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End Of the Road for Duron
yorgasor writes: "AMD announced that their Duron processor will no longer be produced near the end of this year. They plan on focusing all of their CPU production energy on Athlons and Hammers. The Register has more about it."
Seems Duron's not as durable as it's name would suggest.
Video Game cheats, hints a
For the cash strapped, making a linux server on lower end hardware is the way to go (my server is on a P1-120MHz box). Why must they push the envelope so hard?
The lowest end CPU you can find now-a-days is like 800Mhz, unless you go to auctions...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Has anyone noticed it's getting harder to upgrade pcs? I can't just get a new processor a year after my old one. because by then the processors seem to need new motherboards, faster memory etc...
AMD did not officially announce that Duron is no more, they merely stated in their earnings conference call that by the end of the year they expect to be producing nothing but Hammer & Athlon.
The Hammer will be the performance processor while the Athlon will be the value processor. They were also quick to point out that by that point it will actually be cheaper for them to make Athlons than it is for them to make the current Duron and that those Athlons will be available for equivilent to Duron prices now without the Duron limitations (in other words, full L2 cache, etc.)
With that said...like all conference calls of this nature, it was forward looking and merely states their plans, not necessarily fact.
A good thing really. It was always kind of pointless and a little insulting to sell the same K7 design with a cripplingly small cache at a discount. I don't think the difference in die size really accounted for so significant a savings; it was a form of tiered pricing to get more out of the market.
Not that there's anything wrong with capitalism, but it always irked me and reminded me overmuch of intels old celeron/pentium3/xeon tiered caching, where you had to pay rediculously more for the same chip with different cache, which was especially insulting when the cache was off die, and the price would pentuple for a xeon over a "consumer" pentium3, which was certainly a *cough*
little bit more than the cost of the extra cache chips they stuck in the sloted model.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
This will mean a price drop on Durons still on the shelf, and used Duron processors will become really abundant and cheap.
Plus, once the Hammers are released, the price of Athlons should take a cut.
The speed of time is one second per second.
How are they gonna own the low-end market now?
Because of the requirements of Windows XP there is no low-end market
It seems that all this means is that theyre going to shift the athlons into the low end position of their market and use the hammer class chips to fill the high end void. It's just a matter of naming convention and of course getting an extra $5 per low end chip for name value.
--aiee
AMD pricing for Athlons is much higher than Durons. All the Durons are under $100, and all the Athlons are higher. Presumably AMD will drop the price on Athlons when the Durons go away. I can't see them abandoning the low end.
When processors cost $300 and up on average, having a budget processor line was important. Now that a lower-end Athlon processor (the Socket A 950) is all the way down around $70, it's more worth while for AMD to just produce Athlon series chips in the 32-bit world. Heck, the top-of-the-line processors are generally right around the $300 that used to be an average selling price!
Fewer chip lines=more efficient production=lower costs=lower prices on balance.
Intel's pretty much done the same thing, except they've all but killed the P3 in favor of the Celeron at the low end.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
On the other hand, AMD's pricing hardly justifies a value processor, since compared to Intel processors they are already pretty cheap.
If they widen the XP line just a little bit by extending the slower models lifetime a little, they can fill the gap the Duron leaves behind with the XP itself.
Also: when the Hammers arrive, the XP will fade away and presumably act as a value processor for a while. A Duron as an even cheaper CPU wouldn't make sense in such a scenario.
Another reason I can think of, is that it doesn't make so much sense to make a CPU with a 100 MHz FSB. With today's materials this will probably not be cheaper to procuce than 133 MHz parts. So you're actually producing less than you can for the same cost, just to create a difference between models. Essentially the smaller L2 cache is the probably the only difference in cost of production between the Duron and the XP.
An Athlon Tbird 950 is only $58
The Athlon XP 1500 is only $93
These prices are from newegg.com
By the time the Duron is canned that XP 1500
will cost about $60.
Are you really that strapped for cash? To quote Chris Rock, "I got two jobs, you can't get one?"
So will they call the chip that implements DRM in hardware the 'Screw driver' ?
When you look at pricewatch there's no question the AMD chips offer lower prices for comparable chips. Now it looks like they're going to dip to even lower prices. When they dedicate the Duron production lines to producing Athlons its going to make an impact on their prices. As for public perception let me ask this... Didn't it always seem that AMD Athlons got better exposure than Durons? Duron budget systems were always rare in big name systems when compared to Celerons. Which is a shame. I'd love to see AMD develop a healthy market demand across the board from econobox to server. Given the choice though I'd like better cheaper server processors though than a cheaper low end PC. The community's thoughts?
Looks like AMD will only be producing flash memory within the united states now. I have some friends who work at the Austin FAB and I know that their future is uncertain. RIP Duron, long live the Hammers!
-- Adam
The Slot 1 Pentium 2 and 3 had off chip SRAM
caches that ran at half the speed of the CPU.
The Slot 2 Xeons had full speed cache that
intel had to manufacture themselves because the
normal SRAM vendors didn't sell 400MHz and
faster SRAMs. That's one of the reasons that
the cost was much higher. The second was of
course that they could rip off businesses who
both a) could afford it and b) compared it to
sun and it was still cheaper than an UltraSPARC
I'm actually surprised that AMD came out with a lower-end chip at all, when its high-end chips are cheaper than their competitors low-end chips. It's weird, it came into a market where people were expecting to pay a few hundred bucks for a decent chip and offered decent chips for under $100.
Reminds me of a story: A woman wanted to sell jewelry in a kiosk. The jewelry was cheap to make so she priced it accordingly. She could conceivably sell her earrings for 5$ and make a profit. She was doing lousy. One day someone with a little business sense told her to arbitrarily mark it up to 25$ for the cheapest-looking ones, and even more expensive for the others. After doing this, she sold out her stock like lightning and had to take more orders.
Funny how the human mind works, isn't it? The Duron chip is cheap, gets little negative press that I know of, and is being produced by a company held in high esteem in the home PC market. So, naturally, it must fail.
I think the Duron should have been held as an ace in the hole -- although there's nothing stopping them from keeping it in mind, I guess. IBM's major response to AMD was to lower the cost of their high-end chips. If they'd responded instead with a bigger push for the Celerons, maybe the Duron would have had a better chance...
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Do we hate AMD today?
First I decided to get a VLB mother board. Just after the purchase PCI won the market. Then I chose to buy an Aureal sound card. And just after that, the Aureal died. Then I got a Voodoo3 video card and that also died a horrible death. And now... just after purchasing an AMD Duron and a new motherboard, they claim that there will be Duron no more. Damned... Either I'm a bad decision maker or then I'm an angel of death. Too bad there is no place to bet for the loser because I'm going to buy a new monitor...
thats right kiddies, it's time for dual processing the cheap way. get yourself a cheap-o Tyan Tiger MPX motherboard (http://www.tyan.com/products/html/tigermpx.html), and wait for those duron prices to rocket downward; then get yourself two 1.3GHz Morgans and some nice CPU heatsink/fans (i think the Thermaltake Volcano 7+ should do nicely - http://www.subzerotech.com/reviews/hsf/volcano7+/) and a case that's compatible with this dual mobo (most 300W+ power supply-enables cases, but might need to get specific). then load all the crap from your older system into this one and you've got yourself a kicking cheap dual processor system. i think the last quote on the heatsinks, processors, and case together was below $400, but will fall even further down with this news. and dont even get me started with overclocking....
I don't know why this made me think of the Radio Shack Color Computer, but it did.
Seems like the Duron and the Celeron (DX/SX, etc) are just crippled versions of the "better" Athlon and Pentium x.
Much like back in the late 70s when Radio Shack was designing their more affordable Color Computer they anticipated it to have 32k of ram using 16k RAM chips and designed the board for those chips. The chips didn't actually exist when the board was designed, but they *knew* as it was rolling down the assembly line the 16k RAM chips would be available.
Murphy has taught us well and true to form 16k RAM chips were not available. The chip manufacturers skipped 16k to 32k! So instead of
their "low end" computer being built with 32k total it had 64k total. Which was 16k more than their "high end" model!
Solution: break the most significant address line.
For the same cost to the company they produced a bit less than they marketed and sold. (yes, pun intended.) For the sole intent of keeping the price of the high end model inflated.
This is exactly what intel did with the 486's. They made DX processors and applied too many volts to the FPU and blew it out. (blown out as in destroyed not to be confused blown out as in programmed with PLA).
I guess now the trend is going to be low-end 32-bit, high end 64-bit. This is considerably less less transparent to the programmer. And I am not quite sure how this is going to benefit AMD's venture into the 64-bit arena.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
One of AMD's critical weaknesses is a lack of fab space. They have very few fabs available to them, and they need to very carefully select which fab will produce which silicon. (This is actually a common issue with silicon fabs, since a new fab runs $3B or so nowadays, but AMD has a really bad space shortage problem for the size they are)
If you look at the AMD roadmap the future is the Hammer series - which incorporates the x86-64 instruction set - and Barton, which is allegedly a hyped up Athlon on a smaller core (0.13 micron) with no x86-64. Barton is being poised as the low end processor, while the Hammers are high-end.
With that in mind, where would a Duron fit? Realize that AMD is currently losing money. Ridding themselves of Duron not only frees up fab space, but also allows them to move the entire processor cost structure up a notch or two.
The current bottom end of the market is probably going to disappear, since the Celeron doesn't have much life in it either. But since they're already unpopular in the retail market, it's not a huge loss. If you want to build a cheap system, you're better off buying components that aren't brand new anyway. Swaps, ebay, and so forth are dirt cheap on those kinds of things.
I can see why, with the pricing of lower-speed Athlons, but I thought the Duron was a nice foil to Intel's Celeron. My last purchased box had a Duron in it -- never a hiccup. .... sniff .... Duron, we barely knew ye'
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Why all these stupid names for 80x86-compatible processors.
Because a chip vendor can trademark a name but can't trademark a number. Thus the move from "386", "486", etc. to the "Pentium®" line.
Did you know? Intel applied for trademark registration for "Sexium", but the CDA forced the company to sell 686 processors as "Pentium II" instead.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Where Duron's gone or how it fares
Nobody knows, and nobody cares
I remember the Archimedes processor ran BASIC 100 times faster than calculated, then they found that their refactoring of the BASIC interpreter decreased its size so much that the whole interpreter fit in the CPU's L1 cache. ARM processors I think it is - RISC.
Can Transmeta pull off any miracles like this, such as using a JIT compiler to translate the entire executable app instead of just doing it in the background like they're doing now?
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Duron was AMD's low end Athlon, sort of what Intel did to the Pentium with the Celeron.
The Hammer series cpus will be 64 bit extensions of the IA32 compatible processors. While Intel went with a totally new (and incompatible) cpu design for their 64 bit chips, AMD extended the Athlon to 64 bits adding larger registers and new instructions. The Hammers will be backward compatible with Athlons and Pentiums and will boot 32 bit Windows and Linux with no software patches. They can also run new 64 bit software and even run 32 bit software under a 64 bit OS, switching modes on the fly! (Sortof like the 386 and up running real mode software under protected mode in a virtual cpu box).
It remains to be seen which 64 bit design will be better, but my vote is for the hammers!
I pulled that price for the Athlon 950 from Chip Merchant (I've used them before, and though they're not always the cheapest, they have a good rep and have always taken care of me well). I didn't expect they'd be the cheapest, but they're typically about what the average Internet merchant sells for on most products.
For comparison shoppers:
An Athlon 950 from Newegg is $58 as of a few minutes ago.
The most expensive two Athlons are the MP2000 and the XP2100+ - currently at $270 and $260, respectively for retail box kits. Pretty close to the $300 high-water mark I mentioned. The 2200+ isn't listed yet, but I believe they stuck it just over $300 in pricing.
For comparison's sake, Newegg sells the top two P4 Northwood processors (2.2 and 2.4) for $410 and $541, respectively - but all their other processors are well under $300. I've never used Newegg, but I've heard they're pretty good.
For the most part, when I buy barebones systems I like to buy the best combo I can afford - my most recent one was a few weeks ago and consisted of an Asus P4B-266, a P4 1.6A (good bang for the buck and OC-friendly), a good ATA100 drive, and a 256MB stick of DDR. I bought a decent case and then added a GeForce 2MX card and such that I already had.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
they might even hurt intel a little more
/. in quite a while</flame> There's absolutely no reason anyone other than AMD should revel in Intel being hurt. The whole point is about competition, and forcing companies to sell products for a fair price -- fair meaning that the manufacturer can make reasonable profit and that the customer gets a good deal for his money. Do you honestly believe that AMD (or any other manufacturer) wouldn't jack up prices if they were the only game in town?
<flame>This has to be the most moronic thing post I've seen on
AMD purposely names its processors after horses because you cannot trademark them.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
Hm, 64 bits is really interesting. I am by no means an electrician, so perhaps someone could tell me if this is plausible, but... would it be possible to use a 64 bit CPU as a dual 32 bit CPU? Like instead of running a 64 bit OS, you run a SMP 32 bit OS or even two 32 bit OS's in parallel. I see no reason why it wouldn't work. Just have one OS use only the first half of each address or register, and the other OS use the other half. With a little clever masking, it should work!
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Next time you buy something, short the stock of the company that makes it.
** Big Disclaimer **
I am not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice. Although anyone who gets their financial advice from Slashdot probably gets what they deserve, you should bear in mind that the value of stocks can go up as well as down, and if you short a stock your maximum potential gain is 100% while your potential loss is unlimited
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E_NOSIG
Horses? I thought Athlon was some fake Greek god or sauce or something. Personally, if I were AMD I would avoid giving my CPUs names so similar to "Teflon." I don't want to use the phrase "could fry an egg on", but let's just say that there are already far too many similarities between my CPU and various cooking implements.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
No, that was how Intel did it with the first Celerons. The Durons are actually a different chip made in a seperate process from the Athlons. The Duron "crippling" is by design in order to save on die size.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Because 512K of it costs as much as 128M of SDRAM. Not to mention the fact that SRAM, while much faster and much more expensive, is also much less dense, to the point that a reasonable amount of it, like 64M, is about the size of a shoebox.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
If you are the angel of death, you may as well put it to some good use! :)
Nathan
Belanna Torres, just get back to engineering and concentrate on the warp drives, OK?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I think the primary reason why AMD is phasing out the Duron is the fact that outside of the do-it-yourself crowd, there was almost NO demand for the Duron CPU here in the USA, despite its technical merits.
Besides, for low-end computing Intel's Celeron had such a hammerlock on the market that there was no real incentive to use an alternative. Note that most of the major computer manufacturers still offer machines that use the Tualatin Celerons (1,100 to 1,300 MHz speeds). Indeed, the 1,300 MHz Celeron is actually a pretty nice CPU, especially with 256 KB of L2 cache on the CPU die.
... AMD has announced that it will focus it's production on high-end processors. In other news, scientists predict a record year for global warming...
"Derp de derp."
You can't get caught up in the 'processor wars' too much. My home systems include:
Athlon 900 (slot, Windows) Athlon 650 (slot, Windows - gf's) Duron 700 (Linux) P166 (Linux firewall) PII 266 - old firewall PII 300 - nothing yet P100 - nothing yet
Do I need an AMD XP processor? Nope. But as long as they keep getting faster and faster, the used market will get better and better. Remember, Linux needs to be able to keep up with new hardware too, but as long as it remains backwards compatable, I'll be happy. I could run RedHat 7.2 on all of the above for one purpose or another. Try that with WinXP, NT, or 2K.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
While I'm ill-equipped to evaluate the veracity of the technical elements of your post, I am confident I can shed light on the economic point.
Spreading a single product over a wide range of market demands and pricepoints allows companies like Intel and AMD to spread the cost of making the chips over a wider range of customers. If they didn't sell a crippled chip for slightly more than it cost to make, and a normal chip for way more, then they'd have to make up the profit somewhere else. They'd have to average the profit over their un-crippled products, which means the cheapest part they made would be more expensive than a certain market segment would be willing to pay. That means they'd not get that market segment's money at all, so they'd have to increase their profit margins even more to bring in the same return on investment.
(Venturing into off-topic here...)
It's a little like insurance. Insurance companies will charge everyone as much as they can so they can insure as many people as they can. Own an expensive car? You can probably afford expensive insurance. Nevermind that you may statistically cost the insurance company less (or not, as the case may be).
Much of what we identify with capitalism, religion and government is really just ways of spreading our challenges out so that the pain of any one member of the group is well below his or her threshold of intollerance. This helps the social organism and the individual survive traumas which would otherwise threaten the survival of the individuals and the group.
Now, that's not to say that any of these particular systems is best. Nature adapts, and as long as we exist we will keep improving on what we know. I'm just saying that what looks from first glance to be simple greed actually serves a greater purpose in a bigger context....sometimes.
Ok, I'm being trolled. So be it.
The companies that specialise in memory tend to specialise in DRAM. Cache is SRAM. The difference is that DRAM is a bunch of capacitors, while SRAM is closer to transistors. Knowledge in fabbing one does not necessarily mean knowledge in fabbing the other.
When I was upgrading my P3 600 mhz, I thought about getting myself a new P3 chip to stick in the same mobo, but looking at the prices I found that it was the same price to get an Athlon XP 1700+ (that's about 1.4 ghz) with a new motherboard as it was to get a 1.2 ghz p3. It looks like Intel prices may have fallen a bit since then, but still, AMD chips are just absurdly cheap.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Hammer sounds more sexy than P4.
Depends on if you're into watersports.
Sounds like AMD wins this round of Roshambo though:
"P4!", "Hammer!", "...damn."
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
M.C. or just Mike?
Ok, bad joke, but someone had to say it.
No, wait they didn't...
Then you will really this this article. It is some speculation that AMD might enable 64 bit instructions on all (new) platforms.
salesman: Sir, do you want this 2 Ghz 32 bit PC or this 2 Ghz 64 bit pc?
Since the slowest CPUs today cost less than $100 from a price perspective it does not matter very much they are way more powerful than needed for many tasks.
What I find annoying is that is still hard/impossible to buy a SMALL, SILENT and CHEAP system. My iPod has probably enough hardware resources to replace my Dual P90 Firewall, if it had two network cards...
There are small (5 1/4 inch) systems available, but they cost more than $1000, and they are not silent.
Cyrix C3 runs at 700MHz+, costs less than $100 and fits in a standard Socket 370 MB. That is more or less the first i386 processor you can run without much cooling since the early pentiums. Why cant someone put such a processor, 256Mb of ram, a silent slow disk, vga, nic and ethernet into a small box (no extreme design, just something slightly smaller than a minitower).
Of course the coolest thing would be if Apple put a G3 in such a box (like a budget cube), but that will of course never happen.
> Microsoft now must make the determination what to do and when
It must begin to dawn on Microsoft that adding a green meadow background and passport control to Windows is not enough reason to get many people to upgrade their Windows.
Hence it needs to launch Win 64 bit soon to create a need for upgrading. As Intel do not push Itanic 64 bit more than so-so, AMD might be the company that bring 64 bit to widespread use - and Microsoft needs that. But AMD also needs acceptance from Microsoft, without them it would be VERY difficult to sell the virtues of the special 64 bit part of Hammer.
Actually, if you had spent the money on faster processors when you got the system, what upgrade could you do now?
If you had gotten dual 1GHz P-IIIs rather than 800MHz, and you could now only upgrade to 1.2GHz, it wouldn't be worth the money in terms of performance increase, just to gain a 20% boost. You got a 50% boost only because you went cheap on the original CPUs. You would have been able to get a 100% boost if you had gone cheaper and gotten 600MHz originally.
I'm more impressed with the fact that the board supports 2GB of RAM, which you have now, up from the original 1GB.
That is one smooth-ass analogy, sir. Thank you for the help. It's too bad it wouldn't work...you could have Windows 3.1 running twice alongside Linux.
How's this for a variation: have all the architecture of a 64-bit machine (busses, memory, etc.), but then just stick in two 32-bit CPUs? All their I/O to the rest of the system could be masked appropriately, so as far as they know they are running alone!
This would be fast because everything is already right there. It's also cheaper, b/c buying 512MB memory is cheaper than buying 256MB twice.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
C'mon I'm sure you can find some !!
If they can price their CPU's low enough and still make money then they might even hurt intel a little more.
In the just announced Q1 results, Intel made almost one billion dollars in profit, and AMD lost several million dollars. So who's hurting who?
How much frigging cheaper than $40 do these cheap bastards need a processor to be before they buy one?
Hell, at some point, shipping is gonna cost more than the chip.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Actally:
Resistors and capacitors are both modelled with transistor(s) in most LSI/VLSI logic, because people are good at making transistors.
You'r eright though. A DRAM is using a transistor in a capacitive function.. and its only 1 transistor i beleive.
Where as a SRAM latch is something like 6 transistors per bit.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Ah right i got story then.
Man gets four new tires on his car. Puts 4 old tires out on the road with a sign that says "FREE". None touches them. Few days later he puts a sign on the tires that says "$20 for all four". Someone stole them before the day was over.
Not sure of the point? Neither am I, but I am sure it's around here somewhere.
I own 7 Duron 950s for personal use.
With motherboards and ram, the total bill was less than $1200.
They all run great, and they were the best price/performance ratio on the low end when I bought them. There were two dips in the price/performance ratio, one was midway up the Athlon performance curve, and one was at the 950Duron with the older core. I went with the durons, since I wanted quantity over single machine performance.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I can't believe the USPTO actually let them trademark the letter I when used in relation to computers and such.
By now, the "I" trademark has little if any legal force left. Unlike with copyrights and patents, if you don't enforce a trademark by suing or licensing, you lose exclusive rights in the mark.
ObDuron: On the other hand, a paint manufacturer doesn't generally have the right to prevent a semiconductor maker from using a similar or identical trademark because paint and semiconductors are considered separate domains, even though the first hard drives' platters were essentially coated with paint.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What most people don't know is that the Duron was created for a couple reasons. The first was to beat the celeron down, which is does nicely. But the other reason is that it was a way for AMD to improve yields. Thunderbird chips which couldn't pass the full cache test could have most of its cache disabled, and used fine as a Duron, this made AMDs yields make intel's down right embarassing.
I'm guessing now AMD runs the durons on its own process, since AMD has a large marketshare. I wonder if they'll introduce a cheap OEM chip version to help their yields again, or still offer the Duron in limited quantities to certain suppliers.
Joe Sixpack will not care, nor notice. His machine is slow because cheap computers come without sufficient amounts of RAM. Had the manufacturers included more RAM in their lower end systems, people would realize that the high end systems did perform so much faster that the higher price was justified.
I'm using a P3 533 mhz with 512 MB of RAM. I run VMWare to be able to access company email, otherwise I'm all linux. According to hype, this should be obsoleted and unacceptable. It isn't. Even the VMWare solution is acceptable (though not ideal). You have to wonder if there are "conspiracies" within the hardware industry that makes Microsoft appear angelic.
So, for the end user, more RAM from the manufactorers side would be much more cost effective than a slightly faster processor.
Stop the brainwash
If so, is it intentional or unintentional?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
That was the trick... I spent as much as I could afford. and I cut back on ram and processor speeds to throw the extra money into the motherboard.
the number one rule... spend as much as you can on the motherboard... if you have to drop back a level on the processor to afford it... that's fine.. as processors become dirt cheap within months. spend the most on that motherboard and you'll be happier in the long run AND I have seen expensive mobo+slow processor run faster/better than a fast processor+cheap mobo.
and yes.... the 2GB ability (6 dimm slots is AWESOME... but not being able to use DDR is a pain.. oh welll sdram is still available) was the major selling point... My mobo is designed for server use, no way around it... but I find that I was able to avoid every pitfall with SMP and linux because of it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I dont know about that. I have only used linux on my machine and I have seen a remarkable increase in speed when compiling with the -j2 option (to use both processors BTW) and my BMRT rendering times have dropped significantly.
as for overall desktop performance... VMware is snappier for my hardware hacking... (Gotta use windows to hack windows-only hardware... Vmware makes sniffing serial/parallel/usb devices trivial) and I sure do wish they would enable the SMP abilities on the linux Quake3T release.... just to say I have it... not that it's needed at all.
I will not say 50% or 30%.. but I will say I have it feeling overall faster and that was my goal. (the 2G ram was for BMRT and my Non linear video editing.. You have to love firewire and DV cameras!)
I will say that in a year.. my computer will still feel faster than the Pentiuum4 3ghz machines with the 500mhz memory bus and whatever IDE abortion that is out then...because right now most people think I have prototype hardware when I boot in 1/3 the time they do and that is with the delay of spinning up the scsi drives.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I have two PII systems at home, and they are just that. You can pick up one from one of the many liquidators around. I got a Dell PII 266, 64MB, 4 gig, nic, snd in one of those thin cases for $85. Works great for some servers, they are pretty quiet, and don't generate all that much heat. I was using it as my firewall, but replaced it with a P166 system (no fan other than the PS). It is just a firewall.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
You are correct about more RAM being a better solution.
For example, my system at home (a home-built system) uses an Abit AB-BM6 motherboard with a Celeron A 466 MHz CPU, a four-year old CPU design. Yet, performance is still pretty reasonable thanks to the fact I'm running 256 MB of RAM and a 10 GB ATA-33 hard drive.
In short, for many computer users a major RAM upgrade and a switch to a faster hard drive could increase performance of the computer by as much as 50% or more regardless of operating system, since the computer doesn't need to spend so much time doing virtual memory swaps to and from the hard drive.
You seem to be limiting your definition of altruistic actions to conscious actions. I don't think this point of view is very useful, because it makes altruism impossible even hypothetically. It renders the word meaningless.
But the fact that our brain has a "warm fuzzy feeling" reward system wired into it is itself altruism, of a subconscious kind. Remember that the mechanism that creates the warm fuzzy feeling is also a part of you. Hence, although your conscious mind may be acting selfishly, on a deeper level, your human nature is being altruistic in giving you a warm fuzzy feeling for no other reason except to help the EFF (or whatever).