out ...

I use my PC for :

• Running Linux and learning as much as time allows me (Jez I had so much time when I was a student... Think of all the time I wasted in High-School running the evil W monster)
• Doing some gaming i.e. : Diablo II, Unreal, UT, Undying (Although that thing is going to cost me a new box)
• Spending numerous nights filling my brain @ Slashdot, Tomshardware, Anandtech, Arstechnica, StorageReview, Developper.Intel.com, and most importantly, hounding the web for all the case manufacturers and their take at a quiet box.

As I'm writing this post, that is probably going to be the base documentation for my Silent Case Project, you're guessing that my sleepless night of browsing have not yielded the desired result.

I've check out many options such as water cooling, moving the PC to the closet, returning to the forest where a PC is pretty far from your everyday quest for survival. None of them suits me.

The objective of my project is to build a case that meets the following criteria :

• A silent as possible
• Accessible
• Provides sufficient ventilation to maintain all the components running within thermal specs
• Be light enough to be easily transportable (Let's not forget the Lan parties ;-)

To attain those goals I have to :

• Read all I can about noise, sound, aerodynamics, PC specs
• Find suitable materials : A case is not just a protection against unwanted fingers and dust ; it must provide EMI shielding, proper grounding, resist to impacts, and fit into my conception of the king of object you want in your bedroom (If you were thinking about plywood and a box of rusted leftover nails, forget it)
• Find the tools or the companies or individuals with the means to work the materials I choose to build the casing

For the sound isolation I was thinking about some kind of foam. Mineral lint would be affective but that takes too much space and it's not the kind of thing I want beside my bed. Form the casing itself, metal is almost inevitable if you want EMI shielding and grounding. And as for you who wonder why I have not mentioned water cooling yet, the greatest source of noise is not my CPU cooler and your just moving the problem out of the case (Nice ; you have water heating up but unless your reservoir is like a bathtub or something you will have to transfer the heat for the water to the air).

That about as far as I am. If you have any idea that might help me, please fell free to send me some bits forming ASCII characters at Prozzaks@operamail.com

To finish up, here is a list of thing that might help people wanting to achieve similar goals :

• http://www.formfactors.org/ You should be able to find all the documents regarding the ATX form factor and thermal design guides. A must if you want to build a quiet PC.
• http://developer.intel.com/ Intel has contributed a great deal to the ATX definition ; here you will find many relevant documents including thermal design guides for all Intel processors.
• Etract from my favorite's :
  
  

  Hardware\cases PC CASE
  Fong Kai
  PowerOn
  Enlight Corporation
  dir.yahoo Enclosures Manufacturers
  procase
  YY Computer
  Psi
  IN WIN
  Amtrade
  American Suntek
  Addtronics
  A-Top Technology, Inc
  Nikao
  Palo Alto Products
  Antec
  Lian-Li
  amaquest
  Koolance
  Quietpc
  PC Power & Cooling
  
  
  

  Hardware\Heat Sinks ALPHA
  Cooler Master
  AVC
  ekl
  GlobalWIN
  globefan
  RDJD
  Foxconn
  Spring Spread
  Sanyo Denki
  TITAN
  TaiSol
  ChipCoolers
  Orb a
  ElanVital
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Form Factor Platform Development Support
  SSI
  WTX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Standards Fibre Channel Industry Association
  PCI SIG
  RAB
  serialata
  SPEC
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Storage RAID.edu
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Cours CS 252 - Graduate Computer Architecture
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info The PC Guide!
  Hardware Bible
  FullOn3D
  developer.intel.com
  HwB The Hardware Book
  United Overclockers
  Ars Technica
  Tech-Junkie
  HardwarePub
  Webopedia
  Illustrated Guide to the PC Hardware
  SysOpt
  2CPU
  Ace's Hardware
  Technical Support - RaidHelp v1.0 - Free RAID Technology Guide
  Computer Architecture
  OPENCORES.ORG
  TechFest
  MidWest Micro Support
  
  
  

  Hardware\Resalers GeekTek!
  Micro-Bytes
  ALCO
  ABC Micro
  2CoolTek
  Plycon Computers
  TCWO
  ABC Micro - Lprix
  Case Outlet
  The Chip Merchant, Inc
  Cimsys
  OrdiGros
  ALIENWARE
  SHENTECH
  FireStorm
  Hyper Microsystems
  TWEAKBOX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Reviews Tom's Hardware Guide
  Sharky Extreme
  StorageReview
  HardOCP
  AnandTech
  SystemLogic
  x-bit labs
  Active-Hardware
  FiringSquad
  SocketA
  Overclockers Australia
  HEXUS
  dansdata
  SysReview
  
  
  

  Hardware\Manufacturers AMD
  ASUS
  Belkin
  MassMultiples
  Promise
  StarTech
  VIA Technologies, Inc
  ABIT Computer Corp
  Comcase
  Micron Semiconductor
  ECS
  
  
  

  Hardware Freeboxen
  

Umm don't people run Linux on their Intel or non-Intel PCs??

Acutally, it's much much much worse than this.. it would be more like: Intel sues ME for using AMD, Microsoft Sues YOU for using Linux, Marvel sues Fargo for reading Penny Arcade instead of Marvel comics, etc. These guys aren't suing the competition, they are suing a customer because the customer choose the competition.. It's truely frightening...

Acutally, it's much much much worse than this.. it would be more like: Intel sues ME for using AMD, Microsoft Sues YOU for using Linux, Marvel sues Fargo for reading Penny Arcade instead of Marvel comics, etc. These guys aren't suing the competition, they are suing a customer because the customer choose the competition.. It's truely frightening...

During the presentation CEO W.J. Sanders III presented a few interesting slides which compare the die sizes of the Athlon and P4 at both the 18 and 13 micron process, plus their new processor roadmap and projected performance of the clawhammer vs. P4 (guess which one wins?). I've mirrored them here so you don't have to watch the whole hour long presentation. If your into AMD though it is actually an watch.

Sanders jokes about hating the blue men (who doesn't?) notes that if you had bought intel stock 2 years ago you'd have 0 earnings, but if you'd bought AMD you'd have made over %200. And on the topic of this disucssion, he extols the Atholn's much smaller die size (the P4 is 1.8x bigger than the Athlon) AMD can get much higher yeilds, and therefore sell at a much lower price.

Thats actually what I thought at first, too. Then I looked it up here. The little box with "Clawhammer" in it also says "w/ x86-64 technology", which is their way of saying "it runs 64-bit." It's just made for 1-2 processor configurations, while the Sledgehammer is for bigger SMPs (like up to 8).

You can read about the temp specs in this document: (in pdf.. sorry.. that's all I could find)

http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/athlon/techdocs/pd f/23794.pdf

It says 90C is the maximum die temperature. I guess that means you should start worrying if it hits 80C. My 900MHz T-Bird seems to hover between 60-70C. That bothers me, but I'm not sure what else I can do about it. I have a good heatsink that should keep it a lot cooler than that, but for some reason it doesn't seem to be working. I also added 2 extra fans to my case to help with airflow, but nothing seems to work.

However, suppose you've got a SMP machine with four CPUs, I guess you'll get into big trouble.

Whoops! I guess we know which processor you're NOT gonna be using in that four CPU box.

pSOS is an embedded kernel (and all the various add-ons), formerly written and sold by "Integrated Systems, Inc" (ISI). A little over a year ago, Wind River purchased ISI. Only a couple months after the aquisition, they announced that pSOS would be discontinued. Maybe there's another explaination, but it appears that they purchased ISI to bury the competitive pSOS kernel.

Only several months before this happened, I had started a little embedded project where I work, and we decided to purchase a kernel and TCP/IP stack. I spent about a week checking out the various vendors, and I investigated pSOS quite a bit, since some of our customers had some very successful products based on it. I also took a good look at Linux. I really wanted to use linux, but the truth is that it requires quite a lot of memory and a 32 bit chip, and I was hoping to stay with a 16 bit chip and smaller memory. Still, I started out with an absolute requirement that the vendor provide source code. ISI never provided (normal) customers with source, and Wind River is about as closed as closed source gets. I ultimately went with US Software, who provide source and have a product targeted at smaller systems. ATI Nucleus was a close second choice. I utlimately obtained both vendor's API reference manuals, and USSW's were more down-to-earth (provided a much better conceptual model of what their code was doing) and they were easier to use. USSW's TCP/IP stack comes with two interfaces, the usual sockets interface we all know and love, and their own very light weight interface. If you use the light weight one, you can compile without sockets (saves about 12k code space). I needed to add a tiny feature to the light weight one, and within 1 day I was able to read through the TCP/IP stack source and understand it enough to add the thing I needed with good confidence I was doing it well. I made a similar addition to their kernel, in the space of about one day. With these small changes to customize their interfaces to my needs, I got my code running in only a few weeks, and I was able to produce a 16-bit x86 (real mode, yuk) executable image that was about 50k that included their multitasking kernel, tcp/ip stack, and my old single-task app converted to nicely run multi-threaded to serve multiple concurrent sessions, all running on very low cost hardware, AMD's Net186 Eval Board. Having the source code for whatever kernel you're using in an embedded project is a major advantage. Don't ever let those slimey salesmen tell you otherwise!

Wind River (and the former ISI) are closed source. They put a lot of effort into sales and marketing, and they put quite a bit of effort into trying to convince me that it wasn't an advantage to have source code. Fortunately where I work the management is pretty sensible and doesn't presume to be able to evaluate kernels and network stacks. When it became obvious I'd never select them due to being closed source, they made a couple attempts to directly communicate with my managers, which raised a couple questions, but they trusted my judgement that having source code was critically important.

I know of a similar group that had started a project based on the Netsilicon chip, which at the time was only supported by pSOS from ISI. Netsilicon provided source for their device drivers, but the pSOS kernel and stack were closed source. Well, there were a lot of really unhappy campers when Wind River bought ISI and announced they would bury pSOS, and Netsilicon and their customers were certainly not amused. Getting stuck with an obsolete object-only library that has a bug really sucks.

So before anyone gets really excited about the great things Wind River might do for BSDi, take a little look back at the not-so-distant history where they purchased ISI and then almost immediately announced the death of ISI's core product, pSOS... with what appears (from my limited point of view) as an utter disregard for the installed pSOS customer base.

An remember, these guys are closed source proprietary software. They spout all sorts of marketiod language about "total cost of ownership", "industry leading [insert word]", blah, blah, blah. They make some pretty impressive product offerings, yet there is no shortage of horror stories of someone who hit bugs or needed to add a feature and was absolutely helpless without the source code. I saw a good example of one of those stories above, and I hope it gets moderated up to 5 (though PHB's wouldn't ever read slashdot), having the source code can make all the difference between spending a day or two customizing/bug fixing and spending weeks of frustration on the phone and ultimately working around it somehow.

AMDZone
Gamer's Depot
Ace's Hardware
GotApex?.

And here is a presentation with benchmarks and a roadmap. Have fun. Don't let biased slashdot postings warp your mind!

should ex-hippies really be the target audience? Are they the ones running all the servers nowadays?

Sure. Ever worked a gig in the Bay Area? Freaks, Deadheads, long-hairs, and flower children everywhere, and many working for high-tech firms, pardon the pun ;^). IBM is doing a lot of this linux work in Austin, which is a pretty hippified place...

At least that's how was. That's how it looks. Word has it that several of the coolest stoner spots have closed (White Rabbit, Steamboat, Electric Lounge, Liberty Lunch, ...) have closed up, and most of the big tech outfits there (Moto, AMD, ,and Big Blue, all have drug tests... Austin Comedian Steven Kendrick says that "Austin Sucks" now because of it... (Of course, you can always refuse to participate in FORCED URINATION, and help make the world a better place in the process...)

The moral of the story is that it may be hip to *look* like a hippy, but just don't *act* like a hippy...

I wouldn't throw out my current servers, but I would certainly favor boxes that were otherwise equal but used less power. Why?

1) Why be wasteful? Just because you can afford to do something doesn't mean you should. I pay about 5% more to use 100% renewable power. (Before the latest crisis, I paid 20% less.)

2) It's cheaper. Even under moderate assumptions, you could save a couple thousand dollars a year for a medium-sized commercial web site. That money would be much better spent on more hardware. Or more beer.

3) It's cooler. Not in the sense of hipness, but in terms of temperature. If the Register's numbers for a dual-Itanium server power consumption are to be believed, a couple of those babies would put out more heat as a hair dryer or a space heater.

Judging by Athalon's heat output, the heat output of typical CPUs scales 1:1 with speed. A lot of server rooms I enter are already running a little warm; imagine what it will be like after a round of upgrades to faster and hotter boxes.

Maybe you can afford to pay for the electricity, but can you afford to pay for a massive upgrade to your air conditioning?

OT: in case you want to try Win2K again...

There's a reghack-NOT-patch for your particular scenario. I had similar problems under Win2K until I applied this fix--crashed every few hours, especially in 3D games. It's chipset independent--happens with VIA, SiS, ALI, AMD, you name it. I applied this fix, and Win2K now actually gets uptime comparable to WinNT. That's not saying much, I know...

Interesting that it only happens with Win2K. Says something about that O/S...like maybe it was rushed out of the door? Not like that's anything new from MS.

Kelledin Tane, the Dreaming Minstre
"All your base are belong to us."

I think AMD has a different plan for simulating ClawHammer than using Transmeta technology. AMD recently announced it is teaming up with Virutech a Swedish startup that produces Simics, a full system simulator. You can find out more see AMD's press release and Virtutech's press release.

The AMD guys went for a different solution, instead of a new architecture they decided to keep x86 compatible and extend it to 64bit, more or less the way intel did for 286->386. You can read about it at AMD 64bit x86 .This way they'll perform a lot better in the 32bit field than the Itanium ever will. All they need to succeed is proper software support, same as intel.

Angry Penguins practice UltraViolent Lithography! The Linux Pimp

I'm an AMD fan (and they're hot, so they can use all they can get, HAH! ouch) so I'm glad to see AMD finally getting going on the high end laptop market. For comparison to the 25W and 29W power consumption, here's some Intel mobile power consumption data:

Original Mobile Celeron 266: 5.8 W
Mobile Pentium III @ 650 Mhz 7.9 - 14 W depending on load (speedstep technology)

And previously from AMD:
Mobile K6-II @ 400 mhz: 12 Watts
Mobile K6-III @ 450? mhz: avg. 12 watts probably more.

So again, AMD comes out heavy on the power usage, and probably heat. Unfortunately my Pentium II laptop is already heating my groin area too much when I'm working with it on my lap, don't need another 20 W of power getting transmitted down there.

It's just common sense.

I'm an AMD fan (and they're hot, so they can use all they can get, HAH! ouch) so I'm glad to see AMD finally getting going on the high end laptop market. For comparison to the 25W and 29W power consumption, here's some Intel mobile power consumption data:

Original Mobile Celeron 266: 5.8 W
Mobile Pentium III @ 650 Mhz 7.9 - 14 W depending on load (speedstep technology)

And previously from AMD:
Mobile K6-II @ 400 mhz: 12 Watts
Mobile K6-III @ 450? mhz: avg. 12 watts probably more.

So again, AMD comes out heavy on the power usage, and probably heat. Unfortunately my Pentium II laptop is already heating my groin area too much when I'm working with it on my lap, don't need another 20 W of power getting transmitted down there.

It's just common sense.

The article is wrong - the mobile devices don't run at 1.6v. If you look at this page from AMD it's 1.4v. Assuming this is the same core rather than the upcoming Morgan core, then the power consumption should just be scaled down by the square of the suppy voltage. 21 W for the 600 MHz and 24 W for the 700 MHz, based on the power consumptions for the desktop versions.

An X5 processor could be an AMD (see here). There is also a PowerPC chip called 604e-X5 running 166 MHz, but these are not as common. You can find specs for the AMD X5 here.

An X5 processor could be an AMD (see here). There is also a PowerPC chip called 604e-X5 running 166 MHz, but these are not as common. You can find specs for the AMD X5 here.

I already posted in the AMD thread, so I won't reiterate it here, but it explains the problems with both INTEL and AMD. Here's a link to that post

I just found some more comparisons here

As you can see, it's pretty damning evidence.

This is probably an error. A slightly older story on the same site quotes final quarter of 2001 for first samples with production in the first quarter 2002. The AMD 64 bit FAQ agrees.

WRONG! There is NOT a "lot of software that goes like that..." In fact, the only reason you'd buy a PIII to run content creation apps is because Photoshop has SSE and Athlon doesn't. 3D Studio DOES run on Athlons, according to AMD's press release:

"AMD Athlon processor outperform comparably configured Pentium III processor-based systems on a long list of high-end commercial, workstation ... These cutting-edge applications include Adobe's Photoshop 5.0 and PhotoDeluxe 3.0, Autodesk's AutoCAD 2000 and 3D Studio MAX, Dragon Systems' Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software, Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder, Ligos' LSX-MPEG Encoder, LizardTech's MrSID Publisher for image compression, Geometrix's 3Scan 3D modeling software, and id Software's Quake II."
( here )

I'm a little confused (maybe like the rest of you), as to why anyone believes that looping the benchmarks will do any good. Benchmarks tend to fall into two categories:
First, there are benchmarks which are a snippet of code from a real-world application. These snippets are not random, but are captured to represent the typical operation of the application. However, the code tends to be more diverse, with fewer loops and a wider variety of subroutines, which tend to make these benchmarks scale very poorly with most processors.
Second, there are the so-called "artifical" benchmarks, which are programs written to emphasize some aspect of a processor's operation (memory bandwidth, integer/floating point throughout, etc.) These benchmarks scale extremely well, because they contain numerous well-behaved loops.

Processors have numerous innovations that make them tuned for looped code. Processors have had instruction caches for at least 15 years now. Intel has a trace cache in the Pentium 4. AMD has predecode In addition, modern processors incorporate branch prediction schemes to help predict loops. With a the same pieces of code run through the processor several times, the processor will usually get the direction of the branch correct, leading to greater execution throughput

Getting back to the original point, looping any piece of code through any processor will improve its performance on that code, provided that it fits in its caches and predictors. Since a majority of benchmarks are application-based, I can see why Transmeta is a bit concerned about comparing apples to apples. Even with pre-translated code, Crusoe is not much better of than any other x86 processor.

That being said, their low power technology was a good idea, but their overall performance is lower, so I'm betting that Intel's high performance coupled with their lower power versions is at the heart of IBM and Compaq's decision, not through any political or economic pressure, but simply because Transmeta isn't that far in the lead with (performance/power).

In short, ditch the imposter CPU and get 100% i686.

AMD does not warrant that your AMD processor will be free from design defects or errors known as "errata". A description of the current characterized errata are available upon request.

So, it looks like, using your own logic, AMD is saying, the Athlon is crap, but we don't have to fix it.

Personally, I think what both vendors are saying is "hey... we've made an awfully complex product... and we might have borked it up here and there. sorry... but you can't sue us for it." Right or wrong? I don't really care, but let's not go off half-cocked, shall we?

I don't know about the Transmeta CPUs, but it seems that AMD's embedded processors do play nice with Linux.
Details are on the AMD site.

I don't know about the Transmeta CPUs, but it seems that AMD's embedded processors do play nice with Linux.
Details are on the AMD site.

Since no one's mentioned it, AMD has a competing technology called "PowerNow!" You can read about it here

It's already available in the K6-2/3+ line and should be available for the Athlon laptops sometime early next year.

Unlike Intel's technology, PowerNow! users a gradient technology (though certainly not quite like Transmeta's level) instead of just fixed speed steppings.

• System Bus: The AMD Athlon processor's system bus is the first 200MHz system bus for x86 platforms, as well as the fastest x86 processor bus available, delivering up 50 percent more peak bandwidth than any other x86 system bus. The AMD Athlon system bus is designed for scalable multiprocessing and leverages high-performance Alpha(TM) EV6 bus technology to enable exceptional system performance.

• System Bus: The AMD Athlon processor's system bus is the first 200MHz system bus for x86 platforms, as well as the fastest x86 processor bus available, delivering up 50 percent more peak bandwidth than any other x86 system bus. The AMD Athlon system bus is designed for scalable multiprocessing and leverages high-performance Alpha(TM) EV6 bus technology to enable exceptional system performance.

Only demonstrated. Read the press release.

All Socket A Athlons and Durons are multiprocessing enabled. They only require a new chipset to do so. AMD is developing the 760MP for this purpose. It will also support DDR SDRAM. This topic will be discussed in much detail at the Microprocessor Forum next week. VIA may or may not develope a multiprocessor capable chipset for AMD processors. Hotrail was developing a chipset that would support 4 and more processors, but they dropped the project. I'll be covering all news of the 760MP next week at AMDZone, and expect Tuesday to be the big news day if you are interested in the 760MP. There should be a load of new information, and possibly a press release or two.

Here's an amusing disclaimer from one of AMD's news releases regarding the x86-64 chip. Of course this is just to protect themselves from lawsuits, but is pretty funny anyways:

Forward looking statements in this document include the risks that developers may not support the x86-64 technology and design tools for the technology in a timely manner or at all; that AMD will not successfully implement the technology in its products on a timely basis; and that AMD may not effectively penetrate the enterprise market.

It is interesting that the way the kickest-ass place sells stuff that manafacturers don't make. What am I talking about? They sell "Duron 750's". Impossible. /off-subject

Fixed costs to the wind, recurring costs I gotta keep an eye on ;-)

It's gonna be a long year, the Hammer won't be out until late '01.

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