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DDR SDRAM & Athlon Specs
Mr. Wong writes "We've finally got some solid benchmarks of DDR SDRAM on an AMD Athlon. Rambus better watch out, DDR looks solid." As well, check out this submission: ph4t1dck writes "Anandtech managed to get a hold of an Athlon motherboard with support for DDR memory and then proceeded to put it through its paces. Looks like this could spell big trouble for Intel & Rambus since the Athlon with DDR seems to be destroying the P3 with RDRAM. It'll be interesting to see how the P4 fares in all this with its 400 mhz front side bus."
Anyhoo, P-III is likely to have more relevance than Intel should be comfortable with because:
That's rather important; you can't get systems based on a CPU until you can get all the necessary components.
The fact that StrongARM motherboards aren't readily-and-cheaply available is certainly a contributing factor to a lack of widespread use for "desktop-like" applications.
The fact that Athlon SMP motherboards aren't available (yet?) is THE CRUCIAL factor that results in there being a dearth of SMP Athlon systems.
And once P-IV is "released," there will be a time when it is still not usefully available due to the motherboards and cases not yet having gotten through distribution channels.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
What are some good well-rounded Linux benchmarks?
Also of interest was the reports of decent stability with the pre-production motherboard. P. Mmm, gotta love GHZ
Bleh!
First off, as some people have pointed out, the P4 is running slower than the P3, clock for clock. In addition, by the time the P4 is due out, at current ramp-up for the Athlon, we should be seeing eqivalent-speed Athlons running on DDR 133mhz system busses, or roughly eqivalent to 266mhz. In addition, we're looking at using DDR SDRAM on the 266mhz system bus, which should give it a nice little kick in the pants versus RAMBUS, which probably won't even be able to fill half of the 400mhz system bus of the P4.
Now, Intel might still have some tricks up their sleeves, but IMO they've just plain dropped the ball. The Athlon came out of nowhere, kicked them in the pants, and they just weren't ready for it. They were investing major money in the Merced chip program, trying to milk some more money out of the P6 core, and so little RnD went towards upgrading their Pentium line.
Me? I'm bullish on AMD, bearish on Intel. I doubt that Intel is going to go out of business, but I can see a reversal of position and popularity in the cards if AMD doesn't fumble and Intel keeps on their current chosen path.
InThane
I've been seeing about a story a week on Techweb. Latest one has Micron and Hyundai (Yes, Hyundai!) filing suit trying to get the Rambus patents declared invalid. I gave up on submitting them to /. since they're always rejected, but Techweb has enough interesting stuff on it that it should be one of the sites you visit on a regular basis anyway.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Also if the bus doesn't have some form of flow control then the memory controller will have to wait until it has a full line almost ready to go before it can start sending data - this will add a lot to latency - but now with a bus/memory combination that run at the same rate these sorts of latencies will also go away.
A prediction - as 266MHz (2x133) DDRAMS start to appear the k7 bus will be pumped up to 133MHz (266 on both edges) and k7 speed grades will start to appear in 66MHz increments rather than the current 50MHz ones.
Anandtech is running NT. Serves 'em right.
Yeah, but if you look down the list of companies they thank, one of them is absent... ;-)
Geez, I love how moderators mod things up even though posts aren't based in reality.
3d-Now! is not merely an MMX extension. It was the first SIMD extension for floating point in the x86 architecture (Intel's SSE came later). It operates independently of MMX.
As for not being a substitute for your graphics card...well duh. But keep in mind that your CPU isn't doing nothing when pushing Quak3 out to the monitor. There's still the whole texture and lighting stage that must be done on the CPU (yes, Nvidia and all can get around this, but not all software uses those extensions).
As for "Is 3dNow used?", the answer is YES! Most modern video drivers actually incorproate 3dNow instructions in them as does some software. However, a lot of software prefers SSE since it's backed by the big guy. For reference though, the Athlon supports SSE prefetching just like the PIII.
However unlikly, if this bus is the same 400mhz, 8 bit bus of rambus, it's going to be slow.
Rambus uses a 8 bit bus where DDR SDRAM uses 32 bits at 200 mhz. That's 8bits*400mhz=3,200 and 32bits*200mhz=6,400.
How about an alpha? It uses a 64 bit bus at 200mhz. 64bits*200mhz=12,800.
How fast will the P4 fare in all of this? Well, once the info get there, it's going to be fast, but it might take a while, oh, and don't try to push it.
Funny how everything has moved forward, but Rambus and Intel is trying to drop a 8 bit on our heads.
Sorry, I won't buy a P4, just like I haven't bought anything after the p233 from them.
MarNuke
There's no reason to bitch. Unlike most sites, AnandTech lets you see the whole thing on one page - the trick is to click on the "Print this article" link. It also gets rid of the sidebars and such.
For this article, the 1 page link is http://www.anandtech.com/printart icle.html?i=1319.
I wouldn't disagree that a solid general purpose FPU is a better component than a specialized parallel unit.
I checked with the man (JC) about SIMD optimizations in Q3. To paraphrase him, there isn't any in the id codebase (having to write it in asm, lacking portability, uglifying the code, and not enough speedup were his reasons.) But it's likely to be in the various OpenGL drivers.
I agree that Q3 is not the be-all end-all of benchmarks. It showcases a on set of CPU strengths/weaknesses. UT is similiar in that it will exercise different aspects of the CPU and it doesn't make any sense for a benchmark-er to say one is better (or in this case more "normal") than the other. They're just different and either one is a good indicator of general system performance. And to say that one CPU/mobo combination is better based on selecting benchmarks to show that is ridiculous. It's no different than Apple claiming that the 266 Mhz G3 in their iMacs is twice as fast a processor as the 500 Mhz P3 because of a very damaged benchmark suite (ByteMARKS.)
Unlil we start seeing differences > 10% as a general rule in a wide range of benchmarks it would be pretty much irrelevant to a typical user to go with any 1Ghz machine (if they want that kind of speed.)
What would be interesting to see is a null-OpenGL driver for Q3. Thus we could leave the graphics card/driver/agp/pci issues out of things and just see how fast this particular task can be solved by a particular CPU. And to tell you the truth if we're looking at tasks that can be optimized by use of specialized instructions then they should be used. Otherwise we aren't testing the boundaries of the chips involved. IMO.
Like I said before, I'd rather have 3DNow! than MMX anyday. But even before either of those I'd take another 500 Mhz of CPU clock and 256 MB RAM.
If I had a nickle for every time some new product announcment "spelled trouble" for Intel, I'd be retired now. I certainly hope that as new things emerge Intel's death grip on the PeeCee market will erode, but we can only hope. Sometimes I think that the g33k culture gets too excited over things like this, not realizing that Joe Consumer generally doesn't know squat about what's in his box, and is more concerned with what software is pre-loaded, or what kind of speakers come with his new PeeCee. Not to mention that sales to businesses dwarf end-user sales (and the DIY PeeCee builders are less than noise in the equation), we have to ask "Does that make $en$e to the corporate buyers?". If big business endorses it, it will succeed. If Dell/Compaq/Micron/etc don't package this hardware properly, then the Intel/Rambus camp may continue to succeed in spite of its inferior performance.
-This sig intentionally left blank
Question...whatever happened to 3dNow? Did it just never catch on or what? I remember thinking it could have been a great technology, on processor 3d modeling stuff. Sounded like something gaming companies would have jumped on. Is it even included in the new Athlons?
--trb
The Tech is better, but it seems that our court system is going to put Rambus on the top, considering all the lawsuits that the Rambus consortium is winning.
According to Ars Technica, only Micron remains.
This means that we're going to pay extra for our RAM habits. I believe that the CEO of Intel earlier stated that Rambus forcing out DRAM was a scenario that Intel was intentionally pushing for.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
In other words K7's been crippled by its memory subsystem from day 1 -it's only now you will start to see it running at full speed ....
The P-III is at the end of it's life... it seems rather pointless to compare it's performance versus the Athlon any longer. In most cases, for this generation, the Athlon either provided superior performance, or at least equal performance, while costing a fraction of what an Intel chip would have costed...
With the P-IV on it's way and having a TON of architectural changes to itself and the rest of the subsystems, any comparison of the P-III vs Athlon should be disregarded come the Pentium 4.
I'm not AMD bashing - i've got an Athlon 700 system enroute to me as I type this, but P-3 vs Athlon seems to be beating a dead horse at this point in the game.
Looks like this could spell big trouble for Intel & Rambus
I read yesterday that NEC is now caving to Rambus on IP. I haven't read anywhere that Intel isn't doing a DDR chipset. (840 IIRC) While I'm glad to see benches at last, I would dismiss neither Intel or Rambus, as both seem to be in a good position to take advantage of DDR. Please note as well that DDR motherboards and RAM won't be widely available for a couple months, yet. Plenty of time for Intel (who does sometimes hold the cards closer to their chest) to make hay, too.
Now if Infineon and Micron could just dent Rambus' IP claim we might have something to really celebrate.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Anand's site seems to be Slashdotted or something. Sometimes the pages come up and sometimes they don't.
Since pulling up any given page on Anand's site right now is sort of a crapshoot, and the benchmarks start on PAGE 8 or so of the review, you might want to jump straight to the benchmarks... here's the link...
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.h tml?i=1319&p=8Just change the "p=8" to "p=9" or something to jump to page 9 instead of 8... gotta love those excessively-paginated articles to boost those ad hit rates.... :-D
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Similar to the Blue affect of IBM. Although, looking back over the past 10 years, I'd say IBM has learned that they actually have to be smart and competitive, telling people "Just buy from us, we know what's good for you" doesn't work anymore. With Intel's stumbles of late, the sheen of invulnerablility is showing some tarnish. AMD needs to work on pushing their track record in the faces of those corporate buyers. Same applies to the SDRAM, RDRAM and DDR SDRAM front. If purchasing agents were made aware that all systems up to now have used SDRAM they'll cast a jaundiced eye at anything else, unless Intel is pushing it and they trust the Intel name and aegis.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So a comparision where AMD wins is more 'normal'? And how about those excuses for why the P3 is beating the Athlon? These sorts of tests should really be done without any bias. I mean I'm all for whacking the yutzes on the head for screwing around with RDRAM, but let's get real here... if a platform is faster for a particular benchmark it's faster and there really isn't any point in rationalizing away the fact. Who cares if it uses optimized instructions for a particular intel chip. For hell sakes, I'd rather have 3dnow on my celeron instead of MMX, but that doesn't mean that I will ignore the fact that software which leverages 3dnow is faster than the car wreck that is MMX.
All of the settlements I have heard of so far were foreign companies who have a track record of not really fighting american companies in american courts anyway.
That changes with Micron, who have far more of a level playing field.
They're the ones we should be watching. Micron has the best chance of winning. If they do, that will quickly turn things around and these settlements will stop happening. If they settle, well, then everybody who is left is likely to.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Yes, you are correct, they DID get rid of East Germany. Germany now has no Eastern region, as during the German re-unification a relativistic spatial contraction was performed upon the German landmass, thus compressing Germany into a two-dimensional region. Under EU law, this sort of national compression is legal, and is totally unobservable by the residents of Germany.
Unfortunately, the huge area of Europe which was formerly occupied by the three-dimensional Germany is now a dangerous void. Anyone who falls into the aforementioned void will instantly be sucked into a parallel world of frightening paradoxes such as "What if I killed my own Grandfather?" and "If God made the world, then who made God?".
People who happen to fall into this void are forced into an infinite lifetime of hard labour, where they are forced to make RAM chips from ear wax and their own anal hair. Once a week, a huge space cockroach called Tarquin descends into the void to harvest the RAM chips. The RAM chips are then distributed (by supernatural means) to shops around the world where customers may purchase them. This is how East Germany manufactures RAM.
Thank you.
Intels own demo pitched a 1.5 GHz P-4 vs a .75 GHz P-!!!
;->
Draw your own conclusions
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I agree that Joe Sixpack will probably just get a Duron for Christmas since it's advertised to go more Megahurts (see the Register)than Intel and will be cheaper and more available.
Personally, it's really nice to see some competition out there in hardware land, but the corporate buyers at my workplace don't worry as much about
- MHz (a forgeable performance metric)
- my tasks/unit time (a better metric)
- the initial price
so much as the demonstrated reliability and trouble-free operation over the past 3 years. What those buyers are worried more about is how much it will cost to maintain that box over the next 3 years, i.e., how many visits required by a support tech.That basically means, in x86 Windoze compatible land, that you get Dells with Intel chips, expensive RDRAM notwithstanding, since they have historically been rated as the most reliable.
I love the Athlon and would like to get a NICE DDR Thunderbird system so it wouldn't be so starved for memory. By NICE, I mean with redundantly extravagant cooling fans with quiet ball bearings and a large Ultra160 disk with high MTBF and low noise/heat.
But Guess What?!? All the OEMs see AMD and think,
The only alternative is to build your own Athlon system. But I think it shows where there are gaps in marketplace based on building a solid AMD based system. Until someone puts together solid AMD-based systems for 3 years running, or gets Dell to abandon its Intel-only policy, there won't be the penetration and competition in the corporate marketplace to give those buyers a real choice and reasonable prices.
All the performance leading technology that the K7 or K8 can muster won't change this reality.
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There will be also a SMP version of the 760 DDR chipset, however sources say that the 2 way system will be ready only next year, and the status of the 4 way system is still unknown.
More to the (OT) point, AMD is more responsible for Intel's dropping prices. They may regard AMD as an mere imitator, but they certainly are reacting to AMD, which speaks volumes.
DDR will be a good thing when we have a number of chipsets and motherboards to choose from. Fortunately for us, TaiwanInc. will have a number of these available by the end of the year, so we don't have to wait for Intel to "invent" it.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar