Athlon 64 Pushed Back to September

Orion writes "AMD confirmed today that their new Athlon 64 will indeed be pushed back to September. Originally planned to be released in April or May, AMD has decided to put all of its brainpower into the launch of the 64-bit Opteron, which is still scheduled to be released on April 22. This article explains that AMD is still going to try to get a few more Athlon XP processors out before the Athlon 64 hits stores. The 3000+ has a planned February 10 release date, and the 3200+ should be out by the middle of the year according to the article."

Comments

So?

[Salden]

The server market needs the 64bit cpus before consumers do anyway. I am looking forward to the barton cores with their better cache performance. It's still impressive to see what their doing with a look less cycles than Intel. I hope they get a good share in the server market with the Opteron as it will build confidence in AMD across the board.

Tactically wise

[l33t-gu3lph1t3]

AMD's decision to delay it's Athlon64 CPU series release date until September (possibly timed to the release of a 64bit version of Windows) is pretty smart, actually. By delaying, AMD loses in the highend desktop arena, but is now able to spend those resources on the potentially far more lucrative Opteron systems. Why release a fast, inexpensive processor for the desktop market when you can release a slightly slower one, for a different market, for much, much more? By concentrating on the big iron of Opteron, AMD might be able to halt their financial bloodletting, and get back in the black in time for Athlon64...

Re:Duke Nukem!

[Wolfier]

Price of an average game: $60
Price of an expensive system: $4000

Total: $4060

That is, 406000 pennies. Assume every year is leap, 406000 / 366 = 1112.

i.e. 1112 years from now you have saved enough money.

However, price deflates. By that time these stuffs probably go for free.

My best bet is, spend all your pennies now and wait for 20 years. Then get them both for free.

Why change?

[avandesande]

Why pull the rug out from under the Barton Athlons when they are still making money and relatively competitive with Intel's cpu? Technology releas dates have as much to do with marketing as engineering...

Please don't rip on release dates

[diablobynight]

You know I would prefer them to wait and release a product when it works right as apposed to when Intel released the first P4s and they were slower than the P3s on the market. Plus these processors originally named sledgehammer and clawhammer will be a great addition to the multiple cpu community because they contain there own memory processors, so the woes of redundant work in multiple CPU systems will be reduced by not having to recache the memory constantly, like modern Xeon servers do. Plus don't you like the idea of your memory bandwidth actually increasing with each processor you install

Re:It's a good thing

[ackthpt]

Actually, to make systems respond better, increasing processors isn't going to help. Increasing cache hits and reducing time for disk reads is really the only reason to make systems snappier.

Which is why, cache aside, simply adding system memory often improves performance far more than dropping $$$ on a new CPU. Particularly the case with MS apps, only they can explain why my XP 2600+/333 smokes the computer at work in everything but loading MS applications. More than twice the clockspeed and a fat lot of memory doesn't seem to make a hoot of a difference, meanwhile Persistence of Vision renders much, much faster (almost dislocated my jaw the first time I saw it render a 1024x768 anti aliased image in a fraction of the time the 933 PIII did at work.) Probably the same old bottlenecks all versions of windows suffer, load tons of crap in memory and everything waits on disk i/o.

If MS were required to put a meter on the screen: [Microsoft Visual Studio] *click*

Now loading 128MB of DLL's you probably will only need 2% of.

So if I set Super luser mode, the software doesn't do SQUAT. No clippy, no autocomplete, no nothing. I hate it very much when my typing stream gets interrupted because Word or MSDev or Excel goes off and tries to autocomplete something (so I spend several hours every time I get a new machine turning said features off, and every new release turns them back on.. ). :-)

Always top of my list of complaints about MS apps, getting them to shup up so I can get something done. I know exactly what you are talking about, because I've been there enough myself. Now if only I could stop crap from popping up while I'm typing (Not web pop-ups) and removing focus. That is some seriously irritating sh!t, espeically if it includes a default action set on a button and I was just hitting ENTER (RETURN for those of use who remember the past :-) and I begin yelling obsenities. Warnings should be passive and off to the side. Yeah, I'll see them, but let me finish what I'm doing, as I'm the master not the damned slave.

Re:AMD is waiting for Microsoft

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

C't, the German technical magazine, got hold of a 1.2GHz Hammer recently. They ran various 32-bit benchmarks on it against a 1.2GHz Athlon XP and a 2.2GHz P4s.
The Hammer blew the Athlon out of the water and was only slightly slower that the P4 on most tests. For example, the Linux 2.4 kernel compile times were: 161s (Hammer) 222s (Athlon) and 166s (P4) [yup, I know the Hammer won that one].
Two weeks later, they posted more benchmarks with software optimised for the P4. The Hammer benefitted more from the optimisations than the P4 did.
Bottom line is, everything benefits with this processor. 64-Bit applications benefit even more. I bought shares in that company this week on the back of those results and wish they would release that baby as soon as possible to anyone who wants it.