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. "

Comments

Speeds

[jd]

The processor has not been the limiting factor for some considerable time. If it had been, we'd all be using Dec Alphas by now.

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.