Two Approaches to the Next-Generation Desktop

puppetman writes: "Tom's Hardware has a review up of a pre-production P4/2666 using 533 mhz Rambus memory (and shows it stomping the competition). The Pentium 4 needs memory bandwidth, and DDR doesn't supply it. Or does it? Anandtech, ironically, has a preview of the E7500 chipset from Intel - dual channel DDR with support for up to 16 gig of RAM. With a new bus architecture, this looks perfect for high-load databases that need wide pipes to hard-drives, memory, and ethernet. Both of these technologies look great for mid-range database servers. Anandtech claims that dual DDR200 will provide 3.2 gig/second bandwidth, where Tom claims that DDR266 (single channel) offers only 2.1 gig/second. Intel is sure hedging their bets. I wonder what AMD has up their sleeves."

Comments

Re:Why AMD won the battle before it even began

[jred]

Most computer stores sell Dell, Compaq, Gateway, Emachine, or something similar. The big name companies supposedly get huge concessions from Intel to only sell Intel, although I think Emachines does use some AMD, if they're still around.

Although AMD has the cluefull users in the bag, Intel has the clueless. All they know is Intel Inside. And they're the ones who go to work & decide that it's Intel or nothing, and the business world is what really matters to chipmakers. I know that where I work, they'd rather overpay for a P4 crippled by SDRAM than a better performing, more inexpensive AMD solution. I've given up trying to get them to buy AMD, now I'm focusing on at least trying to get them to go DDR/RDRAM on the P4s.

Screw Yall

[aengblom]

Screw Yall that say we need a GHZ. My PII 400 with 256 megs of ram is plenty fast! It runs every app I need it too at this point. (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, MS Office, In Design, Acrobat) The only thing that's a bit slow is writing large PDF's and large In Design files and these are way past the needs of most users.

Still, the processor companies are in trouble. The reason is that the smart money will go towards some nice peripherals. Software just isn't crying out for more processor speed. Maybe a video camera, an IPod and some decent software.