Slashdot Mirror

ON THE HIGH END?? You must be kidding. Out of the narrow selection of AMD motherboards, they all have stability problems, and their performance over Pentiums is negligible.

Cites, please? Do you have anything to back up this claim?

If you are having stability problems with an Athalon system, it's probably because you failed to follow AMD's guidelines. The Athalon, particuarly early ones (like mine), are finicky about the hardware they work with. They are particuarly sensitive to the power supply, which is why AMD has a list of recommended power supplies on their web site. A UPS with a power conditioner is a smart investment for any high-end system. (I use an APC Smart-UPS 650)According to the guys I buy my hardware from, somthing like 90% of the stability problems with Athalon systems that they see come from people using an out-of-spec power supply. Most of the rest of the problems come from using marginal memory.

My primary system is a FIC SD11 with an Athalon 550. I got it within the first two weeks of it hitting the market. It's almost a year old now, and I have had ZERO stability problems with it. It runs 24x7; the only time I ever have to reboot it is when I switch into 95 to do some gaming. This box primarily ran NT4 Workstation up until May, when I switched it over to RedHat 6.1 It was rock-solid even under NT, and has been just as stable under Linux.

It makes NO sense whatsoever to buy a top-of-the-line CPU and MoBo and stick it in a bargain-basement case with a cheesy power supply and no-name RAM. Spend the extra money and get server-grade memory and power. Likewise, if you ignore the manufacturer's guidelines and use out-of-spec parts, you have no right to be pissed at them when your substandard components crash the system.

Before you build an Athalon system, do yourself a favor and RTFM first. You'll save yourself a lot of aggrivation.

"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

ON THE HIGH END?? You must be kidding. Out of the narrow selection of AMD motherboards, they all have stability problems, and their performance over Pentiums is negligible.

Cites, please? Do you have anything to back up this claim?

If you are having stability problems with an Athalon system, it's probably because you failed to follow AMD's guidelines. The Athalon, particuarly early ones (like mine), are finicky about the hardware they work with. They are particuarly sensitive to the power supply, which is why AMD has a list of recommended power supplies on their web site. A UPS with a power conditioner is a smart investment for any high-end system. (I use an APC Smart-UPS 650)According to the guys I buy my hardware from, somthing like 90% of the stability problems with Athalon systems that they see come from people using an out-of-spec power supply. Most of the rest of the problems come from using marginal memory.

My primary system is a FIC SD11 with an Athalon 550. I got it within the first two weeks of it hitting the market. It's almost a year old now, and I have had ZERO stability problems with it. It runs 24x7; the only time I ever have to reboot it is when I switch into 95 to do some gaming. This box primarily ran NT4 Workstation up until May, when I switched it over to RedHat 6.1 It was rock-solid even under NT, and has been just as stable under Linux.

It makes NO sense whatsoever to buy a top-of-the-line CPU and MoBo and stick it in a bargain-basement case with a cheesy power supply and no-name RAM. Spend the extra money and get server-grade memory and power. Likewise, if you ignore the manufacturer's guidelines and use out-of-spec parts, you have no right to be pissed at them when your substandard components crash the system.

Before you build an Athalon system, do yourself a favor and RTFM first. You'll save yourself a lot of aggrivation.

"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

• K6-III is similarly clocked Pentium® III processor.
• K6-2 is a Pentium II w/ 3DNOW, 100MHz bus
• K6 iscompetitive with the Pentium ® II and superior to both Pentium with MMX(TM) and Celeron

and here's AMD's comparison on what's different between the K7 and PIII.

anyway, i'm still talking out of my ass, but i have links that fart too.

• K6-III is similarly clocked Pentium® III processor.
• K6-2 is a Pentium II w/ 3DNOW, 100MHz bus
• K6 iscompetitive with the Pentium ® II and superior to both Pentium with MMX(TM) and Celeron

and here's AMD's comparison on what's different between the K7 and PIII.

anyway, i'm still talking out of my ass, but i have links that fart too.

• K6-III is similarly clocked Pentium® III processor.
• K6-2 is a Pentium II w/ 3DNOW, 100MHz bus
• K6 iscompetitive with the Pentium ® II and superior to both Pentium with MMX(TM) and Celeron

and here's AMD's comparison on what's different between the K7 and PIII.

anyway, i'm still talking out of my ass, but i have links that fart too.

• K6-III is similarly clocked Pentium® III processor.
• K6-2 is a Pentium II w/ 3DNOW, 100MHz bus
• K6 iscompetitive with the Pentium ® II and superior to both Pentium with MMX(TM) and Celeron

and here's AMD's comparison on what's different between the K7 and PIII.

anyway, i'm still talking out of my ass, but i have links that fart too.

If you are cracking your Duron then you are doing something wrong. Most likely you are using a non socket A heatsink, and you are using too much force to put it on. It is very important that the heatsink is designed for your CPU. This article is full of so much misleading information that I can not believe it. I suppose this is what happens on sites that just spit out as many articles as they can write in a day, don't do any research, and then spam news sites to get posts about it. It is ridiculous. Spacers will only redirect heat back into the CPU die, taking off the support pads is a bad idea, not using a correct heatsink is playing with fire, and there is no defective packaging going on, that is ridiculous, what is going on is a string of websites not knowing what they are doing and screwing up their CPUs and then crying about it, like it is AMDs fault, and that is a joke.

"Thunderbird" Athlons will be labeled as "Athlon, with enhanced cache", and unless you get one in a pre-built system from a distributor like gateway or dell, the processor will be in socketed form rather than on a slot-A PCB.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.

AMD Athlon pipeline is only 10 or 12 stages

11 or 15. Six for decode (FETCH, SCAN, ALIGN1/MECTL, ALIGN2/MEROM, EDEC, IDEC/Rename), or maybe five depending on how you feel about IDEC/Rename. For integer instructions (at least direct path ones) you then have SCHED (which can take multiple cycles, depending on how long it takes for all inputs and an appropriate functional unit to become available), EXEC, ADDGEN, DC-ACC, RESP (DC-ACC and RESP are cache accesses, I'm not sure where the write back is -- they may have left the retirement out of the document I'm looking at). The FP pipeline (FP instructions, MMX and 3D Now! instructions as well) is longer, 15 stages (including the first 7 above), more for FMUL.

That's all taken from Appendix B (page 191) of the AMD Athlon Processor x86 Code Optimzation Guide (it's a PDF).

Intel P4 (aka Willamette) has 20 stage pipeline, and it remains to be seen whether the high clock rates this enables makes up for the hits it'll take due to latency and branch mispredict penalty.

I thought the Willamette's was more like 25 pipestages for the integer unit, and an undisclosed (I assume higher) number for FP operations. The PPro's is pretty long allready, like 18 or so (that may be for the FP). I assume about the same length in the P-II and P-III since they are the same microarcheture.

I'd like to add that I have heard that PowerNow! is a technology that is somewhat independent of the core. The K6-2+ will be great for power consumption in smaller devices, but PowerNow! laptops based on Durons and Thunderbird Athlons will eventually become available.

I'm not sure if this will be as significant, however. I haven't seen any mention of power consumption with the Tbird cores, but I assume they will require a lot of juice -- probably more than an Intel SpeedStep, despite the fact that AMD has the better implementation.

--

http://www.amd.co m/products/cpg/athlon/benchmarks/benchmarks.html

In some cases it's close, but Athlon is ahead of PIII on pretty much everything. On computationally intensive stuff like Photoshop, it's not even close - Athlon scorches PIII (for that matter Duron scorches PIII on floating point too):

Photoshop benchmark

The independent review sites such as Anandtech, Toms hardware, Aces, etc all have pretty much the same results, although the details obviously differ based on the exact system configuration.

The only benchmarks I've seen where PIII beats Athlon are memory benchmarks where the PIII is running on an i840 platform with PC800 Rambus memory, or on an overclocked BX platform. For many people these arn't realistic comparison platforms, since PC800 Rambus memory is prohibitively expensive and most people do not overclock their systems.

Anyone looking for an affordable high performance memory solution should wait until Sept/Oct for AMD's 760 chipset which supports DDR. Given Athlons 200/266MHz DDR FSB, the speedup you get with DDR should be much greater than PIII gets with Rambus memory, since PIII is limited by it's 100/133MHz FSB.

http://www.amd.co m/products/cpg/athlon/benchmarks/benchmarks.html

In some cases it's close, but Athlon is ahead of PIII on pretty much everything. On computationally intensive stuff like Photoshop, it's not even close - Athlon scorches PIII (for that matter Duron scorches PIII on floating point too):

Photoshop benchmark

The independent review sites such as Anandtech, Toms hardware, Aces, etc all have pretty much the same results, although the details obviously differ based on the exact system configuration.

The only benchmarks I've seen where PIII beats Athlon are memory benchmarks where the PIII is running on an i840 platform with PC800 Rambus memory, or on an overclocked BX platform. For many people these arn't realistic comparison platforms, since PC800 Rambus memory is prohibitively expensive and most people do not overclock their systems.

Anyone looking for an affordable high performance memory solution should wait until Sept/Oct for AMD's 760 chipset which supports DDR. Given Athlons 200/266MHz DDR FSB, the speedup you get with DDR should be much greater than PIII gets with Rambus memory, since PIII is limited by it's 100/133MHz FSB.

http://www.techweb.com/wire/stor y/TWB20000630S0011

This spells it out a bit clearer that both Gateway and AMD agree it's a Gateway issue - either the motherboard or power supply.

Originally Gateway said it's be fixed by July 10th, but that has more recently changed to July 18th. Given the specificity of the date, I assume that they now know what the issue is, and are waiting either for rev'd motherboards from Jabil, or for a shippment of an appropriately spec'd power supply.

Interestingly AMD's web site:

http://www1.amd.com/athlon/power

Lists 52 approved power supply for 900MHz ATX, but only 37 for 1GHz ATX...

When I build my dual processor Athlon box later this year (waiting on the AMD 770 chipset and Mustang core CPUs like the rest of the world), I'm going to use a PC Power and Cooling 350watt power supply. That'll handle anything I'm going to throw at it.

From Here

AMD has disclosed specifications to the major OS vendors and Microsoft so that they may ensure that their operating systems and tools will be AMD x86 64-bit aware

AND

"By extending the x86 instruction set to 64-bits, AMD's x86-64 technology should give us very fast compiler retargetting and the easiest kernel port so far," said Alan Cox, Linux Kernel Developer.
-----------------

It looks like a real battle ahead for Intel.

Any idea if Intel is EVER going to change the name? I doubt it. "Pentium" is such a household name, and whenever it is mentioned, the average person recognizes it, and associates it with a fast computer.

Joe Luser might associate "Pentium" with "fast computer," but in my mind, there's a slightly different association. :-)

I suppose the trick now is to get that across to Joe Luser. The "P!!!" ads were a start, but they don't go far enough.

_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/

My problem with linux has been (lately) that when I try to install redhat, the install terminates.

Sounds like a Redh*t problem...but then you said you tried Debian, too. Back in the day, I started with SLS, then went to Slackware...nowadays, I'm using SuSE. (I took a quick detour into Corel Linux (based on Debian), but I couldn't get it dialed in just the way I wanted and didn't want to waste the time to figure it out when I knew how SuSE is configured.) I've installed SuSE on everything from a Cyrix 5x86 up to a K6-III and have never run into problems. I can't say that I've ever used Redh*t, but it seems that when someone posts to comp.os.linux.* or /. with a "Linux problem," it often ends up being a Redh*t problem.

I tried one of the BSDs (don't remember which one) a few years ago...there didn't seem to be anywhere near as much activity swirling around it as for Linux, so it didn't stay on my computer long. Now that my NetWare server setup is trashed (flaky i430VX-based motherboard, not a software problem...funny how most of the hardware problems I've run across have been with Chipzilla hardware, not stuff from this underdog or that underdog) and the machine it was on is fixed, maybe it's time for another trip into "BSD-land."

_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/

Although still in the works, below is the AMD announcement over the AMD-760 chipset which enables DDR-SDRAM. This stipulates that 266MHz DDR SDRAM can potentially deliver 2.6 times the memory access bandwidth of traditional SDRAM (due I think to lower latency rates in concert with higher bandwidth). Read it here.

I have heard release dates as early as late July, but you know how that goes.

-L

Take a look at http://www.amd.com/about/glance.html
"AMD provides Windows compatible processors".
So AMD is saying not willing to embrace Linux.
So why bothering with M$-designed CPUs ?
----------------

See the AMD Athlon FAQ, question :

Question:
My memory has all the requirements listed above, but it also has ECC (Error Correction Code). Is that a good thing?

Answer:
ECC is an excellent function for memory, but it is of no advantage for your new AMD Athlon processor-based system. In fact, it may slow down the performance of your new system. You may want to consider using memory that is not ECC.

There are no Athlon figures up (anyone know them?).

AMD has some SPECfp-95 numbers here. They show a 800Mhz athlon at 26.6 (P-III shown at 19.8), 900Mhz at 27.5, and 1000Mhz 29.4 They use to have some SPECint numbers as well, showing about a 15% lead over the P-III, but that was at a clock speed where the Athlon had the half speed L2 cache, and it was when the P-III also had a half speed cache (P-IIIs with the smaller, faster, more associtave cache L2 are a bit faster on many benchmarks then the older P-IIIs). So I don't know how the current P-III stands in int to the current K7. Probbaly not as good or AMD would publish those numbers.

The orignal poster wanted to know if the Alpha was competitave with lower clock speeds. The answers shown here say the 21264 is. I want to point out that the picture was somewhat diffrent with the 21164 and 21064. They are strictly in-order machines, and the 21064 has very strict instruction grouping rules.

The 21064 (frequently) does less work per clock then a P-III, P-II, and even frequently a PPro. Of corse the 21064 was new a very long time ago (8 years?). The 21064 did somewhat less work per clock then most of it's contempary RISCs. But it was clocked much much faster. (i.e. 133Mhz 21064 vs the 50Mhz TI SuperSPARC, definitly much faster then the 386s and 486s of it's day as well)

The 21164 did more work per clock then the 21064. It's contemparary RISCs were doing much more work per clock. Far more out of order dispatch and specultave execution in the other RISCs, and in the PPro which Intel brought out during the 21164's lifetime (I think). However the 21264 once again had a dramitaic clock speed advantage (2x or more in some cases - 3x to 4x over the Intels for a while).

The 21264 is a diffrent kind of Alpha. The first one to do a lot of out of order and specultave execution. Clock for clock it gets far more work done then the 21164. Which is good because it no longer outclocks many of it's foes. It has even lost the top slot in SPECint which the Alpha has held more or less since it's introduction (not at all times, but never lost it for more then a few months that I recall -- then again I didn't check every month!). Even the SPECfp it shows some weeknesses it hasn't in a long time (I recall it having a firmer grip on #1 here, losing when HP announced new HPPA machines, and to some of the RS/6000s, but allways regaining it fairly soon after).

Seeing a 21264 with a really fast clock will definitly be an impressave thing. It will strain it's 8M L2 cache at 1.2Mhz for sure. Probbably blow right past it. I wonder if they will have a much larget L2, or if they will use a big L3?

I also look forward to the 21364. I don't think Compaq has said a lot about it, other then SMT. Simultanius Multi-Threading, which looks similar to SMP on a chip, but it lets the CPU assign functional units on a per-cycle basis to acheve maximum throughput. I wonder what else the 21364 will do. I wonder if it will go back to a simpler in-order less-specultave execution model (using SMT to tolarate the memory latency).

I heard the 21364 taped out in December as planned. I don't know how the test samples were, or what the rest of the schedule is.

P.S. dispite never having owned an Alpha, I'm definitly a member of the "Alpha is fast cult". A pity it has allways been cheeper to ray trace using more CPUs of something else (the K7 last I did my estimates).

To cut a long story short, Intel figured this out, and put the smack down on anyone who supported the Athlon. Not just VIA, (whom Intel despise for matching their chipsets in many respects, and then selling them cheaper), but motherboard makers too. ASUS didn't even put the K7M on the front page of their website for months, and that was widely regarded as the best all-round K7 board! Personally I think Intel need to be taught a lesson, which is why I'm a confirmed AMD advocate now. Hopefully with Duron, and maybe Joshua (Heh! VIA get their own back!) assaulting the basic Celeron, the Athlon taking on the Celeron II and PIII, and the Thunderbird and Itanium slugging it out, those of us who are more tech-savvy can return the smack to Intel.

Anyway, to avoid going too OT here, it will be interesting to see exactly how AMD will make up the shortfall in mobos when the Duron is released. If the vacuum that faced the Athlon upon release can be avoided, we can hope for an interesting fight, which I hope makes Intel question a couple of fundamental issues (Such as, don't fire your older workers, who've probably been in the game for a while, because they will go elsewhere). On another note, It would be cool to see AMD and VIA team up and use the same socket standards on their lower-range chips, or even better, to implement a standard everyone will use, and stop these tit-for-tat architecture changes, that renders building/upgrading machines a logical and financial grind! (Unlikely, but I suppose I can dream.....)

AMD has several useful utilities to determine information about your Athlon. You can find them at the following URL:

http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/bin/

Among the programs listed here are things to measure the clock speed, find the CPUID, and other information. Binary and sources are available.

I have no clue how useful this would be in these cases, but it's certainly worth looking at.

Intel is proud to announce it's newest line of processors, created to combine the speed of AMD with the iMac style of computer, The MD 20/20/86. The MD will come in grape, banana and fruit punch.

Warning! Use of these processors in multiple cpu combinations, especially if flavors are mixed may cause your computer to be blurry-eyed, slow, late-rising and generally hungover in the morning.

the Press Release is here. And the FAQ is here. The Spitfire has come a long way baby ;)

the Press Release is here. And the FAQ is here. The Spitfire has come a long way baby ;)

Yes, I know that the slashdot gang gets many article submitions but they could at least read the the one they're gonna post.

I've been told that the case is actually AMD's
EasyNow! design - thanks to Chris Tom for the head's-up. Wonder why they aren't suing AMD?


This almost sounds like inside info, yet anyone who read the article saw this and its hyperlink. Maybe you should hire Chris Tom to do your proof reading. I wouldn't care but this shit happens all too often usually with misleading titles and summaries. Read one for the Gipper.

(MM note: I don't care if you mark this down, I've got karma to spare.)

There is a simple reason why. The AMD EasyNow (which the FishPC is modeled on) looks nothing like the iMac. Go see for yourself: AMD EasyNow Fish PC E-machines e-One and Apple iMac

The Fish PC is clearly modeled on the EasyNow design, but with the iMac color scheme. And that's really the only similarity, and it's been hashed out already in past stories that, design patent or not, nobody can patent a color. You can patent a design that uses particular colors, but not the color itself on any particular type of item.

Since he's currently using one of those outdated 1GHz Athlons! http://www1.amd.com/products/cpg/ath lon/quotes "I use an AMD Athlon processor- based system as one of my primary development systems. A 1 GHz AMD Athlon based system running Red Hat Linux offers a powerful platform for general purpose software development, games and multimedia. " --Alan Cox, Linux kernel developer, Red Hat

Hard drive and microprocessor manufacturing both produce large volumes of highly toxic "stuff". Hopefully someone on Slashdot who knows more about how the biz handles this. It should definetly factor into any responsibly motivated purchasing decision.

I remember reading an article a few years back in AMD's "PC Currents" about how they reclaim the silicon waste and donate it to art schools and the like where it is used in pottery.

I couldn't find anything about it specifically on their website but I did find this.

Highspeed ASCII drawing was to be placed here...

Say it ain't so! On the issue of SMP support, having support on the processor could certainly be a help. However, lacking it (processor ID) does not bar the possibility. Otherwise, things like 32 processor Xeon systems wouldn't fly, as IIRC, the processors only have support for 4 IDs.

On the Athlon, I've read that they do indeed have 'support' in the manner mentioned above. references:AMD

The FIC-SD11 and MSI's seem to be the most stable.

There are new ones coming out.

This is a list of where people have the most problems, in order of most occurences, as far as I can tell:

1. Power Supply 2. Memory 3. Video Card

AMD's website has this page that shows you their recommended memory, power supplies, video cards, etc. Just follow this and you're golden!

I can't seem to get to AMD as well.
I think they're getting hit also.


The Tick - "Spoon!"

I can't seem to get to AMD as well.
I think they're getting hit also.


The Tick - "Spoon!"

AMD DEMONSTRATES 1.1GHz AMD ATHLONâ PROCESSOR
- AMD Athlonâ Processor Built on Advanced Copper Technology Shatters GigaHertz (1000MHz) Barrier-

SUNNYVALE, CA--February 7, 2000--AMD today demonstrated a 1.1 GHz(1100 MHz) version of the AMD Athlonâ processor...

From the AMD Press Release (Emphasis mine)

Thanks for coming to my rescue! I knew I'd seend these number referenced before - not at this site, but somewhere...

I couldn't for the life of me find anything on either Intels or AMD's sites aside from press releases, so i didn't even bother with IBM or Motorolla.

However, according to the press releases:
Mobile Celeron-266 uses 5.8w
Mobile Celeron-333 uses 6w
Mobile AMD-K6-III-P uses 12w

Those are pretty far cries from the Pentium III's usages. I don't recall Transmeta mentioning these lower numbers in their conference. It's almost like they were comparing their absolute best case against Intels absolute worst case... My hopes are definetly NOT that up about getting a Crusoe system, at this point.

To ensure reliable operation of AMD Athlon(TM) Processor-based systems, an AMD-recommended 250W or larger ATX 2.01 power supply is required for the majority of system configurations. Recommendations are based on the ability of a supply to provide the power sequencing and current requirements of AMD Athlon systems. The current supplied on the +5VDC power rail as well as the combined current supplied by the +5-VDC and +3.3-VDC power rails has been tested on the supplies listed below.

When selecting a power supply for your system, please refer to the following list of power supplies that have been evaluated and are recommended by AMD for use with AMD Athlon processors. The following power supplies are recommended for their capability to supply appropriate power on both the +5-VDC and +3.3-VDC power rails. In addition, this list is not intended to be a comprehensive listing of all power supplies that support AMD Athlon processors.

Unfortunately, this just isn't true. On my machine at work (a nice AMD Athlon 550), dragging windows around is noticeably faster in Win NT than it is in Linux/X. That's sad, but true. Still, I might agree that for 3D, the need to get rid of the pipe bottleneck is larger.

It would be a good idea to consider the AMD Athlon platform for these systems. I say this because of the much higher (200Mhz) external bandwidth and better bus handling. This allows for faster multi-CPU support and better processing speeds for large data objects in RAM (as opposed to the slower i840 bus and memory support).

As the Army is not simply pushing large amounts of memory around (such as for DVD or 3D gaming textures), but rather dealing with huge numbers of pieces of RAM, PC-133 (and its decendants) provide much better access times than RAMBUS does.

The Athlon's use of Digital's (now Compaq's) EV6 bus is a huge step in the right direction for processing large amounts of data and sharing that data between processors, memory and PCI cards.

They call it SledgeHammer. I think this press release indicates that AMD isn't waiting around to be crushed by IA-64.

A 64-bit architecture with NO speed penalty for IA-32 programs, plus a super-fast (like 20x) I/O bus. Booo-yaaah!

For more information about how AMD plans to really allow fast multiprocessor systems read about the LDT here: http://www.amd.com/prod ucts/cpg/mpf/pres99/micropforum.html

While on the same sort of subject someone pointed out in an earlier comment about how AMD is turning into a competater rather than an alternative. This will be significatly more visible with AMD's 64 bit processor vs IA-64 architecture since AMD for the first time will not just be "copying" Intel's instruction set. Personally I think AMD's plan will go over well for a lot of x86 users wanting to go to 64 bit but not wanting to simply expand the architecture rather than go with a whole new one (though both will be able to run 32 bit x86 code, AMD's chip will do it faster though). The real question is how long will it take AMD to come out with it and how many more delays will Intel put on IA-64 (especially considering the first two IA64 chips, Merced and McKinnley are targeted toward the server market, not the desktop market). So the competition between Intel and AMD will only grow hotter in the years to come (not to mention Rambus vs DDR SDRAM, etc...).

For those who might have missed AMD's presentation at this years microprocessor forum (it talks about stuff like LDT and AMD's 64 bit processor) here is the link: http://www.amd.com/prod ucts/cpg/mpf/pres99/micropforum.html

How are they cooling these fast chips it must be more than multiple fans and heat sinks. Difficult to tell - the cooling information should be Here, but that seems to only go up to the 700. I suspect they haven't gotten around to updating that bit yet, or Marketing are outstripping Production - just like at Intel :+)
--

In case anyone is interested, here are links to the technical specs pages for the Athlon and the K6-2
--

In case anyone is interested, here are links to the technical specs pages for the Athlon and the K6-2
--

It's nice to see that AMD is keeping ahead of Intel in the speed wars, but not so nice to see they seem to be pushing up into the same sort of price bracket to do so. One of the GOOD things about the AMD Vs Intel wars was that it was acting to push prices for chips down; I don't really *want* to be forced into buying the latest and greatest chip at enormous expense, just so I can play the latest games; I would much rather have a chip at a price I can afford, that is just below the leading edge
That said, the tiny little trailer that points to the new 553MHz K6 at a reasonable price is a much more welcome sight....
--

• A Personal Jukebox MP3 player w/ the car audio kit
• The ever-popular choice, a 3Com Palm Vx
• I could really use a new harddrive, or, better yet...
• I'd love to have an Athlon system to replace my P133
• Tux would make a great stocking stuffer
• I'd like to have a DVD player

There's an AMD equivalent to the CPU identification application - it's actually better than the Intel one because it does Intel as well as AMD chips, in a lot more detail as I recall.

The downside is that I believe it is Win32 only.. but then isn't the Intel one? There is some source code made available.

Look here - this may require you to enter your email address as registration.

Q.

Just pointing out AMD's plans to implement 64-bit extensions to x86 architecture, rather than clone intel's IA64 architecture.