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AMD Cuttin' Deals, Releases 800 Mhz Athlon
MatriXOracle writes "AMD seems to be on fire lately. According to this C|Net article, HP will be including K6-2's in new portable models, and is considering the Athlon for desktop use. Meanwhile, Gateway is blaming its disappointing earnings on supply (or lack thereof) of Intel chips, and will start selling systems with AMD chips very soon. Finally, an 800MHz Athlon is being released today. "
The Athlon's right now do not support multi-processors. This is because they were unable to get an important part of MP working in time for their tapeout of the core. So, they disabled it until they had time to fix it in Core+. You'll have to wait for a future version of the Athlon (mustang?). They are also working on a chipset that includes Lightning Data Transport and MP.
You crazy amigo. Remember a little company called IBM? Novell?
I have to disagree. I just bought a 450MHz K6-3 for $190. I could have put it right into my old Socket7 mobo, but decided to upgrade to a Tyan Trinity 1598C2 mobo (w/ 2 megs of L3 cache!) for $120. So you can have cheap upgrades. In my opinion. the K6-3 is the best upgrade available for Pentium boxes in terms of cost/performance.
Screw Intel SMP anyways... If I've got something that needs tremendous power for server or 3D render usage, I wouldn't waste time with Intel anyways as an Alpha would be more suited to the task. Any app that needs this kind of power has an Alpha binary available.
For me deciding between $1000 for upgrading my ancient ppro180 or a dreamcast was a no brainer.
The ppro is a great linux/NT4 workstation does everything swell but is showing it's age on newer games such as Q3 (don't get me wrong, it still rocks, but once you see 32big rendering on a TNT2 I get a little jealous).
Got the dreamcast and have been loving every minute of it.
Although... I do miss installing new sound/video/directx drivers for every single new game!
Now if Sega would get get off it's but and implement multiplayer I could make my Ppro last until after the milennium....
It doesn't really solve the memory. With 50ns RAM and an 800MHz CPU you're looking at 40 wait states for a cache miss, I believe. Although as cache misses get less and less frequence (as a consquence of bigger and bigger caches), I suppose bus bandwidth will become more important.
Bringing back memories. I remember when I could run a c64 and 2 1541's with Fast Hack'em. SHUT OFF the computer, and copy disks all day long with only the drives. Every 1541 came with a 6502 (and they cost twice as much as a comparable apple,atari,trs80 drive at the time).
The compatibility issues of turning peripherals into standalone devices that can work amongst themselves are no different really than those same compatibility issues in general. Vendors make winmodems and winprinters and what are essentially 'win-scanners' all without the help of 'more complicated device interaction'.
If vendors care to make things 'compatible' they will be so, regardless of how independent your devices are.
I ran a Cyrix 133 before. seti@home took approx 100 hours per unit. My Athlon 650 takes less than 10. Also, subjectively, a povray render is about 10 times faster soon.
No regrets. (cept I couldn't get a 700
Rich
Linux runs great on my Athlon 500 running on a FIC SD11.
A small thing to be sure but it's kiven me a warm glow about AMD
Rich
A local screwdriver shop here in western Washington (US) said the Celerons they received just after Christmas no longer SMP, even on a BP6 board. Clearly Intel got around to crippling them; expect dual Celeron setups to rapidly become unavailable.
And I can't get one at the screwdriver shop up the street.
There have been options for a while. I had a Cyrix 486, then an AMD 486 -- both ran faster and cooler than Intel 486s and both were a lot cheaper. I had one of the first Cyrix 686s and a K5 -- both were excellent chips and both are still in use. I now have a pair of K6s and an old used Pentium rechipped with a C2 Winchip. All do well. I am not a game player, so I have not seen a reason to buy Intel chips for quite a while. Given the damage that I saw them do to friends of mine (emotional, physical), I am not interested in supporting them. I find it distressing that people think that the otions have just come about.
Why? Morons are almost inevitably willing to buy crap, so why go to the trouble of helping them out?
You've obviously never tried Office2000.
This makes my 550mhz Athlon feel too old. Time to upgrade.
Dogbert: "Your computer appears to be outdated. You are no longer state-of-the-art. You are falling behind in the tech world."
Dilbert: "I bought this YESTERDAY!"
9 Times out of 10 I find these strange problems are caused by "The cheapest crap memory you can find" Try swaping the memory with a good Micron DIMM.
Well, it's the people that can make it happen. I work (parttime) in a computer shop and when people ask me for information I always give them the choise between amd and intel, then they ask what amd is and then after I explained them some common misunderstanding issues they buy a k7 or k6-2. Geeks can make a difference ;-)
Nice marketing, whay doesn't AMD have such a commercial, are they going to support a ID themselves? This makes me wonder... Please don't give in AMD!
Compaq calls Firewire I-Link. Man I'm getting tired of all these marketing stuff...
Are you sure it was the cpu, I'm doing parttime technical support here for a computer shop and I've seen a lot of these faults, they were all bad mem.
And that's sort of what I was pushing by means of 'contemplate the converse'. Is AMD not hitting Intel below the belt over this product serial number thing because they might wanna do it later? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....
I've already submitted the story... wonder where it went. *shrug* Samsung is apparently working on a chipset that will support dual Athalons as well as allowing the drop in of Alpha CPUs. My question is why no one noticed this earlier? The announcement of it was last week? (I think, maybe longer) As to those of you who feel behind the times because you have only a 500mhz Athalon and they're up to 800mhz now. My heart bleeds. No.. not for you.. it just bleeds. (nearly all 500mhz Athalons will reach at LEAST 700mhz overclocked. Most will reach 750-800+mhz) If yer gonna throw it out... I'll take it.
I've been searching the web for a few days on overclocking Athalons....
.18 microns? .18 micron chip?
I'm unimpressed with what I've found.
Is it just ridiculously simple and that's the reason that I can't find anything?
I've found sites that sell the clocking cards...
I've found sites that mention results from overclocking.
I've 'Heard' about people's success at overclocking Athalons...
and yet I cannot find anything concrete like there is
with say... the celeron phenomenon.. *shrug*
I'm buying a 500mhz athalon and a Gigabyte board...
I want to know if there are any linux issues with the gigabyte board.... Anyone?
What are some success stories of overclocking with cache at full speed?
What lot was your chip from? Was it
Has anyone bought an Athalon lately and NOT gotten
a
How can you tell the difference?
Normally I wouldn't have to ask these questions as I can find the answers myself...
Yet I've not been able to. (and I can find things
on the internet very well... I'll find something in 5 minutes that you've been searching a week for.)
If ANYONE has any answers... drop me an e-mail.. I'd be curious.
(submitted THIS to ask slashdot as well... *shrug*
No response yet on this one either.)
I agree about Gateway being junk. I bought a computer/monitor from them in 1996. The monitor, power supply, and sound card have gone out. The modem was a (slightly) modified sportster 33.6. The unmodified version could be flashed up to 56k, but NOT the Gateway. The Intel Venus motherboard won't take a bios flash unless it's Gateway's version. Of course they aren't too worried about what they don't sell any more. :( Did I say that the power supply was THE loudest I've *ever* heard?
Don't drives already copy from one to another without the intervention of the CPU? Isn't this the very definition of DMA? Or am I just confused?
The question is: should I buy a 733MHz system with IDE, or a 400MHz system with SCSI? Note that I don't follow prices a lot, so you may have to fudge those numbers to get equivalent prices. Anyway, most consumers seem to be choosing the 733MHz system, but I can't figure out why.
Encoding mp3's is very processor-intensive. So is editing sound files. I once selected an entire 4-minute song in Cool Edit Pro and started glitch removal on it. It gave me an estimated time of 5 hours! I let it run for a little while to see if the time estimate would go down and too see how much it was accessing the hard drive. The time estimate didn't go down and it was only infrequently accessing the hard drive, so most of the work was processor intensive. The speed of your processor also matters when you try to do real-time monitoring of noise reduction software. The speed of your CPU determines how many effects you can run at once and preview in real time.
Intel inside? Intel outside looking in ! AMD in my box...Brothers box ... yours too? Watch out Intel !
Most of you garden persons dont give a crap about where it comes from. As long as it works and cost less there happy so what the @$%^ are you talking about?
Ahem ... What you thought of is not really feasible ... Let me explain a bit ... First off .. its really complex .. there is no such thing as a static rating of CPU speed .. Mhz or number of pipelines in a processor only say something about the maximum capability of a processor ... For such a formula as you propose you would have two choices: looking at the microarchitecture and judge what the processor might be capable of (check out http://www.arstechnica.com/cpu/index.html for example or (a bit older) http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read.php?articl e_id=62 ). The drawbacks are that you a) can only make educated guesses b) arent very exact c) dont know whether this is true in real applications. So the second thing you can do is running real applications ... and because a processor runs BenchMarkSuiteXY very fast that does not mean that YOUR favourite application runs fast ... so the only way to know what to expect from a processor in a certain discipline is to run benchmarks on it that are identical or similar to the programs that you are interested in ... Thats why there are 3D-games benchmarks (eg Quake3) and Business Application Benchmarks (BApCo) and Scientific Benchmarks (SPEC). And different benchmarks yield different results for the question which system is better ...
Doesn't anybody else know that the L2 timing on the Athlon is slower since they went to 750Mhz? Intel did the design change for full speed cache for coppermine, while AMD rushed out 750/800 just because Intel put out it's chips ahead of schedule. I'd respect them more if they quit the MHz race and waited for their full-speed cache design.
You would have to take into consideration (in no specific order): Branch prediction (which depends on previously taken branches), Fetch and decode bandwidth (+L1-I-Cache-hits/misses), Different memory access patterns of software that result in different cache hit/miss ratios, the capability of the OoO-Scheduler , the number of Ops that can be dispatched to the Functional Units, the latency and throughput of Ops (THIS ONE comes closest to your "magical number" describing CPU-speed) the number of outstanding transactions on the busses, Cache and Ram latency (though that might be covered by Out-of Order scheduling), Pipeline stalls that occur because of mispredicted branches or cache misses, Concurrent accesses to RAM from different devices (CPU(s), Graphics, Other Busmaster on your PCI bus), Interrupts etc etc etc ... and most of these things mostly depend on your software (e.g. the memory access patterns define how good your CPU is at caching the needed data which in turn defines the average instructions per clockcycle FOR THIS SPECIFIC SOFTWARE ON THIS SPECIFIC CPU)
the things i just mentioned all influence the speed at which your software works
There simply is no such thing as a universal quantifying number for a specific system because every program behaves differently
How does this get a score of one? Are the moderators on crack?
--ac
It depends on your application. If all you want to do is invert matrices all day then you could probably make do with a hercules monochrome graphics card. If you just want to play games than why are you bothering with a pc? Get a dreamcast! Before I upgrade I always do some type of study to learn which upgrade will make the most amount of difference.
Please excuse me if my math is wrong. :D
People are using 500MHz CPUs with 60ns RAM now-a-days (for example). The x86 can grab RAM in theoretically 1 cycle, but with 60ns RAM, that would add on a theoretical maximum of 30 wait states??!
Of course this is why (a) we have cache; (b) we have pipelines; and (c) so much effort is put into designing compilers. However, caches seem to be getting bigger and bigger, so obviously super-fast RAM is getting cheaper. I don't know the latency of the various caches used today, but I'm guessing they must give a 500MHz CPU RAM with only a couple wait states if that.
So my question is, would it be possible or benificial to have a smaller amount of fast system RAM (say 32MB of 10 or 20ns) versus a large amount of slow ram (say 128MB of 60ns or greater)? What is the pricing scale like in the world of RAM? This is something I don't hear much about. There are caches on chips that are 2MB or even bigger?! Since I don't follow the software upgrade cycle, in about 10 years time will I be able to fit my entire system RAM into cache?
Well I'll draw a North American football analogy if I might. While it's nice to get those 80-yard touchdown passes, a 10-play touchdown drive is usually more effective. They get you the same amount of points, but with the drive, you tire out their defence, gride away at their morale, and you can really set the tone for the game, saying "I'm in control". You just don't get that with a 1-play long bomb.
I think there's something at least a little bit similar in business. If AMD releases the 1GHz chip, then you say "OK, now what?". By releasing regularly, methodolically, and always just barely one-upping Intel, they can help show that they're the ones in control of the market, and keep it going for a long time.
nice attempt at posting "informative" info to disguise blatant first post.
Your post has no substance whatsoever.
800Mhz, ever closer to the dreamy 1GHZ chip... How long?
Maxtor has a horrible repuation; the reason their recent drives are better is because most of them are OEM drives from IBM.
Rich
Kryotech changes the clock multipliers, they don't overclock the bus. If you overclock the bus, the cache chips will fail.
Yes, AMD has been producing .18 micron athlons at least since the beginning of December, and probably earlier. Some overclockers got the .25 micron parts to 750mhz, and the .18u parts will easily go above 800. The only reason they've been delayed is because of problems with the L2 cache at high speeds. AMD actually had to slow down the cache on the 750 (compared to the 700) to make it work, so the Athlon 750 & 800 aren't really much bang for the buck.
When I read PC magazines (which was about 6 or 7 years ago), I remember Gateway fitting their boxes into their add campaigns. Besides looking keen, I heard that they were well made, and some people were even able to make simple play houses for their children out of them. Does Gateway still give you these cow-spotted boxes? Anyone who's got a Gateway care to comment on them?
Compaq is *not* using Firewire *instead* of USB, they are continuing to use Firewire in *addition* to USB. Look at the specs of the already available Presario 5900s (athlon) and 5700s (PIII) and you'll see that they already have both Firewire (ieee 1394) and USB. The 7xxx series just continues to have both. I emailed the author of the article at The Register and he said that he did not mean to say that Firewire was replacing USB completely or that Firewire was not already available in Compaq Presarios.
Trust me. Keep the Voodoo3
Good to know that at least there is now a commercially viable alternative to my dumb ass in the troll market
"the difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad" -Salvadore Dali
Actually, so are western digitals (or is it vice versa and IBM's are WD OEMs...something like that) btw the reason for the recent 6gig drive problems...they had to recall ALOT of 6 gig hard disks...I work as a computer technician and I only gave my customers something other than WD during that recall...i was forced to give them maxtors but I don't own the place and therefore don't always choose the parts... I've got 3 WD drives in my box right now; an 80meg, an 850 meg, and a 6.4 gig (which i bought last year and didnt have to worry to much about recalls ;-). That 80 meg has been in use since 1990....it's still going strong. Maxtor's on the other hand, rate right up there with JTS's, IMHO. If I had to pick something other than IBM or WD it's be Seagate. I will hand it to Maxtor their latest ones have seen many problems.
Wouldn't it help their cause more to release a slamdunk over Intel that Intel couldn't match, just to steal some market share?
No. Intel's "mainstream" status means it could simply follow, say, an AMD announcement of available 900MHz chips with a MarketFUD announcement of 1GHz chips Real Soon Now. By waiting for Intel to trumpet a vaporchip (UnobTainium, anyone? :) and then announcing a faster real chip, they gain credibility twice.
All I can say is Debian potato has worked fine so far on my K7M. Now if someone could tell me how to make the onboard sound work in Linux (my best guess so far is to use ALSA), I'd be real happy.
I went an AMD! 800 MHz is cool!
a real zero.
AMD will never be as successful as Intel (not within this lifetime, anyway), for the simple reason that people generally have a vague distrust of anything that doesn't dominate the market (Microsoft being a notable exception).
First thing i want to say : What the limiting factor is depends very much on your application ....
.. but a server-class-bus would be just too expensive for home users). The only thing that can sarurate a PCI-Bus in a desktop-computer is the graphics card (that is why AGP was created) ... but even those do not hit the limit too often ... ... if BUS bandwidth were the problem we would see tremendous differences...
.. memory is really slow compared to the CPU ... but OTOH its just more cost/performance efficient to make use of the spatial locality found in practically ALL programs by integrating fast caches on/near the CPU so a faster memory subsystem would really be nice but an about equal-performing system with slower RAM but more caches for less $$$ is preferable ... ... your solution is only appropriate (sp?) when the cost of really fast RAM comes down considerably (just look up some Rambus prices to know what i mean .. and Rambus is ONLY good at bandwidth but has high latency) ... maybe you are thinking of integrated DRAM
.. why integrate a seperate CPU on every device that sits idly most of the time (how often a day do you print, access HDs etc?) when the main CPU has some spare cycles left ... its sometimes better to spend the money on MHz on the main-processor that can do other things when not currently controlling peripherals than spending the money on more intelligent peripherals (yes this is more-or-less the old SCSI vs IDE debate .. agreed SCSI has the more intelligent devices .. but IDE wins in the price/performance area BIG TIME). ... because of the 3D-craze the back-end part of the 3D-rendering pipeline was completely "outsourced" to a specialized chip on the graphics card ... when HD-performance is the bottleneck you still can buy SCSI or RAID-controller or whatever ... Sound is processed by DSPs on soundcards and not by the main processor (except you have those Audio-Modem-Riser-cards (AMR) .. death on them)
.. noone stops you from buying that 10000$-puppy that will run Quake3 (not that i am assuming you want to play it) slower than my K6-2 400
About the (PCI-)Bus: Its not too slow (except you are talking about big fileservers that do nothing else than fetching large chunks of data from their RAID-subsystems and push it out over the network
e.g. a PCI Voodoo3 does not so bad compared to their AGP brethren (with double the bandwidth) and the difference between AGP2x and AGP4x is somewhere near 1%
About the memory: Yes i agree
This argument also puts down completely your 4th paragraph
Next Topic: Speed of devices: Again its a "higher cost or higher performance" - design decision
On the other hand we have "intelligent" devices where there is a need for it
Final word: you probably want a computer that has
64-bit PCI busses + 256 MB Rambus memory (you wanted faster memory no?) + RAID or network attached storage + a LAN attached printer
You can have those
FWIW--I believe that Gateway uses fairly commonly available motherboards (used to be Intel for the socket sevens, probably the same now for the slot 1's). Also, IIRC one of those MS/Intel/Compaq PC specs (eg PC97) set up a port color-coding standard, so many of the mobo manufacturers are now adhering to them. A cool thing indeed, says I.
What you're saying is bogus. OK, I do agree with your first point that most (office and internet) apps aren't CPU-bound. However, you never mentioned price. How much do you want to pay for a computer? Is it worth spending an extra $200 for a 10% speed increase in some component that translates into a 2% speed increase in your application? Most consumers say no.
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My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
****Gfx Scrollbar Special case hit!!*****
I might be looking at purhchasing an Athlon system or two, but before I do so I'd like to find some benchmarks of them running common Linux/Unix tasks, not benchmarks from a gamer's standpoint. Does anyone know of a site has Athlon kernel compile times/raytracing times/etc, or can anyone provide benchmarks based upon their own personal experiences?
I'm somewhat predisposed to buying an Athlon over a P3, but it'd be nice to have some more evidence to support this decision.
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keep acting shocked and move slowly towards the cake.
I've got a Cyrix 150MHz CPU (not even MMX), 64Mb of RAM and 2x 10,000 RPM SCSI disks.
If I ever find I'm hitting my system really hard (I'm not)
1: First thing I'll upgrade is the disks, not the CPU; I'll go for fibre channel disks if I can find them.
2: Second, I'll upgrade the RAM , not the CPU so I have plenty of cache and no swapping.
3: Then the bus architecture (new motherboard will probable force a CPU upgrade).
4: Next my video card.
5: Last of all, I'll upgrade the CPU.
Deleted
Why is 128MB of ram really needed? I can run X, quake2, and be compiling all at once and my system is still perfectly usable even with 64MB of ram. As far as hard drives, I'm getting by just fine with my (IDE)5 gig drive...what am I going to do with the (albeit faster) 20 and 30 gig drives available today? If I had dsl or cable, I might use the space to mirror ftp sites, but I don't have the high speed luxury. Oh, and my viper 330, with it's staggering 4MB of ram, plays quake satisfactorily. Anyway, I seem to have forgotten my original point, so I'm going to take this opportunity to shut up now...
Save the children; quit overparenting!
I wouldn't say a lifetime, but the market is so big that even with Fab 30 AMD can only supply somwhere between 30 and 40% of the PC market. So, it will be quite a while before AMD "beats" Intel, requiring adding 1 or 2 more Fabs. the important thing is that they remain a viable and profitable competitor with the 20-30% marketshare capability as a threat to Intel.
Dastardly
Firewire is not an alternative to USB. Firewire is for high-speed devices like hard drives and video cameras. USB is for low-speed devices like keyboards, mouses, and joysticks.
There are USB hard drives, but they exist only because (1) they could, and (2) old iMacs don't have any external busses more appropriate for hard disks (this is very reminiscent of the hard drives that connected to the first macs thru the serial port or thru the floppy port. "Yep, i'm a 20M floppy! Really!"). USB sucks for hard drives, because it's so slow.
Sure, an Athlon system will cost more than a Celeron - but what about a K6 based system? Then you're looking at similar performance and a lower price (mainly because of the cheaper mobos).
"Alpha isn't faster for integer performance"
F /...
From spec.org:
AlphaServer ES40 Model 6/667 --- 413 (base CINT2000)
Dell Precision Wkst 420 --- 336 (base CINT2000)
Thats a PIII 733mhz vs a 667mhz 21264A Integer based performance. The alpha is roughly double on FPU. And uh I hate to tell you but 3rd party VAR alpha systems aren't so much anymore. You can get a pretty decent box for 3.5-4k. Please check your facts before posting again.
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Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
That may be the bottleneck for particular applications, but it sure isn't a problem for a typical workstation user (workstation as in development system, not high-end graphics stuff where the bus is very important).
A third bottleneck is in the speed of devices. These are ALL controlled by the main processor, even today. =COMMODORE= were doing better than that, in the 70's!
You can buy intelligent network storage devices today. Putting memory and processors (I assume that you mean those to be user-programmable, because harddisks already contain memory and processors) in harddisks would just increase the complexity and price of the system. Modern OSes and chipsets can copy from one device to another pretty well (DMA transfers etc.), spending most of the time in code that has a good reason to be executed (file system overhead - you *do* want a choice, don't you?). As for printers, you can also buy some with ethernet interface. Just consider the network the modern replacement for the serial connections of the C64 ...
IMHO, the biggest problem today by far is the software - it's so amazingly bad in quality that anyone who has used computers 10-15 years ago must be getting nervous fits daily while watching the crashing, freezing, buggy, inconsistant and badly designed applications and OSes waste his/her time. I don't care whether a CPU runs at 800 MHz or 333 MHz, as long as the OS and applications I'm using run fine on it, and that is measured by the time I am forced to wait unproductively, and not using benchmarks (which explains why software is such a big problem).
I sure would like to blame the demise of software quality on one single reason, like the prevalence of the C language or the fact that Microsoft managed to train people to accept bad quality because compatibility with the rest of the monopolized market was more important, but it isn't that simple. It's obvious though that people don't hesitate to release crappy software as much as they used to, so ... kudos to everyone who still pays attention to quality!
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I can't agree with this - software designed for morons would normally be easy to use and tolerant towards users' mistakes ("idiot-proof"), but it is exactly the opposite of that, i.e. extremely sensitive to wrong input, misinterpretation of options and so on. Then again, if you argue that programmers are so incompetent that they fail to make software safe for idiots, you've got a point...
The idea that programmers have just stopped paying attention to quality because other issues have become more important (showing-off features rather than making sure that there are no ugly surprises for the user after a few minutes of use), appeals much more to me, though.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Guess that's why I have an ASUS K7M and an Athlon 650 on the way.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
I have half a suspicion that all these people making all these remarks about faster not being better are secretly peaved that AMD is beating the pants off of Intel. :-)
An Athlon is about 10% faster than a Pentium III of equivalent speed, and they will both benefit from motherboard and bus technology improvements. I'm very pleased about this. Competition is good.
As far as desktop apps are concerned, this isn't a big deal, especially for Linux. But for games, or heavy development like compiling large source trees, it's very nice. Even with all the speed bottlenecks in a system, a faster CPU does make a difference.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I'll back you up. My 'new' P2-450/Ultra2SCSI/MatroxG400 doesn't feel 4 times faster than my old P133/WideSCSI2/Mystique220. Except for bootup time, normal GUI apps seem about the same speed (maybe Netscape launches twice as fast, but it's still perceptable at a point when the genius designers of Netscape 4.x said it wouldn't be.) The only real differences is Quake or processor heavy jobs.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Don't forget both the PIII and K7 are desktop chips, and the market for the top processor speed desktop is pretty thin and consists of people that are willing to pay somewhat of a premium to get what they percieve as the best possible. Considering the meager performance difference between 733 and 800 Mhz, many people are shelling out big bucks for what is essentially a status symbol. (Most corporations intentionally buy 6 mo old chips, like 600Mhz, or steer clear entirely and buy Celerons)
Since this high end market isn't going anywhere, and you can only charge so much for a desktop chip, AMD might as well keep the revenue coming in by just staying 1-2 steps ahead of Intel.
Now, if AMD had a 1Ghz big cache server CPU, they would best served by getting it to market as fast as possible and stomping on the Xeon with undeniable numbers.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Well, sorry about that misinformation - blame The Register.
I didn't look at Compaq's homepage, because I don't like their desktops PC's, but they are a major player anyway.
Besides, just the fact that they are supporting Firewire, is a good sign IHMO.
I can't see why it shouldn't be used for keybords and the likes too?
Just because it is fast, it should also be possible to use it for slower devices.
It would IMHO be nice to have one *very fast* bus for all your devices, so you all you devices can be connected in the same way. It would be much more convinient.
Of course the fast devices should not be slowed down by the slower devices...
Isn't that what USB 2.0 is supposed to do?
Seems to be a lot of discussion going on about intel vs AMD.
It'll be quite interesting to see what Transmeta has in store for us. Of course Transmeta will only affect the mobile CPU market, at least for starters.
Ps. Have you guys noticed the similarity of the debian/transmeta/intel inside logos?
I don't consider myself a power user... but the appeal of two cpus helping my cause is too tempting. With prices of lower end Athlons at an attainable level, I can see myself very happy with a dual athlon system. As jabber stated, motherboards are what's holding athlon's momentum from booming... but again I really wish there was a dual board out sooner rather than later (Tyan?? Asus?? are you guys listening?).
Anyone who tells you different is living in denial.
I think that the main reason that Gateway created a garbage K6-2 system was the fact that it in the eyes of GW's marketing department, they had found a great alternative to a low cost system. That is utter crap. I work for GW so I was as pissed off as the next guy. The worst part is that I'd say 90 percent of GW's sales force had no idea just how bad the Select systems really were. (Select = AMD systems from GW). I did my best to let every customer know what they were getting themselves into. Then again can you name one mainstream company that has use an K6-2 system to its fullest potenial. I sure as hell can't. It had gotten so bad, that right before the Select systems died, you were not able to make any configuration changes to the system besides adding RAM or changing the hard drive size. None of the other components would function well with the system. We have been told that we are going to be stocking the Athlons for the past month. I don't know when and if it will actually happen. Who knows/ All that I do know is that the Athlon is in too high of a price point to sell cheaply. At least I'm hoping that the don't sell it cheaply. I guess that we will find out soon enough.
Technology's a battle between companies producing more idiot-proof systems and nature producing bigger and better idiots
I could write everything in tight x86 assembly code, but it would be a waste of time and money. For most programs, the total cost is minimized by writing the program in a high level language like Visual Basic or Delphi. The customer wants a user friendly program with a GUI. CPU cycles and RAM are cheap. Programming labor is expensive. We are expected to write more complex programs with tighter schedules and smaller budgets.
The technology is also a problem. How do I keep up with the latest stuff from Redmond? I don't have the time to learn all of the fine details of the Win32 API, OLE, COM, ODBC and all the other buzzwords. The rate of new technology increases every year.
>>It really is getting to be a bit rediculus IMHO.
Rediculous only in the fact that they're looking to convince Joe User that he needs 800MHz to use email, surf the web, and balance a checkbook.
Gamers obviously benefit, but also consider folks like myself.
One of my hobbies happens to be 3D graphics and quite frankly, I'm tired of waiting 6-12 hours for a single high quality image to render on my old workhorse (and let's not talk about animations.) Every MHz jump means worlds to me as it relates directly with FP performance and thus render time.
So it's not just the Quake lovers that'll benefit, but anyone creating art, anyone into signal processing (I'm sure they're out there), anyone into simulations, anyone doing architectural design, etc.
Granted, we're probably in the minority, but there are those of us out there that use our home PCs for compute intensive tasks and we don't want to spend $20k for a computer that can deliver performance.
My 3.14159 cents,
Galen
I am sooo looking forward to putting mine together (K7-600). I'm just waiting on some memory chips I have on order and then the thing gets put together , the OS installed, and my old machine (PII-266) gets switched to its new roll as a commited Linux development machine).
BTW. Check out http://www.ubid.com
sometimes they have decent prices on items, sometimes the bid goes higher then you can pick it up for locally, do your research first, their Recommended price is usually too high.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
I really agonized over one myself.
:)
I've got a K7-600 and plan to put Win98 SE on it
(for the record Linux will outnumber it by 2:1 in my house, once my old win95 machine becomes my new Linux development box).
I like Asus and wanted to buy the K7M (it seems to be a decent board according to all the reviews I've seen). Then I took a step back and realized that one of the main reasons I was buying an AMD chip was because they
1) make a better chip and
2) to support them.
Asus isn't even listing their A-slot board on their US website (or hadn't been last time I checked).
I decided on that basis to go with the FIC board (FIC SD-11) since it lagged only slightly compaired to the Asus board in some reviews I saw.
I haven't had a chance to put the system together yet (I'm still waiting to pick up the case and some memory) so I can't tell you how its working, but I've heard good things from other people.
Additionally, I have heard that if you pick up an Athlon Mobo you should check about Bios updates when you set the thing up as apparently most of them had a few quirks they needed to work out (another reason I decided to go with a Mobo manufacturer who wasn't hiding the specs. page away somewhere).
BTW. Since we've always refered to Windows/Intel machine as 'Wintel' machines does that make a Windows/AMD machine a 'WAMD' machine?
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Just set your sites on how much your willing to pay and judge accordingly.
:)
:)
Figure out what you would be willing to pay and then wait about 3-6 months. Chances are the processor you want will be within your price range. Traditionally I've always advocated buying about 2-3 revisions below the current 'top' (I picked up a K7-600 2 weeks ago). This usually gives you a decent bang for your buck, and with the money you save you can usually upgrade to that really nice high-end (now) 800 in a year or two, for a much more reasonable price
Of course by that time the high end processors will be 3ghz but thats a different issue
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
seems that Intel has successfully sold you to RDRAM. Forget it. It has higher latency than SDRAM.
And DDR SDRAM gives more bandwidth than single channel RDRAM anyways. Without increasing latency (instead decreasing it at 133 MHZ).
And you dont want dual channel RDRAM with an 840 mobo (except if you always want to buy TWO RDRAMs for upgrades...).
Sure, DDR isnt available. But considering the price RDRAM isnt really available, too.
And besides that: PC100 SDRAM usually isnt the performance bottleneck. The point is that you dont NEED anything above a P200 except for 3D games...
Alpha isnt faster for integer performance. And this is what counts, even for Q3.
Simply accept it: The fastest Alpha is usually slower than the fastest x86 for most applications (and much more expensive too). Also GCC most likely still delivers pretty slow Alpha binaries.
PCI is adequate for anything except video. We have AGP for this.
Or does your HD deliver more than 100MB/s, and you desperately need gigabit ethernet, too? At the same time?
Memory: Ever wondered why the transition from PC100 to PC133 doesnt give any significant performance advantage? Any why Celery with PC66 is pretty fast regardless?
Commodore? The C64 CPU controlled its devices much more directly than PCs today. No DMA, no nothing. 100% cpu usage for anything IO. Be it disk, tape, or printer port.
Disk drives loaded with basic OS and printer drivers? Hu?
>The inability of Alpha NT to run Intel NT binaries, and the non-existence of Alpha Win98, probably has much more to do with Intel's continuing dominance than anything else.
Alpha is not really faster except for scientific simulations and similar.
And its unreasonably expensive.
AMD cannot compete against Intel with budget CPUs only. They tried and lost. Since Intel financed their low end line with their high end monopoly.
The high end is where the profit is.
And a budget Athlon is underway anyways.
ram size: yes, the more the better. Up to 128-256MB, depending on the application.
faster hard drive: 22MB/sec and 9ms seek time are enough for me. EIDE. DMA. CPU usage is low. You may need to fiddle with hdparm however...
graphics card: To be honest: For 3D you better run Windows 98. For anything else a low end 8MB card is really fast enough.
Hm... I remember they had a parallel cable. Pretty fast.
Anyway, the 1541 was intelligent, too, but any data transfer still sucked up 100% CPU. On the other hand, these were no multitasking machines.
And, admitted: the PC disk controller is extremely dumb, you cannot connect more than two drives, it doesnt know about disk zones (and therefore wastes capacity), and you cannot calculate mandelbrots with it...
daisy chaining: sure.
disk drives with own OS: interesting idea. But with some decent SCSI raid controller you basically have that. Of course at a decent price.
But disk drives with an integrated filesystem and some high speed protocol would be nice...
disk drives with printer drivers: OK, that makes some sense. But far too much hassle with the chaotic PC architecture.
hm... ok, if you tested it yourself, you have more first hand facts than I have. Still, going back to the original point, PC100 memory doesnt seem to be a significant bottleneck. Right now.
CPUMark, FPUMark: Yes, more or less useless.
PMMX: These are not bad, I run an SQL db on one of them...
And for the firewall: I use a 486 doorstopper...
A single P3-700 is most likely faster than any Alpha you can get for 4k.
The $1000-question is:
How much Alpha MHZ can you get for $4k (as a complete system)?
costs for a Dual P3-700:
p3-700: $800, x 2 = $1600
128mb: $300
board: $300
scsi hd+controller: $700
other stuff: $600
====
$3500
Re: SCSI subsystem...
Anyone out there working on a SCSI floppy disk? IE, something that doesn't totally hork windows when you try to read from it? For that matter, does the same thing happen with SCSI CD-ROMs? I know windows gets the interrupt that a new CD-ROM has been inserted, and it completely paralyzed until it figures out (based on autoinsertion) whether or not to run anything.
I've always thought floppy drives and CD-ROM drives could be done much much better in terms of how they interact with the PC.
"Though it may take a thousand years, we shall be FREE."
Of course, the alphas ran at much higher clockspeeds, but it was quite efficient . . .
Umm, They've had 800Mhz parts sitting in warehouses since NOVEMBER.
where have you been?
And yes, they've been waiting for Intel to make a move. What do you think Intel did when they totally controlled the market? They waited for a competitor to release something comparable to their current high-end stuff (or make an announcment of somethign comparable, or better), and then they would release, in volume, the next highest grade. One step ahead, or at par, all the way.
And, IMHO, AMD could drop 1Ghz on us right now, but they aren't because they're making a killing competing with Intel the way Intel competed with them for a decade.
AMD just opened a huge new state-of-the-art fab in Dresden, Germany, so I don't think they're going to be having any supply problems in the near future. In fact the Dresden fab is so big that there was talk a little while ago about Motorola also using it to make G4's. Don't know what came of that though....
I agree with you. The mhz-race is only amusing. :-) It is not the speed of the systems that matters, it is what you do with it. I still have on my network a sun 3/80 20mhz, 12mb ram workstation, doing neat stuff. As a matter of fact, I think the mhz race is setting us back. What happens when cpu speed gets faster and ram gets cheaper? people write very horrible code, which uses 10x more ram that it should, and runs 20x slower than it should. It is very very sad, but we are actually walking back instead of forward with these. Has anyone ever seen a 3D engine running at full speed on a 386? I have, I am not talking wireframe, I am talking about shaded, and textured. If the cpu race was very slow, and we still were stuck on P100. Are you telling me, we will be behind? no way, we will be ahead, cuz when people realize that no faster cpu is coming soon, they start thinking of clever ways to do things, new better and improved algorithms are designed. Good programming pratice and what not is adopted. Ah well, tis sad,tis sad.
I know all these people buying the latest processors, upgrading every 3 months. They now have a whatever500mhz system, with 512 mb. So what?
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
nope..we had a bunch of the oem boards a while back with no problems. compaq generally sells shitty hardware see www.compaqsucks.com and buy gateway (which sells amd for a long time now)...or buy oem boards. did you check the memory ? it could be a memory problem..the cpu is generally the last component to fail and the memory the first.
I remember when I first got this machine (Celery 366 w/128, IDE disks, Matrox Millenium, NT4). Two things really bothered me: the disk was always clacking and my mp3s skipped.
The mp3s skipped when I scrolled. I was told that this was because the bitblts on the PCI bus starved the isa bus and Nothing Could Be Done.
My disks were always clacking. When I Alt-tabbed from Dev Studio to Acrobat I would often have to wait 500ms or even a second for the screen to redraw. Gee, I guess 128 megs wasn't enough.
I finally got pissed off and, in a fit of rage, installed linux. My mp3s no longer skip and my disks are silent. Why? Is it because vi uses less mem than dev studio (yes)? Is it because xmms is smarted than winamp (doubt it)?
I suspect that linux has better DMA handling and smarter caching. Yes, I actually switched OS because I felt my disk was swapping too much.
Ryan
No, it was the CPU. I work at a warranty auth. place and I replaced the mainboard and memory first for the reasons you stated. It was the CPU no doubt about it. Once I replaced it it booted up again.
The problems that were occuring (later on) were happening during post. Before that (when it would still pass POST) the errors were occuring sporadically even in DOS. Like MCafee loading the DOS 4gw protected mode would bomb out with a stack dump. It wasn't even getting to windows then. Again, no doubt it was the CPU. Twice.
Anybody else had problems with these failing? In my experience it's very unusual to have a CPU fail, but just this week we have had two new Compaq's come in with bad AMD CPU's. They were both 350's. They started with various memory errors and faults, then eventually wouldn't boot any more.
Hmmmm.... embedded OS's all throughout your computer system (hard drives, floppies, printers, monitors) all individually upgradeable. Sounds very cool.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
The alternative is VCSDRAM. Virtual Channel SDRAM has some more onboard cache and can have more than one concurrent transfer at a time (like RDRAM) plus it has a MUCH lower latency due to the SDRAM design plus the extra chache. If you think that a 50% increase in memory bandwith plus an increase in latency (RDRAM is 16 bits X 800 MHz = 1.6 GB/sec, VCSDRAM is 64 bits X 133 =1064 GB/sec) is better than a 60% (500 to 800) increase in CPU power is probably not using some very weird programs. (Or a database/file server) And Toms HW has shown that even Quake only has a memory bandwith requirement of 100MB/sec, far less than even FPM DRAM but really needs the low latency. Finally, the only reason you need the extra power is for 3D or running a server. The only case I can think of where higher memory bandwith would be better is the database/file server example. (Or serving up 1 million static web pages per second using NT:) Say if you were running a CGI server, CPU speed would be more important. Finally, MaximumPC did tests on RDRAM vs. VCSDRAM, and in real world apps (Premiere, Inspire, games, etc.) they were more or less tied. The only place RDRAM was better was synthetic benchmarks like bootmark or Winbench.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
As I recall PC66 RAM is like 12 or 10 ns, and PC100 goes down to like 8 or 9 and PC133 goes all the way to 7ns.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
AMD is in the business of making CPUs. That's right, business. In order to survive, they need to focus on the high-end chips, because that's where all the money is. They probably make 20 times the profit on a single 750 chip than on a 350 K6-2.
I'm in the same boat as you, and can't afford the high prices they want for Athlons right now, but I still rejoice with each new release. Why? Because it means the prices will soon be dropping for the somewhat slower chips, to the affordable range.
And before you say Intel has a better "attitude" towards the consumer market than AMD, why do think that such a thing as Celeron exists?!? If it wasn't for AMD, Celeron probably wouldn't a word in your vocabulary. Think about it.
Don't count on it.
You seem to have forgotten the one thing that Intel (and Microsoft) are better at than anyone. Marketing. Sure, you and I know that AMD gives you more bang for the buck than Intel, problem is, the average consumer doesn't.
Most people I know have never even heard of AMD, but most of them know about Intel from their marketing blitzes. Sad but true.
Y'know, I used to think that building your own was definitely the way to go. After opening up a PII 400 Cow the other day to replace it's NIC, I was quite impressed by the amount of planning that had gone into it's construction:
1. thumbscrews on the case. I know, more and more companies are doing this, but it still isn't as prevalent as I'd like to see.
2. a snap-off cowl over the fan, focusing airflow over a PII heatsink that was larger than stock.
3. the motherboard used seemed to have the perfect location for every connection: IDE cables didn't hide the memory slots, and everything seemed extreemly easy to access.
4. ports on the back were color-coded, for the technologically impaired. My sister, a "nail technician", could have set this thing up.
That "Cow" forced me to look at my "Frankenstein" in a whole new light. They seem to be covering all the bases: they made it easy enough for an idiot to use, and a snap for anyone with the gumption to crack the thing open and go to town.
Now if it only came with a linux distro pre-installed...
> I just upgraded to an Athlon 500 from an old P200MMX.
And me from an Pro200 to Dual Celerons 550.
2 - C366 $35/each
2- Heatsink/fan $30/each
Abit BP6 $130
I overclocked the C366 and they have been rock solid at 550.
> Did I notice that much speed difference? Only in graphic intensive 3d games.
Windows NT was MUCH more snappier. And since I'm a game developer, compiles are drastically shorter.
I loaded up Prim95 on each CPU (Task Manager > Affinity) for 100% cpu usage. I then started up Unreal and it was smooth as glass.
Of course 128 Megs helps since I usually have 4 or 5 apps running at once.
Cheers
> I don't understand why people would be buyin Intel chips ...
1) The quality of the Athlon MBs havn't been that great until just recently.
2) Scared off because Athlons require cleaner power.
3) Overclocked Dual Celerons 366 running at 550 for $35 each is pretty hard to beat !
Cheers
> We need intelligent devices!
Instead of 2 ide drives on the same channel with your bandwidth going out the window, use SCSI my friend. It is an intelligently designed IO system. SCSI hard drives and CD Roms will barely use the cpu.
Problem is, people don't want to pay more for a better thing, when something cheap is "good enough" for the home user. i.e. ide
Cheers
> Also, I'm not sure that NT or Win98 are really flexible enough to accept a plug-in replacement for the standard filesystem drivers, in which case there isn't much motivation for anyone to create such a product.
;-)
They are. The Microsoft Joilet CD File System is a perfect example.
Virtual CD is another example of a virtual drive (and filesystem.)
Creating a plug-in file system is not trivial but it can be done. Snag the NT DDK docs is you want the gory details
Cheers
My old gateway P133 still runs fine, however, I've run into major problems with any gateway build after around 1995/96. Friends have also had nightmarish times with any of the newer gateways.
Eric VanAlstine All comments posted are mine alone, not Intel's
Good to know that at least there is now a commercially viable alternative to intel in the x86 market
"the difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad" -Salvadore Dali
The sad thing about AMD, is amd is still regarded
as an enigma in the industry. The major distributors don't sell systems with this processor, because of licensing pressure with intel, and plain ignorance. What will hurt AMD will be if large resellers like dell, gateway, and compaq don't start selling amd in quantity. AMD's reputation will be made by those who do sell them, the smaller companies.. Such as axissystems.com . a west orange thieve's den. I purchased a computer from them in early december, to have it arrive on january 3rd. When I received it, the cd-rom drive had that typical failure problem (you hear it stutter as it moves), keyboard was missing, power supply was flakey. When I tried calling their 24/7 technical support.. nobody answered night or day.. the operator could sometimes get me a human.
An inquiry to the California Attorney General revealed that axissystems was one of a number of computer resellers in the west orange region (why didn't anyone tell me before west orange was called the pirates cove of california?) for such activities. Oh well, after axis found out about my call to the attorney general they were nothing but happy to take my computer back, and bend their refund policy of not refunding shipping.
Companies like this, who are lead customers for amd, will end up giving amd systems a foul stench in the mind of the average consumer.
"And how can this be? For he is the
800 base MHz + (800*33%-clockup for cryo)= 800 + 266.66 = 1066
So unless the article was updated and I didn't catch it, this is not based on the 800MHz, though nothing stops you from taking a preexisting SuperG's 750 out and putting an 800 in...
yes, you are correct. The article is from Nov 15th--way before the 800Mhz Athlon came out.
SMP - until AMD get that sorted out, they're toast in the workstation and server market.
--
Cheers
Cheers
Jon
Actually, the SuperG is only 1000 MHz, and is made from a Athlon 750MHz because:
750 base MHz + (750*33%-clockup for cryo)=
750 + 250 = 1000
whereas
800 base MHz + (800*33%-clockup for cryo)=
800 + 266.66 = 1066
So unless the article was updated and I didn't catch it, this is not based on the 800MHz, though nothing stops you from taking a preexisting SuperG's 750 out and putting an 800 in...
- Sig
I've done the same thing... bought a P-100 for Quake, built a PII-266 for Quake2. Now I'm just waiting for all the parts of my Athlon550 to arrive for Quake3. (also got a 7200rpm drive and some pc133 ram for it too, can't wait)
And this also allows the PII to stay as a linux only box. Oh, life is good.
-JeremyH
As for AMD getting out their 800 (and soon, 850) Athlon, sweet! That just means I can afford an AMD 500 Athlon (which I'll overclock to 800+) sooner!
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
I'll stick with Maxtor, I haven't had any problems with those yet.
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
So what I guess I'm saying is, the hardware is there, no one sees the need to make the software any more efficient in it's use of that hardware, because there will be something better/faster a month down the road.
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
There is kernel support in 2.3 for the onboard sound on the K7M, I believe, although I have not tried it.
meisenst
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
I am running an Athlon 500 on an Asus K7M board with no problems at all.
meisenst
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
Er. Running Linux on it, that is.
s/submit/preview/g
meisenst
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
One reason to buy Intel is because celerons are cheap. 500 Mhz Athlon plus motherboard is at least 350 bucks. In the Mid and High price ranges AMD would be my choice, but Intel still has the best performance for the buck at under $300 for processor + motherboard. When you throw overclocking into the mix, the celerons look even better.
In my head I see a diagram made up of pipes leading from the CPU. The pipes are metaphors for the maximum data throughput.
A CPU, rated by how many FLOPs or how much raw data it can push per second, pumps water into the pipes and hits the front side bus, which is X megahertz and can push X gigs of data per second. The Cache (L1 and L2?) represents pipes through which data flow is restricted to Y gigs per second. Then the RAM is another link in the pipeline, restricting flow to Z gigs of data per second. Then the AGP bus for graphics, then the PCI bus functions, and their respective restrictions.
Now some pipes will be wider than others so they aren't creating restrictions. In fact their potential is being under-utilized. However as I see it the pipes are getting smaller as they branch out - the CPU being the origin and the fattest pipe, the cache being the next fattest, then the FSB, then the RAM, then the AGP bus.
An AC referred to wait states, and I was wondering
A) The cpu speed
B) The Front side bus
C) The L1 & L2 cache speed and size (though I'm sure this would be a fuzzy number at best)
D) The RAM speed and size
in something called a 'core performance' formula?
There could be attendant formulas for hard drive performance WRT the max core performance. You could then go on to calculate video pixel performance on a system, given you know how to plug in the universal quantifier number describing the video card's output and the AGP bus.
I would love to see this formula as it would greatly simplify analyses. You could take that max performance formula and break it back down for an instant analysis of the theoretical maximums and limits of every subsystem. With it you could instantly and accurately pinpoint the weak spots, and then, of course, compare it against benchmarks.
About benchmarks: benchmarks would then simply solve the question "how much of a bottleneck is the OS/drivers with regards to the system's maximum throughput?"
Any thoughts?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Athlon systems sell for less than Intel systems, feature for feature and mhz for mhz, in every place I've seen. $50 to $100 less for an identically equipped machine up to 600mhz. (After that point the 633's vs 650's skew the comparison considerably)
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The gamers are brutally disloyal. They always hunger for the fastest biggest and baddest. They'll switch to an Athlon in a minute if they know the chipset will give them a monstrous speed advantage without an overly outrageous price tag. Which is to say if the coppermine is superior to the athlon by a maximum of 5fps in laboratory conditions, but the system costs $1000 more (an excellent real world analogy for this would be the RDRAM vs DDR SDRAM comparison), they'll go for the Athlon!
The Athlon only needs to stay close, or a breath ahead, of Intel, while keeping its prices down, down, down. The gamers will lead the exodus, and as the
When the dual boards come out, Intel has instantly lost the whole Linux community over the Chip ID issue. Linux people will have an economic and performance motivation for dumping Intel, plus the anti big brother aspect will weigh in.
A suggestion to AMD: advertise your chips with "No Big Brother Inside" ads and hit Intel down below the belt. It'll cause controversy galore, but you're going to score a lopsided public relations victory in the process.
peace!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Jus tpicked up my new Athalon 550 machine last friday. In line with my tradition of getting a new computer with the releases of doom -> quake -> quake2 -> quake3.
:)
And man, I really really love it
Not to mention the lack of any sort of unique serial numbers on my cpu.
They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen
Fish! LipHo
Yeah, I agree. At the moment all I need for my favorite game, Team Fortress Classic, is a K6/2 300, with 64 megs ram and a Cable line. I really don't know what i would do with an Athlon 800, with 256 megs ram, a T3 line and a 72 gig HD. It really is getting to be a bit rediculus IMHO.
First they dis AMD by cutting their product line, then they buy Amiga. Now, They've cut their losses on Amiga and come crawling back to AMD, the company they said wasn't good enough. This is a cow country PR disaster! I also find it funny watching the cash cow Intel, who rested on their laurels, releasing what the wanted when they wanted, scuttle like a frightened chimp. Way to go underdog! -Chris
I can play DVD just as well on my old pentium, hardware decoder card works wonders. I'm not saying that the Athlon didn't make my computer go faster, just that it's not that big a boost without having the rest of the hardware catching up to it. So what if the CPU is a new generation if the motherboard is still using the same stuff as last year?
Look, I'm not saying that Athlon is the same as an old pentium. Yes, it's considerably faster, but when you're at the 800Mhz range, does it matter that much? What's the difference between 800Mhz CPU computer and a 500Mhz CPU that has the same hardware for everything else? You might notice some increase early on but with larger files and calculations, more and faster memory, scsi hard drives, and overall more bandwidth will be better than a faster CPU. Why would anyone pay $300 extra for a 1% boost in performance? Yes, RDRAM is much more expensive than PC100/133, but what alternative do you have? DDRAM, sure, I'll just pick that up next time I go on pricwatch. It might not show that much a performance boost on a PIII, but then the PIII FSB is running at the same speed as the PC100/133 RAM. I'm sure you'll see a larger gain from a system who's FSB is twice the speed of the memory. And since DDRAM isn't out yet, what's the alternative?
This might be a bit off-topic, but I can't see strategy and role-playing game folks jumping to consoles; there are just far more of them for PC, and with more variety too.
For action games, it's fine.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
AMD has traditionally been playing catch-up and follow Intel footstep with a limp, but this Athon is beginning to change all that. Hope they also release a reduced cost model, because I certainly cannot afford the ridiculously high prices new processor is costing these day.
- Etam
Cutting down the compile time so you can do more testing->make changes->re-compile. And if you want to play DVD in Linux, you will need as fast a processor as you can get because the code is not very optimized.
- Etam
Might be a while, I suspect AMD are aiming most of their current R&D at their biggest money-making target market: mainly game players, who these days are usually pretty technically adept, and welcome the best price/performance. Network managers are usually fairly conservative, and probably not likely to buy Athlon's, and thats (in my experience) the biggest market for dual and quad processor machines.
Don't forget that the high end processor market isn't the only one. AMD are definitely on par at the higher end market. But what about the poor beggers (students like me) who can't buy a new Athlon or Coppermine on a whim?. The release of the 533 Mhz Celeron, with more to budget chips to come shows a good attitude to the entire consumer market from Intel. I can't really say the same of AMD, with still no sign of a budget chip I'd consider looking at (i.e. with Level 2 cache). They seem to be concerned a bit too much with winning the speed race...
From my perspective, AMD is giving Intel a very good fight. I work for a small OEM builder in Cary, NC (minutes from Redhat, and Epic if anyone cares ;). Less then 6 months ago, when the choices were limited to the Celeron, P2.350-P3.550, and the K6-2.350-K6-3.450, our sales totaled in at around 10% Celeron, 50% Pentium, and 40% AMD. AMD won the "low-end", and Intel took most of the high-end sales. And the Celeron was limited to people that wanted low end but would only buy Intel, or were planning on overclocking. When word got around of the Athlon chip, sales actually dropped for all chips--everyone was waiting for the Athlon to come out. There was tremendous word of mouth. Some were waiting to purchase it, and others were waiting for benchmarks to come out so they could compare first. When it finally did come out, sales skyrocketed with AMD shooting well in the lead. Our sales now are around 5% Celeron, 30% Pentium, 25% K6-2/3 and 40% Athlon. AMD is well in the lead, and sales are not showing any signs of falling. Well there still are plenty of Intel.Nuts(tm) out there, many of them large business owners that are looking to Intel for stability, there are just as many followers of AMD nowadays.
A small thing to be sure but it's given me a warm glow about AMD
Rich
Have they really had these since November? I wouldn't be surprized if you're right but if you have evidence I'd be interested in seeing it. Even some good juicy rumours would be cool.
You're certainly right about them holding back product to keep profits up. I'm sure they could release some 1Ghz parts now, but the yields wouldn't be great and it would kill the market for lower speed chips (where the yield is decent).
Some have said they should release their fastest stuff right away to grab market share, but that would be costly. Intel (or Microsoft) can to that - and it's not a bad strategy - but when you've been losing money for so long you need to worry about short term profit or your investors will lose confidence.
It seems to me they're playing it just about right. If the demand for Athlons suddenly took off they probably wouldn't be able to supply them. This way the supply is probably in line with the demand, Intel is looking like a poor cousin, and everybody is happy.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Intel announces their faster CPUs during the holidays and AMD announces _availability_ of their 800 MHz CPU in the first week back from holidays.
Is it just me, or does it seem like they had these things sitting in the warehouse waiting for an Intel announcement. I bet if Intel had announced 850 MHz AMD would have matched that too.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
The reason today's software sucks is quite simple.
Programmers are becoming more stupid:
Today a lot of software is written in VisualBasic. 10 years ago - C was dominant. 20 years ago assembly was dominant. When you lower the barriers to entry, you get more stupid participants.
Users are becoming more stupid:
20 years ago a computer user would have to be pretty smart. Now, any old moron uses a computer, so the software is mostly designed for morons
(not necessary, but true).
People are becoming more stupid:
This is more complicated, and only applies to 1st world. It's caused by automation making it possible for people to think less, along with the physical addictiveness of mindless ritual (iso9000 etc) leading to reduced cognitive capacity (or morons, to use the correct scientific term).
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Here's a link that has a good list of Athlon motherboards that have been announced, preannounced, or are available.
Slot A
the more convinced I am that Intel has taken aim at it's foot and is loading a 10 gauge. AMD is in good position to take a big lead. Intel has wonderful parts no one can have, and AMD has good parts you can actually buy. Granted AMD has a problem with the cache speed and all, but at least you can buy em and sell them.
Perhaps my understanding of the problem isn't complete. The Athlon will support MP, and the EV6 will support MP... There's just no chipset for it yet, correct? I wonder why AMD isn't cracking on that. Seems like the Athlon would be a great Intel-killer if they got some MP motherboards out there.
--
A host is a host from coast to coast...
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
The biggest bottleneck is in three parts:
1. RAM size. People today should be running at bare minimum 64 MB, with 128 MB of RAM preferred. Even Linux users who run graphical environments like KDE or Gnome will benefit from 128 MB of RAM.
2. Get a MUCH faster hard drive. While SCSI is the preferable solution, it's still quite expensive to implement, mostly due to the higher cost of SCSI host adapter and UW/UW2-SCSI hard drives. If your operating system can take advantage of the PIIX4E Intel chipset implmentation, you can do bus-mastering on ATA-33/66 IDE hard drives, which lifts a big load off the CPU; in that case, a good 7200 RPM hard drive is a must.
3. Get a faster graphics card. If the new graphics card has drivers supported by the operating system, then you will get faster redraws everywhere (even beyond the 3-D graphics acceleration so much touted nowadays).
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
SCSI drives cost way more than IDE drives. Do you really think it costs that much more to make them? It doesn't.
The drive manufacturers like having IDE around. They could produce SCSI drives at nearly the same price but they don't want to. It's better for them to sell IDE to the masses and have expensive SCSI disks around so they can get more money out of the businesses who need servers.
Put simply, it's not a matter of how much the drives cost, it's how much people are willing to pay.
I know this sounds like a big conspiracy (and it is) but it's really not uncommon... For example, Intel selling the Celeron cheaper than the P-II even though they cost the same to produce, or going farther back the 486SX vs. 486DX. Businesses like to have a low-end line where they can make money in volume and a high-end line where they can gouge the people who can afford to be gouged.
I'd say that disks are the biggest bottleneck today, just because memory is still too expensive to be able to fit all your apps and data in RAM. Not that you need to, but everytime the disk light lights up, that's what's eating up your time...
And as for "intellegent" devices... SCSI... it's here... it's been here forever... it's just most people are too much into cost and not into quality. Yep they cost more, but they're generally faster (because they represent the high-end of disk drives) and better constructed (again, better margins means they can spend more on parts to build them). And with me, copying files from one disk to the other has yet to cause my CPU usage to rise more than 4%...
Now we just need the motherboard vendors to jump on the bandwagon. We're off to a decent start but more choices, and easier availability of systems and parts is needed.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
RDRAM will NOT make your PC go much faster - sad but true! Maybe it will go a little bit faster but definately not more than you will feel from going from a 200Mhz - 550Mhz!
:-(
AGP is not a significant bottleneck as long as your video card has enough onboard RAM, and todays cards has 32MB and the next generation will have 64MB! It's quite enough, and futhermore, more and more games (which are the ones that use all this memory) will use texture compression, which will make the demand even smaller.
RDRAM has a huge bandwith, *but* it's latency "stinks" - it is worse than all the other kinds of memory, and often it is better to have memory with a lower latency than a higher bandwith.
It's sad but the producents of memory hasn't been able to make memory with lower latency - the latency has been going down with a very slow rate
The main thing to faster speed is to have enough RAM - there is a major difference between having to swap to the harddisk and having enough RAM and therefore not use a swapfile!
You're right about the harddisks - they have to be faster - much faster, they are the bottleneck right now.
Like I said, amazing to me how one customer interacts with a company and has a really bad experience, then the next has an easy time. Flawed systems.
I stick with IBM deskstar drives now, pretty much.
Try compiling some serious C++ code
>The inability of Alpha NT to run Intel NT binaries
Well, there's always FX!32 (or whatever). Though it is software emu, so it is painfully slow... it does work, tho...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
How was I to know the Micro-Star MS-5185 motherboard that the system was built on was flaky as hell? (Micro-Star doesn't even acknowledge that model's existence on their site, BTW.) Confronting Gateway about the problem resulted in them saying, "It's due to that 'Linux' thing you're running." I ended up replacing nearly half the system components. The original processor is still cranking along, though.
Gateway will probably do well selling systems with AMD processors. They just need to make sure the other components of their systems aren't wretched crap.
Give a monkey a brain and he'll swear he's the center of the universe.
Also, does this mean we'll see a Kryo CoolAthlon announcement for 1.066 GHz? (upward multiplier is 133%)...drool drool....
Yup, and you can read about it here on Tom's Hardware.
numb
Instead of bumping your RAM speed up to 800 MhZ, why not make your RAM bus 4x larger and capable of moving 256 bits in one cycle?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The K6-2 533 costs exactly the same as the 533 Celeron.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Gateway's never really been marketing to our demographic. We like to build our own (Which we can generally do for about 1/2 to 2/3'rds the price for comparable machines.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
AMD has a great chance to stomp Intel into the ground when Merced flops -- and it WILL flop. If AMD has the foresight to have their own 64 bit chip in the wings when Merced is released, they could take the market leadership away from Intel more at least through the end of the decade.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
is AGP 4x, PC133 RAM, more than 3 RAM slots, and SMP on K7 MBs. VIA has a chipset they claim is already out to deal with the first three. Of course official Red Hat support would be nice also as opposed to the "it's a to recent technology to be properly tested" on there website.
Of course, given the $100 difference between a K7@700MHz and a K7@750MHz I have fears of what the 800 price will be it, or it's availability (try to find a P3 800 without being a corporate customer to Dell, etc. and you will see what I mean)
Also, does this mean we'll see a Kryo CoolAthlon announcement for 1.066 GHz? (upward multiplier is 133%)...drool drool....
- Sig
So why did this happen for video cards, but not for disk drives? Probably because most users (who aren't running high-traffic Web sites at home) aren't complaining about the disk performance. They were complaining about video performance. Also, I'm not sure that NT or Win98 are really flexible enough to accept a plug-in replacement for the standard filesystem drivers, in which case there isn't much motivation for anyone to create such a product. (I'm assuming that a "filesystem accelerator card" would basically be a disk controller with a filesystem driver built in or loaded at boot time, which would then accept high-level filesystem requests from the OS's filesystem driver and take care of all the underlying details, just as is done with video accelerator cards.)
RDRAM performance only gives you a small improvement over systems with PC133 RAM, according to the latest Windows general and game specific benchmark tests at Tom's Hardware. In the windows general test, the point spread between the i820/PC133 RAM and the i840/RDRAM is something like 25 points, with the lowest scoring 321 on the BAPco SYSMark98, and the highest at 343. In the game test, the i840 scores 122 in Q3 Arena (640x480x16), while the i820 scores 111.6. Hardly a mind boggling improvement.
You are not going to notice that difference in a game. But you are going to feel it quite long, hard and wide in your pocket book. A whole lotta spankin' for nothin'. You can get an Athlon 750 for less, and the performance in real time is either superior, or not far enough back behind the Coppermine to justify the cost of the Coppermine/RDRAM combo.
Likewise RDRAM + the Athlon won't mean anything, either. Athlon's support of AGP4x will mean a lot, however.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Kryotech is selling the Super G, a 1000mhz Athlon running at a temperature of -40C.
However, your problem is not the chip speed, but the surrounding bus speed and RAM speed. The chip runs at 1000mhz, but the Front Side Bus is only 200mhz and the RAM runs at 100mhz. YUCK! Talk about your kinks in the hose!
The things you'll want to address before you improve your cpu speed are:
1) RAM speed. You'll theoretically wanna blast open that blockage in the pipeline with 800mhz RDRAM, although it has been shown that this does not deliver anywhere near the astronomical improvement that it is meant to deliver.
2) Cache speed. It runs at half the speed of the cpu - or, almost half. This needs to be rectified ASAP.
3) AGP support. This is very important in games. I predict AGP4x will really unleash the speed demon in every computer.
Is it any wonder that with all these bandwidth limitations, the Super Bypass only yields a 2-5% increase in performance over a non Super Bypass board?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I just upgraded to an Athlon 500 from an old P200MMX. Did I notice that much speed difference? Only in graphic intensive 3d games. And that's because the video card is 10 times better. It doesn't matter how fast the CPU is, there's just too many bottlenecks right now to slow it down. Now, if the Athlon MB came with support for RDRAM (and the cost of RDRAM goes down significantly) and onboard SCSI, along with an AGP 4X, then it might go faster.
Compaq is going with AMD too - both on their desktops and on their laptops!
Futhermore they are using Firewire instead of USB.
This could be a serious boost for Firewire!
The story is here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/000103-000001.html
I know this is slightly off topic. I was thinking about doing an "Ask Slashdot" but felt it would be wasteful. I'd like to use an Athlon on my next box and want it to run Linux/Win9x. I've heard there are some problems with some mainboards. Does anyone know for certain which work the best under Linux? I haven't seen anything on the distro sites other than "some mainboards have caused problems with Linux."
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
>We need intelligent devices! Badly! Floppy drives and hard disks with their own memory and processors.
Get a good SCSI subsystem - good cards have nice processors on them, and can have several to many megs of cache. Costs more, but so does everything in your comment...
64 bit or 66MHz PCI (both, preferably) would be a welcome addition, and are not as cost prohibitive as many other solutions. 64-bit 33MHz devices can coexist with 32-bit devices, and still maintain the speed advantage... PCI-X makes this even better - remember PCI was designed as a cost-efficient performance bus. Mostly cheap, sorta fast, reliable. What are you using that presently ships with EISA? Yikes...
Not that your sound card, modem, or even 10BaseT network really taxes PCI all that much... and those should all have processors, bus-mastering, and DMA (damn win-modems!).
If you want a pretty extreme example of what you are mentioning, go look at an AS/400 - separate processors for all of the I/O functions, high speed internal busses between subsytems... and expensive... do you want to spend $1-2k for a decent system, or $80k... it's up to you...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
800 mhz...
Since I've stopped playing games other than nibbles, tetris and such gems, the mhz-race is something I watch and giggle somewhat at.
What you really need for ordinary desktop apps is MEMORY (goes for Linux too, only slightly less than in Windows), not more mhz. And even so - Mhz is not everything for a processor, a well designed processor with slightly less Mhz can be faster than a poorly designed Mhz-rich processor.
// Simon, remembers his 1-Mhz 8-bit computer...
The -biggest- bottleneck is the bus. PCI and (E)ISA are all way too slow. I believe there's an extended version of VME, which is a seriously nice bus system. A PC with a VME bus would get a serious performance boost.
The next biggest bottleneck is memory. It's WAAAY too slow, partly (I suspect) due to the large distances between the chips. Large distances mean a lot of time wasted synchronising and/or waiting. That's time better spent on other tasks. Fewer physically larger chips would solve this problem, by reducing the average distances travelled considerably.
Another factor in the slowness is that chip manufacturers prefer to churn out low-cost, low-speed memory in bulk, which forces people to then buy lots more much faster memory for cache. If main memory ran at a decent speed, we wouldn't have that problem in the first place.
A third bottleneck is in the speed of devices. These are ALL controlled by the main processor, even today. =COMMODORE= were doing better than that, in the 70's! We need intelligent devices! Badly! Floppy drives and hard disks with their own memory and processors. Not just a few scraps of cache, but enough to do useful work. If you're copying files from one drive to another, there is NO reason, WHATSOEVER, for the main processor to be involved at all.
The same is true of printing. If you had your disk drives loaded with a basic OS and some print drivers, you wouldn't end up swapping files everywhere on the system just to get them to the printer. Computers should be designed to be efficient, rather than like a Donald Duck cartoon. Cartoons are great, but they aren't really the best place for inspiration for computer design.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)