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AMD Roadmap for Coming Year and Beyond
nexex writes: "With a new year comes new products, and AMD certainly has some new toys for us to drool over. The first of 2002 will see the release of "Thoroughbred," a version of the Athlon XP chip made on the more advanced 130-nanometer manufacturing process. The chip will cover 80 square millimeters in area, or 65 percent of the space of the "Northwood" Pentium 4 coming from Intel in early January. That chip measures 116 square millimeters, according to AMD estimates.
For more, including info on Clawhammer, Sledgehammer, and all the Intel bashing you can handle, see here." I hope they don't really mean that "these new chips will also consume less heat than current AMD notebooks chips."
Consume less heat? I believe they mean dissipate less heat.
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http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoo m/0,,51_104_608,00.html
That link includes a pretty roadmap graphic. It also shows the Barton design following the Thoroughbred release.
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Actually, AMD has been at least making an effort to look like they encourage the development of 64-bit Linux for their upcoming "Hammer" processors.
See www.linux64.org for more details.
If the decisions were made on a strict technical basis, what would keep Intel alive?
Lower cost bundling to the OEM's
Fewer customer returns
Faster turn around to OEM's with replacement parts
High power processors ready for laptops today
Mind you, I run 2 Athlon machines at home, and 1 at work. On all of these machines I have been extremely pleased with stability and performance of the AMD processors. I always build my own PC's, and I am not an OEM. I don't have the same kinds of concerns they do.
Mabye the free market rules are not applied to computers?
The free market works just peachy. Athlons are doing quite well with folks such as myself purchasing individual components. It's the OEM space that AMD is hurting in, and for a variety of reasons.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
If Dell &co want reliability, then why do they put up with stuff like this and this? Your argument just doesn't hold water.
Do I even need to mention the Pentium I floating point flaw, coverup, and recall?
My comments are far less FUD oriented than the person I replied to, by your definition.
(Full disclosure: I run an older IBM 2xPIII BX system with no intention to upgrade for a year or two. If I was in the BYOB market today, I'd buy AMD.)
First of all -- I was talking about motherboard chipsets, not CPUs. The CPU has no value until you plug it into something.
Second, Dell is shipping PIIIs for the exact reasons I mentioned -- known stability and standard RAM is more important than performance for their customers. Intel has to 'prove' their new chipsets to this market just as AMD does, and Intel has a much better trackrecord of doing so.
Sure it's fun to think about an Andy Grove/Micheal Dell goatsex conspiracy, but just maaaybeee Dell buys Intel because it's a better value for them and their customers.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Actually I think that you mean x86-64.org
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
I need a mission critical server that is x86 based? Forget intel chipsets, forget VIA, forget SiS, I go with Serverworks chipsets With pentium III processors, Serverworks are proven reliable chipsets vendor, and while the cost of the motherboard is a bit (well a big bit :) ) higher, it's still way cheaper than goind into most other platforms.
I need building an x86 renderfarm? NOTHING beats the power of a tigerMP with dual athlon price/performance wise. Stability? it is, it's simply rendering, not running quake while processing SETI units and running beta video drivers with leaked chipsets drivers.
The processors are a tool, you don't see people fighting over mastercraft vs black and decker when they come to buy a screwdriver, why you guys gets so religious about processors? I remember how happy most of you were when celerons with cache came out, overclocking that 300A to 450... you didn't think about AMD back then (well most of you didn't).. you were just saying "the k6 sucks, celeron rules" (I own a dual 366->550 that I'll probably change to a tigerMP). Of course most of what intel did to get flamed happened after that (rambus, crappy chipsets after BX, patent crap with via, etc), It's still pathetic to see how people react so badly...
Don't get me wrong, I find what intel did (especially with the rambus and via case) disgusting, but buisness is buisness, if they deliver good stuff at a decent price, I'll still get it, I have a company to maintain and a job to do. Of course if in the process I can do something about it as a IT manager, I will do it, but NOT at the demise of the company that employs me. There are alternatives to Rambus (serverworks gives a nice memory bandwidth with standard PC133 ram, they should come out with the same technology with DDR memory soon so that WILL kick hard). This is where I voice my opinion. Still, I wouldn't pay 50% more for AMD if intel would offer a similar technology same specs, same performance for less, this is where it becomes religious and pathetic.
If tomorrow I could get dual 2.2GHZ intel processors with rambus, 33% cheaper than an AMD based solution with DDR ram, I'd go for it, right now, it's AMD that has the upper hand, so these are the guys that I buy from for general computing/renderfarming.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
The best case for VLIW (Intel calls it EPIC, because VLIW has a bad rep, but it's VLIW) is inner number-crunching loops. Think rendering, audio/video compression and decompression, and similar stuff. But most computing isn't about tightly coded inner loops any more. Least of all on servers. Mostly, it's about calling lots of little subroutines that call more little subroutines. That's the worst case for explicit parallelism. Unless the compiler optimizes over subroutine call boundaries (which typically means very heavy inlining), explicit concurrency stalls at each subroutine call. Not good. The HP compiler guys working on the Itanium compiler admitted a few years back that it was going to take a major breakthrough to generate good Itanium code.
Three times in the past, Intel has tried to move away from the x86 architecture to a new, more modern one. The iAPX 432, the i860, and the i960 were all moves in that direction. All three were dismal flops. In Andy Grove's book, Only the Paranoid Survive, he takes this as a lesson that Intel should't try to force an architecture change on its customers.
I would have expected Intel to come up with the Sledgehammer and somebody else to be pushing the Itanium.