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Intel Cancels its Timna chip
zensonic noted that Intel has announced that they are
cancelling the Tinma chip. It was an integrated chip that would be used in low end systems... they cited market demand and design problems as the reason.
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Rack up another intel foulup due to the MTH debacle. First the entire Camminogate scandal, with the RIMM slot removal, and then the recall due to the MTH. Now because they still cant get it right, they have to cancel the Timna. Once AMD gets their chipset situation together (they need a cheap/integrated chipset a la i810) to go with their Duron, they will be set to do well on the low end.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Software is made to match existing or future hardware. Quake3/UT are a massive improvement, graphics-wise, over (say) Doom. But Doom was smoking fast on my 486/66. Quake3's install CD would physically emit a laughing noise as the drive door closed if I tried installing it on that box. And as fun as Doom was, Quake3 is MUCH easier on the eyes to play and just plain more INTERESTING. It's the rampant increase in hardware quality that gets you that, er, interestingness.
Same goes for Office-type apps. I remember in the days of the aforementioned 486/66, Word would take nearly a minute to load, took forever to spell/grammar check, and don't even THINK about running anything in the background! MIDI player maybe! =) Now on Windows/Linux on my spiffy new-age box, I can have several apps going at the same time, say (under Windows) Photoshop, VC++, Netscape, SQL Server clients... hell, SQL Server... all stuff that I'll regularly tab between during the day.
And there are still apps that bring this new box to its knees. Bryce comes immediately to mind as an app that makes my CPU and RAM cry in pain. Maybe a little 256M upgrade...
My point, and I do have one, is that while it sometimes seems that technology progresses for no reason other than to encourage consumption, the efficiency and kewlness factor of PCs now is far greater than that of PCs 5 years ago, 10, 15... I'm surprised those old XTs got bought by ANYONE for anything besides Lotus 123. They were all but unusable. Sure, products are made to make money, but by labelling the PC consumers as suckers you're really blindering yourself from the big picture.
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The gravitational constant of protein has changed. - Turbine
Even with the long drunken drive back down 280.
What's new in that?
Well, if you think it's a turd now - do you remember it 6 years ago? THAT was a dry turd..
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Darn, now I have to redraw my schema....
I posted the original FACE intel comment, I post it on every intel-fscks-up article that slashdot posts. So, for the third time today - here's the original article - and I won't venture any insight as to why the original comment got reset (kinda pisses me off), but it's most certainly a factor as to why Intel has been missing to boat. This is also in the Pentium IV thread.
I post this every time Intel screws up (which is pretty regularly, when you think of it) and every time, no moderators pick up on what's going on. So, for the good of my health, here's the same diatribe yet again:
Intel is losing their edge because they treat their engineers like garbage. Please have a look at the Former and Current Employees of Intel protest web site for the skinny on what's going on there. Intel's abusive human resource policies are coming back to haunt them, because the people with the experience to pull these projects off are getting fed up and leaving for companies like Texas Instruments and AMD.
Always look for what's going on behind the scenes.. Intel has some great spots to work, but the microprocessor division and their manufacturing lines are not one of them.
Don't buy intel. Don't buy their stock. They need to correct their HORRIBLE HR policies - and I wonder why Slashdot hasn't picked up on this earlier.
This is somewhat weird, as I was just planning to get myself an Abit VP6. I just got a BP6 not three months ago, but the C366s didn't pull 550, and thus it can't decode DVDs properly. So then, I was looking at Athlon SMP (actually, it's not proper to call it SMP, it should be just "multiprocessing"), but that's at least four months down the road, and I need the speed right NOW. However, I'm gonna ditch the VP6 in favor of a dual Athlon (or maybe a single or dual Alpha... yummy!) as soon as those come out.
Is anyone else hooked on SMP like me? Is anyone else on a wacky upgrade cycle like me? I think I'm crazy, but then again, working over the summer has its advantages...
Now, as for what this has to do with the main article... well, the VP6 and such is where Intel really needs to be putting its efforts. Making a cheap line, a normal line, a power line, and a super line, as documented in recent reports, is normally called SPREADING YOURSELF ALL OVER THE PLACE. Some can do this, but it gets tedious and tiresome, as is evident by this article's announcement. Now, while I'd rather see Intel lose even more market share, I can still say that for them to do better, they maybe need to NOT try and segment the market into so many little slices.
Long rant? Yes. But hey, this is slashdot... discussion encouraged!
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But if you look at sales figures you can see the most growth in two areas:
- Cheap desktops (less than $1000)
- Notebooks
I think people are getting smarter about computers and making the decision to buy a cheaper desktop if they don't need all that speed, and also choosing a smaller, cooler form factor like a laptop instead of buying a high-performance desktop.In addition, it looks like thin clients are making another go of it and that also indicates that people are rejecting performance at the cost of simplicity/reliability.
There will always be a hardcore minority of game/benchmark freaks that want the latest and greatest, and since they tend to also have more technical knowledge they have a disproportional representation on the web.
BTW since I just bought a new space heater... I mean Athlon desktop I have to count myself amongst the hardware freaks, but I sympathize with those that want a simpler computing experience.
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"Rock over London... Rock on Chicago..." -Wesley Willis
Read the "The Story of Hussein" from Netslaves for a glimpse into fun & games Intel, er "ChipTek" style
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end communication
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
I basically agree with you - most people have no real need for a 1 Ghz processor, DDR/RDR RAM, or awesome graphics cards. However, Slashdot does attract (no flamebait intended) the '133t haX0r juveniles (and aging arrested-development g33k5), so there's a weird lust for bleeding-edge chips. (I share that edgy hardware lust, so I must be one of the latter sort of technophiles).
However, _most_ college students just want to get connected to the campus-net, write their papers, communicate with their professors and assistants, and get through school. They don't focus on the coolest/fastest stuff ('cause Dad - unless he's a geek - isn't going to replace it every semester).
Last Fall I gave my daughter a Sony VAIO notebook for school. Campus tech-support couldn't get it to connect to their net. This year, she bought a different PCMCIA NIC, and it works! It's just a notebook, but that is just what many students have now.
So, only students who believe, wrongly, high-end hardware will impress professors, will pressure parents for latest systems.
[Here's the "I walked 10 miles through snowdrifts to school" story.] When I was in college, I did _type_ all my papers on an Olympus portable (that was a typewriter, for those unfamiliar with them) and I managed to communicate. However, there was an IBM 1401 in the computer center. It took Fortran punch-cards. There was also a commercial service-bureau down the hill (that also used the punch-card regime, plus OCR), and I worked there as a "night operator" for a while, in the early '70s.
That little datacenter processed the billings for Evergreen Air (the CIA airlift contractor during the Vietnam war). I've never seen so much money flow through any system since then - add millions of dollars per day, multiply by months, and - as Everett Dirkson said - pretty soon it adds up to real money!
Back to the topic. Intel is in trouble! They aren't capable of releasing any competitive products, lately. The P4 is delayed, as is their wrong-designed Itanimium, and now... Timna is canceled - will Intel sell a lot of suspect overclocked P3 chips this year?
Timna is (was) an internal codename, not a marketing name. BTW, it's the name of a copper mine in israel, dating back to biblical times.
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The problem with Timna was not with Timna--it was with RAMBUS. Timna itself has been ready for over 6 months--the problem was that this "low end" processor was designed only to use Rambus memory. Timna wasn't late, the "bridge" chip was late. Intel made the mistake of assuming that Rambus would be the de facto standard and very plentiful by now...
Bizarre. My first post vanished. That's some serious bad karma!
As I may have mentioned, my first thought when I read "Tinma Cancelled" was "Duron". Intel's roadmap has some serious potholes in it, after recalling PIII's, push back of the P4, supply problems and losing customers to AMD. AMD folks must be heading down to the Tied House (in DT SJ) to get plowed.
I know a number of people within Intel who say expense practices are loose and Intel is hemmoraging large amounts of cash on sloppy management and indecision. I'm expecting after this week there will be some shakeup and possibly some restructuring. This many mis-steps usually doesn't go unrewarded.
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Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The new management wanted to change Intel's direction - that is what new management always wants to do. Since Intel was a successful dominant player in a single huge market - they decided to become an unsuccessful player in lots of smaller markets. Of course the consequences of that sort of direction change seems to escape the perceptions of the razor sharp minds who are paid the big money to lead industry.
I am reminded of the huge retail discount chain who spent close to a billion dollars to build branch stores in Mexico - only to discover to their shock that Mexico is a poor country compared to the US and that the people there couldn't afford to buy what they had to sell.
Doh.
No need to worry, the commarades have taken over slashdot. Please be patient while the crackers learn how to use the slashdot database. If you find that your comment has disappeared, your username is erased, or that the site root has been deleted and you get a 404 message, the crackers appologize profusely.
That's Tin-Ma, like Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons. We just missed out on robotic maids! Crud. Guess I won't be able to pick up a Tin-Ma at Fry's, and my room is still such a sty, too. I'll have to formulate a plan to deal with this, start with a few beers, then a few more and possibly pass out. Yeah, that works. Guess I don't need a Tin-Ma after all.
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Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Intel has done, lately:
1. Continue to push through new standards in the industry.
Unlike MS, who introduces new "standards" in software to twist old ones and keep things proprietary, Intel generally pushes through hardware standards that improve hardware in general.
Remember AGP, and everyone bitching at the time that it wasn't needed? I bet everyone's glad that their video cards today aren't running on the PCI bus. Speaking of PCI (which is getting old and crusty itself) Intel is leading the development of its replacement, in the same way that it led the development of PCI to replace ISA. ATA-100, and its future successor, Serial ATA, come to mind as well. Even RDRAM (may it RIP) was just bad execution of a good idea (more serialization, less traces on the memory bus).
2. Merced.
Whoa, before you flame this, think about it for a moment. This oft-delayed processor not only introduces a new computing paradigm (EPIC), it's also a processor that completes 8 instructions per clock cycle. Once the die shrink comes around, and clock speeds start coming up in McKinley, what exactly is going to compete with this 64-bit chip? Not Sledgehammer. Not a whole lot of RISC chips out there.
3. Willamette.
Merced, reversed. Instead of focusing on the number of instructions per clock cycle, it simply focuses on the number of clock cycles. While a lot of people have commented derisively about it, 2 years from now when the Willamette core has been refined and Intel is several GHz ahead of everyone else, I don't think near as many people are going to be laughing.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I recently got a PII-300mhz server, with 64 megs of RAM. You know how much it cost me? Nada. A company was forsaking it for a newer model, and I got it for free. Now why would someone pay now for a chip not much faster than the chip of yesteryear that can be had for free or close to it?
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"Rock over London... Rock on Chicago..." -Wesley Willis
If I recall correctly, Intel's roadmap included the Celeron and the Timna, along with PIII and P4, along with Itanium. Seems a tad broad, so a thinning was reasonable. I didn't expect the Timna to go, rather the Celeron. That it's almost October and we're still looking at Celerons and PIIIs as the core of their line is telling.
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Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That is a completely accurate statement. So was my previous post. What's 2+2 ?
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Well, looks like Intel's just started another nail in their own coffin. Now, Moore himself is standing there over the fine oak with inlays of pure silicon, holding the nail for me...
Do I reach for the framing hammer sitting on the workbench?
Pondering this situation, I consider their market dominance despite more techologically advanced peers. I wonder about the costs to computer users everywhere of the forced compatibility with an ever-more obsolete core ALU as Motorola's 68000 is pushed to relative obscurity, used only by a fringe of purists that doesn't even include me anymore.
I question the sustainability of a processor design style that adds transistors without calling upon those gates to do more, to be more efficient.
And as I hit Ingram Micro's website and buy 17 new computers for the office, I pick up the framing hammer and give it a good swing. Right on the mark.
The new machines have Athlons under the hood.
It's not a perfect swing, mind you. It's not a Motorola or a Transmeta. But it's what I need.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I basically agree with you - most people have no real need for a 1 Ghz processor, DDR/RDR RAM, or awesome graphics cards.
Sure. That sounds great.
Remember the first Pentium 60 you saw? Or Pentium 100? Remember how lightning fast that was, and how it was the pride of your desktop?
Then, the MP3 came along, and you wanted to listen to tunes in the background as you worked.
The MP3 is on the verge of becoming the next "killer app" (if it isn't already). And yet a P100 with 24 megs of RAM and Windows 95 will barely play them.
Sure, Windows is inefficient, but's it's also about as close to a standard OS as we've got right now. The point remains, the P100 is obsolete: it won't do what I want it to do.
How long until the next big thing comes along and forces you to move up to the 1GHz box that you just shunned?
Your stance is pretty naive, especially given someone with your history in the field:
there was an IBM 1401 in the computer center. It took Fortran punch-cards.I mean, I'm sure a 4.77MHz XT could do a lot of things that, for a variety of reasons, your FORTRAN-punchcard system couldn't do. I know my old DEC PDP-8 couldn't keep up with one.
But, thankfully, the XT wasn't the be-all and end-all. It was a great machine in its time, but I'm really happy that I'm not limited to them. If we'd been limited to XTs, the World Wide Web, MP3s and emerging technologies like practical video streaming just wouldn't have been possible.
So, which comes first, the intensive apps, or the hardware to run them?
(And no, I'm not as old as I sound; when I was in high school, I scored a junked PDP-8 from the Canadian Federal Government. I still have parts of it.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Folks,
I think the reason why the Tinma chip has been cancelled is simple: it would have been too limiting compared to a motherboard that uses the Intel i815 chipset, which has dramatically dropped in cost lately.
Remember, the i815 chipset has a fairly good graphics subsystem (it may not be nVidia GeForce quality but then the majority of computer users don't need that level of graphics chips) and a very good sound subsystem (it has full wavetable MIDI support); that's why many medium-cost computers are now using the i815 chipset matched to a FC-PGA form-factor 600-700 MHz Celeron CPU.
Besides, the Tinma CPU would definitely not have compared well against the AMD Duron 700 MHz systems.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
yes Intel do alot of standards in the glue layer but this is mostly get a bunch of people and thrash it out
anyone who has a good idea and does not play with the group and goes for standard anyway be doomed as they make every effort to discount you I would not mind as alot of bright people work there but they can go round spreading FUD quicker than I would believe
MERCED
jeez give me a break I would like to see what Intel are paying HP
HP do the parallel optimization and pipeline design and compiler and VLIW design and Intel say hey well market it and produce it HP say ok and now Intel get all the credit ? well its egg on face because the glue between IA32 and IA64 is holding things up as well as it being a complex chip HP are nearing PA-RISC and IA64 integration because they are very umm similar
HP are more involved with Willamette simply because its the chip they are useing
dont be silly
regards
john jones
have you seen andy groves Intel watch ?
why is it there ?
(a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
Apple's stock just nosedived 50% - I don't think anybody should be taking a page out of that book... or, alternatively, maybe Intel already did. :-)
sig fault
The nugget I seem to notice missing in most articles about Apple's failure is a recently familiar one, supply chain disruption, i.e. parts shortages. Can't make them, can't sell them.
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Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Sometimes what are apparently dumb ass management decisions work, but mostly they fail. Sometimes wise decisions fail, but mostly they work. There are always good sounding arguments for foolishness; else why would anyone ever make a foolish decision? In Intel's case abandoning a successful strategy to do just the opposite might work - but so far the evidence is strongly against it. Even the staunchest supporters of the new direction have to admit that it is a very risky approach; the odds are against it.
The reason that fools continue to exist in the world is that they succeed just often enough to keep trying. Those successes are both necessary and proper - the wise don't have the world completely figured out, and successful fools remind them of that fact. It is more evidence of the Yin and Yang nature of reality: mostly the wise succeed and mostly fools fail, but there is an element of the wise failing and fools succeeding.
Had Intel continued to do things the way it did things in the past: with focus, great engineering from experienced personnel, a sterling reputation, and a huge bankroll for development, it is difficult to see how anyone could have challenged them. Now the only part of that package which is there is the huge bankroll, and that may be enough to buy Intel the time to succeed with its new direction, or it may not be, time will tell.
I've used my Pentium 100 mhz for 5 years before I finally upgraded to a pentium 2 466 mhz celeron. ...
The old PC was so useful under unix that I kept it as my only PC for quite all that time. When I bought it, it was top of the line at the time. I remember paying over 3000$ for it.
It was a capable machine and it can do everything I needed, play mp3s, compile, write perl and php scripts, browse the internet etc
The strange thing is that with the latest windows and all the latest software I don't feel my new pc is any faster than my old box. Sure I can play nice games but I don't see the benefit.
Why does all windows software become more and more slower and bloated instead of being more efficient?
The only way I can really see a performance increase is doing anything under unix or when I'm compiling software under both windows and unix.
So now I'm sticking to my original platform (freeBSD) I wonder how many more years I can get use out of it before I finally need to upgrade!
Old PC's are still usefull. My old PC is still useful as a personal all-purpose server and I always look for old hardware people just throw away. (I just think their market idiots)
"If a show of teeth is not enough, bite
If you think a 333 MHz PIII is fast enough for everything you do then you're not in the high end. Believe it or not, there *are* applications that will suck up as much power as you can give them. Try doing FDTD modeling and you'll see what I mean. Better yet, try debuggin FDTD code. Every time you make a change to the code you have to wait several minutes while the code runs just to see if your latest change works. If you're coding all day, your productivity is very dependent on the speed of your machine.
Methinks there were planning to sell the chip at a price identical to that of an AMD chip twice as fast. :-)
"Feel a glory in so rolling / on the human heart a stone" --E. A. Poe, "The Bells"
The server must be using a Timna chip.
I'd like to cancel my first post, please.
I was just here, and there were 30 comments..
Where the hell'd they go??
.sig: Now legally binding!
It seems to me that Intel has *really* lost their focus in the post-Andy Grove era. They've acquired a million companies, and are just staying alive because their name is Intel. First the Itanium (well, I guess that started in the Andy era), then the P4 being delayed, now this! Too bad Intels competition can't seem to *majorly* punish them (yea, AMD chips are cool, but they don't have any dual/quad processor support & aren't really being placed into high-end servers by companies like HP or Crapaq (oops, I mean Compaq))
Doh!
Who would buy a chip named TIMMAHH!!! =)
God Fucking Damnit
Faceintel.com
The poster's contention was that Intel is working its engineers to the bone, and under a demeaning work environment, and this is why Intel is falling behind - their top talent is leaving for AMD and Texas Instruments (TI) en masse as a result of management. This, the author contended, was the real reason for Intel's recent failures - they've pushed their engineers too far.
I doubt this is a conspiracy, but I'm reposting this anyway, as the comment deserves to be seen, as does the site.
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Why would they do this, I mean, we all know that the celeron worked out pretty well???
Seeing a chip like this dropped is disturbing. Two and a half years ago, I bought a Pentium II 333. At the time, it was the top of the line. The previous machine I owned was sixty some odd megahertz, which I used for software development and running a buziness, so 333 MHz seemed like lightning. I still think it's a smoking system. I use it for development, including coding in what are traditionally seen is heavy-duty processor intensive languages like Lisp. That same machine is also used for 3D modeling. The usual advice is "buy the fastest machine you can get if you are going to 3D work," and that's what I did. Everything I do on that machine is snappy. I played Unreal on it, when it was first released, in software rendering mode--because I didn't have a Glide card--and had great fun with it. I have no speed complaints whatsoever. I'm not like some guy trying to justify that this Commodore 64 is still useful; I honestly think my PC is very fast.
Since I bought my machine, the bus speed jumped from 66 to 100 to 133 MHz. Processor speed went to 350, 400, 450, until the low end machine you can get from mail order catalogs is around 633. High end close to twice that. The Pentium III and Athlon became available, with better throughput and more cache. At the same time, video cards progressed from the then-new Voodoo 2 to the TNT, TNT 2, Rage 128, Matrox G400, GeForce, and GeForce 2. Take a low end machine out of all these specs, say a 600 MHz machine with a 100 MHz bus and a TNT 2. That's at least twice the performance of my machine. And in all honesty, I don't know what to do with all the power of my current set-up.
These low-end chips that get kicked around, like those from Transmeta, are still more powerful than what I currently have. And yet the constant wisdom that is spouted is "there's no market at the low end."
I cracked open my machine yesterday to add a new card, and it really struck me how much junk there is in the average PC. Mine must weight 30 pounds. There are a couple of fans, and two absolutely enormous heat sinks. It bothers me to see people tossing these out and buying new machines, just so they can surf the web, listen to MP3s, run Office, and play horribly broken game demos (that is, game demos that don't look like anyone gave a moment's thought to making them run fast on more than reasonable machines). Nobody cares about power consumption or form factor either, just so-called "performance." Even if you need a car battery to power a video card, some people don't care. "My bubble sort is too slow! I need an Athlon!" At some point, this has to stop. People don't realize how much they're being suckered here, which is surprising for the typical anti-corporate college student geek.
problem 1 for Intel
x86 is a screwed up architecture and you have to have ever decreasing die sizes and people to rejig everything (memory access/SMP crossbar) to get real improvements (AMD know this and are dumping/saying it is not surported parts for their upcomeing 64bit chip )
2
the DIE SIZE is BIG putting it mildly
this means less profits something intel does not like
good old digital has a bit of problems with patents
enter Intel's lawyers (these are people who I give respect to ! )
Intel gets strongARM + a whole bunch of people who only have 3-5 years left to get shares/pension now sorry but Digital's engineers (who have been doing this for a long time) + Intel's budget and we get
(drum roll please)
Xscale
die size/performance that beats the pants off anything MOT has produced and part of the ARM arch so yes all those routers/palms/watchs (IBM linux watch)/4G phones can use it and have code that runs on it
er and you want to prat around with x86 compatible stuff which is huge die/power requirements
I don't think so
kiss it all goodbye because x86 is going bye bye dorthy
john jones
(a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
About 1:32 PDT Slashdot wa
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
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Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'll even let you use it:
Account name: God Password: Pete
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
Reason #2 to put more money in my AMD stock (that's twice in one day!).
-- "Microsoft can never die! They make the best damn joysticks around!"
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Either way, is Intel now a Lion?
Why to design a new low-end chip while you can get a good old MSX to do your work?
Hey, lots of offices out there buys ultra-fast Pentium machines so they can use Word. Throw this away, get a MSX running Wordstar and it's all set!
Long live the Z80!
Close the world, open the NeXT
Intel is on a downward spiral folks. For the longest time it seemed as though they could do nothing wrong, then cam PPro which was a fine chip, but not what was needed. Ok, it was the software makers that shot that one down. Fast forward to the i820 screw up. I had 5 systems affected by that. Nope, not at all impressed. Oh, let's not forget about the serial number issue. Then there was the P3 1.13 screw up. And shall we discuss the P4 setbacks? Rambus? ZX chipset? I am sure I have missed something? Oh ya. first generation celeron (except the the insance oc'ers out there). What's next Intel?
tinfoilmedia
This is one of the many mistakes they have made recently. Not only has Intel planned on using RDRAM for the Timna platform, but also there is a extremely high transistor count. That would make it a lot more expensive to manufacture, inducing much higher failure rates, higher costs, and much slower clock speeds. These in combination with the already very inexpensive i810 platform which would offer similar performance at a much lower cost is most definantly what caused Intel to can Timna.
Now, had Intel released Timna, with RDRAM and all (Assuming RDRAM was, say, half as expensive as it is now)it would bring the low end PC market to even smaller profit margins, with higher prcies too.
In mass quantites, a Celeron 600 would probably cost around $50-60, and a cheap i810 motherboard with built in sound, video, and winmodem for another $50 or so. In the case of the Timna, the CPU would probably be in the $160 range, going by past "low end" CPUs from Intel, but the motherboard will naturally be cheaper, so maybe $30-40 for a motherboard. Add another $100 for the same amount of memory, and you have something that costs a bit more then $200 over a similarly equipped Celeron system.
Had Intel chosen to go this route, they would have shoved Timna down the throats of companies, stopped making Celerons, and we would have more expensive "cheap" computers that aren't any better then the old ones. Not only this, but also consider that because the computers would be in the "cheap" range, they would need to keep profit margins low. Very low. In order to offset the cost difference, they would have probably had to sell Timna systems at a gross loss (Not a Net loss, a Gross loss), which would cause a mass exodus amongst a lot of PC building companies, who would revert over to AMD where they could see more profits, better sales, etc.
This situation would see Intel almost completely drop out of the low end market, and their midrange stuff would be sorely lacking. While this may have been a good thing for AMD, it is not for the consumer, as less competition on any level (As in AMD owning the low end market) causes less price competition, and we would see prices drop slower, slower releases of new processors, and higher pricing.
It truly is a good thing Timna was cancled.
Only those who dream can grasp reality.
Next on the block: Itanium. Doesn't go fast enough, and needs an optimizing compiler with the mind of God to make it go.
Went to the Stanford EE380 talk last week. The head architect of AMD's 64-bit architecture spoke. No details on implementation, just the architecture as visible to the programmer. It's the obvious extension of x86 to 64 bits, no more, no less. In 64-bit mode, there are more registers and no segmentation. Bootable as a 32-bit CPU, can be run in its native 64-bit mode, or can run 32-bit programs under a 64-bit OS. Still supports all the 16-bit modes. The GCC port took about a month. That's the probable future.
This cancellation couldn't possibly have anything to do with the whack of people who were just shunted over to the P4 project to speed it up... allez allez!
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The gravitational constant of protein has changed. - Turbine
LINUS
great comedy company.
Ace's Hardware has been covering AMD's advances fairly well - they have an SMP Capable chipset (the 760MP) in the works, which should be out by december.
p ost_id=10000240
4 .html
A little bit of info here: http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read_news.php?
As for compaq: well, make what you wish of this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/1222
I'd say that AMD is setting it's self up to replace Intel rather quickly. Already, many OEMs are droping their Intel only policy...
RAMBUS equals bad karma.
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
I've read somewhere (not sure where, maybe TheRegister) that AMD et al are afraid to hire ex-Intel employees because of the threat of legal entanglements. Too bad, really... I'm sure Intel has some of the best chip engineers in the world, but they are being stifled by Intel's lack-luster management staff.
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---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
Why use Intel chips anyway? We all know Transmeta is 5 years ahead of them.
Remember AGP, and everyone bitching at the time that it wasn't needed? I bet everyone's glad that their video cards today aren't running on the PCI bus.
A viable replacement for PCI at 32 bits/33 MHz has existed for many years now - PCI at 64 bits / 66 MHz.
This has been used in workstations since long before AGP was introduced. But, instead of migrating this standard architecture down to the consumer level, they introduce their own in an attempt to capture market share.
Likewise, there's no reason for AGP 4x to exist, when PCI 64/133 has just as much bandwidth and doesn't restrict you to only one slot.
Speaking as a person who's done graphics driver work for a few years, I can say that there are many, many fun things that you could do with multiple high-speed card ports with multiple graphics cards. However, that doesn't seem to be on Intel's agenda. PCI 64/66 would also give us somewhere to stick 1 Gbit network cards without losing most of our bandwidth. If not for AGP, these ports would be standard by now.
PCI 64/66 would also give us somewhere to stick 1 Gbit network cards without losing most of our bandwidth.
That should be "bus bandwidth". The network card would work fine. Just don't try to use two of them in one machine, or a PCI graphics card in the same machine.
you can get by with a 386
but why would you?
You're missing the point. A nice 1995 Chevy or Ford is infinitely better than a car from 1912. But does having a 500 HP Chevy mean all that much in comparison with the 1995 car? Unless you're into drag racing, no. If you compare a 300 MHz Pentium II and a 1 GHz Athlon, the differences are irrelevant. They both feel identical for everyday tasks. In fact, you couldn't figure out which was the faster machine if you were just using Windows and Word and browsing the web. Even for more advanced work you wouldn't notice the difference, except in a few cases (like rendering scenes overnight in 3DS MAX). See the point?
oh get a grip
yes its non x86
how many phones are there ?
and how many have ARM processors ?
now how many routers are there ?
how many PDAs are there ?
how many games consoles are there ?
please
oh and how much do you think the software that runs on all those is worth ? to the company LOTS just because you paid money for the software does not mean its worth that answer this if a company would like to be paid by consumers or a nice hunk of cash + 1c for each one shiped what would make you more money ? (you are not microsoft which is a good thing!) any bean couter will tell you take the cash plus roayltys it makes more money
please all palm software is going to break when they change to a new CPU unless they emulate it
ah well
john jones
(a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
There IS a difference! You can't compare 300 mhz to 1Ghz and say there is no difference! 300mhz is simply too slow to buy.
Then you are a fool. I stopped noticing speed increases after about 200MHz or so. I can't tell the difference between a 200MHz chip and a 1GHz chip, except in contrived circumstances (like running Unreal in software rendering mode).
They should have called it the "Timber!"
Maybe they're cancelling it because the name isn't as memorable as "Itanium" or "Xeon"
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
I think that this is a move in the right direction. We already have enough stinking bargain chips (now that VIA is starting up the damned Cyrix series again with the CyrixIII, that puts the total of cheap-ass CPUs from 2 [Intel Celeron and K-6 x] to 3). Maybe now the Intel hardware designers can work on a chipset that doesn't suck, like a DDR chipset for the P4, or maybe a new 440BX-esque chip for the Coppermine series. I'm sick of VIA dominating the chipset market with their "0.25 micron crap on PCB" strategy.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I really don't mean this as flamebait, but honestly, someone name three things Intel has done right lately.
(By the way, I'm not anti-Intel or pro-AMD. I use a PIII, fyi.)
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Microsoft is not the answer, Microsoft is the question. The answer is "no".