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New AMD Athlon 2600 Processor Released
Ertai writes "Looks like the latest AMD processor is out today, and is taking it right to Intel! Running at 2.13 GHz, the Athlon XP 2600+ is reviewed at Amdmb.com. The benchmarks show that the new Athlon on a 'revision B' Thoroughbred core with the frequency increase is able to beat out the Pentium 4 2.53 GHz processor on almost every test. Not only that, but it is a good overclocker as well! Check it out." AMD's press release on the topic also notes a Athlon 2400 was released as well.
Old school hackers everywhere rejoice.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
Now I just need to buy one of these badboys along with a new motherboard that will support it...
;)
Then switch to scsi so my hd can keep up. Change from PC133 to PC150 ram, might as well get a raid system, a new video card, and toss on a gigabit network while I'm at it
Anandtech has some alternative review links over here including the more in-depth (and perhaps more objective?) review, at Tom's.
Slow down!! All you young whipper snappers in such a hurry! Back in my day all we had was a Commodore 64, and we were *thankful* to have it!
My poor Pentium II 333 Mhz just can't keep up
*sigh*
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
But can the 2.1 Ghz Athlon run in SMP mode like the 2.5 Ghz Xeon?
Yeah...those Intel bunnies are probably furiously at work right now...
One thing that the Pentium 4 still seems to hold over the Athlon is operating temperature..
My 1.5GHz Athlon(1800 XP) still churns out a fair whack more heat than my 2.2GHz Pentium 4.
And no, a liquid nitrogen cooling system is not the answer to my problem..
If you read the review of the new processor by Anandtech you will find that the processor hasn't hit mass production yet. This is more of a paper launch much like what Intel did with the 1ghz P3 back when the 1ghz Athlon was released. It still won't be another month or two until we see mass production and then commericial avalibility. But the numbers sure do look nice :) Good to see AMD can still get some higher speeds out of the .13 process!
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Of course, Intel just announced it's 2.8GH due out next week.
Mr. Pabst has a review too.
Wait about 6 more days until the Pentium IV 2.8Ghz comes out....
2.8Ghz...my first computer didn't have that many MHz
Saw the same thing over at Toms Hardware Guide. And it was overclocked to 3100+
Remember: If you buy anything from spammers, you have a small penis.
This looks like a great chip but I am bummed that it is not supporting a 333 mhz front side bus! We have mb's w/ 333 mhz FSB's but we still can't take advantage of it. BTW- is there any significant advantage in running PC 2700 (at 333mhz) when the processor is only running 266 on the FSB (basically asynchronously)?
On the positive side, I hope this means a price drop on the 2200's, because I'm building a new system soon and want to take advantage of the thoroughbred (.13 micron) core.
Most Athlon XP's will run cooler than your Thunderbird. Your processor was more or less the cause of AMD's temperature rumors. :-(
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
AMD's 2.1ghz running better and faster then Intel's 2.5ghz. I wonder how Intel's marketing department is going to spin this?
Running at 2.13 GHz, the Athlon XP 2600+ is reviewed at Amdmb.com. The benchmarks show that the new Athlon on a 'revision B' Thoroughbred core with the frequency increase is able to beat out the Pentium 4 2.53 GHz processor on almost every test.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Games? Video compression/editing? You say a Celeron doesn't affect your daily work, even if it could be nicer for gaming. What about the millions whose daily "work" is gaming?
There are still customers who have reasons to continue upgrading their computers.
Heck, if I had to, I'd upgrade my computer to play NWN on. I don't need to, but I *would* have to if I only had a Celeron 600.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Well, it's not too long until AMD starts using their new Clawhammer architecture with the introductory processor being similar to a 3400+. And then it's a whole new ball game when it comes to scaling.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The only short-term way around heat in the chip itself is thinner fabs and lower voltages. Long-term you have to use new materials like copper and 4 state transisters.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
http://athlonxp.amd.com/overview/quantiSpeedArchi
Anyone who has taken an OS course (ugh, NachOS) knows the pains of TLB management -- I really would like to see the 'voodoo constants' they used. (Background: the clock-hand approximation of LRU is one of those "voodoo constants" -- most of physics is filled with "voodoo constants" -- likewise...programming an OS is filled with them. If you've ever looked at SPRITE and LFS, the i/o data burst rate suggests that the time-slice should be ~8 seconds -- etc etc. I'd _really_ like to know AMD's voodoo constants.) =)
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
Just because you only run Word, and don't run any CPU-bound jobs as part of your daily work, doesn't mean they don't exist. For development work, for example, builds are often CPU-bound, so a 2.4GHz machine will compile six times as quickly as your 400MHz machine. That's a big deal when a build takes 5 minutes instead of 30.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
It's just that most of the software most people use was built for the slower architecture. It's almost a catch-22. Software designers can't work outside hardware limitations and also have to cater to people who don't have top of the line PCs, and hardware manufacturers would have a hard time selling someone a computer that is twice as fast if they'll never notice for what they do with it.
What?
When the Athlon 2200 was released, one of its bragging points was that it ran flawlessly on the ECS K75SA board, by far the best board for the money.
Has anyone tested the new 2600 on the ECS? I'd like to hear if it runs, and if there's any issues.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Try OpenOffice.org as a replacement for MS Office. You'll find you need the 2+ GHz processor to get anything done.
finally, a developers perspective. i agree. i tried working on a 500mhz sunblade. sure, it was cool cause it was 64-bit and such, but builds did run a LOT faster on my 1.6 athlon. and it does make a difference for big projects. the last thing you want to be doing is waiting forever for a recompile.
then again, back in the day, people had to wait a DAY to recompile and the output of their program was handed to them. sure, this seems wasteful, but it also causes you to think just that little bit more, which makes for essentially much better code.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
I wonder if the Dresden fab where these are made is under water.
There is something wrong with your heat sink and fan unit if you have to do that. There is no reason that it should be "unbearable". 60^-70^ is completely normal for an Athlon.
Check your heat sink. Make sure that it has a proper level of silicone compound on the core (not too much). Don't use exotic heat sinks that look pretty, but suck at cooling.
I don't understand why people have a problem with heat. Fast electronics get hot. It is normal. An cheap-o AMD approved cooler should suit it just fine.
You might want to look at Serial ATA, then. And yes, Intel is one of the designers of the spec.
CPU performance will be a factor again within a couple of years. Software developers just have to get used to the headroom and realise the true implications of what they can do now. I'm working on some software right now (planning to release it under a BSD license now, but I have plans for a commercial release at some point in the future) which would heavily tax a modern CPU. And yes, it actually provides some *gasp* value. And no, it has nothing to do with video editing. :P
Be patient! We'll find something to do with your excess clock cycles soon enough.
I guess one of AMD's engineers finally noticed that Intel had passed them in performance, so they put the Hammer CPUs down for 5 minutes to slide back up to the top of the performance charts. Pity that Intel is supposedly releasing the 1.8's next Monday. Personally, I'm all for AMD coasting along with Athlon, so long as they're really throwing all their efforts into Hammer.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
This announcement is very important for one reason. Competition. Intel has had the CPU lead since the April release of the 2.4 GHz Pentium 4. The June release of the Athlon 2200 had to be a disappointment for AMD, since it not only was slower than the Pentium, but also had very little overclocking possibilities, which should have been possible due to the move from .18 to .13 micron production process. The only thing that the 2200 had going for it was price.
This was a serious problem for AMD and for competition in the CPU market. The Athlon line has always promised leading edge performance. It was key to legitimizing AMD as not just a low cost knock off of Intel, but competition where the margins are, at the top end.
Now AMD has regained if not a lead, then at least parity with Intel. And what is more important, several reviewers are saying there is a large overclocking potential with the 2400 and 2600 (The 2600 runs by default at 2.13GHz, and AnandTech overclocked to 2.4 and Tom's hardware overclocked to 2.6GHz, but only for a short time). What this means is that there is headroom in the design for much faster processors.
One thing to remember is that this is not only important for the desktop (where one could successfully argue that all this speed is overkill). This also effects the Linux server market, where this speed is needed.
Without serious competition at the top end, Intel produces slower, more expensive products. Competition is the key force driving the CPU market, and we have all benefited. Except maybe Intel's profits.
If the only application you run is word, wtf are you reading slashdot?
Ok, stupid rhetorical question, because some gamer with far too much time on his hands is just yearning for a few more fps, a few more Mhz, and that will make everything in his pathetic life okay. Until the next new processor.
But for the rest of us, who really needs it? I'm running dual-processor PIII-1Ghz in all of my machines. Why? Because they are dirt cheap and good enough. I can slap two PIII's on a dual m/b for around $300. And it screams (loud enough for just about anybody except Joe MegaGamer). I can do office work, CAD work, design work, run a server, etc, etc.
People talk about the "Mhz myth", but I think a lot of them miss the point. It isn't whether a 2.53Ghz P4 is faster than a 2.1Ghz Athlon. It's whether or not you even need that much processor speed in the first place. Does a web browser run any better on a 2.53Ghz P4 than on a 500Mhz PIII? I doubt it.
A friend of mine had his workstation (1.7Ghz P4) burn out on him, so I loaned him my laptop (700Mhz PIII) to use until he got a new board. A short while later, he asked me how I upgraded such an old laptop to a P4? I told him I didn't, it was a PIII. He was quite surprised because he didn't see much difference between it and his old workstation. If it hadn't been for the fact that he was heavily invested in DDR memory (which won't work in older PC133 SDRAM sockets), I think he would have opted for a dual PIII when he bought the replacement.
See, there's these things called compilers, and several people on Slashdot use them... occasionally.
"And like that
I don't know about you but now days as long as the processor is faster then 400mhz I really don't care that much.
Most people don't. The many people that do are the people who run CPU-bound applications like 3D games, CAD, simulations, or kludges like Office 2000.
Right now, I run Slackware and GNOME on a AMD K6 200MHz CPU with an overclocked memory bus (100MHz), and everything works pretty well. Mozilla takes a while to load, but it really isn't bad. Nautilus is unusable, but I don't use graphical shells, anyway, and don't care. The other less intensive applications, such as Gnumeric and GNUCash, work just fine.
The only reason to get a faster CPU is when it truly increases productivity or makes something practical that previously was not. For general productivity applications, computers have been adequate for a very long time.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Seriously. Now, when I'm randomly accessing large volumetric datasets, my CPU can stall for a few dozen more cycles on a cache miss. Woo-hoo!
Someone tell me when they start putting around 32 MB of level-three SRAM cache on the motherboard. Then maybe I'll be more interested in CPU speed improvements.
Try OpenOffice.org as a replacement for MS Office. You'll find you need the 2+ GHz processor to get anything done.
This is bullshit. I run OpenOffice.org on a five-year-old Sun workstation (440MHz CPU), and OpenOffice is just fine. It doesn't have the quick-load feature enabled, so the only one thing I can complain about is the start-up time.
I think your statement is more accurate if you are talking about Microsoft Office 2000, which is the real fat-boy of office software.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Hopefully they can undo the damage that Cyrix did, releasing a "PR400" part that was 400 only when compared to a theoretical Pentium with a FSB of 66MHz running Doom, but only had about the performance of a 266Mhz P2 running Quake, which would have made a much more reasonable comparison for the time period.
For a much better discussion of the subject, check out JC's.
Bryan
Clue: You're welcome.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Does the 2600 play my Atari cartridges?
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
In 10 years you will be talking about how any chip over 30 Ghz is fine, there is no reason to upgrade to the new 50Ghz.
If we only get 50GHz in ten years, then something is seriously wrong (Motorola syndrome?)...
My calculations are around 5 THz in ten years, well have 50 GHz in 2007-08.
-- all calculations are very rough and don't take actually reality (like transistor size and such) in to account --
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
yuk yuk yuk. My 600Mhz Duron does everything (including OO 1.0) I do bar 3 just fine. Winamp's visualization studio absolutely murders my CPU - it won't run bigger than about 512x384 below 100% CPU load. High-quality two-pass divx encoding takes almost 12 hours for an average-length movie. Audio encoding is also unnecessarily slow whether it be using lame with -r3mix or ogg vorbis.
Anyone who claims a 600mhz CPU is too slow for office apps needs more memory and/or a faster hard drive and/or a motherboard that doesn't have the magic numbers (i810, i820) on it.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
this new cpu allow to people to convert their CD to MP3 even faster!
MP3 and Ogg encoding at archival quality already run faster than realtime on my old PIII 866 MHz. If the encoder can compress the audio faster than the CD drive can read it reliably[1], then what's the point of being able to encode faster?
[1] CD drives typically rip audio CDs slower than data CDs because Red Book audio carries less error correction coding than data or MP3 audio.
But do you even really need the encoding to run faster? I typically put a few CDs into CDex and then encode them in the background while I read /.
Will I retire or break 10K?
... For development work, for example, builds are often CPU-bound, so a 2.4GHz machine will compile six times as quickly as your 400MHz machine. That's a big deal when a build takes 5 minutes instead of 30.
Builds are CPU bound?
6x processor speed -> 1/6x compile time, 30m -> 5m?
Total BS. Disk I/O is a compile bottleneck. RAM I/O is a compile bottleneck. Have you actually compiled non-trivial programs?
Games?
All my NES, Super NES, Game Boy, and Game Boy Advance games run just fine on my old Dell with a PIII 866. Games != bleeding edge 3D games. Besides, nowadays, bleeding edge 3D performance depends more on the video card than on the x86 CPU.
Video compression/editing?
Without training, most budding directors will make crap even worse than that movie Dana Carvey just starred in. If I had enough money for a cinematography class, I would probably also have enough money for a box with the new processor in it.
Will I retire or break 10K?
for example, builds are often CPU-bound, so [build speed will scale linearly with CPU clock]
Wrong. Building a large project is highly disk I/O bound. Normally, GCC on my PIII 866 MHz compiles the one source file I have changed within about two seconds. Linking takes the most time because it has to retrieve dozens of .o and .a files to produce a .exe file.
Only the builds on "Clobber" tinderboxes, where the system does a "make clean" before rebuilding the software, are CPU-bound. Builds on customers' machines are CPU-bound, but they can run while the client is reading some web comic (I/O and user bound).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Soon, 1.5 V Thoroughbreds should be available at 1.4 - 1.6 GHz (1700+, 1800+, 1900+). These run at around 50 W, compared to about 65 W for the 1.75 V Palomino.
And also, speed is really important if you play games.
One month ago, I ran Super Mario Bros. 3 at full speed on an NES emulator running on a Pentium 100 computer owned by a school. My current sub-GHz machine runs Game Boy Advance games at full speed. Games != bleeding-edge 3D games.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm running OpenOffice on a 533mhz celeron with 128mb of RAM and it runs just great, I also have the quickstart feature disabled, so the only slow thing is the startup time.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
How does Combat look on these babies?
Mortal or non-Mortal?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I could see holding back on multiproc systems when the big manufacturers were preloading Win98/ME, but doesn't Win2kPro and WinXP support multiproc systems? I, for one, will likely make my next PC a multiproc machine.
Darn you.
When I first read of 'bunnies', I thought of Energizer.
Then, for half a moment, it occurred to me that you might be referring to certain attractive-looking females employed by a certain photographic magazine.
Finally, I realized you were talking about the Intel advertisements with the guys in those colorful 'bunny-suits'.
Now, the image I can't get out of my mind is of shapely percussionists in colorful environmental suits. With large, fuzzy ears.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
2600, is that the temperature in Celsius, or Farenheit?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
According to Toms Hardware Guide, the Athlon performance is severly reduced by VIAs bad memory handling.
Now wouldn't it be a good investment for AMD to help VIA getting an improved memory handling? Given that most Athlons are used with VIA chipsets, it would make Athlons perform much better, and VIA probably wouldn't be opposed to free help.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It boggles the mind that now it takes a >500 MHz processor just to run a word processor with reasonable response. I used to run a word processor on a 7.8 MHz computer, and it was not blazingly fast, but it did OK. Where are all those compute cycles being used?
hence my disclaimer about reality...
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
I just upgraded from a Pentium to a dual Athlon MP 2000+ system at home. It raised the temperature in the 11x11 foot room by 8 degrees.
Myth/rumor: The Athlon XP is a furnace of unimaginable heat! I'm getting a Pentium IV! Even though they are slower and more expensive, at least they won't dim the lights then melt them!
The fastest Athlon XP chips dissipate less than 5% more heat than the fastest Pentium IV chips. They can, however, handle more heat before cooking.
Myth/rumor: Tom's Hardware guide is "more objectvice" or even "Tom's Hardware guide is reliable"
I can't believe I read this, even in a Slashdot comment.
Tom's Hardware Guide is infamous among forums such as those at StorageReview.com and among people that actually know what they are talking about for being little more than a hardware review tabloid. Read the reviews! They come to illogical conclusions and sensationalize most of their reviews.
Read the Athlon review in question:
This is AMD's admission that the previous performance scale was set too high, especially when it came to the higher clock speeds.
Umm... Could it be that because the CPU is advancing where the other components such as memory and FSB are not, that it is possible that AMD added another 66MHz to make sure the rating system was still accurate? It isn't like system performance scales linearly with CPU speed when everything else sits still. Whoever thinks that Tom's Hardware is a good place to get hardware reviews doesn't have a clue about hardware!
Read Tom's glorious review of the KT266a vs the Nforce where despite there being less than a 5% difference between the chipsets and despite the Nforce outperforming every one of the many KT266a that outnumber it greatly in some tests, their "conclusion" was Conclusion: KT266A Trounces nForce 420D - Soltek is Front-runner
Tom's has had some good reviews, and most of the reviews BY TOM HIMSELF are pretty good, but most of the reviews are from his editors, and the proof is in the reviews--they are making Tom's Hardware more of a tabloid than a legit hardware review site, riding on the reputation that Tom made for the site years ago. I know, I was once an avid Tom's reader and am disgusted how the once clear and thoughtful reviews have turned into manic drivel.
If you want reviews that are actually well thought out, intelligent, and have sane conclusions based on mere facts, try Ace's Hardware, Ars Technica, and Anandtech.
Ace's Hardware reviews are clearly the best and most researched, but they are few and far between. Want an excellent review of current and future memory technologies written with the help of actual engineers? Read Ace's Hardware.
Ars rarely has hardware reviews, but when they do the reviews are good.
Anandtech is a good all-around major review site that as far as I can tell has never been biased, but is a little bit too PC for me. (that's Politically Correct, not the other one)
Is Tom's biased? Read the reviews! They aren't biased in a classic sense as far as I can tell, that is, they don't "always favor Intel" or "Always favor AMD"; rather they are often biased against one or the other. They will post stories that are clearly opinionated bullshit from ignorant tech writers that tend to have a bias against one or ther other. This is a mystery to me as they surely piss off both AMD and Intel all the time, and don't make any friends in the process. Overall, I wouldn't say that bias is a big problem at Tom's Hardware as much as stupid technical writers that don't know what they are talking about is a problem.
Want more examples? Point me to a review at Tom's and I'll tell you what's wrong with it (if there is anything wrong with that particular one)
At Tom's--read the reviews by Tom, but everyone else is not trustworthy.
Myth/rumor:
When you hold a seashell up to your ear, you can hear the sea.
Fact: You can hear the same sound reflections by holding a drinking cup up to your ear. It has nothing to do with the ocean. The question is, if you hold a Unix shell up to your ear, can you hear the C?
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Yeah, now try installing Gentoo with X and KDE on there :)
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
Must be a personal thing - I used the original shipping version with MSDN and have had no problems...albiet I'm just using it like a new version of visual studio and not the .net stuff.
What must really be fustrating is after spending $465, they probably wanna charge you some ungodly minute rate to be told how to get around the problems in their products if you can't figure it out yourself.
> he asked me how I upgraded such an old laptop to a P4? I told him I didn't, it was a PIII.
I bet if you ran Adaware on his old machine you would have your answer. It's not that your computer was running just as fast as his, it's that his computer wasn't running as fast as it should. I love going to client call that says his/her computer is running much slower than it used to. Adaware plus a few minutes waiting and you have yourself an easy $75 service call (and they think you are a genious for fixing it so fast). Thank you spyware and thank you Lavasoft.
There is the possibility he had a slow hard drive too. A slow hard drive can affect performance greatly. I know Dell and Compaq seemingly love to throw 500rpm drives in their machines to lower the price. Dude, you're getting a slow piece of shit.
How about a hot-swapped hard drive? 100 gig drives are a hundred bucks - you could get one for each day of the week. Get two sets, so you have last week's stuff too.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
See, I just bought my 1700 XP processor, now I want this one..... All hail the AMD Gods.......
I have an Athlon 1700. I *know* that it's actually 1.47GHz, but who really cares? It's what the product is called.
It's well documented that megahertz is not a reliable indication of processor performance between processor architectures. It's really only useful for differentiating all Pentium 4's from each other, and all Athlon's from each other.
In that case, calling it an "Athlon 1700" is just as useful as calling it a "Pentium 4 2.8GHz". It's really only a model number.
I think generally, if your computer is primarily used for business software and web surfing, even an Intel Celeron A 400 MHz will suffice.
The big bottlenecks nowadays are insufficient amounts of system RAM and a too-slow hard drive. Given the price of hardware nowadays, going to 256 MB of RAM and getting a modern hard drive that is ATA-33 compatible (today's ATA-100/133 drive can run in ATA-33 mode) speeds things up quite a lot, mostly because 1) you don't have to do hard drive memory swapping and 2) data read/writes on the hard drive is so much faster.
For example, a system using the Intel 440LX chipset and a Pentium II 266 MHz CPU actually runs quite well (even with Windows XP Home Edition or a contemporary Linux distribution with everything installed) with a memory upgrade to 256 MB and switching to today's fast hard drives.
I'm not sure why you claim that I'm wrong when you provide a number of examples of CPU-bound build enviromnents. In fact, your post states fairly clearly that only incremental builds are disk-bound
Only building the whole package is CPU-bound. A developer typically does not sit for x hours a day in front of any of the machines that build the whole package; she mostly sits at her own workstation, which builds the software incrementally. And often, in lower-profile projects, she doesn't run clobber builds except on a branch, right before a release.
(Or do your files really take more than 2 seconds to load from disk [during the link phase]?)
Yes. I don't always have the privilege of a RAID 5 array. I often hack on a laptop, and laptop computers' low-wattage hard disk drives are notorious for their slow performance. Opening several dozen .o (object code) and .a (object code library) files requires several dozen seeks across the hard disk. In addition, some cross-compilation target architectures use a post-link tool to add asset data to the finished executable. The disk hits add up.
Will I retire or break 10K?
THat would be....hmmmm...nearly a year ago now.....
Advanced users are users too!