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AMD Officially Rolls Out 1Ghz Athlon
spudwiser writes: "AMD has a press release on their Web page concerning shipment of the 900, 950, and 1000MHz Athlon processors. Also included are times for the live satellite interview with the CEO and VP of AMD." Check out some of the benchmarking info about the new chips as well. I wonder how Andy Grove [?] is feeling today.
1000Mhz==!Ghz 1024 ist only for data because its 2 to the power of 10! but in the inernational Messuringsystem it is allways 10 to the power of 3! kilo 10^3 Mega 10^6 giga 10^9 tera 10^12
And I will always remember *microsoft* for having the first *mainstream* OS that had decent memory protection and mutlithreaded multitasking... Remind me when NT came out... and remind me again just how old and cruddy the Mac OS has become. It's about that they ship a decent OS. OS X 2000 = Windows NT 1993. :) Go home.
Yes, he stepped down from CEO, and became president in Moore's place. And as one of the founders of Intel he probably still has a pretty large number of shares so I would imagine he cares quite a bit about the company's performance.
A CPU running at 1000 "mhz" would be running at the astonishing clock rate of 1 "hz".
:)
If it were 1 Hz, it would be one CPU cycle per second. I wouldn't want to compile my kernel with that
You partially right, but Athlon even with 1/3 cache is much faster in FPU than similary clocked Coppermine, also Intel has said that 1 Ghz Coppermines will be available in large quantities only in Q3 this year, by that time AMD will have >1GHz Thunderbird with DDRRAM, so Athlon will be fastest prosessor for a while.
The competitive advantage won't last long because Intel's rolling out 1GHz very soon! Competitive advantage is not an advantage if it can be easily imitated.
Why are you freaks so impatient to see Athlons with SMP support and > 1024MB of RAM?
I don't know anyone that is holding off on an Athlon b/c they can't put 4 GB of Ram in it.. Give me a break. Why don't you give the company a few months to develop? The Athlon's technology is still immature, and we will see furthur butt-whippings by AMD later..
PATIENCE!
BTW, you should have bought a Xeon instead of the Athlon, so you could put 2 GB of RAM in it in 8 years when it will only cost you $20 bucks.
Maybe Sun has proved this point (who needs speed?)
Is Sun speed challenged -- do they lack the ability to design fast circuit boards, chips, network connections? Are they in the wide and slow camp (like IBM)? Or TI? (DSPs are wide and slow).
SBUS is 25mhz(?)
I haven't seen the large Sun boxes with 450mhz sparcs(?) - 400 seems to be the limit. So the UE10000 at our computation center can't be upgraded.
Didn't Sun start talking about the Sparc 3 in late 95 or early 96 when the 200 mhz Pentium Pro with its 200 mhz cache beat them on the business-side of the specmark? (cpu95 baseline integer http://www.specbench.org) Alpha was faster back then, but the Pro surprised a lot of people. Especially folks working on wireframe based CAD design tools (the Intergraph was twice as response as the SGI box of the day). The Pro was off their (Moore's law) curve. Does anyone remember when Sun first mentioned their intention to build a 600mhz processor? I vaguely remember some design conference in late 1995.
Why are the Sun boxes still popular for non-scientific work (perhaps even scientific)? There are lots of faster Unix boxes (and it sounds like even Linux on PCs runs rings around equivalent systems - given the same number of processors and memory and disks). It is hard to find benchmarks for comparison (can't blame them).
Since AMD and Intel started playing performance tag Sun customers now have processors less than half the performance of either.. a spec baseline integer number of 16 vs 36+ for AMD or Intel.. maybe only the MIPS chips are slower... Sounds like Sun needs some competition in their sparc suppliers (and/or design teams). Especially if they want to move folks to mostly interpreted code in servers.
And Intel & AMD's IO seems to be coming along, including memory bandwidth (> Sun's IBM's). Especially when you divide the number of processors into the memory subsystem bandwidth. And Sun is now says they are following Intel's lead on next generation IO? I remember something about PC to PC gigabit/s cross-country demo (with small packets?) at some event to do with supercomputers. Maybe Linux clusters? Some tape library vendor did a terabyte an hour (parallel tape) backup from a 4 processor PC. And then one of the database vendors did 500 gbytes an hour concurrent backup (on an 8way?) without a big impact(?) Amazing stuff.
The Specbench site also has some cad & graphics & opengl benchmarks. I was surprised to see almost no Risc or Unix presence. When did this happen?
Christensen sure called it. I wonder if the new Playstation will drive enough investment and a large enough aftermarket to improve its base technology at a more rapid rate than PC components? Where Christensen implies that it is the overall size of the market created that picks the big (not niche) winners (drives a sharper exponential curve that overtakes the previous market leader - the 8" vs 5" vs 3.5" disk drive story).
Ari
erp. something upstream ate my less-than sign.
And Intel & AMD's IO seems to be coming along, including memory bandwidth (> Sun's IBM's).
should read
And Intel & AMD's IO seems to be coming along, including memory bandwidth ("greater than" Sun's and "less than" IBM's)
Ari
No, he's famous for that unintentionally hilarious rendition of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds."
"Who was the second person to run a mile in a minute?"
Someone ran a mile in a minute? Why didn't somebody tell me? I didn't even hear about someone running a mile in 3 minutes.
That's what I meant. If you don't believe me, check the link (buzzaldrin.com). Bloody typos.
It's not '1000 mhz', it's 1000 MHz. 1GHz is more correct still. 1000 mhz isn't in any accepted units at all, and 1000 mHz is 1000 x 0.0001 Hz, which is a very silly way to express 1Hz. You added an extra '0' - 0.001 Hz. tenths-hundredths-thousandths. milli is 1/1000th. As a /. reader, I'm sure you'll understand. ;)
Jeez, man, I can barely read his post at all! Every time I read one of his posts, I try to figure out whether he's
1. not a native English speaker.
2. 6 years old.
or
3. actually as stupid as he sounds.
Based on the content of his posts, I'm leaning toward 3.
OS X 2000 = Windows NT 1993
Read up stupid... You should be comparing MacOS X with other UNIX based systems not some OS derived from a copy of MacOS 1984.
re: chip competition. doesn't seem to have worked even though you'd think it would be in their best interest not to be trailing the pack. I don't think any of these companies had a chip that wowed folks at introduction (does this mean there's something wrong with the basic processor architecture that constrains speed so that none could succeed?). And wasn't it 5 or so years ago Zander told anyone selling Suns they'd forfeit their contract if they stocked things like Solbournes(sp?)? Not a great way to promote revenues to drive a chip competition. They should have studied the PC industry a little more closely. But maybe neither absolute nor cost-performance matter. Their stock just keeps on doubling (which was the start of this thread, performance doesn't matter).
:-).
:-)
re: TPC (?). Last I looked at http://www.tpc.org Compaq and IBM solutions had it all over the big Suns (in the top 10 performance leaders). Granted the best Sun number shipped late last year and the IBM & Compaq shipments come later this year (so Sun may be able to retake the lead before they ship). Though it does look like Compaq can just keep on adding machines (rather than telling the customer "sorry, your problem just got too big".) Seems they get linear scalability going from 32 to 64 to 96 processors. But what alarms me is that it appears Sun doesn't "get it" - they talk a great distributed processing story, but they are still selling mainframes and mainframe approaches.
And it appears the Compaq system is using some form of component technology and web based delivery model. The other vendors in the top 10 look like 1970s 3270 screen emulation and DB connection muxing to me (no M3 or weblogic to be found?). So Compaq looks 3-tier (state of the art) and Sun looks mainframe-terminal based (or maybe 2-tier, client server) - either a 20 or 10 year old approach. Though the Java advocates I talk to say they will have a EJB OTM implementation that will beat Compaq and Unisys Com+ stuff real soon now. Maybe this means Sun's next TPC benchmark. It will be good to see more competition and real numbers behind the analysis at places like http://www.objectwatch.com.
re: IO. I can't find anyone who can backup 500 to 1000 gbytes an hour with the smaller UEs. Compaq must have poured some magic sauce on those 11 PCI slots in their 7U 8-way they started shipping last fall (they or one of the analysts said they sold more in the 4Q of 99 than forecast thru year end 00? Hard to believe all these machines are file and print servers). Plus it doesn't take a college grad to make them useful (seems to me you want your brightest folks working on your business problems and not doing plumbing.. but this inversion happened in the early mainframe days as well).
And Compaq can put six of them in a standard rack, so in the same space as a big UE cabinent plus room for the maintenance guy/gal to fix things they can put something like 144 processors and 144-288 gbytes of RAM and 200 PCI slots... and since its not a mainframe, you don't need raised floor and fancy air handlers (not unimportant to us lab rats
re: disk. the compaq hot swap stuff is pretty sweet. no cables on the disk, etc. plus their disk packaging is 20% tighter (less floor space). And not having to call in a service rep to hot plug PCI cards (no screws) etc is amazing. Christensen implies that specialty companies will invest more against their specialty than the generalist (the lag between improvements in disk packaging in the Sun offerings over what Compaq and Dell shipped some time ago). Or Apple milking old models for so long before improving its performance that the lousy PC architecture was able to beat its performance because the specialty companies and volumes meant that the PC could afford to have two computers (the mainboard and video card) for the price of one.
re: reliability. The big Dells we have have not had a cpu die that I know of, but I know our big UE has had multiple processors replaced, and NICs die, I think. Ok, it is a little older (but I don't think I've ever seen the even older pentium Pro 200s fail). What's your experience with the Sparcs? I suspect they run too hot for their cooling (or need more filter maintenance, or they are really serious about their humidity requirement - so the air is not too dry).
Christensen in his Innovator's Dilemma implies that all the "ilities" follow investment which follows volume times price point at a given interface. So the mass market stuff has got to have better reliability (else it would not be mass market).. (and the maintenance fees would be outrageous - and they're not). where appliances are the example. 10s-100s of millions of anything have to be more reliable 10,000s of something (else there are not enough phones in Baltimore to answer the calls).
You can see it in the TPC executive summary, right? Hardware with the same basic performance has 5-10 times the maintenance costs if it comes from a vertical vendor (who has to compete with all the specialty companies in the competitive layer cake of the larger mass market industry). And maintenance costs must reflect reliability (or something else is going on). I remember hearing that mainframes could often be upgraded for their maintenance costs. Sounds like this is where Sun is at.
But I thought mainframes would be gone 5 years ago. Wonder just how much of this is the entry fee to the country club? ("here's my Bently, let me in" "no, it's not fast, but doesn't it look sexy?"). And there's no end of IPO money to be spent. Still, the market does punish waste, and the 4-8x cost-performance advantage the larger market has over the verticals will have to show up somewhere / sometime.
Interesting stuff to watch and forecast. Especially the leaps in section C of the WSJ. "gambling illegal in your state and you're addicted?" "Try E-Trade..."
Ari
How long after the introduction of a new fastest chip does that price drop for the former latest chip drop from $700ish to $500ish? (And I mean in quantities of one or two).
For someone just using a single large ATA-66 drive, the advantage that a SCSI device would give you is very minimal. The only reason I'm excited about the 1GHZ chips is that this summer when I finally get the funds to upgrade, I'll be able to buy a 800-900 mhz Athlon chip for around $250, and the fact that I'm using an ATA-66 HDD will have almost no bearing on the speed I'll be seeing.
i know a everyone gets on the "its not the clock-speed" stuff when we hear about x86 chips and MHz, but at what point do we finally say, ok a 1000MHz is fast than 400Mhz regardless of architecture? and the gap seems to keep widening, and Im referring the the spracs that cost 10g's for a 400MHz and the O2's that ha, cost 6G's for last years news, ya the r5000, that sgi sold us and released the r5200 the next day.
true, they both have the same market share
And the storage capacity is determined *before* the drive is formatted. Just like the 3.5in floppies (1MB unformatted capacity (720K formatted) and 2MB unformatted capacity (1.4M formatted [not 1.44M!])).
you seem to forget that the athalon has a full 128Kbyte l1 cache, while the p3 only has a measly 32kb l1 cache. so, considering that the athalon's level 1 cache is almost half the size of the p3's combined level 1 AND level 2 caches, the level 2 cache running at 1/3 isn't that bad. witness the comparison between celerys and p3s at the same clock speed, assuming that KNI instructions aren't being used. smash (too slack to log in)
I've always found it interesting that everyone considers Intel the evil empire, and AMD they best friend (like it isn't a giant CORP as well). Did anyone notice that it was Intel's competition that forced AMD to release the 1Ghz chip? We all knew that AMD was sitting on it, so why didn't they release it when they had it? I'll tell you why, because they wanted to slowly ramp to 1Ghz and suck as much money out of our pockets as they could. Now that Intel is no long the "king", maybe we'll start bashing AMD around here.
here have a Happy Pill, Desco !
The 1GHz Athlon could have released as far back as October. Meanwhile they have been working on the AMD760 and 770 chipsets to provide DDR ram and 2-4way SMP. For the higher end Athlon implementations AMD will be producing the chipset since via wants to concentrate on the Desktop area. Most roadmaps show these new AMD sets being for sale in mobos Q2-Q3 for DDR and Q3 for SMP.
Nonono... TJ Hooker. Maybe he went on to do Unsolved Mysteries but he's famous cuz of T J Hooker.
end of the year? Guess I'll save my money some ore...
Who was it said that spelling flames always contain a spelling error ? I guess this is the same thing ..
Yes, it's obvious here. But it's a mistake made so often that it seems worth making the point - just to see if some of the posters have actually forgotten that m is a million times smaller than M.
OK, OK, a billion. Depending on your definition of billion.
No... they didn't beat intel by "just two days".. you see... if AMD had not been pushing out these products then intels roadmap would still be way behind... according to cnet AMD has "plenty" on 1ghz CPUs. but there will be a shortage of 1ghz PIII chips... big surprise! It's like intel is just selling their prototype models becuase they really have no chance in hell of getting decent yeilds untill AMD has alreayd released a 1.1, 1.2, 1.3ghz, chip and so on... It's really the same thing intel has been doing all alone with CPU race. If AMD didn't exist then at best we could have seen 1ghz in Q1 of 2001.
Ya sure bonehead. Just like 1024 meters equals a kilometer. Aren't you the funny guy.
*hint hint: sarcasm*
But... But... KryoTech got there first didn't they?
pornking
I'm not quite sure why they spent all this effort being the first to 1GHz. So, they beat Intel by two days. Who cares? Do they think the consumers do? I don't. The average computer buyer doesn't, either.
Are you kidding? The L1 cache is DAMN important... Sure you have to feed it, but remember it gets fed much more than the item you are reading! It has spatial locality too... This means that sequential loops will run mostly in the L1 cache. The L1 gets fed basically once if you can keep all the inner data inside the L1. You don't need to load an entire application - just the loop that is currently happening. The difference between a loop in the L1 and a loop in the L2 is STAGGERING! Try benchmarking for x for y compared to for y for x and you will see the difference. A larger L1 cache should make an immediate difference in perf0ormance
My 400MHz G4 is still faster than the 1GHz Athlon...and 3times faster than the PIII 800. Suck on that Wintel / Linux fanatics!
So? Next year it'll be $199 for qty 1, when $1000 gets you the 2 GHz chip. Just buy two or three steps behind the top-of-the-line, and everything is quite affordable.
The 1GHz Athalon uses a 1/3 clock divider for the cache. If Intel uses a full speed on die then I think it will be faster than the Athalon overall. Even though on Sharkys, that K7 beat out every thing, the P3 800 was not too far behind. The P3 will prevail at 1GHz until AMP gets out an on die implementation. Enough of this. Go here for some Scooby action.
Trolling for Scooby doo!
I came across some old PC magazines at a library a year or two ago. It was cute to see 1988/89 Gateway ads with 486 SX/25s and DX/33s for $4000. Ah, the memories...
Most importantly, when will these come out in Dual/Quad configurations? Anyone who only uses one phone at a time is borderline Amish if you ask me.
Every schoolchild knows that Bull Aldrin got there second
That should be "Buzz", as in Lightyear.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Nice.. Now I just need to find a decent motherboard manufacturer that produces dual/quad processor configurations for these beasts.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Maybe you all forgot, he stepped down as CEO last year. Isn't he on some island drinking from coconuts right now?
I think larger L1 cache will compensate it. BTW - it's strange how people only keep in mind L2 cache when talking about caches. Considering that L1 cache does 90% (or so) of the speeding job.
Not sure where you are getting your numbers on this one, [...]
The rule-of-thumb is that every level of cache catches (hits) about 90% of the accesses thrown at it. This means that for 100 accesses, you spend: 90*[time to access L1] + 9 * [time to access L2] + 1 * [time to access Main RAM] . (And so the average is 0.01 times that. )
So, no L2 speed does not really matter all that much. Sure you can generate a benchmark that fits in L2 cache, but not in L1. Then it will depend highly on the L2 speed. But in general, the on-package L2's are good enough.
Roger.
The Athlon 800 uses a 2/5 ratio cache, the Athlon 1000 uses a 1/3 [so the /800 has 320MHz L2 cache and the /1000 has 333MHz]. That's on the Anandtech site.
Comparing P3 and Athlon benchmarks is a bit fiddly, because the best P3 results are obtained using Rambus memory, an i840 motherboard, and Intel's v4.5 compiler which can vectorise FP operations and do prefetch.
For Athlon systems, you're tied to PC133 memory on a KX133 motherboard, and it's not possible to tell ICL v4.5 to generate prefetch operations but not SSE, so you don't get the prefetch benefit.
So you get a SpecFP95 figure of 29.4 for the K7/1000 from AMD; if you go to specbench and search for the P3/800, you get
24.5 - BX motherboard, PC100
28.9 - i820 motherboard, Rambus, Intel
32.4 - i840 motherboard, Rambus, Dell
If you compile on the P3 with options such that the code also runs on the Athlon, you get a score of about 19.5 and the P3 appears incredibly slow - but this is what you expect when running code which is essentially unoptimised.
Running hyper-optimised cache-blocked code, like Prime95, an Athlon/500 is 25% faster than a P3/500E and 45% faster than a normal P3/500.
Of course, the K7 system is enormously cheaper than a P3-and-Rambus system here in the UK.
It drives down the costs of the middle (read 700mhz) processors and the true test of who's in better shape will be to see the availability of the systems. I get the feeling AMD's yeilds are much better than Intel's at this hairy edge of speed.
Hillary as the first to scale Mt. Everest. Nobody remembers who got there second..."
Tensing got there second.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
No... AGP is a completely separate bus from PCI. That's how it's able to manage much higher bandwidth than PCI, otherwise it'd be limited to PCI's maximum speed.
And you're right, the bandwidth numbers i punched out are flawed, in that you'd only ever see that if you were basically displaying random noise on your screen. On second though, photo editors would also bump into bandwidth limitations when scrolling through large documents.
If and or when that were the case, then a PCI card would indeed pull down the rest of your system as it tried to fill it's buffers.
I've always been really disappointed with AGP, in that Intel originally promised so much more (shared memory, etc...) but ultimately only delivered a faster pipeline.
Unlike every OS out there aside from Win 9x, Win NT, and the Mac, Windows 2000 will be able to run Microsoft Office. There will also be BackOffice Server, soon enough. I believe Oracle is bringing Oracle8 to 2000, as IBM is doing with DB/2. Lotus, however is not bringing it's office productivity suite to 2000, or if it is, it isn't getting it certified. Say bye to another MS Office alternative.
Joe consumer doesn't care about memory footprints or anything. They'll just go buy a new machine to run 2000 on.
Though yes, I think Intel's doomed when Merced finally arrives... First it had no backward compatitbility, meaning that it would have been completely dead in the water. Now they've bolted on an x86 core, which means that there'll be little incentive for a LOT of apps out there to get ported to it (we don't really need 64 bit browsers, word processors, or email clients), except for non ported tasks, it'll run slower than any other chip because of it's lethargic clockspeed...
In the mean time, AMD is going ahead and adding their own 64 bit extensions to the x86 architecture. I wonder what the new monicker will be ? Wintel = AMDSoft? Winamd? Winalt?
I don't know...
But Linux is pretty much 2nd tier across every arch. except x86... Yeah, it runs on PowerPC's... Yeah, it runs on SPARCs... But where are applications like Oracle, Sybase, DB/2, WordPerfect for those archictectures? Linux needs those to win it's "war"...
So far as your PCI-to-AGP thing goes....
IF you were running your screen at 1024 by 768 at 32-bit color depth, with a 75 Htz refresh rate, you
re already moving more data per second than PCI can handle (according to my calcs, that's >160 MB/Sec - PCI does 132 MB/s)... But video is really the most demanding operation in a desktop computer.
Switching your video card to an AGP one was a great move, because you've moved the graphics into another bus. Aside from that typical bus usages would be:
CD quality sound: 176 KB/Sec
10 base T ethernet: 1.25 MB/Sec
100 base T ethernet: 12.5 MB/Sec
UW2SCSI: 80 MB/Sec
USB: 1.25 MB/Sec
So basically, with video on a separate bus, you can completely saturate 2 100 Megabit connections, while churning away at disk array, type constantly, and listen to several streams of CD Audio...
I wonder how fast someone will try and overclock one of these...
I seem to think someone suggested that Tensing was actually first up. Not that it matters much, neither of them would have got to the top w/out the other.
The general public has a fear of overclocking.. pretty simple.
BilldaCat
Do you honestly think that anyone was confused in any way about what the unit of measure was? I understand "correct is correct," but c'mon! I don't even know why I'm responding, except I'm on vacation and bored. :-)
Now, if the unit of measure was meters, then the case could be confusing, but I think everyone can figure out that mhz, MhZ, or even mhZ all really mean MHz.
Illegitimi non carborundum
I remember getting a brand-new 486DX33 in 1992 and being the guy with the fastest machine on the block, so 10 years ago, 100 Mhz was unheard of!
If we've gone from 33 to 1000 (or 1050 in some cases) in just 8 years, imagine what will happen in another decade.
Mr. Jetson, you have a call...
Illegitimi non carborundum
His claims are far from outrageous. That you look to Sharky for technical insight doesn't rack up any points for your team, either.
If you like benchmarks, you should look here, here, here, or maybe even here.
The Coppermine has a few technical advantages over the Athlon, and even outperforms it on most platforms. The Athlon still suffers from a selection of mostly sub-par motherboards, and Intel's 820 is a dud. There are no great chipsets available to the motherboard manufacturers right now (though Via's KX133 is off to a good start) -- a "wait and see" attitude is probably the best thing for us about now. Poot.
It's not '1000 mhz', it's 1000 MHz. 1GHz is more correct still. 1000 mhz isn't in any accepted units at all, and 1000 mHz is 1000 x 0.0001 Hz, which is a very silly way to express 1Hz.
Surely slashdot readers understand that case is significant!
1) About PCI: Yes, I know there are 64bit/66Mhz PCI motherboards but cards working that way are hard to find. Plus, while I don't know the gory details about PCI internals, I experienced good speed improvements after replacing my PCI video card with an AGP one... maybe I'm wrong again but this seems a PCI limitation to me because the only element I changed was the video card and I don't think there's a noticeable difference between a Matrox Millenium and a GeForce in pure 2d drawing speed!! :)) Ah, with this one I didn't want to compare apples and oranges (that's what you said :), I just wanted to point out that while companies are struggling about megahertz they are doing nothing to improve PC architecture, nothing besides this Rambus thing that will help only when prices will drop and when Intel will do a good, reliable chipset like BX.
2) About memory: yes, Rambus is not bad in itself: it's how Intel drove the whole thing that makes me laugh (faulty chipsets etc. etc.)... and there's the latency issue: I think DDR-RAM is more intresting but cuold be a matter of taste
3) About s-bus: you're right, I'm reading Ultra2 specsheet and the s-bus is indeed very close in design but inferior in performance to PCI: I was thinking about Sun's UPA (that seems more like a "multiple AGP with arbitration controller"), and Intel's NGIO: I think this will be the future, but frankly it's too expensive nowadays...
--
"The crux of the biscuit is the Apostrophe(*)" - FZ
Every schoolchild recognizes Neil Armstrong as the first man to walk on the moon.... Nobody remembers who got there second...
Every schoolchild knows that Bull Aldrin got there second, if not because they actually care about learning such things then because they watch tv and have seen the NASA commemorative coin commercials he did a few years back. Celebrities are notorious for extending their face-time with endorsements -- how many people do you suppose only recognize Shatner as the Priceline guy?...
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
"Ceci ne pas un sig."
That sentence has no verb. That's like saying "This not a sig". Should be
"Ceci n'est pas un sig."
Merci.
Hands in my pocket
Why won't AMD and Intel stop with this stupid mHz wars and actually worry about quality? We say what happens to Intel when they rush a product (Pentium I's)... Lets hope AMD isn't prone to the same mistakes. But seriously, now that the race-to-the-gigahertz is over, PLEASE, AMD-- Start concentrating on developing that powerhouse chip of yours: Get a chipset out that uses DDR-SDRAM. Develop a chipset that takes advantage of Athlon's ability to have the 64 processor SMP that you hypes so much when the chip was first announced. Make a chipset that's worth a damn and don't rely on VIA to cover up your crappy chipset.
Desco
Apparently its important to AMD, here's a quote from the press release:
"Every schoolchild recognizes Neil Armstrong as the first man to walk on the moon, Roger Bannister as the first to run the four-minute mile, and Edmund Hillary as the first to scale Mt. Everest. Nobody remembers who got there second..."
I wonder how much of an impact this will have on performance, compared to Intel's Kamati offerings with a 1/2 speed cache? Also, does anybody know what the multiplier is on Intel's newest P3's? I can't remember their stupid name.
In fact the latest Pentium III (which are replacing the old ones) are codenamed Coppermine, and the cache is not 1/2 speed of the CPU but full speed (the size is only 256 KB but this still makes it faster than the old Katmai core)
From the Article :
Pricing and Availability
AMD is currently shipping its 1GHz AMD Athlon processors priced at $1,299 in 1,000 unit quantities. AMD is also announcing the availability of 950MHz and 900MHz AMD Athlon processors. The 950MHz AMD Athlon processor is priced at $999 in 1,000 unit quantities. The 900MHz AMD Athlon processor is priced at $899 in 1,000 unit quantities.
I don't know about everyone else, but that's a little pricey for a processor. You can build a decent full system for that kind of money. The benchmarks are pretty decent though.
The price to stay ahead of the Jones' isn't moving much, even with heated processor competition.
//Phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
1GHz processor ushers in a new era of information technology. AMD plans to lead in the gigahertz era.
I don't know... certainly the x86 tech that permitted AMD to enter the "gigahertz era" won't take it much farther. I'd compare this to a 10Mhz 6502 - extremely interesting for its time, but less a presaging of things to come than a logical endpoint to an old tech.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
The 800Mhz Athlon has a 2/5 cache divider, which yields a cache speed of 340 Mhz.
The 1Ghz Athlon has a 1/3 cache divider, which yields a cache speed of 333Mhz.
The effective cache speed of the 1Ghz chip is thus slower than the cache of the 800Mhz chip.
Your claim is thus blatantly wrong.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
Well, AMD rightfully thinks it is important because people can go to COmpaq or Gateway *today*, custom build a system at 9xx+ mhz, and have it arrive within a month. A ghz system is probably price comparable with a Intel 8xx mhz system due to use of RDRAM, and the shipping times are probably about the same .
As an aside, Dell couldn't manage to get 2 P3 700 systems to a client at once. A 700 and all the 600s arrived, but the second 700 took two more weeks.
matt
Damn
My 900Mhz cordless phone isn't the fastest anymore!
I'll have to upgrade to the 2.4GHz phone.
Megahertz is everything, right?
/nutt
i just heard this on the radio, looks like they beat Intel. Go AMD! :) -motardo
Wow... I never guessed these processors were so $$$$-y. The G4, as I remember (I can't find pricing info any more... odd...) is about half as expensive or less, at half the clock rate.
Where is my mind?
mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
Read this message aloud in a James Kirk / William Shatner voice.
Where is my mind?
mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
My motherboard (an Apple G4) has a software-controlled L2, so once I wrote a mini-program to determine just what the cache does. It read 512k of memory over and over again (the cache is 1M, but it's no different). It turned out that setting the cache to 150MHz doubled or tripled speed, but increasing it all the way to 300MHz (overclocked) only made a 10% or so performance gain.
So, the main advantage of cache RAM is latency, not transfer rate.
Where is my mind?
mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
that should be increasing it to 150MHz *from being turned off completely*, and a 10% gain over the 150MHz speed. Sorry...
Where is my mind?
mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
I stand by the statement. Look at Anandtech's latest review of the 1 GHz chip .
I picked the SYSMARK2000 to demonstrate my claim but look at them across the board.
PIII (800) BX PC-100 Ram - 30.8
Athlon 850 AMD-750 - 30.8
Sure, if you enable superbypass (not supported by my K7M motherboard in the revision I bought) or use a Via KX-133 chipset motherboard you can eke out a few more points. The PIII can also get a small jump with RDRAM but it costs a fortune so I'm not using it for comparison.
You busted me. I work for Intel. Read my previous posts.
Sweet, SI arguments aside, now we have hex versions... who's gonna be the first to put it in binary or octal?! Please email me when it happens, because it's going to be an earth-shattering event!
When the K7 was hyped and announced, I bought stock in it (it was around 17/share). This was one of the BEST investments I've ever made. This company does amazing things, and they are coming straight from the underdog's corner and taking a bite out of Intel's monopoly. I now own a 550 Athlon and love it.
:)
AMD seems to realize how to win over much of the market - Low prices, high quality, and a good enough supply. They've also got plenty of the stuff they're working on for the future, making this investment better than ever. Where's intel? Still talking about the same project that's been going on for 3 stagnant years? I want my 3dnow NOW!
Although AMD's stock might be a bit higher than when I bought it, if you have as much faith in this company as I do, you should definitly consider buying it if you're into the market. This is no penniless web stock, this is a real deal company that's going to rock the desktop world. There's a reason why Gateway and other companies are signing back with AMD: Because it rocks!
Mike Roberto
- roberto@apk.net
-- AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
I actually have a dual 2.4GHz telephone.. 2 antennas for twice the talking power! (1 is send, one is recieve, or so it says, but I think that 1 is just useless, or maybe the NSA monitoring antenna. [shutup, john...]) -John
People really need not to focus on the speed. Maybe its just me, but Microsoft Word only runs marginally faster (basic features obviously) on my pIII 667 then it does on the 486's strangling around campus. Same for Linux, but Pine runs no faster on my box then it does on a 386 dumb-term. Its really sad that these gigahertz boxs are only slightly faster in our day to days tasks then boxes with MUCH slower CPU's. The modern user base, especially the geeks, really need to check themselves and who they support and why. There is no reason to support AMD merely as a successful competitor to Intel. It should be based quality, and sorry, but the Athlons are by no means pIII killers.
Are you kidding? The L1 cache is DAMN important...
I am well aware of the importance of the L1 cache. I would highly doubt that it accounts for 90% of the performance of the CPU however.
This means that sequential loops will run mostly in the L1 cache. The L1 gets fed basically once if you can keep all the inner data inside the L1.
Try doing this with any sufficiently complicated loop. Other than for enumerating a small array, you will almost never get all your data and instructions in the L1 cache. It just simply isn't big enough for instructions, data, and everything else your computer is doing at the time. You will get much better performance by having a larger, faster L2 cache so that when data needs to be swapped out of L1 it can be retrieved again very quickly. Look at the CuMine processors, which could halve the L2 cache, run at core speed and still maintain the same performance as their 1/2 speed Katmai counterparts.
The difference between a loop in the L1 and a loop in the L2 is STAGGERING! Try benchmarking for x for y compared to for y for x and you will see the difference. A larger L1 cache should make an immediate difference in performance
I agree with you that L1 is faster than L2, but there are a couple of considerations to take into account. First, L1 cache is a very expensive and lucrative asset, on-die L2 is cheaper and not terribly much slower. You could get similar price/performance with a smaller L1 and a much larger on-die L2. Second, Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you make the L1 cache too large, then you start slowing things down and end up with an L1 cache that has the same latency as it's L2 couterpart. Then you are back at square one. You need to find a balance between your L1/L2 caches so you don't hit this problem. One of the major factors in finding this balance is bringing the L2 cache to processor speeds, and putting it on the die. Besides, how much closer is the L1 cache compared to the L2 cache when they are both on the die, really...
The "Top 10" Reasons to procrastinate:
The "Top 10" Reasons to procrastinate:
10.
Does anyone know if Kryotech will attempt a 1.5GHz machine or something with these? I would assume you woule be looking at about $4000 for whatever they put together...
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
I have a 1000MHz (base 2) 8088!
"The best way to do mathematics is to be creatively lazy." -I. M. Isaacs
Well,
Andy Grove is sitting having coffee right now thinking that he'll lots of high speed motherboard chipset and ram. He's also thinking that all this is good since developers will use the power and force upgrade cycles across the industry. Everything that hypes the platform is good for Intel.
AMD is really interesting but will have to prove that they have the staying power to keep up for more than a single generation of processors. Historically, AMD has been an also ran who offered interesting ways to upgrade older machines. Eighteen months from now they may demonstrate true leadership. For now, it's interesting but not really exciting.
Sorry I misspoke :-) Price and performance!
"Switching your video card to an AGP one was a great move, because you've moved the graphics into another bus."
AGP and PCI are still on the same bus, I think. not completely sure about this one.
"IF you were running your screen at 1024 by 768 at 32-bit color depth, with a 75 Htz refresh rate, you
re already moving more data per second than PCI can handle (according to my calcs, that's >160 MB/Sec - PCI does 132 MB/s)... But video is really the most demanding operation in a desktop computer. "
Your bandwidth numbers seem to be a little off to me. Your video bandwidth calculation is assuming that we are shoving each refresh of the video card across the bus. The 160 MB/s you calculated would be needed between the output of the video card and the frame buffer of the video card.
Also, AGP was discounted as an improvement to 2D graphics quite a while ago. Intel has pushed AGP as a 3D graphics solution because of it's ability to store textures in main memory. But this hasn't even panned out, because local memory on the video card has much higher bandwidth _and_ dedicated bandwidth than using the AGP bus to get to main memory.
One good comparison of PCI and AGP is between the AGP and PCI implementations of Voodoo 3 cards. Basically there is no siginificant differences for the games I've seen benchmarked. In Quake3 and the other standard popular benchmarks (not synthetic, just games) AGP had very little benefit over PCI.
I'm sure that AGP has benefits in certain situations but consider that of the top two 3D consumer chip makers: Nvidia puts 32 Megabytes of ram on board and 3dfx makes PCI cards just as fast as the AGP ones.
As long as AMD stays on top... We really don't know - do we?
Your mouse moved. Windows must be restarted for the change to take effect.
Computers are like air conditioners.
- They stop working when you open Windows.
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
I clicked on Compaq's website, selected the US version, and zipped right over to home users.
BOOM - right there in my face was this 'Compaq shatters the 1ghz barrier
Oh yeah, this is good. Tom's Hardware was right, intel is hemmorhaging badly.
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
My work PC is twice as weak as my Kryotech Athlon SuperG at home
I've always had a superior PC to what my worksite had. I play games online at home and work at work. Now and then I'll bring my parallel orb drive in and pull down mp3's but that's the most non-work stuff I'll do there.
I'll be even less attracted to do anything on a work PC when internetconnect DSL hits here in 2 months
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Aside from their supply problems and the RDRAM fiasco, Intel caused me to switch loyalty to AMD because of the Product Serial Numbers they stuck on the PIII's. I immediately became an AMD fan after years of dissing them, and lo and behold, less than a year later, AMD started winning big time!
Note to Intel: it is a good day to die
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
So, officially, did they come out before Intel or did those 'few' Intel chips already hit?
The GHz mark is obviously a technological breakthrough... any estimations on when we'll have Laptops with that clock speed?
Fight or flight its all the same
Live to die another day
--Ryan
considering that I could already get a 1Ghz Athlon from Kryotech here kind of blunts the excitement for me. Admittedly, it was spendy, and they had to chill the thing to like -40C, but it was shipping. I wonder why AMD didn't flaunt this little gem more while they had the chance?
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
If AMD did not do this, Intel definately is and would have. No one is going to *care* and the 1/3 speed cache is not that big of an issue so stop griping since I know most /.'s dont even buy chips as soon as they go out because everyone knows in 6mo the things going to be a fraction of the price. *mutters* I think everyone likes complaning :p
Yes but AMD was the first there with the 1Ghz chip NOT Intel.
Apparently you don't know Econ 101 or Marketing 101.
Being the FIRST one there, gives you a competitive avantage. The market DOES look at this.
Just look at Yahoo.
Good luck finding a PIII 800 anywhere.
I invested in a state of the art 500 Mhz Pentium III last June. Now only 9 months later Intel and AMD are both preparing to ship 1 Ghz CPU's. I feel the overwelming urge to buy one. I dunno though, I think I'll hold out for the 1 Terrahertz chip coming out this fall.
... didn't i take the blue pill --
- Shawdog
-- Why oh why
The Tick : Spooooooooooooooooooooon!.
Neo : There is no spoon.
As I've posted before I wonder how many people who buy these 1ghz machines will actually use them to there full potential. I personally would be pumping out all kinds of distributed programs and would definantelly consider NOT using windows.
BTW how many of these 1ghz Athalons can you stack together. Or do they have to stand alone... because I've yet to see a dual athalon box.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
But the average investor does! AMD is up over $5, around %13.
I recall back in December reading an article about AMD's initial announcement for that 1Ghz chip and the article pointed to a link here for a company that makes cases with a cooling compressor for the chip.   And according to the company, this case is for the "home user"!
;-)
Should be interesting to see Intel's 3.5 - 4.5Ghz chips soon and the liquid nitrogen coolant I seem to keep hearing about (no lie - I have heard that)...  
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
Look at the advertisement ($$) and media attention ($$) AMD is getting. Compaq and Gateway just announced new machines powered by the AMD Athlon ($$) to be released later this month. There is a strong theme here: ($$).
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
But is there any truth to the rumor that they run Win2K faster than an Athlon?
I will always remember that AMD was the first to require 1000 MHz to do what the G4 can do in 500 MHz.
As for Intel, I already forgot who they are.
...would have been seeing a First Post! on this topic!
Someone is not a lamer here. And just does not think about games.......... G4's are sweet and kick ass other X86 design. Great systems for a good LINUX workstation.
AMD a best friend, ummmmmm NO!! INTEL a best friend NO!!
AMD once again you bring out your super fast useless processors. WOW Windows loads up faster. The motherboards hurt for one and your CACHE on your crap cpus hurts for the second. And the people that would use these fast cpus well wouldnt buy one. They would buy a real chip like, an ALPHA, MIP, SPARC, or a G4. Maybe if you ever get a decent motherboard out, maybe i will actually give a fuck about your chips. Right now your best is an board with 100 MHZ bus i throught you were so proud of that 200 MHZ bus well oh gives a fuck when the RAM dont support and the boards dont support. Well if you use RDAM it would, oh but you dont got any boards that support that.
One of the most important, most beneficial, and most powerful leadership indicators is *being first*. AMD reaching the 1Gig mark first is a momumental achievement that cannot be underplayed by them. They now have bragging rights, Intel is sloppy second, even if they're just one day late doing the same thing. What's the name of the second person to fly the Atlantic solo? What's the name of the second cloned animal? Who was the second person to step foot on the moon? Who was the second person to run a mile in a minute? Who was the second person to fly faster than mach one? Who was the second President? People generally don't have enough brain space to remember seconds, so we only remember the leaders, the #1's, the top dogs in any particular category. Any marketing book worth a hoot, such as The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, will underline the incredible advantages of being the first to reach an important milestone, such as this one. AMD is quite smart pointing out this fact in no uncertain terms. When you're second, few people care--that's simple basic human nature. Scott Miller, 3D Realms
I was going to buy one of those 900MHz cordless phones, but I think now I'll wait for the 1Ghz ones, I think they dial faster or something...
So did the k6. It's just different from Intel's. To the best of my knowledge, noone ever built a chipset for dual k6's. The athlon bus is licensed from alpha, so maybe this time around . . .
No, the Athlon is NOT an implementation of the x86 hardware. Furthermore, neither is the x86 (at least anymore).
Ever since the K5 and Pentium Pro, the chips have shared nothing in common with the 8086 except the instruction set.
I agree with you otherwise, though. Code morphing and other hardware-assisted JIT techniques really do look like a major advantage.
-Billy
Sun has some. TI makes the UltraSPARC. Fujutsi (or Samsung?) is working on the HAL SPARC V9 (and has been for some time). In the past Cypress, Ross, Fujutsi, and Samsung, and Mekio have all made SPARC CPUs. Sun publishes the SPARC ABI and ISA, and promotes compatation. They even publish the bus specs.
The problem is componies don't see as much profit in that design space as in x86 compatables. There is a lot of money to be made there, but if Sun doesn't pick you to make CPUs for them, you end up in SPARC clones, or 3rd party CPU modules, and there just isn't the same kind of money there.
Sun switching from SBus to PCI isn't the same as Sun following Intel on I/O. Sun still does their own memory systems (well low end boxes use PC memory because that is the only way to get prices even remotely close to PCs).
Morover PCs almost allways have one PCI bus, plus one or more bridged PCI busses. The bandwidth from the CPU to any pair of PCI devices is limited to half the PCI bandwidth (half for one, half for the other, and in reality some switching cost). Sun's high end machines (even their midrange) have multiple independent PCI buses, so you can push a Ultra160 SCSI at 160Mbytes/sec on one PCI bus, and not interfere with bandwidth on another PCI bus. The Sun SPARC4500 can have 4 diffrent sets of PCI busses (the 4500 is also one of the last SBus machines, what it really takes is up to four backplane bords which can have memory and CPUs and/or PCI and SBus slots; each backplane bord communicates over a very high speed bus the "FHB")
PCI (esp. the 66Mhz 64bit kind found on many Suns) has enough bandwidth to handle most all perhrials, and is cheep. So it is a fine bus for most things. Why is Sun wrong to use it?
At the low end I susspect:
At the high end
Or at least that is my guess, I don't buy big Sun boxes. Just the medimum ones.
It doesn't seem to have put them in first, second, or even 3rd place in CPU speed. On the other hand maybe without it they would be dead, and dead last. After all Sun was never focused on CPU design, they only did the first SPARC in house. DEC had been good at it over twice as long as Sun had been in existance when that stratagey was picked. Sun had no fab plants then either.
Then again maybe if Sun had decided to build a pool of talent and do it in house the SPARC could be at the top of the SPECfp list, not the Alpha (or does the 1Ghz K7 manage to beat the 700Mhz Alpha? I doubt it, the Alpha had a 3x SPECfp lead last I saw).
The first SPARC, the 4/110 and 4/220 were three times faster then machines costing five times as much. The were a revolution. The didn't wow folks, they stright out floored them. At least the ones that didn't think it was a lie. They made no impact on the PC market since they were $10,000 machines.
The first really popular SPARC the one in hte SparcStation1 was again so much bloddy faster then anything anyone else had that DEC had to drop their plans to design a RISC CPU in-house and start the fastest workstation design-to-market project ever done (I think it was a little under a year, or a little over, I forget which).
When DEC finally brught their MIPS baised machines to market and edged out past the SPARC Sun brought the SPARCStation 1+ out (as an in-line upgrade -- existing SS1 orders were shipped the SS1+ at the same cost!) forcing DEC to drop it's brand new DS2000 because it was laughable next to the 1+ (or maybe this was the 2, I forget).
It was only after DEC managed to bring the Alpha out that they managed to beat the SPARC, and keep beating it for the rest of the decade. Not bad for a little upstart workstation peddling "snake oil" and hoping to one day "piss with the big dogs".
The SuperSPARC was impressave, but not ground breaking. The MicroSPARC was pretty wowing, if you were intrested in low cost CPUs (it was very cheap from the very start -- and not too slow). The Ultra1 and Ultra2 were not awe inspireing. The SPARC-V9-US3 is not wowing in terms of clock rate, but in terms of L1 and L2 load to use latency they are indeed wowing. But it is Mhz that makes the headlines. Even if SPECint/SPECfp would be a better set of numbers to chase.
Too bad CPUs cost so much to make, it would be intresting to see what would happen if a compony designed an extreamly long pipelined CPU with a fantastically fast clock that wasn't really all that fast (the long pipeline would make a fast clock "easy", and at the same time make it impossable for the CPU to actually be fast without monster good load bypassing and branch prediction). Would it sell great because it's clock is 2x to 3x to 4x as fast as everyone else's, or would it flop because it would be slow as a dog on any real code?
Probbably more then five, I think Solborne was only around from '91 to '94. The Solborne was a competing SPARC baised system, not a new SPARC CPU Sun could put in their box. Worse yet it did multi-CPU suport much better then SunOS did (Solaris wasn't out at the time).
It was probbably a dumb move (long term), but it wasn't quashing a rivel CPU. they even used the same CPUs most of the time.
I assume that is true, but I don't know for sure. Also while the Compaq's are priced similar to Suns (I think) the IBMs cost a lot more. Then again they have a better rep for reliability.
I doubt it keeps scaling linerally after that -- unless they had all 10 top 10 spots they would have kept showing better systems. The PR coup of holding the top 10 spots (or top 5!) would make it worth it. Even for an expensave benchmark like TPC-C.
I have no idea. We have strayed far from my area of knolage. I will say Alpha kicks some serious ass, and I'm not supprised you can make nice systems from them. But it is really a market where I don't buy machines, I don't evaluate them, and I don't really understand the needs of. I'm a "small server" guy myself. If I can't lift it, I probbably don't run anything on it. (note, I can lift systems one at a time and still get a rack full of small servers).
I havn't had a CPU or NIC on the SPARCs go bad yet (I have had a DOA or two shipped to me). I have had a DEC NIC go very bad (caused the machine not to boot), one of hte DE-100s. It happened to be in my home machine though, so heat/dust/humidy wasn't the same. All my DECs are PCs. Most of them ageing. I've had drives go bad on both (many more on the DECs, but that is the fault of the HP SporeStore drives). The DECs lock up randomly sometimes (like once a month per 100 machines), the SPARCs get an ECC'ed bus fault less then once a year per 100 machines, and the OS (not solaris, same OS on the PC and SPARCs) re-try code for that didn't work last time it happened (it has happened maybe three times). Most of the SPARCs are newer, but some are quite old SPARC20's with 3rd party ROSS HyperSPARC modules.
The PCs are all in a nice machine room. Some of the SPARCs are in a not-so-nice Telco-co-lo (well, Ok, it's pretty nice too). I would never do that with a PC. We have done "hands off" OS upgrades on the SPARCs (one of the benifits of being a small server guy is I can send all the load to machines B and C when i take A down for an upgrade). Literally we schedule someone to put the new OS CD in the SPARC, and then at out lesure we schedule the upgrde and do it from halfway across the USA with nobody at the facility.
I beleve that as a genneral rule, but there are niche markets where reliability is the goal, not price. I totally expect a IBM390 to be far more reliable then the best x86 machine built. Even if part of that is only that the 390 is designed to detect the error, and let you replace the part with no intrruption of service (or minimal).
Also the SPARC and Alpha and mainframe buyers take much more time on the phone. They won't hang up until the problem is solved. PC buyers have been conditioned to take various forms of "you'll have to upgrade", "that isn't a supported configuration", and "oh, that's Microsoft's fault". They don't insist you give a root cause failure analisis.
I do belve he is right about the ford Mustang being less prone to brakage then a Lotus, or Ferrari.
This has been a long reply. Hoe someone reads it :-)
As far as I can tell, nothing. The motherboard the air-cooled 1Ghz part ran in has a better chipset (the KX133). If you look at page 3 air cooled part is shown with the KX133, and 256M of PC133 memory. If you happen to magically know what the Kyrotech part is (the benchmark didn't say) it is one of the old AMD750/751 baised motherboards, like the second set of systems. It doens't support PC100 memory, and it had may not have supported the PC100 memory as well as it could (many 750s can't use "Super Bypass" mode, which as far as I can tell is a way to skip 75% of the latency in the common case, without getting the wrong answer sometimes).
In other words this is kind of a lame CPU benchmark since the systems were not made as similar as possable. It is a fine system benchmark, since you won't get the Kyrotech in any other motherboard. You probbaly wouldn't want to put a new AMD in a non KX133 system. Still the totally diffrent hard drives and sound cards and stuff, and diffrent amounts of memory arn't a good idea to get a isolate component test! Maybe not even for the system test (what gamer would spend over $1000 on a CPU, and stick with crappy 2 chanel on the motherboard sound chip?)
The benchmark makes a big deal of the slow L2 cache. It doesn't mention that the L1 cache is 128K, quite a bit larger then the P-III L1 cache (which I think is 32K). So when the Athalon gets the faster L2 cache, while I have no doubt it will help a great deal, it won't help as much as, say going from no cache on the Celeron to a 128K cache.
The P-III also has a much lower latency to it's small L1 cache, and to it's decent sized L2 cache. That can make a big diffrence for anything that chaces pointers down a linked list, or any other extreamly latency sensitave application.
All that siad, I really like the Athalon, it is a good value for the money. My new Unix box sitting next to my desk here is an Athalon (only 650Mhz, I figure I'll pick up a DP system later in the year if I'm lucky).
Basically, the world has changed slightly, and the x86 people now have the best process technology.
Intel and AMD have 0.18u; Alpha and HP and MIPS are still on 0.25u, and Sun will get to 0.25u with the Ultrasparc 3 this summer.
Alphas are still a lot better at scalar FP per clock (with two FP units and without that dumb register stack), but if you're doing single-precision work a P3 or K7 with SIMD instructions will be as capable as a $5000 21264 machine.
HP's PA-8600 chip is amazing; 1536k of L1 cache running at 550MHz (as fast as the L2 on the fastest Xeons around), with a brainiac design even more sophisticated than the 21264, delivers ridiculous speed for that clock rate. But at the price, I'd still rather have a decent second-hand car
Seems to me that this CPU MHz race makes no sense at all: until we're stuck with PCI bandwith
limitations these little monsters will only do more idle cycles, while waiting for data...
I really hope that the big players will find a new architecture, but something more interesting than the ridicolous Rambus thing:
maybe they will come out with a solution like Sun's S-BUS, this would really change the PC market!
In fact, if I remember well, S-Bus is not really a bus but each slot has a point-to-point connection to a dedicated controller
that handles data without CPU usage: this would be a real change! (but correct me if I'm wrong)
--
"The crux of the biscuit is the Apostrophe(*)" - FZ
Are you looking at the same data I am? On the various benchmarks posted, I see the following Athlon performance, normalizing P3-800/133 to 100%:
102.6%, 96.0%, 97.6%, 102.4%, 103.4%, 86.6%
A couple of percent on an isolated benchmark or two hardly amounts to a "severe can of whoop-ass." If anybody thinks these benchmarks show a significant difference between Intel and AMD x86 chips, they're kidding themselves. First, benchmarks are imperfect approximations of real-world performance and expecting a few percent difference to apply to the real world is naive. Second, in my experience, it takes about a 15-20% difference in speed in interactive applications before a computer becomes noticeably faster. Any speed difference less than that is only useful if you're running some kind of loooong compute-bound task. 10% might be worth if if you're running a render farm or doing weather simulation, but then you wouldn't be building a render farm based on Quake III results.
Those of you who are either an Intel x86 advocate or an AMD x86 advocate needs to realize that you're both in one narrow corner of the CPU architecture world. It strikes me as like arguing over exactly which Corvette options make the best car while ignoring Ferraris, Porsches, etc.
The 1 GHz Athlon is basically a crippled chip
Well, if so, then it's a "crippled chip" that benchmarks faster than any processor Intel has ever released.
Consumers have known for a while that AMD has the fastest processors out, but Intel still has the reputation of being market leader.
Given AMD's stock rise today, shareholders appreciate AMD delivering on their promises...
The announcement isn't that empty either - remember that AMD's policy is to announce when then can deliver in production quantity... Of course Intel will now "announce" the 1GHz PIII in the next day or so, but by their own admission they won't really be able to deliver it until Q3.
... it's only 3E8Mhz. What? Is slashdot now going to announce every new chip in the world? Wait at least for 400Mhz part. That would be at least somewhat round number.
:-)
Gee. Seriously, great job from AMD! Greets. A bit expensive though.
BTW: When you think we gonna have Socket (or whatever) Athlon parts for 50-80 bucks?
> "I wonder how much of an impact this will have on performance, compared to Intel's Kamati offerings with a 1/2 speed cache?"
I think larger L1 cache will compensate it.
BTW - it's strange how people only keep in mind L2 cache when talking about caches. Considering that L1 cache does 90% (or so) of the speeding job.
Oh, wait, maybe you're right. Seriously, I could care less about a 1GHz CPU, what I want is on-board 1.44 ADSL with a monster cache and scalable super-cache CPUs (say 500MHz). Now that would rock!
Will in Seattle
Yes, Intel is a Big Bad Multi-Billion Dollar Corporation. And the x86 archietecture has had a deservedly bad reputation since before most Slashdotters were born. What's humorous to me is that the teeming geek masses have gotten behind the AMD like it's a real alternative to the situation. AMD is not exactly some guy hacking hardware in his house for the good of the people. The Athlon is still an implementation of the x86 architecture.
The advantage of AMD is that they're providing an alternative to Intel, but the victory is slight. AMD isn't running down a new road that will give them a big advantage over Intel; both companies are pacing each other, and AMD has to keep the prices down in order to get anyone to look. Companies like Transmeta have a bigger opportunity, because they can do things that Intel simply can't do, like running at 1/25 the power consumption and 1/10 the price. Not that I'm a Transmeta fanatic, thank you, but I think they're the type of company that could have a more notable effect on the future of CPUs.
For us to have competition, AMD needs to partake in the marketing war. End of story. Having successfully done so (so far), their products are become of better quality, as their Athlon revisions with full speed L2 cache will probably debut next quarter. This will probably dovetail nicely with SMP Athlon motherboards, of which I have heard that the first may debut in the 3rd quarter.
matt
There's three kinds of lies - lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.
But anyhow, on the benchmarks you linked to, the Athlon's cache only affected it on games and synthetic 3D benchmarks. On professional level applications, the Athlon 600 was faster than the P3-800.
I mean, who would want these for games, anyway? On demanding games, it only got 98 frames per second! Seriously, at the $1299 price point, the main purchases of these things should be professional apps. If you're playing games, either get a slower Athlon with an overclocking card, or wait for the Thunderbird with full speed L2. Or get a 1 Ghz Athlon, so you brag to your friends, and put up with that painfully slow 98 frames per second.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
AMD held a very brief conference call this morning. I actually got to pretend like I was an important person and listen in. Compaq and Gateway have dibs on all March shipments of 1 Ghz processors. Everyone elso can get them in April. Also, here's the new pricing:
1000 Mhz:$1299
950 Mhz:$999
900 Mhz:$899
You also want to support lots of RAM. But the motherboards most places are selling (including Gateway's 1000MHz Athlon system) are limited to either 384M or maybe 768M of memory (the VIA chipset, like on Tyan's S2380, is a good example of a high-end board for the Athlon.
On top of that, there's still no multi-processor (forget that....how about DUAL processor?) motherboard for the Athlon. You can get dual processing MBs for Pentium-III's cheaply, and >2 processor MBs for Xeons, if you want to pay the price.
Just wanted to mention.... of course, even the non-Xeon Pentium-III has relatively few motherboards available that will support over 768M of memory, but you can go to the the Xeon and get MBs with up to 2GB (easily) 4GB (just becoming available from Tyan and others). 1GB is available for regular PIII's from several vendors.
Disclaimer: My system is a Athlon 700MHz. It rocks.
PS: Gee, Compaq: You'd think that when you issue a press release about your new system, you'd actually be selling them, but you're not (at least on your Web site). Gateway is....
Well, considering what Intel has been doing since AMD beat them in the clock-speed race and every benchmark race there is, I'd say that Intel is definitely just shooting for the MHz and not even caring about whateher the chips melt in their sockets (the 600s) or even boot!(the 800s)
But, don't get all worried about the 1/3cache like everyone else is, just overclock it to half and it'll beat anything Intel throws on the market for 3 months.
Esperandi
Yeah, and no one cared about when the Athlon hit 600 before Intel. Remember, that's why Andy Grove put his engineers under the whip and produced a nice little processor that promptly overheated and melted in the socket. Sure, they fixed it with a patch later (and reduced its performance significantly), but I think this is a good sign that AMD should try to fluster Intel all the time.
When you sit back for years being the biggest kid on the block used to releasing processors at your leizure and leading the speed race by a mile, you get fat. And a little later on down the road, you get your ass trampled by the little skinny kid who has been running his ass off and before you know it you're sitting there with an 800MHz chip which runs slower than the kids 750 which doesn't even really matter anyways because he just released a 900, a 950, and a 1GHz.
Everyone is railing about the cache. It's still going to be faster than the slowpoke P3.
And all you anti-corporation nazis take note - this is how monopolies are tumbled!
Esperandi
750 doesn't support PC100 memory? Doesn't support Super Bypass? Huh? It supports both. It didn't support super bypass when it first came out, but they do now.
Somethnig else to consider:
1.25x800 = 1GHz
1x1GHz = 1GHz
Lower multiplier to overclock. The multiplier on the processor is also probably different.
People seem to forget that a benchmarked chip is almost always slower. A chip running 100MHz x 4 = 400MHz is slower than a 200MHz x 2.
Esperandi
Sigh, someone always brigns this up and they make themselves look like a complete tool. The Pentium 166 ran about $2000 in quantities off 1000.... the week after it was released. The week after a processor is released, it is SKY HIGH in price - it halves in 2 months. It happens this way with each and every single chip. The Athlon 500 I've got opened up at around $900, it plummeted in price right afterwards.
;)
The bottom line is do not trust price estimates unless you're an OEM who *MUST* have the fastest thing the split second it is released. Otherwise, just wait until the thing is not only shipped but in the hands of retail vendors, then hop on pricewatch.com every day forr a week and watch the prices fall through the floor.
Computers are getting cheaper and cheaper in every aspect, only people who don't realize this just aren't experienced with watching processor prices...
Esperandi
(BTW, a P3 500 Xeon with 2MB of L2 cache costs $1900 *RIGHT*NOW* after its been out for ages, if you want expensive, there's the "other guy" to look at
Ultra-ATA/66 blows away most SCSI alternatives in both price and cost.
Wow, and my new car beats yours in both economy and miles per gallon!
Because you asked:
SGI's current processors are clocked from 225 to 300 MHz, while Sun's UltraSparc II(i) is clocked from 248 to 480MHz.
But you recognized it:
clock ratings are little more than marketing hype.
As you can see from the AMD-vs-Intel battle and Cyrix's PR-ratings you can't even compare MHz-ratings of x86 processors, let alone those of different architectures.
Furthermore, in the enterprise-class server market it isn't all about CPU speed, it is I/O throughput which is way more interesting.
I think larger L1 cache will compensate it. BTW - it's strange how people only keep in mind L2 cache when talking about caches. Considering that L1 cache does 90% (or so) of the speeding job.
Not sure where you are getting your numbers on this one, but keep in mind that no matter how fast the L1 cache is ([almost?] always the same speed as the processor), the L2 cache has to feed it. So if you figure a 128K L1 cache running @1GHz, and a 256K L2 cache running @333MHz, you can see where the problem comes in. Unless the entire application (read _very_ unlikely) can fit in the L1 cache, not even counting the OS operations/data, then you will see a significant slowdown as compared to a full speed L2 cache. What everyone shouldn't forget is how memory works, even if it isn't used more than once, each piece of data has to travel through each type of memory (main->L2->L1) before it can be processed.
Just my 2c.
The "Top 10" Reasons to procrastinate:
The "Top 10" Reasons to procrastinate:
10.
Maybe "full of old ideas" but not "insightful"... Sure, it used to be easy to show how RISC was more elegant than CISC but that was years ago guys. There have been hundreds of improvements to the x86 line that are quite innovative. Sun doesn't advertise it's CPU speeds because they're not so great. Unisys kills Sun's UE10000 with it's new Windows 2000 offering. Slamming IDE? Again, this isn't the IDE of old. IDE has had huge innovations. Ultra-ATA/66 blows away most SCSI alternatives in both price and cost.
You're right in being suspicious about Intel and AMD cutting corners, because they are. Right now, the MHz war is all marketing. That little speed rating marked on their CPUs make a large difference when it comes to selling machines with tier-1 computer manufacturers, which makes a large difference on their quarterly revenue sheets. This doesn't mean, however, that Intel and AMD are resting on their laurels because they can simply up the speed on each new processor by 50MHz easily. What goes on in the background is their roadmap for the future, like the Willamette and Thunderbird processors for instance, or the Itanium and Sledgehammer in the more distant future. There are long term advancements in CPU technology to be had, but they won't make short-term ideals of their shareholders happy if that's their main focus. Just look at where AMD was last year for proof of this. AMD was developing their next mother-of-all-processors, the one and only Athlon, which was to settle the playing field. However, it was only vaporware until August. They didn't have anything to keep them too profitable at the time. The K6-2 and K6-III weren't doing very well, and AMD couldn't just do something like release a K6-2 that was 50MHz faster to keep them going, because hardly anybody (except for the strictly economy-minded people and manufacturers) wanted them. Therefore, AMD and their shareholders lost quite a lot of potential earnings, even though AMD had the promise of the Athlon coming on the horizon. Now the picture is different for AMD. The market is eating up their Athlons like crazy, and they know what may be a relatively small increase in speed and performance will do very well in the market just because of the psychology of the "MHz" number, and the fact that their processor has been so successful. They can afford the time to develop their next innovation in processor technology. And it does take time. I don't mind it at all, I'll be happy as a pig in mud for the next year or so sitting on my Athlon 650, knowing that the GHz CPUs won't benefit me very much.
Even if fellow /.ers don't think this is such a huge milestone, AMD certainly do. Reading through that press release reveals just how much both AMD and Intel wanted to have the bragging rights to the first 1GHz x86 chip - likening it in achievement terms to 'breaking the sound barrier' is definitely a little extreme in my book, but I think the general public and the marketroids will have a field day with a 1GHz processor. I suspect that Intel will be extremely anxious to get their own press release announcing the 1GHz Coppermine out as fast as possible now to stop AMD claiming all the glory, but AMD will get some very useful publicity over the next 24 hours. Intel and the Pentium brand are still the CPU type that over half the computer-buying populace recognise in isolation and it is a major publicity boost to AMD to hit the 1GHz milestone first.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
There are a few areas where this will help (high end calculations, etc. But I feel it is aiming at winning over pen pushers.
In my previous support role out Finance controller was running pretty big calculations on desktops. THey had been informed that memory would allow them to do better and bigger calculations. They got me to order 3x256 MB dimms for each machine. He would not listen when I said that win 95 would never use it and in fact he would probably end up with more resource allocation failures...
Moral of this, well, competition is knocking down the prices of smaller processors, which is good, but I think the 1000, etc. marketing ploys are aimed at people like that controller.
I personally have a P166 MMX for my home use whihc does everything I need it to do. I can't play unreal tournament, but, hell, that's what work pc's are for.
Working for the (other) man
Well, it's official, you're nobody.
My other
The race between the americans and the soviet union to get to space. Soviet beated the americans with the first satellite and first human (altought, by a very thin time margin!). Now that race can teached us that : 1) Being first does'nt necessarely bring success. 2) Being first is good PR 3) Beating the winner afterward is even better PR And that means that Intel can still be the 2000 CPU winner. Only time will tell!
Gateway has a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal today (3/6) touting a system with this processor.
All that time I spent drooling over 4mhz systems, hoping to someday be able to afford 64k of memory . . .
.
And now, the "insignificant difference" in the *cache* speed is twice the speed of my dreams, and that cache holds more memory than a room full of computers or a box of disks . .
Pass the Geritol and my cane, please . . .
Yeah, companies like Dell is the most logical explanation for why AMD is doing this so soon. Dell will have to explain why they can't supply a 1GHZ machine while Gateway can. There may be a very good explanation (the AMD 1GHZ processors are crippled compared to what will be out later this year), but how many consumers will understand that?
This puts pressure on Dell and others who haven't gone for supporting AMD products.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
I understand the desire of AMD to beat Intel to to 1 GHz but when Intel does release more than vaporware, the benchmarks will blow the K75 core Athlon away. The 1 GHz Athlon is basically a crippled chip, with an L2 cache running at only 1/3 of the processor speed. Until the Thunderbird core is released and they have cache running at full processor speed, expect the Athlon to significantly lag the PIII at the same speed.
I'm not convinced that AMD would ever have released this chip except to beat Intel to the punch. The significant improvements will only come as the entire architecture improves (full speed L2 cache, AMD 760 and AMD 770 chipsets with DDRAM support). Current Athlon users will have virtually no incentive to upgrade until then. I'm sticking with my K7 500 (running smooth and stable at 750 w/ 1/2 cache). I'd be willing to bet the improvement would hardly be measurable trading off 250 MHz of wait states for lowering the cache from 1/2 to 1/3.
r/
Dave
OK, but I don't know that it's fair to blame AMD for this. Some of their early offerings (K5 generation, IIRC) did emphasize good architecture - pipelining, parallel execution etc - at the expense of raw MHz. And they suffered for it, because Joe Public has never heard of pipelining or parallel execution, but knows that 400 is a bigger number than 350.
Result: AMD got the message and refocused their efforts on explicitly trying to pump clock speed as high as possible. I recall an AMD exec openly saying as much some time back. Doesn't seem to have done them any harm, you must admit.
My point is: if the mass market is too dumb to care about anything but clock speed, you can't blame AMD for giving it to them. You might blame Intel, whose advertising seems to be deliberately aiming to sow confusion and ignorance about the technology they sell, but that's another story.
There's an article over at TechWeb that says intel plans to have a 1GHz p3 out by the 8th. And HP announced it will be the first to ship a 1GHz machine. I hope they didn't sacrifice quality for a good press blurb. But then again, I'd love to see them steal more market share from Intel.
I wonder how much of an impact this will have on performance, compared to Intel's Kamati offerings with a 1/2 speed cache? Also, does anybody know what the multiplier is on Intel's newest P3's? I can't remember their stupid name.
You can see on this page some benchmarks, showing that the AMD 1Ghz just barely outperfom the Kyrotech 1Ghz chips. When you look at the cache, the kyrotech is an 800 upped to 1G, therefore the cache, which was at 320 is at 400 in the kyrotech, vs 333 in the AMD chip. What else was changed in the AMD chip to make it outperform an older version of itself with faster cache?
thanx
Well, if it wasn't for the rush to the magic number (and the record books) we never would have seen this so soon. Intel is going to be hard pressed to get their yields up to where they can keep up with AMD's deliveries. I think we're seeing the changing of the guard at this point where AMD takes over the market leadership role and is going to drive Intel's product development rather than the opposite as has been the case in the past. Even with the superior performance in a "mhz even" case for AMD, they haven't stood still to have to prove equivalent benchmarks, they've attacked Intel in the forum Intel chose, clock rates. Congrats to AMD! Lead on!
Well its good to see that x86 based processors have hit the 1GHz mark. Now i am no expert on CPU's when I did computer architecture we studied the MIPS architecture and it was pretty clean (the subset we studied) and small....
I would like to know what the clocks on many of your boxes are like. I am pretty sure Sun does not sell their Eu10K's based on the MHz rating of their CPU;s. Also, how about some info on the SGI boxes and others ? ?
Also I find it interesting how marketing has made the MHz mark so freaking important that people spend 100's of dollars to get an extra 50 Mhz and then go and get IDE drives!!!
In parting I have to say that i have been a fan of AMD for sometime... cant wait till i start working so i can actually afford a K7! GO AMD!!!
and kudos to the Engineers there to be able to keep the x86 arch. going... as i recall it was called the "Golden Handcuff..big money for backward compatability with a backward technology"
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
The latest benchmark utility from Ziff Davis, Content Creation, is described as a system-level, application-based benchmark. Using Adobe Photoshop 5.0, Adobe Premiere 5.1, Macromedia Director 7.0, DreamWeaver 2.0, Netscape Navigator 4.6, and Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge 4.5, CC Winstone 2000 applies stress on a system's CPU to determine real-world content creation performance.
Heh, what better way to see how stressed a processor can get than to throw Netscape 4.x at it?
The competition between Intel and AMD has been good on the one hand in that it has increased processor speed, encouraged new innovation and dropped the price of the processors down. But I'm starting to wonder how many corners AMD and Intel are cutting trying to one up each other. I think they've both gotton so absorbed with processor frequency that they forget the real benchmark of processors: How fast they run applications. There are other, non-x86 processors out there that would blow an Intel/AMD processor out of the water, even running at half the clock speed. So what if I have a bajillion-kagillion megahertz processor when my Palm Pilot runs faster.
I think they need to start making the processors better, not faster. If they improve the quality of the CPU, the speed will come along naturally.
kwsNI
As you can see here, the Athlon 800 delivered a severe can of whoop-ass to the Pentium III 800 (both 133 and 100 bus speeds). And the following two points can be observed:
1) The Athlon 800 has the same cache divider as the Athlon 1Ghz.
2) The performance of the Athlon does not "severely lag" behind the Pentium, and in fact, it's a whole lot faster!
expect the Athlon to significantly lag the PIII at the same speed
Dude, either you work for Intel (FUD anyone?), or you better have some concrete information to back up your outrageous claims.