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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.
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
The prices of the older chips will drop with the introduction of the higher rated chips. If you pay attention you'll find that the high end systems always stay about the same price, just the speed increases and that trickles down the family line. 2nd fastest will be 80-85% of fastest, then 75%, 60%, 50% and so forth. We can see some of this in the announcement 1000mhz (1ghz) @ $1299, 950mhz @ $999, 900mhz @ $899 and so forth. As the supplies of these chips come in, the demand for the available 750mhz chips will drop off (from the system manufacturers) and the onesy twosy prices will drop as well. The onesy market doesn't drive prices, it's the system people that are scarfing up the 1000 piece lots that make a dent in demand. Keep in mind they're announcing a new speed bump, not the availability of more affordable middle speed range chips. Also, look at where the price has gone already on the chips (700mhz) that were top of the line 3-4 months ago.
Another beauty of Linux (or xBSD) is that while computers keep getting faster, the OS isn't getting any slower. In the M$ dominated world, one has to constantly upgrade one's hardware to keep the software running at the same speed. Since old computers don't really get slower with time, they are still useful to people like us. I've got a P-100 doing just fine as a remote access / web server, and a P2-266 running really well as a desktop. If I used Windows, I would be screaming for upgrades by now.
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.
Bear in mind that the Athlon uses SDRAM, not the PIIIs Rambus memory, so a 128K Athlon system will be $500 or so cheaper based on that. Of course a lot of these premuim 1GHz systems will be used as servers with 512K or more....
Anyway, seeing as Intel don't expect to ship production quantities of the 1GHz PIII until Q3, Athlon is the only game in town, and they in the nice position of being able to enjoy that end of the price curve!
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
AMD dropped prices on the Athlon on Jan 28. They discontinued the 500 chip.
On Feb 28/29 prices dropped again and they discontinued the 550 chip.
Will they drop again at the end of this month? Who knows.
You can find a 550 at a bargain and if you get the right week number, find out what core is inside and overclock that puppy easily to over 700 mhz. Check HERE to see what cores are in which week number production CPUs
You won't find AMD reducing prices of their high CPUs anytime soon I don't think.
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!
Yes, the Athlon does support Multiprocessing. It's a point to point protocol of the EV6 bus, which gives each processor in a multiprocessor setup full bandwidth, as opposed to Intel's GTL+/SMP, which shares the same bus for multiple processors, giving diminishing returns on more than a couple of processors.
Hopefully the chipsets for this should be out soon. Tyan was talking first quarter at the end of last year, but I think it will more likely be second quarter, since there's only 3 weeks left in the first quarter.
A pet peeve: People refer to the new Athlon chipsets as "SMP". They're not. That's Symetrical MultiProcessing. They're Point to Point Multiprocessing, which I guess would be PTPMP or something.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
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.