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AMD Delays Hammer
TeJarz writes "C|Net reports that their next processor (Hammer) has been rescheduled from its original Q4 release to Q1 2003. To quote C|Net: 'The delays are occurring to accommodate the release of a new version of Athlon with a 333MHz bus, said Crank. Current Athlons come with a 200MHz bus and 256KB of secondary cache.' Let's hope this doesn't get moved again."
...have a 266MBz bus
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I, for one, am hoping to replace our Alphas with cpus from the AMD Hammer series. We're about to buy a bunch of P4-based machines despite the problems we've had with certain tight loops in scientific code performing 80 times slower than a similarly clocked Athlon (according to Athlon advertised "speed", not actual clock). No, I'm not exaggerating, and this has been verified independently -- the P4 cpu has some huge weak spots that really suck if you hit them. If Hammer were out and working properly, we probably wouldn't buy the P4 machines to hold us over.
We need 64 bit machines to accomodate massive memory for our research. I'm really hoping the Hammer can provide a relatively inexpensive and *commoditized* 64 bit platform for us to work on, compared to existing 64 bit (workstation/server) platforms. And I want it yesterday. Actually, I want it last year.
I have no idea what the editors or submitter meant, of course.
-Paul Komarek
Intel will always be one step ahead of AMD. Where do you think AMD has originations from? I'm all for competition, but intel has billions into R&D whereas amd only has millions.
And we have seen time and time again as intel puts out something that is more intuitive, faster, more stable, etc. I'm sure you can argue one of those last points, sure, but you get my drift - that i'm sure of also. And you would be your money amd knows it too.
Hard as that may be to believe, some people use their computers for real work. And some of those people run into that dreaded 4G limit--4G is not a lot of memory anymore these days. And many of these people would love to have the choice of a Hammer over Itanium.
I am a big computer geek. I'm 20 years old and I've been into these things since I was 12. I learned BASIC and HTML in 8th grade, and C an C++ sometimes around 10th grade, which was also when I got into using Linux (Slackware '98!). I have a big history in gaming, networking, programming, and fiddling around with other general random stuff, including lots of multimedia. Over the years, I've gone from a 486SX 25MHz, to a DX2 66MHz, to a Cyrix 6x86 166 (don't ask what I was thinking), to a K6 233, and finally, to a Celeron 366 which I have been running for two years and am currently running at 550MHz. This CPU works great, and it does everything I need it to do. It compiles kernels fast, it works with multimedia and video editing at a decent speed, it encodes MP3 and Ogg at a good rate, and it can handle the games I like (Quake III and Unreal Tournament, mostly). Why haven't I upgraded, you ask? Well, I did for a while, to an Athlon 900, and the performance was great, but I killed it myself. Ever since then, I've just stuck to the Celeron. Now, after Athlons have been out for a long, LONG time, I have an Athlon XP 2000+ sitting around, patiently waiting for me to get a motherboard and case to go along with it's RAM and 80GB hard drive. But I am patient, I'm not worried, I'm not some kinda freak that believes extremely strongly that without this boost in performance I'm gonna freakin die. That said, I will probably not be getting an AMD Hammer CPU until one or two years after it's been in the market. I might get it sooner, who knows, but I am not in a hurry for this thing. There is no rush for me. Why? I don't know... I mean, I do a lot more with computers than most people I know running processors operating at over 1GHz or 2GHz, and I'm really happy with my simple, old, yet still fast, robust, and fully-functional Celeron 550 CPU. Upgrades are overrated, and anyone sweating diesel because this thing has been pushed back a few times, needs to take a chill pill, and calm down. A good thing... a TRULY good thing... is well worth waiting for.
If I recall correctly the original release timeframe was Q4-Q1.
I'm glad your happy with your slow Celeron, but don't assume that for the rest of us we don't need the fastest CPU possible. Time is money and the faster myself or someone else can get their work done the better. There are a ton of apps out there right now where that speed CPU is just no longer a viable solution.
I do happen to agree with not freaking out about a processor release date. But do realize that people are excited about this cpu for a reason.
BTW many of us here were using computers and programming before you were born. Your only 20 for Pete's sake.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch