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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."
Hrm, the third paragraph is an intresting one. "Instead of a (Microsoft-Intel) duopoly, we are going to have a holy trinity," he said.
:P
I guess we know where AMD stands with regards to Linux
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Consume less heat? I believe they mean dissipate less heat.
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"My biggest fear is that Intel will come out with a 32-bit processor with 64-bit extensions because it is the right thing to do," Sanders said. "The Itanium it turns out is a niche product...We are going to have a role in the industry because we better fulfill Microsoft's needs."
the Itanium is a niche product now. in a few years i expect its time will come. 64-bit is not cool now but eventually OEMs are going to lean that way for upward compatibility. remember that the PowerPC existed in relative obscurity for a while too, and now it's the basis for what are probably the best UNIX machines on the market.
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.
"At the end of the day, we need to get a Compaq, Dell or HP," he said. "IBM is going to be tough."
On the consumer desktops and notebooks it will be hard for AMD to displace Intel. The "Oh it must be faster it says so" mantra will always be a key selling point in the retail world. The server side will be interesting with promise of less heat, smaller size and 64-bit application support, Intel chips will have more competition in the rack systems market. IMHO I would love to see dell ditch intel for all its notebooks and use the new AMD chips. The batteries have to discarge so fast it fries my PC cards with the heat.
"Get them before they get....
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These new chips coming from AMD are nothing short of amazing. While Intel struggles with their attempts to force a slower, proprietary memory architecture on PC users and push a weaker processing architecture, AMD is leading the market and producing technology that is faster, more reliable, and cheaper.
Unfortunately for AMD, better technology often loses to superior marketing forces. Several of my friends went to work for Dell after graduation, and they told me that their employer is not going to be supporting these new AMD offerings out of allegiance to Intel. Dell (and many other manufacturers, such as Gateway) are afraid of Intel cutting them out of the loop when supplies are tight so they give AMD second-rate status or drop support altogether. The problem also exists that many customers buy Intel exclusively, despite its low performance/price ratio.
The future isn't nearly as bright for AMD and TMTA as it should be. If our government actually punished companies for anticompetitive practices, things would be different. Maybe in 2004 it will be a priority for the new administration. But I am not holding my breath.
~walter
I remember reading a comple of months ago that Dell would offer Athlons on thier laptops. Well, the other day I went to Dell's web site to check them out and gasp! no Athlons. And now that Dell discontinued Linux too, they are back to being the Wintel bitch they always were.
Anyway, I think Sanders is overly optimistic in his analysis. It doesn't matter that Pentium 4 is a dog -- it's made by Intel, therefore it will sell. Also, without support of large OEMs, AMD is going to have a tough time. I only hope that it doesn't end up like Alpha -- a great technology that's been effectively killed and buried.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Quick answers: Dell, HP, Gateway, IBM, and superior marketing. Intel is basically a household name, whereas AMD is still thought as the nockoff brand. So long as consumers believe that Intel is the real thing, therefore it must be better, and AMD is just a copy, therefore worse, then the big names will not support AMD processors.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
...as far as I know.
They would however (as I'm sure a lot of other people will point out) consume less electricity. Therefore their power consumption will go down, which in turn will lower the heat emission.
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.
"Appaloosa, a discount version of Thoroughbred."
they must have been smoking something really heavy when they named that.
My experience hasn't shown this. Here at work we have dozens of Athlon and Duron based boxes which have been running quite solidly for months. The motherboards (various brands and chipsets) and CPUs have never been a problem, even when we had a batch of bad CPU fans (Orb). When we replaced the fans everything was happy again. We've had a couple of hard drives die and other minor stuff like that, but not one failure you could blame on AMD. I know dozens of people who have Athlon and/or Duron based machines and I don't recall ever hearing one of them complain about them. I've even got a few old K6 or AMD 5x86 or Am486 based machines that have been running reliably for years. So you should be modded down for either not knowing what the hell you are talking about, or at least for not providing any sort of supporting evidence for your assertation.
If AMD managed to release their x86 with 64bit extensions in 2002, Intel would be big trouble. Too bad that they missed their targte again.
I have seen no evidence whatsoever that current AMD chips are less reliable. The fact that AMD chips use a lower clock rate and generate less heat strongly suggest the opposite. In fact, reliability of processors does not seem to be a significant factor in overall PC reliability at all: disk drives, fans, memory, motherboards, and ports all usually go first.
If Dell would ship AMDs, we'd buy them. Instead, they are shipping souped up versions of the Pentium 3 to their corporate customers because that's the only thing they can ship from Intel. I really wonder whether the cosy relationships between, say, Dell and Intel, are merely friendly or whether there are some other arrangements...
I've said it once, I'll say it again... 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.
s p4-15.html [tomshardware.com])
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/xpv
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... if I had known about the KT7A Faq (http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kt7/kt7faq.htm) before buying one, I probably would've passed... but all the "review" sites just a good things to say about it...
These new processors actually do consume heat as they operate, turning it into valuable CPU cycles. These processors require the use of a whole new CPU packaging technology that pumps heat into, rather than out of, the CPU core. Initial tests in laptop configurations have proven uncomfortable to use, due to the fact that the laptop begins to condense water out of the air, and eventually frost over as it runs. AMD expects that these problems will be solved by the time these processors reach the marketplace.
They will no doubt use this new technology to bury Intel, Microsoft, AOL Time Warner and the Soviet Union. Having vanquished these foes, they will split their company into a half dozzen competing CPU manufacturers that compete fairly with one another. Each of these new chip makers will pour billions of dollars into Linux development. Their executives and directors will use their extra income to feed starving children and help build a better public education system.
Oh, wait. That would break the laws of thermodynamics. Never mind.
In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
Maybe AMD has a new angle on power consumption. Maybe their proccessors extract thermal energy from the surrounding atmosphere to power the chip.
Or maybe not.
Yes I have a 8K series and a 7500 inspiron. That article is a little off though. The 7500 was the first dell laptop w/speedstep, but it would throttle down only if it was running off batteries when it booted. The 8K series changed speeds in realtime(?) I ended up patching both and disabling speedstep. But dell is much better than gateway's attempt with the 750 Mhz solo. Not only did it fry PC cards, and occassionlly make a burn mark on my desk. It would power up and down the so much, it crapped out the little HD after 3 months, burned up the internal modem and then the onboard video card went. That notebook (9300) went through 3 HD, 2 MB and about a gig of notebook RAM. Talk about a lemon.
"Get them before they get....
AMD is not doing fine. They had a net loss of two hundred million dollars last quarter. Furthermore, they admitted that they lost about 1% marketshare to Intel in that quarter. My predicition is that they will exit the microprocessor business if the PC industry doesn't pick up within 4-5 quarters. Their cost structure just doesn't support it.
Buying an Athlon gives you that fuzzy feeling that you're supporting the underdog. Even if the prices were the same I would choose AMD. We NEED 2 competitors (or more) beating each other to have low prices and fast progress in technology.
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.
Yes, just swap VCC and VDD. Can't see why this hasn't been thought of before. (-:
Disclaimer for the idiots: trying this will almost certainly popcorn your entire computer.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
And who the fsck are you to make predictions? My prediction is that you're a bozo.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
while you're compiling your code
I better not type what I was planning to type next, otherwise I'd get a moderated lame.
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.
I can attest that Athlons and Durons work just fine with Linux as well. We hardly have any Intel boxes in our office at all, including servers, although most of the rackmount servers we have in our colo are Pentium III's. That is pretty much only because at the time we bought them 1U Atlon SMP boxes weren't as readily available as they are now.
Other than a certain tendency to prefer to support the underdog if possible (I want to make sure the market stays competitive), I am inclined to buy whatever offers the best price/performance and runs stable, and right now AMD seems to have Intel beat.
The EPIC instruction set architecture of Itanium/McKinley is not a good match for Java Virtual Machines....at least thats what I read in a technical article about IBM's Power4 architecture. Apparently JVM's can't take advantage of VLIW as well as compiled code can, and this makes sense because Java is compiled to machine-code on the fly. Like it or not, Java is a major player in today's software technology. If AMD continues to excel with IA-32 (which is a decent match for Java), it will help Java as well as AMD...
And even if it is - what is AMD going to do about it? Why aren't you hassling the folks who hack agpgart for assistance in implementing the workaround?
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
I was at the computer markets today & I could've sword I saw a old SCSI/RAID controller, or something, with a i960 chipset.
The "junk motherboards coming out of Taiwan" make up most of all motherboards sold, INCLUDING those that Dell uses. Virtually every company either is based in Taiwan or outsources their production of motherboards to Taiwain or China. This includes the Intel motherboards that Dell uses.
Dell using Intel exclusively has a lot to do with the way that they sell all their systems as custom-built setups. They try to eliminate as many variables as possible and outsource as much testing as possible. This is why they use exclusively Intel processors sitting on Intel motherboards using Intel chipsets. It's not so much that these are better/more stable, just that Intel does all the compatibility testing for them so that all Dell has to test is things like video cards, hard drives, sound cards, etc. If AMD wants to sell to Dell they would probably have to get some OEM to produce "AMD" motherboards for them and sell Dell kits of processors+motherboard+chipset. Of course, this doesn't fit in that well with AMD's business model.
That being said, VIA, ALi and SiS have had more then their share of ups and downs in the past, while Intel chipsets have usually being pretty consistent. I'm personally looking towards the new nVidia chipsets for AMD to see how that changes the landscape of things.
'while Intel chipsets have usually being pretty consistent'
It's even had to subcontract production with its competition.
Even with the risk of the sub-contractors bringing out unbranded clones.
Which has occured in the past, when Asus & Epox sub-contracted some of their board manufacturing to others.
All of a sudden you could buy unbranded clones made from the same plant as the sub-contracted boards. Because those plants were making more boards than what they told Asus & Epox.
As those boards didn't go through Asus's testing process, Asus had to send out world wide warnings over the clones.
The smaller the design, the lower the voltage you need, and the less power you consume.
However, manufacturers also take advantage of the shrink to up the frequency, bringing up the power consumption. We're still a ways off from having a thermal crisis. AMD still hasn't started using "thermal spreaders", and they're doing fine. Once they put the thermal spreaders on, they will be able to dissipate heat more quickly.
For those that think we're to the end of the road for air-cooled processors, no, there are heat sinks/fan combos today that are much more powerful than a chip needs without overclocking - and there are still many improvements to be made. For example, we could use larger fans at lower RPMs to move lots and lots of air without much noise at all - how does 60 CFM at 32 dB sound? (it sounds pretty quiet.)
Also, there are other ways of getting more benefit from air-cooled heat sinks. Most heat sinks do well with the addition of a copper plate on the bottom, for reasons too lengthy to go into here. And, by using well-designed shrouds, you can up the effectiveness even more.
So, why don't they make heat sinks like that today? The same reason they didn't make modern heat sinks 5 years ago - they didn't need them. With a small amount of thought and engineering, I believe that we can at least double the wattage of a chip without too many problems.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.