Slashdot Mirror
A Triplet Of AMD Goodies
Michael Baumann writes: "Look out Intel, AMD's at it again! Check it out!" According to the usual "Sources close to," "[a] 1.2Ghz Athlon chip should appear sometime near the end of this month." That would mean all my computers have been officially lapped, which is great. Ryan Shrout writes: "It looks like the rumor circulating on the Web recently that AMD would be removing the pins on the socket A CPUs to stop multiplier adjustments via the motherboard may be false. This post at the Athlonmb.com forums (Scroll down to the post by OptiX) states 'the simplest way to put it is that the multiplier lock seems to be part of the chip package rather than the core, and short of a new processor stepping and a complete revision of the processsor interface there's no way the FID pins can be removed, unless the multiplier becomes a purely DIP switch set function, which would defeat the object of the exercise!!'" Secondly, and probably of interest to far more people, this page discusses the expected price drops on AMD chips in the near future, and says that "the official date for the change is Oct. 30th, but [that] many larger distributors will be taking advantage of the lower costs as soon as the 15th." I hope so -- heat up, market, heat up!
I think the reason why AMD is now way ahead of Intel in the CPU game is the fact that unlike Intel's Pentium III (which in many ways is still based on the original P6 CPU core pioneered by the Pentium Pro way back in 1995), the Athlon CPU core is a "designed from scratch" core that is capable of being increased in speeds to well beyond 1,000 MHz.
With 128 KB L1 cache, a totally-new FPU unit and now 256 KB of on-die CPU-speed L2 cache, the current "Thunderbird" Athlons will reach 1,400 MHz by the end of this year, matching the speeds of the Pentium 4 when that is released. A 1,400 MHz Athlon on a motherboard running DDR-SDRAM will likely be at least as fast as a Pentium 4 system running RDRAM, but will be substantially cheaper.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
All of my AMD CPUs have suffered what the technical community knows as Silicon Burn. Mind you, these are K6-2 and K6-3 CPUS, but all of them have failed due to Silicon Burn. I've heard several reports of the new Thunderbird Athlons failing due to Silicon Burn as well. Personally, the extry 200Mhz isn't worth it to me when I know that the CPU could fail tomorrow. I have had no problems with Intel CPUs, even when overclocked they do not experience Silicon Burn until you have been using them for several years.
LoC-
I really do enjoy most of your trolls--looking through your user info it's kind of humorous to see which happen to end up +5 funny (generally the heavyhanded ones) and which 0 troll and -1 flamebait (often the most subtle)--but I think this is a bit irresponsible. Believe it or not, there are many people on Slashdot dumb enough to swallow this. And while you (and I sometimes) might think they deserve to pay an extra $100 for an equivalant CPU, both they and the good folks at AMD would rather legitimately disagree.
Indeed, while I think it's a very disturbing sign of how much corporate power has usurped the 1st Ammendment, there have been companies who have sued posters for knowingly making similar false claims in online public forums--and won. Yes, they shouldn't win, and yes it's very doubtful that AMD would stoop that low, but that doesn't change the fact that you're purposely spreading ignorance and doing a lot of people a great disservice by posting shit like this here.
If you want to troll making fun of public misconceptions of AMD chips, save it for boards like JC's or Ace's or SI, where people actually know something about the CPU market, not Slashdot where the vast majority are completely ignorant on the subject. And think before you post, dude.
No SMP chipset for the Athlon has been released yet. The AMD 760MP chipset, which supports SMP and DDR memory, should be released in late 2000, according to AMD. Motherboards will probably follow soon after.