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?

Comments

I still question your conclusions.

[Christopher Thomas]

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.

You are still ignoring several very important considerations.

1. Infiniband motherboards do not presently exist. Claiming that AMD or DEC/Compaq's motherboard architectures blow them out of the water is very premature.
   
2. You are blithely ignoring the serious problems involved in widening busses.
   
   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).
   
3. You provide no support for your claim that Infiniband's performance will be poor.
   
   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.
   
4. You're assuming a single channel. Any sane design that I can think of would use multiple channels in parallel to boost bandwidth (receiver logic has to be more complicated, to combine packets from two asynchronus data streams, but this isn't that difficult).
   

Can you provide more support for your claims, so that I can see where your arguments are coming from?

Second-class?

[vex24]

does anyone harbor any lingering thoughts that AMD is a second-class citizen in the chipmaking world?

Dell, apparently... those jerks still won't sell me AMD powered boxes. :P

wow!

[shren]

now software designers can release even sloppier, slower, uglier code and still have it work fast enough!

Re:wow!

[Ian Wolf]

I laughed, but this isn't funny. It's all too true.

I have to laugh when people (non-technical people) complain about how a computer is obsolete the day you buy it. To which I am always inclined to ask what they are doing with their computer that it can't keep up. The answers are almost always the same, word processing, email, and browsing. They simply think that becauses there is something faster out there that theirs is somehow obsolete.

Hardware companies are building jets, and most software companies are simply building bigger biplanes with gold plated instruments, leather seats, and a teak prop.

Well...

[DarkEdgeX]

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.)

My biggest beef against the whole PC market;

[2nd Post!]

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!

Re:SMP? FireWire?

[Anoriymous Coward]

Like those SMP Pentium IVs you see all over the place, right?

I agree with you on the firewire, though.

--

Fa-a-a-st.

[banuaba]

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