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Dual Athlon Motherboards Creep Closer
Quixote writes: "The Inquirer has an article about a dual Athlon MoBo sighted in Taiwan. Running with 1.8GHz Athlons. Sweeeet!. Ahem. Tom's Hardware also has a photo of the MoBo. Can't wait to get my grubby paws on one!" AMD seems to be waiting for the Christmas shopping season or something -- would be nice to see some mid-range dual-AMD motherboards soon, because those dual-NIC, built-in-SCSI ones look a bit out of reach for now.
AMD seems to be waiting for the Christmas shopping season or something -- would be nice to see some mid-range dual-AMD motherboards soon, because those dual-NIC, built-in-SCSI ones look a bit out of reach for now.
Sorry, but I don't think that the average xmas shopper is looking for multi-processor motherboards. AMD has little-to-no need to worry about "mid-range" SMP boards.
Remember, we're geeks. We may be growing in numbers, but we hardly make up the bulk of the xmas shopper population!
According to the local rumor mill, someone has a test board with durons, and the board will be under $200 at launch!
The procs where AMDs *new* Paliminos (.13 micron, etc.). They're supposed to run cooler with the smaller etching. Even then these procs and mobos aren't widely available (the person mentioned in Tom's article stated his lab got the stuff through *certain* sources). When they're released to the commercial market, they've probably have been improved. Anyway, try checking out www.overclockers.com. Ed mentions that the high demand for AMD procs is likely the cause for the current quality problems. Also, AMDs are mostly sought after by the hobbyist market who aren't so concerned with the heat problems.
Reasonable??
Then I think you might want to skip Tyan board, as they are definately not cheap, and looking at the specs of this board and it's components - this going to be a very very expensive board..
I hope that Asus and Abit will start showing something soon, I've heard some rumors that they plan to bring Dual Athlon boards too..
Hetz (Heunique)
hawk
hawk
To get to the 1Gb of ram I need with current motherboards, we had to use 2x256 + 1x512. THe latter runs abour $800. Going to 4x256 and not needing a u160 controller will pretty much cover the motherboard and extra processor.
However, I won't get cold . . . hey, wait a minute! my office is already too hot in the winter--though not as bad as poor Bill next door, who has to open his window when it's 10F outside . . .
ohh, and the noise. Not just all those fans, but I'm going to have 3x15k scsis in here, along with the 4ide drives.
I think this puppy only gets powerred up for the heavy runs, and I work on the laptop most of the time . . .
I produced one, and followed them back. There were 5 or six of us there, watching dan add new memory to his laptop (an extra 2M, i think!)
It suddenly hit me: 20 years earlier, we'd have been watching the installation of a new carbeurator the same way . . .
hawk
Does anyone understand what the onboard video is? I assume it's only midrange. I don't need high performance, but I doo need to be able to drive a 21" sony at 2048x1536. Just what does this have?
hawk
Then there was the old Macintosh Portable with its 1.5A power supply. That wasn't enough to spin up the hard drive, so you *had* to have a battery in it during boot. (And I never would have debugged that blown fuse if there hadn't been a similar and common problem on the powerbooks . .
hawk
From Pricewatch: DDR 512
I really need ECC which is even more expensive. There is always grossly nonlinear cost behavior at the high density end of the RAM market.
And where on Crucial's website may I find 512 MB ECC PC133 DDR SDRAM DIMMs?
Search, the web and tell me where I can buy 512 MB DDR SDRAM DIMMs for less than $600 to $700 each. The point is that I need 1 GB of RAM. The motherboard has two slots for DDR.
Read...think...then respond.
I can see your point about the ethical issues here, but I am spending my customers' money. I am obligated to put the best solution on their desk for the best price. There is no room for me to prop up substandard technology.
And the 10% increase that I mention is a measured quantity for my application. I ran the same benchmarks on a KT133a motherboard with PC133 and a AMD760 motherboard with DDR. The DDR system was about 10% faster. I could probably have seen the same increase by moving to CAS2 PC133 on the KT133a.
Truthfully, if I opted for AMD, I would stay with the KT133a. I have not tested the SiS chipset, but stream numbers seem to correlate tightly with my application performance. The VIA and Ali Magik chipsets both have lower stream numbers than the 760. If the SiS stream numbers are higher, I might take another look. But the 760 only gave me about a 10% improvement over a KT133a with CAS3 SDRAM. I would probably go with the Asus KT133a board, four cheap sticks of ECC CAS2 256 DIMMs, and a 1.33. I would end up with about the same performance I got from DDR.
In other words, DDR is offically a "waste of money" in my book, until someone shows me otherwise. Right now, the P4/RDRAM combo is way out in front and I suspect that the 1.7 GHz chip will put it even further ahead for my application. I am going to be buying Intel and Rambus...even if it is against my will.
Well, I finally broke down and bought test equipment. A 1.5 P4, i850 motherboard, 640 MB RDRAM and 1.33 Athlon, AMD760 motherboard, 512 MB DDR SDRAM. I built them, installed Linux, installed the CFD software my customers use, and did some benchmarking.
The long and short is this: for this application, the P4 was the winner by a huge margin. The 1.5 P4 with RDRAM was over 60% faster than than 1.33 Althon/DDR rig.
So, this is important to me and to other scientific computing folks for a number of reasons:
- P4 prices are in a freefall
- I can put 1 GB of RDRAM on an i850 board with a 1.7 GHz for $1400 (CPU $400, RDRAM $800, MoBo $200)
- The only DDR motherboards worth anything are based on the AMD chipset and they only have two DDR sockets. So, to get to 1 GB DDR, it costs about $600 each for two DDR DIMMs...$1200 just for RAM!
- Even the "best" DDR implementation is only the slightest improvement over SDR. (about 10% in my tests)
So, I am sure that this will infuriate the lemmings who wander in to moderate. I have been waiting for the dual AMD setup with anticipation, but when it comes, it desparately needs decent DDR support. At least for my application, Intel and RDRAM are doing something very right.So, RAMBUS sucks as a company. Intel isn't much better. For Unreal Tornament and Office Bench-O-Rama 2000, the Athlon might be the easy choice, but I think Intel has a viable platform in the i850 and they may well evolve it into an outstanding dual system. They have the kinks out of their RDRAM implementation. AMD and VIA should take note. Their DDR implementations are worthless.
I know I have been waiting for these AMD beauties to come out the door. When MHZ and CPUS are a must and you are running on a tight budget, dual AMDs are a dream.
Now I need guranteed software support for them...
(for some reason some vendors will not list AMD as a supported proc... )
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Just replace pub with cafe
No. No... NO!!! Never replace pub with cafe.
I'll be glad to sit around in a pub and discuss penis size, er, uh...cpu speed, but never in a cafe.
I have always had (and still do have) dreams of building...gasp!!...Yes, that's right... a Beowulf cluster. I know it's a running joke and kind of cliche on Slashdot to say so, but I still think the concept is waaaay cool! Just for the pure, geekish enjoyment of it!
By the way, I'd just like to add that I've long waited for these dual capable motherboards to actually be available, but I must say that they are starting to seem like the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot and UFOs all rolled into one. Drat! Perhaps someday...someday...
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
Gosh, thanks for pointing out that 3600 is usually greater than 1600. Usually....
What do you set in make.conf? Can you really set CFLAGS there without it getting stomped later?
I think it is unclean because you are setting CFLAGS, not C_OPT_FLAGS so something that doesn't want to be optimized gets your settings, as do things that have their own carefully worked out settings.
It is partly a limit of make, and partly a limit of how it is used ('tho I admit that the modern BSDs use make far far better then 4.3 ever did).
I don't think that was true, I know it got slammed in initial benchmarks, and then a few months later it was doing OK (but not significantly faster then the much slower AMDs). I think that has more to do with the motherboard chipset and memory systems improving then any compiler changes. Then again I haven't been watching closely, so I could be wrong.
The compiler itself has a fair number of CPU specific bits, but they are mostly enabled by flags. On set for "what exact instruction set should I use", and a second set for "what CPU should I tune for". So you can make sure your code will run on a 486 or better (but maybe not the 386), but have the instruction ordering and cost weightings for a AMD K7, or a Intel P4 (I think that is -mtune=CPU).
Redhat may not want to compile up different RPMs for each arch, but if it is important to you, you can do it yourself. I don't know how, on FreeBSD you can do some unclean things to the master Makefiles and pretty much everything will use the new settings. If RPMs are mostly source you should be able to do the same kind of thing.
That's still not a why :-) I have been told you can use the Intel compiler as a backend for MS Visual C++ if you own it, so I guess either that compiler is too slow for most Windows software authors to want to use, or too expensive for their managers to pay for. I wonder if they can use gcc as a backend...
I expect the Alpha would do well there also. I don't think the Alpha is dead, there are still good people working on it. Just not as many. The next Alpha (which is late already, tape out being a significant fraction of a year late) looks nice. The one after it (which might come on time!) looks like a real killer.
Of corse the other "next gen" CPUs look pretty killer too. The IBM POWER4 actually looks more impressive then the next-next-Alpha. I don't recall that being the case before (the POWER has held the lead, but mostly by having their new CPU coming out a few months ahead of the new Alpha, not a year or more!). Of corse IBM seems to be playing it close to the vest, so we don't know if the POWER4 is on time.
It happens. I've had posts mistaken for personal attacks that weren't.
I doubt it. Most of the compiler related benefit is pretty small. The prefetch instruction for example gave about a 20% boost to the stream benchmark when shoved into an experimental version of gcc (this was the AMD prefetch). At that time it wasn't taken because it made some other benchmarks worse (the compiler wasn't smart enough to know when not to use them). That was about 18 months ago, so I'm not sure if they were improved and put in, or shelved for a post-3.0 release. Most other tweaks are smaller. SSE/3DNow would show a bigger improvement, but so far no compiler has done much with them, that is all hand coding (or on the PowerPC minor compiler assist because Apple modified gcc to have AltiVec datatypes), but you still have to change the C/C++/ObjectaveC yourself).
Just as importantly gcc sees optmisations for both CPUs (and many others), not just the Intel version.
The Intel compiler (as far as I know) doesn't get AMD optmisations, but it also isn't all that wildly used, despite being a very nice compiler. Most windows code isn't all that optmised, I'm not really sure why.
(note the superscaler changes seem like they would require a lot of compiler help, but ever since the PPro the x86 CPUs have mostly been out-of-order machines and don't need much compiler help in instruction ordering to get pretty close to top speed so unlike the 21064 or Pentimum1 or SuperSPARC rather then getting a 2x to 4x speed up for getting just the right ordering the speed up is tipicaly more like 10% and that is when there are lots of cache hits!)
Actually if you want integer performance Intel pretty much has the SPECInt crown (at least last month comp.arch was abuzz because the Alpha had finally lost it, and was in danger of losing the SPECFP as well, but that's what happens when half your design team is lost and your new CPU gets to be 20% as late as Intel's Merced).
The SPARC isn't a performance leader, and hasn't been for a very long time. It does give you access to some great rackmountable hardware, a ROM monitor that is great for lights out management, and a lot of other things, but raw CPU speed isn't it.
I think the Alpha still wins in SPECFP, but if you can do with reduced accuracy non-IEEE FP the PowerPC or Intel or AMD may beat it. For I/O the S/390s seem like a better bet :-)
Pretty good advice.
If you are CPU bound BSD/OS will do fine. If you have some I/O in there Linux and FreeBSD aren't too bad, but they could be a lot better. They are certainly better then Solaris was after the same number of years of effort. I'm not sure the BeOS kernel is actually any better then those OSes. The userland is better positioned because of the way they designed it, and they promote use of threads quite a bit.
P.S. yeah, I know it was probably a troll, but I had to reply :-)
Who says you don't learn something new every day?
I read slashdot and comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips regularly and this is the first time I've heard of the nickname for SSE.
Still, I don't think I deserved being called an idiot for this. Lighten up people!
Jeff
Opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.
The article mentions support for Screaming Sindie instructions. That's a good one. Someone must have dictated "Streaming SIMD" (or SSE) over the phone and the reporter obviously didn't have a clue what was meant.
Jeff
Opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.
Oooh, yeah and the PIII 1.13 Ghz chip worked sooooo well too! Whats that you say? Oh, Intel pulled it from the market? And the floating point performance is sooo good too.
Which motherboard did you buy? I have found processor has little to do with system stability. A good motherboard is the key to stability. So you got burned on your Athlon 500. The first release of any chip is a bad value in my opinion.
actually, it does mention it, doesn't it? :)
more coffee required this morning.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
What they don't mention is what was in a news post last week at viahardware.com (which I can't find again now, drat!) - AMD recommends at least a 450W power supply to run the two Athlons. Cooling the system containing these things must be a whole lot of fun too.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
Have a look at quietpc.com. I've just finished sorting out my 1Ghz Tbird to get it down to an acceptable temperature and noise level. They do silent/quiet PSUs approved by AMD, fans, drive enclosures and other bits. The noisiest thing in my PC now is the 25mm fan in the back of my CDR, which sounds like it's about to fail - Papst have just announced a quiet 25mm fan, but it's not actually available yet.
Also try http://home.swipnet.se/tr/silence.html for more lots of info regarding 'Silent PCs', TCO99, and what manufacturers can help you.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
... or just trolling? here are the current DDR prices. $90 for 256MB module. The rest of this post is similarly BS.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Hell, in school, I had to keep the case off of my box so that I could manually stager the spin up on the drives. I had to unplug one or two drives to get the first set of drives spinning, then plug in the rest of the drives.
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
1) if my car can accelerate faster than yours, then I'll get to my destination faster than you will (assuming all else is the same, and no interference from Johnny Law)
2) I *frequently* use my car as a tool. I've pushed things over with it, used it as a ladder in my front lawn, and used parts of it in ways that they aren't intended. Just like my computer.
3) I have a genuine AT motherboard in my car to play music and record information about the car, so with the simple plugging-in of a monitor, I can do everything with my car that I can with a regular computer - as well as driving it. :)
The inquirer also has an article which breaks down the 460 watt PSU requirement by component. I still want one even if it would up my electricity bill. Random thought: I hope they don't release these first in California...
--
Here's the relevant bits off /etc/defaults/make.conf (you're supposed to put your changes to /etc/make.conf, which doesn't exist out of the box, mind you):
...) are not recommended
# The CPUTYPE variable controls which processor should be targetted for
# generated code. This controls processor-specific optimizations in
# certain code (currently only OpenSSL) as well as modifying the value
# of CFLAGS to contain the appropriate optimization directive to gcc.
# The automatic setting of CFLAGS may be overridden using the
# NO_CPU_CFLAGS variable below.
# Currently the following CPU types are recognised:
# Intel x86 architecture:
# (AMD CPUs) k7 k6-2 k6 k5
# (Intel CPUs) p4 p3 p2 i686 i586/mmx i586 i486 i386
# Alpha/AXP architecture: ev6 pca56 ev56 ev5 ev45 ev4
#
# If you experience any problems after setting this flag, please unset
# it again before submitting a bug report or attempting to modify code.
# It may be that certain types of software will become unstable after being
# compiled with processor-specific (or higher - see below) optimization flags.
# If in doubt, do not set CPUTYPE or CFLAGS to non-default values.
#
#CPUTYPE=i686
#NO_CPU_CFLAGS= true # Don't add -march=<cpu> to CFLAGS automatically
#NO_CPU_COPTFLAGS=true # Don't add -march=<cpu> to COPTFLAGS automatically
#
# CFLAGS controls the compiler settings used when compiling C code.
# Note that optimization settings above -O (-O2,
# or supported for compiling the world or the kernel - please revert any
# nonstandard optimization settings to "-O" before submitting bug reports
# to the developers.
# Note also that at this time the -O2 setting is known to produce BROKEN
# CODE on the Alpha platform.
#
#CFLAGS= -O -pipe
#
# CXXFLAGS controls the compiler settings used when compiling C++ code.
# Note that CXXFLAGS is initially set to the value of CFLAGS. If you wish
# to add to CXXFLAGS value, "+=" must be used rather than "=". Using "="
# alone will remove the often needed contents of CFLAGS from CXXFLAGS.
#
#CXXFLAGS+= -fmemoize-lookups -fsave-memoized
#
# To compile just the kernel with special optimizations, you should use
# this instead of CFLAGS (which is not applicable to kernel builds anyway).
# There is very little to gain by using higher optimization levels, and doing
# so can cause problems.
#
#COPTFLAGS= -O -pipe
As for these getting stomped over, hello! the whole FreeBSD source tree honours these and the vast majority of the ports tree too. If you fetch a tarball of the net then just fix the makefiles so that it does fit the FreeBSD way of doing things, and submit a port. Most of the times this has been done by someone else though, since there are over 5000 ports nowadays...
What did you use for BIOS? (Surely the Athlons needs to run something when it starts, and a ROM that has Alpha code won't do. Right?)
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
What did you use for BIOS? (Surely the Athlons needs to run something when it starts, and a ROM that has Alpha code won't do. Right?)
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I usually make subsidary boxen out of 'em and their various supporting hardware.
(ie boxen for irc, icq, muds, and light browsing; low-end servers...)
But donating 'em is good too, and I wish my old school had done that more often - they had a literal huge closet full of slightly obsolete PowerMac G3s. Not that I like PMS much, but...that much processing power going to waste irritates me.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Hahahahahahaha, You know, its comments like this that a true gems, and make slashdot the crack up fun hillarious read that it is. (There were a few other truly remarkable comments in the Science section today on the Mars 2020 story, rofl)
;).
1 0510.html)
1 0510.html)
Often these classic slashdot comments make it into IRC channel topics
--- Topic for #diskiller is Must.....Resist..... Need money for...food and...rent...Must not give in...to dual Athlon creamy goodness...oh God give me...strength... (Info: http://www.theinquirer.net/10050107.htm, Picture: http://www.tomshardware.com/technews/technews-200
--- Topic for #diskiller set by diskiller at Fri May 11 22:16:26
And
--- Topic for #FreeBSD is Must.....Resist..... Need money for...food and...rent...Must not give in...to dual Athlon creamy goodness...oh God give me...strength... (Info: http://www.theinquirer.net/10050107.htm, Picture: http://www.tomshardware.com/technews/technews-200
--- Topic for #FreeBSD set by diskiller at Fri May 11 22:19:12
--- ChanServ gives channel operator status to diskiller
D.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
> Now when I go to Tom's site I get not just one, but TWO visa card ads!
Visa thought that would be appropriate for the dual-Athlon article.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> How the hell is a 'me too' off topic!?!?
LMAO.
It should be a simple inductive proof: if the parent was on topic, then a 'me too' is on topic.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> have always had (and still do have) dreams of building...gasp!!...Yes, that's right... a Beowulf cluster. I know it's a running joke and kind of cliche on Slashdot to say so, but I still think the concept is waaaay cool! Just for the pure, geekish enjoyment of it!
I wonder if some geek with a desire for fame, and more space than sense, and a sublime disregard for the magnitude of his power bills, might step forward and start the Team Slashdot Monster Beowulf Project. As we Slashdotters retired our old machines we could ship them off to the project, where they would be added to the cluster upon arival.
We could probably create the world's faster computer just using our junkware. "Just for the pure, geekish enjoyment of it!"
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I've been waiting for dual-Athlon + DDR for about a year, but I finally realized that they weren't actually going to come out until I spent my money on something else. So I went and bought something else a couple of weeks, to clear the metaphysical logjam.
Think of me when you boot your dualie.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Of course, it is in Japanese, but the pictures are *great*.
Yeah, I visit that kind of Web site now and then too.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
1) There is a booming market on the various country specific newsgroups, In the UK there is uk.adverts.computers. There are also the various auction sites out there and all the for sale stuff on Yahoo. (As always buyer beware)
2) Have you seen the price of Quad Boards?
FYI, "screaming sindie" is a nickname for SSE, "propably" not made up by *ntel
Way to look like a...
I own several Tyan motherboards and none of them are unstable. I purchased two Slot A motherboards last year a Tyan and an Abit. The Tyan works without problem and the Abit fails to even post. I would spend money on a Tyan product before any other.
This is nothing but FUD, and I cannot believe I even responded to this.
AMD processors are a viable solution for plenty of choices. They also give have much better value/money.
The Pentium IV is also currently a risk, as you have NO UPGRADE PATH.
The Pentium IV is still a good processor, and may be your best bet for extreme performance, but it is no less of a risk than AMD-processors.
As far as I know, Durons are just as SMP-capable as Athlons, and should work in this motherboards.
The only catch is that Athlons will perform much better due to their bigger amount of cache, and since the motherboards will probably be rather expensive, at least in the beginning, there might not be much point in buying one, and then fitting them with the cheaper but poorer option. Besides, athlons are not very expensive right now.
that is not what she said to me...
nosig today
that size doesn't matter.
Best Slashdot Co
The parallels are true. Lots of car freaks are geeks. Many geeks are car freaks. Think of how much some of us enjoy hacking, and remember that hacking a car isn't that different from hacking a pc. Philosopically, anyway.
Best Slashdot Co
If you don't care about it looking good, cooling isn't too big a deal. It's easy, even. Either just totally take off the side of the case, or drill lots of holes (if you care about RF), and then blow a $15 super-quiet desk fan at it. I'm running a duron 600 @ 900mhz, plain ol heat sink & fan it came with, @ 47C w/28C ambient. Plus, it cools my overclocked TNT2 much better, and does a good job on my hard drives and power supply too. All for $15cdn..
Same setup would work really well with a dual configuration, and it's whisper quiet, too. Could always do it with ductwork, I guess, but this works great, and it's $15cdn. Can't beat that. Heat concerns amuse me when they have to put a 1lb heatsink on the P4, and that's to act more as a heat transfer buffer than an effective sink, imho.
..don't panic
only on slashdot...these parodies are so true. There was another one that was even funnier...in which sigs spread like memes through the comments, but I can't find it now.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Yea, right...
The UP1000 would technically accept a Slot-A Athlon in the Slot-B slot. (Slot-B being a
superset of Slot-A) Why you'd want to do that when you can get a Slot-A motherboard cheaper is beyond me.
The UP2000 has Slot-B slots but the chipset, the Tsunami, doesn't support Athlons.
There's no such board as a UP1200.
FWIW, I work at API.
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
I really wish AMD would get this stuff out the door. I'd love to be able to start buying dual or quad CPU AMD servers. No one takes them seriously in that market yet since you can only do single CPU systems.
:(
I'm also annoyed at the lack of some vendors support for AMD. I just ordered a new desktop for work. We use Compaq Deskpros. Not a single AMD system in all the Deskpro lines. The only way to get an AMD workstation from Compaq is to buy the Presario, which I won't do. I ended up getting a P4.
I wonder how long it will be like this in the server market even after AMD starts shipping the SMP chipsets. If Compaq doesn't put them in their good workstations, why would they put them in their servers? Give us our Athlons!
[1] ... What the heck happens to all those outgoing chips?
... recycling some of the 300's and 400's and making a Quad motherboard running say a PIII 400...
eBay baby, eBay. Seriously, for a company such as Intel that works on the principals of planned obsolesence, there must be hundreds (nay, thousands) of slightly older chips *somewhere*.
[2]
There's no such thing as the PIII 400. Also (as someone else mentioned) you can't get n-way SMP with PII's unless N=2. Finally, price out some quad-proc mobos... expensive... Note also that a 1.33ghz thunderbird machine will, for all intents and purposes, stomp a 4-way 400mhz machine for LOTS cheaper.
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
Intel crippled the P2 core (since carried on to the P3) to allow only 2 way SMP. You need Xeons to go above 2 cpus.
ostiguy
IHMO I don't see the big deal about running out to get the `latest` high speed (Mhz) chip to run from any vendor be it Intel, AMD, Transmeta, etc., especially something that hasn't been tested in real world condition so my question are as follows...
[1]
When the 300's and 400's came out the same hooplah surrounded them and everyone hyped them much the same way as the comments on this story. If marginal fractions of people brought those chips, then carried on to other higher speeds, what is everyone doing with their other chips... Is there a chip cementary I should know about or are people doing cool shit like donating older chips to non profit companies, or edu's or something? What the heck happens to all those outgoing chips?
[2]
What about recycling some of the 300's and 400's and making a Quad motherboard running say a PIII 400 wouldn't it be cheaper, and faster for certain tasks. Has anyone tried this?
I'm not hardcore on hardware since I don't do any high tech scientific computing, or distributed computing, hardcore gaming, etc., so I always wonder who in the `real world` buys these chips and for what...
Want Root?
create a an overlying case for the PC with 4 slots cut out, left side, right side, top, and back. On the side place some fans blowing inbound, let the back blow outbound. With the top cut out you could get a hose similar to something a clothing dryer would use, and hook it up to a "Penguino" floor standing air condition to keep cool air circulating into it.
Actually you could make a nice little desktop set up with something like that and keep most of your PC's in there to keep them cooled. Just don't forget to have AC filters on the insides of the carve outs to keep the PC's dust free. Or you could dish out for a single freon cooled case.
Want Root?
That being said, room for 2 GB of DDR. *DROOL*
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Not only is MP P4 coming out before MP Athlon (P4 in May, Athlon in June), but MP capabilities came considerably earlier to P4 relative to the first launch. In this case, MP capabilities will be available about six months (May 2001) after the original launch (November 2000), but in the case of Athlon, it was almost two years (June 2001) after the original launch (August 1999).
I wonder if California is going to have to put energy usage controls into place similar to their car emission controls. Or maybe just a "Power guzzler" tax? /. users hate Windows or think Microsoft is out to get them!
____________________
Remember, not all
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
Well,
Intel tried to get the consumer with the P4's ultra high speeds at the sacrifice of clock-for-clock performance. Although the P4 isn't even close to dead yet, it certainly hasn't been the seller that they had thought it would be. Unfortunately for Intel, they have overlooked multi-processor P4s for the time being. AMD may have them over a barrel here.
I wonder if dual 1Ghz AMD's will do anything for Joe consumer? I am sure that we are bound to see "2000 Mhz" in big letters across the Best Buy circulars. Yes, this is misleading but could this finally be the important weapon that AMD has been looking for? Possibly... I know that I want one simply for the sake of sheer geekness. My 650 Athlon works fine for now, but SETI should fly on this thing...
Time to buy AMD?
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did you remember to put a heatsink/fan on your processor. it sounds like you dont know a damn thing about setting up a computer, either that or you buy your chips from K-Mart.
metatr0n.net - the digital divine
I was talking about internal DC currents. If you have a pair of CPUs drawing 100 W total and running at 1.0 V, that's 100 A. When they go from sleep to full-bore-computation, that's a hell of a sudden current change for the power supply to deal with.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
Umm... don't you mean your running dual Alphas? I don't think you can plop a slot A Athlon into a board built for Alphas.
--- "1.21 Jigawatts!" -Doc
Ok, everyone seems to be agreeing, and yeah, of course I see the parallels. There is a difference though. Why do you want a pc in the first place? to do work, to play games to communicate. Cars take you places, but you can't create tools with them. PC are tools that (in a programmers sense) help you create tools. Computer geeks like fast computers, big surprise. You can always use more speed in your computer (ALWAYS!). You can't usually get someplace faster because you have a faster car. Faster computers open up new doors, faster cars are more towards fun cool stuff then opening up new possibilities.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I guess that makes me one of those guys who has a few cars, in bits, lying around in the back yard. Waiting to be re-built into something.
That seems like an aweful lot. Crucial has 256MB sticks for around $100. I wouldn't think that a 512MB stick would cost 6 times that....Did you get screwed?
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=72297+ 84685+/usr/local/www/db/text/2001/freebsd-smp/2001 0422.freebsd-smp
Really, I don't. Welcome to America.
The product might turn out to be buggy, but dissing the whole of Taiwan in one sweeping statement is horribly predjudiced
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
It IS news or even a discovery for some nerds :-(
;-)
And it matters for both men and women
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
... it was made up by the spiteful Brits from my favorite news source - www.theregister.co.uk
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
As someone who has majored in compilers and compilers optimization specifically, I can tell that processor-specific optimization matters. It matters less than some general optimization (such as common subexpressions or moving common stuff out of loops etc) on processors with non-RISC instruction sets (and not many registers), but still has a lot of value in it.
;-) and the "optimization curse" simultaneously. They need programs that will work on every hardware.
;-)
;-)
And here comes the nice part. Do you know one of the biggest advantages of the Open Source? You can compile any source specifically for your computer, so it works perfectly on it. Why should you care about 486 compatibility if the binary won't ever leave your Athlon?
On the other hand, Microsoft and other ISVs are taunted by the backwards compatibility that is their biggest asset preventing mass escape of the POWs (i mean customers
Frankly speaking, I'm still surprized that MS does not provide three versions of Windows/Office (Max optimization for the latest and greatest from Intel; Max optimization for Athlon; works on everything from 486 to Cyrix/IDT, but not optimized) at least to the biggest of its OEMs and system integrators.
I'd guess it happens because MS is a mess and they don't want their support to deal with many versions of Windows/apps for gaining 10-20% of performance that will be rather achieved by buying a new computer with new Windows license
OTOH, some benchmarks suffer. So what, MS pain, Open Source gain
Another thing is that Intel is very unhappy with the word WINTEL because 'W' comes first (I have a lot of friends working there), but it can't do much about it. AMD is the stick that MS uses to keep Intel at bay. Intel tries to use Linux the same way, but with much less success.
The only reason AMD is alive and has not died out in the beginning of nineties is Microsoft that decided not to limit themselves to Intel-only approach.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
I don't suppose if anyone heard anything about dual duron mobos coming out at all...? I remember this was in the rumour mill for a while.
More importantly, if they did... would it be a Duron Duron? :-)
I'm posting this from a dual Athlon, in fact. Dual Slot-A Athlons @ 650 MHz each on a dual EV6 motherboard from API. The only major downside is wonky AGP, but my PCI Matrox Millenium II is keeping up pretty well (I don't play games or do anything 3D anyway). True, it would be faster if I would use actual EV6 Alpha 21264s...
Processor for processor, an alpha will beat the pants off a SPARC. (Heck a 32-processor Alpha GS320 beats a 64-processor Sun SPARC in benchmarks Enterprise 10K?)
The ultrasparc 3 however has have support for 1000 way SMP!
That is the only advantage SPARCS have over alphas, that I know of, and if you are buying that kind of system, you had better do more research than the little I have done!
What sort of cooler did you put on there in the first place? AMD and Intel both recommend HSF's for their chips and two additional case fans creating airflow across motherboard and chip. At least with x86 at these speeds, the days of aircooling your chip are long gone.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
Orville and Wilbur Wright have just stayed in the air for 53 seconds on their new fangled flying machine.
* I.E. -- why has it taken soooo loooong to get AMD into the SMP world????
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
It is now at:
http://www.tomshardware.com/technews/technews-2001 0510.html
There is also another article with decent info here
They also have updated info on the specs on the front page.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
As opposed to motherboards from what other country?
Need money for...food and...rent...Must not give in...to dual Athlon creamy goodness...oh God give me...strength...
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
As someone who swears by Abit motherboards I would say the time to get a dual athlon system is when Abit release a dual athlon motherboard.
no sig.
What about dual Duron? Do Durons support this, and does the MoBo support it? I remember the rush for dual Celerons and Intels lies about the possibility of using dual Celeron.
TO WHOEVER IS DRAINING MY KARMA
SUCK MY ASS!
I'M SO FAR ABOVE 25, U CAN'T WIN
SCUM-SUCKING UNION-LOVING SOCIALIST
I agree that one shouldn't diss "the whole of Taiwan", but I have a Tyan motherboard (S1590S Trinity 100AT) with enough bugs that I'm not sure that I'll buy another Tyan. To illustrate the bugs:
1) Internal communications devices lock up the BIOS load.
2) The RAM loses contact in the socket every once in a while.
3) The serial and printer ports fail, briefly, every so often.
4) There seems to be something going on with the IDE controller, as my machine frequently has to rescan the secondary IDE channel for devices.
After this experience, I'm not ready to put down hundreds of dollars on another one of their products.
Its the only Tyan board I've ever had, and I bought it on a reccomendation from a friend. I only brought it up because it was built at the time the original poster was talking about.
I don't suppose if anyone heard anything about dual duron mobos coming out at all...? I remember this was in the rumour mill for a while.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Last year Taiwan put out some terrible, buggy products, so I would say that the wait will be worth it... particularly if we're going to have to rely on them.
At that time, we had massive problems with Taiwanese tech products in the supply chain which were built. Power supplies down to cases down to motherboards. Quality control issues, from "oops, we forgot to include jumpers" to "oops, this causes disk corruption and we'll get around to fixing it eventually".
So, what I was saying is, it is worth the wait to let Tyan get it right versus getting it out because public pressure demands it.
not my momma, most of hers are found at my website>
Cool! Imagine how much faster the internet will be with dual 1.8GHz Athlons! ;-)
if you call 2 pictures of Dual Athlons on that page lots... and of the same manufacurer, super micro... Still a cool page tho, especially if you have the karate skills of japanese like me...
wait, that was a public school... 3 years down the drain, and I still don't know karate or japanese...
Damn them to hell! Hell I say!
-2, offtopic, troll.
http://www.tomshardware.com/technews/technews-2001 0510.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/technews/technews-2001 0510.html
Unless x86's really could become a piece of some omnipotent AI mind. Just think, one day in the future Office 2050 in answer to Microsofts "Where do you want to go today" helpfully informs you that you should actually "Go to hell" and doesn't run because its not int the mood.
Time was not so long ago when computer geeks would spend time discussing how they could change the world, come up with exciting new products, benefot millions. Now they just seem happy to become clones of those guys who sit with a beer in a pub and discuss how to get an extra 2bhp out of their car engine by tweaking the injectors or resetting the turbo waste gate dump pressure etc etc etc ..... Just replace pub with cafe, bhp with mhz and car with CPU. Sad isn't it?
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I may finally be able to upgrade/trade in this ABIT BP6 MoBo for something a bit snappier. But the price will have to be reasonable.
We have been waiting since the Athlon was first released for a Dual MoBo to hit the streets. Does this mean that it is going to be a good motherboard since they took so much time to make it right?
I don't usually flame people but I can't resist this one.
This is so full of crap I almost don't know where to begin. The possible performance increase you might see in the future from using the P4 is offset by the fact that it costs more know and doesn't perform as well. In the future that you are looking at the Sledgehammer will make a much nicer desktop processor than either of those chips. Get the best performance you can afford know and upgrade as necessary. If you really need the best performance you use what is best at the time of purchase and upgrade when there is a significant improvement by changing. You don't buy the slower now and pray for miracles.
As far as OS's go, that is what truly gave away the fact that you are a troll. SMP support in Linux and W2k is more than adequate for any purpose your limited brain can come up with. Especially since SMP performance is determined as much by the app as by the OS and the current crop of apps could all stand a little work in that area. There is also the fact that the Palimino chip cans use 3Dnow and Screamin Sindie instructions if I remember correctly.
You buy your P4. I'll spend the same amount on an Athlon system and spend the difference in price on RAM. My system will smoke yours now and even at the end of there useful lifespans there won't be an appreciable difference in performance over the range of apps most people use. I'll still beat you on everything except games and graphic apps.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
I'm looking at building a system for general use, but primarily as a platform for video editing. I've been kind of waiting for a dual Athlon system 'cause I need something with lots of speed.
I need something with lots and lots of speed, lots of memory and multiple large hard drive. I'll probably run Win2k as a my primary OS (it seems to support the widest range of video capture cards).
Can I get some /. opinions on system bases for this application? I'm not married to athlon or p4 and since I'm not certain the application will take advantage of multi-cpu's, I'm flexible there too.
Just looking for some opinions before I shell out lots of cash.
Thanks
We're not scaremongering... This is really happening, happening
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
You definitly have a point there...with the removing SMP and such. But don't kid yourself and think that AMD and Intel have hidden cpu's that are running at way higher clock speeds and have all sorts of cool new tech in them because that isn't true. They pretty much don't have anything better then you can get right now that they can actually produce in large quantities. A 25Ghz. CPU is useless unless you can get a good manufacturing yield on it... Those blocks of silicon are expensive...VERY expensive. If you don't wnat your CPU to cost a couple thousand dollars or more you have to get by without wasting as much as possible. Plus, people know way to much about what goes on in those companies, they kind of crap would get reported.
Maybe you don't know how to setup a computer? I have an Athlon 1.2ghz and it has yet to break down at all. Sure it runs hot but I have a nice heatsink + fan + fan + fan + fan.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It has tens of pictures of REAL and working Dual Socket A motherboards, with a nice bit of information. Of course, it is in Japanese, but the pictures are *great*.
---
"The universe is a womb for the genesis of gods."
My di..Ghz is bigger than yours !
Due to various changes to the super-scalar and caching features of pentium in the P4, AMD processors are a dangerous risk if you plan to use your machine for a particularly long time. As compilers are reworked to take advantage of the changes, AMD processors will perform considerably worse in comparison.
In short, if you want intel, buy intel. If you want performance, buy a different architecture, like alpha or sparc. Don't waste your time on the low end if you are doing high end stuff, and don't blow your cash on dual proc boards that you aren't going to be able to take advantage of. Hell, there aren't any really good SMP OSs for intel anyway, except BeOS, and that suffers from other problems that keep it from achieving much popularity.
Denial isn't just a river in Italy
You have restored my faith. My comments about compiler based performance increases are drawn from benchmakring done prior to the P4 release. I've utterly forgotten the details, except that P4 was slammed utterly in the initial benchmark, but after severe hand made adjustments from the intel techs, it blew the competition away. Evidently the compiler wasn't quite up to scratch at that point.
Obviously designing a compiler like gcc requires making some trade-offs, given the way it is used. Redhat can't afford to compile rpms exclusively for x86, and they can't start seperate distros for AMD and intel, realistically. As a result, compiler optimisations are a compromise.
I can tell you why the windows compiler doesn't optimise well: Apparently they haven't written code to optimise for P2 yet. Hopefully, they'll skip a generation or two and jump straight to P4.
Drag about alpha. I'd still recommend sparc for high-end over most other things, due to excellent bus speeds and huge MP support. Bus speeds count for a hell of a let in some fields.
Finally, it wasn't meant to be a troll. Seriously. I don't know what happened there.
Denial isn't just a river in Italy
Dual Processor AMD boards ??? Why is this a landmark step... First we have to examine the market for PC's. The traditional market for the big guys has been corporate and this means standardisation. Most corporate clients want single vendor contracts with discount (as if any corporate client pays the full price). The corporate IS management world is full of idiots who don't understand the technology but like the buzzwords. Unfortunately many of the 'managers' failed to understand the technology early on and have been sliding backwrds ever since. Since the Gartner Group report on TCO they have been given a nice report to show to upper management and say what they are doing about it. This means BUY INTEL, BUY COMPAQ or IBM and then try and make it all look complicated. Lucky for the IS managers the big suppliers are all to eager to support that they buy all the hardware from them and will supply reams of information about how this is cheaper for the company, even if they are paying 20-30% more for the same machine. This 'over standardisation' is noe getting to a point where the IS managers want not only single vendors but also single product ranges. Unless AMD are accepted by the big vendors and represented in the server market the corporate market will stay out of grasp. I have personally heard it explained to senior mangement that these 'toy' machines will crash the whole network if connected. AMD have aimed squarely at the single processor market, how many SMP servers are really in the market ? Unfortunately for AMD this is not really the issue and until decent Dual and even quad processor AMD machines are available from the big vendors the millions of machines that only ever run Office or email will stay is INTEL. This is a reality that AMD must live with, the server market may not be the volume they needed in the past but having got a reasonable share of the SOHO market they must address the issue if they want to get the big corporate cleints.
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