AMD's Athlon XP 2700+

kraven_73 writes "According to some Taiwanese sources, AMD will officially reveal its Athlon XP 2700+ processor on the 7th of October. Most interesting is that this CPU will have a 333 MHz FSB. The first implementation of this increased FSB on Athlon platform. It is expected that the novelty will be based on the latest Thoroughbred core stepping 1, just like the current Athlon XP 2400+ and 2600+, and will work at 2.17GHz."

Comments

What's the point anymore

[ObviousGuy]

To bring down the price of slower chips to reasonable levels, that's what the point is.

Expensive bleeding edge crap.

Tom's Hardware Comments

[Winnipenguin]

TH has this info and advice:

Once again, Intel wages war on AMD, fighting to attain the fastest desktop CPU. AMD is sure to launch the Athlon XP 2800+ soon (in October at the latest), so that it will be able to keep close on the heels of its arch-rival. Intel has also made preparations of its own, with the P4/3066 up its sleeve.

At any rate, the real winner is the ambitious end user, who will be able to choose between the P4/3066 and the Athlon XP 3000+ by the time Christmas rolls around. Both the successor to the P4 and the AMD Hammer won't be available until next year.

As always, price-conscious buyers who are interested in getting the best price/ performance ratio are a bit better off with an AMD Athlon XP than with a P4..

Link here:
http://www17.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q3/0208 26/p4_2 800-16.html

Glad they chose to up FSB

[McCart42]

Most hardware review sites I've read commented that upping the FSB speed was the best way AMD could reclaim the speed crown...Intel regularly uses much higher FSB clocks with their chips (in the neighborhood of 533 MHz). I may be missing some crucial aspect of AMD's strategy but that seems to be what is holding them back right now, from a high-level standpoint.

Re:Glad they chose to up FSB

[Alan Partridge]

I'm sorry, but Intel does NOT use a 533Mhz FSB speed any more than AMD use a 333Mhz one. The "533" refers to 4x133Mhz (it's a 133Mhz bus with QDR tech) whereas the "333" refers to 2x167Mhz (it's a 167Mhz bus with DDR tech). Incidentally, I think that Apple is the first company (unbelieveably) to have implememted a 167Mhz FSB in their new "DDR" G4 designs. Shame the G4 chip isn't up to using the (otherwise fast) bus in DDR mode. Oh well, roll on the fabled MPC 7470!

Re:Glad they chose to up FSB

[Xeriar]

Intel uses a Quad-pumped architecture, that is, in a given cycle, the flip-flops trigger four times (beginning rise, ending rise, beginning fall, ending fall).

AMD only has a 'double-pumped' architecture, where the flip-flops trigger on both the rising and fallig edge of the clock signal.

Unless AMD licenses Intel's technology, they really can't compete in that arena for awhile. There are other strengths to the AMD platform that help bridge the gap, for example.

Re:Glad they chose to up FSB

[taeric]

Note he said beginning rise, ending rise and not beginning high, ending high. The rise/fall of a signal are not connected.

Now, I am not saying the original poster is correct, as I don't know. However, what you said makes no sense. If the next rise happens as soon as the previous fall ends... then you are saying that the hold states of the clock are as fast as the rise/fall states. I HIGHLY doubt such a statement. This would essentially be saying that as fast as we can make a clock switch is how fast the clock goes. This is CLEARLY not the case.

Did I missunderstand you?

Re:Glad they chose to up FSB

[FueledByRamen]

I was under the impression that the four cycles were:
12341234...
_|-|_|-|

1 = low (0)
2 = rising edge
3 = high (1)
4 = falling edge

I am probably wrong about this, but I thought I might as well throw it out there.

Re:Glad they chose to up FSB

[tshak]

AFAIK - and this is based on earlier P4 systems - although Intel's bus has a higher throughput it also has a higher latency. Only applications that demand throughput gain an advantage, while many applications can actually run slower on these "quad pumped" busses. DDR memory has the same problem when compared to SDR memory, but nowhere to the degree of RAMBUS memory. AMD seems to have found a balance. For the future we can only hope that QDR will not have the same latency issues. However, I share a similar concern and I wonder why AMD didn't go to 400mhz DDR. You don't have the latency of the Intel platform, but you have great throughput. I can only speculate that it's because AMD runs at a much lower clock rate that the extra bus speed would do little for real world performance.

The move to 166mhz bus is nice but

[DeafDumbBlind]

Might as well wait for the Hammer.
The built in memory controller should to wonders for latency. Of course the 64 bit stuff will be a nice future feature to have.

Re:The move to 166mhz bus is nice but

[ackthpt]

Might as well wait for the Hammer.

This, of course, is the risk of having a really sexy new item coming down the pipeline. At some point those Xtreme gamers/programmers/modelers/or just people who like to have the latest and most expensive thing on their desk to play solitaire with, begin to hold back on purchases and wait for that new item.

I'm on the fence, but at the rate I've actually done anything to build my next system (hey, I did buy a cabinet! :-) the wait for the Hammer shouldn't be much longer (why does this name summon the memory of the artwork inside PF:The Wall, hmm, something there, but what...)

Fortunately for AMD, not everyone is holding off and all these really spifftacular improvements of , what will eventually be $60 processors in a couple years, are pretty damn exciting.

Re:The move to 166mhz bus is nice but

[Nameles]

I'm personally waiting for Hammer to come out, as well as serial ATA, and whatever the next DDR speed is going to be (400?) before I overhaul my 1.2ghz Tbird 640megs of SDRAM and 265gigs of IDE drives.

Re:The move to 166mhz bus is nice but

[ackthpt]

I'm personally waiting for Hammer to come out, as well as serial ATA, and whatever the next DDR speed is going to be (400?) before I overhaul my 1.2ghz Tbird 640megs of SDRAM and 265gigs of IDE drives.

Looking over at Asustek and a few other mobo makers, these things should (barring the usual initial bugs) provide some serious stomping power, for apps compiled to run native 64. Expect games to take some serious advantage of this, and as has been noted by CNN, gamers can drive the high end PC market. Naturally, this means everyone else benefits from the spending of the trailblazers.

Re:The move to 166mhz bus is nice but

[Christopher Thomas]

I'm on the fence, but at the rate I've actually done anything to build my next system (hey, I did buy a cabinet! :-) the wait for the Hammer shouldn't be much longer (why does this name summon the memory of the artwork inside PF:The Wall, hmm, something there, but what...)

I'm waiting too, but that's because I don't think I'll have to upgrade for at least a year.

Remember how long it took for Athlon DDR chipsets to stabilize, and for the prices to drop. I'm not expecting a reliable, affordable Hammer/Opteron system until at least mid-2003.

Now's as good a time to buy as any (just not for the top-of-the-line models, with the speed war going on).

Re:The move to 166mhz bus is nice but

[ncc74656]

Might as well wait for the Hammer. The built in memory controller should to wonders for latency. Of course the 64 bit stuff will be a nice future feature to have.

I thought for a while that I'd do that, but I started getting tired of 12-hour SVCD encoding jobs (which is what you get with a 1.0-GHz Athlon when you use TMPGEnc at some of its highest-quality settings). Besides, a single-processor Hammer setup looked like it was going to be more expensive than the dual-processor Athlon MP that I just put together. With 12-hour jobs cut down to just 3 hours, life is good. :-)

(Whether a single Hammer would be faster than a dual Athlon MP is still an open question, especially with 32-bit apps. I've heard Hammer is supposed to be 10-25% faster at the same clock speed when running 32-bit apps, but one processor would still need to be damn fast (probably 3500+ or better) to keep up with a pair of Athlon MP 2100+s.)

Re:The move to 166mhz bus is nice but

[babyruth]

(why does this name summon the memory of the artwork inside PF:The Wall, hmm, something there, but what...)

The protagonist in PF The Wall leads a group called The Hammerheads, with their logo being 2 hammers in an X. Just cross your forearms over your head w/ closed fists in a crowded place and see if anyone notices...

Re:The move to 166mhz bus is nice but

[geoswan]

Might as well wait for the Hammer. The built in memory controller should to wonders for latency. Of course the 64 bit stuff will be a nice future feature to have.

Let me share a budgeting lesson from the game of Monopoly, that I feel is on-topic here.

In Monopoly, practically everyone wants to acquire Park Place and Boardwalk. Sure, when your rivals hit those properties, once they have hotels, they have to dig deep. But Those properties are expensive to buy, and expensive to develop. Whereas Baltic Avenue, and its sibling, are very cheap. Developing houses and hotels on those properties is also very cheap. And yet, when you do the math, the return on investment on those two properties is the best on the board -- better than Boardwalk.

The new machine, the cutting edge machine? You know you have to pay a premium for it. You know its value will depreciate very quickly. Its value will depreciate much more quickly than a computer built around a more mature technology.

Sure, I figure buying the latest, whiz-bang thing at premium prices, so you can have bragging rights, is a fine strategy, if you are rolling in dough. If I won the lottery, I would go right out, and buy a premium machine, with lots of memory, and 512MB of DDR.

But if you are on a budget, I don't think it is a good strategy. A lot of my baby-boomer pals hold off on buying a new computer, until they can pay for a premium, latest whiz-bang thing. When I ask them why, they say, "well, I want it to last me for five years or more. So I have to get a really powerful machine, so I won't be left too far behind."

I figure that, if you are on a budget, you should buy the technology that is a year or three behind technology's cutting edge. It is a lot more affordable. So, you can afford to replace it, or upgrade it, more frequently. I figure, on average, my computer is more up to date if I upgrade it every two years, but only to the level of last year.

My last CPU was a K6-2 500MHz. I paid about $75 CAD (about $50 USD) for it. I used it for about two years. Last week I bought a Duron 1100 for $75 CAD, and an ECS K7A motherboard, for another $75 CAD. Next year maybe I will replace my old PC133 RAM with DDR. Maybe I will get an Athlon 1400, when its price drops to $75 CAD.

No, it doesn't give me bragging rights. But, on average, I figure I am farther ahead than if I blew all my dough on a premium machine I expected would last me five years.

My buddies who buy that latest whiz-bang thing are happy with their bragging rights for the first six months, and then, if they follow their budget, they have to sit through 54 months of feeling their computer was an expensive lemon.

Re:The move to 166mhz bus is nice but

[Nameles]

I'm a gamer in and out. Right now I'm a bum computer technician, since there weren't many games worth playing over the summer (no good NWN mods, I suck at WC3 so therefore I didn't buy it) as well as no console games. When I'm a PCGamer though, I do go full force (within reasonable budgets and current deals my friends have on their old hardware).

I'm personally waiting for the Giga-byte version of what I stated up above, still with onboard RAID, as well as USB 2.0 and Firewire. I give them a couple of months and they should have a high end board with it, and in a few more all of them. They already do on-board LAN and 6 USB (4 1.1 and 2 2.0 I believe) and FireWire onboard (later two through headers). I've used them constantly in building machines (pretty much all the non-heavy duty "real" file servers I've built use GB boards, and I like their product.

BTW, I checked Asus after the fact, and they don't have any boards displayed for Hammer, unless the XP boards will take it (which I should probably know but don't).

Re:The move to 166mhz bus is nice but

[jonadab]

> In Monopoly, practically everyone wants to acquire Park Place and
> Boardwalk. Sure, when your rivals hit those properties, once they
> have hotels, they have to dig deep. But Those properties are
> expensive to buy, and expensive to develop. Whereas Baltic Avenue,
> and its sibling, are very cheap. Developing houses and hotels on
> those properties is also very cheap. And yet, when you do the math,
> the return on investment on those two properties is the best on the
> board -- better than Boardwalk.

Okay, I'm going to follow your line of reasoning way off
topic here, but rest assured I will bring it back full circle
and return to the topic at hand eventually...

Both are poor investements, if they are the only thing you develop.
Boardwalk takes too long to develop and doesn't get hit with any
frequency, and Baltic and Mediterranean with hotels can get hit
three times and not pay you enough to land once on any serious
developed property. Sure, they pay for _themselves_, but you
can't build a game strategy around that, unless you plan to forego
dice and land on your own property every time.

The light blue, orange, and yellow properties are the ones you want.
The orange ones (New York and so on) are best. Build them to three
houses as quickly as you can for optimal return on investment. When
you can afford it, push them on to hotels for the extra income. The
yellow (Marvin's Gardens and whatnot) are a bit harder to get
developed, and the light blue (Connecticut et cetera) max out too
low, but they still give a good return on your investment. If you
can get both these sets, build the light blue ones up first, and
pray the orange ones don't get built up by someone else before you
can get serious with the yellow ones, because a couple of lands
on St. James will wipe out your chances of building up any
investment capital. In a pinch, you can substitute the magenta
or red ones, but it's an uphill battle, because the magenta (St. Charles &c) cost more than the light blue to develop and don't get
hit enough to pay off like the orange, and the red ones compare unfavourably with the orange and yellow on the same grounds. I
should mention that the light blue set by itself is inadequate
to allow you to compete in the game. However, it can be good
enough to let you get another set developed that you otherwise
could not (say, the red ones).

In the event _two_ powers emerge with sustaining levels of hotel
income, then the properties on the fourth side of the board (green
and dark blue) become important.

If you play with an open market (trades and sales among players
permitted), it is _always_ a good investment to purchase any
bank-owned property you land on except the utilities, because
developable property is worth more than the bank price. (Usually
substantially more.) If you play with a closed market, you have
to be more selective in the early game, so you can afford to get
one complete set. Also: resist the urge to believe that the
rents on undeveloped properties (excepting railroads when there
are no serious (>Baltic&Med) developed properties yet) can have
an impact on the outcome of the game; it ain't so.

> The new machine, the cutting edge machine? You know you
> have to pay a premium for it.
This is true.

> You know its value will depreciate very quickly.
While also true, this statement is meaningless. _All_ hardware
depreciates rapidly, whether it was top-of-the-line or bargain
basement or used. Today's $200 system will be worth approximately
nothing in sixteen months.

> Its value will depreciate much more quickly than a
> computer built around a more mature technology.
Only because it has further down to go. What is more interesting
is not the resale value but the replacement value and the cost
of maintaining it at a usable level.

> well, I want it to last me for five years or more. So I have to
> get a really powerful machine, so I won't be left too far behind

There is merit in this approach. Now, "really powerful" may be
overkill, but you do want to get a system that will be able to
be maintained with affordable upgrades for several years, for two
reasons. First, it means you can get comfortable with the system
and finally get to the point after about two years where you
_don't_ discover every _week_ something you hadn't got around to
installing yet that you need (PAIN), and second because upgrading
is a good deal cheaper than replacing, so the costs ballance out
if you strike a decent happy medium.

Now, it's possible to go to far. A Boardwalk system is not
for the average user. It's price-prohibitive. But it's possible
to get a system that can be developed (upgraded) to a decent and
reasonable level, like New York and St. James, for a pretty
reasonable price, and it will last you a lot longer than a
Baltic system. My computer right now is over four and a half
years old (well, most of it is; some components are newer).
It will be at _least_ another year, maybe two, before I have
to replace the system. (Some components I'll be able to keep,
of course, but I'm talking motherboard and CPU at least, and
probably some other major parts too at that point.) If you
bear with me, the ecconomics of this will bear me out.

Discounting the monitor, which is really a subject for another
thread, I paid $1550 for this sytem new, in 1998. It's a
PentiumII/233 system, but the motherboard was a nicer one with
lots of expandability. I could have got a system for around
$1200 at the time, but it would have been much lower end, not
nearly as upgradeable. For example, when RAM prices dropped,
I eventually beefed up my system to 512MB of RAM. If I'd bought
a $1200 system, it would have maxed out lower than that, and I'd
have replaced it by now; instead of spending $80 on RAM a few
months back, I'd have probably spent $400 on a new system. PLUS
I'd have had the hassle of losing my nice, comfortable system with
everything I use already installed and going back to an out-of-the-
box system with virtually nothing installed, at least two years
sooner than necessary. Compare:
$1200 + $400 + PAIN = $1600 + PAIN
$1550 + $80 + comfort = $1630 + comfort
In addition, I had a somewhat better system ad interim. My
conclusion: Yeah, Boardwalk systems are for people rolling in
dough, but Baltic systems are for people who enjoy pain. Buy St.
James systems (or at least Connecticut systems) and stay sane.

What this means is, you don't have to wait until you can afford
a Hammer system. All you have to do is wait until the news of
Hammer systems hitting the market drives the prices on moderate
Athlon XP systems through the floor, and buy one of those (St.
James) or a good quality non-bargain-basement Duron system
(Connecticut). If you feel guilty about saving money at the
expense of a struggling computer industry, make a donation to
your favourite OSS vendor or something.

Disclaimer:
People who use a lot of CPU power may find that things
break down differently. Most of what I do leaves the CPU
sitting idle most of the time, so I find that things like
RAM and drive space (I'm a multibooter (six OS installations
on the same hardware and counting...), which uses up drive
space several times as fast) are more important. If you do
a lot of raytracing or calculate the factorials of large
primes, you'll have to upgrade the CPU, and that costs more.

In Today's Rumor Mill Report...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, my ears are now tuned to the Hammer frequency.

Subject, of course, to pricing ;-)

Re:In Today's Rumor Mill Report...

[scotch]

Did I hear you right? Is it almost Hammer Time?

Re:In Today's Rumor Mill Report...

[WIAKywbfatw]

In my crystal ball I can see an email inviting Intel marketing people to an upcoming strategy meeting.

The subject line is becoming clear... it says... Stop Hammer Time!

Re:In Today's Rumor Mill Report...

[MisterBlister]

The subject line is becoming clear... it says... Stop Hammer Time!

Stop... Hammer Time? AMD is 2 legit 2 quit. Intel can't touch this!

Re:In Today's Rumor Mill Report...

[checkyoulater]

Stop... Hammer Time? AMD is 2 legit 2 quit. Intel can't touch this!

Please Hammer! Don't hurt em!

Re:In Today's Rumor Mill Report...

[ArthurDent]

It doesn't matter because you can't touch that!

Power usage?

[MiTEG]

Intel was just hit by the bug (or was it planned?) of the increased power consumption of higher clocked P4's on the same die. This seems to be a lot higher clock speed than the top of the line Athlon XP now, and I think it already uses around 70 watts. Is there any chance AMD will be struck with the same problem and forced to design new MB's supporting the power requirement boost? If it doesn't happen with this model, perhaps it will in the future.

Re:Power usage?

[axis-techno-geek]

AMD has had this problem with the 2200+ xp processor, the new 2400+, 2600+, and speculation is the 2700+ are using AMD new core, which is on scale with Intels core, but the AMD chips do run at a lower frequency with a greater instructions per clock cycle (IPC) rate to give the equivalent of a higher clocked processor.

The P4 2.8GHZ chip runs a 2.8 GHz, where as the 2700+ XP run at just below 2.2 GHz for the clock frequency, so in theory, AMD has 600 MHz to "use up" before they run into this problem again, by which time I guess they plan to have the new "Barton" core out.

Re:Power usage?

[moheeb]

This isn't really an unforeseen problem....generally the higher you push the Mhz the more power you need. AMD faced this problem before, when they redesigned the Athlon they were able to make their XP line of processors run a good deal cooler than their Thunderbird predecessors, at comparable clock rates.

Re:Power usage?

[Hoser McMoose]

Well, FWIW the Thermal Design Power of the P4 at 2.8GHz is 68.4W. This number is kinda-sorta-but-not-quite the maximum power that the chip will consume (I've ranted about this in other threads :> ). AMd's AthlonXP 2600+ has a maximum real-world power draw of about 68W as well (AMD does document the real exact figure, but I don't have the data sheets in front of me and they don't open properly in Mozilla anyway due to a bug in the Acrobat plug-in... but again, that's for another rant).

So, is AMD going to have to redesign their motherboards to accomodate this new chip? Well, maybe and maybe not. The Athlon 1.4GHz processor is the highest power consuming chip of the Athlon line to date at 70W maximum, and that's probably going to about what an AthlonXP 2700+ will require. However the 2700+ will get that 70W at a lower voltage but higher current. Long story short, it depends on the motherboard. AMD tends to leave this sort of thing more up to the motherboard manufacturer's designs, while Intel kinda forces motherboard manufacturers to do everything the Intel way. So, chances are that some AthlonXP boards will be able to accomodate this chip without change, while others will need a new voltage requlator.

Slightly off-topic, but...

[Mr. Sketch]

I've been curious, I have an old standard Athlon motherboard (Socket A), and I wasn't sure if it would work with a new Athlon XP processor, or if I would have to upgrade the motherboard too. I thought I remembered reading an earlier slashdot article a while back about motherboard incompatibility, but I wasn't sure. I would just like to know so I can budget a new motherboard, if necessary, in my computer upgrade in a few months.

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks!

Re:Slightly off-topic, but...

[Azar]

The new VIA KT400 chipset will support the 333MHz FSB. You should be able to look at the silk screening on your motherboard to see if it supports it or not.

Chances are, however, that it doesn't. Plan on buying a new motherboard.

Re:Slightly off-topic, but...

[Algan]

Look at your old MB manuals. You should see the supported processors there. I have an older ASUS A7V that supports only SDRAM, so I will definitely need to upgrade soon... Doom3 will probably give me the final push.

Chances are you're gonna need to upgrade the MoBo too... and the memory

Re:hm?

[Kushy]

When will the CPU race finish? Will it ever? Why? are you in some kinda rush for it to finish? Myself I'm just waiting on the hardware to play catch up with the CPU market. Faster clock speeds are really nice but with out the rest of the hardware really supporting it, what is the point? Okay I get a few frame rates faster on my newest FPS but I want full digital movies that put me in the action, that will be be much more entertaining. Oh well planning my next shopping trip to pick up the a few 2100+ AMDs so I can have a dual machine at home now for next to nothing.

Processor Speeds and Software

[n3uxf]

One of the main reasons faster hardware is coming out is an attempt for the company to make more money, as there is always those out there who want the "biggest and fastest" just because they can. It is also interesting to note is that companies keep on developing faster hardware, yet the software industry is not able to keep up with this due to the time it takes to develop software. By the time software has been developed, faster hardware has rendered the software obsolete.

Re:Processor Speeds and Software

[fgb]

faster hardware has rendered the software obsolete.

That should read "faster hardware has rendered the software tolerable."

Re:Processor Speeds and Software

[zombiestomper]

What's the alternative?

A good example of building software for future hardware is the 'stunning success' of MicroProse's Falcon 4. So successful that the dev. team was canned...

When it came out (1997 I believe) flying a mission @ 640x480 was like watching a slide show with framerates 10 fps. It's only been in the last year or so that the technology has caught up with the F4 to make it playable. Suffice to say, most folks didn't want to dole out cash for something they couldn't play for 4 years.

Moral of the story: If you're a developer and you don't need to worry about putting food on the table, then coding for future hardware is a good idea.

Re:Processor Speeds and Software

[CybrKnight]

I agree with you to some extent, if someone buys a machine with a processor nearing 3Ghz for doing word processing and spreadsheet stuff. But try switching back to a 1Ghz after gaming, doing CAD, or 3D animation on the latest and greatest and you'd have a different story. How much power your software needs is all in the application. Heh... I made a funny.

WTF you talkin about willis?

[Scrybe]

Right now the AthlonXP has a FSB of 133DDR or an effective 266. Increasing this to 166DDR or 333 gives an additional 25% bandwidth. This means that the IS a point to putting DDR333 ram in an athlon MB and seeing a real performance advantage. I personaly would like to see them skip 333 altogether and go to 400. This would bring them up to one generation behind the P4 in terms of FSB bandwidth and would even out alot of the test scores that ppl are complaining about right now.

In case you have been asleep for the last year the FSB is the AthlonXP's largest bottleneck!

As for overclocking: Remember when the 266 FSB came out and ppl were complaining about the low overclock potential on the new boards? well that will happen again, but the second generation of boards will ROCK for overclocking. I have my money on boards that will handle a 400 FSB within 6 months of volume market penetration for the 333FSB.

Re:WTF you talkin about willis?

[madcowherd]

200 FSB speeds are possible on current motherboards, well almost... my IWill XP333 can do 195... and with better memory can probably do 200. But, the key factor, it has a 1/6 divider for the PCI. As soon as motherboards start coming with this (there are currently "333" motherboards w/o a 1/5 setting) then yes, we will see 200.

Re:WTF you talkin about willis?

[mczak]

nope, the original poster was (somewhat) correct.
It's true the ram doesn't need to run at the same frequency than the FSB, but it doesn't help if it runs faster (DDR 333 ram has a bandwidth of 2.7GB, but the FSB at DDR 266 only 2.1GB). So, the FSB is not the bottleneck if you have DDR 266 ram, but it definitely is with DDR 333 ram. (There is an exception to the rule that higher-bandwidth-than-fsb ram won't do much for performance, this is if agp texturing is used, but this really only matters if you have an integrated graphics chipset.)
That said, tests with the higher (333) FSB show decent, but not really large performance increases - the Athlon XP doesn't seem to be that much memory bandwidth limited today.
I also disagree with the original poster about just using DDR 400. Not only a JEDEC specification for DDR 400 ram doesn't exist (and DDR 400 ram is needed to get really a performance improvement out of a DDR 400 FSB), but first boards which support such rams have some stability problems obviously at that speeds (the new asus kt400 board only allows one (!) dimm at DDR400 speed, and 2 at DDR333 speed). So, this would most likely be a nightmare for board manufacturers.

mczak

Re:WTF you talkin about willis?

[Ost99]

I also disagree with the original poster about just using DDR 400. Not only a JEDEC specification for DDR 400 ram doesn't exist (and DDR 400 ram is needed to get really a performance improvement out of a DDR 400 FSB), but first boards which support such rams have some stability problems obviously at that speeds (the new asus kt400 board only allows one (!) dimm at DDR400 speed, and 2 at DDR333 speed). So, this would most likely be a nightmare for board manufacturers.

I know the VIA 400 chipset has problems with this, but the new SiS 648 chipset does not have any problems with this at all, and allows for more that one DDR400 chip at the time. See Tom's hardware for more on the SiS chipset.

- Ost

Re:WTF you talkin about willis?

[Chris Burke]

That's mostly true, but there is one factor to consider -- the FSB of the Athlon has much better utilization than the memory bus. The theoretical maximum of the DDR RAM is exactly that -- theoretical. You're usually doing really good if you're getting 70% of that. So the 266 MHz FSB can benefit from faster than 266 MHz RAM, to a point -- benchmarks with PC2700 and 266 MHz FSB bear this out. As the RAM frequency increases, you get diminishing returns until you really are getting no benefit because you are saturating the FSB.

In fact, I'd wager that the reason the 333 MHz FSB shows only minor improvements in performance with PC 2700 is because PC2700 was still not completely saturating the 266 bus, so the new FSB only gives a tiny improvement in actual bandwidth. So that plus the small improvement in latency are the only benefits you're getting.

Re:WTF you talkin about willis?

[mczak]

The theoretical throughput rates of ddr (and also sdr) ram are far from only being theoretical. Every modern chipset is able to get around 95% of that value in practice easily (the famous SiSoft Sandra memory scores...). That 95% is only possible if you have consecutive memory accesses however, if you read random 8 Bytes blocks out of your 1GB, throughput will completely go down the toilet. So, maybe faster ram really does help somewhat, at least if the accesses are not consecutive. But it's easy to see faster ram won't help for peak throughput since it indeed will saturate the bus (almost) completely:
http://www17.tomshardware.com/mainboa rd/02q1/02022 0/kt333-14.html (the ddr266 scores are on a different chipset unfortunately, but the KT266A is close enough to the KT333 to draw that conclusion).

mczak

Re:WTF you talkin about willis?

[Chris Burke]

Yes, you can construct an artificial address stream that gets close to the theoretical maximum bandwidth of the RAM. Yes, your theoretical maximum is limited by the FSB as well as RAM. But outside of SiSoft and other synthetic tests, that maximum is rarely achieved. In the case of bandwidth-hungry applications with non-optimal access paterns (nearly all of them), the more efficient FSB will provide more than sufficient bandwidth to handle what the memory bus is capable of sustaining.

I'm not saying that the faster FSB won't be good, or that it never happens that the FSB is limiting bandwidth. I'm saying that most of the time at DDR 333 the bottleneck is still going to be the memory bus, not the 266 FSB.

Re:WTF you talkin about willis?

[tshak]

Remember though that Intel's bus has a much higher latency that limits it's performance in certain applications. When DDR400 becomes available it will be a superior solution then the Rambus solution that Intel used. Like CPU's, the FSB on each platform can't be compared Clock for Clock.

Re:WTF you talkin about willis?

[Lelon]

it breaks down like this... dang i've lost the link

Anyhow, if all things are equal (meaning primarily the timings on your memory) then pc2700 will out preform pc2100 on a 266 fsb. however, if you have to lower the timing on your ram (say, from cl=2 to cl=2.5) to get it to run at pc2700, then you'll actually get a lower result. so, expensive pc2100 is better then cheap pc2700.

the reason people always use a memory module thats faster then their FSB is because its so easy to increase your FSB (even to just 140-145 on a lock xp). this yeilds much faster results with pc2700, not so with pc2100. extreme overclockers lower the multiplier to acheive syncranous 166/166

i cant spell

Little Confused...

[Tha_Big_Guy23]

Most interesting is that this CPU will have a 333 MHz FSB...It is expected that the novelty will be based on the latest Thoroughbred core stepping 1, just like the current Athlon XP 2400+ and 2600+, and will work at 2.17GHz."

This seems puzzling to me that they are releasing the 2700+ with the same CPU core as the 2400+ and the 2600+, over a month from now. The Thoroughbred core stepping 1, is only a temporary solution to the problem that AMD is lagging behind Intel, and they know it.

The Barton Core, which is supposed to be the successor of the Thoroughbred core, should be just around the corner. The new core runs with lower voltage, with the added advangage of working with a double L2-Cache, meaning processing power upgrade. Seriously I think they should use the Barton core instead. Granted it may take a bit longer to finalize it, but, that would make alot of the AMD faithful happy, because all they have to go on right now is sheer processing power, since the memory speeds of DDR RAM lag way behind the Rambus RAM that Intel's using.

Re:Little Confused...

[KUHurdler]

Since it only costs them 10 minutes in time to change the stamp from 2600 to 2700, I'd say this is probably a cost effective route to take.

Re:Little Confused...

[Hoser McMoose]

I don't know that the Barton core will use any lower latency, or lower power at all.

The Barton core won't actually be manufacturered by AMD, "Barton" is the code name that is now being used for the AthlonXP processors that UMC will be building for AMD. First off, UMC is still a few months away from shipping chips. Secondly, they might not be able to manage as high clock speeds as AMD manages in their own fabs. AMD's Fab 30 in Dresden (where the Athlons are currently all produced) is quite a high-end fab that is really tuned for high performance/high clock rate chips. UMC's fabs tend to really emphasize low cost/high yields, so they might not get the same sort of bin splits that AMD can get on their own.

The real benefit of the Barton core should be for multiprocessing setups, where the extra cache should really help out a lot. For single processor setups, I doubt that we'll see that big of an improvement over the current Thoroughbred core, probably only about 3-5%, or about the same as the improvement seen when increasing the bus speed from 133/266MHz DDR to 166/333MHz DDR.

Re:Wtf is with this?

[OrangeSpyderMan]

I completely agree. I am sorry to say that there is simply no news in this article, just a rumour. And a pretty dull one at that. To hell with my karma, this just isn't news, and shouldn't be on here. It's not even the release of a chip (which as others have pointed out happens at a predictable rate every month or so anyway... so probably isn't news either).

I guess it's just a slow news day for /.

How about they release the 2400+/2600+ first

[1000StonedMonkeys]

A 333MHz FSB is all well and good, but until AMD actually delivers the XP 2400+ and XP 2600+ that they supposedly released a week ago, I'm going to take this sort of announcement with a grain of salt.

Re:How about they release the 2400+/2600+ first

[bigfinger]

Um... AMD didnt announce the 2700+ please read before you post.

Re:How about they release the 2400+/2600+ first

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the 2600+ is pretty well intrenched in retail channels now. Look in pricewatch.com.

THG and anandtech have said conflicting things about the availablity of the 2600+ (and 2400+). I personally haven't had any problem with getting them yet. Heck, I've ordered three of them in the last week. :-)

- Davey "Muskane" Maller
http://www.overclockers.com.au

Re:How about they release the 2400+/2600+ first

[duge4u]

Maybe I'm missing something here but I just (5 minutes before this post) went on pricewatch and did not find any mention of the AMD 2600 or 2400 processors. I even did a brand search and looked at the highest prices category and all I could find was a seriously overpriced 2200 MP for $408.92 at COMPUTERHQ.COM.

I've been googling for a few days now and still haven't found any retailers that stock or even promote the sale of the 2400 or 2600. If you could post a link it would be much appreciated.

Maybe there is a different pricewatch in Austrailia? I dunno...

Re:How about they release the 2400+/2600+ first

[1000StonedMonkeys]

s/announcement/rumor/;

Not a troll, just a question ...

[KelsoLundeen]

Okay, let me preface this by saying I'm genuinely curious about the answer. So I'm not trying to sow the troll seeds here.

That said, I'm curious about what people are using these super-fast processors for. Apart from upgrading so that you can play the immiment Unreal Tournament 2003 demo ("Only two weeks away!") and hoping to get the jump on a Doom 3 system -- what exactly are people doing with their super-high powered rigs?

I just upgraded to an Athlon XP 2000+ (from a PIII), and while I sorta dug the impressive 3DMark2001SE scores (over 10,000 with a Ti4600), I'm still not exactly sure what I need all this speed for.

For gaming, yes.

But for what else? MS Word still opens in a split-second.

OpenOffice 1.01 still opens pretty quickly.

IE, Netscape, and Opera still open in a split-second.

And, yes, now I run Quake3 with all the settings cranked.

But this sorta of "gee whiz, that's cool" wore off in a couple of days.

Now I'm left with a pretty powerful system, but I'm at loss as to what it has actually improved. Maybe if I were doing a lot of coding, then the compilation speeds would jump significantly, but I guess since my main coding right now is writing a fairly small (only around 6,500 lines) text-adventure in INFORM, I haven't really seen the jump in compilation speeds I'd see if I were compiling hundreds of thousands of lines of code ...

So, I'm curious. I haven't tried NWN yet, so maybe that's the sort of high-powered cybercrank I need to get myself hooked on the slickmercury speeds of AXP 2000+ and Ti4600.

There's always the new Neocron (sp?) beta 4 out ...

Anyone?

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[dagashi]

to compile stuff a hellovalot faster!!

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[breadbot]

You could try doing Java development with it -- that's what I do, and believe me, with current IDEs, you need every bit of horsepower you can get! Or .NET development, for that matter (although it's a bit better). I'm sure FSB speed would help too, as Java makes it easy to be a real memory hog.

Now, admittedly, is as much about Java programs tending to be slow as it is about modern processors being fast ... (perhaps they are inextricably linked)

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[thefirelane]

Wait a minute, you mean there has to be a reason for buying the fastest processor made?


---Lane

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[TheWickedKingJeremy]

I'm still not exactly sure what I need all this speed for.

You probably dont ;) If you have an Athlon 2000+ you should be all set for some time... Even games do not require a processor like that, as the graphics card plays a much more important role in game-performance. I have an Athlon 1200 and a Geforce2GTS, and I have yet to play a game that does not run beautifully.

Processor speeds are most important if you do a lot of heavy number crunching, such as video encoding, etc... or if you just want to kick a$$ on Seti-at-home

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[VAXman]

Mainly to develop faster microprocessors.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[edremy]

I'm not normal, but here's a few from my background

Video editing. Nothing out there is remotely fast enough for what I want to do, and what I want to do is pretty limited.

Computatational chemistry. Nothing out there (or scheduled for the next ~100 years) is fast enough to do the simulations people are really interested in.

License key cracking for those companies who decide to use encryption. :^)

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[killmenow]

I'm still not exactly sure what I need all this speed for.

For finding things

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[Telastyn]

Why running windows of course!

heh, but in all seriousness, I use most of my speedy athlon machines for running algorithm confirmation tests, and silly things like mersenne checking.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[panopticon]

I see that you don't use Photoshop too often. When was the last time you tried to run filters on an 8x10 300 dpi file?

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[Dale Dunn]

CAD and engineering analysis in general will always be able to use all the speed you can supply.

If you don't need it, don't buy it. Intel and AMD build and sell these things largely for the same reason Dodge builds Vipers. It's propaganda. But that's far from the only use for them. As an engineer, I always drool over more procesor power. It's not uncommon for me to wait 20-60 minutes for my Athlon 1400 (running 1500) to complete some tasks.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[gregbaker]

That said, I'm curious about what people are using these super-fast processors for.

I agree; I don't see the point. I just upgraded to a Althon 2100+ from a Celeron 500 and the difference is minimal. Kernels compile in a flash, but other than that, no great improvements. Some lags is a few applications are gone, which is nice.

What I really want is a faster hard drive--the only real wait on my system is for large applications starting up as they come off the hard drive. Opening Openoffice takes about 10 seconds; closing it and opening again (from cache) takes maybe two.

I'm thinking about setting up my /usr partition as a two-disk RAID-0. The throughput should double (small test partition confirms). Sure the probability of failure doubles too, but my /usr is all backed up by my local Debian archive anyway. :-)

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[Zathrus]

Most others already said it - video editing, video encoding, high end math. If your compile environment needs that kind of horsepower, then you're probably using bad tools or doing something horribly wrong in your code (duh, there are exceptions, but for 95% of the coding out there?)

In the business world there are often needs for more CPU - although more often than not the issue is I/O throughput rather than CPU.

As for NWN - shrug... I'm running it on an Athlon 750 w/ a 32 MB GF2. Am I missing out on some of the eye candy? Probably, but it still runs just fine.

I do plan to buy a new system in the near future though - but I'm playing the waiting game right now since I don't need a new one yet and some of the parts I want (or would like) aren't available yet. Mainly I'm waiting on the NV30 to be released. A 333 MHz bus Athlon would be nice (although there's a slim chance of returning to a P4 -- I'm still vaguely looking for someone doing benches comparing an RDRAM and DDR setup) and Serial ATA would be nice. USB2.0 and Firewire are everywhere now, and all the new MBs for Athlons will do thermal die checks.

Oh, why do I want a new system? UT2k3 and Doom3 of course. Duh.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[Boogaroo]

The reason *I* would use a faster processor would be to speed up video editing. I process vacation videos and other stuff from my Digital8 camera(DV) to DivX for the space savings and to reclaim my tapes.

On my Celeron 400, I can play most games, but compressing one hour of video takes close to 8 hours...

My roommate has an Athlon 2000+ and the compression is at realtime. A real boon if you ask me.

My roommate does audio processing(music, soundeffects, etc...) and for him the faster machine means instead of waiting ten minutes to re-render the music with the chosen effects it only takes a minute. Another blazingly huge win for faster processors.

I used to do 3d stuff for fun, so that's yet another project that could be greatly improved with faster processors.

The REAL reason we need faster processors? Well it's human nature to push things to the limit. When we find we can do something faster, we'll either do more of it, or improve it(and make it require more power as well).

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[DarkRabbit]

I know you are going to get slammed by the 'Bill Gates said 640k was enough' crowd so I thought you would like to know that Doom 3 isn't going to require a Freon cooled GeForce 3000 XP+ SupraGamer to be playable ...

Doom III playable on current hardware says John Carmack in Interview with GameSpy

-DR

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[Merlin_]

Folding@Home is what I do with my increased CPU power. Fine, we decoded the genome, now what? Protein folding and understanding proteins is the single most important thing for the advancement of medical research. Overall, I would rate it more important than getting crazy framerates in quake.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[archen]

Mozilla

yes I'm serious. At times it's still the only application that can actually make Winamp skip. (That's with an athlon 1700)

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[Ninja Programmer]

But for what else? MS Word still opens in a split-second.

OpenOffice 1.01 still opens pretty quickly.

IE, Netscape, and Opera still open in a split-second.

Sorry bub -- Word, Open Office, IE and Netscape all take more than a second to load for me (and that is unacceptable to me.) But the real pisser for me is Adobe Acrobat. My god that thing takes for ever to load.

Initial load time is not all processor though. Its hard disk, software and OS architecture.

So, I'm curious. I haven't tried NWN yet, so maybe that's the sort of high-powered cybercrank I need to get myself hooked on the slickmercury speeds of AXP 2000+ and Ti4600.

Well I have NWN. But I also have a GeForce Ti4600, so I can play with 2x AA and its absolutely fine.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[hexile]

I'm using an Athlon 1700+ for working on a primitive NLP written in Perl. The Lingua:: modules are an amazing set of tools, but some can be a bit hoggish with the CPU. I'd heartily welcome more processor power. Especially when parsing anything that isn't trivial in size, or complexity.

Perhaps you need to stop playing games, and start programming. Then again... the coputer really is the game for some of us. =)

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[balloonhead]

For most users, the answer is no, you don't need any faster. Today's 'obsolete' chips (like my AMD XP 1500+) are much faster than what I need. For a few power users (scientific stuff, large app compiling, rendering, SETI...) these will offer some benefit. For a few 'bleeding edge' enthusiasts, they are desirable. For the rich, they may as well have them. Everyone else - 800MHz is probably enough; it's about the bare minimum for decent DVD playback (you can scape by on a bit less but that's a reasonable minimum.)

Remember also that today's 'normal user' chips are yesterday's fastest - if chip makers thought the way you did, then we might have stopped with only a few hundred MHz (and of course 740K RAM).

The other benefit is in coding - today's languages are designed with bloat in mind. That's why C++ is better than C (war! war!) - C is more efficient, faster, and therefore better... but C++ on a faster processor is just as fast (or faster), who cares about efficiency, and easier to program and maintain (the whole purpose of OO programming) - the point is, let the RAM and processor take care of the dirty work, and give us the apps to play with. The bloat simply doesn't matter any more. Obviously this is oversimplifying somewhat (peace! peace!) but the principles hold true... just think, if processors were fast enough, and computers were powerful enough, then programming languages could be so powerful (read - idiot friendly) that all you would need to do is fire up your 'Microsoft NaturalLanguage++(h4X0r 3d¦7¦0n)' and type in "/\/\4k3 4 l33t g4/\/\3 4 8¦7 l¦k3 'quake 8'" (make a l33t game a bit like Quake 8 - I'm not very fluent in h4x0r I'm afraid) and it would do all the dirty work for you.

In the short term it's nice when things do start a little bit faster, but for most intents and purposes it doesn't matter. In the long term, when your house central server is automagically ordering your groceries, booking the car in to get a service, paying your bills, playing you two different DVDs in different rooms and some elevator music in the hall, running SETI and PersonalGenomeDecoder (OK, I made that one up) in the background, and the kids are deathmatching with a video-link up to their friends (who live in big plastic bubbles on the moon), and sending all this info and more back to microsoft; only then will you appreciate what these slight incremental power-ups might do in the long term.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[mpcooke3]

Having switched from Windows and IE to Gnome and Mozilla, trust me I *need* a 2Ghz machine :)

Matt.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[StoryMan]

Did you read the last part of his message?

He *is* programming. Inform is an OO programming language for creating Zmachine text-adventure games -- like the old Infocom games.

Check out the Inform website.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[drightler]

Compiling Mozilla...

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[Stonehand]

;)

"I speak of the computer that is to come after me, a computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate. Yet, I will design it for you..."

Deep Thought, thinking of the Earth, in HHGTTG.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[Christopher Thomas]

That said, I'm curious about what people are using these super-fast processors for.

Well, I was *going* to use it to try materials/chemistry simulations based on brute force approximate solutions of Schrodinger's Equation...

But, in practice, it's been for gaming. Tribes 2 ran like a slide show until I upgraded both my processor and my video card. It's also nice being able to play Amiga games under WinUAE without the sound skipping.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[friedmud]

Exactly!!

Just slap Gentoo Linux on the system and you will be using every MHz you got to create the ultimate operating sytem.

I personally just have a 1.2GHz with 512 SDRAM and I am severely wanting to upgrade right now - but I think I am going to wait until next summer so I can get a Hammer... mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 64-bit Linux! Delicious!

Derek

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[PacoSuarez]

I spend a lot of time waiting for my computer to finish some task. The lesser I wait, the more work I can get done. The programs that I spend most time waiting for are:
- Compilers.
- 3D renderers.
- Chess programs.

Actually, I write the 3D renderers and chess programs that I just mentioned. So the cycles "modify-the-renderer, compile, render, aggh-it-still-looks-ugly" and "modify-the-evaluation-function, compile, render, aggh-it-still-does-not-select-the-right-move" can be made much shorter with a powerful CPU.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[aussersterne]

Someone already mentioned video editing and DVD mastering. This is job #1 for my fastest single-CPU setup, which is always OC'ed and which cannot possibly get fast enough. I'm a small operation with only a few machines. It is no fun to have to stop working and wait hours for a chunk of video to encode.

ALSO, there's a lot of frame-by-frame work going on here with things like Photoshop/GIMP (yup, use both) and that's where my current dual Xeon setup comes in. Here again -- for some of the more complex filters or transformations (i.e. perspective transformations and so on) on many successive images or frames... you run out of CPU very quickly. I/O is actually somewhat easy right now... a couple of mid-range drives in a RAID can easily deliver data as fast as I need it or write it as fast as I need to store it. I'm always waiting on CPU.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[davros74]

You're thinking too much along the lines of a home-user running Windows. There's a very real presence of Intel (and unfortunately, not so much AMD) CPUs in low cost workstations for business use. Linux is certainly part of the picture as well, as almost all EDA vendors have or are releasing Linux versions of their tools.

What do I use my 80x86 cpu for? Well, I work in a hardware engineering group which does ASIC and FPGA design. We have a CPU farm of about 30 machines with Intel P4s running RedHat 7.2. (May see AMD Hammer chips in the future - we are excited about this possibility). We run everything from RTL and gate level VHDL and Verilog simulations, to chip synthesis, to test insertion and fault grading simulations. One of the last chips I worked on required such a large set of ATPG vectors (and the design was just so huge), that it required breaking the test vectors into ten groups, and even then, just one file (10% of the total) required an 8GB Sun box to convert the vectors to the fabs tester format, and the gate-level simulation took 10 days. PER FILE. Yes, that was total of 100 CPU days of simulation time for one chip just for ATPG vectors. And these were running on 1.8GHz Pentium 4s with 3GB of RAM. Not surprisingly, leading edge tools in this field are starting to look at distributed simulation over high-speed backplanes (read: not ethernet).

Tomorrow's technology is designed and verified on today's hardware. Every generational step in every sector of industry leapfrogs like this. You can't design next year's high performance video card using 80286s. Definitely for ASIC/FPGA design, there isn't a system fast enough for how quickly we (the engineers) would like a simulation to finish in. Being able to run more simulations overall means a better design out the door. More stuff caught up front. The faster a simulation runs, the quicker it will finish, meaning we can get by with fewer high-priced licenses for our EDA tools. (Licenses are usually in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars EACH).

You can never run enough tests before a product is done. How many tests/simulations are run, depends on how long they take to run. Give me the fastest CPU you got, decked out with the most physical RAM it can handle. (Sadly, the 32bit limit on current 80x86 platforms is hurting us badly - go x86-64! go AMD! Capture the workstation market!)

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[mcelrath]

Again, video.

My computer is admittedly aging. I have a Matrox Marvel G200 video card and I record TV shows direct to disk, edit out the commercials and then re-encode them to mpeg2 or divx to burn on CD. At this moment I've got almost all of Farscape. Once upon a time I recorded all of Babylon 5 to videotape. Call me an eccentric collector of sci-fi. ;)

These newer Athlons/P4's should be able to record straight to MPEG4/DivX without an intermediate step which would seriously reduce the disk space and time required. My current computer takes about a day to encode a 1-hour show to mpeg2.

However I'm waiting for the dual Opteron systems to come out. That way I can also use my computer while it's recording/encoding.

Yeah, I could get a PVR, but then I would lose the ability to edit out commercials, and do you know any PVR's which use MPEG4 and can transfer shows off so I can burn them on CD?

I can't stand to watch regular TV anymore. About 3 seconds into the commercial I get bored and want to go do something else. Besides I don't like them telling me when I have to watch their show. I have better things to do. I'll watch it on my own time thank you. ;)

-- Bob

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[dpilot]

Speech recognition?

Not personally involved, but close to a year ago I seem to remember reading that good speech recognition with the fastest Pentia (Don't remember if it was PIII or P4.) and K7 was still "slightly slower than realtime."

Seems to me that that situation may have changed, that we may now have faster-than-realtime speech recognition. Maybe now the system can figure out what I said, and then have time to do it, too.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[cheezehead]

I don't have one of these fast processors (yet), but I have been doing some AVI to MPEG2 encoding (home movies), and I can assure you that you can use every last bit of speed from the processor there. Currently using a 1.8 GHz P4, and boy, I sure could use some more horsepower...

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[lateralus_1024]

So you can run beta versions of MS Longhorn & Corona.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[aero6dof]

For video editing, I would think that you would get better performance by upgrading your hard drive to a raid setup and adding as much memory as the system will handle. Of course upping the FSB helps.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[i am fishhead]

Software is always a few years behind the hardware ... and for good reasons.

1) Developing software takes time.
2) If your software only runs on ONLY top of the line hardware (i.e. crawls w/out a 2.53 GHz P4 and a gig of RAM) , who are you going to sell it to? By keeping the CPU/GPU/ect requirements low (by removing features), you give youself a higher number of potential buyers (at the risk of your product being less apealing to the customer).
3) How much flash animation / animated what-have-you did you see 5-6 years ago? The incresed power of processors makes new, ever more annoying ads / websites posible.


As time goes by, the power of the "averege" system goes up. More features are put in software, incresing the hardware requirements. People buy new hardware, allowing the cycle to continue.
There are also advantages to geting a more powerful system:

1) You buy a more powerful system so it will be longer until you have to upgrade. The same system that ran the original UT well will probly be hard pressed to run UT 2003 faster than 5fps.
2) The time before it becomes unusable w/ modern software will be longer: Old Pentium processors will just choke on Windoze XP and Office 2000 won't run too well on a 486.
It's not that you won't ever use that CPU power ... You just don't use it now....

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[Falrick]

20-60 minutes? Man, I envy you. I do wireless systems simulations. While I haven't yet had the pleasure of experiencing this, some simulations take 'days' to run on a 32 processor SGI. Granted, I don't know what these translate into on x86 hardware, but it's not going to take that down to less than a day any time soon.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[afidel]

funny, I run it on a P2-300 and don't have any such problems, maybe something is wrong with your soundcard and/or motherboard (many Via chipsets have pci bugs that don't agree with many soundcards).

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[nft]

I build computers at a video game company, and we usually buy the fastest processors. Our average cost per computer with AthlonXP 2000+'s is about $800-900, so it's not even that expensive. The Pent4's are also fast, but the price/performance battle goes to AMD. Lately we've been prelighting our levels in Maya. It's about 4.5 times faster on a 2.26p4 vs 1200 Athlon TBird. We need fast computers for floating point math, baby!

I'm guessing these 333FSB Athlon's will be a lot faster if they can keep them cool enough. I'm also guessing that today's hot-ass chips will be remembered as the stone age of computing in a few years, hopefully.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[mozumder]

speaking of which we're really hoping that AMD would release the hammer ASAP for us EDA users. File sizes can reach dozens of gigs and runtimes of over a week to get the latest grahic chip frequencies to optimize the design to run at 500Mhz instead of 300MHz..

We seriously need cheap & fast 64 bit linux machines for some of the latest generation ASIC designs. It looks like the Itanium is not catching on for EDA. (Why is that? Too expensive? Not enough manufacturers of commodity parts?)

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[dominator]

I work on a few of the larger Gnome related applications out there - AbiWord, Gnumeric, to name two. I also compile Mozilla from time to time, and I once even dared to try to compile OpenOffice.

What do these faster boxes with "absurd" gobs of RAM and CPU gain me? Reasonable compile times. On my 1.8GHz P4, a fresh compile of AbiWord takes about 10 minutes. On my older box it took half an hour. On some of our developers boxes, it can take up to a whole hour! Now, if we can wield this new fast, cheap computer horsepower to get fresh compiles of our application down to say 3-5 minutes, you have no idea how much time that can end up saving us in the average day and how much more productive we can be.

Dom

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[m11533]

Software development. The development cycle, the time it takes me from the time I change some code until I am running that new code to test it, always takes too long. I am currently running a dual Zeon 2.2 Ghz machine with 1G 266DDR RAM. And it still takes me over 30 minutes for the dev-cycle. And, this is a vast improvement over the prior system I was using. This system is not quite the absolutely fastest buildable right now, but its no slouch, yet I'd love everything to be twice as fast. I'll also admit that not everything is CPU speed. Builds require well balanced systems with great disk subsystems as well as great CPUs and RAM. Thus, no only do I need as much CPU horsepower as I can get my hands on, only slightly less than the number crunchers of the world, but I need it packed into systems with great bus and disk speed. I don't see nearly as much progress on that front...

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[JCholewa]

> But for what else?

I like to download old episodes of shows that you don't see on TV anymore, the kind of stuff that I loved as a kid and for which I have unending nostalgia. Additionally, earlier this year I casually decided to give professional wrestling programs a chance, and for some inexplicable reason I now find myself hooked on it. Now, I don't care so much for the poorly written, [often, but with a few very talented exceptions] poorly performed WWE (formerly WWF), so I like to download more region oriented events, those which I cannot obtain via reasonable methods (such as via Pay-Per-View or on regular TV).

My usenet downloading program creates tremendously huge databases of binary newsgroups and their contents. Occasionally, the application can be locked up while it's thinking about how to display or manipulate this data. Additionally, it takes a lot of processing resources to convert from yEnc or UUE to a binary file.

Usually, these files are RAR files that are broken up into many parts. Because some of the parts may not reach all the servers, a bunch of parity files (.PAR) are also put onto usenet for each of these RAR sets. If you're missing some RAR parts, you use the parity files to rebuild those missing fragments. But this is an intensely computational process, and it could take a *looooong* time before you're all rebuilt.

Then you have to use WinRAR to transform all these fragments into a single mpeg or ogm or whatever format the movie file is in. This can take a long time. Usually, a Video-CD will take several minutes to be extracted from the RARs (mind you, I usually have a bunch of apps active at the same time as this).

On my Duron 800 with 768MB PC133 SDRAM, it'll take two hours to convert an SVCD to VCD format (if I want to burn the video to a CD-R so that I could view it in some DVD players or so that I could simply keep it in cold storage for viewing some later time.

All the above applications are incredibly time consuming and would increase in speed greatly if I upgraded the processor in my computer. There is no upper frequency limit where the benefit stops being critical.

There are some other things that would be positively affected by upgrading. I usually have in excess of thirty web pages opening up at once in Opera. My email database has tens of thousands of messages in it, and it sometimes takes a while for the searches and the filtering to finish.

There are probably other things, but there you have some very strong reasons why at least this one guy can use an Athlon XP 7500+. ;P

-JC

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[ptbarnett]

I use my desktop with specialized simulation software. There's a direct relationship between processor speed and the amount of time required for me to complete a simulation. The faster I can do the simulations, the faster I can provide results for clients.

I don't try to stay on the bleeding edge, but I typically upgrade when I can double the processor speed. I build my own computers and sometimes just swap out the motherboard, leaving everything else substantially the same.

I usually upgrade about once a year, but it looks like this interval will be about 18 months. I haven't decided if I will upgrade when Barton hits the streets or if I will wait for Hammer.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[balloonhead]

I see this was modded a +1 insightful, -1 troll. Troll how? I see no reason why someone can mod down something as a troll on such a whim. Where is the troll elememt? The C/C++ bit? If someone cannot see such a patently tongue in cheek comment (with parenthesis added so even idiots can understand) then there is no hope for a moderation system.

The /. mod system is broken. I am pissed off because I wrote a fairly well-thought out argument, and some tit mods it down for erasons of his own. Negative mod point just do not work; a comment I have heard often but not really appreciated until now.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[NakNomik]

I am a Video/Audio/Photography enthusiast. I make lot of digital video home movies, and then edit them. I used to use a P3 667 earlier and the video editing program used to take 45 minutes to render a 15 minute clip. Now with my P4 2.4(Northwood) it takes less than 15 minutes to render a 15 minute clip. Of course I also have 2 huge hard disks and a CD-RW to burn my MPEG files. One 5 minute clip at DVD resolution takes approx 1 GB of disk space (in AVI format, because that's the native format of my video editor).
I am not claiming that the performance improvement over the older P3 machine is all due to a faster processor. Every thing has become faster. I'm using RDRAM instead of DDR, using ATA100 disks instead of older UDMA disks, and a 24X CD-RW in place of a 4x one.

I also scan and retouch lots of photos I take. Because I want to have the best quality, I scan my negatives at 2400dpi resolution and then retouch those photos. Since the images are huge, a faster processor with RDRAM helps a lot.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[geekoid]

video editting, big number crunching, keeping the house warm.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[tshak]

I second video editing. With high speed disk drives (10-15K RPM, 3.5ms access time, etc.) my bottleneck is always Premier eating up my CPU. I do not do video editing professionally, just for fun. I want to render in real time, but I'm actually rendering at over 10times realtime if there's a lot of filters and/or effects.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[archen]

Ever veiw pages with heavy Chinese or Japanese? Win2k reports Mozilla will spike up to 99% CPU time on some Japanese pages, and essentially stay there until you get off the page. I think Mozilla 1.1 fixed all that, because I haven't had a problem with that for a while now. I still had to put up with that behavior for months.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[TheWickedKingJeremy]

That is interesting... (this is speaking from a person who does *not* do a lot of video editing BTW) But I always thought video editing was more a matter of having 2 gigs of RAM versus a processor intensive thing... Is splicing videos together really that processor intensive? or does that factor come in when adding filters or effects of some sort? Just curious...

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[archen]

Soundblaster 5.2 (5 something or another at least). I had the same problem when I used the onboard sound also. The _real_ problem is that Mozilla would just suck up the resources. Usually I'd have to wait around 4 seconds just to change between windows or apps. (as I said before, thankfully Moz 1.1 seems to have fixed whatever was happening)

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[Billly Gates]

Easy. Minimal system requirements for Netscape 7

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[ajayrockrock]

Sound Editing. Plain and simple. I have fast hard drives setup in a RAID configuration and I have a fast processor to do a lot of cleanup work on audio that I'm recording into FLAC.

This is all after I encoded my entire CD collection (~600 CD's) to FLAC. Now running that script to turn the FLAC's into MP3's or OGG's is faster then my old P3.

later,
ajay

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[gaspyy]

Graphic design: When you work with HUGE files in Photoshop (4500 x 3000 pixels) every second counts.

3D graphics: your computer is never fast enough in this area. The more power, the more details you can add - area shadows, sub-surface scattering; it's now feasable to work with global illumination solutions.

There are many computing-intensive areas where a fast computer is required. Your aunt may not need it, but this doesn't mean I don't need it.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[joebp]

OpenOffice 1.01 still opens pretty quickly.

OpenOffice.org 1.0.1 compiles in 6ish hours for me. Hence, I need more speed ;)

Re:Not a troll, just a question ...

[sanity_slipping]

Rendering.

It takes me 10 minutes to render a useful preview so that I can see what needs tweaking.

On the other hand, that lets me browse Slashdot quite a bit.

Re:hm?

[TheWickedKingJeremy]

When will the CPU race finish? Will it ever?

You didn't get the memo? It ends June 17th 2004... From then on all technology will be at a stand-still, and most of us will find new jobs involving drills...

Re:hello

[scotch]

processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 9
model : 11
model name : Pentium XI (SmeltTown)
stepping : 61
cpu MHz : 40094.670
cache size : 4096 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
bogomips : 7605.97

Re:How fast is fast enough?

[ackthpt]

You didn't have Windows on your Osborne, sucking all the power out of it. Clear enough?

why?

[tps12]

Hey, this sounds great, but...am I the only one who doesn't see the point? I've been running my 500MHz P3 since mid-1998, and it's all the power I need. Even the latest games don't require this amount of firepower. The only reason people keep upgrading is because of advertising. In 25 years we will all be using the same stuff, and laugh about how we all thought that anyone needed 2700MHz CPUs.

Re:why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you collaborate with the rest of the people that say the same thing on every article about faster processors? Or did you just copy/paste a post from the last thread?

Re:why?

[greymond]

I totally agree - I just upgraded from my old P2 350 MHz to a P4 1.6GHz (pre-northwood) and although I love the speed and can play all the games I doubt I will NEED a new system for another 3 years at least.

Re:why?

[tps12]

Actually, it's neither human nor "geek" nature (by the way, I recommend looking up the original definition of "geek" before you go around boasting about how "geeky" you are). It's bald-faced American consumerism, and it disgusts me. Since you're so good at acquiring new "stuff," I suggest you start looking for a new planet; this one's almost used up.

:(

Re:why?

[geekoid]

That lastest games will not run reasonbly well on your system. By reasonable I mean at a good resolution, with most of the options on.

While technically you are correct, it is above there min requirements, but min requirements seldom run the game in a playable manner.

Re:why?

[Billly Gates]

I believe it was doom1 and doom2 that started the whole pentium craze in the early and mid 1990's. The 3d accelerator phase started after quake1. Todays games are old and made for late 1990's hardware. My old pentiumIII 700 with a geforce2mx can play quakeIII3 at 800 x 600 at 50 fps without a sweat. However from what I read I will be lucky to get even 2 or 3 fps for doom3 or unreal2003, even on a pIV with my video card.

My point is that people are running older software which was made for older systems. In the 1990's software was evolving faster then hardware and this is why many people hated Windows and found Windows3.1 as slow as a dog. I remember only using Windows for the world wide web and used the dos compuserve for everything else. Today its vice versa. Games and office suites mostly used today are old. Of course I am sure OfficeXP would fly on my old machine and its only games or speciality apps that would require a new systems. I bet as cd burning software gets more popular and the latest games come out, that people will once again be upgrading. Infact this might be Microsoft's only hope for OfficeXP migration. Mainly from people buying new pc's altogether.

I plan to buy one soon because I use Gentoo Linux which requires beefy hardware for its package management, as well as run UT2003.

Re:why?

[Hoser McMoose]

Well, 10 years ago everyone was saying the EXACT same thing about how we really didn't need these new fandangled Pentiums, and that a 486 was really fast enough for everything, and that in 10 years time we would all be laughing at the people who thought that they needed a 100MHz processor!

The more times change, the more they stay the same. 10 years from now, we'll all be looking back at these AthlonXP 2700+ systems and wondering how we managed to get by with such SLOW processors, because runs REALLY slowly on anything less then a 10GHz chip.

It's been happening for the past 20 years, and I don't see anything today that makes this look different.

wake me when FSB is 400MHz (800MHz in amdlingo)

[johnjones]

they have the FSB running at 400MHz and call it 800MHz

thats surposed come come out with the chipset and Opteron (or whatever marketing call it, the K8 )

Intel be worried very worried

regards

John Jones

Re:wake me when FSB is 400MHz (800MHz in amdlingo)

[Magila]

I'll just point out that the reason why the FSB speed is refered to as 266Mhz/333Mhz/etc when the clock is realy 133Mhz/166Mhz/etc is because of something called DDR (Double Data Rate). What that means is that for each clock cycle the FSB goes through two transfer cycles. Therefor the FSB is effectivly running at double the speed of the clock hence the doubled Mhz numbers. Intel does the same thing with it's P4s except their FSB runs at 4x the system clock.

I want a Hammer!!!!! :(

[exhilaration]

Who cares about the "2100+" or "2900+"? I've been holding off upgrading for months waiting for AMD to release Hammer.

:( *sniff* so close, yet so far away... Hammer..

Re:I want a Hammer!!!!! :(

[akuma(x86)]

I wonder how much AMD may be "Osbourning" themselves.

Re:I want a Hammer!!!!! :(

[havardi]

Hammer. So hot right now. Hammer.

Product Naming

[Aknaton]

Am I the only one who really, really disklikes the naming scheme of these processors? Although I know that clock speed does not always reflect performance, I would still rather see CPU names that include it.

Re:Product Naming

[liquidsin]

Why? They tell you the speed of the processor. Why does the name have to tell you the MHz? Do you go around telling people what kind of car you drive, and tacking the horsepower on to the end of that? "Yeah, that's a '98 Chevy Cavalier 2.2L 110 HP".

Re:Product Naming

[Boiler99]

I would dislike it if it were inaccurate as to the relative speed compared to a P4. But, given that they were quite conservative in general, I don't think it's a problem at all.

Consider that the general public is still fairly computer illiterate (how many times have you been asked, "How much mega-hurts (sic) does that computer have?" by someone?) they need a figure that shows the speed to Joe Homie. MHz and PR don't matter to anyone as long as they can get an idea of how decent something is for the price they are paying.

Re:Product Naming

[kaladorn]

Good point. Especially when even for cars, one would have to ask: At what RPM is the horsepower obtained? And what's the torque curve look like? And what's the curb weight of the car? etc.

Raw statistics are meaningless without an understanding of the entire context. Further, they actually enter the category of outright misleading.

And for the record, a moderately good car with a great driver is far more impressive than a great car with a useless driver... :)

No, FSB isn't really much of an issue *yet*.

[Kjella]

Tests run by overclockers show something like a 1.8% increase in performance for an AMD 2000+, not exactly much to write home about. However, like with rambus when it was first introduced, it's reasonable to assume that ir will become more important with higher clock speeds. If you believe that this or going to 400MHz FSB will drastically change anything, do some research. The Athlon is not designed like the PIV, and doesn't benefit from it in the same way.

Kjella

Porno.

[autopr0n]

The custom viewer app I wrote to moderate Autopr0n.com is still pretty slow on my duron 1.2ghz. It basicaly renders all the .jpg on a page into a back buffer so youc an flip through them quickly. It can take up to 10 seconds to decompress all the pics.

So, it would be nice to get as fast a computer as I can get my hands on :)

Re:Porno.

[Schik]

Just be sure to wash your hands before putting your hands back on that fast computer.

FSB not the sole factor

[msgmonkey]

Actually the FSB is n't really the sole factor because even though the bandwidth increases the latency between the request and the memory being on the bus does not decrease enough to compensate. So in real terms simply increasing the FSB gives you negligable gains. Modern CPU's dont acccess individual words of memory across the bus, they request complete "cache lines" a cache line is filled even though you may only request a byte of external memory. On a Pentium III a cache line was (if my memory is correct) 32 Bytes. Now the P4 was designed for high a MHz clock and bus. The P4 was also designed to work with RDRAM memory that has high bandwidth but also higher latency than normal SDRAM. In order to get round the latency problem, they made the cache line 128 bytes wide so even though it took longer to request those 128 bytes, they came in so fast that the overall access time was reduced. So in short AMD cannot simply just increase the FSB and expect large gains in performance. They would also have to alter the cache/memory subsystem significantly, which would not be worth it since the Hammer chips are around the corner.

FSB we don't need to stinking FSB

[spiro_killglance]

The clawhammer and operatons don't have a front
side bus, anymore, the memory controller is
on the chip

Re:FSB we don't need to stinking FSB

[barawn]

The FSB of a Hammer chip is the bus linking the chip to the North Bridge, which no longer includes the memory: it still has the AGP port, and needs to get to the PCI bus somehow. In the Hammer system, the FSB is actually a 32-bit HyperTransport link, running at 400 MHz DDR, so 800MHz effective, for a combined bandwidth of 6.4 GB/s. So yes, Hammers still have an FSB.

Re:FSB we don't need to stinking FSB

[hattig]

No, the northbridge is on the hammer chip itself. the FSB is on the chip itself, between the core and the switch fabric that is on the chip that connects up the CPU core, the memory controller(s) and the HyperTransport interface(s).

HT is just a system level interconnect.

Running at 800MHz DDR (1600MTransfers/s), 16-bits in each direction for 3.2GB/s in each second in the case of Hammer.

So no, Hammers do not have a FSB as such.

Re:FSB we don't need to stinking FSB

[hattig]

"in each second" should be "in each direction". Where is the edit function when you need it. Slashcode must be the only such software that doesn't include the facility for someone to edit their own post, or at least append onto the end of it.

And that damn Oracle advert messes up the page - nothing else appears.

Re:FSB we don't need to stinking FSB

[barawn]

Depends what you define as a northbridge, and what you define as a FSB. The bus type (EV6, HyperTransport, whatever) is just a name for the signaling and protocol - the name of the bus itself can still be "Front Side Bus".

The "traditional" northbridge had a memory controller and an AGP controller, as well as a PCI controller. The PCI controller got moved completely off the North Bridge to the South Bridge and replaced with a proprietary interconnect in a lot of modern chips. The memory controller was moved on die, but the AGP controller is still off-die, and thus needs a chip for it. This chip could be called the "north bridge". It's just a name - AMD calls it the "HyperTransport AGP 3.0 Graphics Tunnel" (which doesn't really make much sense, as it also has a HyperTransport link to a south bridge - how does THAT relate to graphics?) but it's still a North Bridge, just without the memory controller.

There are two HT links on the system, which is why it makes sense to call it a "north bridge" and a "south bridge": there's a HT link from the CPU to the North Bridge (the AMD 8151) and a HT link from the North Bridge to the South Bridge (the AMD 8111).

So, yes, they do have a FSB, unless you want to call it something else: "highspeed HT link" and "lowspeed HT link" (for the North Bridge-South Bridge interconnect) maybe? Got me. It doesn't matter. The FSB has always been the high speed link out of the processor to a bridge chip, which then has a low speed link to another bridge chip which has all the PCI, LPC, ethernet, all that crap. Hammer doesn't change that, it just removes the memory controller from the North Bridge.

Re:FSB we don't need to stinking FSB

[hattig]

It is called an AGP tunnel because "tunnel" is a HT term for a device which has an upstream HT connection, and a downstream HT connection.

The FSB has traditionally carried CPU signals to the device that has the memory controller. As the memory controller is on the die of the Hammer, there is no FSB off the chip, just a high speed interconnect to connect up further processors or I/O devices.

The Hammer core does have a FSB. It runs at core speed and connects to the on-die switch that connects up the core, HT links and memory controllers.

HyperTransport is a point-to-point link, not a bus. Maybe you could call it a Front Side Interconnect, or how about Processor Interconnect, because Opteron's will have 3 HT links - and 3 FSB's on a processor sounds a bit silly...

Re:FSB we don't need to stinking FSB

[barawn]

It'd be more appropriate to call it a "North Bridge with AGP8X and HT Tunnel", as there's definitely no requirement that the north bridge connects to the south bridge using an HT link. I think one of VIA's chipsets is doing that so they can use an old south bridge... Anyway, it'll be most appropriate to ditch the "North/South bridge" concepts if they ever switch to one die for the PCI bus+AGP port+everything else. Then it'll just be a HyperTransport system hub. Of course they'll also have about 1000+ pins on one chip, but who's counting? :)

However, it really all comes down to what you define as the "FSB", which is tough because Intel just made up the term back with the PII. You can call it the core/memory/I/O interface, in which case, yes, it's internal now. You can also call it the processor's external data bus, in which case it was replaced by the HT link. One block diagram I saw from AMD called it the "system interlink" or something like that.

It's difficult to try to use old acronyms on a new design, especially because Hammer is really quite a striking difference from the old designs. I'm sure AMD will use something like "system interlink" or something like that for the main HyperTransport link. I doubt it, though - people use "bus" for just about any topology now. Wasn't the EV6 bus for the Athlon really a point-to-point link, anyway?

Well, though, if there's one thing we can agree on, though, no one will ever be claiming that a Hammer-based processor is limited by its "system interlink" or whatever. 6.4GB/s is way more than enough for now, especially when all you're doing is shoving data at the PCI bus and the AGP port.

Re:FSB we don't need to stinking FSB

[hattig]

The nVidia Hammer chipset is a single chip design. On-board AGP controller, PCI controller, all the USB, Firewire, IDE and other gizmos as well.

Some SiS Athlon chipsets are single chip as well. Pretty stable as well and well featured, and cheap.

A HT device that only has a HT uplink is known as a "HT Cave".

Old southbridges used to be PCI devices. E.g., VIA 686A/686B as used on the KT133, etc.

1000 pins doesn't seem to be a real problem for BGA devices like chipsets at the moment. AMDs 8131 is around 800-900 pins IIRC.

Re:FSB we don't need to stinking FSB

[Hoser McMoose]

Both the terms "front side bus" and "northbridge" are rather outdated and really don't apply to the Hammer architecture at all.

"Front Side Bus" stemmed from the PPro, which had two memory data buses, one on the "front side", which connected to the memory controller and everything else, and one on the "back side" which connected to the cache. With the Hammer, the cache is integrated so the "back side" bus never leaves the die (same as with the P4 and the AthlonXP) while the memory controller is also integrated, so part of it's "front side" never leaves the chip either, it just has a memory bus. Hypertransport is a chip-to-chip interconnect that is used for the rest of the system. You can call it a "front side bus" if you like, though the term really doesn't make any sense in this context.

"Northbridge" and "southbridge" also no longer make any sense. These terms originated because they were the "north" and the "south" end of a PCI bridge, which gave the processor a way to talk to PCI devices. Of course, the functions that these chips now perform no longer have any PCI at all in them, and the bridge is entirely in the I/O chip (what some people are still calling the "south bridge"). Intel is using their Accelerated Hub Architecture instead of PCI for interconnects, while AMD will be moving to using Hypertransport again as a chip-to-chip interconnect. AMD calls their chips "hypertransport tunnels", which is a somewhat more accurate title then a PCI bridge.

FWIW the only chipsets that I'm aware of which still use actual PCI north and south bridges are the AMD 760MP(X) and the ATI Radeon chipsets. AMD uses 66MHz/64-bit PCI to interconnect their chipsets, which gives them as much bandwidth as any competing technologies. ATI, meanwhile, is using 32-bit/33MHz, which is part of the reason why their Radeon chipset will likely really stink in the desktop market (nice for laptops, useless for desktops.. but I digress)

Re:FSB we don't need to stinking FSB

[barawn]

You're not going to get any argument from me here: "FSB" was a term that stuck around far past when all chips had moved cache on die, and should've just been called "system bus" for a while now, especially when the system bus speed and the memory bus speed were independent, which means that the "system bus" wasn't even really a "memory bus" - it was just a bus to a chip that contained a memory controller. NVIDIA's nForce chipset really showcased that, with the DASP integrated into the chipset. They were really trying to be a secondary processor. Now, with a HyperTransport link out, the best term would be "system interconnect" to satisfy those who can't stand using "bus" for a point to point protocol.

As per the North Bridge/South Bridge distinction, I'll agree that the original idea of the word no longer applies, but no one really has a good set of words for them yet. The "I/O" chip isn't really a pure I/O chip - AGP is an I/O port as well, and it also contains system monitoring information. Yes, it's input and output to the processor, but, well, everything is by a strict definition.

I dunno. "AGP tunnel" and "I/O chip" don't sit well with me. The first name stresses AGP too much, and while it's the main reason for the chip right now, it may not stay that way - in addition, the AGP chip doesn't need to be a tunnel (I think one of VIA's Hammer chipset is still using V.link, since they're using an old southbridge - I think). I think I'd prefer "High Speed Peripheral Interface Chip" and "Low Speed Peripheral Interface Chip" - that's pretty much dead on for the differences between the two chips, and the reason for the separate chips. Yes, there are those who merge the two chips (thus creating a combined Peripheral Interface chip) but many motherboard vendors will want to keep the two chips separate for reuse in multiple platforms.

In the end the winner will be

[Ironfist_ironmined]

your rich bastard `fathers'-boy' friend, who gets $400 for christmas and is told to spend it how he wants, so gets his daddy to make him a much better PC than you, which he then infects with Win2000 because he cant figure out how to install any linux distro, despite you lending him the CDs and offering to come round your house.

Re:In the end the winner will be

[fataugie]

I get $1500 for Christmas as well as gifts, does that make me a rich bastard too? I get it from my in-laws.

Probably

[Jogar the Barbarian]

Depends on how old it is, and what you consider a "new XP" processor. My EPoX 8K7a is running a Thunderbird 1.33 GHz, but it will support--last time I checked--up to a 2200+ XP. That's the Palomino core. I don't know about the Thoroughbred core. Check your mobo's manufacturer's web site for da skinny.

Need for speed vs nice to have

[Ride-My-Rocket]

I agree, to an extent -- I recently went from a P1-200MMX CPU to a P4-600 box w/1Gb RAM. That's my desktop applications machine, and it runs all of my day-to-day apps beautifully.

Games are a definite reason to buy a CPU with a lot more go-juice. Of course, this doesn't really satisfy the question of what you really NEED a blazingly fast CPU for...... because AFAIK, games aren't something you really would ever need (even if there _are_ gamers out there who would crucify me for saying so). But it's definitely a practical example of what you could use that speed for........

What for?

[Fascist Christ]

I'm curious about what people are using these super-fast processors for.

You need it to run the next version of Windows.

My ears are bleeding.........

[Ride-My-Rocket]

Please never utter those words again. I actually had to live through that decade -- once was enough. :P

To compile the Linux Kernel of course!

[John Kacur]

... anything else for that matter, good for things like GENTOO

Try Seti@Home

[DrDebug]

Ever get addicted to looking for little green
men? Try Seti@Home. Once you are hooked,
you will want to process a workunit as fast
as you can!

Or, if you want to aid humanity another way,
try Folding@Home, where they 'fold' proteins.
There are a couple of zillion ways to fold a
protein, and figuring them out sooner than
later will definately aid people.

Faster CPU's can only help the cause.

Re:Try Seti@Home

[roarl]

What's more, a 3000MHz (equivalent) P4/Athlon may actually be quite as fast as the old 500MHz Alpha when it comes to Seti@Home processing!! (Imagine that, wow that's really something!) Last time I checked, the performance of a 500MHz Alpha was 6 times higher than a 500MHz PIII (for Seti@Home, that is). Unfortunately, a 3000 MHz (equivalent) P4/Athlon won't be fully 6 times as fast as a 500MHz PIII.

It's a shame that the superior Alpha technology has been left behind by sheer market steamrolling. OTOH, from what I hear the Alpha folks are now working at AMD, so maybe we will see some Alpha performance from the Hammer?

Darn! Just too late.

[fr2asbury]

I just used that last of my liquid nitrogen on that Pentium!

Cheers,
Jonathan

For fuck's sake

[Chris Burke]

Would you PLEASE stop making that joke?

It was amusing in a 'I know what he's referring to! Tee hee!' kind of way when I -first- heard it about a YEAR ago. So please, for fuck's sake would you shut the fuck up!

Re:For fuck's sake

[scotch]

Would you PLEASE stop telling everyone what to do?

You were amusing with your cooler-than-thou attitude for about three syllables, but then it got old. I've never posted that joke BEFORE, so for fuck's sake take the stick out of your ass, get off your goddamn high horse, and get over yourself!

Re:For fuck's sake

[Chris Burke]

Would you PLEASE stop telling everyone what to do?

You may consider it a request, worded strongly due to the pain caused by the stupidity of the joke.

I've never posted that joke BEFORE,

The joke was still retarded, incredibly old, and constantly repeated. I don't believe you've actually been living under the rock necessary to have never heard it any of the 300,000,000 times it's been repeated; your excuse rings empty. And even did it not -- the idea that you could possibly be sitting at your keyboard, typing that nonsense, thinking to yourself how witty and original you were being... it boggles the mind with new depths of idiocy, never before conceived.

Nice try, but it requires no high-horse riding to realize that that was stupid, and for me to desperately want you to shut the fuck up.

Re:For fuck's sake

[scotch]

Jesus, lighten the fuck up man, that joke may be old, but there is a certain humor in using an old joke at the right time. Everthing that comes out of your brilliant mind is witty and original, so maybe you don't have to resort to timing for your humor. Well for "fuck's sake", have some pitty on those of us who aren't nearly the fine specimen of the human race that you are.

Here's a free clue for you: if you think that by blessing us with your advice to "shut the fuck up" you will in anyway reduce the number of times "hammer time" or any other lame slashdot joke is repeated, or that you will increase the caliber of discussion around here in any way, you are seriously fucking deluded. The only effect your little frothing at the mouth has is to contribute to the general inane posturing that goes on around here.

PS. take the stick out of your ass.
PPS. nice hand waiving to dismiss the objections with the inaccuracies in your first little hissy fit
PPPS. get over yourself, you are not so fucking brilliant that others' stupidity can cause you pain

Re:For fuck's sake

[festers]

Tell me, how long did it take you to become such an arrogant prick? Or maybe you were just born that way?

Re:For fuck's sake

[Chris Burke]

Man, your whole schtick is to paint the other guy as some self-righteous asshole, isn't it? Yeah, because pointing out that your joke was old and stupid means I think I'm better than you. Good job, Dr. Insight! I guess then that it'd make me a self-rightous narcissist if I pointed out that your excuse has changed from "Well I've never posted that joke before" to "Old stupid jokes said at the right time can be funny!" So you knew it was old and stupid, but thought that was the right time to say it for hilarity? I don't care, because you're timing sucks too. Oh no, now I think I'm God, for only a Divine Being is able to form opinions on humor, meaning I must claim to be such! Please, where can I get treatment for my God Complex? Is there a People Who Wrongly Think They Can Call Jokes Stupid Anonymous?

And what exactly makes you think my purpose is to improve the quality of slashdot by telling you to shut the fuck up? If I actually cared about the lame jokes like yours half as much as you'd like to pretend I do, I'd have abandoned the site as hopeless long before your sorry ass dropped by.

Make no mistake: it'd take a lot more than your crappy jokes and lame attempts to defend them -- in fact, a lot more than anything you could possibly say -- to cause me to froth at the mouth. If you see someone who is so much as frowning slightly after reading words you wrote, you will know with 100% assurance that the person is not me.

P.S. Stop imagining my ass with sticks up it; it creeps me out.

P.P.S. There were no inaccuracies in my first hissy fit. Your joke was old and lame -- I never said (nor gave a flying fuck) if it was the first time YOU had said it.

P.P.P.S. Of course stupidity can't cause me pain, barring some strange scenario involving a math test and electric shocks. That was exaggeration for humorous effect, Captain Doesn't Understand Sarcasm. And feel perfectly free to tell me that it wasn't funny at all. Use whatever bad words you want in your description of just how unfunny I am. I guarantee I won't call you a high-horse-riding self-righteous egomaniac for doing so!

P.P.P.P.S. Shut the fuck up. Thank you.

Re:For fuck's sake

[scotch]

I have to concentrate on work now - it's been fun! Let's do this again sometime, OK?

HAND

PS. shut the fuck up

Re:For fuck's sake

[Chris Burke]

Twice as long as it took you -- I'm an underachiever, after all.

Re:For fuck's sake

[Chris Burke]

Sure!

P.S. No, you shut up.

The CORRECT answer is...

[Chris Burke]

They have two clocks, ninety degrees out of phase, and the latch data on the rising and falling edges of both clocks. This provides the four transitions needed for quad-pumping.

As opposed to the other answers, which made no sense.

Have a nice day.

Re:hm?

[waterlogged]

The only memo I got was about some TPS reports, and I used that to clean a fish with

Re:hm?

[nojayuk]

and most of us will find new jobs involving drills...

Dentistry?

AMD HEAT issues AC is not cheap!

[spineboy]

I like AMD's but even w/ case fans I still can get a thermal overload on 90+ deg days when I'm running at 100% CPU usage.

I'm gonna go w/ Intel just cause I cant afford the AC bills in the summer to keep the AMDs cool

too cold to handle?

[h4x0r-3l337]

How come in one of the pictures the guy is holding a little styrofoam cup with what's supposed to be liquid nitrogen, with his bare hands? Is that little layer of styrofoam really insulation enough to prevent his fingers from freezing?

Re:too cold to handle?

[jasonditz]

Yeah you can do that.

You aren't protecting your skin from the cold, you are protecting the cold from your skin. Works dandy.

Remember the Osborne II

[geoswan]

Might as well wait for the Hammer. The built in memory controller should to wonders for latency. Of course the 64 bit stuff will be a nice future feature to have.

Do you remember the Osborne computer? It was a very popular CP/m computer. Osborne computer grew like crazy. Osborne announced an "Osborne II" computer, and IIRC, sales dried up, as everyone waited with baited breath for the new model. Because revenue shrunk Osborne couldn't afford to finish development of the new model. Then the IBMPC came out, and his target market disappeared.

If too many people hold off purchasing an AMD now, because they want to wait for the newest, whiz-bang thing, then the possibility exists that AMD will not be able to finance the development of the K8 on time, or even that AMD will go bust.

Bioinformatics

[roberto0]

edremy was very close to being right when he said "computational chemistry"

I study bioinformatics, which might be considered computational biology. I compile and run programs that perform some heavy-duty computation. A lot of the algorithms I require are either non-parallellizable (aligning multiple protein sequences) or trivially parallelizable (making multiplt pairwise alignments).
The faster the proceesor, the faster I can report my results

But, guys, let's not make them too fast. I still want to run jobs in the batch queue and go out for lunch while I wait!

Probably mistake somewhere.

[TheLink]

If the FSB is at 266 there's little gain using DDR333.

They probably ran the FSB at 266 and the memory at 333. Go look at their other benchmarks at:

http://www17.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q3/020826/p4 _2 800-05.html

You'll see:
Athlon XP 2600+ (2133/133/166MHz).

So FSB at 133. See the bandwidth benchmarks in same article, the 2600+ seems to do about the same as the 2000+ benchmarks in the article you cited, so the memory is clamped to the same limit.

They have a Athlon 2666/166/166, so they have run it at 166/166, but they need to lower the multiplier to do a proper DDR333 vs DDR266 test.

That said,
http://www17.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q3/020821/at hl onxp-04.html
Says CL2.

Whereas:
http://www17.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q3 /020821/athl onxp-20.html
Says CL3.

Whatever it is, something is wrong somewhere.

developers, developers, developers...

[dollargonzo]

calls steve baldwin...

truth is, for ur avg consumer, u are correct. all the things u use, namely word and quake, don't need much more. that said, both were designed to run well on SLOWER processors. also,they are meant to be realtime.

anything that is not designed to be realtime will be faster. any simulation, any encoding, and also any COMPILATION. sure, u don't need to to recompile whole projects very often, but still. u said it urself: kernel compiles in a flash. but for ppl who spend a lot of time doing this, it is definitely visible.

another thing, any kind of video manipulation. editing or encoding. encoding a dvd takes about 2.5-5 hours for a 1.5 hour dvd. here the relation is purely linear. at least for popular movies, i can go download them faster.

Here's a better test

[TheLink]

http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/cpu/article. php/3261_1363691__9

Look at the SiSoft Mem BW scores 2400. That looks more like DDR333 with Athlons :).

Don't know what the PCMark numbers mean. Wouldn't be surprised if they mean nothing ;).

Anyway it's a pity they didn't test Quake 3 with the 1700+ overclocked to 2200+/166. Coz I believe Quake 3 is very memory bandwidth intensive.

Whatever it is Tom's Hardware's SiSoft mem bw figures of around 2000 for both DDR266 and DDR333 are very suspect to me.

Re:Here's a better test

[mczak]

No, both results are perfectly correct - the difference is hardocp used DDR333 ram together with DDR333 FSB, and tomshardware used DDR333 ram together with DDR266 FSB. This just shows that to get the most out of fast ram, you need a fast FSB which has around the same bandwidth. The tomshardware link I used was just to show that the ram bandwidth throughput is indeed limited by the FSB bandwidth (you can't expect more than 2GB ram bandwidth throughput even if you'd use dual-channel DDR 400 memory system with a maximum bandwidth of 6.4GB/s).

mczak

Re:hello

[JollyFinn]

Hey you got one thing completely WRONG the cache size must be much larger by then.
The memory/processor gap increases, so best way to improve processor performance is add more cache. And with currently at 512kb, and with die shrink you get to 2Meg by 0.9u at 5Ghz. At 10Ghz theyll probably put 8Megs of cache on mainstream desktop part. Its the most efficient use of silicon space for improved performance at that time...

Deceptive marketing

[AntiNorm]

and will work at 2.17GHz

If it runs at 2.17 GHz, then why the hell are they marketing it as 2.7 GHz? Being an EE, I am well aware of the fact that different architectures -- like IA32 vs AMD -- have different per-clock-cycle performance aspects. Yes, I also know that the customer just sees numbers and thinks 'gee, P4s are running at 2.7 GHz now while Athlons are at 2.17 GHz. P4s must be better then.' But I don't see it as ethical to get around this assumed ignorance by telling what amounts to an outright lie. AMD should instead win customers from Intel by convincing people that their processors are better even at lower clock speeds (which they are, really). If people started to think that AMDs were better at lower clock speeds, AMD's popularity would explode.

I am not being an AMD basher here. I have always been an AMD user, and continue to be one to this day. And contrary to popular belief, there are plenty of computer stores out there that label 2700+ systems as 2700 MHz. Even then, AMD knows damn well that most users think 2700+ means 2700 MHz, and that they don't realize that the s/MHz/+/; is just AMD's way of obscuring the misleading marketing. Fact is, the stores and AMD *are* marketing the systems as 2700 MHz, which they are not.

Re:Deceptive marketing

[Performer Guy]

You said it, you're an EE. Most of AMD's customers aren't and they need to sell chips. Like it or not Intel deliberately created a pipeline with too many stages so they could clock their chip high. People care about performance, AMD is telling people their chip performs like an Intel or better at some clock rate. Otherwise their customers wouldn't get it because they aren't EEs. You clearly know the real clock so there's no problem. Get over it, if AMD marketed like you suggest they might be out of business already.

Re:Deceptive marketing

[Hoser McMoose]

AMD tried that, and their popularity dropped, profits dropped and they were barely able to sell their top-end chip for $100. Apple is still trying it, and still failing miserably (though Apple has the unfortunately downside of actually have very slow chips, regardless of whether you look at their clock speed).

Face it, the few that know enough to bother looking beyond a single number know enough to realize that clock speed is a completely useless number.

Personally I don't really care too much one way or the other. AMD replaced one totally meaningless number with another totally meaningless number. Ideally this sort of thing would just encourage people to actually look beyond the pretty number and try to figure out what it actually means, but both myself and AMD's marketing dept. are well aware that that sort of thing is WELL beyond what 99% of the buying public are going to do. So, model numbers it is, and they worked. AMD's profits and average selling price have increased a lot since the indroduction of their model numbers, even now in a bit of a PC market downturn.

Computational Mechanics

[hunterk1]

Try a Tyan 2466 w/2 MP1900+... Then the research codes only take a week to run.

GIVE THOSE EXTRA CYCLES TO SOMEONE ELSE

[frooyo]

download SETI, or that cancer program to break down proteins.

Let it run in the background all the time to use those extra cycles.

You won't notice a difference and you are giving back to a worth cause...

Re:How fast is fast enough?

[Billly Gates]

Just wait for doom3 and ut2003. Oh wait you said productivity. Ah, nevermind.

Re:Not a troll, just a question ... Answer... Maya

[samdu]

Maya. Until I can render a high resolution, ray-traced screen in an instant, I don't want to hear all of this " computers are too fast nowadays, when I was growing up, my computer was an abicus, AND I LOVED IT, IT WAS FINE!" crap.

-Sam

Re:AMD HEAT issues AC is not cheap!

[Hoser McMoose]

Processor myth #1: AMD chips generate more heat then Intel chips.

Check the data sheets sometime, the amount of heat that an AthlonXP and a P4 put out is nearly identical. Both are also only in the 60-70W range, or about the same as your typical light bulb. We all know how turning on a single light in your house cause your AC bills to skyrocket!!!

This troll is driving me crazy

[fm6]

What's the point of this one? To stamp out urban legends by poisoning the market? To create an urban legend? To drive me crazy?

Oh wait, that must be it. Never mind!