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AMD's New Thunderbird Articles & Benchmarks
nd writes: "The NDAs for AMD's new Athlon Thunderbird reports just expired, and the benchmarks have been pouring in. Tom's Hardware's coverage (in German) is here , a translation to English is here - Anandtech also covered the new CPU release. For those of you who want to learn more about the Thunderbird, here is an interview with AMD on the processor release. Overall, the Thunderbird is performing quite well, and will be sold at the same price as current Athlons.
"
As Tom stated in the end of the review, it is somewhat disasppointing. I was hoping the new Athlon would completely trounce the intel chip. Instead, intel beats it by a fraction on a couple of benches, and Athlon comes out significantly ontop in just a few scenarios.
Amusingly enough, if AMD wins, it will be because of price and availability, not sheer performance. I imagine there are benchmarks out there that Tom didn't present that might cast the athlon in a more favorable light.. theres no doubt in my mind that it's simply a better designed processor.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Here's a far better English version of the Tom's Hardware article
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
Some sort of hack that will post to slashdot for you with the same link.
The Thunderbird was meant to smash Intel, but looking at the benchmarks is hasn't really. At the high end > 850Mhz AMD is now slightly ahead of the CuMines from Intel.
But, Intel has new Willamette chios due by the end of the year and hasn't had to start using copper yet. As I see it, AMD maybe ahead now, but they probably won't be by the end of the year as they don't appear to have anything to put up against Willamette.
Some sort of hack that will post to slashdot for you with the same link.
OK, this is a troll which I just fell for.
It's a malicious CGI script which makes you follow up to the article, as anyone just seeing the article (or later on surfing at -1 when we all get modded through the floor) will find out.
Frankly I don't give a damn about karma, but this is just *annoying*.
If you appreciate this CGI script, then you can contact the original author at zk65@hobbiton.org. You can also visit the author's web page here.
:)
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Obviousness is always the enemy of correctness. -- Bertrand Russell
Skim the visible posts first. It looks like the "More Informative" link is a trap.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The Register is running a story that AMD have unveiled the Thunderbird.
CPU Review has a review of the Thunderbird here, and Sharky Extreme review it here.
Please disregard the above message, it's a link I dubiously clicked on and it points to some CGI that ends up redirecting your browser to a POST url on slashdot. Sorry about that.
.sig temporarily out of service"
"This
SkyHawk
Andrew Fremantle
I click that damn link, go to another virtual desktop, then come back and see two slashdot windows up and think 'damn.. ns must have opened another window and not gone the the link.. guess I'd better click it again'..
..it must be fuckin monday morning. Bitchass trolls.
//phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
Guess they fooled me.
/. has a virus now?
Does this mean
Heh, thanks. Someone got me once. Now I've become a little more cautious.
This one uses a cgi, so you can't get the source, but here is another way of doing it (save it locally and open it with vi, if you're paranoid like I am now).
I'm not too well versed in http, but couldn't the slashdot comment submission script be patched to check for the referrer field of the browser and reject it if it isn't coming from slashdot.org?
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
Don't rush out to buy your T-Birds just yet. To take advantage of the chip (or in many cases for it to work at all) you need to get a motherboard based on the KT133 chipset. That's KT, not KZ folks, because it was renamed at the last minute. KZ was an abbreviation for German concentration camps - now that's a naming flub, forget about Intel's "E" and "B" debacle!
To be honest, I'm disappointed. Previously the cache divider had held Athlons back behind CuMine chips at higher speed, and now that it's integrated I would have figured the T-Bird would have been kicking ass all around the block. I'm sticking with my P III 700E overclocked to 1008 MHz for now...
I'm watching Jerry Sanders, AMD's CEO, on CNBC TV right now talk about the T-Birds and I'm nonplussed.
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Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
..pisses me right the hell off. He makes the Thunderbird look worse by taking any chance at all, no matter how insignigicant, to point out anything this chip has against intel. Everywhere you look on thie review, the benchmark graphs show the coppermine on the new BX133 even to the Thunderbird or ahead of it, and all Tom can muster is 'Thunderbird is able to leave its predecessor as well as Intel's Coppermine behind it, as long as this processor does not run on the BX133-chipset' Yeah.. So the Thunderbird can run with the new Intel's, as long as your don't run it on the best motherboard. Now I'm as big of a fan of AMD as anyone else.. I'm about to buy an athlon in the next week or so, but Tom is totally biased against Intel and it shows in his articles. He shouldn't have to be making excuses for the Thunderbird not beating the Intel like it should, he should be showing us that it doesn't, and questioning why.
Fscking benchmarkers.
//Phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
The parent post has another CGI "trap" link in it. It does not appear to be the original, because its timestamp is later than the original problem.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Whoops, this took over the whole thread, shows how stupid people are...
As somebody wants to view the source it is here (this is the source to the cgi programme)
and if you want to see how many people have visited go to the log. Maybe I should disable it now....
zk65@hobbiton.org
wow.cgi has now been edited to put its comments in sid=wow which you can access by going to http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=wow
If you want to run it click wow.cgi or view wow.txt (the source to the cgi)
I find it odd that the Athlon can be shown to be 33-38% faster in pure FPU benchmarks than Coppermine, but none of that performance seems to show up unless you make a test specific for it. Is this an indication that the Athlon CPU is great but that the chipsets are awful for it? What would an Athlon do with a chipset as good as Intel's?
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
Some reviewers are agreeing that the power of the AMD CPU's won't be fully used until the new chipset has arrived: the new chipset (760 ?) is due to Q3/Q4 2000, it will enable "good" AGP 4x (hopefully) and will support PC 266 DDR SDRAM.
But I think that AMD should also add support for Firewire bus on their chipsets, this would differentiate them from Intel's offering (as Intel is a die hard supporter of USB/USB 2, I doubt very much that they would add also Firewire support on their chipsets).
I think that people would appreciate much more to plug easily their DV camera to their computer (without having to buy an expensive card) than going from 88 to 95 fps in Quake III or things like that...
Hmm...I wonder why the results are slightly behind Intel's (or about the same). If you consider pure CPU power benchmarks which are 10% (30% FPU) it seems just weird. None of these so-called-non-biased-benchmarkers have written a single word about it.
How would st. like gcc's -mcpu=athlon parameter for compilation change Athlon's performance? (I was told 30% -- could it be?)
Anyone else tried to compare AMD's officials results to Sharky's or Tom's. What do you say?
I have an alter-ego at Red Dwarf. Don't remind me that coward.
Tom's benchmarks (as people have already pointed out) are based on an overclock, and are only valid for the overclocker. The "BX-133" is just a BX chipset overclocked to 133-MHz FSB, and thus not something that Intel or most manufacturers recommend. Typical of Intel technology, the BX is an excellent chipset that was abandoned for market reasons.
If compared on a testbed of Intel's choosing, it would be a 820 or 840 with 800MHz Rambus which lacks the performance of an overclocked BX according to general testing I have seen. Thus, the minor disparity between the Coppermine and Thunderbird in Tom's tests would likely evaporate into a strict cost or brand loyalty decision.
Basically, AMD has caught up to Intel for most practical purposes, and need only the better chipset designs to make them their equal. Some SMP sets, and perhaps better optimized single-chip sets, would be much appreciated. IMO, they have an advantage in the area of memory by not being tied to a proprietary architecture like Rambus. When DDR-SDRAM becomes widely available, AMD will unveil even more "thunder" while Intel pays their penance.
-L
It doesn't even need to be done with a CGI script. A simple redirection in a static web page is all you need to do the trick. I demonstrated this last month here on Slashdot--got about 900 posts in 48 hours (my link gave a specific warning what it would do though.) At any rate, there was some discussion of the problem here. Plus links to PHP source to do it, etc.
Near term solution--run your mouse over the link to see if it's suspicious. This offers little protection really, but it's the best you can do.
numb
I'm not too well versed in http, but couldn't the slashdot comment submission script be patched to check for the referrer field of the browser and reject it if it isn't coming from slashdot.org?
If the slashcode just forced the post to be previewed before submitting then it wouldn't be a problem. Forcing people to preview first would also have other beneficial side effects.
numb
I must be special, it's showing up over threshold.
What distribution are you using? I can't think of one that lets a regular user nuke /usr/lib/*
Or maybe you are using the root account for everything (snicker), this isn't Windows you know.
Lars -
And...
I'm not too thrilled about this last part, the fact that there won't be an easy way to tell the difference between an aluminium T-bird and a copper T-bird. I'd imagine that copper vs aluminium will make a big difference in terms of heat and overclockability. I would imagine that the copper T-Birds are going to run cooler and overclock higher than an aluminium chip.
I seem to recall seeing a web site somewhere that gave directions on how to decode the Athalon's serial number; and that part of the information available therein was which fab line it came off of. Does anyone have that link? Then, all I'll have to do is find a dealer who'll let me look at the serial # of the chip before I buy it. $319 for a 750MHz sounds like a sweet deal to me (The article didn't say if the prices quoted above are estimated retail or AMD's price for 1000 chip lots)
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Excellent idea. I second that.
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
Not to disagree with you about Tom's bias, but you do realize that the "new" BX133 is just the old BX chipset running at a 133Mhz FSB, right? Since the BX chipset doesn't technically support the 133 Mhz FSB at all, and Intel has been trying to phase it out for a long time, it is in fact something of an exception, even if it runs just fine.
From what I've been reading AMD does not recommend using their new Thunderbird Socket CPUs with KX133 slotA boards, such as the Abit KA7 (even though Abit say it's T'bird compatible). Well I've been delving a little deeper & it seems that while the T'birds from the Dresden fab30 (copper interconnects) are at best iffy& at worse won't work with a KX133 board (via a slocket), many seem to think the Austin fab25 (aluminium interconnects) T'birds do seem to be compatible with KX133 boards, such as the Abit KA7 (via a slocket). Well I just read at www.sharkyextreme.com that the Austin T'birds will have a blue core, while the Dresden T'birds will have a green core. Plus as they are 'flipchip' type socket CPUs, like their previous K6 designs, however not with the aluminium 'primary heatsink' cover, you'll be able to see the colour of the core, unless the fansink is pre-installed & epoxied on. So it seems that if slockets become avaliable for the T'bird, & you already have a KX133 board, such as the Abit KA7, you might be able to upgrade to the T'bird if you buy a green one (& cross your fingers). As their are a few P6 boards that have both a slot & a socket, hopefully a few of the board makers will come out with VIA KT133 boards that also have both a slot & a socket on them too. Apparently, also, AMD will be supplying slotA T'birds to OEMS for use with such Irongate (AMD 750 chipset) boards as the MSI K7Pro, which are said to be quite compatible with the T'bird. Hopefully some of these OEM SlotA T'birds will filter down to the reseller market.
Just compare the performance of a early FIC SD11 with its immature BIOS & the later SD11 board revisions with later BIOS revisions - there's a huge difference, relativelly speaking. Also compare a VIA 133A board with old 4in1 chipset drivers to the same board with the latest 4in1 drivers - again a huge difference, relative to what changes have been made.
Need I say more. Also the Austin ones are said to be compatible with the earlier generation Athlon boards, via slockets. The Austin ones will also be avaliable in slot form (as well as socket form) for OEMs.
If the slashcode just forced the post to be previewed before submitting then it wouldn't be a problem.
Couldn't the bad-guy auto-post script just fake the HTML state that indicates you've previewed the comment at least once? You'd have to keep that state in a server-side database, which would add overhead to the existing system. How much overhead, I don't know.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
'bx133' is a name Tom invented for a 440BX chipset running at 133 MHz FSB. I'm willing to bet the only reason it outperforms T-Bird at all is because of the overclocked AGP (89 MHz, 2/3 the FSB clock). BX can't run AGP at 1/2 the FSB clock.
The i815 Beta comparison is probably more realistic. The AGP is running within spec at 66 MHz.
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
I thought the dual processor workstation market was the market the thunderbird was supposed to grab some parts - not ?
Cheers, Mickey. [Team Opie|OpenZaurus|OpenSIMpad|Wellenreiter]
You can't trust benchmarks because it is so easy to skew their results. I think you should buy the AMD chip because it is cheaper and the performance is as good or better.
There is also another important thing to consider: acording to http://www.netcraft.com/whats/, www.amd.com is running on apache under linux. Likewise www.cyrix.com is runing apache under bsd. However, www.intel.com is running some sort of micros~1 crap.
I am not sure it that is good enough to sway your chip buying practices, but it is food for thought.
Just gave the go-ahead for a friend to build me an Athlon 700 system w/512MB RAM, G400 32MB, two huge IBM HDs, video capture, SB Live, CD-R, etc...
Think it's worth waiting for the Thunderbird? Any idea when I'll be able to buy motherboards/CPUs for it? I really don't want to wait long. Been waiting long enough already! (First planned to buy the thing last October then kept puting it off for a couple months at a time...)
k7 thunderbird is a better cpu than a p3. That doesn't mean systems based on it, are necessarily better though. There are no shipping KT mbs yet anyway, so the pre-release numbers have a chance of improving
What tom does is most relevant. Comparing systems as a whole. He along with every other mainstream techy site thinks his readers just want to play games. Tbird's only advantage is faster L2 cache speed, and games don't care about cache.
You shouldn't be asking him to root for the same processor you would like to win.
Anyways, if you want to just focus on the processors, and not the mbs, then just compare the KT to the apollo. Your pecker enhancing athlon measures as long as you think it does.
The viewperf benchmarks show 20-30% difference over the apollo P3.
Thunderbird should be good when the 760 comes out. You have to wonder how committed mb makers can get to the KT chipset, when 760 is 2-3 months away.
I might get a Duron.
I can't believe you assholes fucked me like this. I'm reading an article, I click the fucking link, and you trigger happy moderating assholes RATE ME offtopic and troll, into oblivion! Well FUCK YOU TOO! I didn't even know it was going to do this - I had no idea it wasn't an informative link, and thanks to you assholes, my Karma droped below 25!
Rob said it was a real shame, and it was messed up, but he isn't going to start giving Karma back to those of us who were victimized by this, so tough. It's too much of a headache you see, too much like work. So I have my own solution:
EVERYONE WHO GETS ONE OF THESE IN METAMODERATION - DISAGREE WITH IT - COST THE MODERATORS A POINT PER POST - FUCK THEM LIKE THEY FUCKED ALL OF US WHO FELL FOR IT.
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
Scott
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
hmmm... this certainly leaves a love-letter type taste in your mouth.
Why doesn't AMD make a Xeon killer? A Thunderbird with a one meg on chip l2. And where are the SMP motherboards. I want to build a killer server.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.