First Benchmarks of AMD Hammer Prototype

porciletto writes "As seen on Ace's Hardware, this article features Quake 3 benchmarks comparing an 800 MHz ClawHammer sample to Athlon MPs at 800 MHz and 1667 MHz, as well as a Willamette Pentium 4 (256 KB L2, 400 MHz FSB) at 800 MHz and 1600 MHz. The benchmark results indicate a 40% performance increase over an Athlon MP for the ClawHammer. Additionally, the 800 MHz ClawHammer manages to tie (actually outperform by 1 FPS) the 1667 MHz Willamette Pentium 4."

Comments

It would be more interesting if...

[xiox]

They tested some software which had been compiled for 64 bit mode. With the large number of 64 bit registers the hammer has there should be some significant speed improvement.

Re:It would be more interesting if...

[Jugalator]

Enlighten me! :)
How many registers are there?

I've only programmed on assembly level for MIPS (32 regs) and x86 (whoa - registers gone awry) :)

In short, the MIPS was fun and an excellent "beginner's processor" to try out your noob assembly skills on. The x86 was a nightmare. :P

Re:It would be more interesting if...

[Jugalator]

Ah, thanks ;)

Found this PDF document to be a very interesting document with tons of info about the Hammer. So intersting that I felt the need to post it here. :)

Regarding registers, it shows that not only has it got 2x "standard"/GPR registers that's 2x wide, but also 2x SSE/SSE2 128-bit registers.

So it seems to total in 16 * 128-bit registers, 16 * 64-bit registers (and 8 * 80-bit regs for floating point ops).

Yeah, and a widened program counter register too. :D

Intel has a Big Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been saying this for many months, and I'll say it again: By far the biggest problem on Intel's horizon is the AMD Hammer series of chips. In the IA64, Intel decided to make a clean break and go to a new architecture, incurring performance hit when running IA32 code. AMD instead blew out the IA32 architecture to 64 bits.

Expect a massive FUD attack from Intel in the coming months as they try to convince the world that their chips aren't really inferior to those from AMD.

Re:Intel has a Big Problem

[jtshaw]

Not to take the side of Intel... but as an Electrical Engineer with a good amount of interest in microprocessor design I have to say I like Intels move away from x86. X86 is definitly not even close to the best computer architecture out there.

It does make most sense for AMD to spend there time building a 64-bit x86 processor then it does a completely new architecture atm. But that doesn't mean we wouldn't all benifit greatly from dropping x86. Of course this can't be an overnight change, but it does need to happen.

Eventually you have to break backwards compatibility to move forward without making things ugly. x86 is old, it is overly complex, it is inefficient in many respects, it is time to say good bye. There is a reason the original designers only expected it to be a 3-5 year temporary solution.

Re:Intel has a Big Problem

[Jay Carlson]

Yeah. But IA64 made a lot of sense for Intel, given their market position when the effort started.

Think back to Rambus. (Back?) Intel got a lot of options on Rambus stock, provided that Intel could ship n percent of systems using Rambus memory. If Intel had no significant chipset competition, this would be easy. But it turned out there was enough competition to give people a choice of chipsets, and hence memory technologies.

Still, the P4 seems consciously designed to play to Rambus strengths. It chews memory bandwidth like candy through prefetching, which helps cover the higher Rambus latencies. I think Intel took a performance hit relative to AMD when the market preferred DDR SDRAM.

Anyway, it's a great story for Intel if they could control the future of PC technology. Rambus gets rich, Intel gets rich, you pay more. Three cheers for AMD for breaking this.

IA64 now looks similiar. If it wasn't for the aura of inevitability associated with the Itanic, nobody would be particularly thrilled with it. The initial SPECint numbers where it barely kept up with a SPARC were the first practical warning---if you don't count the schedule slips.

If IA64 was inevitable, everybody would have to pay up to transition to it. If it was the banner Win64 platform, a lot of places would be buying them regardless of relative price/performance. But because it looks like AMD will eat IA64 from the low end, and with POWER4 staring down from the high end, there's no longer an obvious niche where IA64 dominance is inevitable.

Four cheers for AMD.

Re:Intel has a Big Problem

[ryanvm]

In the IA64, Intel decided to make a clean break and go to a new architecture [...] AMD instead blew out the IA32 architecture to 64 bits.

Right, and what's interesting is that from a pure geek perspective, Intel did the right thing - AMD did not.

People have been griping about CISC and Intel's grotesque manifestations of x86 for years now. So they finally do the right thing and sit down with HP to spend a couple years hammering out a brand new design. And what do they get from the geeks? Nothing but boohs and hisses. You guys should be ashamed of yourselves. Did you really want a Pentium V, VI, etc.?

I'm glad Intel finally quit x86 cold turkey. AMD may have bought themselves a little time with the Opteron, but the sooner we're all off x86 the better.

Oh, and don't think that IA64 won't be looking MUCH better once we start seeing properly optimized software and later iterations of it. Intel is just like Microsoft, the first implementations invariably suck, but they always get better from there.

Re:Intel has a Big Problem

[jmauro]

They haven't quit the x86 cold turkey. That's part of the problem, it can STILL run unmodified binaries built for an 8086. IA64 has x86 grafted onto it. That's a big reason why its been delayed for so long and why the performance sucks. There is a lot of hardware on the chip to convert x86 instructions to IA64 instructions. Time that could of been spent making the rest of the chip better, has been spent verifying x86 conversion circuitry. Intel will never drop IA32. They learned that with the iAPX-432, i860, and the 8080. No one wants a chip unless its x86.

Re:Intel has a Big Problem

[Jay Carlson]

Or the short form of that:

AMD design engineers run into an Intel strategy exec at a conference. Intel guy says:

And my plan would have worked, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!

Re:Intel has a Big Problem

[Sloppy]

Eventually you have to break backwards compatibility to move forward without making things ugly. x86 is old, it is overly complex, it is inefficient in many respects, it is time to say good bye.

Everybody has been saying that for twenty years.

Twenty years. It is far too late for x86ers to worry about "making things ugly". That sacrifice was made in the early 80s. And it paid off.

The reason Intel is still in business, is because they knew what drove the market. Superior (in performance, power use, and just plain elegance) alternatives were around all along, but x86 still got all the sales. The reason for this is that the strongest market force is the need for good compatability with The Legacy. Against this force, all other considerations are irrelevant.

That's why Intel survived (flourished) in the 90s, and why AMD is about to kick their ass. AMD's embarrassing toadying to this principle in the Hammer design, shows that they understand. Intel attempt to raise the bar, shows that they have forgotten. Intel's chip is going to be the next 68k or PPC or SPARC. It'll be a niche, where everyone says how neato it is, and yet few actually use it. And in the mean time, AMD will be selling gazillions of Hammers.

Re:Intel has a Big Problem

[ryanvm]

Or maybe you mean the sooner we're all on Intel's DRM technology the better.

Exactly what Intel-sponsored DRM are you referring to? The only technology that Intel has introduced that bothered me was the short-lived serial number fiasco, and once the press put some heat on them they dropped that quicker than a pair of wet undies.

Most of the hardware companies out there are not too keen on DRM. How does it benefit them? It's the legislation sponsored by content providers that you have to worry about.

Hammer's final name

[joestar]

is "Opteron" (see http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma tion/0,,30_118_4699,00.html)

Re:Hammer's final name

[SuperCal]

If I were AMD I'd stick to Hammer. Hammer says: I'm hip, I'm happening; I can kick your a$$. I'm tough; I scare the hell out of the porkiest, poorly optimized code. Grrrrr Opteron says: I ware glasses.

Re:Hammer's final name

[Alan Partridge]

I believe that the new naming scheme is something like this:

Duron becomes Athlon Jr.
Athlon XP becomes Athlon
Clawhammer becomes Double Athlon
Sledgehammer becomes Bacon Double Athlon with Cheese

Re:Hammer's final name

[kigrwik]

"Do you know what they call the 'BaconDouble Athlon with Cheese in France ?"
"What, they don't call it the 'Bacon Double Athlon with Cheese' ?"
"Nah, they got some sense, they call it "Le Hammer"
"Le Hammer, sh*t"

(well , actually we'd pronounce it "le ameure" (no 'H' at the beginning and the usual adding of an 'e' at the end))

"We're french types-ah , why else do you think we have this outrrrrrrageous accent for ?"

Re:why would anyone buy intel?

[jridley]

I currently have two Intel P4 machines; my laptop (Inspiron 8200) and my machine at work. I would rather have gotten an AMD chip in both cases, but on the laptop, I was shopping for features and had to get an Intel processor based machine to get the other features that I wanted, and with the work machine, I took what they gave me.

Having two AMD machines at home, a Tbird 1400 and an Athlon XP 1700+, I'm seriously underimpressed by the P4 performance. As far as I can tell, the only reason to buy Intel anymore is out of pure inertia; they bring nothing to the table.

Non-Intel all the way!

[blankmange]

I have purchasing and building computers for over 10 years now and have yet to use an Intel cpu -- and have not missed out on anything. I cannot forsee abandoning the AMD platform anytime soon either -- bring on the Hammer (or Opteron or whatever they are calling it this month...).

ps -- where is the obligatory Beowulf cluster commentary on this??? I am shocked and appalled at this apparent oversight by my fellow /.'ers...

Re:Non-Intel all the way!

[jcoy42]

I have purchasing and building computers for over 10 years now and have yet to use an Intel cpu -- and have not missed out on anything.

If you don't have a basis for comparison, how would you know?

You certainly missed out on a whole slew of pentium FP bug panics.

arrg stop with the quake already

[tomstdenis]

Why is Quake the benchmark of a good processor? Maybe computers can do something other than cache intense graphics?

Gah.

Tom

Re:arrg stop with the quake already

[Fantanicity]

Why is Quake the benchmark of a good processor?

Because Quake is what will be used by people who believe 'reviews' and 'benchmarks' from sites like aceshardware.

Re:arrg stop with the quake already

[Syllepsis]

Why is Quake the benchmark of a good processor? Maybe computers can do something other than cache intense graphics?

You are right, and in fact Quake is not even a good benchmark for gaming in general. However, it is very memory intensive and was generally the P4's strong point.

Saying that the Opteron will smoke a P4 at Quake is saying that it smokes the P4 at its own game.

The test is a good indicator that if ...if... AMD can deliver at somewhere near the promised clockspeeds, Intel is going to have to ramp the P4 very high to compete.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of /. humourists

[Hektor_Troy]

*dread*

Amazing performance from a clock-limited proto

[Thagg]

If you manage to get through the slashdotting, the story in the tecchannel web pages is amazing. The prototype Clawhammer, while limited to 800 MHz, performed shockingly well on the few, but varied, benchmarks they subjected it to. It's interesting that both Intel and AMD teach the same lesson, that MHz doesn't determine performance. Unfortunately for Intel, they demonstrate it by the P4 not running as fast as the MHz would imply, where the AMD chips run far faster than MHz would imply.

I can't wait for these chips to get out there.

thad

Re:Amazing performance from a clock-limited proto

[systemapex]

I think the release of the Clawhammer shows the great divide between Intel and AMD's philosophies widening. Mind you, Intel's strategy isn't entirely bad, although it seems highly inefficient at first glance. Intel will happily fire back when the Clawhammer is released. What will they do? Quickly ramp up the clock speed towards 3.4-4GHz. I wouldn't be surprised if they also enable hyperthreading on "consumer" P4s. And, they'll increase the memory bandwidth of the P4 platform by releasing dual-channel DDR chipsets. As for AMD, this looks like one great chip. If AMD plays its cards right, I think it would REALLY make a splash in the server/enterprise market. Whereas, Intel can stay neck and neck with AMD on the consumer end, we've seen how great AMD's SMP platform is. Imagine a 4-way AMD hammer computer:-)

Re:I want one already

[ShavenYak]

Normally I would be a sarcastic dick and say 'about when Mozilla 1.0 comes out', but that won't work anymore.

Don't worry, though. You can still refer to indefinitely long time periods as 'about when the Hurd is released'.

Yes, but

[Xcrap]

Can that hammer smash a block of itanium without breaking?

Re:Yes, but

[Decimal]

Can that hammer smash a block of itanium without breaking?

Sledgehammer can. Clawhammer is better used for ripping out chunks of embedded Celeron.

Re:would be faster

[turgid]

AMD has effectively done that, if you've read any of the technical documents to see what they've done. The 64-bit mode has twice as many registers that are completely general-purpose (as opposed to the old CISC design of intel where one was a loop counter etc.) They've only implemented the simpler intructions in 64-bit effectively making it a 64-bit RISC. Since the K6, AMD processors have been superscalar RISC internally with a translation layer which breaks down complex x86 instructions into simpler RISC ones. It's still there for running legacy code, and completely transparent, i.e. it operates concurrently and with no performance penalty with the 64-bit instructions. The x86-32 registers are effectively just the top-right quarter of the x86-64 registers. Go and read AMD's docs. It's all there (and has been for the last 2 years).

Not an optimal test of a 64-bit platform...

[nahtanoj]

As has been said, Quake is only relevant to the chips concerned in that it only tests the 32-bit compatability of the Opteron. I would have like to see some tests that demonstrated the advantage of 64-bit processors over 32-bit processors. Granted, the reviewers only wanted to show benchmearks that the populous was familar with and they were pressed for time. Let's give them a break for that.

Nahtanoj

Re:Benchmarks

[10Ghz]

"This is a server chip. Benchmark it using a database, a web server, number crunching, etc."

In case you don't know, Clawhammer is meant for desktops/workstations. Hell, there's even a mobile version of it in the pipeline! Then we have Clawhammer DP (dual-processor) and Sledgehammer that are meant for servers.

Please, get your facts straight before opening your mouth!

Not the best architecture

[dpilot]

Not to take either side...

But if Intel was going to supercede a messy architecture like X86, I wish they'd done something better than IA64. While the jury is still out on the merits of IA64, it has some of the marks of Internal Politics on it. It sounds like a VLIW camp inside Intel sold some management on a renamed version of the basic approach, and the project gathered Corporate Inertia.

At the same time, it doesn't sound as if all of the VLIW problems have been solved on the compiler side, so it's not clear that IA64 is doing any more than a clean, modern architecture cable of OOO execution could have done.

Out of the Hammer series, I'm reminded/hoping for the phenomenon described in "Soul of a New Machine", where they managed to clean and extend the old architecture at the same time. By the time they were done, the old architecture was an ugly wart on the side of a new clean one. The fear was the new being an uglier wart on the side of an already ugly one, and they avoided it.

I don't know enough about Hammer to know what the case is. I have the documents, but haven't made time to read them. I've also heard some rumblings that some of the performance improvements to IA64 involve de-purifying it's VLIW to pick up OOO techniques. I've heard that VLIW was an attempt to sidestep OOO because those prolems were feared, but in the meantime the industry has learned how to do OOO pretty well.

Re:Not the best architecture

[Decimal]

It sounds like a VLIW camp inside Intel

*sigh*

I wish we'd just start calling these data types what they are - int16, int32, int64, float64, etc. It could save us all so much confusion. I mean, what are they going to call it when chips move to 512-bit? Uber Turbo Fantastically-Amazing Super Very Long Instruction Word? :/

Re:Not the best architecture

[RobKow]

VLIW is roughly synonymous with multiple parallel instructions per instruction word. Which is what makes the IW VL. :)

Re:Not the best architecture

[roca]

AMD's 64-bit "long mode" IS cleaner than ia32 protected mode:
-- No segmentation
-- Can address bottom 8 bits of every GP register (in other words, GP registers are truly general purpose now)
-- Some stupid instructions removed (e.g., BCD ops)
-- Recommend using SSE2 instead of the x87 horror

In addition you get the nice extensions of long mode:
-- 16 GP registers
-- 16 SSE2 registers
-- 64-bit ALU and memory ops
-- IP-relative addressing mode

If you look at long mode and ask, "what's really horrible about this?" I would only say instruction encoding and a large number of remaining wacko instructions. But together these give the x86 a performance advantage it has always had over other designs --- small code size and therefore better memory system performance for the instruction stream.

"Please Opteron, Don't Hurt 'Em"

[jeffehobbs]

...doesn't have the same ring.

~jeff

Re:Benchmarks

[MindStalker]

As the other guy said clawhammer is the consumer chip. Also Quake 3 is an excellent test of memory usage, bus speed, and in general overall performance of a computer. It uses everything the computer can give it, and more. Hmm can wait to start benchmarking computers with DOOM 3

Re:1667?

[Jugalator]

you've got to wonder what intel isn't doing to optimize.

FYI, we had a teacher in a processor architecture course that worked with optimizing algorithms and had worked for Intel. He left and started working for AMD instead. He openly said that Intel sucked. Guess what PR that gives when it's from the mouth of an insightful teacher. :)

So they must do something wrong over there. :) At least in the eyes of some optimizing guys. heh

The reason it's only 800MHz.

[zardie]

It's just a sample. AMD released the Clawhammer processor to manufacturers for demonistrations and testing, so they can develop the platform, so that, get this, benchmark results would not be released. Let's face it - who in their RIGHT MIND would benchmark an 800MHz CPU against the latest and greatest processors?

Obviously, these guys did. AMD will NOT be happy about this.

Also remember that the Opteron will be running at MUCH higher clock speeds upon release. I'd guess above the 2GHz range for sure, but AMD doesn't want anybody to know that. This also suggests that this lil' 800MHz sample could be very overclockable.

This is AMD's weapon that can really take a LOT of market share. Microsoft already have a Windows XP build ported to the Opteron/x86-64 platform. The Opteron runs cooler, as well.

One thing that disappoints me - I have not seen ONE PCI64 slot on any of these test boards!! I hope that this'll be worked out before release.

Re:1667?

[Jugalator]

Forgot one thing... He elaborated a bit about P4's and said that "Intel has an interesting super long pipeline in the P4's - it's gonna be interesting to see what clock speeds it requires to fill so it can be of use to 100%". :)

I guess we have an explanation of the diff in AMD/Intel clock frequencies right there...

Re:why would anyone buy intel?

[jridley]

BTW, what I do most is video encoding, mainly VCD and SVCD using TMPGEnc. For that application, the Athlon XP 1700+ (running at 1.47 GHz) absolutely BLOWS AWAY the P4 running at 1.6 GHz. I mean, it's a LOT faster, and the P4 has more RAM and everything so it has no excuse. AMD might finish a job in 2.5 hours and the P4 would take well over 3 hours to do the same job.
Don't ask me about game performance, hell, I don't even have Solitare loaded.

Sign...more of the same

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll start this by saying YES, I work for Intel. Hate me...whatever.

But its SOOOOO disheartening to see my fellow nerds and /.ers so ignorant on something like the computer scene. I'm talking about all the AMD LOVE and Intel hatred posts that always follows a news article about CPU's.

I can understand the love for Linux. A group of people programming for free, fighting a giant like Microsoft. But why should AMD garner the same sort of love and respect? AMD is a giant corporation itself, willing to screw you over. They'd charge you $2000 per processor if Intel wasn't around (and yes Intel would do the same).

Last week Intel dropped the prices of its processors. AMD was forced to follow suit, dropping their prices about 2 days later. Did the Slashdot community cheer Intel?

So along comes this news...AMD Opteron 800 MHz beats a Pentium 4 1.6 GHz by one frame pre second. I guess I fail to see why everyone is so excited?

I'll wager ANYTHING that when it ships, a 800MHz Opteron will sell for at LEAST twice the price of a Pentium 4 1.6Ghz.

Why do I even bother.

Re:Sign...more of the same

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Why the love? Perhaps because AMD has brought something to the table that was long lacking in the hardware scene: competition for Intel.

Seems to me that Intel used to spend months, even YEARS between significant speed increases of their processors. How long to go from a 486/33Mhz to a DX2/50? How long from the 486 to the Pentium? The Pentium Pro? Before AMD was on the scene Intel would milk every processor for a long, long time. People would pay through the nose for Intel chips. Intel's profit margins were grossly higher than anyone else's in the industry.

Now comes AMD, bringing similar (sometimes GREATER) performance than Intel chips at a FRACTION of Intel's price. A quick check of Pricewatch shows an Athlon 2100+ going for $177, while Intel's 2.2Ghz P4 (the likeliest competitor) is going for $238. The situation was even more out of wack last week until Intel lowered pricing. Do you think for one minute Intel lowered prices out of the goodness of their hearts? Of course they didn't. They did it because Athlons had been grossly undercutting them in price and performing every bit as well as Intel's finest.

Your predictions on the pricing of the Opteron are not valid as there will BE no 800Mhz Opteron. The Opteron is most likely going to debut around 1.5Ghz, give or take a couple of hundred Mhz. It will most likely cost twice what a 1.6Ghz P4 is costing right now, but that'll be just fine as it will most likely OUTPERFORM that 1.6Ghz P4 by about two to one. Things will be much closer with the Northwood B chips, but no matter what, AMD will almost certainly undercut Intel in pricing while delivering the same (within 10%) performance.

Face it: Intel is used to high margins and is unwilling to cut their pricing far enough to put AMD in the coffin. They are running on brand name and little else right now. If the situations were reversed and AMD had the household name and Intel was the relative unknown, does anyone for one moment think that anyone in their right mind would pay the lofty prices Intel is commanding right now? Of course not.

Re:ya missed the point

[afidel]

If you had read the article (and many others) the industry expects that if they can work out some silicone problems the opteron will debute at 1.6Ghz, or twice what the demos are running at. Since the current 800MHz parts are matching the 1.6GHz p4, Intel would need to be at 3.2Ghz to match the Opteron at release, since quatity shipments of the Opteron won't happen till Q2 03 and Intel's roadmap says that's when the 3.2GHz p4 will begin production I would say it is likely we will have the same situation we have today where about once a quarter based on production schedules one of the manufacturers will take the speed crown from the other just to have it retaken a few weeks later. It looks like unless the marketing muscle of Intel can misinform people into believing that just because they come with a bigger number attached that the p4's are SO much better that the Opteron should do well. Add in the 64bit icing on AMD's cake and it things start to look good for AMD in the low to mid range x86 server portion of the market.

Re:Er, yes?

[Syllepsis]

Yeah, I remove the heatsink from my machine while it's running all the time...
I saw the video too, and while it's amusing, I fail to see how this could even happen. The heatsinks on AMD CPUs is on so hard you need to work at it to get it off. Anybody who has one "accidentally" fall off didn't put it on right in the first place.

Haha... what I worry about is catastrophic "smash the flathead screwdriver through the motherboard while trying to loosen the clip" failure.

or also, catastrophic "heatsink clip breaks off the cheap plastic socket notch upon removal" faliure.

Much more likely...

If anything, I wish AMD would do more in the way of promoting bolted heatsinks rather than the cheesy clips.

call me with the real benchmarks

[dutky]

<YAWN> wake me up when someone does a usefull benchmark on these systems. I don't trust proprietary micro-benchmarks and I have no use for Quake III fps numbers. I'd prefer a SPECint/fp score set, but will settle for kernel/gcc/ddd compile times and a stream run. (I don't do enough FP work to propose a poor-man's substitute for SPECfp and the entire question of DB/transaction benchmarking is a tougher nut than I'm willing to crack).

Still, I'm eagerly awaiting the ClawHammer release. Every x86 box I've built for the last 5 years has been pure AMD, and I've been quite happy with them.

Re:Benchmarks

[pwagland]

Please, get your facts straight before opening your mouth!

What? And ruin a perfectly good slashdot tradition? Shame on you for even suggesting it! :-)

Intel should have bought Alpha years earlier ...

[BitMan]

As a fellow ECE, I'll give Intel a mark in the "innovative" column on IA-64. But the concepts of predication, EPIC and compiler-time optimizations we're NOT good enough to even make the new architecture competitive when not considering x86 compatibility. And Intel needs to be smacked for all those stupid extensions -- it's funny to see AMD accomodating them with less effort than Intel.

Alpha has always been the "64-bit RISC of RISCs" and they had binary translation techology c/o FX!32 so Linux/x86, NT/x86 and VMS/VAX apps could run on Linux/Alpha, NT/Alpha and VMS/Alpha, respectively. It was not only original, but using binary translation on the same OS, but different architecture, works far better for compatibility in software than general (any OS) architectural compatibility in hardware/microcode! With Alpha 364 at 0.13um would be kicking IA-64 butt. I mean, 3-year old Alpha 264 0.25um processors beat IA-64 at the same clock speeds!

Anyhoo, as a fellow EE/ECE, please read this post I made a few weeks ago and let me know what you think. It is entitled "How AMD and its partners are putting x86 back on the right track ... ". IA-64 was an ideal and novel concept, one that is not so good based in reality where good branch prediction is better than predication, and run-time optimization is just as important as compile-time. The Alpha 364 team predicted the "problems" with IA-64, which came true.

Re:Kernel Hackers

[autechre]

You've been living in a cave, right?

Yes, _some_ Athlon chipsets did have serious problems with early versions of the 2.4 kernel. But this has been fixed for a very long time. I know this, because I'm using one of those chipsets. Be sure that you're actually using a recent kernel, and that you've gotten the latest BIOS updates for your motherboard.

Also, there were never any problems with running Linux 2.2 on an Athlon.

why i cheer amd

[Indy1]

Quick background:

I am a long time system designer /upgrader / hardware IT geek. I've been working on Amd /Intel boxes since the 386 days. One reason why I cheer for Amd is that in the past few years, Intel seems bent on dragging all of us back into the 286 days of hardware being propeirty. Slot 1, Rdram memory interfaces, etc. Amd seems to have more of a commitment to sticking to industry standards, like (at the time) socket 7, sdram, ddr, etc.

Another reason why i tend to prefer Amd is the cynical marketing processor known as the P-4. The vast majority of benchmarks show that unless your running software thats heavily SSE-2 optimized, the Athlon's spank the P-4. Yet the P-4's are much more $$$$ due to all those wonderful Intel commercials with dancing morons in bunny suits, or some smucks painted up like a martian with a bad head cold. Instend of wasting all that money marketing, use it to improve your designs! Amd spends virtually nothing on marketing, and yet whenever they have a good design, their products sell extremely well. And dont get me started on intel's late ddr support, or the earily 845 chipsets that were sdram only, which had PATHETIC performace.

I guess the point of my whole rant is......I use Intel or Amd, or whoever, as long as they give me a good value for my (or my customer's) dollar. Give me a nice industry standard design. Dont foist some new marketing propierty design on me. If its gotta be propierty, it better be for one of two reasons: Considerably cheaper, or considerably faster. Intel in the past few years has NOT focused on giving the customer value. Amd has. Give me a 1000 dollars, and I can build either an Intel box, or an Amd box thats 20% faster then the Intel box, and just as stable. (I dont buy the Amd isnt stable arguement, it all comes down to knowing your hardware and how to configure it properly for stable operation.)

When Intel returns to delivering a product that is worth the price Intel charges for it, I'll use Intel again. Until then, I'll continue to laugh at ridiculous marketing schemes and do my research on which product is the fastest for the least money.

Fab on a ethnically cleansed viilage

[DABANSHEE]

Because Intel went & built their P4 fab on illegaly expropiated land belonging to Palestinians ethnically cleansed from a village near Gaza .

& have made no offer to compensate those villagers even though as far as the Geneva Convention, the Hague Convenention, the IDHR & the UN are concerned, they (the former villagers) still own that land.

Ace's is pretty good, actually.

[Rui del-Negro]

You're probably thinking of [someoneelse]'s Hardware (cough*tom*cough)...

To judge real-world performance, Quake is at least as good as any synthetic benchmark. Personally, I'd like to see benchmarks for 3DS MAX, TMPGEnc or Photoshop (because those are some of the programs I use daily). But between Quake and WhateverMark2002, I prefer Quake (and I don't even play Quake).

RMN
~~~