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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.
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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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(Nice karma whore post with the links! See you at 5:Insightful.)
AMD is leading the market and producing technology that is faster, more reliable, and cheaper.
Everything I've heard about AMD mobos is that they are *less* reliable than the Intel ones. For corporate customers (cf Dell), that's far more important than the 10-20% speedboost that AMD or better-than-SDRAM memory technology gives you.
You have to get out of the gameboy thinking that performance matters uber alles. Any ol' 2001 CPU, even Celerons, are fast enough for the vast majority of users, even those using client-side Java. That puts the "value" somewhere other than the Quake FPS benchmarks over at Biff's Hardware.
Furthermore, AMD might be cheaper on "Pricewatch", but that's not where Dell buys their CPUs. I would suspect that with the whole package (CPU/Mobo/RAM/Discounts/Kickbacks), Intel isn't a whole lot more expensive than AMD for a big OEM. You see those chips cheap on PriceWatch because the vendor has excess stock.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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.
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'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.
I've bought only AMD processors for years now (starting with a K6-200), and I've never had any problems with the systems in which they were used. It's the result of not getting the absolute cheapest motherboards and other components for these systems. I've seen plenty of Intel-based systems crash and burn, but they were usually dollar-engineered boxen with shitty motherboards (usually PC Chips and similar, though I've had a few MSI boards go south as well).
(I could make some wisecrack about the FDIV bug or the 820 MTH SDRAM compatibility debacle, but I won't. :-) )
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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
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.
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.