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AMD Challenges P4 With 1.33Ghz
ravedaddy writes: "AMD is again upping the ante in the processor war with two new high-performance products: the Athlon 1.33GHz, designed to operate on the 133MHz DDR EV6 bus, and the Athlon 1.3GHz, which runs on the 100MHz DDR bus. There are a couple of reviews pitting the 1.33 Athlon versus the Pentium 4 1.3 and 1.5GHz at Sharky's and at Hardware Central." I'm still happy with last-year's Athlon -- does anyone harbor any lingering thoughts that AMD is a second-class citizen in the chipmaking world?
The problem is while it is a fince commmercial processor, it's major weakness is corporations. The reason companies such as the one I work for doesn't buy AMD chips (which I feel are far better for the price than Intel) is because the chips are not certified with certain corporate software packages, such as some CAD programs like PRO/E.
If AMD would get such certifications, the business world would take AMD more seriously. And with corporate money comes money for advertising to make them even bigger in the private sector than they already are.
- A.P.
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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"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?"
Anyway, Intel can show us as many stupid-ass commercials as they want -- it doesn't matter when they're losing marketshare to AMD at an alarming rate. Intel recently issued profit warnings. AMD reported record profits last quarter. So go figure... maybe advertising isn't everything.
- A.P.
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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"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?"
/me drools over the though of dual (or more:) 1.3G cpus.
Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
I'm trying to order a workstation. Once I found systems that have a 1.2G athlong and ddr ram, I couldn't find any with for DIMM slots! The closest I could find was 3, and only one of those, iirc. grr.
Try encoding an MPEG4 clip on that 800MHz CPU, then on the 1.33GHz CPU. Report back, and explain that you were wrong.
With this latest shot in the MHz war, I often find myself wondering if there's some other way to increase processing power other than cranking up the clock frequency. RISC systems offer reasonably comparable computing power for usually less than half the clock frequency of Intel/AMD chips (look at Sun's UltraSPARC chips now). Are there other ways of getting the same horsepower for lower speeds?
It would seem off hand that an immediate benefit of this would be lower power requirements and significantly less cooling needs. OC'ers routinely chill their CPUs to get to even higher speeds, but at this rate how soon will it be before CPU chilling becomes standard or required?
stop the madness!!!
:)
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
don't forget Tom;s Hardware
I think that AMDZone and www.amd.com might just be a little bit biased, and I noticed Ace's Hardware spending half their time gloating over the performance they got by overclocking one of the new Athlons to 1.5 Ghz, and neglecting the fact that they managed to render it unstable at 1.533 Ghz.
But what really gets me: you're claiming that Slashdot and Sharky Extreme are Intel biased sites? Are you daft? Did you actually read the linked review? From Sharky's conclusion:
With this, their most recent unveiling, AMD has again leapfrogged Intel in all but one of our performance matrices, making the Athlon 1.33GHz the fastest processor we have tested.
The biggest reason they can give *not* to buy this processor is that they're expecting faster (Palomino-based, possibly smaller process) chips from AMD shortly!
Or you could put a heatsync & fan on the thing for $10 and be done with it.
/w proper cooling, it works great.
... that's pretty good if you ask me.
Seriously, I'm sick of this type of AMD bashing. Yes if you run the chip w/o proper cooling it'll die, but on the other hand, if you run it
Case in point. I built a system for a friend on a Duron 750. Got the generic $9 cooling fan solution and some thermal paste. Pasted it up good, put the heatsync & fan on, booted it up and all is fine. Even after running for hours doing 100% CPU load, it won't get hotter than about 100 degrees F
OK great. A newer, faster processor.
What I want to know is when we're going to get motherboards with IO buses and IO devices that can DEAL with a processor running this fast.
Let's face it. You can attach a 40 million gallon per hour water pump to a straw. But that doesn't make it any better than a 30 million gallon per hour water pump because of other limiting factors.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
The desktop Palamino has been delayed so AMD can redirect those Palamino chips to notebooks. AMD can't overhaul all their production lines at once y'know, and the Thunderbird is holding its own against the P4 just fine.
;-).
Translation: there's big-time demand for Athlon notebooks, and I'm really, really glad I dumped my Intel stock several months ago
AMD doesn't have the very cool Blue Man Group shilling for 'em.
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
it's PROGRAM efficiency that's down.
Which is fine with me. I can crank out Q&D VB apps in a couple of hours that would take a couple of days to write in C++. Most of these wouldn't get written if they took that long. So who cares if the VB message board app the secretary uses takes three times as long to update the screen as it would written in C++? On her 450MHz PIII, it's still under a second. And if the user can't tell the difference, what's more important -- your time, or the computer's time?
Just junk food for thought...
800MHz processors are well under $100 now. Do you really expect them to get cheaper?!
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
http://www.aniteccom.com/
Canadian company. 800MHz Duron, C$105. About US$65. TBird @ C$175 = U$110.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
The last 5 or 6 upgrds I've smuggled into here have all been very affordable 800Mhz T-birds - as long as I NEVER mention that they're NOT Intel the users are VERY happy and they don't start quaking with fear, uncertainty and doubt. Ditto with the Linux mail server. Guerrila IT works if you can expunge the mktng bozo's and all the hypnotized suits under their command.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Um, you seem to be missing a few points:
The main thing that affects a system's I/O and memory performance is the motherboard architecture and memory architecture. Chip architecture is secondary.
The main impact of chip architecture is, as mentioned, the communication point between the chip and the motherboard chipset. This has no relation to the RAM type.
In summary, about two thirds of your post was based on incorrect information.
You are still ignoring several very important considerations.
It turns out that this is *extremely* difficult, especially at high speeds, and especially for synchronus busses. Your path lengths for all of the traces have to be the same, or very nearly the same. This is next to impossible to achieve for extremely wide busses. Thus, your claims of it being cheaply extensible should be taken with a large grain of salt. (You can make the bus wider by using more expensive motherboard construction, but this is - guess what - considerably more expensive).
It's an asynchronus serial bus. That removes two major design constraints (controlling the lengths of multiple lines, and keeping handshaking synchronus). I can believe that you could run something like this fast enough to make it competitive with existing busses (though I'd still want multiple channels in parallel in a real system). The fact that Intel is planning to use this at all suggests that bandwidth will be comparable to or better than what they're currently using.
Can you provide more support for your claims, so that I can see where your arguments are coming from?
May I join you in your dreamworld sometime?
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It's not the "general public" that Intel is worried about. It's all about risk-adverse IT managers who control large PC budgets. (And, yes, IT Managers are a huge marketing segment - watch the ads fly over Joe Sixpack's head during any TV sports event.) And it's worked in that corporate PC purchases are still primarily Intel, despite the clear price advantage of AMD.
Trying to market a component brandname to people who buy low-end consumer systems is no-go. These people don't know the difference between Microsoft and Compaq, much less some thing inside the box.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Or wasn't this announced a few weeks ago?
The benchmarks are nice though
You say you want a revolution....
I doubt it. 8^)
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
Don't forget my fave, AnandTech. Lots of people like Tom's Hardware as well.
You've GOT to be kidding me.
I spent $900 to build TWO AMD-Duron 800's, with 128M, 20gig 7200RPM ATA-100 disks. Both of which I've O/C'ed to 1gig.
Already had the monitors...and who the hell wants those POS printers and scanners they sell you anyway? My in-laws purchased a Gateway from the HSC, spent near $2k and the system I built for a quarter that price kicks it's ass.
Can't win 'em all I guess.
der dee der.
I assume you're comparing them to Intel. I would offer that Intel is *also* a second-class citizen in the chipmaking world, given that their current batch of CPUs still boot into real mode.
In any case, I don't think AMD is even close to the level of sophistication of Intel; anyone who does think so has a very narrow view of the industry. Sure, AMD makes a better x86 FPU than Intel, but they still haven't shipped a chipset to run dually athlons, and they don't do nearly as much experimental research - they're really just focused on imitating rather than innovating. Intel is about to (finally) roll out a completely new architechture with IA-64, while AMD is simply coming up with a 64-bit extension to the IA-32 architechture.
I'm no Intel fan, and personally I think the Athlon is a better chip than the Pentium III/IV, but AMD is no Intel.
heh
Wrong. As you can see, the processors are on the left (the other without a heatsink). Those fans are for something else (hd's etc.). I'd notice those CPU's don't have _any_ fans..
OnStar? Never heard of them. SAP?
:P
They run adds on TV all the time, actualy. Onstar and SAP anyway. I'm still not sure what exactly SAP does, though
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
And just like jury duty, you don't want anyone doing it who is too dumb to get out of it.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I have some friends that still think Intel is a safer way to go, despite the fact that I know a few friends with Athlon systems, and I've even built a Duron system for a friend who has not once complained about the setup.
Now if only *I* could afford an Athlon...
GWB to President of Brazil - "You have blacks, too?"
I wonder if that'll change as soon as Compaq AMD-based servers start eating into their high end profits later this year...
Sure there are still plenty of Intel boxes at retail, but they're all low end = 1 GHz. AMD has all the high end. What a turnaround from a couple of years ago!!!!
You've got that backwards - AMD owns the desktop retail sector. Intel owns the server market and laptops.
AMD's 760MP SMP chipset coupled with the incredible 1.5GHz AMD Palomino just shown at CeBIT are going to be used in servers from Compaq and apparently IBM also.
AMD's Morgan (portable Palomino) comes out later this year.
With Rambus rapidly going out of business and DDR P4 chipsets proliferating, Intel is in a world of hurt. Already their dismal selling (~1% of total PC sales) P4 is bested by the slower clocked AMD Athlon, and with P4 hobbled with DDR (it was designed for the huge memory bandwidth of RDRAM), the comparisons of P4 vs Athlon and Palomino just get more and more lopsided. Intel has dropped the ball.
What do people do to their AMD systems to make them unstable? My 1GHz Thunderbird has only been restarted a single time since the day I got it. And that was 17 days ago, during a power outage that lasted slightly longer than my UPS. I have had AMD systems for years and none of them had even the slightest hint of a problem with stability.
;-)
Maybe I've just been lucky...
OnStar gets mentioned in a lot of car and car rental commercials...
SAP has several wonderfully boring commercials, but they are fairly frequent.
BASF... about three or four years now, the whole "We don't make the things you buy..." routine...
All of these are featured prominently on CBS/NBC/ABC/ESPN/CNN and any other news related timeframe, or any type of show aimed more at adults than children (like "When MIR Attacks!!!" on Fox)...
Of course, you'll never see these if all you watch is Cartoon Central for Anime or Cow and Chicken...
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I have an PC164-SX Board with a 533MHz 21164PC that I'm thinking of parting with...
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I'm more of a Dew/Alpha guy, rather than Jolt :)
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
That's odd.... I bought a Dell with a Duron in it not a week ago. Check their home section, there business section really doesn't do AMD.
I've had this sig for three days.
It depends on whose software you're running. I remember kernel compiles taking the better part of an hour when I was running a 386SX-25 with 4MB RAM and 120MB of 3600-rpm disk, and that was for pre-1.0 kernels with just the QIC-02 driver added in. The system on which I run Linux now is a K6-III-450 with 256MB RAM and 10GB of 5400-rpm disk, and kernel compiles take just a few minutes with support for multi-protocol networking (NFS, SMB, and AppleTalk), sound, SCSI, and other stuff. If I ran it on the 1.0GHz Athlon I built a couple of weeks ago (with 256MB DDR and 45GB of 7200-rpm disk), it'd be faster still. Win98 is more responsive on the faster hardware, at least. Still, I don't doubt that there is less attention paid to efficiency and more attention paid to piling on features in today's software that most people will never use.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Have a look at the Linux source code sometime...arch/i386/kernel/setup.c is particularly interesting as to whose bugs need to be worked around by the kernel. Looking at init_amd, one bug is attributed to B-stepping K6 processors, that comes into play in systems with more than 32MB RAM. (BTW, AMD used to replace those processors that were affected...I don't know if that program is still in effect.) By comparison, init_intel has workarounds for the F00F bug (non-root users could kill any Pentium or Pentium-MMX system) and the Pentium Pro's CPUID bug (it says it supports the SEP instruction when it really doesn't). There was also the problem with the 1.13-GHz Pentium III running so badly that it was recalled, plus the FDIV bug in the first Pentiums. Now try telling me that Intel makes a better/more reliable product than AMD.
I'm on my fourth AMD processor now...started with a K6-200 and went through a K6-2-300 and K6-III-450 to arrive at the 1.0-GHz Athlon I'm using now. (The K6-III is still in use, only in my server now.) I've also built a few K6-2 and Duron systems for others, and the only problem that's ever popped up in any of them was an overheated SiS 530 (on the one time that I tried building a really cheap box) in one of the K6-2 boxen...fixed that by slapping a cooler on that chip, and in any case it wasn't a processor problem.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
It's a sad but true fact of life that in the world of consumer goods, brand image is crucial to growing market share, because in fact most people do care about brand names. The way advertising drives demand, you at some point have to work at establishing brand consciousness in the public at large. Why do you think companies like OnStar, BASF, and SAP spend money advertising the way they do? They never sell directly to the end consumer, but they work at making their brands household words nonetheless.
It's about creating a perception that you're the only game in town - that's why intel spends so much on their advertising - specifically to drown out AMD. AMD's best bet for wooing away Dell and the other business-machine providers (where the real money in PC sales comes from), is to get buyers asking Dell, "Why don't you sell AMD machines?" The best way to do that is through aggressive advertising. The fact that AMD has the superior product should only make that job easier.
Right...
What AMD really needs is mindshare. When was the last time you saw an AMD commercial on TV? Compare that with the Blue Man Group ads for the Pentium 4 that intel runs just about every hour on every channel. AMD can't get OEM agreements with the big PC manufacturers - did it ever occur to them that it might be because Joe Consumer doesn't ask Gateway or Compaq about the latest Athlon machines?
OEMs are never going to worry about building AMD-based machines when there's no market demand. AMD has to make the public believe it's a serious competitor before the OEMs will believe it. I want very much to see AMD succeed and make the Athlon the top chip for x86 machines - but they have to know how to drive demand.
Right...
Serves you right for putting it next to my box, which I was cooling with liquid hydrogen!
Ditto. I just flashed the 0112 (beta) BIOS into my old TX-97 motherboard. My old P166MMX now supports 2.0V-2.2V CPUs. $30 for a K6-III at Fry's (which I originally bought for my I-opener!), and my old P166 box is now chugging along at 400 MHz with 256K on-die cache. If I overclock the PCI bus, I can take it to 500.
For $30, I turn "that old computer I don't use anymore" into an all-in-one software-based DVD player, MP3 jukebox, and decent gaming box for the price of a pizza and a case of beer. (And I find a good use for the TV-out jack on the video card, which I never bothered to use, 'cuz hey, I can't play DVDs on a P166 ;-)
> word processing, email, and browsing.
In defence of your nontechnical friends, if they're "compulsive upgraders", their "old" computers probably have gotten slower, even if they're doing the same tasks. Netscape 3.0 to IE5.5? Word97 to Orifice2K? Win95 OSR2 to Win2000 or WinME? Yeah, if they've done these upgrades, their perfectly adequate P166 boxen probably are grinding under the strain, especially if they cheaped-out and got 32M of RAM.
Computers don't get slower as time passes, but software does.
Is it "innovation" or "let's add stuff to lock more people into our products!"?
Take a look at Itanium (or their IA-64 instruction set) vs. AMD's Sledgehammer core-- IA-64 is just another operating environment, like Protected Mode was to Real Mode, except that IA-64 processors start out in IA-64 mode instead of having to switch modes after being reset. Sledgehammer, AFAIK, is just new instructions without a new operating mode. IA-64 introduces a HUGE number of general purpose CPU registers (no more EAX, EBX, ECX, EDX, EDI, ESI limitations!) while (from an admittedly brief review) AMD adds a total of 8 general purpose registers.
So Intel has added as of yet unused and so far unnecessary registers to a new operating mode which can (will?) potentially lock consumers into their products as software gets written to take advantage of said (dubious and patented) innovations?
While AMD has simply taken an existing operating mode, added a few general purpose and non-proprietary registers, and improved the overall design and performance of a tried-and-true architecture with known quantitative qualities?
Do I need to bring up the higher monetary entry point in the marketplace for those "innovations"? Why pay extra for something that isn't fully utilized when I can purchase a similar product, which performs just as well (if not better) for much less?
Somehow this doesn't seem to be "innovation" to me. It reminds me somewhat of how the Japanese do little that is truly "new" in the gestalt sense but instead rely on tweaking existing technologies to bring out their full potential. And last time I checked they 0wn3d many major markets which were invented and developed elsewhere (VCR anyone?) by approaching the market in such a manner.
Of course, I'm probably just an idiot.
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
There's nothing wrong with the 440BX chipset, really. If you get a recent revision of the Asus or Tyan dual BX boards, you can support Coppermine CPUs all the way up to the 850E (depending on your BIOS, revision, etc). You don't get PC133 RAM or AGP4X, but who really cares? AGP4X is all about marketing, and PC100 memory on a BX will probably outperform PC133 memory on a VIA chipset. VIA chipsets suck royally.
Not having a 133 MHz FSB is a bit of a drag, but I haven't had trouble supporting five Ultra2 Wide SCSI hard drives (four 7200 RPM and one 10K RPM), AGP 2X, and two 100Mb/s NICs on my 440BX. This is obviously a lot more than the typical load placed on a BX motherboard... or even a KT133A.
The i840 isn't such a bad choice now that RAMBUS memory is so cheap. Cheap?! Yep. It's cheaper than DDR SDRAM in some cases. Check it out on pricewatch.com.
What about the Serverworks HE and SL chipsets, if you don't like using PC100 or RAMBUS memory? You get dual or quad processor motherboards; 64 bit, 66 MHz PCI; multiple independant PCI busses; PC133 RAM; and some really awesome other stuff, all for around $300 or $1000 (dual P3 vs quad Xeon). Add another $100-$150 for integrated 64 bit Ultra160 SCSI. Wow.
I dunno about you, but I'd get excited over a motherboard that cool for just $300. I paid $250 for my dual Asus P2B-D in October of 99. My KT133A board was about $125 a month ago. So, for just a little bit over the price of a dual BX or two KT133As, you can get a monster server board. Nice deal.
Integrated 440GX, 450NX, and beyond can be prohibitively expensive. Try buying them from ebay cheap if you want a killer Xeon board from Intel. The 450NX supports four Xeons. Nice. Not cheap, though.
You can also look at workstations/servers from Micron (they make their own cool chipsets). Some awesome stuff never makes it to the public, because of non-competition clauses Intel makes people (like Micron) sign.
And, one last thing: don't ever trust marketing. Just because it's new doesn't mean it's better. Sometimes the best solution is older technology. It has proven reliability, lowered cost, *known* issues (rather than unknown issues), and more mature driver support.
As an addendum to the one last thing: watch out for diminishing returns.
Intel has dropped the processor UID from the Pentium 4 and the cC0 revision of the Pentium III processors. AFAIK, AMD processors have never had such a UID that could be used like that one Intel implemented.
But then you have a lot of people who do (I don't... I'd rather get an Alpha over anything right now) and with that kind of FUD, a lot of people are going to think that AMD is a POS company.
Or Jolt for us Alpha/SPARC nuts? Hehehe :)
You are forgiven :)
Hehe... cool... unfortunately, I don't have the $$$ to buy things right now :(
Unfortunately, the current revision of the Pentium 4 processor and the i850 chipset only supports one processor. It's not until the new Pentium 4-based Xeon until we see 2+ processor based systems.
The standard Pentium III processors can only scale up to two processors, but then you are limited to the BX/GX chipset (aging, only officially supports 100Mhz FSB), the Via chipset (I'm still a little wary of it), or the i820/i840 (requires Rambus memory). The Xeon allows you to scale well above 2 processors, but then you have to pay through the nose for a decent motherboard and the processor.
I think AMD should take it's time to release the 760MP to make sure that performs like it is supposed to and it is stable enough to cram in 2x1.33Ghz processors. Since the current gen Athlons use the EV6 protocol, there are a lot more traces required to connect to the processors to the northbridge chip, but then you get two independent channels rather than a shared bus found on all Intel chipsets and processors. Even the first-gen Itanium will still run on a slightly tweaked version of AGTL+ (ie: shared bus).
Tyan is expected to be the first MB manufacturer to release a Dual Athlon board. The model number is S2462. It is reported to have on board Ultra-160 SCSI, dual 100 MBps Ethernet, EIDE, and ATI Rage 128 graphics built on. The price estimates I've heard have it priced at approx $960.00. The last I heard on a ship date was "sometime in May."
There's also an article that says that samples are shipping now. Apparently both Tyan and AMD were demo'ing boards at Cebit. Tyan with a board running 2 900 Mhz Athlons, and AMD with a board running 2 1.2 Ghz Athlons.
For more info, check out http://www.amdmb.com/index.html#News-1486.
Or do a google search on terms Tyan, S2462, etc.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Sure. Mathematical proofs are VERY biased to those who are verball oriented. I, for one, can easily get a concept if you put it into words, but big equations just fly over my head like so much wind. Besides, bias is built into the very fabric of perception. Name something that *isn't* biased.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
although this poster is largly incorrect, he has a point. AMD is releasing a product called LDT (or, sigh, HyperTransport... dumb names... Athlon my ass, it's a K7) which will offer a 6.4 GB/sec point-to-point bus. While Intel seems to have something similar in the pipeline, AMD's solution is much farther along.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'm not sure what definition of "sold out" this is... but AMDZone is far more "sold out" than anandtech. It's got a freaking brand name in it's URL. What do you expect it to say "This chip sucks. It's too fast." These four sites are all also biased, just differently. Everythings biased. Thats one of those fundamental truths of life. People just tend to call "fair" whatever they see that is biased in a way that they find agreeable.
Justin Dubs
At a certain point this will no longer be possible. Not because of an end to Moore's law or anything, but eventually (soon?) things will be pretty much as ugly as they can get!
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
No. Being marketing driven is not the answer. That will cause them to wind up doing all kinds of dumb shit like Intel has lately. The answer is to produce superior technology for a year or two and build up a well-deserved good reputation.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
... mostly, because of the chipset support under Windows. In the past, it wasn't up to par as with the Intel chipsets. Thankfully, drivers are now mature. e.g. VIA 4-in-1 are up to version 4.29.
... they already have the best type of advertising: Word of Mouth
:)
The other reason was "compatibility" in the past. With Intel chipsets, you were pretty much guaranteed not to have any problems running software.
Me and 2 other friends finally went the AMD route: picked up the Abit KT7A-RAID w/ a 1.2Ghz last month. Why? Because the price/performance just smokes Intel! (Especially considering when you pick up a good stick of PC133/CAS2 memory, and enable all the BIOS memory tweaks on this mobo!)
Who [AMD or Intel] will get my money on my next upgrade? AMD will, IF they can support dual and qud processors. (I miss my dual Cels/550)
But for the moment, I'm VERY happy with AMD, and will support them for the next few systems I build. (I've given enough money to Intel for the past 10 years: i.e. 286, 386sx, Pentium100, Pentium133, PentiumPro, Celeron) It's time to support AMD - the end user only benefits from the competition between AMD and Intel.
The "geek" friends that I know are all going the AMD route. When we get asked for advice from our non-computing people we steer them towards AMD.
About the lack of flashy ads by Intel. AMD can't even compete in this area: (doesn't Intel spend money on their adverstising budget, then AMD makes?) but AMD don't have to
P3's were hot last year.
Athlon's are hot this year.
(pardon the pun.
...imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
You may not notice a performance increase on your home PC, even in applications that squeeze every last cycle out of the CPU. However, you could certainly see a performance increase on, say, a 16-node Beowulf cluster of 1.33 GHz, versus the performance on a similar cluster of 1.2 GHz machines.
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"ALL YOUR CODE ARE BELONG TO US!" -- Jim Allchin
AMD is releasing the jacked up Athlons but delaying the Palomino's.
Someone you trust is one of us.
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Could any of you really tell the difference between this setup and a 1.2Ghz machine?
:). No wonder you sound so jaded. What would be an interesting review would be: Athlon 1333-DDR against a Celeron 450 (overclocked) against a K6-2-550. now /that/ would be interesting, and would educate me as to how I should upgrade.
I honestly dont think this chip is for people with 1.2 Ghz machines. It's for people like me, with old overclocked celerons who were gonna do their yearly upgrades soon.
Inherent in your rhetorical question is an assumption that 1) Chips aren't any faster than they used to be (noticablely faster) and 2) that the cpu companies like AMD are just marketing fluff -- all Ghz and no substance.
Truth is, chips are significantly faster than they used to be. Moore's law has gotten faster not slower in the past 2 years. You must read alot of review sites, that are constantly comparing the new stuff to the stuff that came out a week earlier
Guess what? AMD is beating Intel there too. Intel is trying to bait users with more performance but added vendorlock. AMD convinced API, one of the leading Alpha system producers to use their bus. Why? Intel uses a 1-bit high frequency bus, AMD uses a slightly lower frequency variable width bus which gets you 8-bit,16-bit,32-bit, and I believe 64bit and 128-bit are possible with some tweaking. Intel's bus still shares the bandwidth among devices. AMD's is almost peer to peer.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
I wasn't talking about chip arch. I was speaking of motherboard arch. AMD is releasing a high speed main bus which is API compatible with PCI but blows Intel's 1-bit serial bus (Infiniband or something like that) out of the market.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
The ISA is a consumer issue not an Intel issue. Nobody gives a damn except consumers who already have old software.
IDT Winchip uses a MIPS core with an x86 ISA. MIPS is one of the most cost-effective power-saving high-performance cores you can buy. If they would just advertise. I love AMD. It's great, but now that I've heard of IDT's use of MIPS I have to try it in an Amiga sometime. (yes you can use multiple CPUs at the same time with software running concurrently)
AMD tried their 29K system with their own ISA. It smoked Intel's crap. Guess what? Nobody wanted it. Why? Software wouldn't run on it. The people holding the pursestrings as far as ISA is concerned are consumers not Intel.
1st tier is as pointless as grains of film to a wedding photographer.
No one cares about the ISA. It's purely a compatibility feature.
You'll note Merced/Itanium was announced almost two years ago and still it hasn't hit the market. The ISA is a road block to the owner as well as the competition.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Heh, you claim bias and the first link you post is to AMDZone...
uuhh.. have I just been trolled? damnit!!!
Sigs are awesome huh?
Um Dell doesn't sell any AMD based systems (no Duron's, Athlon's, or K6-X's)... If you have a Dell it's not a Duron in it... If it is a Duron then it's not a real Dell...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Ok I'll bite & reply to this...
If you've looked & read around on Slashdot a bit you'd notice something... It's called: 'Dell owns a huge chunk of corporate IT sales'. And some of us would like to see AMD stay in business by for instance getting some corporate sales (which tend to net bigger profits)... More profits for AMD means newer chips faster, better R&D, more quickly updated fabs, increased numbers of fabs, etc... So we would like to see Dell sell AMD more for the sake of continuing AMD's sucess...
I doubt many of us are annoyed with deal because we want to buy one, we are annoyed because they have missed the boat & taken corporate IT customers down a Intel only path that hurts AMD's outlook on the future... Not to mention: "Well I run an athlon 1.2 at home, but this Dell at work just blows..." I mean come on, who really wants to have a nice comp at home & come in to the office to use a measly 400 Mhz celeron?
Just a few things to think about...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I'm gonna keep this short...
From my perspective (& I think most consumers) it's looking at Intel (with IA-64) & finding you need to buy not only a new computer, but new software as well because this "innovation" makes your old software run slower than my old 486DX2 50 with anything not coded for it...
In comparison AMD has created an open standard allowing full backwards compatibality while advancing the architecture to do similiar functions as what Intel did... Same software runs just as fast (if not faster)...
Hmm well I'm goign to choose AMD over Intel here... So it may not be "innovation" even if it is a new step up for x86 (similiar to when they went to using RISC-style core logic), it's still what makes sense to keep things runing without huge expenses... Heck do business users/home users need more than x86 anyways? For that matter both IA64 & x86-64 are designed to be used mostly in servers (well except for clawhammer within AMD's x86-64 family which is a 'workstation' cpu) for the next several years... Which is using mostly x86 (for the few Intel servers) or RISC (alpha, Sun, MIPS, Power, etc)... Which at least gives AMD a spot to fill... Intel is trying to shove their way into a space already occupied & not showing any real gains to choose it over another platform...
lastly... "the only innovation that can occur now is with a changing of paradigms and a changing of actual instruction sequencing". Well that is your opinion... I wouldn't agree completely... I think what we have works & works pretty well for most things... "IA-64 puts more of the burden on the compiler to figure out what code is trying to do, and puts less of the stress on the run-time architecture" We already complain about how coders & compiler writers can't seem to optimize code very well... This is just the worst thing possible when you think about it... Yes lets rely on peopel who don't have the time/desire to optimize for existing archs by requiring them to do so... Sure great 'innovation'... "hence the 'IA-64 is just another mode of the processor' trick-- code can switch at will from IA-64 mode to protected mode to real mode and back, and real mode/protected mode code can take advantage of IA-64 if the mode exists without using an IA-64 OS" Um no, this is not who it really works... IA64 is a VLIW arch which isn't even somewhat compatible with x86 on a internal level... It's not a 'new mode' but a complete replacement that has a 'compatability mode' of sorts which is incredibly slow & obviously not native to the cpu's core instruction set...
frankly after reading this I don't believe your an 'assembly language programmer' or if you are you haven't finished reading those 'ver 1,000 pages!' of information on IA64...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I was almost beginning to think that no one else in the world sharded this view. I so agree with this man, mod him the hell up more! Seriously 99% of end user applications (not including games as its a fad item and newer games push newer hardware) don't need anything more then a Pentium or Pentium II. Wonder if there is a way to optomize hardware to work around certain "types" of apps, like office suites. I know that question is a little odd, but really, most software is the same, but modern games in no way relate to the function of most say word processors...probably could make a killing if you could offer such systems to business, "Your business apps will run []% faster and be []% more stable then a generic computer, etc."
The result would be a monopoly by AMD, which would be FAR worse than an Intel monopoly.
I'd like some of what you are smoking. Why on Earth would an AMD monopoly (not that that is feasible in many years) be worse than an Intel monopoly? Intel have already showed us that they will not flinch from asking $2000 or more for their fastest chip, or slow down Moore's law to a dribble. It is only competition from AMD that has forced Intel to speed up the scaling and lower their prices (somewhat).
AMD, on the other hand, delivers faster CPUs at half the price, unlocked so you can OC them if you want. The only problem is the power comsumption, but that is being taken care of in the next revision. Now, it is possible that AMD would be just as evil as Intel if they got a monopoly, but we haven't seen that yet.
I don't want Intel to die, but I'd like them to go down to, say, 35% marketshare, with another 35% for AMD, and the rest shared between Transmeta and VIA (who hopefully will release a decent chip at some time).
AMD does not "innovate", they "tweak" and "re-design" existing technologies for the most part,
They have to. AMD has less than 10% of the financial resources of Intel. They can't afford some things Intel can. And AMD does innovate (damn, I hate that word - contaminated by M$), what about Hypertransport (used to be LDT)?
usually for shockingly low prices
Since so many people are so computer-illiterate and brand-loyal to the point of blindness, they have to. But the times are a-changing.
(which ends up cutting into R&D funds, which is VERY bad in the long run)
If you want to support AMD's R&D you can buy two CPUs then; use one and put the other one in a drawer. Then AMD will get as much $ from you as Intel would for a worse performing CPU, you have a backup CPU and warm fuzzy feeling from helping AMD's R&D.
But in a few years, developers and designers will have had enough with the current x86
Didn't they say exactly that some 10 years ago, when the first RISC chips came? ;-)
Really, if you know anything about CPUs, you must know that there has been a convergence. RISC chips are becoming more CISC-like, and CISC chips more RISC-like.
IA-64 still runs 32-bit code, just slower.
Yes, but not little slower. Didn't an 800 MHz Itanium perform roughly on par with a 50 MHz 486 on i386 code?
Personally I think that IA-64 will be stillborn. It is far slower and more inefficient than the RISC chips it is supposed to replace and runs legacy 32 bit x86 apps so pathetically slow that a 233 MHz G3 iMac could probably outclass it in emulation mode...
/Dervak
Both are properties of internet.com.
Reading from their legal statement (link is at the bottom of their page), I see them simultaneously requiring me to adhere to the GPL attached to their "experimental versions of GCC and binutils", and also forbidding me from (2) modifying them, (3) using them for commercial purposes, or (4) decompiling/reverse-engineering/disassembling them.
Sounds like RMS should give them a call...
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
According to the GPL, the FSF can sue them and win, simply by virtue of them hosting GPL'd software on their website.
Now, please don't misunderstand me -- I'm not trying to cast AMD as the bad guys. Personally, I prefer their products to Intel's. But they are in violation of GPL license, and somebody should inform them of that error, so that they may correct it.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
anyone harbor any lingering thoughts that AMD is a second-class citizen in the chipmaking world?
Every company that I've worked for...least for desktops. they just choose intel by default since it is a safe, no-brainer and no one really cares all that much (me for example...Would I prefer an Athlon, yes. Would I fight purchasing to get one, no.)
Until AMD can erode this mindset among those who purchase equipment for large companies, Intel will continue to be a class above the rest...no matter if their chips run faster or not.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
The pics were also posted to the web very close to each other, time wise. About 1 minute difference. Here's the HEAD of each gif, note the dates. The space in the second HAD is a slash artifact.
/graphics/screenshots/985242384image003.gif HTTP/1.1
/hardware/reviews/cpu/thunderbird_1-33ghz/image003 .gif HTTP/1.1
$ telnet www.mydesktop.com 80
Trying 63.236.73.169...
Connected to www.mydesktop.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD
Host: www.mydesktop.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2001 06:17:11 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) AuthMySQL/2.20 PHP/4.0.2
Last-Modified: Thu, 22 Mar 2001 06:26:24 GMT
ETag: "c1c3c-2a6d-3ab99b10"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 10861
Content-Type: image/gif
$ telnet www.sharkyextreme.com 80
Trying 63.236.73.81...
Connected to www.sharkyextreme.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD
Host: www.sharkyextreme.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2001 06:16:06 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.12 (Unix)
Last-Modified: Fri, 23 Mar 2001 01:34:00 GMT
ETag: "9bb42-2a6d-3abaa808"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 10861
Content-Type: image/gif
-no broken link
Actually I just noticed they are both in the 63.236.73.* subdomain. It's likely that there is some affiliation.
-no broken link
Next thing they do is hop over to an AMD thread and beat Intel into the ground with trolls and flames, which kinda infers that they want Intel dead. The result would be a monopoly by AMD, which would be FAR worse than an Intel monopoly.
AMD does not "innovate", they "tweak" and "re-design" existing technologies for the most part, usually for shockingly low prices (which ends up cutting into R&D funds, which is VERY bad in the long run).
Athlon is great right now. But in a few years, developers and designers will have had enough with the current x86, and will want a better option: IA64. x86-64 is only good in the respect that it runs 32-bit code very fast, as well as support for 64-bit code which would (ideally) also run very fast.
The gest of it is that x86-64 is an "expansion" to the aging x86, which should have been ditched long ago to begin with. I seriously doubt that it'll take off faster than IA-64 will. IA-64 still runs 32-bit code, just slower. Personally, I'd invest in a chip with a brighter FUTURE, not for support for legacy applications (kinda like the Pentium 4 vs. Pentium III/Athlon debate).
The chips are hot, but I have some problems with the rest of my system. For one it runs too hot and too noisy. My first Motherboard died, and I'm not getting the FPS on my GeForce that other Intel-based Motherboards are getting.
I also wasted about 6 months trying to get my motherboard to run stably (until MS brought out a patch for AMD chiupsets...). Even thought this is not the chips problem etc. etc. I still wasted time, thus Intel would have been much cheaper in retrospect.
Those are my gripes, and even though at heart I support AMD, I'll go for a P4 next. It's a better chip, even though most applications and benchmark programs don't reflect it yet.
(See the FlaskMPEG benchmark for the optimised versions... both for Intel and AMD)
Yeah really cool. AMD makes another cheap and faster processor I'd like to buy.
/. collective: Anyone knows where/when I can buy a decent dual or quad processor able motherboards, or anyone's using one of these babies?
But I really like to be able to run a dual or quad processor machine equipped with these Athlons, I really need one. But still no motherboards support this according to the AMD people I spoke to on Cebit today and the one I emailed last week, well they had one working prototype they told me.
They also told me other companies hadn't released such motherboards either.
Their motherboard would be ready this summer, but the guy hesitated when he told me, so I guess it will at the end of the year.
But I found a benchmark on the internet of a guy claiming to test linux on his dual Athlon machine, he didn't mention the brand or type of his motherboard. Searches with google didn't find me anything more than other people asking the same on forums.
So I'm asking the
If this is not the case I think there's something to say for intel the more expensive processors, atleast they are supported by the people who manufactor multiprocessor boards.
This whole thread reminds me that programming efficiency is getting less and less important as computers get faster. We're at the point that big name companies are releasing slower and slower software and charging more and more money for it. Is there anything being done to keep the efficiency of software moving along just as fast as the hardware? You'd think that 300 MHz should really mean something. I remember having a 25MHz machine and thinking that there'd NEVER be a 200MHz computer made for years, but when it was, it'd be amazing. I was sorely disapointed, not because it didn't show up, but when it did, it the software for that day and age didn't run any better than the software for my old 386. Maybe this is standard evolution, but I've always hoped for more...
moo.
How about these:
Hardware companies are building jets, and most software companies are simply building bigger biplanes with gold plated instruments, leather seats, and a teak prop.
;)
Please don't mix up your analogies like that. You'd be better off saying that the hardware companies are building bigger airports with wider runways and more passenger gates.
Remember the article in The Onion about the $5000 computer that downloads video, displays on monitor? Now there's TV/FM tuners, video editing, 3-D graphics because we *can*. Oh, and multitasking...
People used to (slowly) back away from me because I used my computer to listen to music
uh, what's wrong with your stereo?
It's stupid, I can't make a playlist that it won't forget or is longer than 2 hours...
Now I've got a digital VCR. Silly? Hey, they sell them for about the same price, but they won't play (insert your favorite game) nor can you sw*p mp*'s on it either.
It's like roads...build them and they'll get used. FWIW I still use a P166 laptop, and my office machine is a K6/2. I could upgrade them, but I'll wait. I'd probably still be usign my Quadra 700 (25 mHz 68040) if some rodent hadn't shat all over the MB. They can get in through an empty PCI slot...
---
I overclocked my CPU and now it reboots 25% faster!
...Time is the best teacher, unfortunately it kills all of its students.
Dell, apparently... those jerks still won't sell me AMD powered boxes. :P
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
NO!
Coke is it!
mwuahahaha!
Cool your AMD Sledge-o-duron with new laser de-crystallized frozen Coke slushies!
Woohoo!
Windows crashes 33% faster on this one compared to a 1 GHz model
--
Je t'aime Stéphanie
the title says it all :)
-raph
The only problem with AMD is they still haven't delivered a working machine with more than one processor. Until they can give me a dual or quad processor system .. they're going to have to be TRUELY in second place ..
Even if the 1.3G Athlon beats out a PIII or P4 system, if I get a PIII or P4 system with 4 or 8 processors in it, I'm sure that would kill an athlon system.
Question: Do you think AMD is holding off on releasing the 760MP Chipset (the multiprocessor chipset) because they don't know if they'll be able to keep up with demands once people start buying two or four processors at a time?
Problem is, the whole reason Intel switched architectures is because the P3 was reaching the limits of its design, while the P4 is capable of much, much more. In a few short months the P4 should be up to 2 GHz, and promises to run even faster. When this happens, AMD will be hard pressed to compete without fielding a new design itself, and then it'll be back to Intel out front with the other chip makers playing catch-up.
Isn't the forthcoming Palomino more or less a new design? (afaik it's not radically different like P4, but should consume less power and allow clock frequencies close to 2GHz) Somebody more informed, please correct me if I'm wrong?
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
now software designers can release even sloppier, slower, uglier code and still have it work fast enough!
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Nobody would buy a 733 Mhz chip when they wouldn't notice the difference over a 700 Mhz chip. Yet the 733 Mhz chips have sold very well. Because people don't just compare it against the 700 Mhz chips.
Everyone has their own sweet spot for CPUs. Some people might want the extra tiny bit of performance a 1.33 Ghz chip provides over a 1.2. Others will be quite happy at 900 Mhz with a 100 Mhz FSB.
--
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
or is that an intel only thing. That tells me which I'm getting.
AMD here I come.
Mix this with the chip cooler from yesterday and we'll have something that will suck electricity like there's no tomorrow.
Oh, it seems the pre-shipments went to California already. About a month or so ago, right? May want to hold off getting one.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
Ummm... *HP* came up with IA-64, not Intel. Part of the deal for Intel to deploy it was that HP wouldn't claim any credit for IA-64, OR for McKinley, which they also designed.
You're going to have to find another example of recent Intel innovation.
--
There is no sin except stupidity -- Oscar Wilde
HP had the basic IA-64 architecture already designed when Intel was brought in to implement it. Intel fucked up their implementation (Merced), so HP had to design McKinley to make up for it. Under their agreement, Intel also took credit for McKinley. But Intel had little to do with the design of IA-64, or with its features that are actually innovative, or with the processor design that will actually implement it decently.
So yes, you are going to have to try again.
--
There is no sin except stupidity -- Oscar Wilde
Come on, man!
:-(
When I got my current job (as a contracting programmer) last August, I got a 6-years-old Pentium-100 computer w/64 megs of RAM! My boss tells me now that I might get something new in August...
You might think what company it is that can't give a contractor who costs it between 13 and 15K/month?
I'll answer: What is Hewlett-Packard?
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
This processor is like the Subj - mean and lean, but completely non-practical. I mean, it's cool to brag while having one, but the ratio of price/usefullness is pretty low for both.
;-) with 120 hp/litre is pretty innovative, the same way as the processor that is one of the first reaping the full benefits of DDR.
Another thing in common b/w the two is that both are cool from the technological point of view. Engine revving to 9000 RPM (No, it is not Redhat packages
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
We use 1.2GHz Athlon machines at my work for Finite Element calculations - essentially computer simulations of various engineering systems, and that extra 10% is important to us. When a calculation takes 22 hours as opposed to 24 hours, that's 2 hours of engineer's time at ~$100 per hour, compared to an extra $100 in machine cost - paid for in one day. We pretty much see a linear increase with clock speed for many of our runs and on top of the 50% - 100% performance gain we see over the PIII 1GHZ (20% to 33% in clock speed times 25% to 45% in IPC, in boxes that cost a hell of a lot less) that's a lot. A P4 gives us about 40% less IPC than the PIII and only equals the 1GHz PIII due to faster clock rate - it doesn't look like SSE2 buys us much with current compilers, and the P4 x87 unit is a piece of crap only issuing a result every 2nd cycle. We've just bought 8 of them, and plan on buying about 20 more for setting up in a parallel environment. While we support all major platforms including Alpha, Sun, SGI etc, for price/performance these AMD boxes can't be beaten. While we can buy Alpha systems etc, you pay a hell of a premium for them and they'll be outdated quickly. This way we can update these machines regularly, shifting them onto other projects when faster stuff comes along. Since we're dealing with $1000 hardware as opposed to $100,000, there's no 'guilt' about getting rid of them later, and means we can bid lower on contracts than competitors using expensive equipment. As soon as we can get our hands on decent AMD dual boxes, we'll buy a load of them too. Paul cnbr28@yahoo.com
I still have a 400Mhz K6-2 and I am quite happy with it. Sure, it doesn't compile that fast, but it runs SDRAMs and until DDR gets affordable I don't see any reason to update. I might have to get a propper PCI IDE Controller for my new shiny really fast HD, but that's where we had some real innovation. 3-5 MB/s to IBM 307030 with 30 MB/s !
I agree with you completely, but I say push on boys and girls.
As the people who have to have the fastest chips start to gobble these up the prices are going to to fall even further on their slower, but capable cousins and that is always good.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
Afro 3 writes: "Konami is again showing us their moves in the music game war with a new high-energy product: Dance Dance Revolution 4th Mix, designed to operate on the 6-arrow DDR platform. There are a couple of reviews pitting the 4th Mix DDR versus Parappa the Rapper, Umjammer Lammy, and Bust a Move at DDR Freak and at DDR UK." I'm still staying cool with last-year's 3rd Mix -- does anyone harbor any lingering thoughts that that's not their real dance, they can do better?
Yeah, and if you pit a 800Mhz Itanium against a 2Ghz Sledgehammer, I'd be very interested to see who is victorious.
So wouldn't it make sense to buy a Sledgehammer that will be faster while providing legacy support for the next few years until Intel starts cranking out a faster, more powerful chip?
When was the last time you saw an AMD commercial on TV? Compare that with the Blue Man Group ads for the Pentium 4 that intel runs just about every hour on every channel.
Perhaps if Intel spent as much money on R & D as they do on airwave saturation with the stupid chimes and the inanity of the Blue Man Group, AMD's taillights wouldn't be so far ahead of them.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Take a look at this page from the Hardware Central article by Vince Freeman. In particular check out this graph (which is curiously not hosted on the Hardware Central website).
Now look at the Sharky article by Chris Angelini and Ben Hirsch. Compare their graph.
The second pages of both articles are also very similar in structure, both discussing (in the same order) the fact that it's the same core, the cache, the bus, and then the chipsets. The comments are different though. Are these two sites getting the same person to do the benchmarking?
WTF?? are you trying to do here man ??
You know that people have overclocked a P4 to 2+GHz with a VapoChill?
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
Unfortunately, these processors also run EXTREMELY hot, especially above 800Mhz, and they can melt. I've personally witnessed two AMD CPUs (one a Duron 600, one a T-Bird 1.2) spew out the smell of burnt silicon. Am I just a statistical fluke?
I still refuse to pay Intel's high prices, so I guess I'm forced to deal with sending back melted chips every so often...
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
A site with the name "AMDZone" doesn't sound biased toward AMD at all. Nope.
-Jayde
What's a sig?
I worked at a LARGE electronics retailer in Canada a year ago and we ALREADY were seeing a large number of Athlon based machines coming in. Athlon based computer are easier to sell also.
Here's why:
Profit margins on PC's are really sad (retailers tend to aim for 7% on the computer itself).
Now if Athlon based machines sell for, $200 less than Intel machines, that leaves me with $200 of the customers money to spend on other things. This permits me to convince them that the $200 they saved by going with an Athlon can be used for extended warranty, and other accessories.
Extended Warranties and Accessories is where ALL the real profit is in computer retail. And when I say, Accessories, I don't mean external CD-writers, I mean CABLES. Cables rule for sheer profit. Also the Belkin UPS makes good coin.
Go to Future Shop if you live in Canada, and look at the price tag for a computer. Look at the bottom of the price tag, there's a letter/number combination, next to the UPC number. Usually they're something like A122Z0032
It translates to the commission that the sales person will receive for that particular item if sold at full price. The Z(or whatever letter is in the middle) represents the decimal point. In this situation that combo would be $122.00, it's been a while since I stopped by at a Future Shop, but thats how it still was last time I was there.
But ya - you'll see how sad the commission made from a machine can be if there is no extended warranty with it.
When you measure, you are limited by that which can be measured.
The most interesting part here, as I see it, is now that dual-Athlon motherboards are becoming available, it is possible to get a pretty angry machine simply by bying two 800 Mhz Athlon's and put them on a dual motherboard. Woohoo! :-)
Right on! ;-)
You mock their use of the old Pentium Pro core, but I think of it as being proof of their excellent core design skills. For a core THAT old to still be giving birth to new products TODAY is a testament to how well designed it was. (And also gives reason as to why Intel is losing the coveted speed race-- the PPro core was never designed to go as far as it has, it just did simply because it was designed so well to begin with.) You'll receive no arguement from me about the Pentium 4, it was a big mistake to make the cuts they did (dropping their L3 cache entirely and cutting back on their L2 cache from the original specs). The final nail in the P4's coffin has got to be the lack of good FPU support-- SSE2 might be a great technology once it receives more adoption, but for older software or discontinued software, the P4 was a major blow.
You also ignore their laughably bad motherboard chipsets. Until recently, if you wanted top performance and stability, you went with the 440BX, which was designed years ago.I'm not a big fan of Intel chipsets, but the topic was processors, not core logic chipsets. Again, you'll get no arguement from me about their dealings with Rambus and their chipset problems (i820, etc). Although, to be fair, the i815e IS a nice chipset, it's just too bad Intel caved into what MUST have been pressure from Rambus to neuter the chipset to only accept 512MB PC133 max.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Well, they have been innovative where it counts, new instructions. MMX, SSE and SSE2 are VERY well designed and suited to the tasks that are common-place now-- multimedia experiences. (Be it games, playing movies, working with audio or video, etc. these instructions are a singificant help if present. I think MMX got more of a beating from the popular media than it deserved, considering how well the instructions perform when used properly.)
Branch prediction, out of order execution and so on, I agree, nothing new really except that those philosophies had never been applied to the x86 core. But definately not new ideas.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
No, I don't have it backwards. For the hobbyist, I won't deny for a second that AMD is kicking Intel's ass from here to [some city far from where you live]. In the RETAIL MARKET, AMD still hasn't got all of the OEM's and major PC manufacturers sewn up. It's all a matter of perspective I guess, I mean, I wouldn't mind if AMD beat the snot out of Intel, maybe it'd cause them to get their products out faster or be more competitive with their prices (especially for things like the Pentium 4, which performs worse but costs more than a Pentium III 1GHz). I think the competition is bringing some good things out, but I definately don't see AMD "owning" the retail sector.. that's just AMD evangelizing hard at work.
Go ahead, walk into Cicuit City, CompUSA, or any other computer store retailer and take a head count of Intel systems vs. AMD systems. That's what the non-tech saavy consumer sees. And that's what drives retail sales (that, and I've never seen an AMD television commercial, have you?).
AMD is definately on the right track with their Athlon product line, and the follow-ups they've made to it since, but they've still got a way to go with public relations.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Against the first run of Itanium's (IA-64), sure, I wouldn't be surprised if the Itanium got beat. You're not figuring in the fact that the Sledgehammer is running on a tried and true platform, just adding in new instructions and a few registers. IA-64/Itanium is an entirely different architecture, and will take time to mature (hence the huge delays since Merced/Itanium were originally announced many moons ago). Innovation doesn't occur overnight, and it doesn't always perform as planned right out of the gate. In the long term, IA-64 will eventually displace IA-32 in both the server sector and in the consumer sector; in the short term, IA-64 will be geared towards high-performance servers and workstations. The platform lends itself well to SMP, and it scales VERY well. I'd say in one and a half to two years from the date of first shipment of IA-64 CPU's we can expect to see some good numbers coming from that core.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Some people got ahold of early test processors and ran some old code on it, big deal. I'd hardly say that's how the real thing will perform.
In comparison AMD has created an open standard allowing full backwards compatibality while advancing the architecture to do similiar functions as what Intel did... Same software runs just as fast (if not faster)...Uh, there's nothing closed about Intel's standards either-- or did you miss the part where I said they literally GIVE AWAY manuals with PAGES of information on both their assembly language mnemonics and the actual byte-code output by IA-64 compilers?
Hmm well I'm goign to choose AMD over Intel here... So it may not be "innovation" even if it is a new step up for x86 (similiar to when they went to using RISC-style core logic), it's still what makes sense to keep things runing without huge expenses... Heck do business users/home users need more than x86 anyways?I'm glad you think technology is at a stand-still and that the x86 architecture, which was designed in the 70's, should carry us through the new millenium. Thanks, but no thanks-- it's clear from the extensions that BOTH AMD and Intel have added (MMX, SSE, 3DNow! and so on) that the architecture was never intended to be used for the tasks that are being asked of it. CISC is reason enough to ditch it.
Well that is your opinion... I wouldn't agree completely... I think what we have works & works pretty well for most things...For most things.. right now. What are we supposed to use in 2-3 years or 5-10 years? More of the same, just smaller die and more transistors? The architecture was never meant to scale this far, and new architecures have been found since the original x86 that perform better and faster at a lower clock speed. This is why an 800 Mhz Itanium may well perform better than a 1.2 GHz Thunderbird when running native code.
We already complain about how coders & compiler writers can't seem to optimize code very well... This is just the worst thing possible when you think about it... Yes lets rely on peopel who don't have the time/desire to optimize for existing archs by requiring them to do so... Sure great 'innovation'...I said compiler, I never said coder. Compilers for IA-64 would be responsible for ordering instructions properly such that they can be executed in parallel (IA-64 makes this process much easier and actually encourages executing multiple paths of code at the same time, taking branch prediction to a whole new level). Compiler writers don't tend to make the same poor choices in instruction selection as your typical lazy C++ or Visual Basic coder will.
Um no, this is not who it really works... IA64 is a VLIW arch which isn't even somewhat compatible with x86 on a internal level... It's not a 'new mode' but a complete replacement that has a 'compatability mode' of sorts which is incredibly slow & obviously not native to the cpu's core instruction set...Actually you're wrong, and unfortunately not for the last time-- it **IS** just another operating mode as I described. You can freely switch (upon using CPUID to detect the presence of it anyways, unless you want to non-compatible with non-IA64 processors) between IA-64 code and IA-32 code (protected mode or real mode). This allows 32-bit OS's to take advantage of the new instructions without re-writing the entire thing from scratch as IA-64. It's a clear win for backwards compatibility because it gives software developers a chance to continue using their older IA-32 code whilst developing on an IA-64 platform, and vice versa.
frankly after reading this I don't believe your an 'assembly language programmer' or if you are you haven't finished reading those 'ver 1,000 pages!' of information on IA64...Frankly I don't care what you believe-- I enjoy my work and I enjoy developing software in multiple languages (x86 being something I particularly enjoy writing). You're right about not having read all 1,000 pages of the Intel documentation though-- my company doesn't develop IA-64 solutions yet because we obviously don't have the hardware to test and develop on! I've really only read Volume I and Volume II, Volume III, the instruction set reference, I've only skimmed through to see what kind of instructions the architecure provides and how it relates to what the previous volumes discussed. I'll finish it eventually though, rest assured.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Intel's documentation describes the IA-64 environment as just another operating mode, albeit a totally alien mode (real mode and protected mode atleast have the luxury of sharing the same environment-- registers, stack, etc. IA-64 has completely different registers or aliases IA-32 registers to IA-64 registers). IA-64 also has 128 general purpose registers and 128 floating point registers-- far more than SSE/SSE2 provided (weren't SSE's registers just aliases of ST (the normal FPU reg's)? I know MMX registers were just aliased ST registers.).
If you ask me though, talking about IA-64 is more like questioning Intel's competency then complementing it's innovation. IA-64 is now over 3 years late (first planned release for the Itanium was 1997, with early '98 being the first published date), and it's beginning to look like it's performance is going to be competive with chips that were out 3 years ago! To be fair, though, the Itanium is dead anyway, even Intel's all but given up on it in favour of the McKinley.No disagreement here, you're right that Merced is WAY late, well beyond vaporware. The thing is though, Intel is starting to show the technology off and getting it into vendors hands in limited quantities. There's no doubt that the first iteration will flop as a processor in the market, but the thing is, atleast it's there and future iterations of the core will likely yield much better results. (EG: McKinley, as you stated.) How this relates to AMD vs. Intel as far as 'innovation' is again easy, Sledgehammer just extends IA-32-- IA-64 re-writes the whole mess and starts from scratch: new bytecode, new instructions, new environment, new everything, and an optimized (hopefully) core to run it all. Intel can't do much more with their IA-32 cores that they haven't already tried, the only way to make it run faster is to change the rules. (IMHO, of course.)
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Actually I won't-- Intel and HP co-designed the technology. That's not a big secret that somehow instantly obliterates my opinion. It's a fact that HP was working on VLIW technology before Intel came along, and it's also a fact that the same research into VLIW went into the design of IA-64. But for you to say IA-64 existed before Intel got involved is erroneous. It wasn't until after they allied themselves that IA-64 was designed using technology created by both entities that it took shape. Regardless, it's still innovative and a vast departure from the x86 platform we deal with today.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Look, I'm not going to engage you in some flamefest where you spit out random unprovable "facts" that you deem to be gospel in your attempt to distort the truth. Anyone who investigates what's out in the media and what's been reported can easily see that HP worked in VLIW before Intel came along, and that the two partnered on Merced. Merced was not completely "fucked up" when they teamed with HP, Merced wasn't even in any sort of development beyond the typical vaporware talk you see at all the large community shows. Your idea that Merced is Intel's own labor of love and that McKinley is HP's own design is also false, based on everything stated so far in the media and on Intel's press site.
Please, don't try to flame me with disjointed half-truths and "facts" that you can't prove. If you have some sort of evidence that can persaude me you're right and I'm wrong, I welcome it, but so far you're just fanning flames and offering no real insight.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
It's innovation-- take your own question and apply it back to the original x86 architecture. Was Intel locking anyone into their products then? The answer is yes, but as everyone here on /. is aware, emulation isn't illegal and nobodies stopping AMD from making their own compatible version of IA-64 (the specs are all out there for the taking, check out developer.intel.com, and Intel will even ship, FOR FREE, IA-64 manuals to you that weigh in at over 1,000 pages!).
So Intel has added as of yet unused and so far unnecessary registers to a new operating mode which can (will?) potentially lock consumers into their products as software gets written to take advantage of said (dubious and patented) innovations?Wrong. You clearly aren't an assembly language programmer-- the biggest problem with x86 CPU's is the LACK OF GENERAL PURPOSE REGISTERS. IA-64 addresses this problem using these methods--
128 General Registers (64-bit)
128 Floating-point Registers (82-bit)
As you can see, compared to the number of registers available in the 386 through to the Pentium 4, this is a HUGE number. (FYI: The Pentium III has 4 32-bit general purpose registers, 6 if you count ESI and EDI, 7 if you can safely use EBP. There is also a similarly low number of FPU registers, again, Intel has addressed this with IA-64.) These registers would not go unused, and they are VERY necessary. The kind of optimizations this will open up are mind-boggling to an assembly programmer.
While AMD has simply taken an existing operating mode, added a few general purpose and non-proprietary registers, and improved the overall design and performance of a tried-and-true architecture with known quantitative qualities?You're suggesting that Intel sticks with an admittedly broken and ancient architecture? Intel has stretched the x86 core as far as it's going to go, the only innovation that can occur now is with a changing of paradigms and a changing of actual instruction sequencing. IA-64 puts more of the burden on the compiler to figure out what code is trying to do, and puts less of the stress on the run-time architecture (not to belittle the IA-64's strong architecture, simply that it's taken a much more RISC approach than their x86 processors have).
All of your points about cost of innovation and so on are moot-- it wouldn't be innovation if Intel stuck with the status quo. AMD isn't innovating, AMD is copying and now trying to extend x86 to last a little longer. Intel wants to ditch the x86 architecture but still leave a migration path for older users (hence the 'IA-64 is just another mode of the processor' trick-- code can switch at will from IA-64 mode to protected mode to real mode and back, and real mode/protected mode code can take advantage of IA-64 if the mode exists without using an IA-64 OS). In the end, one is innovation and one is just an attempt to keep the x86 around that much longer.
I'm not anti-AMD, but to say that Intel isn't trying to innovate and is instead trying to force people to adopt some new hardware of theirs is just plain wrong. I don't think either company is trying to do that, or else we'd see a total dismissal of the x86 instruction sets-- but instead, we're seeing both AMD and Intel keep the x86 around in both their 64-bit implementations as legacy support.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
I don't know if I think of AMD as a second class CPU maker/distributor, but I still hold Intel in a higher regard simply because they tend to offer more in the way of innovation.
Take a look at Itanium (or their IA-64 instruction set) vs. AMD's Sledgehammer core-- IA-64 is just another operating environment, like Protected Mode was to Real Mode, except that IA-64 processors start out in IA-64 mode instead of having to switch modes after being reset. Sledgehammer, AFAIK, is just new instructions without a new operating mode. IA-64 introduces a HUGE number of general purpose CPU registers (no more EAX, EBX, ECX, EDX, EDI, ESI limitations!) while (from an admittedly brief review) AMD adds a total of 8 general purpose registers.
AMD is definately a lot different from their start-up days, and it's nice to see them trying to innovate with technologies like 3DNow! (and even nicer to see adoption of their technology alongside Intel's own technology), but I still see some work to be done before they get the major acceptance Intel enjoys in the marketplace (and not the hobbyist).
(Before anyone flames me, I know Gateway and other companies offer AMD processors in some of their offerings, but in general you still see a much larger number of Intel processors out in the retail sector vs. AMD processors.)
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Not exactly, considering the fact that Athlon CPUs are ussually much cheaper than equivalent Intel offerings ...
Over last 3 years I have run 3 different AMDs on my development machine ( sometimes involved in very heavy compiling for hours ) and had no problem at all. ...
Most recent 1 GZ Thunderbird is working perfectly (I had it for a month or so)
I have heard about problems with chipsets but I have never seen or experienced one
As *cool* as seti@home and distributed.net are, they don't count as making our world better. They are good things and cool things, but do not help make the computer a life-style quality multiplier.
I can only think of trivial examples, like parsing, categorizing, and analyzing the music you listen to (songprinting, frequency of play, length of play, type of play) to help you find more music you like, and sharing this info with other machines to make music databases as easy to browse and search as the internet has made text databases browseable (if not easy).
But what can a single 400MHz machine do to make the average household 10% happier?
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Get a Mac tower. Heck, get a dual CPU 533MHz G4 with built in firewire, CD-RW, gigabit ethernet, and a GeForce3 ^^
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
What for?
Here I have a 650MHz P3, there a 300MHz P2, at home a Celeron 450, and in my hand a 400MHz P3 laptop
Most suck power being idle.
What can we do (Open Source, PC industry, software industry) to make computers truly powerful, useful, productive! All these resources, Python, Perl, C/C++, CPUs, memory, storage, networking...
What can we be doing with all of this capacity to truly make our world better?
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Right about incremental performance boosts. Running UT I get 40fps on a K6-2 300 overclocked to 418 and a Geforce 256. A new system would be a 300% increase for me, but what's the increase on 1.2Ghz to 1.33Ghz, 9%. "Hi, would you like to upgrade 300% or 309%?" When I can see a tenfold improvement, it'll be time, just like upraging from my 486-33. Until then, I need the money for beer.
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Could any of you really tell the difference between this setup and a 1.2Ghz machine? I mean seriously, this isn't flamebait. Your app might open, what, 1/20th of a second faster, and you might bet 5 more FPS in Q3A.
It almost seems like what's the point with these incremental releases.
Blue skies... Barthie burgers... girls.
Neither did Intel, until the endorsement money started talking.
Blue skies... Barthie burgers... girls.
I have to agree. The AMD system I use at home is by far the most stable of my 3 main systems. The other 2 are both Intel (One Celeron, one Pentium) and both are more likely to freeze or choke.
The question of course, is do you mark that up to the processor, the drivers, or the mo-bo? I am of course referring to all systems having the same OSs installed on them, with AMI BIOS.
Have any of you used the BMRT (Blue Moon Rendering Tools, http://www.bmrt.org) on the Intel vs. the AMD? I don't have any systems that are speed comparable to run this test on. However, it's a great benchmarker.
-WSAn operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
I wouldn't say that AMD is second class... it's like saying Linux is second choice. Really AMD and Linux have something in common... they both have the competitive edge to put those big guys on their knees praying for their next release not screw up!
;) When was the last time AMD made a call back? rofl!
Disagree? Well when was the last time your Windows crashed or gave you a prob and where able to recover easily? Ok then, when was the last time Linux crashed? (lol). When was the last time Intel made a big mistake? When was the last time Intel ever released something NEW before AMD (in that past 2 years that is)?..
Ok obviously there's more to it than that.. but I believe everyone has a choice... and in a way it's equal!
Great ideas happen at 4am. Bad career moves happen at 4pm...
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
Well, I think that both companies would do much better if they could convince people like me why I should shell out more money to replace my perfectly usable P II 233. If it runs, it runs. I couldn't care less about how fast my CPU is.
AMDZone
Gamer's Depot
Ace's Hardware
GotApex?.
And here is a presentation with benchmarks and a roadmap. Have fun. Don't let biased slashdot postings warp your mind!
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
actually, systemax runs those kinds of ads on television and they are doing the other angle. They basically push the Athlon over the intel processors because of its performace and reliability. So these kinds of arguments will go both ways, but it's certainly unethical to lie about a product and call it 'unreliable'.
Like those SMP Pentium IVs you see all over the place, right?
I agree with you on the firewire, though.
--
> does anyone harbor any lingering thoughts that
> AMD is a second-class citizen in the
> chipmaking world?
Yes, I do. The Pentium 4 is a new chip architecture, and no one disputes its current incarnation is a dog. It's fairly easy to beat the P4 1.5 GHz using older chip designs.
Problem is, the whole reason Intel switched architectures is because the P3 was reaching the limits of its design, while the P4 is capable of much, much more. In a few short months the P4 should be up to 2 GHz, and promises to run even faster. When this happens, AMD will be hard pressed to compete without fielding a new design itself, and then it'll be back to Intel out front with the other chip makers playing catch-up.
I have two Athlons and three P3s in my home workpit. The Athlons were cheaper by far initially, but thanks to crappy chipsets, I spend more time making the Athlons work than the Pentiums. At work, I don't even bother risking help-desk issues by buying AMD. Sorry guys, but as long as I still need to let users load personal apps on their boxes, AMD is still a 2nd class citizen to me. Besides, Windows is evil, when did we decide Intel was evil? Intel makes a good product for the price, and based on what AMD is putting out, I think the pricing is justifiable.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
right on brother
-Zuchinis
While we're on the topic, what's up with the lack of x86 mainboards with FireWire (IEEE 1394) support? I read a while back that the boardmakers aren't supporting 1394 because Microsoft doesn't want them too - because M$ doesn't control the standard.. but you'd think that would scare the Intel guys more than the AMD guys..
How about it, VIA, can I get a MB with Firewire for my new camcorder? Or do I have to go Mac?
Maybe Mozilla will actually run fast on one of these :-)
Yeah, I got one of those bad boys. Overclocked it to just over 2ghz, I'm cooling it with liquid oxygen. I run at about 35 kelvin
Had a little problem with open flames, tho. Foom! No more box.
Course, I did manage to decapitate one of the blue men in the ensuing explosion. I made his little blue head into a hat for my dog.
Brant
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
In my experience, while the Athlon chip itself is great, its motherboard chipsets just don't seem to be up par with the chipsets for Intel systems in terms of driver stability and compatibility.
--
Assume that there are valid arguments against your position.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
- Nietzsche
This is turning itno one those old debates where it is just a simple matter of personal preference. Each company has 'die hards' that will never admit the other company has done something good. Pepsi IS better though.
Ok this has been bothering me for quite some time now.
I am not quite sure why everyone is so bothered with the fact that Dell chooses to not sell AMD based systems. The simple fact is:
Anyone who knows alot about building computers NEVER buys a pre-made system. They buy the parts and build it themselves.
So what ends up happening is:
the people who feel the most strongly against Intel are the ones who don't buy pre-made systems in any case. It doesn't matter if they are AMD OR Intel systems.
The people that actually want a pre-built system that is Intel based go to Dell and get a quality system.
Since most slashdotters are not going to buy any of the machines that Dell sells please tell me why Dell should care what you guys think? If only selling Intel based systems works for them why not just leave them alone?
Oh and before someone points out that they just happen to be very experienced with computers and still buy pre-built systems. Well, there is a simple solution for you: Don't buy a Dell!
SmileeTiger
BTW: This is not meant as a flame I just felt the need to point some facts out that most people seem to forget.
I recently purchased my FIRST AMD chip since the 486 era and I must admit I was amazed by the speed and loved the price on it. However, since then I've been cursing up a storm due to problems with the VIA chipset under Windows 2000 and compatibility with the Geforce series of cards (which I happen to have). I had to reinstall 21 times before I found the *right* combination of drivers to install so Windows 2000 wouldn't bluescreen on me.
And yes, I know all of you are going to say "windows 2000 sucks" or "run Linux", well my answer to that refers to why business systems and makers of these systems (eg Dell, upper end Compaq workstations, etc) do not use AMD chips! Sure, Counter-strike ran great on my AMD chip, but Intel chips are still more stable in the workstation market and that's what these manufacturers (and myself) are really looking for.
I'm sorry, but until AMD gets another chipset maker other than VIA to start developing chipsets, the shortcomings of the chipset available will stop me from purchasing another AMD (and yes, the new laptop I just bought was an Intel and was a Dell and will run Windows 2000... without any problems =)
tyan makes one called the thunder 7.. it's server class and subsequently VERY expensive.. ~$950
it's on the front page, or at least it was last time i looked.. the tyan.com front page has an image in the top right corner that says Tyans S2567 thunder is here. click that.
sorry that post was wrong.. here's a link to a picture of the board here i can't find the original page i read this on
found it..: here
I was bored last night so I was watching a shopping channel. They had a p3-800 with 64 megs of ram, 20 gig disk, 17" monitor, and a throw-away printer and scanner for $1800! The salesman implied that AMD processors are unreliable. Just what we need: used car salesmen selling computers.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Intel (the ones who have had trouble with that tricky 'division' thing in the past) has what in the way of testing that AMD doesn't?
I mean if would be one thing if Intel has always had rock on chips, but they have the same 'industry standard' failure rate for chips (Not just processors, but chips!) that others have.
-- What? Another
It seems to me that the only reason AMD is doing this is because AMD is riding an unprecedented wave of success in the processor market. AMD has made enormous strides and each set of quarterly results seems to herald a new record in terms of overall sales and net income.
Diplomacy is the art of letting people have your way
It's going to be hard for AMD to keep up the clock speed race with the Pentium 4, but this is a good start. Here's two more reviews, Anandtech and Tom's Hardware.
Isn't it about time somebody came out with a 64bit processor for the PC instead of just continuing to up the clock speed on 32bit chips? Isn't the G4 a 128bit chip? Why hasn't Intel caught up yet?
Anyone not using liguid N2 better know what they are doing. liguid Oxygen can be very explosive. Helium. not to bad, but Nitrogen is cheaper and has a much olower freezing point.
what?
All the machines I request for purchase at work are intel. All the machines at home which I've paid more than $10 for are AMD.