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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."
Rumor has it that AMD intends to begin advertising a dual-purpose "egg frying" processor shortly.
Do you like German cars?
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
"I thought they weren't going to concentrate on PC processors [slashdot.org] anymore?"
I'm not surprised you thought that, you didn't RTFA.
half a year ago and prior to that id give AMD the advantage over Intel for their chips (except for the deceptivity of 2100+ chips being 1.73 Ghz).... even accepting their tendancy to overheat.
but lately Intel has been steadily ahead with clock cycles that even AMD's "2800+" marketing cant compete with.
luckily Intel has had a Looooooooonnnnnnnggggg track record of power hungry chips which i suppose allows AMD to give more muscle for less juice in laptops....
but to say this is "yet another case of AMD one upping intel" is a bit too much.
-- enter the sig --
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
Not to be too much of a pessimist but lets face it. The mobile market is dominated by Intel. I would love to buy an AMD based laptop when it comes time to replace my current trusty Dell 8100 but Who will make the laptops with these processors? Certainly not Dell, HP, IBM or the likes of any Tier 1 supplier that wants to keep on receiving their share of the Intel Processor Yields.
When I went looking to replace my old laptop a year & a half ago there was not a single tier 1 hardware maker that would dare put out an AMD based laptop in the market in fears that they might make mad the bear that Intel is.
Until the industry stands up to Intel in the same way that they need to stand up against M$ this will continue to be the case.
Simple enough to ask (This is a serious question) What if any current Tier 1 hardware manufacturer sells any Athlon based system for "Office" use? What about "Home" use. I dare say that the Home is the only one likely to have an answer. Are laptops devices mainly used in an "Office" or a "Home" environment? (Meaning you don't buy your kids a laptop to do their homework on, but you do have a laptop to "extend" your office to outside your place of work.).
Gato
First of all, thanks for the helpful links to AMD's and Intel's websites.
Second of all, Intel has been "one up" on AMD for quite some time now, being at least a couple of months ahead in terms of performance (3.06Ghz with HyperThreading is out now and available to buy). As always, it's great to see that AMD is hanging in there, but there's no need to toot their horn no matter how they're actually doing.
"I want 16cpu MB with 8MB cache per chip damnit!"
I want a cruise ship, a space shuttle, a space station, and a cell phone so tiny that I risk accidentally swallowing it, damnit!
Forget Barton Core, I want to get hardcore with their Grand Prix Models ;-)
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
AMD needs to cement some deals with some major OEMs and fast. They released a mobile processor before, but I can't name anyone that sells athlon laptops. Hopefully somebody big like gateway or hp, etc. will pick these new chips up post haste. AMD is still lagging in the desktop world (Hammer where are you?) and they are bleeding cash like a sieve, hopefully, they can gain some footing here and give intel a run for their money.
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.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Problem is, OS's are developed to desktop standards, not laptop ones. Granted, my 400mhz may run OSX nicely, It'd prolly crawl on an iBook of the equiv. Mind you, I understand the ramifications of a low power chip, but shouldn't the goal of a chip maker to make the coldest, fastest chip and the OS maker to make the fastest, smallest OS?
C'mmon people.. get on the ball here!
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Ok, let it out. We all think it's quite funny that you're the first person to think up that you can fry an egg on an Athlon, or use it as a tanning bed, or whatever.
Fact is, Barton 3000+ dissapates 74W max, while Intel's P4 3gig dissapates 82W max. SO SHUT UP ABOUT IT ALREADY!
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?
I want 16cpu MB with 8MB cache per chip damnit!
Okay.
I write in my journal
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
At several hundred $s each, only in very high stake games...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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 want a Pony!
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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
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
with the code name 'Judas' but they decided to hold that one back for a later show.
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.
Great!
Because we all know how good the Athlon naming conventions have been in the past!
I mean, my 2400+ Athlon that runs at 2.0ghz? No problem! My 2700+ Athlon that runs at a higher clock speed than a 3000+ Athlon? What? No worries. Thunderbird, Barton, ThoroughBred A, Thoroughbred B? Know it like the back of my hand
Thank god AMD is clearing up the confusion caused by intel (Oh my god! Two different processor names! ahhh!!!!) by setting an example with it's own naming conventions!
Huh? The Barton 3000+ (at 2.5ghz) is running pretty close to the speed of a P4 2.8ghz, even if it isn't running very close to the 3.0ghz. Athlon's still have an edge as far as performance per mhz.
"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
I remember reading that they did want to do that, but there was still the little problem of cost. The mobo gets more complex, etc etc.
Then there's the little matter of OS and App support. Windows 2000 handles dual processors pretty well, but it doesn't appear (I'm talking about image here, not substance) to work twice as fast. You need multithreaded apps etc etc etc to make good use of it.
Remember when I mentioned the rendering bit earlier? I could use a machine that's 16x faster than what I have now, but a 16 processor machine would be virtually worthless because of all the management that'd need to be done. I wouldn't get 16x performance out of it. I have 2 processors now and I'm barely getting 1.5x. The only real noticable benefit I'm getting from the extra processor is that my multithreaded apps are a bit faster and Windows (explorer etc) is much more responsive.
Yeah, I'd like dual to be the rule too. But the market doesn't want that. I agree that it's not impossible to do. I agree that it could be done. But there's a lot more to it than just releasing the hardware. The software end of it too can be problematic.
Considering what I know about chips and power, they probably really do munch a lot of energy, but if you were to ask me which parts I thought most drained a notebook computer of its valuable energy resource, I would have been more quick to suggest something like a backlit LCD display or things with moving parts such has the hard dissk and other peripheral devices.
Out of all laptop devices, is it the CPU that consumes the most? I would appreciate it if somebody could clear me up on this. :)
If you measure quality with a thermometer, I suppose you're right.
The AMD Athlon XP lacks for any integrated overheating protection means, and the most of systems based on it do not have any correct thermocontrol mechanisms. At present Athlon XP based systems do have thermal problems and are not protected from serious failures of cooling systems.
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?
SuperDug says "Looks like yet another case of AMD being one-up on Intel."(on cache size)
Really. Centrino has a 1MB L2 cache - since the Barton core just caught up to the P4 Northwood with 512k and the new AMD mobile cpus aer based on Barton, I'd say that makes the AMD chips HALF cache size of Centrino. Why don't you try reading the specs before you make comparisons?