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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. "
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)