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AMD Releases 12 New Chips at CeBIT
SuperDuG writes "AMD now offers three categories of processor for notebooks grouped under the Athlon XP-M brand. It labels them "desktop replacement," "standard," and the new "low-voltage". AMD plans to make a desktop replacement in the notebook computer market using the Barton Core, a technology designed to double the CPU Cache. Looks like yet another case of AMD being one-up on Intel."
What about the Centrino processors released last night? 1.6GHz performing equal to that of a 2.6GHz P4? AMD is way behind in the Mobile race. Does anyone know what voltage the XP-M even runs on?
Kristopher
AMD isn't "one up" on Intel until these chips are benchmarked and compared side by side with offerings from Intel. Until then, "low-voltage" is just as nonsensical as "centrino".
It would be interesting to see how the low-voltage Athlon XP-M processors compare to the vaunted Centrinos. Seems to be shaping up to be an interesting battle. Still, the categorization is a good move for AMD, I think -- it's a much more intuitive naming convention than the confusion that's doubtless going to be caused by Intel's Pentium 4M/Pentium M/Centrino names.
-- shayborg
If AMD plans to bring it's desktop hammer chip out later this year, I assume that it also plans a mobile version. Does it have a timeframe for this yet?
I have been entertaining the idea of replacing my desktop with a laptop for a while now but have also been lusting after the advance reports of the hammer line. As my current desktop is a non-DDR 1 Gig Athlon, just about any laptop around today could probably knock my socks off; However the battery times on the current generation counts against them.
I appeal to anyone with knowledge in this department: would the mobile hammer suck up even more power than the current gen? (I also have a reluctance to try explaining third degree burns on my balls to the doctors in casualty)
come on AMD you have 802.11b via the alchemy boys and girls
no NEW networking chips and NO gigabit ethernet....
what I would like to see is a bluetooth chip (or licence one) that also sat on the motherboard
they are not expensive at $5
On the motherboard so I can sync my phone/palm/life
regards
John Jones
all I want out of a mobile chip is these three things:
-large cache
-customizability of the laptop from non-proprietary vendors
-efficiency to allow decent power consumption at a fair clock speed (preferrably user-tweakable on the fly; I don't need 800 MHz if i am typing something in vi or pico).
number 1 has always been an issue for low-end processors like the duron and celeron. Number two is tough, usually reserved for the PCMCIA market when it comes to mobiles. Centrino does nothing for me in this aspect, while the new Athlon M chips allow for it. And number three may exist, I honestly don't know as AMD's site won't load right for me (in windows at work, no less). But I do know that my 400 MHz clocks down to 100 when on battery, and suits me fine for most on the go tasks like typing and excecuting short perl and python scripts. If i could do that with a laptop designed for 1800 mhz designed to battery at ~800 for 2 hours and manually told it to underclock to 200, imagine the improvement in battery time.
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I bought a p-2000 from fujitsu last year and one odd thing is they charge sales taxes for all 50 states(I doubt they are giving that money back to the states). So expect to pay 100+ more for anything you buy from fujitsu direct.
The centrino based X31 from IBM is new release too. Thinkpads cost more but they are built like tanks and come with a 3 year warranty compared to the usual one year from many other manufactures. The X31 would be a much more attractive package with 802.11G and legacy free. Who the hell needs a parallel port on a subnotebook?
eh, its not our fault you're a bastard. Is it so much to ask that CPU makers put decent cache on chips, and that multi-processor be standard? Apple has been doing it for years, with much success. Intel proved in '97 or so that a 1MB on-chip cache was feasable with its Pentium Pro 200 1MB Cache chip. It is utterly unreasonable to think that it is any more difficult to make a chip now with a large cache, in the 8 to 16 MB range, and that more boards be dual processor. BeInc had the right idea with their BeBoxes before Apple did, but due to circumstance was utterly smashed by the PC Clone market due to price, not performance. Someone should wake up and realize that rather than putting out chips like the Duron and Celeron they can put the difference in the motherboard by making them single or dual processor.
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I'm currently using a laptop with an Athlon XP-M chip and I love it, better price and great power management. I'm glad to hear that AMD is continuing to inovate in the mobil processing arena. If this continues, I'll definitly purchase another AMD based laptop.
There is no dark side of the moon really, matter of fact it's all dark
Cache memory tends to be section of the CPU that fails, it's hard to manufacture and this results in high failure rates when you have stacks of it. This is typically why Celerons and Durons have been so cheap. A poor yield puts up the cost of the good uns, hence why Xeons have always costs so much (plus they're aimed at high end servers)
I would like to see some of those 1400+ and faster low voltage chips in a desktop machine. I know there are relatively low power alternatives like the VIA C3/EDEN processors and the tualatin-based Celerons, but for some things like games and high-res video, those processors are kind of lacking oomph.
As a rather frivolous example, with neither mplayer+Quicktime dlls, nor the Quicktime player for Windows, my 1.0 GHz Celeron could not play the 1024x464 trailer of the Matrix Reloaded without dropping every 2nd or 3rd frame. A 1.533GHz (1800XP) Athlon chewed through the Quicktime with mplayer without any problems at all.
That machine however, uses significantly more power, generates way more heat and requires more noisy cooling gear.
Those low voltage cpus would be the cats ass for building a small, quiet, cool and still very powerful desktop machine that is a little easier on the power bill. Anything that uses less power is good in my mind.
Not sure which of the 3 flavours they will be using but probably the low power version.
Now some of you may say; so what thats not mainstream SUN aren't selling ANYTHING at the moment. But we've got a Sun Blade B1600 in a rack at work and it looks damn nice - I'd buy one just to brighten the room up.
I just wonder when AMD are going to make the switch to multi-core cpus
It's deceptive because their name doesnt sat AMD 1.7 Ghz performs like a 2.1 PIV.... Their name implies that THEIR chip IS a 2.1Ghz Chip....
To give your product a name that implies it ITSELF is of that Mhz is misleading... although it may perform as well as a competing product of said MHZ the joe consumer is being led to believe that he has a chip that runs at THAT Mhz.
This my fried is deceptive...
-- enter the sig --
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
I am glad to see that AMD is responding to Centrino. I heard a rumour going around that AMD was getting out of the PC x86 Chip market. Being an AMD fan, I'm glad to see this is not true!
--- WAL
between consumer and business "grade" anymore. Except maybe winXP pro vs. home. I've got a "consumer grade" HP laptop (athlon) and it has integrated 100bt, cd burner, etc, etc. Tons of businesses buy the "consumer" versions as they are cheap. Is the stuff that *most* people do at work that different from what they do at home so as to require a better computer? Quite the contrary, in my (consulting) experience, most home pc's are faster than the machines people use at work. Doesn't hold true for companies with a bazillion computers that want some kind of management capability but those companies don't make up the majority of businesses anyways...
You're right that most notebooks are made by around 4 tiawanese companies (wistron, quanta, ???) but there are a few others that make superior notebooks...
I believe Sony and Panasonic have their own manufacturing lines, and that's why their products can be a little thinner and lighter than the generic tiawanese computers... But Samsung and LG in Korea are also starting to make new laptops (the Samsung P10 and Compaq Evo n800 series (by LG) are among the best desktop replacements around, with much higher build quality and thinner/lighter form factors than any Tiawanese laptop...
The power consumption of AMD's mobile processor is still much much higher than Intel's. Tom's Hardware says here that the power-saving features of the Pentium M are supposed to ensure that Pentium-M has an "average power consumption" of less than 1 W, while still delivering satisfying performance. PCWorld corroborates that here stating that the 1.3-GHz, 1.4GHz, 1.5-GHz, and 1.6-GHz Pentium M chips draw an average of less than 1 watt of power.
Compare that to the advertized draw of AMD's low-voltage chips including the 1800+, 1700+, 1600+, 1500+, and 1400+ models which dissipate 25 watts when operating at maximum power. If that's the maximum draw, the average is not likely to be less than 10..
The caveat is that the other laptop conponents, most notably the backlit display, consume the lion's share of the battery life anyway. Lord knows I support the underdog (I even bought a Cyrix instead of an original Pentium), but this Centrino chip is good.. damn good.
C'mon, AMD, make an updated MP chipset.
For all the stuff AMD and Intel are coming out with for "mobile computing", there is no way they will ever be competitive with whatever Apple is using. When it comes to notebooks, Powerbooks just wipe the floor with any x86 notebook, it's not even close. Not even in the same ballpark. Give up, AMD and Intel, and leverage your good strengths instead of your pathetic weaknesses.
"but lately Intel has been steadily ahead with clock cycles that even AMD's "2800+" marketing cant compete with. "
0 ,0 0.asp
That's where your wrong. The new 3000+ Barton is faster then the Intel 3.06. The same will be true of a 2800+ Barton vs. a P4 2.8. The fact that a P4 3GHz gets beat by a chip running almost a 1GHz slower is embarassing for Intel to say the least and most certainly confirms AMD's "number+" processor naming convention. It's Intel marketing that doesn't live up to the hype, not AMD's.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,10958
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
The goal of the OS maker is to put in more and more features that require better and better CPUs, thus making their product better (not because of bloat, I mean come on, Windows XP is DEFINITELY much better than Windows 95, and a lot of it is in the features).
Actually, the goal of any company is to make money, whatever it takes. If people think a 'hotter' cpu is better for whatever reason, lets make that baby cook.
As to XP being better....no, I would disagree. For what I do, its slower. dialog boxes take forever, it wants to figure out everything I am doing before i do it. saving files on 95, the dialog pops up instantly on 500mhz. on my 2.5ghz, it takes several seconds to check all the drives. XP is constantly hitting my firewall trying to call home, trying to seconds guess me. Not everyone WANTS everything integrated. I would prefer to use products other than MS without it breaking some damn feature. I can give lots of examples, but I dont need to.
I don't need a 'smarter' OS. I need an OS to get the fuck out of my way and let me get my job done. Just be a thin layer between Photoshop/Sound Forge/Flash/Mozilla and the hardware. When I want to listen to music, I will start a player. XP insists on starting a dialog menu asking me what to do every time I put in a music cd, even tho I always select 'do nothing' and 'remember my preferences'.
XP is suck ass slow. It just looks pretty doing it. I would gladly pay the same $ for 95 if they would simply keep it SIMPLE and updated. And fix the 256mbram bug. Gladly. I might even pay more. 98, SE, ME, dont get me started.....
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Cache is less and less useful, the more you have of it. with 64K, you only cache miss, say, 10% of the time. Or your data is in cache, 90% of the time, say. With 256K, you only miss... 5% of the time. Adding another 768K, and you might get down to only 2%. Yay. You still have to load data in the first time - so it can't be in cache - it's all the way out on disk. Adding another 50 MB really won't help too much - especially for how much it costs - it will only snag another 1% tops. These are just numbers i'm making up - but that's pretty much how it goes.
Now - cache gets cheaper, and it makes it worth while to add more. But the "throw more cache at it" approach doesn't help a whole lot. And the more cache you have, the more expensive managing it becomes.
And just throwing on more CPUs doesn't help either - like another poster stated - you can add more processors, but managing them, making sure they are doing something useful and different, and not running into each others' memories...that's a trick too. 2-way SMP might be useful these days, but only for power users who really use their machines. Most people still only run one program at a time...it's usually not economically viable to ship smp systems for people that won't ever use them.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
Rumor has it that AMD intends to begin advertising a dual-purpose "egg frying" processor shortly.
This is a very good decision on AMD's part, since the Intel P4's egg-fryting capabilities significantly exceed those of every available AMD processor.
There's been no word about whether AMD also intends to challenge Intel in the workshop space heater market.
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Indeed the Centrino part is rather interesting in that it's specifically contradicting previous claims about the effects of processor power consumption on battery life: For those who recall, when Transmeta first started making promises about ultra-long battery laptops, Intel and some of their vendor friends poo-poohed them, claiming that the battery was only one very small part of the equation and even an ultra efficient transmeta processor wouldn't make much of a dent on battery consumption. Now we hear that it'll change everything...
As a sidenote, the bell of doom has pretty much been rung for Transmeta hasn't it?