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I suspect the Celeron and PIII are the same die, perhaps with crippling fuses or bond pads on the former. Anyone know for sure?

Well, Anand Lal Shimpi knows. It says in the article:

The Celeron 800 remains unchanged from the previous Celeron processors. It is still manufactured by disabling half of the cache on low-yield Pentium IIIs that have bad cache blocks, thus giving the Celeron half the cache as well as making that cache half as associative as the Pentium III's cache. This ends up hurting the Celeron severely as it, clock for clock, is unable to outperform the Pentium III, even when both are clocked at the same FSB/memory clock.

This is nothing new, Intel (and every other chip maker) has been doing this kind of thing for years.

Follow the link "Print this article" at the bottom of the page if you have JavaScript enabled, or simply replace the "showdoc" by "printarticle", as in this link.

hardware geeks and case modders rejoice, as serial ata uses a skinny litle cable, much like the audio out cable from your cd-rom to your sound card. makes the case a lot neater (imagine hiding the cables by taping them to the sides of the case!) and increases airflow. check out yummy pictures at http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1174.

complex

How about a new symbol to go alongside the ubiquitous 'Designed for Windows {95/98/ME/NT}' and 'plug & pray' ones on new hardware? Something like 'Designed for Linux - designed to work', or even just a pretty picture so you know it's tested and includes Linux drivers.

Then I might actually be able to tell if my new kit works on a decent OS before forking out the hardearned or waiting for someone else to try it first!

JJ

Coincidence ... but I was just hunting for this when the article came up. I am looking to build a new computer with with an AMD athlon chip but all the reviews about motherboards on Toms Hardware and Anandtech seem to have a MS Windows centric view.

I hope they do come out with a review for linux but that just might take time. SO what have your experiences been under linux ? Anything people like me should be keeping an eye out for ? Or something you would definitely recommend ?

Durons are just the amd version of the celeron so it doesn't matter much anyway most geeks would buy the athlon anyway.

This Duron + SiS 730S platform isn't aimed at geeks, it's aimed at the goddamn-cheap market, the people who flog crappy PCs at low prices via full-page ads in the newspaper with lots of exclamation marks!! I think it has a lot of potential there - Anand says the 730S will cost $6 more in bulk than the Intel 810E, but that's no great hardship given that low-end Duron CPUs (obviously such machines use low-end CPUs) retail for $18 - $24 less than same-clocked Celerons (pricewatch).

Now of course these machines will suck, because even if the 730S is OK, and (as we all know) Durons are cool, every other component will be complete ass. Nasty 15" monitor, crappy case, cheapest drives in the world, etc. But anyway, it's more sales for AMD, helps fund their work on nice CPUs that geeks will love..

OT Question...Advertising for Anandtech?

Am I alone in noticing that Slashsdot has been doing _lots_ of articles from Anandtech, and less and less from say Tom's Hardware and the like, almost like a small advertising campaign.

The article linked above is a fairly in-depth explanation of why Athlons are good servers (for some applications at least). Personally, since that configuration was put in place, I haven't seen Anandtech down or slow even once. Used to be crawling around major release time (GeForce, Athlon, that magnitude of news).
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#o#

From Anandtech's article on the future of video card manufaturers, 3dfx is basically going to license Quantum3D to manufacture the cards, nullifying the entire purchase of STB, which started the whole process of 3Dfx (with a capital D back then) creating their own cards... Nothing will change, 'scept 3dfx will be able to focus more on creating the chipsets (which'll be a GOOD thing, since their latest ones have been pretty shoddy).

Look at the UT test :
The new P4 even gets poorer performances than the P3...
--

Look at the bottom of the Q3 test page.
In 640x480 we have :
Athlon 1,2GHz -> 170 (fps/GHz=141.66)
P4 1,5GHz -> 191 (fps/GHz=127.33)
Winner: AMD

In 1024x768, we have :
Athlon 1,2GHz -> 100 (fps/GHz=83.33)
P4 1,5GHz -> 101 (fps/GHz=67.33)
Winner: AMD

--

Reviews are all over the net now...here is some of them:

Anandtech
HardOCP - on HardOCP's frontpage you can find more links to reviews.
Toms Hardware hasn't got his review up yet, but I bet it will be soon...

Greetings Joergen

Try holding the power button down for a few seconds, BTW. If Linux had decent/any(?) ACPI support, it would behave the same way. I question why you would want to do that to ANY operating system, but to each his own. I reckon you would fare much better with your own components as well -- even without the chassis cover, I rarely hear the 30GB IBM Deskstar 75GXP in my PII, and it also happens to be one of the fastest IDE drives currently available...

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.ht ml? i=1331

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.ht ml? i=1331

Those looking to save quite a bit of money on their motherboard and memory should definitely take a look at the 694D Pro, but since this is a dream system, we'll go with the slightly faster i840 despite the large price premium.

Er... recent tests I've seen seem to indicate that PCI vidcards are an even match for AGP. On paper, AGP smokes PCI... but in real life, it seems to be a dud.

[Anandtech]: "The results are really no different at higher resolutions, with the PCI card falling only 1.2 FPS behind the AGP card when at 1600x1200x16. The max difference comes at 1280x1024x32, with the PCI card performing 2.3 FPS slower than the AGP card, a difference that may be attributed to the slower bus speed of the PCI card. This difference, however, is not really noticeable."

This is an Athlon 750 system; the bottleneck isn't the CPU, and apparently it isn't the bus.

--

And don't forget, these are preview boards, hopefully the real thing should give us an even bigger boost. Go DDR! :)

It seems AMD has been planning to release a 266MHz FSB processor in 2000 for a while (Note the slide is from Comdex in the Fall of '99). Now, whether or not this will actually happen is up for discussion.

Oh, and by the way, this preview was on Anand's web page on the 14th of this month... how do things slip through the cracks so often here?

and for those folks who are too lazy to copy and paste, bleh.

The linked article is cobbled together review of the g450 for WINDOWS (I haven't looked at the GeForce side) with a cover page discussing Linux. You can see here the trail of where this story came from! The review features lovely snapshots of Windows drivers and it doesn't look like the reviewer has been near X.

Sorry - you are going to have to swallow your pride a little! Scroll down that page to the base where it has a link to XFree86 background and you will find the rest of the review. Just because there are links to two Windows reviews of the two cards doesn't mean that that is all! :-)

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Duh Slashdot,

yet again we have provided someone with a rake load of traffic for.....NOTHING.

The linked article is cobbled together review of the g450 for WINDOWS (I haven't looked at the GeForce side) with a cover page discussing Linux. You can see here the trail of where this story came from! The review features lovely snapshots of Windows drivers and it doesn't look like the reviewer has been near X.

I haven't been as happy in a long time as when I saw this story posted (this is essentially the decision I am making in the next fortnight or so baring the Radeon) and to have actually read a document on what you could get out of these under Linux would have been brilliant. Instead I am another person writing a comment about the quality of the posted story on /.

Of course it's slower than the P4 at the same frequency. The chip was designed with a longer pipeline, which has allowed Intel to up the clock rate by doing less per tick. This was no surprise as people have been discussing it since the architecture was announced.

That said, they did design the ALU to work on both up and down swings of the clock, which means that integer operations could run up to twice the speed of the rest of the CPU.

More detailed info can be found in this Anandtech article.

As for the power consumption, etc. If people are willing to plug their video card into a wall socket for a few more frames/sec in Quake 3, then I don't suppose power consumption is that big of an issue. I guess you could mount two 250 watts in your case if you were really worried about it.

There's no reason to bitch. Unlike most sites, AnandTech lets you see the whole thing on one page - the trick is to click on the "Print this article" link. It also gets rid of the sidebars and such.

For this article, the 1 page link is http://www.anandtech.com/printart icle.html?i=1319.

Hmmmm... looks like Anand has some decent hardware--maybe it's the OS? :-)

Anand's site seems to be Slashdotted or something. Sometimes the pages come up and sometimes they don't.

Since pulling up any given page on Anand's site right now is sort of a crapshoot, and the benchmarks start on PAGE 8 or so of the review, you might want to jump straight to the benchmarks... here's the link...

Just change the "p=8" to "p=9" or something to jump to page 9 instead of 8... gotta love those excessively-paginated articles to boost those ad hit rates.... :-D

As mentioned in this german article from Heise there are already some names (Siemens/Fujistu, Compaq and IBM) announcing sub DM 2000 (probably translates to sub $1000) PC's with this part. Since MHz still sell in the OEM business this might make some dent in Intels OEM sales and that will probably hurt more (in terms of $$, not of faceloss) than the whole 1.13 GHz story.

Another more detailed article can be found at Anandtech.

Sorry people but Intel is pulling a fast one here. What they have done is allow some part of the CPU's core to run at 2x the rest of the chip. If they were to do this to the PIII and find one which would run at 1GHz, then couldn't they say they had a 2GHz CPU?

The AnandTech Editorial posted here a few days ago covers this.

If a 20 Stage Pipeline was a good move is to be seen. But the design takes the long latencies coming with a pipeline stall into account and tries to battle it at every front. This are better Branch-Prediction, ALUs working at double CPU core frequency and the Trace-Cache. since this is the first chip implementing a Trace-Cache i'm very interrested how this new cache model will influence performance.

To see how the new chip perform we will have to wait for neutral benchmarks. Perhaps it will not beat the Athlon clock by clock, but it will start with 1.5 GHz und will scale well beyond 2 Ghz this will make it the performance leader for some time.

About the floating point performance. IMHO Intel stopped beating the old x86 stack based FPU model to death and is walking along the way of SSE2. With a good optimizing compiler this will be pretty competitive. We can only hope Intel helps to get gcc to a point where it can optimize for the SSE Instructions as well as the Intel compilers.

thomas

From the article:

The P4's bus, unlike the Athlon's EV6, isn't a Point-to-Point bus, meaning that all CPUs must share the same 3.2GB/s of available system bandwidth. With a Point-to-Point bus, although it's more complicated to implement, each CPU in a multiprocessor environment gets its own connection to the North Bridge ...

IANACD (I am not a chip designer), but this seems to me like a major disadvantage compared with the Athlon. Am I missing something obvious?

The article says:

The 432-pin Pentium 4 should dissipate around 52W of heat when operating at launch speeds; this puts it below that of the 1GHz Thunderbird that is currently available.

Works for me - here is the summary:

AMD has steadily been gaining market share ever since the release of their Athlon last August, their Thunderbird last June and their Duron shortly thereafter. The company has come from a microprocessor manufacturer that focused on supplying processors for the value market segment to a manufacturer that is helping to drive the desktop market in both performance and value segments.

One of the main reasons that AMD's recent processor releases have been so successful is because, unlike their competition, primarily Intel, the K7 architecture and its derivatives are free from the numerous limitations that 5-year old P6 architecture imposes on Intel's current flagship, the Pentium III. By reading the above statement, you'd assume that the Athlon was all but demolishing the Pentium III in terms of performance. Well, it's not.

The beauty of the K7 architecture is that it is very scalable, especially when you consider the largely untapped (by AMD of course) high-end workstation/server market that demands multiprocessor solutions. So while the Pentium III and its accompanying P6 bus are performing just fine now, there is a definite need for a more powerful solution for Intel's future processors if they plan on holding their current market advantage.

Intel gave us a very pleasant surprise at the Spring 2000 Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in February: for the first time the Willamette's architecture was discussed in a decent amount of detail. However, Intel has remained fairly quiet about the Willamette until now.

In two days, Intel's annual Fall IDF will commence, and the big topic of the day will be the architecture upon which the Willamette, or Pentium 4, is based. We were given the go ahead by Intel to let you all in on the details of this new architecture today so you can get a head start on your IDF reading, which we will be providing later this week.

A lot of what we will be talking about in this article is a follow-up to our initial IDF coverage in our Intel IDF Report #1 and our IDF CPU Report articles that were published earlier this year.

More at http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.h tml?i=1301&p=2.

Works for me - here is the summary:

AMD has steadily been gaining market share ever since the release of their Athlon last August, their Thunderbird last June and their Duron shortly thereafter. The company has come from a microprocessor manufacturer that focused on supplying processors for the value market segment to a manufacturer that is helping to drive the desktop market in both performance and value segments.

One of the main reasons that AMD's recent processor releases have been so successful is because, unlike their competition, primarily Intel, the K7 architecture and its derivatives are free from the numerous limitations that 5-year old P6 architecture imposes on Intel's current flagship, the Pentium III. By reading the above statement, you'd assume that the Athlon was all but demolishing the Pentium III in terms of performance. Well, it's not.

The beauty of the K7 architecture is that it is very scalable, especially when you consider the largely untapped (by AMD of course) high-end workstation/server market that demands multiprocessor solutions. So while the Pentium III and its accompanying P6 bus are performing just fine now, there is a definite need for a more powerful solution for Intel's future processors if they plan on holding their current market advantage.

Intel gave us a very pleasant surprise at the Spring 2000 Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in February: for the first time the Willamette's architecture was discussed in a decent amount of detail. However, Intel has remained fairly quiet about the Willamette until now.

In two days, Intel's annual Fall IDF will commence, and the big topic of the day will be the architecture upon which the Willamette, or Pentium 4, is based. We were given the go ahead by Intel to let you all in on the details of this new architecture today so you can get a head start on your IDF reading, which we will be providing later this week.

A lot of what we will be talking about in this article is a follow-up to our initial IDF coverage in our Intel IDF Report #1 and our IDF CPU Report articles that were published earlier this year.

More at http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.h tml?i=1301&p=2.

Works for me - here is the summary:

AMD has steadily been gaining market share ever since the release of their Athlon last August, their Thunderbird last June and their Duron shortly thereafter. The company has come from a microprocessor manufacturer that focused on supplying processors for the value market segment to a manufacturer that is helping to drive the desktop market in both performance and value segments.

One of the main reasons that AMD's recent processor releases have been so successful is because, unlike their competition, primarily Intel, the K7 architecture and its derivatives are free from the numerous limitations that 5-year old P6 architecture imposes on Intel's current flagship, the Pentium III. By reading the above statement, you'd assume that the Athlon was all but demolishing the Pentium III in terms of performance. Well, it's not.

The beauty of the K7 architecture is that it is very scalable, especially when you consider the largely untapped (by AMD of course) high-end workstation/server market that demands multiprocessor solutions. So while the Pentium III and its accompanying P6 bus are performing just fine now, there is a definite need for a more powerful solution for Intel's future processors if they plan on holding their current market advantage.

Intel gave us a very pleasant surprise at the Spring 2000 Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in February: for the first time the Willamette's architecture was discussed in a decent amount of detail. However, Intel has remained fairly quiet about the Willamette until now.

In two days, Intel's annual Fall IDF will commence, and the big topic of the day will be the architecture upon which the Willamette, or Pentium 4, is based. We were given the go ahead by Intel to let you all in on the details of this new architecture today so you can get a head start on your IDF reading, which we will be providing later this week.

A lot of what we will be talking about in this article is a follow-up to our initial IDF coverage in our Intel IDF Report #1 and our IDF CPU Report articles that were published earlier this year.

More at http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.h tml?i=1301&p=2.

Works for me - here is the summary:

AMD has steadily been gaining market share ever since the release of their Athlon last August, their Thunderbird last June and their Duron shortly thereafter. The company has come from a microprocessor manufacturer that focused on supplying processors for the value market segment to a manufacturer that is helping to drive the desktop market in both performance and value segments.

One of the main reasons that AMD's recent processor releases have been so successful is because, unlike their competition, primarily Intel, the K7 architecture and its derivatives are free from the numerous limitations that 5-year old P6 architecture imposes on Intel's current flagship, the Pentium III. By reading the above statement, you'd assume that the Athlon was all but demolishing the Pentium III in terms of performance. Well, it's not.

The beauty of the K7 architecture is that it is very scalable, especially when you consider the largely untapped (by AMD of course) high-end workstation/server market that demands multiprocessor solutions. So while the Pentium III and its accompanying P6 bus are performing just fine now, there is a definite need for a more powerful solution for Intel's future processors if they plan on holding their current market advantage.

Intel gave us a very pleasant surprise at the Spring 2000 Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in February: for the first time the Willamette's architecture was discussed in a decent amount of detail. However, Intel has remained fairly quiet about the Willamette until now.

In two days, Intel's annual Fall IDF will commence, and the big topic of the day will be the architecture upon which the Willamette, or Pentium 4, is based. We were given the go ahead by Intel to let you all in on the details of this new architecture today so you can get a head start on your IDF reading, which we will be providing later this week.

A lot of what we will be talking about in this article is a follow-up to our initial IDF coverage in our Intel IDF Report #1 and our IDF CPU Report articles that were published earlier this year.

More at http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.h tml?i=1301&p=2.

Be sure to look at http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.h tml?i=1298&p=9 for benchmarks with the Det3 drivers. There is a big improvement. I was going to get the ATI 64MB Radeon, but with a $400 price tag, and the GeForce 2 GTS 32MB being almost as good, Ive decided to save $150 and go with the latter. The extra 32MB may come in handy down the road, but... right now I can think of better ways to spend that much money.

Tommy claims that the Pentium-3 1.13GHz is unstable, and he can't get benchmarks to run. Why?
Because the Pentium-3 demolishes Athlon, and costs less. So he made up this little story. Ach!

As you can see, some other Hardware sites had NO problem running the 1.13GHz Pentium-3.

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html? i=1290

http://www.shar kyextreme.com/hardware/reviews/cpu/pentium3_1x13gh z/

http://firingsquad.gamer s.com/hardware/p3-1133/default.asp

They even ran it on 440BX and VIA boards! Firing Squad OVERCLOCKED it. But Tommy's was broken, really, and it must be a SCANDAL for Intel.

Here's a scandal for you--AMD's stock price is going to cross Intel's this week, heading the wrong direction! No wonder Dr. Tommy is having problems!

Tommy claims that the Pentium-3 1.13GHz is unstable, and he can't get benchmarks to run. Why?
Because the Pentium-3 demolishes Athlon, and costs less. So he made up this little story. Ach!

As you can see, some other Hardware sites had NO problem running the 1.13GHz Pentium-3.

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html? i=1290

http://www.shar kyextreme.com/hardware/reviews/cpu/pentium3_1x13gh z/

http://firingsquad.gamer s.com/hardware/p3-1133/default.asp

They even ran it on 440BX and VIA boards! Firing Squad OVERCLOCKED it. But Tommy's was broken, really, and it must be a SCANDAL for Intel.

Here's a scandal for you--AMD's stock price is going to cross Intel's this week, heading the wrong direction! No wonder Dr. Tommy is having problems!

Sharky Extreme chose to use the VC820 board, however they mentioned nothing about these "problems" that so far only Tom has found.

The NDA was just lifted today, folks. Don't think Tom is the first and last word, and don't think he has an exclusive here.

I don't trust him. Cough, cough, GeForce benchmarking...

I heard Tom is a bad doctor.

<o)
(\
X
8====D

Sharky Extreme chose to use the VC820 board, however they mentioned nothing about these "problems" that so far only Tom has found.

The NDA was just lifted today, folks. Don't think Tom is the first and last word, and don't think he has an exclusive here.

I don't trust him. Cough, cough, GeForce benchmarking...

I heard Tom is a bad doctor.

<o)
(\
X
8====D

But if I remember correctly Tom's hardware said something about how it truly doesn't offer any real benefit unless you are running your 3D games in 640x480, much above that the GPU (Video Card)limits your framerate. And it has been shown for years that to truly run a business application (word, excel, access, or much anything else) a simple 400 mHz CPU will do you fine.

Yhcrana

Anandtech has a review of the Pentium 3 1.13 GHz where he had used motherboards using the VIA Apollo Pro 133 Chipset which Tom Pabst said did not work with the boards on that chipset. Anand did not say anything about the microcode nor did he use the motherboard that Tom said did not arrive.

The real purpose of Intel introducing a factory overclocked chip is the publicity factor. Now that we've all read about Intel Pentium, fast! crashes! we can go order one from Dell or IBM.

blessings,

From what I have been seeing from Intel I don't see much of a future for them, releasing a chip in slot 1 format when they are obviously trying to go to Flip-Chip socket format. This simply seems like a reason for you to have to go out and buy a new CPU sooner.

With the Rambus fiasco, 64 bit CPU fiasco, this, and the i820/i810 problems I find that Intel needs to sit back and take the marketing department out of the driver seat. AMD has the idea release products that are reliable and available to the general public.

Oh and btw if you want to claim that AMD sucks because of the Ge-Force problems that were occuring that was a driver issue and not a CPU issue. I do however agree that AMD needs to add better sealant to their duron and new Thunderbird chips as Anandtech talks about in their web news sections. Where if you apply a heatsink just a little wrong it will crack the die of the chip. Other than that AMD has intel by the short-hairs and intel isn't capable of doing anything about it right now

Yhcrana

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-

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-

The P3 is already faster than the Athlon at the same clockspeed in many areas. Try checking out a review at Anandtech, or Toms Hardware. The athlon does take advantage of some technologies that the P3 has yet to use, but once it does, I predict it will be faster than the Athlon in *most* areas of performance.

The biggest problem will be the price. That is why I think the Athlon has done so well all this time. For 50% less money, you get a chip that performs only 5% worse than the intel equivelant. I think that is why most people, myself included, like Athlons.

In the forum where I originally read about paypai.com, someone claimed that they checked the SSL certificates, and they appeared to be running through secure.paypal.x.com. I could not verify this, because the site was already down. Perhaps the person running the scam considered this and found a way to fool IE? Another possibility is that the person checked the certificate after he was redirected to PayPal. Anyway, the post that I am referring to is here

anandtech also has a review of the Radeon. To summarise it, at 16 bit colour, it's only an average card. However, at 32 bits, it as good as or better than the Geforce 2 GTS.

I'm surprised there was just Sharky's review. All of the sites normally come up with reviews when the NDA's expire:

AnandTech
Fast Graphics
FiringSquad
GamersDepot
GameSpot
GA-Hardware
HotHardware
PlanetHardware
Tom's Hardware

For my money, Anand's is the best place to go for these things, although Tom usually has better discussions of the details behind the hardware and features itself.

Also, 20 questions with ATI, mostly about Radeon.