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AMD Athlon MP 1800+ Processor Review
Lars Olsen writes: "Amdmb.com has posted a review of the new AMD Athlon MP 1800+ processor -- a big speed jump for the dual Athlon processor family with the new processor running at 1.53GHz. There are also 1600+ and 1500+ Athlon MPs available as well right away at stores around the World.
Dual AMD Goodness is now running just as fast as its desktop counterpart ! Here's a quote: 'Those of you who want to jump into the dual processing Athlon world will finally be able to do so with the knowledge that your processors are the top speed that the Athlon family has to offer. And for anyone who already has a Tyan Thunder or Tiger MP board and a pair of Athlon MP processors, you may just want to pop a couple of these new Athlon MP 1800+ CPUs in your system to boost performance.'" Some of the comments following yesterday's "dream system" article addressed dual-Athlon complications, so make sure you read before you buy.Update: 10/15 15:14 GMT by T : Check below for LinuxHardware.org's take on this chip, and Athlon MP systems in general as well.
Augustus writes "LinuxHardware.org takes a look at the Athlon MP platform under Linux and the newly released Athlon MP 1800+ is included. Covered in this article is not only the technology and performance of the AMD-760 MP chipset and the Tyan Thunder K7 motherboard but we also look at why anyone would consider a multi-processor system."
Well at least I can still count on my fingers how many GHz we have achieved. I suppose when/if these quantum-based computers come about (on a large scale), I'll have to have an infinite number of fingers all representing the possible states of the processer
I'm running at home on a PII 400Mhz and it runs everything I possibly need. My Mother and Father in Law are on a P166 and wondered if they should upgrade. I said no as it really doesn't need it, they just do basic database, spreadsheet and word.
All too often developers use the increased memory and processor speed to write worse implementations, or to create pointless bloatware. I know this will continue no matter what I say but at the end of the day who really needs this much power, QuakeIV players ? QuakeV ? QuakeIII runs fine with my upgraded graphics card, and top of the line sound card, the processor does bugger all.
Moore's law is great, it means computers can do more and more, but for the home market its just silly, 90% of people would be fine not changing their machine for 4 years, but they are forced to upgrade by market perception.
Faster this, faster that.... but never ever actually "better", "more reliable" or "stable".
Hardware is the excuse for bloatware, its not H/W engineers fault but it isn't an excuse to use....
(and yes this is partly a dig at the huge swap requirements on the 2.4 kernel)
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Firingsquad has an excellent review comparing dual Durons to dual Thunderbirds using both Palamino and non- versions of both chips. They conclude that the Palamino Duron is the best bang for the buck.
Computer games are the ONLY applications that tax a home-users cutting-edge machine... At the moment, systems are a little ahead of gaming technology, but in a few months that won't be the case. Just because your parents don't play Dark Age of Camelot or AquaNox, don't assume Joe User doesn't want to.
-Berj
Note to web programmers, MySQL doesn't like it when it runs out of connections. Try increasing the connection pool size. Also, instead of having the page try to open the connection just once, and fall all over itself if the connection fails, try putting the connection request in a timed loop with a timeout of around 5 minutes, and a sleep(5) in the middle to help throttle a little. Your MySQL server will thank you, and your web page viewers will thank you.
If you read Tom's Hardware, you may have seen this fantastic article and brilliant video, which shockingly demonstrates how AMD vs Pentium chips cope with heat emergencies. Considering the disastrous results with so many of the AMD chips, I'd be hesitant to buy anything OTHER than a Pentium until AMD can conclusively show that their chips are "smart" when faced with heat emergencies (heatsink fan stops, heatsink falls off?)
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Take a look at MS Word from 4 or 5 years ago. It ran perfectly well with all the formatting options, spell checker, inline clip art -- all on a P100 or even less. Now what do we have? Everything above, but with bloat like the Paperclip, menus that go 5 layers deep for commands that nobody wants or needs, functions that are duplicated in 3 different places, and a GUI that gobbles up as much RAM as my system throws at it, and doesn't let go.
My other sig is funny!
I like how the little guys are going to benchmarks to indicate how their product actually performs while the big boys (Oracle, I'm looking at you) are recusing themselves from it.
Too bad that IT managers go with what they know (everyone else is using) and what's worked for them in the past.
It may be confusing for Jane Consumer, but it's nice to see that AMD's finally gotten a marketroid with a clue as to what works. Now if only their stock would start working, too...
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
It always happens... you jump in and build your dream system, and immediately it's out of date. Oh well, a duallie 1.2ghzMP isn't anything to laugh at! Glad to hear that the TigerMP supports the new chip speeds out of the box, anyone know how high it will go?
A few notes on the TigerMP though: VERY picky on RAM, very picky on how it's seated (read: install memory before board is in your case, so you can wedge it in on a flat surface!), but since getting past that, it's been ROCK solid! Beautiful system I must say!
MadCow... always 500mhz behind the curve.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
The DID stop using Mhz in the product name. If the processor runs better than the competition, why care what it's called? I'd happily buy the "Omega-Ultra-MegaEnhanced 10Bil GigaDorks" processor if it ran my codes faster than something called, simply, "Pentium 4 2.0 Ghz"
Spite yourself if you want, buy a slower Intel chip and play the same game that you are complaining about.
Intel are making faster (Mhz) chips rather than faster (actual processing) chips.
The simple fact is that the 1800+ is FASTER than a p4 at 1800mhz would be, rather than being a gimmick they are erring on the side of caution.
You are right, most customers would mistake it for a mhz rating, just as if they called it an athlon 1533 no retarded customer would buy it because it has less "Mhz". It works both ways and AMD have to deal with the customers.
no sig.
Why don't you take a look at the AMD Processor Roadmap to see more on their processors.... http://www.threecom.de/artikel/amdround1/ ... though the site is in german.... translate it with babelfish: http://babelfish.altavista.com
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
From your tone I'd expect you woudln't buy AMD anyway. However, if you did any research, you'd find the AMD's new numbering plan is actually conservative. Independant benchmark reviews have shown that the AMD 1800+ is actually more of an equivalent to the Pent 4 2GHz chip. But AMD chose a conservative threshold. Granted, the new Intel cores will boost performance a bit, but even then the AMD numbering plan is expected to be on target. Honestly - who cares what they call the chip - anyone with half a brain can find out the MHz value. But to what end? Me? I want to buy teh system which gives me the most performance for the least $$$ and right now that is an AMD chip hands down when you account for other CPU specific system costs and impacts (chipset, memory type needed, etc)
I honestly think AMD did what it HAD to do - their chips are faster at slower clock speeds and Intel managed to get folks thinking MHz was king. Now AMD has ot try and chance that thinking.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
I've been an AMD fan ever since, erm well always actually even my 486 was an AMD ;-)
I really think AMD will have te expect some problems with this. Back in the good old days (r) of the pentium and the cyrix 6x86 I worked in a computer store and we also sold cyrix computers to customers that didn't want too spend too much money (so sue me)
Very often people came back because they saw that their Cyrix PR200+ wasn't actually running on 200Mhz and demanded a refund (which they didn't get ofcourse) we had to explain the whole thing and it costed us a lot of time
That's why we stopped selling them back then
Another thing is that the semi-geeks (the dudes that THINK they are geek but basically know nothing) won't buy them because "they are already overclocked"
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity
hrm.. and they paid nothing for mysql... so let's see...
Assume they have gotten some value out of it (even a little bit), and they paid $0. value/$ comes out to (a little)/0 = infinity... hrmm.. imagine that
Tom's Hardware notes that the AMDs can cook really fast and beyond the ability of the motherboard sensor to flag. I guess these have on-die sensors but these were noted as being fairly ropey as well.
Intel's P4 seemed to do quite well out of the test as the clock slows automatically as the die temperature increases (in effect the processor ignores the clocks until the temperature goes reasonable). This means that it will even run without a heatsink (but very slowly).
I just get very nervous about having high-end silicon that is vulnerable to a SPOF. It a heatsink detaches or the processor fan fails - blam. If the chassis fan fails, at least there is some chance of a shutdown, but those processor heatsinks make me uncomfortable. Yes, I know I can buy quality, but MTBF is just that, a fan can still fail early.
So I wait for AMD to get a bit more serious about thermal protection and stick with using cheaper processors as thermal fuses.
See my journal, I write things there
Computer games are the ONLY applications that tax a home-users cutting-edge machine... At the moment, systems are a little ahead of gaming technology, but in a few months that won't be the case. Just because your parents don't play Dark Age of Camelot or AquaNox, don't assume Joe User doesn't want to.
But the kicker is that these games really don't need such horsepower. I'm willing to bet that if there were any pressure to get any of these games running on a more resource constrained system, like a game console, then lots of unnecessary internal fat would be trimmed right away. But there's no pressure to do so otherwise. And even if a game that could run just fine on a PII 400 requires a 1GHz processor, certain people seem to _like_ the justification for upgrading.
Hey all you /. people with a fab, here's a fun idea to piss off intel and AMD. Make the clock/speed irrelationship totally obvious.
:)
Imagine an x86 compatible processor that runs at a clock speed of 50ghz? That's right, fifty BILLION hertz! Now, that clock only ever hits a counter that lets the 8086-compatible processor cycle once every half to full second. You could get a whopping 1-2 IPS
You'd be able to make millions selling 8086's that use the first 640k of a bunch of 128 meg chips, and the first 40 megs of a 400 gig hard drive. Think of the possibilities!
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
Don't you need something like this to work out what shower curtains do?
See my journal, I write things there
That is assuming of course that their time has no value.
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
I hope they ship the processors with water cooling AND a backup cooler. ;)
Don't want this baby to get without any fresh air... not if I don't want it to be a smoke generator
42 + 1 = 42
A console is a very different environment. You can tune exactly for the hardware because there will be no variances. A PC game has to allow for 30 different graphic cards using APIs that supposedly make the different cards look the same to you but fail miserably. By the time you get done tweaking for the current morass of cards, a new generation of them is present with their own damn bugs. In the console world you deal with 2-3 environments IF you are allowed/it is practical to port given the current state of exclusive games. Also, if you've ever developed for a console, its very different, with a PC you have a lot of freedom to build how you want and what you want, in the console world you pretty much have to build around the hardware. This means you are constrained to build the same kind of engine for most every game you build on that console. If you don't you are just looking for different ways to cull the scene down to fit into the same miniscule space.
.</RANT>
The two environments are very different, and most of that fat can't be trimmed by wishing it away or blaming on programmers
As for bloatware, start modelling cloth, hair, IK, bump maps, and the hardware gets used again. The reason the games aren't doing it now is because they want the comfortable sales window.
Honestly pushing ultra-high-end features that cut your market to 4% of what it could be isn't a big selling point - good luck convincing your publisher to bring the game to market - and trying to build an engine to scale between low and high-end aggravates the bloat of PC vs. console problem even worse.
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
Except that the high-end game curve has not been keeping up with the processor speed curve. Back in the day, the top of the line processor was need to run the game. You needed a 386/25 or a 386/33 to run games that came out within a month or so of the shipping date of the processor. Now the specs require a PII 233 or a PII 400 or equivelent. I've yet to see a game that on the box requires a PIII/1G. Have you? They do require some sort of 3d graphics card, but technology wise, the games try to aim for the greatest penetration of market share, which is about at the 300MHZ-600MHz. That is unlikely to change, since most of these people won't even think about upgrading any time soon, even if the newer computers make the internet "go faster!"
If you think the MHz is no longer a good measure of performance, stop using MHz in the product name.
That's what they did.
I've heard lots of reports from reputable sources that cheaper Athlon XP's do work in multi-CPU systems. (Even the original Thunderbird supposedly works, although not at top speed due to some cache interactions). I've heard that the Athlon XP uses the same Palomino core as the Athlon MP, so there is really no difference at the hardware level.
Can anyone confirm this? Is this new, higher-priced series of Athlon MP's simply a marketing gimmick, a la NVIDIA's Quadro cards? (which are the same as a Geforce hardware-wise - save one tiny resistor that tells the driver to un-cripple certain optimizations - but cost 2-3 times as much a Geforce)
http://www.tech-report.com/onearticle.x/2994
They only compare against the 1.2Ghz Athlon MP though... although they intend to do an expanded article soon.
shut up man
Did you ever stop to think that if you're not sure you can attach a heatsink properly to a CPU, that maybe you shouldn't be allowed into the case in the first place?
I have some advice for you the next time you need a new machine: 1 800 DELL 4 ME
Even if it was the Athlon "Bill Gates Special Edition?"
- Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
Ha! Thanks for the memories. My favorite part of that whole suicide / press conference was the voice in the background shouting "Someone call an ambulance!" after he gave himself the lead lobotomy.
Sad part is he really was innocent--and there was exonerable proof!
I am constantly amazed by people who claim that faster hardware leads to bad code as if we've been living in the Golden Age of quality code for the past few decades.
With current hardware, people are still writing code a lot of code in C and C++ for performance reasons which has lead to buffer overflows, segfaults, core dumps, general protection faults, and blue screens becoming generally accepted aspects of computer programming. Now that the hardware is finally becoming fast enough, maybe we can wean ourselves from C & C++ and move over to writing apps in Java or even C# instead of still dealing with the same issues that were solvable problems 20 years ago. Programmers have shown that it is practically impossible to deliver significantly problem free C/C++ code in a decent timeframe while programming environments like Java have shown the opposite. Once hardware creeps up enough we can rid ourselves of the problems of C & C++ once the performance gains are not worth the amount of bugs one has to deal with, which is already happening in lots of server applications.
Also once, hardware creeps up enough maybe some of the stuff that has been in research labs for the past 20 years can finally see some use. For instance microkernel are generally seen as a superior way to design an OS but have had difficulty taking hold due to performance reasons (although Windows NT is based on a -kernel architecure and MacOS X is also built on the Mach -kernel) which wil change once hardware advances make it possible for the performance difference to become acceptable.
A.I. being built into applications as well as the OS is another place where hardware performance and memory availability would play a big part in helping come to fruition.
How about voice recognition and face recognition being built into the applications you use?
How about bringing virtual reality to masses?
Or do you think that a 1 GHz CPU and 128 MBs of RAM is all the power a computer user will ever need?
Before AMDMB went splat, I read enough to see that in some tests (most notably memory), the Athlon XP (yes, SINGLE) beat the dual Athlon MP setup soundly. This is because the XP tested in a VIA KT266A motherboard, which has the edge in performance over the standard AMD760MP.
I think the Athlon MPs are awesome, but having a much cheaper, single-processor setup beat out a dually in some tests throws a bit of cold water on my upgrade lust.
shut up man
Anyway, here is a rather illuminating article on "bloatware". Cheers.
You're right, they could cut their polygon count down to a quarter of what it is now, precache almost everything (quadrupling the amount of hard disk space used) and probably use 50% of the CPU they use now. Game developers really are into severely optimizing their code, especially those programmers dealing with graphics; They're usually trying to find ways to optimize every single action.
On the other hand, as others have pointed out, the only way to really optimize the hell out of something is to write it in assembler. That makes any large codebase pretty much unusable.
The biggest thing game developers could do right now to improve game performance is to use really excellent multi-res in a game. Multi-res is a process where, when used to its fullest, lets you start with very high polygon models for everything, and the game engine will reduce the polygon count one vertex at a time, in some cases all the way down to a single polygon. When done right this will let you draw amazingly complex scenes without slowdown; The computer can tell more or less what you're looking at and decide what needs lots of polys.
Unfortunately, even those games which are using multires are using a low-rent version where they pre-reduce the vertex count, so you still "pop" from model to model. It's getting better, though.
The best thing about multires of course is that you don't have to precompute things, like BSP-based schemes, and that it will make the best use of your graphics hardware, while still running well and looking good on lower-end hardware. On the other hand, your graphics card had better handle lighting pretty damned well. Since you can get a GEForce MX400 card for less than $100 (Or a GF2 for about $150) that's really not much of an issue these days.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Noone seem to have noticed AMD's real incentive behind the new numbering scheme:
While they always kept ahead in speed somehow they had to sell the next fastest processor too cheap while moving from 1.1 GHz to 1.2 GHz and from there to 1.33 GHz. Noone wants to pay as much for the next best.
Enter Quantaspeed: Instead of moving from 1.4 GHz to 1.5 GHz AMD can now move from 1.43 GHz to 1.47 GHz and from there to 1.53 GHz, but instead of one step up from the budget choice there are now two steps and AMD can put the higher price at a higher level.
66 MHz isn't much and considering that 100 MHz at 1.5 GHz is 50% less than the 100 MHz speed step we saw at 1 GHz its plain lousy.
Were you drooling over 210 MHz when you only had 200 MHz in your box?
Duuuude, it's got an Intel Pentium IV processor (which is soooo nice!).
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
I manage a LARGE number of AMD boxes for AT&T and have NEVER - EVER - experienced an Athlon melt down. I haven't heard of any serious problems - anywhere - reporting melt downs! Why not? Try answering that - Tom surely didn't!
Since Tom (of Tom's HArdware) has started accepting bucks from Intel, his reviews have certainly taken on a pro-Intel flavor!
Completely off topic, but do you have websites/books of the multires technique?
I've had more problems with intel chips burning up. I've had wonderful experiences with AMD chips. AMD chips are typically faster and for the money simply can't be beat.
I have to say, I'm quite pleased with AMD's processors. For the price to performance ratio, you usually get about 10-20% more performance for about 1/2 the cost of a comparable Intel processor.
I do think they should provide a more accurate "instructions per second" rating rather than relying on Intel as the benchmark for their rating.
Gee, the ALU of a 2GHz Intel PIV is double-pumped meaning it runs at 4Ghz!! They should call it the Pentium 4000!!
This "equivalent" argument is pure crap. A Suzuki motorcycle has about 115 horsepower, while a Porsche 911 Turbo has 300 more. And yet the Suzuki could easily beat the 911 off the line, so therefore Suzuki should market its motorcycles as "GT 415HP" because it has the equivalent acceleration of a 911, right?
Thresh's Firing Squad has a review of the Tyan Tiger with dual AMD Duron MPs, which is probably of equal or more interest to us geeks. For those of you who weren't aware, AMD Durons work in multiprocessor mode as well, and they're very, very close to Athlons in terms of performance (and obviously cheaper.)
What's your damage, Heather?
>Computer games are the ONLY applications that tax a home-users cutting-edge machine...
Wrong. Video editing. To convert a 20 minutes of video to mpeg2 takes 82 minutes with a 450 mhz celery, and 49 minutes with a 850 celery. I still have to convert some 50 8mm video tapes to mpeg2.
-asp
Is the latest Athlon processor overkill for any normal computer user? Yup.
Is there any software currently available that requires this kind of speed? Nope.
Is there any sensible reason to upgrade your CPU? Nope.
Is my rational, analytical mind paying the slightest bit of attention to this argument? Nope.
It's all about the megahertz, baby! In an earlier generation, we were the people tinkering under the hoods of our Fords, trying to get a little more oomph out of a carburetor. Most of us don't need it, most of us have no idea what to do with it, but since when has that ever stopped us? More speed! More storage! More bandwidth! I want more!!!
Good job, AMD. Keep 'em coming.
My id is sneaking up behind my superego with a rock...
Here's the low down on the dual Athlon. It is incredibly fast for any server or workstation application. Of course the app has to be SMP capable which is why your seeing the new KT266A chipset single CPU system beat it out in some apps, but those are only non SMP capable apps. It is apples and oranges. Yes, I would like to see some chipset improvements to the 760MP. The latency is too high. Perhaps the 760MPX will address some of this. I would very much like VIA to commit to their dual Athlon chipset, but they have not as of yet. Another issue is heat. While they do use the cooler running Palomino core, they are still quite hot for say a 1-2U rack. The shrink to .13 micron early next year will eliminate that issue and should hasten adoption by larger computer makers. For the time being though it is a relatively cheap solution for those who need it, and is a blazingly faster web server for those who know how to set it up. Check out my review for more, my site is still up, and we didn't copy anyones site idea.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
I didn't realize that people took press releases as gospel. What's all this crap about a "big speed boost?"
We're talking about mhz increase of less than 10% -- in how many months? It's been over a year since the T-birds were introduced.
Yeah, they have a new core. Whoopee. It's not a dramatically new improvement, and apparently AMD has decided that if its chips, in name, are as fast as P4s, they should cost as much too.
I like AMD stuff, but the Mhz Myth shit hasn't worked for apple, ever, and it won't work for AMD. Apple tried the Mhz Myth stuff back when the ppc601 came out, and despite 6 or 7 years of PR bunko, it's not caught on.
No sig is worth reading.
From over at Firing Squad...
"The initial batch of Athlon XP chips shipped out to distribution were unlocked and this was not suppose to happen. Within a week or two, these unlocked CPUs will be phased out, or recalled. I'm not sure what will happen but AMD has confirmed that the Athlon XPs will be locked very, very soon.
Some of you are lucky, to have snagged a few Athlon XPs that were unlocked."
-Rothfuss
Anandtech has a good review that compares all the latest p4's and athlon xp's. Check it out here.
To me, this is an apples vs. oranges analogy. On one hand, we have the apples, who are the auto and motorcycle enthusiasts. On the other hand, we have the oranges, or the vast uninformed PC-buying public walking into CompUSA and Circuit City stores. Two completely different species.
Intel's ability to con the public into buying into the MHz game is obhorrent, at best. They manufactured an inferior processor, the P4, basically to outmatch AMD in numbers. Intel knew that AMD wouldn't be able to ramp up their Athlons to the same level within a reasonable amount of time. The P4's inferiority is backed up by the fact that P3s outperform P4s MHz-per-MHz.
I feel that AMD's new effective/relative performance ratings are justified in this case, especially since the numbers are realistic (as opposed to their 486/K5 series or Cyrix's CPUs). If Intel wants to bloat numbers, AMD has to catch up in the marketing game in order to survive in this industry. People are walking into the major retail stores and being convinced by salespeople that the P4 systems are better and just as cheap (only because they bundle inferior components such as nVidia TNT2 graphics cards and generic sound cards to reduce the price) as an Athlon-based system. The regular Joe Blow will see a bigger MHz number and an affordable price, which is the killer combination.
The Linux/hardware enthusiasts are by far a minority in the PC market. Thus, the battlegrounds look ugly to those who are more informed, but I'm sure they look even worse within the buildings of Intel and AMD. It's a dog-eat-dog world.
I should have used the "Preview" button. /. is always right.
Hammer is going to be unveiled today as well.
Is there any software currently available that requires this kind of speed?
Windows.
-- "Ever wonder why the SAME PEOPLE make up ALL the conspiracy theories?"
A console is a very different environment. You can tune exactly for the hardware because there will be no variances.
I agree in principle, but that's not it. It isn't polycount either, as someone else said. At the moment, the average PS2 game has more polygons than the average PC game (that's because if you assume hardware T&L on the PC then you have a severely limited market; lots and lots of mass market PCs still ship with the equivalent of a Voodoo 1 or worse, go to Dell's site if you don't believe me).
I'm talking about much larger issues. For example, on the PC you come up with a file format for something, then just keep using it because it works. With a little work, it often turns out that a 20MB file of world geometry can be knocked down to 5MB, just because there's so much garbage in there and no one ever thought about remove it. Or maybe there are thousands of keyframes of animation that make no visual difference and can be removed. Or some trifling module allocates 8M at load time and keeps it around, even though it isn't actually used. Or maybe there's poor collision detection code that does way too much work and could be made to run 4x faster. These kinds of things are _common_. I'm a game developer; I've been there.
I have a dual bp6+celeron (500mhz) setup and I play QUake III arena often. I thought it always used 2 cpus. Do Ineed to set a 'r_smp 1' flag to explicitly enable this? (just picked from the anandtech review).
thanks
LinuxLover
I'll never buy a nuclear power plant again!
Return to Castle Wolfenstein Test.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
The only thing that matters is as follows (in rank order):
1. Bandwidth - face it, email and the web are king. Unless you're a gamer.
2. Video Card - if you're a gamer, you're better off spending your money on this and making sure it has tons of cache.
3. Sound Card - if you're a gamer, you're better off spending the rest of your money on this. The rest of us don't care, so skip this.
4. Memory - more, more, more. Yes, even more.
5. Bus speed - more channel so those CPUs can actually send more data.
6. Hard disk - you really should have more RAM, but once that's crammed, get better seek and access times here.
6. Chip speed - WAY DOWN HERE! - yes, if you maxed on all the above, then you MIGHT notice the difference between a 1GHz and 1.8GHz system. Otherwise, unless you're a graphics artist, YOU SHOULDN'T WASTE YOUR MONEY!
Naturally, when people review systems, they compare older systems with slower bus speed, less RAM, slower HD, and cheaper cards to new systems with faster H/W. Buy the motherboard and cards yourself and pop in a slower chip and spend the extra money on RAM - you will get way more bang for your buck that way.
Aside - I own AMD shares, so sure, go buy these speed demons! But don't do it because you have to, do it because you know you just like BIG NUMBERS.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Engineers do this all the time. I am a mechanical engineer, and the analysis software packages I use to assist in design and analysis of my creations does just this: solve massive systems of equations.
This is very common and very useful.
Also, if I had a PC with 100 times the memory and speed, I could still bring it to its knees. As it is, I have to simplify and granulate my models to make them fit the computing power I have.
How do you think they predict the weather? Design cars and planes? Do thermal analysis? Do vibration analysis? Do electromagnetic analysis? Do displacement/stress analysis? Do computational fluid dynamics? Do transient analysis of all the above?
Yes
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
A much better review is available over at AnandTech.
I have one of the first Irongate chipsets, and my system locks hard about 75% of the time I try to start X. And don't even dream about trying to get into X a second time. (By the way even though my MB - a Gigabyte - has an early Irongate, apparently ALL Irongates are affected.) I have made repeated bug-reports to AMD over the past 9 months, and they always email back with the EXACT same BS saying they are "...working on the issue with distibutions and hope to have a fix soon...". I have now promised AMD that I will take advantage of every oportunity to bitch about their shitty products until they FIX it, which I know they never will.
Buy a Pentium 4 system. Maybe it's more expensive, but at least it works....
To test, type:
startx
Now watch the system lock up hard. Don't worry, you can fix the problem by pressing 'reset'.
Or you can email AMD support and get no repsonse at all...
I just bought a new 1.2 Ghz system with a Gigabyte MB, which has the Irongate chipset. Little did I know that the Irongate chipset doesn't like starting X. After a polite email to AMD, I receive confirmation that this is a known issue, and that AMD are working on the problem. I did some checking around on google, and found that AMD have been sending out the same email for at least the past YEAR to everyone who complains.
So to all those Pentium owners thinking of upgrading: don't bother - save a little more money and buy a Pentium 4.
They fucking crash every time you try to 'startx'. Here's what AMD have had to say on the matter for the past year:
Hello,
Currently AMD is working with Linux to resolve the AGP driver related issue
and our 761 Northbridge. This issue is currently being hashed out with
various distributions of Linux. Unfortunately, the fix has not been posted
yet, and we apologize for the inconvenience. Please stay posted to our
website for the latest details.
Regards
Its up now and I welcome any comments or questions!
Ryan Shrout
http://www.amdmb.com/
amd lies
I was under the impression that AMD changed to this new naming scheme to avoid the public's concentration on MHz. Why, then, do I read an article on Slashdot in which AMD's new naming scheme is broken down into MHz equivalents?
Seriously, I think we all agree here that AMD is making a bold and necessary move to diminish the importance of MHz. Unless we follow suit and stop using MHz as our measure of performance, the public will never catch on. I think the importance of attaching a "model number" to a chip name is that we will eventually forget about MHz altogether and focus on pure chip performance. Let's start that now.
The Mhz equivalents for each of these new processors had no place in this article.
Otto-matic
Oh come on - I use a thunderbird and my games need it - not to mention it is absolutely brutally fast.
Forget it dude.
If you don't sing the praises of Athlon like all the good little sheep they will flame and mod you into oblivion.
Personally, I don't buy AMD because I want a processor that is stable and doesn't run so hot as to burn the paint off the outside of my case.
It's just another piece of shit from a second rate CPU maker.
yeah, just like a blast furnace
So I wait for Michael to DO A LITTLE RESEARCH and discover that AMD'S THERMAL DIODES DON'T WORK.
Do you have any idea how much power it takes to run a Mersenne primality test on an exponent greater than 10000000?
especially one who forgets his p's and q's. or just p's even.
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