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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?
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 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?
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...
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).
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.
Dell, apparently... those jerks still won't sell me AMD powered boxes. :P
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
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)
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."
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?
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.
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
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
Like those SMP Pentium IVs you see all over the place, right?
I agree with you on the firewire, though.
--
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.