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AMD Moving to a 400MHz Bus?
An anonymous reader writes "According to this tantalizing Infoworld Scoop, AMD soon introduce a 400 Mhz bus. Seems that SiS's big announcement at CEBIT is the SiS748 chipset, which supports both 400 MHz DDR & AGP 8X, and is targeted at the upcoming Athlon 3200+."
You DO realize that we are talking about the bus-speed, not the CPU-speed? You don't increase the bus-speed by huge amounts overnight. Move from 333MHz to 400Mhz, while not groundbreaking, is significant.
As to the "whole new architecture"... It's called Athlon64, and it has 800MHz bus (and loads of other improvements). Available in september in a store near you.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
The general rule of thumb for upgrading it to put it off for as long as you can, and then buy as close to the top of the line as you can afford.
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
I think it can take quite a bit more.
Even with half the stated bus throughput, the Athlon seems to do a good job keeping up with the P4, and at a lower price.
Even at a lower clock rate, the Athlon can beat a P4. The Athlon XP 3000+ has essentially the same performance as a P4 for almost all applications, even ones where you'd expect the P4 to excel at (Video encoding) for example.
It helps that throughput isn't everything - Latency is also important, and the P4 was designed around an extremely high-latency memory subsystem (RDRAM), while the Athlon was designed around a much lower-latency memory subsystem. All the throughput in the world isn't going to help you unless the turnaround between a data request and that data coming from memory is fast. The only exception is if you rearchitecture the whole system (and this includes changing the ISA, which means it can't practically be done for x86) around a high-throughput high-latency memory subsystem. (PS2 is the most valid example - That system is designed around throughput everywhere, and it's designed so that memory latency is a nonissue.)
And don't forget x86-64... That architecture is making me drool. (Forget the 64-bit registers - What's important in the short term is that AMD doubled the number of GPRs and vector registers.)
x86-64 >>>> IA-64
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Depending on what you use the PC for, you might not notice anything at all. Current desktop PCs are more than adequate for web/email/office work, and have been since Intel first hit 300 MHz or so. I have a PII 400 running Windows 2000 at work that does not seem slow at all running all the basic, standard applications.
If you do stuff that involves digital video, compiling source code, or other types of activities that actually push the CPU, you might notice a difference between a 266MHz system bus and a 333MHz system bus.
The speed of the front side bus determines in part how fast information can get to the CPU from main memory. If you have fast memory + a fast FSB, you can get your CPU to work pretty darn fast. Your main performance bottlenecks are still going to be memory latency and hard drive access speed, though.
But once information gets from there to the main system memory, if you can keep that CPU at high utilization, you'll notice a pretty significant boost in performance.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I can choose a "top of the line" system, or a system that has 75-80% of the performance for half the price.
As a result, it's cheaper to buy a "lower end" system at a lower price and just replace it with a "lower end" system a year later. I'll get two systems, one of which is better than today's "top of the line", for the same price as one "top of the line" machine today.
Make sure you get something upgradable, of course.
Just look at CPU prices: Athlon XP 2500+ CPUs run around 2x the price of a 2000+. 3000+ CPUs are double that again. That's 4x the price for 1.5x the performance. Same for RAM, and to some degree hard drives. (With hard drives, you often get more "bang for the buck" by getting something close to top of the line. 120 gigs or so is currently the sweet spot as far as price per gig, and that's close to top of the line these days. But as soon as you jump to 160 or 200 gigs the price skyrockets. If you go down in size, you're spending not much less and getting significantly les.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
" Argh... do i wait for athlon64 or opteron, or do I get one of these bad boys?! Decisions, decisions..."
I think you just put your finger on why AMD sales are down. Opteron is so hyped up people are waiting for that. I'd feel sorry for them but I'm also waiting for the opteron before replacing my PC.
Anyone remember just a couple years ago when you could actually plan out a simple upgrade to your computer that would make it perform better for a modest price?
Toss in some extra RAM, wow no swapping!
Replace that CPU, doesn't Quake run good now!
The furious pace of bus speed changes have pretty much killed these types of upgrades for home/desktop users. Adding more PC2100 ram to their system when they know they're getting a DDR400 mobo is highly annoying. And forget about popping a new P4 or Athlons into your 1 year old mobo. Gotta buy $300 of new RAM and a $200 new DDR666-PC31337 AsusBitDragonMSI Ultra Deluxe to go with it!
Bleh.