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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.
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.
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
..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
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!
I'm not sure why it shows how stupid people are.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
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
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"?
Where did you get this nugget? I hadn't seen anything (yet) that indicated that I wouldn't be able to slap a T-Bird onto my existing motherboard (a FIC SD-11). I wasn't planning on buying a new motherboard until the 2-way SMP socket-A boards hit the market.
From what I've seen so far, all the new KT133-based mobo's are socket-A and not slot-A. The T-bird is supposed to be available in either slotted and socketed form factors. I don't see any point in AMD selling slot-A t-birds if they won't work in existing first-generation Athalon motherboards. I could see where you might not get optimal performance out of a t-bird without the new chipset, but for it not to work at all with the older chipsets is really bad - it's not like they've added any new functionality that needs chipset support.
The only major differences, AFIK, between t-bird and first generation Athalon is on-die L2 cache, 0.18 micron process (vs 0.24 on 1st gen IIRC), and some tweaks in the core. I didn't notice anything in the literature that said t-bird is running at a different voltage or anything like that. If you have specific information on why T-birds won't work with the AMD-751 / VIA 686A chipsets, please let me know.
As to your dissapointment in Athalon's performance, I think most of it is due to the fact that most pre-compiled software is optimized for Intel chips. IIRC, the lastest version of GCC has a switch to optimize for Athalon. From what I've seen so far, this makes a noticable difference. (Obligitory karma whoring: Yet another reason to use open source software!)
"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"?
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.
Quite right on the AGP. And even if we could push data across it fast enough, it's not much of an issue. With 32MB and texture compression on most cards, they rarely have texture bottlenecks where they're swapping out textures all the time. A decent PCI Gefore 2 would probably only score 10% (tops) slower than an AGP 4x card.
And, I think you're wrong on the Firewire issue... stuff like that will never get adopted until it's on chipsets. And it's good for a lot, it's basically serial scsi, great for digital video, external harddrives, etc.
USB is aimed at mice and other low bandwidth or temporary devices (scanners). USB2 is fatally flawed and even if working perfectly, not terribly exciting seeing as how it requires CPU interaction on all transfers (device -> cpu -> device) which limits it to maximum of half its rated speed. Then you get all the old USB1 devices (like mice) slowing the whole bus while they transfer data, not to mention that the handshaking between fast devices must be done at slow speeds... Ugh. Not only does the handshaking eat bandwidth, but it eats essentially 10* as much because it's slower.
Firewire is an essential connector for the future, leave USB where it belongs, as a replacement for serial, and let firewire take over the high performance niche.
> kept puting it off for a couple months at a time...
Clearly, the optimal time to buy a computer is when you're on your death bed.
I posted a "when to buy" query to some Ask Slashdot article a month or so ago, and based on the responses decided to wait a few more months to build. Mostly we will see the expected gradual increases in top-of-the-line speed and decreases in price for a given speed.
However, there appears to be a substantial discontinuity in progress when DDR memory shows up, and the posts to the aforementioned thread left me with some hope that it would be here by late summer or early autumn, and would not be much more expensive than conventional RAM. (Indeed, I read a couple of news articles over the weekend that seemed to imply that people are getting DDR engineering samples already.)
If anyone can give updated information on the expected discontinuity, I'd certainly be glad to hear it.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade