Slashdot Mirror

AMDZone also reviewed it here

AMDZone also reviewed it here

The 1.4 ghz athlon has been out for a couple months now... the 1.1 ghz athlon has been out for at least 10 months.

Here is a june 6 pcworld review where an amd 1.4-GHz system is "the fastest system yet tested by PCWorld.com" beating out 5 systems based on the 1.7 ghz p4.

Here is a tech report review of an amd 1.33 vs intel 1.7 where they conclude: "Intel's new entry, the 1.7GHz Pentium 4, performs about like a 1.2GHz Athlon in most situations."

You cant get duel processing power from a pentium 4 like you can with an athlon.

"© 2002, Slashdot, a member of the C|Net family of web sites."

"© 2002, Slashdot, a member of the C|Net family of web sites."

An overview is here.

The press release is here.

I will let the article speak for itself, particularly the images which shows that it really work.

TRUFORM can replace pixel shaders apparently. Anyway, Matrox will have to have something more than "real bumps" to get more of the market back. The G550 is a stopgap though, about the level of the GeForce 2 MX, just to get Matrox more revenues through the door this year in preparation to next years "killer" graphics chip.

An overview is here.

The press release is here.

I will let the article speak for itself, particularly the images which shows that it really work.

TRUFORM can replace pixel shaders apparently. Anyway, Matrox will have to have something more than "real bumps" to get more of the market back. The G550 is a stopgap though, about the level of the GeForce 2 MX, just to get Matrox more revenues through the door this year in preparation to next years "killer" graphics chip.

Well "AIM" is the full acronym of their software, so you'd probably have to have a full Windows title, like "windows95" or "windowsxp". However this does mean that if I were to create a domain called "windowsxpfixes.com" that had a list of tweaks or fixes to Windows XP (assuming of course it doesn't run perfectly out of the box) that MS could snatch my domain.

That sounds pretty scary. It might even mean that if I created a domain called "xpenhancer.com" to sell a multiple-desktop tool for Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft could legally take the domain away.

Note that nothing here says that Aimster claimed to be made by the same people who made AOL Instant Messenger. The mere fact that the name incoporated the name of related software was enough.

This ruling could have huge ranging implications. Think of how many computer fan websites there are out there that use the name of the product in them. www.matroxusers.com, www.amdzone.com, www.voodooextreme.com, www.geforcefaq.com... Since these are normally fan sites it's in the best interest of the companies with the related trademarks to ket the fans express themselves, but what if company XXX comes out with a crappy product and XXXtweak.com trashes it in a review?

This is pretty scary stuff. In the past it seems to me that most of the domain names taken from someone were non-commercial ones that often were squatting on the name. But now what can you do? If you have a domain name that insults a company, they can take it. If you make a product designed for use with another product they can take your name. If you don't make a product at all and you're careless they can take it. Who is safe? I can see it in the news tomorrow:

Popular Linux enthusiast website "Slashdot.org" will be forced to find a new domain name. A lawyer for Megacorp explained: "The syntax for using commands in our environment is well known to require a command keyset of a slash followed by a dot. Our customers were being confused by the "slashdot" website, assuming it was a reference for our command syntax. These people, who admit to being hackers, appropriated the domain name with no regard for our users' confusion. Thanks to the American Justice System we have been able to restore the rightful use of our domain. We just want to reassure our users that despite the misuse of our domain name by these Linux hackers, our software has not been infected with the GPL virus."

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!

I found this over at amdzone I agree:

2CPU has what they are calling Dual 1.53GHz Athlon scores on a Tyan board. Well, there are a couple of problems with that which make me very, very unsure that these are legit. First of the Tyan 760MP board does not have overclocking features. I know, I held one in my hands at Comdex. So you think that they might add clock multiplier features in the meantime? Nope, what they had was the final revision of the board which only needs a final chipset from AMD to be complete. Second, it is very difficult to get a 1.2GHz Athlon to even 1.4GHz, much less 1.53GHz, and then you are telling me they got two to go that high? Lastly there are no details about this system at all except that it is using the Tyan board. Who knows, maybe it could be right, and I'm not saying 2CPU is making it up, but there are not enough details and not enough evidence, and there is too much logic keeping me from believing it. And for the fools that will say that I am jealous because I don't have dual scores to post here, don't even bother e-mailing me. That is ridiculous.

Pretty much says it all regarding the benchmarks we "saw".

Guess you haven't seen the specs for the new Alphas then. Instruction throughput per clock is still higher than the previous version, whereas with the P4 it is less than the PIII. One of these processors is going in the right direction.

Shame that Alphas cost so flippin' much. But considering the 150million transistors on the 21364 and the 300-400 million transistors on the 21464 this can be understood I suppose. 1.5MB of on-die cache adds to this though. I want to read more about the SMT the 21464 is using though.

Oh, yes, the Alpha article can be found from the front page of AMDZone.

A little late but you said you wanted to see 3DNow! optimized flask. 17.75 fps, 4 fps faster than the P4

For a bs less review with unique benchmarks read mine. I literally did most of my testing during a bachelor party because I had the system for only a weekend. Cachemem, SuperPi, Linpack, Primordia, etc are tested. Sorry now Linux marks, didn't have time to even attempt them.

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.

AMD Zone certainly has a lot of info on this lot. You can pretty well find out most things if you dig deep enough.

look, and here is another ling disputing it http://www.amdzone.com/arti cle view.cfm?ArticleID=386

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.

The road map for AMD will be two things: The "Mustang" processor will be released before the end of the year. This processor should do pretty good against Willamette. I have a feeling that Intel delayed Willamette because they found that AMD was a bit behind with the Mustang and could afford to go to 0.13 micron and still not be behind. If they can actually make 'em =)

What else? Obviously SMP support will be nice... Anand (not to mention myself) is expecting them to be out before the end of the year.

Hmmm... one last thing of course (save the best to last). DDR support. If DDR can manage to be less pricy than RDRAM (which it should) then Athlons will blow the pants off Intel. According to this conference call summary AMD's "next gen" supports DDR... whether that means Mustang or the current crop I really don't know. The Anandtech article suggests that it will be for Mustang.

So what's next for AMD? They are about to show Intel just how wrong they have been. We will see a DDR SMP Mustang compete with Intel. Let's see how they like that???

-rt-

We've put up a review of Duron at AMD Zone, the largest AMD site on the net. We also hit a few of your problems (less pages, more paragraphs) and use more benchmarks. For example, Currently, there are five standard SPECopc viewsets: ProCDRS viewset is intended to model the graphics performance of Parametric Technology Corporation's CDRS industrial design software. IBM's Data Explorer (DX), which has 10 different tests, is a visualization application. Intergraph's DesignReview (DRV), which has 10 different tests, is a 3D computer model review package. Alias/Wavefront's Advanced Visualizer, with 10 tests, is an animation application. And Discreet Logic's Lightscape Visualization System, with four tests, is a radiosity visualization application. All five viewsets represent relatively high-end applications. These type of applications typically render large data sets. They almost always include lighting, smooth shading, blending, line antialiasing, z-buffering, and some texture mapping. So we use Specview, Seti, Distributed, and a few other benchmarks made by a friend of ours who attends the University of Illnois. QMC is best described in the words of Tim QMC tests cpu power, cache quality to some extent depending on the file Input1D0, bus io and ram. It calculates the ground state properties of a particular lattice model using a Quantum Monte Carlo algorithm. Linpack is a very interesting benchmark for comparing the Tbird to the classic Athlon because you can watch the data get too big for the CPUs caches and watch performance fall. Here is Tim's description of the benchmark. For a matrix of size N you use 8 * N * N bytes to store that matrix. For 25 sites you use 5KB. Each time the matrix is increased by 25 the memory consumption rises by 4 fold. So you use 5KB, 20KB, 80KB, .... , 5.12 MB. At some point the L2 is overflowed. At that point performance will depend on how quick data can be accessed from ram. This is where you will see a noticable performance drop, or at least you should depending on the latency of getting data from ram. So for matrices that are larger than L1(data) + L2 you are really stressing the quality of the cache and the bus speed. Also you pay a tremendous performance hit for using CAS3 ram. I think it's a very good benchmark. Also to those who commented that Athlon is about the same as Duron's price. That is off Price Watch, which is not the MSRP which was released as always in press releases, and was OEM. Duron will cost much less at Price Watch when it is readily available than its MSRP just like Athlon does now. Hope that helped.

I know the article is written with a very pro AMD point of view. But in the second paragraph of the details section, it speaks to the paraphrased statement from Intel that they don't expect this technology to become standard until at least 2005. I would take this as Intel is not working on marketing a chip of this flavor for now, but is looking at it by 2005. I didn't get the impression that Intel has abandoned or is about to abandon the architecture if they feel it will be standard in 2005.

I've read /. and AMDzone for a while now. I use and advocate for the use of AMD products. When reading previews of new tech, I like to know who wrote the piece, and what the connection between the tech and the author is. AMDZone is ran by Chris Tom, aka ruiner. Highlight the name attached to most posts on the site and check the email address. The site ruiner.net makes reference to his work on AMDZone.

The intentional use of "they talk about" in the post here, which indicates to the reader a separation between the poster and the site referenced, is definitely misleading. There is only one thing worse than faking impartiality, getting caught doing it. No, this is not a major sin, but it is a common marketroid sin, and it is one I prefer not to see either of my regular reads getting into. Ya gotta teach'em while they're stil youngins, else they never learn.

This is just an FYI for those of us who know preview is another word for marketroid. There is probably some meaty goodness in the article, but remember the source.

I've read /. and AMDzone for a while now. I use and advocate for the use of AMD products. When reading previews of new tech, I like to know who wrote the piece, and what the connection between the tech and the author is. AMDZone is ran by Chris Tom, aka ruiner. Highlight the name attached to most posts on the site and check the email address. The site ruiner.net makes reference to his work on AMDZone.

The intentional use of "they talk about" in the post here, which indicates to the reader a separation between the poster and the site referenced, is definitely misleading. There is only one thing worse than faking impartiality, getting caught doing it. No, this is not a major sin, but it is a common marketroid sin, and it is one I prefer not to see either of my regular reads getting into. Ya gotta teach'em while they're stil youngins, else they never learn.

This is just an FYI for those of us who know preview is another word for marketroid. There is probably some meaty goodness in the article, but remember the source.

AMD held a very brief conference call this morning. I actually got to pretend like I was an important person and listen in. Compaq and Gateway have dibs on all March shipments of 1 Ghz processors. Everyone elso can get them in April. Also, here's the new pricing:
1000 Mhz:$1299
950 Mhz:$999
900 Mhz:$899

They are waiting for the AMD 760 chipset which, according to AMDZone are supposed to be released in 1Q'00:


New Athlon Chipsets Q1-Jeff Tom 11:50 p.m. CST
JC has heard from a source that dual and quad Athlon chipsets will be available in Q1 of 2000, contrary to other reports.

According to Chris Hare's chipset chart the 760 will support DDR RAM, although I thought I read somewhere else that DDR wouldn't be supported until 2nd half of 2000.

AMD is important from an idealogical standpoint. I have two Linux boxes at home that have zero Intel or Microsoft components in them. And I like that very much. Every time I use those machines, I'm reminded that I voted for choice with my dollars, and that keeps me voting (like the $3500 ballot I cast when I bought the parts for my K7/600 system a couple weeks ago).

I don't like serialized CPUs. I don't like strong-arm, quasi-legal, neo-soviet business tactics. I don't like to be told what I want. I don't like paying a mint for CPUs just so I can fund some mindless "Our CPU makes the Internet better" campaign.

You like giving Micros~1 the finger? Well Intel ain't much better than them. So give them the finger too and get AMD and Via and Linux all together. If you do, you're casting your vote for freedom, choice, quality, advancing technology and lower prices.

P.S. The "major motherboard manufacturer" the Ars article mentioned is Asus and the mobo in question is called the K7M. Gamer's Depot has a review, as do many other sites. See AMD Zone for more news about all things AMD. And slota.com has a complete list of all the Slot A motherboards. Which makes it an interesting comparision to AMD's list.

-B

-B