Athlon XP1900+ -- Faster Than A 2GHz P4?

doormat writes "AMD releases their AthlonXP 1900+ Processor today, thats 1.6GHz. And it seems like its enough to topple the P4-2.0GHz, even in Quake 3 Arena!! AMDMB has a review of it." Ian Bell points out an AMD press release on the new processor. I love watching my old Athlon get slower every day ...

Comments

That press release:

[JohnHegarty]

AMD INTRODUCES THE AMD ATHLON(TM) XP PROCESSOR 1900+; EXTENDS AMD'S PERFORMANCE LEADERSHIP IN DESKTOP PCS

AMD's QuantiSpeed(TM) architecture delivers extreme performance for Microsoft Windows XP

etc....etc.....

Pricing
The AMD Athlon XP processor 1900+ is priced at $269 in 1,000-unit quantities. For more information on pricing, please visit: http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoo m/0,,51_104_609,00.html

etc...etc...etc....

Re:That press release:

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD has worked closely with Microsoft to ensure systems powered by the AMD Athlon XP processor with QuantiSpeed architecture provide Windows XP users with extreme performance for a great PC experience.

So is that why they called it AMD XP?

Re:That press release:

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, the UK mag PC Pro says in the Dec 2001 issue (this is with the 1800, not 1900, Athlon-XP):

"Is there any bad news? Yes, but only for Intel. The Athlon XP 1800+ sees AMD back as the undisputed king of the performance castle. With a score of 5.24 in our 2D application benchmarkss, the MESH is comfortably ahead of any 2GHz Pentium 4 machine we've seen. In 3DMark 2001, meanwhile, it achieves a monster score of 7,611 at 1,024 x 768 in 32-bit colour. The fact that it can still delIver 5,271 3DMarks at a resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 speaks volumes - Athlon XP and GeForce3 Ti 500 Is a potent 3D combination."

The same issue has a review of a 2GHz P4 which benchmarks at slower than an Athlon 1.33GHz!

Re:That press release:

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh?

I don't see how the screen resolution correlates with the CPU. It's ~100% up to GPU.

Re:That press release:

[zeno_2]

Your processor is still going to be working harder running at a resolution of 1600x1200. Nvidia might want you to think that its all up to the GPU, but its not.

If you don't believe me, try it yourself.

Re:That press release:

[DrSpin]

So how much do I under-clock it so it runs cool?

I'd like to run with a passive heat-sink - ie no fan at all.

Re:That press release:

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the XP stands for eXPensive. Well, at least compared to my 1.4Ghz Thunderbird chip. ;-)

Tom's Hardware Has It Also!

[robvasquez]

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q4/011105/index. html

Wait 20 seco....SHUTUP!

Re:Tom's Hardware Has It Also!

[Ozric]

If you look at the costs on the last page, they take the MOST pricy AMD MB. So you are left with a 140 diff. What a bunch of crap, you can pick up a good SIS735 board for like 60 bucks. So you have a really big rift in the price, pluse the fact that RDRAM is still more then cas2 2400 DRR.
Tom is slanted, I will let you figure out to what side.

Clock for clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Clock for clock it hands the P4-1.6GHz its butt. Nice to see Intel getting slammed at its own game.

Public perception of processor speeds

[Chocky2]

One thing I've noticed over the last year or so when talking to non-techie friends/family is that many people with relatively little knowledge of IT as a whole are starting to realise that the processor speed, however it's being measured, is far less important than the vendors want them to think.

The end result of Intel and AMDs battle of "my processor's faster than your processor" seems to be that people are saying "I don't care" - as they realise that there 'obsolete' PII is actually perfectly capable of doing all the things they use their PC for and that only graphics people and the hardest of hardcore gamers actually need 1.5 to 2GHz.

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[Dashslot]

Related to that is an advert in the UK for a PC with "Intel's fastest ever Pentium IV processor" - nice and specific that, but they go on to say how this wonderful new chip means "Faster Internet". WTF? How is a P4 going to speed up the internet? Maybe if you had a crappy winmodem a pentium 100 would be faster than a 486, but nowadays?

The only advert which pisses me off more are those which tell you can "Own it now DVD" - which I think I will complain about, on the grounds that if I owned the film I would be able to do what I liked with it, including giving a copy to all my friends.

Thanks for listening

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[led]

Sure, but us techies like to have as much power as possible, I did a amusing thing the other day wich was only possible with my Athlon 1.3ghz I pointed my webcam at myself a made a movie of me while playing quake... try that in a PII....
And of course EVERYBODY likes to have a faster computer just to get more seti packets in....

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[ostiguy]

I believe the somewhat plausible explanation for "faster internet" is that windows media player has SSE and SSE2 optimizations

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[mobets]

I just went from a K6-2 500 to a 1.7 P4 and I must say, Mozilla is quite a bit faster.

btw, the only reason I went Intel was that I got it for cheep from intel, there are perks for working retail

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[ncc74656]

I believe the somewhat plausible explanation for "faster internet" is that windows media player has SSE and SSE2 optimizations

Beyond a certain point (that was passed some time ago), though, even that fails to matter. Cranking out 1e6 fps in Quake doesn't matter when you're playing streaming video which is to be rendered at no more than 30 fps. Your connection to the Internet is the limiting factor; a 2-GHz P4 isn't going to make your POS 56K winmodem deliver cable-modem download speeds.

There are applications that need all the speed they can get. It's not the stuff that Intel runs in its ads, though.

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[Kalidor]

Actually it is semi correct. The Itanium chip will speed up your net connection if you enable IPSec, when compared to an AMD processor. The reason is that the Itanium has a special bank of registers for doing the algorithms needed for Win2k and winxp's IPsec. These banks allow the processor to complete the IP-layer encryption without having to mess around with registers that are being used for other stuff, like running your programs. In the AMD chips, even neglecting the problems caused by different pipelining schemes, the chip has to dump all the information it has for the program it running and load encryption/decryption alogrithms and calculate them every time the IP-stack recieves a packet.

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[nologin]

...there 'obsolete' PII is actually perfectly capable of doing all the things they use their PC for and that only graphics people and the hardest of hardcore gamers actually need 1.5 to 2GHz.

That is true for now, with emphasis on the here and now. Otherwise, that statement can be similarly outdated by statements such as B. Gates famous "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

People who want squeeze out the extra processing cycles probably won't mind paying the premium prices. And I don't think the chip makers will mind taking the extra money, especially considering that about 6 months down the road, they will probably need to drop the prices to maintain sales. Simple laws of economics.

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[scott1853]

It's not just processor speeds anymore. People are satisfied with most components now.

It's not like the old days, jumping from CGA -> EGA -> VGA -> SVGA, or from monochrome to color. There's not a big need for consumers to go get 19+" monitors when the 17" are nice enough for most people. Likewise with hard drives. It far less likely that a regular consumer will fill up the 30GB drive that's standard now.

The manufacturers have realized this for awhile. Hard drives, video cards, memory, and every other component is now marketed as "making the internet faster".

The sad thing for the industry is not only the current economy, but also that new hardware isn't going to be as revolutionary as it once was.

It all comes down to the "Killer App" syndrome. There's no need for new hardware until new software is available to take advantage of it. And without a need for new hardware, the hardware manufacturers don't have any immediate need to spend lots of time and money on R&D.

New software needs to come first. I tend to see that most programmers are busy enough playing catch-up with all the new stuff available, implementing new communication APIs and what not. I'm sure a lot just haven't had time to do anything revolutionary.

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[don_carnage]

I pointed my webcam at myself a made a movie of me while playing quake...

Yeah? Well give it up! Did you have your tongue hanging out the side of your mouth? Did you weave left and right IRL to avoid getting hit? This could be very entertaining!

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[Fnkmaster]

Agreed. The really unfortunate part is that we have such great machines everywhere now, they are practically ubiquitous. The problem is the pipe - the promise of broadband is still a bit half baked. I'm not saying broadband sucks or anything, I have a cable pipe at home and I'm running a 100Mbps LAN and 11Mbps WLAN in my home - who would have thought of that 5 years ago? I'm just saying that the next round of killer apps require a more reliable, much higher bandwidth infrastructure, and a better last-mile solution that is lower in marginal deployment cost.

If this makes no sense at all, forgive me - but my vision here is that high resolution, high quality, full motion video streams are capable of being supported by modern desktop hardware. But we still don't have the kind of pipes we need to push this data around. I still don't have a high quality, easy to use, secure, ultra-reliable videophone setup on my desktop. I can trade pictures and MP3s, perhaps the killer app of the last 2-3 years but the DMCA and heavyhanded industry tactics have greatly suppressed this revolution. Also annoying ISP policies regarding running "servers" in the home have made it harder to move toward a fully network-aware home, with remotely accessible services. I think these are all potential killer apps, limited by the pipe and legal morass rather than desktop hardware right now (if anybody has a Tivo and has played with running httpd and downloading extracted MPEG streams, you know how fscking cool this is and how many people would LOVE to play with such a toy, share shows with friends, archive and edit video on their computer, etc.).

Or maybe another type of application will come along - interactive, immersive VR? I don't know, again, there's pretty damned good hardware there. Quake3 and other modern FPS games show a huge amount of possibilities for this stuff. But it's still only used in games. I haven't yet had a "virtual meeting" with a vendor on eBay to negotiate prices, or anything like that.

These are just my stupid futurist ideas. Some of the applications are really waiting on the pipe, not the hardware. There may be other apps just waiting on the law. I don't know if there are any apps waiting on the hardware, but who knows, somebody might come up with something.

The Semantic Web is an application waiting on standardization, infrastructure and software that I think has the potential to become REALLY cool (yeah, I know, Tim Berners-Lee is somewhat disliked by a lot of the /. crowd, and he's pushing Semantic Web stuff out his ass, but I'm still a believer). I don't think that requires any more pipe or hardware to build out the infrastructure and, like the WWW, is a technology that becomes fundamentally more useful as it is more widely adopted and more information is accessible in RDF/Ontology format.

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure that Bill Gates actually said that?

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[GiMP]

Actually... that is the current marketing scam of ATI and Matrox. They are advertising this stuff called "head casting", where you have a webcam pointed at yourself.. and it generates a texture of your face and maps it onto your character in a realtime 3d environment.

It of course, updates so that your expressions are actually seen on the 3d model.

They promised that this will be used for games in the future, although currently I do not see this happening. They do have an instant messager based on it, however...

http://matrox.com/mga/archive_review/oct2001/zdn et _millg550.cfm

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[led]

Yes, I'm afraid a bit too entertaining for public viewing... ;-)

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[Anonymous Coward]

The story I heard was that the quote (wherever it came from) actually referred to the requirements for, say, DOS 4.0. I have no idea why people seem to believe the quote meant we would never, ever, in the vast future of computing, possibly need any more than 640K of memory.

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree with you -- my trusty 266 Mhz PII is running the latest version of all the Linux software I use, and is still peppy and sprightly.

Xemacs is fine. Dillo is fine. Sawfish is fine. GNOME is fine (Nautilus might be slow...I don't know. I like having a desktop unblemished by icons, so I ripped gmc and Nautilus out). rxvt is zippy. links/lynx is fast. vm (one of xemacs' excellent mail clients) is nice.

If you're less of a developer, you could use abiword, gnumeric, balsa, and still have a zippy system.

I'll probably be happy for at least another year with my current system.

"Upgrade fever" stems partly from hard core gaming, and partly from the fact that Windows/MS products are God-awful when it comes to efficiency and RAM/CPU usage. Linux will be the death of the hardware manufacturers. ;-)

If you use Linux, where's the reason to upgrade?

This little guy's a great little webserver, and he doesn't need more than a 486 -- and he's *never* saturated.

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel was talking about how SSE lets you decode highly-compressed video more efficiently -- letting you download streaming video faster (this came out back when streaming video was all the industry rage).

Granted, Intel probably didn't mind helping the misunderstanding along a bit, but if you look at their original ads, they weren't flat-out lying or anything.

Ragnar Ho!

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[Anonymous Coward]

Naw. Matrox wants to get the business market with this. Remember how they swore off gaming and aimed for the business market?

So the problem with videoconferencing, which was being pushed at businesses not too long ago, is bandwidth requirements. It's pricy if you have fifty execs, none of whom want chopping, skipping images, trying to videoconference over your oubound link.

Enter Matrox's "Headcasting". Textures are maybe updated now and then over the network, but just about the only thing that goes over the network is deformation vectors. The guy moves his mouth, a couple of deformations are sent across the network, the video card at the other end moves a few polygons.

"Headcasting" does entail a bit of neat technology. Matrox had to do scads of transformations in hardware in order to keep up a high-res model of the face. Basically, Headcasting is a bunch of software and a seriously bumped on-silicon transformation engine.

But don't try to figure out how Headcasting is going to be cool for gaming. It isn't, and Matrox doesn't intend it to be. It's a stab at a new business market.

Not running a Matrox video card

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[Anonymous Coward]

I've found that a 17" monitor with virtual desktops is far superior to twin 20" monitors. You can't *look* at all the stuff at the same time, and with zero-delay edge flipping and a fast window manager, moving your mouse (or hitting a keyboard key) is as automatic as moving your eyes.

It's cheaper, too. And you get a bigger desktop.

Philosophy and CS

Re:Public perception of processor speeds

[ENOENT]

Hard drives, video cards, memory, and every other component is now marketed as "making the internet faster".

Of course, Making the Internet Faster is just marketroid-speak for Faster Pr0n downloads.

Sex sells.

1900 1800

[pacc]

I don't doubt that the XP1900 is faster than
the P4 2GHz, but at amdmb there's only a test against it's smaller brother the XP1800.

Wheres some real tests comparing it to the P4 : )

How convienient...

[GearheadX]

...I was planning on buying an 1800+ series processor today. With the 1900+ out its price will undoubtedly be driven down, since it's no longer the bleeding edge of performance.

Re:How convienient...

[Anonymous Coward]

And when you go to buy the 1900+, the 2000+ will come out, and when you go to buy the 2000+, the 2100+ will come out, and so on and so on ad infinitum. Just BUY something already, damnit!

Nuts...

[BoarderPhreak]

This insane race that Intel is in is getting a little tedious at this point.

I'd rather they waited a a little in between releases, rather than every couple of megahertz.

I'm not saying that speed is bad, but do we have to have a release for every chip?

-- Don't believe the megahertz myth!

Re:Nuts...

[telstar]

If it continues to have the impact on pricing that it's had so far, why fight it?

Re:Nuts...

[mgblst]

Better this than they start price fixing- or Mhz fixing. In the current situation it seems that the consumers are the winner. But if AMD and Intel started colluding, which i don't think is illegal in the USA, then the companies will win at your expense.

Payola ?

[tmark]

Now, I know have the hype comes from the readership here, but I just keep wondering why AMD and a few other companies like Transmeta get covered here so lovingly. Is it because Slashdot readers don't like frontrunners ? Is there something inherently open-source-dogma-friendly about the corporate philosophies about AMD and Transmeta (though I doubt it, I am sure their lawyers are or would be as agressive about patents and infringements as Intel) ? Surely it can't be just about performance - Transmeta lacks sorely, and I cannot imagine the day when Slashdot posts an article crowing with glee about how the P8 trounces the AMDXP6400 or whatever.

Re:Payola ?

[larien]

The thing is that AMD has generally been beating Intel for about 2 years (since the Athlon came out, basically). The last 6 months have seen Intel make a comeback, but AMD has clawed in front again with the XP range.

As far as price/performance goes, AMD are beating Intel quite handily, and now they're even beating them on plain performance.

The transmeta thing is hairier; they have a damn fine product, but it doesn't have the performance to compete with even mobile Celerons and Intel have done a fair bit of work on Speedstep to reduce the power consumption of their mobile chips. If nothing else, Transmeta have forced Intel to re-evaluate mobile priorities.

Re:Payola ?

[ishark]

It's not payola it's "kill the monopoly". Microsoft gets bashed for its dominant position and attitude. Intel gets bashed for its dominant position and attutide. The day Intel has 10% of marketshare and AMD starts putting out crappy CPUs you can bet that Slashdot will be covered with Intel info.
Another explanation could be that you tend to get quite a lot of (dis)information about the big players in the classic media, so the new (internet) media plays more on the less-known facts with a "balancing" effect.

Re:Payola ?

[TheMidget]

The transmeta thing is hairier; they have a damn fine product, but...

Actually, the main reason why we love Transmeta is not because of their kewl processors... (which aren't actually that kewl, as you pointed out...). No, the main reason is because our God works there ;-)

Re:Payola ?

[Anonymous Coward]

the thing is that the intel chips dont trounce the amds

Re:Payola ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. AMD did indeed catch up with Intel with the XP processors.

However, what AMD doesn't want you to know is that the XP range already contains 0.13um technology. AMD is eating its own future by doing this... too bad there's no such thing as a free lunch - even for AMD.

Re:Payola ?

[Junks Jerzey]

there something inherently open-source-dogma-friendly about the corporate philosophies about AMD and Transmeta (though I doubt it

It's not just Slashdot, it's the zealot personality in general. There's the perception that AMD is both the underdog and a grassroots organization run out of a cabin in Topeka, and more power to them for going up against Evil Intel (tm).

Of course the simple truth is that AMD is also a hulking corporation, just like Intel, so Slashdotters should hate them just as they hate any other company trying to make a buck.

Re:Payola ?

[alexburke]

It's really quite simple: a fully-x86-compatible processor that, clock for clock, blows the "original and best" x86 processor out of the water performance-wise.

If that isn't News for Nerds, I don't know what is...

Re:Payola ?

[stripes]

Now, I know have the hype comes from the readership here, but I just keep wondering why AMD and a few other companies like Transmeta get covered here so lovingly. Is it because Slashdot readers don't like frontrunners ?

There is some of that. Any news-like coverage likes to see things get shaken up a bit. There may also be some Intel specific hate though. Like hate for trying to suppress documents (see undocumented intel, and also the original Appendix H or which ever the hidden one was). Oh, don't forget hate for them insisting Randall Schwartz was prosecuted...

Oh, and I rather hate the x86 instruction set. Which makes me rather torn about the x86-64 vs. iTanic thing...

few other companies like Transmeta get covered here so lovingly

Well, doesn't Linus work there? Plus it is a neat idea, even if it doesn't seem to be working so well.

Re:Payola ?

[entrox]

your god isn't everyones god

Re:Payola ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure if AMD had a functioning .13 fab right now they would be shouting about it from the rooftops.

Re:Payola ?

[Howie]

I don't have any great love of AMD, although my current desktop is an Athlon 1Ghz. After the shitty behavious of Intel during a round of purchasing a couple of years ago I decided to avoid buying Intel as much as I could. Since the other credible alternatives for x86 are Cyrix (low-end, iffy compatibility) and Transmeta (slower, never seen a desktop system), AMD is an obvious choice.

The events in question were Intel canning a processor range just after I bought one processor for a dual processor system when they were not 'bottom-of-the-range' chips (the PIII 500 Katmai), but because they were marketing a new range of forced upgrades which required different chipsets (the 500E Coppermine). The other one was a load of grief with i810 and i810e boards, AGP video, 500E CPUs and a crappy vendor. Intel are not friendly people, and that's before you even look at their internal problems with staff treatment.

Re:Payola ?

[operagost]

You didn't mention exactly what MB you had, but if it was BX then you most certainly could put in a 500E, 550E, or 600E processor. What you couldn't do is put in a 'B' processor. Those require a 133 MHz bus. The 'E' line generally only requires a BIOS update. My now-ancient GA6BXDS can handle two 600E processors. However, since even these are now obsolete, I find myself stuck with the single PIII-450 I bought which doesn't even have an functioning onboard APIC, thanks to Intel's wonderful QC. There's no way I'm going to pay for two obsolete 600s when I could probably get a single Athlon + MB for the same money and more speed.

Re:Payola ?

[NutscrapeSucks]

Depends -- I have an IBM BX-based system, and IBM wouldn't ship BIOS support for coppermine chips. Similar stories for Dell and other big OEMs. So, I'm stuck at 2 600(not E, not B) chips. On the otherhand, my APIC seems to work.

(The worst thing about this is that after the i820 bomb, Intel phased out SMP chipset support for non-Xeon CPUs. I don't need more speed now, so I'm sitting back and waiting for either Intel to change it's mind about workstation SMP, or for the AMD boards to get nice and stable like the BX is.)

Re:Payola ?

[ack911]

Of course the simple truth is that AMD is also a hulking corporation, just like Intel, so Slashdotters should hate them just as they hate any other company trying to make a buck. Ok you seem to have missed the point entirly. If Intel made the best processors and sold them for good prices we would like them too. but they dont. It has nothing to do with thinking that AMD are some friendly tree hugging company. We know they are a large corp. But they have much better policys than intel, Hence the good product, good price. They have also been a lot more open the the open source community than most large corps. get it?

Re:Payola ?

[Howie]

Hehe - in fact it was a GA6BXD (the non-SCSI one). It's possible to get the clock up to 900Mhz or so (not documented), and now possible to use coppermine, but at the time it wasn't, IIRC. Since then, E-Bay has provided me with a second P3-500 to make a nice second system though, and a use for the soundcard that didn't get on with the KT7A-RAID board I upgraded to.

Re:Payola ?

[skroz]

I wouldn't say out of the water... price performance wise, maybe, but AMD has only slightly inched ahead in the performance race. Intel will leapfrog them again soon, and AMD will leapfrog Intel soon after that.

Re:Payola ?

[dmccarty]

I apologize in advance because this long-winded post is certain to wind up being moderated off-topic, but I think your comment raises a serious issue that's at the base of Slashdot.

Slashdot culture, and to a large extent tech/geek culture in general, shares a big slice with the society of anti-establishmentarians (what a horrible word, BTW). For whatever reasons (and everyone has their own), a large group of Slashdotters would rather see the establishment torn down than to ally themselves with it.

I know people who think this way, and I undertsand the idea, but I disagree with it. There is a lot more to be gained by changing a system from within than by ripping the entire thing down and starting over. (For the sake of the argument I'll ignore the obvious long-term benefits of an all-out revolution.) The anti-globalism movement that Katz writes about, and draws 1000-comment articles from, could do a lot more good by having its ragged protestors attend a university and rising within a company than by hurling molotov cocktails at its gates.

With regard to Linux vs. Windows, even Linus said, "Eventually the revolutionaries become the established culture, and then what will they do?" I'll tell you what they'll do: they'll get mad at some small detail within the newly-established culture and use it as a reason to launch another jihad against it. Because that's what they like to do. They're not interested in actually doing anything themselves, they just like to protest things others have done.

To a large degree they behave like children. When faced with a problem, adults will evaluate the system they live in and make decisions within that system to solve the problem. Children, on the other hand, whine and throw temper tantrums until some resolution is reached--the parent relents or the child is disciplined. In these cases, we're seeing a bunch of petulant children throwing a fit because someone has offended their ideals and they feel justified in running through the streets assaulting people because of it.

So how does this relate to the Athlon? There's a sense of forgiveness on Slashdot for the new Athlon XP naming system. "Yes, it's wrong," the average Slashdotter might say, "but they had to do it to fight against Intel." So it's okay for the underdog to play dirty, but had Intel invented this naming procedure they would've been villified on Slashdot from day one. And if Athlon eventually gets the upper hand in the chip war and Intel becomes the underdog, expect a switch of allegience from the disestablishmentarians simply because Intel is no longer the establishment. That is the definitive danger of this thought process. No one can ever rise to the top because the moment that they do, they become the new establishment.

Re:Payola ?

[mother_superius]

As far as price/performance goes, AMD are beating Intel quite handily

Actually, Intel beats AMD there. (price per performance) You're thinking of performance/price (performance per price).

Re:Payola ?

[Anonymous Coward]

People like you crack me up. "they hate any other company trying to make a buck" LOL. Why don't you go stick your head under a rock, it will enable your ignorance a lot faster than hanging out here and making an idiot of yourself.

Re:Payola ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, bullshit. AMD doesn't have "better policies" than Intel. AMD is trying to wipe out the existing king of the arena by underselling him. If Intel went away, AMD would be charging you just as much as Intel once did.

Second, AMD's product is not, IMHO, all that mindblowing. Yes, for consumer applications they can currently squeeze out a bit more performance. However the utter flakiness of the chipsets supporting them is a big issue. If your motherboard and your video card fight, a 2% performance difference is not an issue.
News flash: WinNT/2K isn't *perfectly* stable...but neither does it hard freeze frequently. I've seen hardware issues blamed on Windows a *lot* (I did it myself once when I had a bad video card that would hard freeze my NT system...and, as I later discovered, my Linux box). MS (bad as they are) gets a lot of the bad rap for motherboards that are way too twitchy on RAM timing...mostly AMD ones.

Second, as illustrated by Tom's Hardware (and recently, my dormmate burning through a processor accidentally), AMD procs have lousy thermal regulation.

Third, neither AMD nor Intel is the greatest chip manufacturer *anyway*. Both AMD and Intel's chips are spiralling way out of sight in terms of power consumption. It's just silly. The PowerPC 603e used so much less power than a "modern" x86 chip that it's ridiculous.

Fourth, the x86 architecture blows. Period. Sorry, but that's the way it is. I had a PowerPC system that I used to hack around in assembly on, and the x86 is crap. Whoever came up with variable-width instructions, less registers than I have fingers, and enough legacy junk to drown in should be shot.

Anyway, Intel is actually moving toward IA64, a non-lousy architecture (and way overdue, IMHO). Sure, you pay a premium for Intel's high end products...but at least some of that money is going to R&D for wildly new technologies...not just producing new fab plants, a la AMD. AMD is going to sit on x86 as long as they can, since the cost of going to a new architecture in terms of R&D is enormous.

Of course, not everyone agrees with me...

Re:Payola ?

[Anonymous Coward]

So the fact that Intel happened to finish up a product line right after you bought one of those products makes them "shitty"? I mean, get a little perpsective...

Re:Payola ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoh...I must be pro-establishment. I thought the Athlon XP naming system was pretty much as idiotic as Intel's "Internet speed up" ads.

Re:Payola ?

[larien]

Whatever; you know what I mean :) In any case, sometimes less is better.

Re:Payola ?

[mgblst]

ha... this just seems really funny, from someone with a slashdot user number 266621!!!!

Re:Payola ?

[Howie]

Actually between the time I ordered it, and the time it arrived, the line was killed. It was not the 'low-end' at the time, so I had no reason to expect it. When it went, it went so completely that you could not get stock of anything anywhere. Typically, EOLed products hangs around for at least a while. Also, at the time suppliers had it marked up as out of stock for some time before finding out that in fact there would be no more. It wasn't a graceful obsolescence. At the time it was the start of a chain of related events that made me think that I really didn't want to make any long-term plans that involved Intel, since they certainly didn't make them with me (as customer) in mind.

Re:Payola ?

[13Echo]

It isn't so much that as it is that the black sheep in this business is ALWAYS under-rated, despite performance, innovation, and price. The AMD processors appeal to me, just as other parts, like Kyro2 based video cards. There is nothing wrong with Intel's hardware, I just can't see any justification in their price or their position in the market. The same thing goes with Nvidia and PowerVR. If the tables turn, and AMD CPUs get to be more expensive than comparable Intel products, then I will be taking a turn in the oposite direction.

quake iii

[Anonymous Coward]

i just love how quake 3 has become the benchmarking programming for any video card that comes out now...
maybe they should design the cards to work better in quake 3 and ignore the other...oh wait, i think someone may have already done that...

Re:quake iii

[Anonymous Coward]

It is poor to use Quake III is a comparison, it is a stupid game for the small-minded. How about a game that involves some tactics? Quake III is just stupid.

Re:quake iii

[Equinox]

How about if you don't want tactics? How about if you just want to blow stuff up? I personally don't feel like thinking when I'm trying to relax. There's a reason it's called 'mindless entertainment'...

Doh I got the old one yesterday

[Rushuru]

Argh!

I had just finished downloading the athlon xp 1800 yesterday.
Great now I have to download the new one over my 28.8k modem :/

What? You mean it's not a piece of software?

Re:Doh I got the old one yesterday

[psavo]

I had just finished downloading the athlon xp 1800 yesterday. Great now I have to download the new one over my 28.8k modem :/

I think you wanna try http://www.amd.com/updates/last-minute/patch-xp180 0-2-xp1900.tgz. Worked for me..

Re:Doh I got the old one yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

Bravo You can ride that funny all the way to Ohio, because you try comin' here and we'll just frown. Frown at you. The funny wagon off of which you have fallen is miles away by now (and no doubt has left Ohio.) So, what to do?

So, what to do?

Re:Doh I got the old one yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahahah! :)

Re:Doh I got the old one yesterday

[horza]

Ah, you seem to be ahead of us with your athlon FPGA processor. The rest of us are forced to buy upgrades on a regular basis...

What, you mean it isn't an operating system?

Phillip.

Quake

[Anonymous Coward]

Why, oh why, do you people insist on using something like Quake as a measure for how powerful your system is?!

Use large scale (=requiring tens of gigabytes of memory so that I/O gets tested as well) floating point matrix multiplication or inversion instead. Even serving web pages would do, although it would not take the computer to its true performance limit.

Games, by definition, are not suitable as real performance meters.

Re:Quake

[bribecka]

Why, oh why, do you people insist on using something like Quake as a measure for how powerful your system is?!

Because it's a benchmark that is *tangible* to most people. One doesn't get excited because a processor can do a 500x500 matrix multiply really fast, but run Q3 at 130fps and people start flipping out. Sort of like saying how fast a car can go 0-60--not that everyone is drag racing, but it's easier to understand than the amount of torque an engine puts out.

Re:Quake

[iainl]

"Games, by definition, are not suitable as real performance meters"

Err, you do know what most of these chips are going to be bought for, don't you? Benchmarking on the application you intend to use is the only sensible thing to do.

By all means, if you want a processor for doing matrix multiplication then test it with that, but most of the people after the new ninja AMD chip will be wanting an extra couple of frames per second.

Re:Quake

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok. I can buy that.

Anyone seen a comparision between P4 and Athlon when it comes to raw number crunching? I'm considering buying either a Dual P4 Xeon or Dual AMD for developing computational fluid dynamics code. Obviously most of the productions runs will be on massively parallel SGI supercomputers but prototyping the code on a fast dual processor PC is absolutely essential.

Re:Quake

[bribecka]

Anyone seen a comparision between P4 and Athlon when it comes to raw number crunching?

I remember a few years back when AMD was starting to pick up steam, the K5 (I think) had horrible FP performance. But with the Athlon, the FP pipeline has been greatly improved.

I did a few benchmarks a year or so ago for 3d graphics ops (matrix, texmapping, vertex computation) on a few machines--an Athlon, Intel, Sun, and SGI, and was quite amazed at how the SGI (while way slower in terms of Mhz) beat the AMD and Intel CPUs handily.

But in terms of price/performance, the Athlon chips have always a great deal

Re:Quake

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like some Quake-obsessed moderator was hurt by the allegation that Quake is not the ultimate CPU power benchmark...

Pitiful.

Re:Quake

[Chris Burke]

Hi.

Large matrix multiplies are in fact used as benchmarks by many sites, and are part of specFP, sysmark, and other benchmark suites, many of which you'll see quoted (though not specifically the mat mult part) in these reviews.

The problem is that matrix multiply only tests your floating point/simd unit and your i/o bandwidth. Not a very comprehensive test, and unless you actually plan to do large matrix multiplies, quite synthetic.

As for your web page serving idea, it's called specweb, and anyone who is catering to or buying in the web server market cares a lot about this benchmark. It is a more comprehensive test than just multiplying matricies, but still only targets certain aspects of the cpu (I/O again, cache size).

Games actually make a good addition to these benchmarks. A modern game engine can tax a cpu a great deal, and will use a mix of integer and floating point applications, plus put pressure on the memory subsystem. If the performance isn't limited by the graphics card, then you can use games quite effectively as CPU benchmarks.

It's funny that you mentioned "real". If you're running sicentific apps that multiply lots of matricies, then matirx multiply is "real". If you're running anandtech.com, web serving is "real". And, if you're a gamer, games are real and the performance you see in them is what is the "real" performance limited.

It almost sounds like you want the "max", as generated through some kind of synthetic test. As in the performance you'd never, ever get in a actual application that you'd want to run once you'd bought the system. Which was how it used to be done, and it sucked, so everyone stopped. Let's not suggest we go back, hm?

Re:Quake

[Bert64]

But all these benchmarks are also HEAVILY dependant on the compiler, the os, and how well both are optimised for the cpu.. SpecWEB tests particular webserver SOFTWARE afaik, i could write a SIMPLE webserver to just serve a single hard coded static html page, and it would easily outperform apache or any general purpose webserver... Also i could compile a benchmark with an old compiler and no optimization, running on a poorly multitasking os, and compare it to a hand optimized assembly benchmark running in supervisor mode

Re:Quake

[gmarceau]

Now the one thing I realy can't understand is : Why the hell don't those benchmarker people publish lower-bounds/upper-bounds & stardard deviation data accross their benchmark set. I am the only one that can read them meaningfully?

Afterall, that's what the P4 saga showed us. People not only one their processor to be fast, they also want it to be predictable. It's not ok to run most software bazingly fact and run some other like a dog.

Those are generic purpose cpus for a reason. Being able to run a wide style range of code with top performance is part of their design requirement. Why does nobody's benchmarks represent this?

Re:Quake

[Chris Burke]

Well, probably because having such a number across the benchmark set would be pretty meaningless. An average of FPS in 3 different games isn't going to be very useful, because the games may be very different. FPS in Quake3 are 2-3 times those in Max Payne. For an individual benchmark, normally the reviewer makes several runs to ensure that they get the same number, or at least statistically insignificant variation.

But on the other hand, suites like Sysmark, 3dmark, etc DO produce a single score that represents a number of benchmarks. It uses some arbitrary weighting scheme to come up with this number. Which is why I tend to ignore those scores, because you don't know what they really mean.

If you want to know how the CPU performs on all benchmarks, just look at all of them.

Re:Quake

[gmarceau]

I guess they get hung up on the first urdle, just like you did. The tool we are looking for here is some good old normalisation.

If I can only get my hand on a good set of numbers. I would do it myself and post the results up.

If you want to know how the CPU performs on all benchmarks, just look at all of them

Well, this is more or less what I have been doing. It gets long and tedious after a while, and it makes me post on slashdot looking for a better solution, wishing for even more competent reviewing.

Toppling the P4?

[underpaidISPtech]

Nice editorial work guys.
I saw a review comparing an Athlon 1800 and a 1900.
I didn't see a single thing in there that mentioned the P4 being outperformed or toppled.
Just unsupported speculation.

Re:Toppling the P4?

[Znork]

Yep, sortof weird editorial, considering that most benchmarks have even the XP 1400+ beating the P4 2GHz on some tests. The XP 1800+ has already been pretty consistently outperforming the P4 2GHz, so the 1900+ would at most be taking over the lead in the very few benchmarks that Intel has had a small lead in.

Of course, according to the shootout that Tomshardware had, on the most important test of Linux kernel compilation (:)), every AMD from the old Athlon 1400 to the XP 1800+ beat every Intel up to the 2GHz one.

And thats even without factoring in the price difference on CPU, motherboard and RDRAM. Or the ethical considerations of purchasing Rambus ram.

My next computer will be my first AMD without a doubt :).

Re:Toppling the P4?

[underpaidISPtech]

You state the obvious. We all know that that AMD is outperforming the Intel. My next box will no doubt be running an Athlon and DDR mobo with at least a G of RAM. I just hope I don't have any hardware compatibilty problems like I did in the past with AMD. My overpriced Intel setup has never caused problems throughout upgrades (esp. video cards!)

I was simply pointing out that the linked articles and the post itself were entirely misleading. Now you've got +3 Insightful for linking to articles that support the originally unsupported article heading --- and your responese completely failed to recognize the artificially inflated premise behind this entire "news item".

Congratulations.

Re:Toppling the P4?

[juggleme]

Most of the incompatibility problems with AMD systems can be traced to VIA's south bridge chip (IOW, the chip that handles the PCI bus and most other peripherals). It was included with most AMD boards a while ago, but fortunately these problems should be gone when VIA updates the chip in the KT266A chipset. The SiS 735 as well as (IIRC) a few AMD 760 boards are about the only ones I can think of that are out in quantity right now. The KT266A and the Nforce are coming out pretty quickly though.

Re:Toppling the P4?

[bwoodring]

I wish there was a moderation option called "-1 Asshole" because you would surely rack up a lot of those babies.

Re:Toppling the P4?

[underpaidISPtech]

You too, state the obvious.

I guess it's time to upgrade my motherboard

[linuxrunner]

Originally I bought a Slot A motherboard.... Then the chip makers decided to go socket. I could buy a new mother board, but everytime a New chip comes out.... I will have to buy a new mother board. I buy a new motherboard but it's only good up to a certain MHz. So when I buy the new chip. I need a new board again.....

Someone stop the insanity!

Linuxrunner

Re:I guess it's time to upgrade my motherboard

[dasunt]

Well, that's why you get a nice, cutting-edge motherboard, that supports more memory and a higher processor speed then you need. Sure, you might not be able to afford it, but in the future, the price will drop.

Extra credit if you check out AMD/Intel's roadmap, to see where they are going to take the chip.

Do your homework, your componets last longer then.

Re:I guess it's time to upgrade my motherboard

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you need to buy a new motherboard every time a new processor comes out?

Since AMD went to the Socket A interface, they haven't changed the format of their interface. Compare that with Intel and their P4 mess.

Sure, sometimes faster memory or a faster bus mean a new chipset will be needed, and hence a new motherboard. But the old motherboard doesn't stop the new processor running, just not as optimally as before (and slower).

In the end, it depends on whether or not you want to upgrade your computer system every 6 months, or every 3 years...

Re:I guess it's time to upgrade my motherboard

[Masem]

Many Mobo makers (at least, those that work with AMD chipsets) appear to plan ahead when they design the board and BIOs, in that while the initial revision of the board might only support up to a given CPU, but as the newer CPUs (which they knew were in the AMD pipeline, just not when) are released, they can release BIOS upgrades that allow the newer chips to be used on the older motherboards. If you are actively swapping out your CPU every time there's an upgrade, you can probably get a year's worth out of a brand new mobo.

Plus, with the cost of the mobo outweighed nowadays by CPU and video card costs, it's rather reasonable to update your mobo when you get a new CPU

Re:I guess it's time to upgrade my motherboard

[Anonymous Coward]

However, AMD have stuck firmly with the Socket A, while Intel have continued to introduce new Sockets with each processor. Thats one more point for AMD, in my book. The only things that have changed are the chipsets and the move to DDR RAM of course, but thats not to say you couldn't put one of these new Athlons in your old 760 based board and make do with crappy bus perfomance over the DDR chipsets.

Re:I guess it's time to upgrade my motherboard

[mark_lybarger]

so i get a board that supports a processor 1.4gz athlon, and i'm only using an 800 duron. it supports 1.5GB ram, but i've only got 512MB. when i go to upgrade next year, i won't want to ONLY have 1.5GB, i'll want 2GB, i won't want 1.4gz, i'll want 2.5 gz.

i agree with the above poster. somewhere the insanity has to stop.

Re:I guess it's time to upgrade my motherboard

[fault0]

At least on the AMD side, it's a lot better than Intel. While they stuck with Socket 370 for a while, they are now changing socket/slot forms all the time (forcing new mobos). Just in a few months, with the Northwood, they are going to do it again.

Re:I guess it's time to upgrade my motherboard

[Anonymous Coward]

The only insane person here is you. Trying to keep up with the CPU/Mobo upgrade cycle is stupid. Sit back and wait 3 years, buy an all new kit and turn the old one into a server and you'll be fine.

Not a *couple* MHz

[athlon02]

We're not talking a couple of MHz, we're talking 130MHz for the AthlonXP 1800+ over the TBird 1.4GHz and 70MHz of the 1900+ over the 1800+. When you consider we're still barely in the GHz range, MHz still matter! If they released on every few 100 KHz that'd be different, but until we get up to say 15GHz or more MHz makes a difference, especially considering AMD's IPC over Intel's. But I'll step off the soapbox before I slip ;)

I guess you do have a point though... for bleeding edge people they won't care, but Intel and AMD are competing businesses in a big market, so they can't afford to slip behind each other, it's a vicious game.

Re:Not a *couple* MHz

[BoarderPhreak]

True, true. It is a vicious cycle indeed, and like the other poster said, if it induces a price war, who are we to argue? :)

I guess I'd just be a bit scared to invest in a PC right now since you could be outclassed rather quickly. Not that this wasn't always the case, but at least you knew you had six months or so. Now it seems like there's a new chip out every or every other month!

But like with any hardware purchase, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and go for.

MODERATORS - This isn't offtopic you stupid assholes...

Re:Not a *couple* MHz

[haruharaharu]

I guess I'd just be a bit scared to invest in a PC right now since you could be outclassed rather quickly.

What? You don't 'invest' in a PC, you buy one to do some job for you. If it's fast enough, then who caares if someone has a faster one.

Re:Not a *couple* MHz

[athlon02]

Precisely. Personally, with the exception of 3d rendering on occasion, my Duron 750 + 512MB PC133 does all I need and more some times. I got tired of the outclassing people stage somewhere around the K6-2 350 stage. PCs just have so much power now that most users, including comp. engineering students like myself, don't use all of it in most cases. I wouldn't mind an XP 1900+, but I wish SSD's would plummet in price, those are what the average user *REALLY* needs for performance increases.

Re:Not a *couple* MHz

[SnapShot]

MODERATORS - This isn't offtopic you stupid assholes...

I've always refered the direct approach: MODERATORS - Mod me up as insiteful you fucking morons...

Re:Not a *couple* MHz

[kyrre]

insiteful indeed.

Re:Not a *couple* MHz

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I'd just be a bit scared to invest in a PC right now since you could be outclassed rather quickly.

Dude, you need to quit looking at the other guys' penises, and instead, enjoy using what you've got to get some good screwing done.

I'm serious, even my analogy is crude. There will always be someone with a bigger penis or faster CPU. Don't sweat it. Just buy what you need when you need it, and then get back to work. Don't look back.

But wait...

[dmccarty]

...they didn't test it on quack3.exe.

Re:But wait...

[AftanGustur]

If the AMD enginers can design a 'processor' that detects what application is running, *and* cheats on the performance, then Intel doesn't have a showballs change in hell.

I bet ...

[Archanagor]

it really smokes!

/. a little slow on the uptake this time

[Anonymous Coward]

Anand had a hardware review demonstrating how thoroughly the 1800 kicked a P4-2's ass up weeks ago.

Ghz race

[smaughster]

If this Ghz race remains the main focus for AMD and Intel, we might need Quake 25 Thunderdome just to keep up benchmarking. I am not convinced that a few Mhz is instantly better, but you can never have enough Quake engines :)

*yawn*

[riggwelter]

Oh yawnny yawn yawn!

A few more MHz here, a few more there, so what?

Admittedly with one of those new Athlons and 0.5G of RAM, Nautilus might be half-way usable ;-)

Seriously, apart from a few more FPS while fragging how much of a difference do those few extra clock cycles actually make?

[My pondering could be said to be jealousy, as my main computer is still a P166, but my XFCE/Evolution/Galeon combo works like a dream on it...]

Re:*yawn*

[XMunkki]

Those few cycles, given that enough gamers (talking about games here) have them, give the ability to build higher resolution worlds, more interaction, better AI, and all in that *umph* all people whine games are missing.

Of course the steps there go one at a time, and so this 66Mhz increase in Athlon clock speeds may not be much, but it's the right direction nonetheless.

Re:*yawn*

[Junks Jerzey]

Seriously, apart from a few more FPS while fragging how much of a difference do those few extra clock cycles actually make?

C'mon, we're talking about major speed boosts that increase the processor performance by up to 5%. Wait..five percent. Geez. That's a far cry from the days when we jumped from a 33MHz 486 to 66MHz. These twiddles aren't even worth discussing, especially as a bad driver could kill performance by 50% or more.

Re:*yawn*

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny you should mention - I just built a system using an Athlon XP 1700+, 256 MB DDR RAM. Installed RH 7.2, which appears to install Nautilus by default if you select a GNOME desktop. Runs very snappy thankyouverymuch!!

Glenn

Re:1900 1800

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know if I could use XPs instead of MPs on the Tyan's SMP board?

Confused about AMD strategy...

[AtariDatacenter]

Back in the days of modems (anyone remember those?), US Robotics was a company that you could always go to when you wanted the fastest modem on the market. In a way, you could say "nobody got fired for adopting US Robotics". An ISP that selected US Robotics as their vendor knew where they were going, and they'd have the best speed. Customers would stick with that ISP because they knew that they'd have the fastest connect rates. (Okay, mind you, locked into a propriatary format and vendor.)

AMD is known for having the lowest cost. Period. Rarely ever are they more expensive than Intel. But I get confused about Athlon's strategy. They're not going to have the fastest CPUs for long periods of times, so for something like computer manufacturers, you're not going to select AMD for performance machines (even though they may currently be "on top") because you know it isn't going to last.

I suppose I'm getting far off on a tangent here, but I think AMD would be far more successful if they could continually be known for creating the best performance processor. Then, hardware vendors would be far more likely to adopt their processor and chipsets.

But I don't have my finger anywhere near the pulse of this market. Am I just plain silly?

Re:Confused about AMD strategy...

[iainl]

Its possible you are indeed just plain silly. While the chips are now so fundamentally different that doing a direct speed comparison is difficult, in the vast majority of benchmarks there have only been brief periods of Intel leading the speed race ever since the release of the first Athlons. On the 3DMark numbers (check Tom's review of the 1900+ for details) every single one of the Athlon XPs beats the 2GHz P4, even the 1500+ one.

Personally, I think that when Intel rush out another couple of MHz in an attempt to catch up its not going to last either - I really don't see your argument about Intel being an accepted leader in the performace field.

Re:Confused about AMD strategy...

[snake_dad]

Yes, I remember those days. And IIRC, for a while, ZyXEL was te company to turn to for the fastest modems, and the most features as well.

Re:Confused about AMD strategy...

[Tiroth]

For a while it looked as though Intel was the clear leader for "high end" computing; i.e. memory intensive applications like physics and rendering, even if Athlons were as good or better for gaming and general use. However, Tom's roundup has shown (curiously, to me) that the audio and MPEG4 encoding performance of the Athlon 1900+ is superior to the P4-2000. (I wish they had posted tmpegenc rates, because I don't consider Pinnacle a worthwhile encoder)

Re:Confused about AMD strategy...

[bay43270]

The idea isn't just for AMD to be the cheapest. If they were consistantly 6 monthes behind Intel, but always offered a lower price, they would simply be regaurded as 'dicount chips'. They want to be known for offering comparable quality for a better price. The only way they will be seen as comparable to the market leader is to beat them on every benchmark... after all, they have a prejudice to overcome.

Re:Confused about AMD strategy...

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD is known for having the lowest cost. Period.

Well, the real bargain brands (e.g. Cyrix) might take issue with that. AMD has always been cheaper than Intel, but rarely the cheapest. Also, AMD has maintained a performance advantage over Intel for most of the last two years since the Athlon was released.

They're not going to have the fastest CPUs for long periods of times, so for something like computer manufacturers, you're not going to select AMD for performance machines (even though they may currently be "on top") because you know it isn't going to last.

So what you are saying is that manufacturers should buy slower processors now from a vendor they think will offer faster processors later? Perhaps I should remind you of a blindingly obvious fact; if Intel does manage to recapture the performance lead in the future, that doesn't change the performance of the systems already sold. Wouldn't it make more sense for them to buy the fastest processors available now for the performance machines they're selling now, and in the future buy whatever processors are the fastest in the future, or does that just make too much sense?

I suppose I'm getting far off on a tangent here, but I think AMD would be far more successful if they could continually be known for creating the best performance processor. Then, hardware vendors would be far more likely to adopt their processor and chipsets.

So, you don't think AMD is trying to compete for the performance crown with Intel? I suppose you think AMD is sandbagging or something. Let me assure you that AMD and Intel are both competing as hard as they possibly can to create the highest performance processors. Why do you think we've seen such rapid advances in performance over the last two years.

But I don't have my finger anywhere near the pulse of this market. Am I just plain silly?

Apparently yes. For the last couple years, AMD has been staying neck and neck with Intel in the performance wars, ahead more often than they're behind. Further, they have kept costs low and maintained a two to one advantage in price/performance. And they have been as good or better than Intel in terms of production yields and availability of their highest end processors. Finally, they've done a better job of supporting motherboard vendors by sticking with the same form factor (Socket A) on new Athlon revs, providing a chipset that supports DDR SDRAM, and not threatening legal action against VIA, ALI, and SiS for making Athlon compatible chipsets. What more do you want?

The only reason why AMD hasn't already cornered the market on IA32 processors is Intel's consumer brand recognition. Most of the major system vendors are wary of building AMD based machines simply because the clueless sales staffs at local electronics stores (Best Buy, etc.), as well the buying public at large, have been conditioned to look for that Intel Inside (TM) sticker.

Re:Confused about AMD strategy...

[Sycraft-fu]

AMD's problem in the corprate environment is that up until now they have always had problems of some kind or another. In the beginning it was mainly speed. Remember back in the 486 days even the top of the line sucked. Even if you had a 486 DX2 66 it still took forever for Windows to load up and that was the ebst there was. AMD had some trouble marketing their less powerful solution, though obviously enough people bought them.

So then we have the Athlon which by and large seems to beat out Intel per clock. The problem is that the Athlons have, till now, had pretty crappy motherboards. When they first came out thre was the AMD 750 which had positively abysmal memory performance and problem with the AGP bus such that it basically only worked at 1x. Wonderful. So here comes VIA to the rescue with the KA133 chipset. Except that STILL had problems. I bought one and could not get it to work with my GeForce for love or money. So the KT133 and so on come out. All of which still seem to have issues.

Now finally with the 760 chipset it seems that AMD has a good, solid platform to run it's chips on. Now it's just going to take some time for trust to build in bussinesses. Until the 760, I wou;dn't recommend an Athlon to anyone, including the people I work for. It is just going to take some time for AMD to start winning IT people over. It's one thing to use an Athlon in your home system where, if it goes down you're inconvienced but that's all. IT's quite another to use one in a server that gets you screamed at by 400 people every time it has a problem.

Re:Confused about AMD strategy...

[puelly]

By suggesting that AMD should concentrate to one market you are limiting the capabilities and potential of a great comany and processor. Intel had their reign, AMD should be allowed to enjoy theirs. STOP CRYING THEM DOWN!!

Too bad . . .

[acceleriter]

. . . AMD lost so much street cred using that PR-rating like scheme. If they wanted to deemphasize clock speed as a measure of performance, picking "model numbers" that look a lot like clock speeds in MHz wasn't the way to honestly go about it.

Re:Too bad . . .

[kylant]

Well, Intel's marketing campaign claims, that more Mhz=more speed=faster applications. That's not true either. Have a look at Tom's Hardware Guide where AMD's 1500+ and faster are blowing Intels P4 2Ghz out of the water.

If this is the only way to convince potential customers, that Mhz isn't everything (and you simply cannot "explain" it to them because they won't understand), AMD's pseudo Mhz numbers seem okay to me.

Re:Too bad . . .

[austad]

Why?? You and I know the real speeds of the processor. The naming scheme doesn't change the fact that it's a damn good product.

Joe Blow out shopping with his family at the local Best Buy doesn't know anything about it though. When he sees 1900+, he thinks 1900Mhz. And if this will help AMD sell more processors than they did before, I'm all for it. Do you really want AMD to keep the same amount of market share they have now? Or do you want them to make more money and continue bringing you sweet processors?

Re:Too bad . . .

[elflord]

But did they really lose credibility ? I don't think anyone's accuing them of dishonesty, or of overstating the numbers. If anything, they've been taken to task for understating them (since the 1800+ beats the P42G on most benchmarks)

Re:Too bad . . .

[acceleriter]

I think that convincing potential customers by essentially lying to them is the wrong way to go about it. If they wanted to call them "Athlon E series," "Athlon S class," or whatever, then that would be drawing attention away from clock speeds, as opposed to using "model numbers" that are obviously intended to ape clock speeds.

Re:Too bad . . .

[acceleriter]

You and I know, but the public is being tricked. I wish AMD the best, and own several of their chips (not XP's). But imitating MHz ratings is simply dishonest, and won't help in the end. While I realize Cyrix had other issues (e.g. floating point performance) with their chips, the PR ratings didn't exactly lead them to market dominance.

Re:Too bad . . .

[acceleriter]

I realize I'm only one, but I'm accusing them of dishonesty--they're taking advantage of what they must hope is ignorance on the part of a large portion of their customer base that will never see their FAQ in which they admit that the "model numbers" aren't really clock speeds.

Re:Too bad . . .

[reflective recursion]

public being tricked? If the CPU runs equivalent to "that other processor" then where is the harm? Intel is the one to blame for deceit. Intel makes an inferior product and makes sure the public "understands" that Mhz directly equates to speed.

Mhz is a PR stunt in itself. Who cares if AMD imitates one PR number by their own PR number? The would be lying to the public equally if they used true Mhz but had a superior product. The truth is, people buying processors (other than overclocking weenies) do not care about Mhz. Most simply use it as a gauge for how fast the CPU is. Are they going to feel cheated if they purchase an AMD 1900+ processor that runs only 1.6Ghz, but is _truely_ faster than Intel's 1.9Ghz? No, I think they will feel they have bought a superior product, which they have. If they truely give a damn about some stupid Mhz number then they go to Toms Hardware or similar and find the details.

Re:Too bad . . .

[acceleriter]

But if it doesn't mean anything, they why use it?

The would be lying to the public equally if they used true MHz but had a superior product.

I respectfully disagree. MHz is MHz, regardless of whether or not it's a true measure of performance. It can be verified quantitatively with a counter. Increasing clock speed without increasing performance, and marketing the faster clock speed probably isn't the best marketing strategy, but it isn't a lie, either--Intel says 1.5GHz, the customer gets 1.5GHz. I would be lying if I created a 1333MHz processor and called it a FooBar 1500, when my customers are accustomed to the number representing the clock speed. And, as a customer, I can see that they're not technically lying, but they're trying to pull the wool over my eyes with the fine print.

Re:Too bad . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, sir, I give a fuck what you say, sir!

(P.S. Nobody gives a shit about your lameass complaints. Maybe if AMD had gone and called it "the Super Duper Athlon 3000+++" you'd have reason to be upset, but they aren't doing that are they? So what if they're taking advantage of the ignorance of the customer base? What company DOESN'T?)

Re:Too bad . . .

[Lemm]

That wouldn't work. Intel has seen to it that Joe Blow pays attention to the *clock speed* of the CPU.

It wouldn't matter if AMD suddenly started using titles such as "S Class" or "Advance Xtreme" or "Super Gig Fighter II Turbo", the reaction would be the same. Joe Blow would look at them, say "whaaa?" and wonder where the clock speed was, then give up and turn to Intel with its *safe*, *friendly*, *easy to understand* clock speed brandings. Even though they were the inferior product.

Bottom line: this isn;t a sellout tactic, it's a *survival* tactic. The IT industry isn't exactly the most comfortable business to be in right now, and they have to start using a little spin if necessary.

If it causes the man in the street to pick the superior product, more power to them.

Re:Too bad . . .

[acceleriter]

Obviously, I have enough power over you that you felt you had to reply. I'm flattered to have an AC take such an interest in my valid opinion, and to so eloquently phrase her counterargument.

Re:Too bad . . .

[MentlFlos]

How much horsepower did the old Chrysler 300 have?
How much does it have now?

I personally do not have a problem with the PR rating _AS LONG AS_ the numbers are as close to truthful as can be. Now when Cyrix made those damn awful p rating chips and overrated them... that was just wrong.

bah, whatever

Re:Too bad . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

You are gay.
In the future, please refrain from being so gay.

Re:Too bad . . .

[CTho9305]

Don't you think they'd run out of "classes" pretty soon? And who knows which are better? alphabetical order? what happens when you have the 10*100 ghz, and 133*7.5 ghz? you might not be able to fit some in.

Re:Too bad . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate competition, dontcha. Don't you worry, my throat will never be as long and compliant as yours--I'll save all the cock for tickling your uvula.

~~~

Re:Too bad . . .

[acceleriter]

I'm fairly certain a 1.337 (lose the .5) GHz processor would be in high demand simply due to the leet factor.

Re:Too bad . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but at least Intel is telling the truth about their processors. Me and a couple friends have just sworn off of using AMD and have asked friends/relatives to stick with Intel. The reason being that me and a couple friends act as tech support for other friends and relatives and we don't want the hassle of dealing with questions relating to AMD's misleading PR.

Re:Too bad . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but isn't that kind of selling tactic illegal?
I know it is in Canada and the US, any /.ers outside of North America know of similar legalities concerning the AMD naming process?

Re:Too bad . . .

[Iberian]

First off you grasp of the english language is lacking. Second the whole concept of your post just sounds stupid. I will help you understand. You: Hi friends, you guys shouldn't buy AMD processors. Friends: Why?? You: Because I think you are too stupid to understand that even though they run at slower clock speeds they still are better than Intel's.

Re:Too bad . . .

[elflord]

I realize I'm only one, but I'm accusing them of dishonesty--they're taking advantage of what they must hope is ignorance on the part of a large portion of their customer base that will never see their FAQ [amd.com] in which they admit that the "model numbers" aren't really clock speeds.

I don't think they're taking advantage of the ignorance of the market at all. The market expects an "AMD 1900" CPU to perform like an "Intel 1900" CPU. And it does. The "ignorant customers" in question use the number as a measure of performance. If anything, they're doing the "ignorant customers" a favor, by giving them a number that's a reasonably accurate measure of performance-- which is, after all, what the customers are looking for when they look at clock speeds.

Re:Too bad . . .

[pkesel]

Actually, I think they're trying to overcome the ignorance of the customer base who have made Mhz the incorrect measurement of a CPU's performance. They're not trying to give them false information. They're trying to keep the customer from making invalid conclusions based on the information they've given. Big difference.

Re:Too bad . . .

[TheShadow]

Bullshit. They could have just thrown away their superior design and created a shitty CPU like the P4 and made it run at 2+Ghz so that they could compete in the moron space that Intel has a hold on.

Instead, they decided to change the model number and explain to people (an prove it with benchmarks) that their CPUs have model numbers that match the performance of an Intel CPU running at that clock speed.

If that helps AMD market their product and pull in more money that could be used in their R&D department to create an even better product next time. Well, then that would be great. At the end of the day, AMD is a company like Intel, that has to make money. Luckly, the AMD people want to do this by putting out a quality product. Intel is content with winning the marketing war.

Re:Too bad . . .

[NutscrapeSucks]

Intel has seen to it that Joe Blow pays attention to the *clock speed* of the CPU

Remember a couple years back when AMD hit 1 Ghz and was marketing clockspeed like a sonnavabitch? Nobody was trying to educate consumers back then.

Don't put this all on Intel -- AMD caught them at a transition point and stuck Mhz in their eye. It's only natural that the empire will strike back.

Anyway, I find all of the discussion about how Joe Blow needs to be protected (aka fooled) quite insulting. I don't think he's buying either Intel or AMD because his AOL runs too slow, and any modern computer with decent video will be fine for casual home gaming and so on. The fact that AMD or Intel is 10-20% faster at any point in time is ultimately irrelevant.

In fact, the #1 consumer complaint is probably stability, non speed, and Intel still has the lead in that department.

Re:Too bad . . .

[elflord]

Yes but at least Intel is telling the truth about their processors.

So are AMD. The truth is that the AMD XP 1900 performs at least as well as the intel P4 1900

As for the issue about explaining AMDs PR, well when it comes to comparing the XP to the Pentium,
the PR is no more or less arbitrary than the CPU clock speed. Either way, you'd still need to explain which intel chip is comparable to the "XP 1533" . Sounds to me like you consider your friends too stupid to make intelligent buying decisions, and that they should become intel shills instead.

Re:Too bad . . .

[elflord]

But if it doesn't mean anything, they why use it?

The answer is obvious -- because it correlates with performance, in fact within the one make of CPU, it's a pretty reliable gauge of CPU performance.

Using clock speeds to compare different types of CPUs however is just plain dumb.

MHz is MHz, regardless of whether or not it's a true measure of performance. It can be verified quantitatively with a counter.

First, depending on how the PR is defined, it's possible that this can also be measured (one would hope so) And if MHZ not a "true measure of performance", is it not misleading to use it to describe the performance of a chip ?

And, as a customer, I can see that they're not technically lying, but they're trying to pull the wool over my eyes with the fine print.

Encouraging customers to use MHZ instead of independent performance ratings to measure performance of different types of CPUs is pulling the wool over the customers eyes. Using a performance rating, and moving away from MHZ is not (provided the PR is not loaded or misleading, of course).

Re:Too bad . . .

[Equinox]

Why would it be illegal in any manner? That's just what they decided to name the chip. They aren't saying it's a 1900 Mhz, they're saying the model number is 1900. I don't see how that's unethical, bad PR, whatever. They still tell you how many Mhz it is, it's just not called a 1600 Mhz. Just because people with no (or little) knowledge of computers will mistake it for a Mhz rating, doesn't mean they can't call it whatever the hell they want.

No...

[Greyfox]

We just like things that don't suck. AMD's processors suck far less than Intel's because they go much faster at the same clock speed as Intels do, and they cost a lot less. Transmeta's processors don't suck because they are implemented with some really cool technology with potential that we have barely begun to explore. Intel's rather passe unless you're talking about the Itanium in which case the alpha was at least as cool a 64 bit processor a decade ago.

Re:No...

[fault0]

It's the fault of the user/OEM if the heatsink is not properly put in. Even on Intel side, you still HAVE to use a heatsink (if you want to run at full speed). With a properly install heatsink, nothing will overheat on either side.

Besides, most athlon motherboards have had protection from this for a long time. For example, my motherboard (Abit KT133) automatically shuts down the computer if it detects that the fan on the heatsink is not working.

Also, Athlon XPs have builtin protection with this.

Re:No...

[Skuld-Chan]

I don't get this - I mean my motherboard - ASUS A7A has two options for overheating processors (its a 1200 MHz first generation thunderbird) throttle/shutdown. Last summer when it got really hot it did automatically shut-down under linux once.

This is just as stupid as the old "AMD is incompatible" crap people float around still.

Re:No...

[Reality Master 101]

Transmeta's processors don't suck because they are implemented with some really cool technology with potential that we have barely begun to explore.

Well, they do suck, but they also have cool technology. However, this magical "potential" has been totally explored. I would prepare yourself for Transmeta to always suck as a replacement for Intel or AMD. It's possible that they might find a niche market if they can get the price low enough.

Emulation of instructions will NEVER compete with dedicated hardware for instructions. Mark my words -- they will always suck when it comes to performance.

Re:No...

[NutscrapeSucks]

1) Heatsinks removing themselves has been widely reported by *users*, so there's obviously some design issue with the retainers, even if it's just harder than it looks.

2) The point of Tom's verus AMDZone's test is that only the newest mobos can handle a catastrophic heatsink failure. Older kits are only designed for dying fans. Intel has the thermal protection onboard the CPU, so you don't have to second guess your BIOS or which brand diode your motherboard has.

3) So, it's not stupid, but it's probably not as big of a problem as made out. There's lots of people on lots of boards (including this one) who are crowing "Build Your Own AMD computer for $600!", and amateur hobbiests + tweaky parts = some disasters.

4) There are incompatibilty issues with AMD systems. (Name a hardware vidcap board that's certified for VIA or SiS chipsets.) So that's not crap either.

Re:No...

[Tassach]

Mark my words -- they will always suck when it comes to performance.

Depends on what you define as "performance". Raw number-crunching speed, MIPS, FLOPS, etc. isn't the only CPU statistic that matters. Transmeta has done a pretty good job of meeting thier stated engineering goals. They didn't set out to make the fastest processor - they set out to make one with much lower power requirements.

Saying that a Transmeta processor "sucks" because it's slower than an Athalon is like saying a Honda Helix sucks because it's slower than a Corvette. You could just as easily say that the Corvette sucks because it takes 4x as much fuel to make the same trip. Or you could say they both suck compared to a 4WD Pickup because they can't haul a trailer, go offroad, or carry a lot of cargo.

I wouldn't expect Transmeta to displace AMD and/or Intel in the desktop market, but I do expect them to be able to compete and excel in the portable and embedded computer market.

Re:No...

[Reality Master 101]

Depends on what you define as "performance".

I was thinking in terms of "price/performance ratio", not just raw performance. But still, even when you factor in power consumption, it's advantages are not that much better than the latest Intel low-power chips.

When you also factor in that the processor is far from the biggest power consumer in a laptop, Transmeta is just not going to be a player there, either.

As for the embedded market, that's where I think Transmeta has a shot. It's possible that due to the simpler nature of their processor, they might be able to get the price low enough to be a contender. But again, that's where their only hope lies -- in niche markets. The technology is interesting and unique, but the advantages are just not there for them to be dominant in any particular market.

Re:No...

[Skuld-Chan]

Well my A7A is one of the earlier models - I think its like a year old now? It has a 686A and a Promise ATA-100 controller on it.

I don't think its just newer models - I think its just better built boards because my abit KT7 would do the same thing and it was like a year and a half old

Re:No...

[Anonymous Coward]

You could just as easily call AMD passe...I mean, seriously. They *clone processors*. Not the most new, exciting thing in the world.

And Transmeta is a company aimed at a temporary (while the x86 is still around and a terrible portable architecture) niche. They had some good ideas there, but (unfortunately) I don't think they're going to hit it big. If Transmeta's chips haven't already taken off, I doubt they will any time soon.

Don't get me wrong -- these two keep Intel in check and consumers happier...but Intel is no demon. They make solid processors and chipsets (sorry, AMD fans...but the number of people with AMD procs with hardware problems, sometimes from the chipset, far outnumbers the number of problems I've seen with Intel chipsets/procs)

Re:No...

[Wiener]

You could just as easily say that the Corvette sucks...compared to a 4WD Pickup because they can't haul a trailer...

Believe or not, I saw a Corvette with a trailer hitch just the other day.

Re:1900 1800

[Anonymous Coward]

Here. Here. Here.

apple

[Anonymous Coward]

even apple claims that the top of the line dual processer is faster than Intel

ugh

[Anaki SkyHawk]

i think it's time we stop buying stuff based on M/Ghz coz that doesn't really show the speed. the p4 pipeline is too long (but the FPU runs at 4ghz) to be comared to the amd. thus, p4 is much slower then amd's at the same clock.

Read more here

[JohnHegarty]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/22658.html

PR makes AMD look cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.

Having this stupid PR number on the processor almost makes me want to go back to Intel again. Not being forthcoming with the processor rating makes them look cheap (i.e. cheap as a whore, not in the positive sense of the word).

Re:PR makes AMD look cheap

[acceleriter]

It reminded me immediately of Cyrix. Cheap is a good word.

Re:PR makes AMD look cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you want a rectangle with maximal area? Then have I got a deal for you! This beauty over here has a width of 2000 centimeters. You can't go wrong with that!

Nevermind that other one over there - it's only 1600 centimeters wide, while it claims to be 1900. Clearly a marketing trick to obscure the real truth - everyone knows maximal area depends only on width.

I always thought they were known for that..

[xtal]

Hell, that's why I bought an athlon.. AMD chips have a reputation for being faster, on average, than Intel chips, especially for 3D gaming. Now, factor in the bang for the buck factor along with a little bit more screwing with to make work nicely, and the choice for me was a no brainer.. athlon..

other reviews

[nilstar]

There other reviews of this 1.6GHz processor at AnandTech and at AMD Zone and at VIA Hardware. Check them out.

Except...

[jwriney]

Just for heaven's sake, don't take the heatsink off.

*FOOMP!*

--riney

Right...

[__Fenix__]

Ok the overheating issu needs to be done by an idependant party, i dont mean THG... there intel puppets. And about ram bus 256mb or Rambus = 150$ 256 of DDR 50$ ??? do the math... hell that DDR i can get PC133 for 30$... so comeback when Intel dosnt blow chunks and Rambus is dead.

p.s. i have owned about every processor there is and only intels have ever failed. Never has an AMD products blown up.

Re:Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us don't care that much about the price of the memory.

Yeah, I have DDR and SDRAM based computers. Do I buy cheapest possible memory for them? No. It's going to be tested ECC memory all the way. Not some no-name memory that fails after a few months.

It's a well known fact that the performance of P4 is currently being held back by the CPU frequency and unlike Athlon, P4 will scale way up on the current configuration. Once they start hitting CPU speeds of 3-4 GHz and crank the memory bus up to 600+ MHz AMD will be left behind forever.

Fantastic!

[Anonymous Coward]

Something to make the 1.4, sorry, 1600+ Athlons cheaper!

Y.A.A.A or Y.A.L.A

[GISboy]

Ok, Yet Another Lame/Appropriate Analogy:

Considering the last time a topic such as this compared the Intel's best P4 to AMD's best Athlon.

The Car/Engine analogy was used to no end and many valid points were made, but noboday really put it into a conclusive and easy to understand "package" that the Average Joe User could understand.

Recall, if you will, the movie "The Fast and the Furious" as the analogy of Intel vs AMD saga.

Remember the scene at the end with the race between the souped up Honda and the Toranado?
Intel's P4 is akin to the Honda, as it has a lot of "high-RPM's" and "high-tech" under the hood (i.e. 2.X Ghz and Rambus et al).
The Athlon is like the Toranado(?) and American Muscle car that had the "High Torque" and "lower-tech" that relied on brute force (i.e. 'superior' FPU and Large cache and the blower is similar to DDR-SDRAM in a way).

The end result of the race at the end of the movie was that they (for the most part) tied.

The current Intel/AMD debate is very similar, in that you have all this high RPM/low torque (intel) vs old school High Torque/mid RPM's (AMD).

Re:Y.A.A.A or Y.A.L.A

[Sean5033]

Oh geez, thanks for giving the ending away, I haddnt seen that movie yet...

Re:Y.A.A.A or Y.A.L.A

[Howie]

Geez... since it appears to be a brainless Hollywood action movie(*), I suspect you can probably see the ending coming from at least 30 minutes away.

(*) I haven't seen it either, although it looks like fun, in that mindless way. Nothing wrong with brainless action, but don't expect to be stimulated mentally by it.

Re:Y.A.A.A or Y.A.L.A

[Anonymous Coward]

Bleh, if you are going to make a post about a movie, at least get the frigging thing correct. The race at the end was not between a 'Honda' and a 'Toranado' it was between a *Toyota* Supra and a Dodge *Charger*.

Re:Y.A.A.A or Y.A.L.A

[tshak]

The difference is that a Honda is incredible engineering. Sure, the S2000 is no Porche or TT, but it's a lot cheaper too! The other Honda models run GREAT even with peak tourque being so high in RPM's - they are huge innovators in the consumer car engine business. Flash to P4, and this is a horrible analogy. The P4 was made for marketing numbers. Honda wasn't saying, "Hey, maybe if we increase the peak RPM we can advertise that our cars can handle 8000 rpm's!" It was pure engineering on Honda's part, and pure BS on Intel's part.

Re:Y.A.A.A or Y.A.L.A

[Refrag]

It is marketing on Honda's part too. Increasing the RPM's on their engines allows them to claim higher ratios of power per liter (which they do), regardless whether or not that power is useable or not (it isn't).

Re:Y.A.A.A or Y.A.L.A

[Iberian]

Lets get one thing straight, the best car for the money is probably the R32 Nissan Skyline GT-R.(Of course you have to swap out the engine.) Refrag is right though other than at the track or on the highway when you are feeling lucky how many times are you going to be in you ideal powerband of 6000+ rpms.

Re:Y.A.A.A or Y.A.L.A

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously have never worked on a honda. They are dressed up pieces of shit. Tin cans. They are good and solid feeling where the average driver interacts with them. But underneath, they are filmsy as hell.

Re:Y.A.A.A or Y.A.L.A

[MisterPo]

Agreed that the R32 is the best Skyline, well I think it looks better than all the other revisions anyway. Though I actually prefer GT-S's for straight line drag speed.

Why swap out the engine?? No need, with the right mods you can get 1000BHP out of it quite easily (though at great cost). The engine and gearbox has been the *same* for R32/R33/R34 and so really it has been proven to be basically bombproof.

The whole argument in this thread has been the engine technology, if you are gonna name a car, then why are you chucking out the engine?? Its like me saying that a Daihatsu Mira is the best car if I put in Subaru Boxer engine into it? :)

Regards,

Po

Re:Y.A.A.A or Y.A.L.A

[sean23007]

recall, if you will, that at the end of that race between the honda and the toranado, which you say 'tied,' the toranado was hit by a train and was destroyed. are you trying to say that amd, as a company or a processor, will be 'hit by a train,' or in some other way become incapacitated? I think we all hope that doesn't happen.

Re:Y.A.A.A or Y.A.L.A

[twakar]

For the record...it's not a Toronado.. It was a '69 Plymouth Roadrunner..ala Bullitt, with Steve McQueen, quite possibly the best car chase scene ever filmed

Re:Y.A.A.A or Y.A.L.A

[Cirvam]

Actually I think the chase scene in the orginal "Gone in 60 Seconds" was one of the best ever filmed. Its pretty much the entire movie.

Look at this article

[john_czajka]

For those of you who wish to get the XP processor, make sure you have a compatible motherboard, or else..... check it out...

http://www.tomshardware.com/column/01q4/011029/i nd ex.html

Re:Look at this article

[hattig]

And when was the last time a heatsink fell off a motherboard? The whole video is a joke, built around a stupid situation.

VIA released their C3 cool processor video that showed a C3 lasting 24 hours playing Quake with no heatsink or fan on. That was 800MHz. A similar speed Celeron hung after 5 seconds.

Re:Look at this article

[timbck2]

I have a question though -- where can you buy a C3 processor? I have only seen them for sale at one or two websites. I've never seen any advertising of any type for one, nor have I seen any of the major motherboard manufacturers list it as a supported CPU (whether or not their boards do, in fact, support it).

Re:Look at this article

[thefogger]

Well, I don't know. I work at a PC Spezialist store in Germany, not the tech dept., though. We've been selling Athlon XPs from the day they were out. Before that, we've mostly been selling the TB 1000-1400 and some Durons. I've noticed that AthlonXPs are actually cooler than the TBs. You know, when you use the really cheap ones, the passive cooling part below the fan will get hot. Not with the XPs, with those it just gets a little wormer than room temperature.

About customers feeling tricked I can only say the following: Not our customers. There's generally two categories, Type A looks at the numbers and it makes perfect sense to him: 1200, 1300, 1400, 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800... You can't make it easier for him. Type B knows about the whole trick but generally also reads Tom's Hardware Guide/c't magazine/$YOUR_FAVORITE_SOURCE_OF_DECENT_INFORMATI ON. He cares about performance not numbers. I still have to meet Type C who a) knows about AMDs little trick, b) knows that their procs are faster nevertheless c) and still doesn't buy them.

Re:Look at this article

[Tiroth]

A better question is when is the last time a fan failed? Not everyone monitors their fan speeds/temperature, and it is pretty hard to know if a fan has died if you have other fans in the box whirring away.

You'll find that a 1 deg C/W heatsink-fan becomes a heck of a lot worse than that when the fan stops. If you are cooling 30 watts at 1dC/W you are probably looking at 50 deg C on a mild day. Without fan, you could easily be talking 110 deg C. I'd hope that in this situation my computer would halt as opposed to frying my new $300 processor.

The sink doesn't have to "fall off" to be in the failure range.

Re:Look at this article

[hattig]

In this case the processor heats up slowly, and this means the processor will shut itself off, or slow itself down.

Re:Look at this article

[Sj0]

In that situation, I'd assume that any other fans in the case would continue to pass air over the heat sync, meaning that the processor would slowly heat up. At some point, the processor would hit critical and lock up, prompting you to shut off the computer while yelling "f*cking piece of AMD sh*t!", all the while not knowing that that crash just saved your CPU :)

besides, regular maintenence of fans is fairly easy (blow the computer out with compressed air, then you can use motor oil to lube the fan, which will last forever afterwards -- if the fan is really dirty and dusty, run it under a tap(!!), then let it dry before putting the oil in (you *MUST* use oil after this technique or the fan will sieze)), so we're talking a kind of "if I don't change the oil in my car, and it overheats, It's the cars responsibility to shut down automatically!" arguement.

as for my maintainence advice above, there are always impatient goons who will just rinse the fan in water, then stick it back onto their heatsync without giving it time to dry or lubrication and turn on their (now wet) computers and bitch about how my advice broke their computers, so *don't do any of the above unless you know WTF you are doing*!

Re:Look at this article

[plover]

I've had the heat-sink-clamp-ear on the side of a socket break off. As far as I could tell, it had become brittle with age and/or heat (it was a 6 year old P90 that I was taking apart just for the heck of it.)

Yes, I was in the cabinet taking the heat sink off at that time. But it didn't take very much force to break that ear. I can imagine that much force might be generated by a tall, heavy fan receiving a sideways G shock, of the kind you might cause by transporting the cabinet improperly.

You have to figure that at some point in the future, these mobos will be expected to last more than three years before being replaced. Believe it or don't, but there are people out there who don't upgrade their systems annually.

John

So what boards does this work in?

[SCHecklerX]

Ok, so I don't keep up with hardware. At all. I just buy a new machine every few years if there's a game I just have to play :) This time around it was quake 3, and I ended up with a lovely abit KT7 and an Athlon 900 T-bird.

So...

Does the XP chip require a new m/b or will it work in what I have?

Flame away, I don't care, I have better things to do than monitor every change in the PC world.

Re:So what boards does this work in?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you be flamed? You don't know something, you ask. You'd be flamed had you talked out of your arse about XP mobo's. *grin*

The XP chips works in any motherboard based off of the VIA KT266/KT266A or SiS 735, as far as I know. I've heard scattered rumors of it working on some KT133 chipset boards, but not all. YMMV.

Re:So what boards does this work in?

[AA0]

basically you need to go to abits website and look for a new bios update. If there is one thats new, and says support for athlon xp then you can upgrade. Note that @ about 1.2Ghz the SD RAM on older systems becomes saturated and upgrading past 1.2Ghz is really pointless.

Getting a 1.2 will increase performance massively though, as your FSB will increase 33%

Re:So what boards does this work in?

[eddy]

The KT7 won't fly at all, or won't be stable. Sorry.

I've got a KT7A-RAID myself, and the Palominos aren't supported on card revisions <1.3. I was planning to get a palomino, but I have a v1.0 board. Bleeech.

Re:So what boards does this work in?

[coldmist]

Because of a hardware issue, all KT7* motherboards before rev 1.3 will not work with XP processors. Abit has released a new bios for v1.3 and newer motherboards that give it XP support. Since you probably don't have the KT7a model, and a fairly "old" processor, I'd assume yours is a pre-v1.3 model.

Check for the rev on the motherboard to be sure. Or, if you feel lucky (or careless like I did, since I didn't read their warning at the top of the page and got the 1.3 bios since it was the top one), try flashing your board with the 1.3 compatible bios and see if it works or not. It said it wasn't compatible with my board and simply dropped back to a dos prompt. No damage done though.

See Abit's bios page for details.

Re:So what boards does this work in?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean you cant spend three seconds to head over to amd and look at their recommended motherboards?

Get off your lazy ass and do it yourself, you slut.

Re:So what boards does this work in?

[Skuld-Chan]

Who cares - after you buy a new A7A-266 DDR board you'll still be priced under the P4-2Ghz... Even if you have to buy a whole load of DDR dimms priced at less then 45$ for 256 megs per module you'll still come under the P4.

Re:So what boards does this work in?

[Iberian]

I was looking there but aparently their site is hosed.

Re:So what boards does this work in?

[xjerky]

You touch on something that royally pisses me off. I too have been burned by having the right motherboard model, but the wrong revision. (My Abit BH-6 can only go up to 600 Mhz, but a newer revision can go up to 8-900 I believe). If there is going to be a major difference between revisions, then I think that they should have to change the model number (even to the xxx-II or something) or be guilty of false advertising.

Re:So what boards does this work in?

[IronChef]

I have a BH-6 rev 1.01 and I am overclocked to 850 at the moment. I think that required a BIOS flash though.

I didn't think that they actually had a 1.0 version on the market.

Nooooooo!

[erlando]

I just bought my AMD Athlon XP1800+ and now they release the XP1900+?! I could've had a 70 MHz faster processor if I'd only waited a few weeks! Why oh why didn't I wait? Think of all the time I would have saved if only my processor was that fast!

My world is in ruins..

Nothing to see here...

Re:Nooooooo!

[yatest5]

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, to think my first processor was a P60, and now people are crowing about what a small increase 70MHz is....

Re:Nooooooo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Of I were you I wouldn't sweat it. For me I'm going to bite because that 70MHz can make a difference in hours for me when encoding mpeg-2. So for me it's worth it. For you though don't cry you'll get by.

Re:1900 1800

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but with no warrantry.

Monopoly abuse

[Dave_bsr]

Look, I hate Microsoft. I really don't like intel. Not because of their monopoly status in their realms, but because they use that monopoly status to leverage against the average user.

Microsoft has proved again and again that they don't really want to serve or help the customer. Their products aren't designed to be good per se, they are designed to sell. WinME for example, was a load of crap...it's just a couple of add-ons that could have been patched on to win98. Not sold as a totally new OS. If someone wanted its 'features' that bad. Their .NET service, pay as you go...their felonious practices...does this sound like a friendly company to you, to be loved? They are paranoid of linux, they hate it, but we traditionally love linux here at slashdot. Don't get me started on bootloader issues. Vaporeware, sales over quality software, visual changes to hide the lack of real improvement...They are in court for their abuse of monopolies...this isn't a tough observation. Microsoft is big, and mean, and therefore has bully/hated status here. And for good reason.

Now, don't you remember 5 years ago...the good old Intel monopoly? No one else made good chips for PCs (Cyrix...ha...). Therefore, Intel charged millions. Chip prices were very high...twice what they are now. This competition from AMD has dropped prices for both sides to the floor. We love that. How can you not? Besides, Intel needed competition, and AMD has supplied that. Who doesn't love a company who is the underdog, taking on a high-priced monopoly, an underdog that has consistently has produced higher-performing chips at lower prices. This one isn't tough either. Is it?

Re:Monopoly abuse

[Bert64]

If not for competition in the PC Processor market, intel would be releasing new processors far slower, and charging much higher prices for them. Look what the lack of compatible competition has done to the RISC markets, RISC chips used to easily outperform any x86 offering from intel.

Re:Monopoly abuse

[archen]

"WinME for example, was a load of crap...it's just a couple of add-ons that could have been patched on to win98"

WinME is more than a couple of add-ons. I'm not sure what MS did, but suddenly a lot of legacy 9x drivers had huge problems. I've seen more than a few things which seem to be different for WinME and Win98 on the software level. But, yes it is a pile of crap - proof positive that monopolies can suck.

Anandtech

[XBL]

http://anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1554

He is awesome. Best site for reviews, IMHO.

amdmb website flaws

[Knightmare]

I just tried to load amdmb and I hate to question peoples design choices but I really have to ask why does it take about 100 sql queries to generate any page on the site. There were like 20 in the header section, 20 more in the navbar, 10 or so in the left nav, etc.... Mabey you guys should make a bit of that stuff static. Just a suggestion :)

Re:amdmb website flaws

[TomK32]

Static pages are normally hard to keep updated, but there's light at the end of the tunnel. Software like WML make webmaster's life easy :-)

Re:amdmb website flaws

[pkesel]

So you make a dynamic page and write a cacher into your app server. You check if the page is in the cache. If it is, check so see if it's updated. If not, throw the cached page. Otherwise rebuild and throw the new page, and then cache it.

Why buy a tool to do it when you can write it in an hour or two? And you don't need a webmaster to manage it.

Re:amdmb website flaws

[Knightmare]

If you do as the first response to my comment suggests it isn't that hard at all. You keep your dynamic engine, but you have it output static pages in the live tree of the site. Next time you update your database you regenerate the pages. I know for sure with linux if you use this method the performance gain is unreal, linux is REALLY good at keeping bits of the filesystem in memory. Tie that together with khttpd and you have one smoking webserver.

0.13u in Athlon XP

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a load of codswallop. The XP is a 0.18u CPU. Maybe some process improvements have allowed AMD to fiddle with some of the metrics and get some features down to finer sizes, but that is all.

Maybe Intel's 0.13u technology is so crap that they think that AMDs 0.18u technology really is 0.13u?

Re:0.13u in Athlon XP

[Anonymous Coward]

And how exactly do you know that?

Is it because you work in an AMD core design team or because AMD told you so?

Old Athlon Getting Slower?

[base2op]

I love watching my old Athlon get slower every day ...

Leave it up to a filthy corparation like AMD to send out signals to slow down their older processors when they release a new one. I'm stickin' with Intel.

xp?

[sewagemaster]

woohoo! looks like this athlon xp thing is most optimized running windows XP.... ugh...wait, or is it the other way around? :)

Uh, right...

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... right. See, the whole idea is to let you (the fool buying a computer at Best Buy) that the slower-clocked Athlon is comparable in performance to the higher-clocked Pentium 4 without having to explain the whole time = tclk * CPI * Ninst equation.

As to honesty... Check out the AMD web page. You can see exactly what benchmarks they used and what the results were (all correlated by a 3rd party) to arrive at those numbers. And then you'll see that they were _modest_ about them, because in all honesty an "1800+" is generally faster than a P4 2GHz.

I'm not sure what your problem with this is. Maybe too many bad memories of Cyrix PR-ratings (which were far less honest and much more boastful)?

Web site designers are stupid.

[Chris Burke]

It's most web people don't understand that generating a page once and serving it 10,000 times is more efficient than generating it 10,000 times and serving it once each time.

I know no web designers are going to read this, and I know 99.9% of them are too arrogant to listen if they did, but here it is anyway: If your web page doesn't HAVE to be dynamically generated, then DON'T make it dynamically generated!
This means you should have dynamic pages in TWO situations:
1) You web pages are customized for each visitor (slashdot home, my.yahoo.com, google.com)
2) It is different virtually every time it is viewed (slashdot comments, or a page of stock quotes)
*sigh* Oh well. Hopefully the IT shakeout will help get rid of all these hack web designers.

Pretty cool, but....

[steddyj]

I've always thought that it's pretty cool (and have been duely impressed) that AMD Procs pump out more power at the same clock speed as a comparable Intel chip, but it seems to me that AMD could still learn a lot from Intel on Thermal Overload Protection.

Yes, I'm sure most /.er's have read this article already, so mod me as redundant if you wish, but please hear me out first. The simple fact is that I will not invest in the money for a chip that might send my money literally up in smoke. I recently experienced multiple system halts on my home machine due to Hardware error, only to open my case and find the heatsink fell off the GPU of my TNT2. Luckily, no apparent damage, but I could see the (however slight) possibility of the same happening to my processor. Does AMD want to insure their chip from overload at the price of my system? No? Then I think for the time being I'll stick with the chip proven to have good protection, no matter what kind of performance boost I could get.

Re:Pretty cool, but....

[Anonymous Coward]

If your not a dick when you design your system, you dont have this problem. Heatsinks dont just fall off asshole. FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Re:Pretty cool, but....

[jejones]

What on earth did you do with your home computer to make the heat sink fall off your graphics card? (Or was it not attached properly to begin with?) I'm sorry, but it looks to me as though Tom's Hardware was pretty desperate to make any sort of anti-AMD point it could (BTW, it was running Intel ads on its site back when the 2 GHz P4 came out)--rather like Car and Driver running an exposé of what happens to your car if you take the fan and radiator off and then go drag racing. Duh...

Re:Pretty cool, but....

[Anonymous Coward]

You made that story up. TNT2s don't have GPUs.

I'm Encyclopedia Brown.

Re:Pretty cool, but....

[Jaben]

I have found that heat sinks fall off a lot. I work with lots of computers and about 1% of the heat sinks fall off graphics cards. Why? They just stick them on and then wait. At least CPU heat sinks have clips. I have had 1 CPU heat sink fall off and it killed the board and CPU. The graphics cards start acting funny, and you have a little window o fix them, then they bur also.

Re:Pretty cool, but....

[steddyj]

I'm not sure how it fell off, but it did. As the Troll Anon Coward above states, "Heatsinks don't just fall off [for no reason]." (Trust me, it makes sense when you add that last little bit in) Obviously there was a reason, but have you ever seen the sink on a TNT2? It cant weigh more than an ounce or two, so I have no clue how it fell off. Perhaps the adhesive was from a faulty batch, perhaps the card was manhandled is shipping, who knows? I don't really care, except that I'm trying to get a new heatsink from nVidia.
As for THG trying to make some anti-AMD point, I doubt it, but I don't put it past anyone to try to sabotage those they don't like for whatever reason.

Your point is good about Car and Driver, but consider this... you just paid however much for a new BMW.... and the engine seizes the next day because you were cruising around enjoying it, and the water pump died. It happens, I used to work in auto repair, I've seen it happen. Now, go back to your dealer, he tells you that it's your problem, your warranty will not cover it, you the pump was damaged in shipping and you should have tested it before you drove anywhere. How would you feel? Would you rather go buy a Chevy that will offer a little less performance, but will cover things like that?

Now I know that this scenario is a bit extreme, of course you would be covered under warranty, but I'm just making a point using your example.

BTW, as a side note: Cars are a lot like computers. It doesn't matter if they are American, German, or whatever, everything is still made in Taiwan.

Re:Pretty cool, but....

[steddyj]

Excuse me, but do you know what a GPU is? EVERY video card has one. Some just don't output enough heat to need a heatsink... but then again, why am I wasting my time replying to an anonymous coward?

USP

[squaretorus]

Indeed. AMD need a clear message to send out to people.

"60% the cost, 90% the performance"

Pretty much as fast, a heapload cheaper. They are not going to be 'the fastest' long term in the foreseeable, but they ARE pretty much up there now.

If I bought a PIII 600 or 700 back a while it makes NO difference now, they are both old machines way behind the curve. 20%, even 30% better performance is only desirable at the time. Pretty soon the machines are seen as roughly equivalent as they both start to offer less than half the performance of new machines.

This is a more complex message than 'FASTEST' but a whole lot more useful

Re:USP

[VAXman]

Speed doesn't matter. The generic brand of macaroni and cheese could claim "60% the cost, 90% the cheese" (actually in the case of macaroni, I think it's closer to 25% cost, 100% the cheese), but most people will still choose to pay the premium for Kraft. Intel's the same way. It's brand is so much stronger than AMD's that almost everybody chooses to pay a premium for it.

Re:USP

[juggleme]

> "60% the cost, 90% the performance"

That's not too far off. Change it to "60% the cost, 120% the performance" and it'd be a bit more accurate...

Re:USP

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are underestimating the market. The corporate purchasers aren't mindlessly following brandnames. They also are not buying either Speed or Cost. They want stability and supportability, and Intel and their OEM channels have AMD beat there.

(20% Faster, 20% Cheaper, 20% More Problems, doesn't sound all that great, especially if your userbase is using Excel and VB apps and things designed for 200Mhz CPUs. Maybe that's not true anymore, but AMD has to earn their reputation.)

Re:USP

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeh,
I don't follow how you get 90% the performance from a proc that has consistently out-performed Intel offerings since its inception (with that minor blurb when they wouldn't release the Palomino notwithstanding). AMD is simply the better performer and Intel is playing catchup (the P4 was released early, after all. It's half-cooked). 120% is much more accurate. 50% price is probably more accurate, too.

A *couple* MHz or less than 5%

[Hammer]

Yeah that's right an astounding leap of 4.9% is a questionable bump.
Back in the PII/200 days that would have been like releasing PII/210. Yeay!

Re:A *couple* MHz or less than 5%

[operagost]

Well, no it's more like from the PII-233 to the PII-266. No PII-200 ever existed, BTW.

Re:A *couple* MHz or less than 5%

[Jeremy Erwin]

I believe Intel released the PII 233 and PII 266 more or less simultaneously. (A 4.9% upgrade from the 233 is sightly less then 245 MHz, by the way.) Intel's speed bumps were 33 Mhz at that time, and increased to ~50 Mhz after the move to the 100 MHz FSB. (Coincidence? I think not...)

As for the Pentium II-200, it might have been harder to distinguish it from a PentiumMMX-200. (from a marketing perspective)

Re:A *couple* MHz or less than 5%

[Hammer]

OK so PII/200 didn't exist so then a whopping bump from P/166 to P/175 or so (yes the increase must be a half-multiplier of FSB. This is not to relate to real versions but rather to hammer down the fact that 70 MHz increase is no big number when the processor already runs the other side of 1.5 GHz.
Tell me when 1.8 or 2 GHz is here and I may feign interest.

Re:A *couple* MHz or less than 5%

[Anonymous Coward]

At one time Intel was selling the Pentium 133 for 2x the price of the 120 model (for a little over 10% improvement - gack!).

When the PII-233 was released, Intel was still selling PPro 200s for the server market. Yes there was tons of confusion between the Pros and the (much slower) Pentium MMX models.

Well, it should be...

[autopr0n]

AMD's 'product numbers' are based on the next revision of the p4, so it isn't surprising that a AMD '1900' would be faster then a current 2ghz p4.

Linus

[autopr0n]

Linus works for transmeta. Also, they were very secretive before their first product came to market, so much of the excitement is 'residual' from the great expectation that their silence fueled.

Re:1900 1800

[Rovaani]

Tech Report has some extensive testing of 1900+ on a KT266A platform versus P4 2GHz.

Just in time....

[SomeOtherGuy]

to help you heat your house for the winter...Those AMD guys are ok with me.

G5 Spec at 2.5GHz

[BoarderPhreak]

In this Register article, details about the next G5 are said to be 2.5GHz... Not too shabby!

If the 867MHz G4 already whoops a 1.7MHz Pentium, than this processor should be pretty exciting indeed.

Re:G5 Spec at 2.5GHz

[Anonymous Coward]

I think everything new could kill anything running 1.7 MHz.

Re:G5 Spec at 2.5GHz

[Anonymous Coward]

Except like everything else Apple uses in their computers, by the time you will actually be able to buy it, there will be 5Ghz intel/amd chips available.

Its called Marketing (tm)

[zeno_2]

nt

NOT A HONDA!

[VladTheBad]

It was a Toyota Supra Twin Turbo...... any import junkie knows that......

But, yes, you do have it right... High RPM vs more Torque. The only problem here is that the Supra has crazy torque too.... 3L engine.... turbocharged... if we assume they turbo'd it with some decent boost, say, 14 pounds of boost.. then that 3L engine has 6L of air in it... meaning you can use more fuel... and so on.... THAT creates the torque.

A better P4 type car/engine would be the honda S2000 roadster.... 9000 RPM redline, 2 liter displacement, stock it puts out 240 horse....
now, if we say the AXP is a supercharged 3.8L v6 from a new grand prix SSE....... (puts out about 230 hp... with the supercharger....)

the V6 is a torquey engine, the S2000's F20 is a very revy engine..... Overall, I'd give the win to the S2000 easily, because of its wider powerband you could gear for, as well as the extra 10 hp. Its also a higher technology engine... On the other hand, the grand prix SSE just plain has more displacement.. with the supercharger, even more air.....

Now, if we look at F1 engines..... 16000 RPM.... sometimes 18000.... VERY VERY revy..... although they're meant to stay above 4k RPM just about all the time (else they cool, pistons get smaller, and they start not running well.... this happens even durring a long fuel stop sometimes)

image....

[Anonymous Coward]

a beow....

An. Cow.

the register....Re:Tom's Hardware Has It Also!

[leuk_he]

AMD Zone gives this summary at the end of its review: "No architectural or marketing changes with this release ... expect the previous CPUs to decline in price ... expect a bit higher performance and power consumption."

Anandtech agrees, saying the chip will not offer any significant extra performance over the 1800+, so early adopters need not sweat too much about being left behind. The site believes that AMD is currently the performance leader on desktop processors.

VIAHardware.com reckons users could be just as well off picking up the 1800+ at 1.53GHz and simply overclocking it to 1.6GHz. Users already owning a high-speed XP chip are better off waiting for the next upgrade on the platform to significantly increase performance.

Tech Report has some extensive benchmarking, putting the 1900+ slightly ahead of Intel's P4 2.0GHz in most of them, while SimHQ.com gets very excited about the new chip.

Amdmb.com also has a piece showing the expected five to six per cent performance increase.

but which for the fastest dual?

[hawk]

Now I need to call my local shop and have them change the quote they're working on :)

I thought we were going dual 1800 XP's, since the MP only went to 1.2. But this morning, checking the price of this chip, I discover 1800MP's all over the world, for a small price increase.

So what do I do??? Dual 1900 XP's? Dual 1800 MP?

This system is for smashing numbers and making sure that my code doesn't bring down the system before running it on the heavy iron (hey, bring down the beowolf or the SP2 too often and they get mad :).

or is a 1900 MP likely to be hot on the tail of all this?

hawk, who has to have the money spent by year end

Re:but which for the fastest dual?

[Anonymous Coward]

You cant run most regular XP's in dual mode. AMD locked them this time. You HAVE to get the 1800+ MP.

benchmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that most of the graphics tests done showed that the real issue is with the graphics cards and that there was no 'real' difference between the chips.

Re:benchmarks

[Bert64]

Indeed, game/3d benchmarks should be done using a Software rendering engine when testing cpu`s.

for perspective

[hawk]

> We're not talking a couple of MHz, we're talking 130MHz

To put this in perspective, when I got hear a year and a half ago, that difference is the entire speed of the machine sitting on my desk when I got here a year and a half ago, a 133 pentathingy with 160M. (yes, I know speed isn't linear, but when you consider the memory subsytem is four times as fast, uses less cycles as well, and is 2 or 4 times as wide, as well as cache & fpu . . .)

hawk, now using a 1G laptop and waiting for his dual athlon workstation

F1 engines don't count

[Iberian]

F1 engines are limited in their displacement to begin with so that is why they rev so high. They are trying to do the most with what they have. Of course fuel is a concern also.

Wasting our time

[ioman1]

The MHz race is getting a little rediculous at this point if you ask me. Processors are coming out faster than we can keep up with. Compitetion used to be good for the consumer, now it is abusing the consumer. People will want to stop upgrading at all for fear of missing a newer processor.

Re:Wasting our time

[Anonymous Coward]

rIdiculous.

Why can't Americans spell this simple word?!!!!

Re:Wasting our time

[recursiv]

If they fear missing a new processor, stopping upgrading is certainly not the thing to do.

Re:Wasting our time

[ioman1]

Well, money wise, it is not smart to keep upgrading your processor each time a new one comes out. Consumers will tire of this very quickly.

Kernel compile times

[Mr. Sketch]

did it really take only two minutes to compile the latest linux kernel? that's just insane, not that I compile kernels all that often, but still two minutes for a kernel compile is quite impressive. I forget how long it takes on my 1Ghz, probably 10 or 20 minutes and I thought that was fast.

Re:Kernel compile times

[Anonymous Coward]

and comparing that to the 8+ hours it takes on my 486, just think of the speed boost. =)

Be Confused No More®

[ackthpt]

AMD used to be getting by on the "just as good as Intel but costs less" line of marketing.

In the last year AMD has been going on the "As fast if not faster and still costs less than Intel" marketing.

The marketing tack AMD appears to be taking now is "we're our own company with our own product and it's great" (without so much as the incidental mention of that other processor company)

This is the direction AMD has to go, to get out of Intel's shadow. The upcoming Hammer line of processors is a bold move in that direction -- with the advantage of having built in backwards hardware compatibility -- which departs clearly from the 64 bit architecture Intel has chosen. With ~20% of the market, though probably mostly in Europe and Asia, AMD should be making testing these waters.

All that aside, you as a wise consumer, should choose the CPU that's "right" for you. By "right" I mean speed, efficiency at your primary task, with reliability and support to meet your standards. A difficult decision, really, considering most buyers get suckered by a minimum wage salesman on a commission and make important decisions truly uninformed. Lucky for most of them that you really will not miss the mark by too much, whatever you buy, though customer support is usually where people meet their grief, so consider that a primary factor over speed, etc., unless you're a bold, devil may care, geek who provides your own customer support and get the rest off the net.

Intel has a fab on ethnically cleansed land

[DABANSHEE]

While Intel has a fab on the ethnically cleansed land of Al Faluja I will never buy a Intel CPU or knowingly buy a product with any Intel parts in it.

Some may go on about the fact that AMD's fab in Texas is built on Indian or Mexican land, but those Indians or Mexicans weren't driven off while the Geneva Convention, Hague Convention, the IDHR or the UN exited.

The fact is that until Israel permits the return of Palestinian refugees (to both Rump Israel & the Occupied Territories) & returns all illegaly expropiated lands its in contravention of the Geneva Convention (A49P6), the Hague Convention (1906C), the IDHR & dozens of UN resolutions.

Now as Intel did not lease or purchase the land its Israeli fab is on, from the people with the internationally recognised legal title deeds to that land (Palestinian refugees mostly living in Egypt) its an illegal fab on ethnically cleansed land. So I'm not ever going with Intel.

BTW a good percentage, if not most P4s are made in that Israeli fab.

Moores law broken?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me that performance is doubling at a rate that is quite a bit faster then every 18 months. Is there a good argument out there somewhere on whether Moores law still holds true - I'm feeling that it's not.

Re:Moores law broken?

[composer777]

Yes, Gordon Moore worked at Intel and his law only applied under the assumption that Intel remained a monopoly. Once AMD started providing competition, Jerry Sander's Law took over, which states that processor speed will double every 12 months. Since Intel is still obeying Moore's Law, it is clear that they are doomed.

Re:Moores law broken?

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall reading on Moores law in an architecture book as if it were a fundamental absolute of any engineering feat - balanced between increasing manpower, building on technology, and an ever increasing fundamental knowledge of our universe and the materials that make it up - and limited by the mythical man month, complexity, and our ever increasing willingness to really muck up a good thing (see: the environment). I do not recall ever reading anything about there being a competitive business practice associated with it.

So, if there is a competitive attribute to it, I have more fodder against the thing I recieved that some have called an education. If not, then the original question appears to be answered: Moores law is incorrect.

--

On a different train, who is Jerry Sander??

Re:Moores law broken?

[zephc]

its been faster than every 18 months for a while... Moore's law is better expressed/replaced by The Law of Accelerating Returns

Re:Moores law broken?

[composer777]

I agree, you should ask for your money back right away.

Proof that AMD's marketing was a good idea

[dgb2n]

When AMD gets headlines by introducing a new processor chip that runs only 70 Mhz faster than the previous chip, you can bet their marketing has been/will be successful.

AMD has an advantage. Unlike the old Cyrix PR ratings, these chips really do outperform their intended Intel counterparts. Maybe its just me but I don't think this would be news unless the 1800+ 1900+ etc. rating system was working its way into the minds of the consumer

Unforgivably bad review

[Dixie_Flatline]

That's it. I've had all I can takes, and I can takes no more. This is a message to all of you that write reviews and occasionally do up graphs.

GRAPHS THAT DON'T HAVE A BASELINE OF ZERO ARE MISLEADING.

In the VERY FIRST GRAPH, the numbers show a 6fps difference, but the bars seem to indicate a 100% performance increase of the 1900+ over the 1800+.

If you don't start at zero, your proportionality is lost. You can no longer eyeball the graph and get a rough feeling of what the difference between the test subjects is. You have to read the numbers to be sure, and that defeats the whole purpose of the graph!

You should be able to roughly analyze performance (or whatever) WITH NO NUMBERS ON THE GRAPH. This is why pie charts are useful. A small slice is small. You don't have to look at the number to see that it's a small piece of the pie.

In conclusion: do the damn graphs up right, or don't bother with them. You aren't conveying any actual information if you do it wrong.

Re:Unforgivably bad review

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut the duck up, fick-head. You obviously know nothing about scientific analysis. Graphs do *not* have to start at 0.

Re:Unforgivably bad review

[Sloppy]

You aren't conveying any actual information if you do it wrong.

The purpose isn't to convey "actual information", it's to make it look really fast.

Your diagnosis is wrong. The problem isn't that they're clueless about graphs. The problem is that they're deliberately attempting to deceive.

Stability Ignored

[Anonymous Coward]

No one ever wants to flat out say that the motherboards for AMD chips are a lot less well supported than the motherboards for Intel chips because they're so busy cheering for the underdog.

But if you dig deep into, say, Tom's Hardware Guide: Another factor is the stability and product quality of a system: while all Athlon processors suffered from occasional instability in our tests, the Pentium 4 platform ran without a glitch. (http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q4/011031/xpvs p4-15.html)

Now, for me and I'm guessing a lot of people, system stability is far more important than a few percent performance increase. Since these machines are so closely matched and overpowered anyway, I'd like to see more emphasis on other factors like stability. More than a single sentence buried in one review, anyway. If these things are crashing during the tests, I want to know about it with a big red X on the graph...

Or just the chance to stop having to download freakin' 4-in-1 drivers for my KT7A...

very

[Anonymous Coward]

concise

Groovy! More idle time!

[billcopc]

I guess this means my GPF screens will pop up that much faster, so I will lose less work when my wordprocessor/spreadsheet/morpheus pr0n sessios gets whacked. When they finally reach 10ghz, I wonder if the CPU will tell me "Don't even bother firing up Word, I'm going to crash in 7 seconds".

Seriously, why pump out faster cpu's when they provide nil benefit ? Yes, I do have an Athlon 1000 running anywhere between 1200 and 1466, depending on my mood. I have no idea what to do with it, I actually bought it just to out-clock my buddies (until one smartass bought a water-cooling system - that's cheating). My Geforce2 is still maxxed out, even my previous Celeron was able to push it to the limit. My hard drives are still slow, and I have better things to do than buy more drives to widen my raid-0 stripe. It's already quite clear that the CPU is no longer the most important part of the computer, yet they still bust their asses trying to produce bigger numbers just to bleed us dry of our hard-earned money. We need better memory, better hard drives, better cd-roms, better video cards, better everything, but not CPUs.

I think that AMD and Intel should help out Micron, NVidia, Maxtor, etc. We've reached a point where faster processors just don't yield much more performance, but if they would be wise enough to pitch in and actively work on the other functional parts of a PC, the entire system would become more efficient, not just some over-hyped core that overheats 2 zillion times per second while waiting for an i/o transaction.

anyone wanna give me free money?

[ironfroggy]

it just has to be like this, doesn't it? I'm finally able to build a new computer and new processors keep coming out even better. As soon as I have enough money for the Athlon 1.4Ghz, the XP line comes out and now it gets even better!

Ugh...

It's a toyota, guys

[tsphere]

C'mon, that's a toyota supra with a bigass 6-cylinder turbo engine in it, not a little 4-cylinder rice-burning "hon-duh."

and i think it was an impala SS if i'm not mistaken.

anyway, if you watched it, the SS blew a cylinder and that's why it didn't eat the toyota for lunch. in drag racing and processors there's no place for finesse.

the athlon is a brute of a chip, a brute that can be cranked to higher speeds than anyone imagined, and that's why it beats the "high-revving" (rice-burning?) P4s. good thing it doesn't have to run in the twisties like a road racer...

Eh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just this past week I built a system using an Asus A7V266 mobo, 256 MB RAM, and Athlon XP 1700+ (it was the last XP chip the store had that week :(

Having assembled it and installed both Windows 98 and Red Hat 7.2, some observations:

- it's fast
- it's damn fast
- Windows 98 takes about 2 min to boot, probably because it seems to be loading some weird DOS drivers for my SBLive card
- I'm planning on running a crapload of OSes inside of VMWare sessions on RH, so it probably won't be so fast in a couple of weeks ;)

Will I worry about the 1900+?? Not particularly. My last PC is a PII 233 Dell Dimension from 1997. The speed increase I've already seen is astonomical.

So, if you're going to build/obtain a new system, get an Athlon XP (any speed). But if you've got a fairly recent processor, you probably won't see much benefit.

Just my $.02

Glenn

Yes it's fast but not stable

[vandan]

Perhaps AMD should spend less time dreaming up bullshit catch-phrases like quadruple-cranking data-blasting jesus-saving architecture and put some R&D into their chipsets so they don't lock up when I start X. It has been 14 months since this problem was acknowledged by them, and they are STILL 'hashing it out with Linux distributions', whatever that means...

Celeron for me :)

[Anonymous Coward]

i got my celeron 2 633 @ 950 and that still does all i'll ever want including games ( voodoo 5 5500 looks after that ;) ) even the 240mhz 603e ppc in my amiga manages to keep up ( well it is triple cpu 020 , 040 , 603e :) )

As for stability , u'll never see my box crash , runs burning hot with out taking my house up in flames :P

Also i can chuck any hardware at it with no problems whereas my mate with a cheap'o duron can just about get his voodoo 3 working and then it crashes every 5 mins.

Thank AMD for bringing back the image of unuseable , foreva crashing monster pc's.

So don't get wasted

[Sloppy]

Processors are coming out faster than we can keep up with.

So stop keeping up with them!

Keeping up with processors isn't any different than memorizing any other sort of ephemeral trivia. Just start ignoring the press releases, and it'll be just like giving up TV: you won't miss it. Unless buying/speccing PCs is part of your job, you do not need to keep up-to-date with the latest trivia.

Then, when the day comes that you need a faster box and you think upgrading the hardware is the way to go, and you want to stay within x86: here's what to do:

Surf the net for a couple of hours, to get familiar with what is currently out. Then:

Buy a $200 to $250 processor. The dollars are everything. The clock speed, model number, etc. is trivia that you don't really need to know, except for purposes of motherboard compatability.

pentium fanboys, time to come out and play

[maxpublic]

Ooooh, yet another article on how the much-cheaper AMD processor kickds the silicon ass of the latest that Intel has to offer. Mark my words, the Pentium fanboys will be all over this with "but what if your heatsink falls off/fan fails/aliens kidnap your processor?"

Really, is that the best you folks can do? I mean, "what if your fan fails?". Well, even in the extreme event the CPU fan does fail (and this is highly unlikely, no matter what idiots jump forward to claim that it isn't), the brand-new 1.4 ghz AMD Athlon I purchased cost me a whopping $149! And it's now down to $129, which is less than the price of my motherboard.

So if lightning strikes and the fan actually does fail, and my processor slags itself, I can still buy three AMD Athlon 1.4 ghz processors for the price of one P4 1.7 ghz processor - which the AMD Athlon outperforms.

So tell me again: why should I give a rat's ass about the off-chance that a one-in-a-million will happen and I'll lose my processor? I can buy a couple of more and *still* save money on what I'd pay for a comparable Pentium.

You lose, fanboys.

Max

Athlon XP1900+ & Nforce chipset

[leighlsa]

i think once the combination of the nforce chipset shown here at http://www.amdworld.co.uk/msinforce.htm is used with the XP 1900+ or similar it will finally put those intel ratings in there right place..

Re:Y.A.A.A or Y.A.L.A (offtopic)

[nutbar]

Remember the scene at the end with the race between the souped up Honda and the Toranado?

No, but I remember one between a Toyota Supra and one.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Intel and 3D rendering

[Kuad]

As someone who's spent time working on 3D modeling, I can tell you that Intel has not been best at 3D modeling since the original Athlon appeared. Real rendering (as opposed to that in an FPS) can't be streamed into SSE very well and the x87 FPU on the Athlon is a frickin' BEAST. The only hiccough in that entire time was the period of a few months between the release of the Coppermine P3 and the Thunderbird Athlon.

Re:Intel and 3D rendering

[Tiroth]

Well, I'm looking at the Lightwave tests on Tom's and seeing a huge lead by the P4-2000 vs. Athlon 1900+. Lightwave is actually my renderer of choice, so a 30% difference is hard to ignore.

Absolute 0

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a good point, and that would be appropriate in some cases.

I'm not scientific, however I would think that you'd also need different scales/references points, depending on what you'd want to show (hopefully a constructive comparison).

For instance, graphs on heat dissipation in degrees kelvin starting at 0 won't show much at all.

Re:Y.A.A.A or Y.A.L.A more thoughts.

[GISboy]

Very interesting replies I must admit.

However, at the risk of showing my ignorance to the hotrod/street racer scene what I was looking for was; does my post/argument fall apart at any juncture?

I based my analogy on these premises:
Joe Consumer would watch this movie.
(after all, I did too, but as a screener, heh)

JC *most likely* would be a gearhead to some degree.
(Admittadly I was a 'late-bloomer' gearhead wise, so *my* understanding is technically simplistic)

The RPM or 'revs' analogy has been beaten to death (to put it mildly) but degenerates into too technical a debate for Joe Consumer to follow reguardless of it being cars/computers.
(seriously when you say pipelines, l1, l2, trace-cache, sdr/ddr/rd-ram...you get a look of ?WTF? or eyes glaze over or both).

You'd be surprised how many people actually "get-it" when put to them in this way.
Quite simply, most guys, at the very least, appreciate the history of the classic/muscle car, the power, the beauty or just pop a chubby because of what it *is/represents*.

It breaks it down to a simple and visual representation of: P4/Ghz/hi-revs ~= AMD/lower Ghz/med-rev+Hp.

I suppose "we" are looking for a *perfect, simple, clear* example.

When, maybe if, we find it. AMD needs to *use it and _Advertise_*, already!

Heck, *if* my example was good enuf to stand slashdot and legal scrutiny (as well) I'd say to AMD "take it, use it, get 50% market share, then talk to me, 'kay?"

{grin}

Cheers,

GISboy