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Reviews Of AMD Duron 'Morgan' 1GHz
Anonymouse writes: "AMD today released their 1GHz Duron, based on the morgan core, which was mentioned briefly in your earlier Athlon article. It adds hardware pre-fetch, an internal thermal diode for accurate temperature sensing on boards that can read it, and SSE instructions. It is also the same core that will become the DuronMP for ultra cheap low-end SMP system. NewsForge has a review of it under Linux, and FiringSquad and Hexus.net have reviews for it under Windows." Nice complement to the new Athlons. 1GHz in a low end processor -- sheesh!
Why is it written "Assembled in Malaysia"? Does that mean the silicon is made in Japan and then they put the ceramics on it in Malaysia?
You know, as happy as I should be that notebooks will be faster, and the prices will drop on slower models, I'm strangely a bit disappointed really. As mobile processors get faster and more energy effecient, the less and less likely it is that we'll be seeing any Crusoe-based systems at all.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The comments against INTEL for being a big company aside (AMD Is a big company as well) i have a few things that i like about AMD processors (and some i dont)
The SD Ram advantage and improved cooling should make this the budget buyers choice - the simple fact that it is a flipchip pro as well means you dont neccesarily have to buy a new board - owners of most compatible boards can simply swap chips.
The new core is a good move - the celeron crippling has bugged me a lot - i have sold a few but im not happy totally with their performance and the morgan does get around that ( i find cache comaprisons irrelevant for most users)
In australia you can pick up a Duron and Board with Ram for under $500 (approx $250US) - this is a great price - the Celerons are neck and neck but generally a little dearer - the price gets better when you go to the Tbird - the difference is up to $100 on some models of P4.
The only concern i have about Athlons (as stated in a post on todays other AMD story) is heat - i have found that the AMD processors need good cooling and this means lots of fans - which are noisy, this is a disadvantage to many of the home user (non enthusiast) market who dont want the noise of 3 or 4 fans.
If the new processors do show the claimed lower heat buildups then they will help in making the AMD accepeted in the mass (home - mums and dads) market.
As for vendor support - well the reasons arent hard to work out - IBM make their own processors and they have an already unwieldy product range so they made a decision to drop AMD - Dell are one of Intel's largest customers and i can only guess at the discounts - and Ditto Compaq. I think we will see them move towards AMD (all but Dell - thats not going to happen trust me) slowly - REMEBER THIS - most of these companies rely on their Major corporate customers for cash flow and sales (corporates buy more and are not as price concious as home and enthusiasts) and those corporates by and large Buy INTEL machines running MICROSOFT software (with 3COM nic's, HP Printers, etc etc) The coporate market is the area AMD need to win over - they have had huge success with Gamers and budget buyers but not in the corporates (they have long memories and AMD have had some spectaculat screw ups in the mid/late 1990's with chip problems - this gave them the unreliable tag in many corporate minds - they stick with what they know)
I hope this chip does all it looks like - i want one at any rate.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
You might want to ask Anandtech and Tom's Hardware why they like them so much. AMD's work fine with Linux. Hell, even Cyrix cpu's worked fine with linux.
Ok, now on to the performance.
Let's see Intel's $107 1.4GHz cpu. Nope, their P4/1.4 is $140. For starters, damn near all the benchmarks/tests/etc show that the 1.33ghz Athlon runs circles around the 1.4/1.5ghz P4's. Sounds inferior to me. Cost? I subscribe to the "bang for the buck" theory. No other vendor gives me the computing power for the amount of cash i have to set out like AMD. Not only are the cpu's cheaper, but DDR memory is much cheaper than Rambus. But, i guess Rambus is better because it's more expensive, eh?
Trailing the chip wars. Well, if i was sleeping for 2 years, yes. But the rest of us read the news, and know that AMD is ahead in the actual speed of the "budget" cpu's, as well as price, and well, performance. The Athlon's are up to par with the faster P4's. Obviously one chip will always be faster at certain aspects, intel is faster with some tests, and AMD is faster in others. Is the $500+ for a P4/1.8 really worth it to be a couple points faster than a $107 Athlon 1.4? Nah. I'd put the extra $400 into RAM, RAID, Video, Etc.
Dollar for dollar, you can't build a faster system than an AMD Athlon.
As for being Faceless, multinational company... You might as well boycot damn near everything that's not a mom & pop operation. And I like being able to use a conductive-ink pen to unlock the AMD CPU's for overclocking. I had a 1ghz running at 1.2. Not too bad.
>soapbox mode off
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
That said, I agree with you wholeheartedly; the x86 architecture is like the painting of Dorian Gray, and should have died long ago...but thanks to IBM's unfortunate choice in the early 1980s, the x86 has the advantages of economy of scale--enough people are buying them to make it worthwhile for several companies to flog the dead horse repeatedly. (Even they agree with us; the way they've come up with to keep it alive is to set up a Potemkin CPU, with a decent internal architecture that we, alas, can't get to.) Yes, we're geeks, and if I weren't in a situation in which I got more money for singing at Renaissance fairs than I did for stock options (true story!), I might go for an Alpha. But the hardware of the masses is inexpensive and improving steadily. (Did the Alpha's speed increase as quickly as that of x86oid CPUs?) If we geeks can take advantage of it, why shouldn't we?