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Athlon Xp 3200+ 400FSB is Coming
SoDaLaS writes "Athlon 3200+ Coming:
According to CNET The Athlon 3200+ with a 400MHz FSB is on the way in the next two weeks. It'll be interesting to see how well the processor overclocks at that high of a bus speed...it didn't seem to hamper the new 800MHz FSB Pentium 4, which many people were worried about too."
Lets make sure we're comparing apples to apples. The 400 MHz bus on the Athlon is a DDR doublepumped bus, so its really 200 MHz. The 800 MHz FSB on the P4 is a quadpumped bus, so its really 200 MHz.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
AMD can take advantage of DDR 400 for synchronous system performance. Expanded front side bus + more work per clock cycle= damn good performance. Great stuff.
Unless they shrunk the Athlon core, I don't see a lot fo room for overclocking. The 3000+ isn't an overclocking dream, so simply moving to a faster bus ain't gonna make the 3200+ any better.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
Damnit why, everytime a new board comes out, overclocking is brought up.
First, overclocking works decent for a few people, but is not available to the masses for several reasons including technical difficulty and noise issues
Second, overclocking is kind of dumb (expecting 10000 evil replies for that, but listen first) because if the board really could safely go faster, the manufacturer would produce it that way, and sell it for more!
Third, maybe everyone doesnt want their computer to sound like a jet is going off from the cooling needed to overclock, especially since as computers are getting faster, and more "stuff" is being put in smaller and smaller spaces, heat is increasing as well. Thats why mobos are coming with bigger fans, graphics cards are coming with giant fans that take a whole slot, etc.
Now personally, I considered overclocking, fiddled with it, decided it wasnt for me, but I realize a small amount of people will do it. Cheers to them, but why can we not critically analyze a mobo without considering overclocking, which will benefit less than 1% of users! Lets look at the raw performance, and it should be sweet with this fat bus!
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
The Athlon chips have not been super-sensitive to changes in FSB. The performance impact of the Athlon XP moving from 2x133MHz to 2x166MHz was significantly less than the P4's gains going from 4x100MHz to 4x133MHz. The P4 gains have been incredible with the jump to 4x200MHz.
It seems that AMD is trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of an architecture that would be better squeezed by being optimized, i.e. Opteron. It's a shame that AMD's yields of Opteron have proven to be dismal, but if I was a motherboard manufacturer I'd be pretty mad at AMD right now. More motherboard manufacturers are going to have to qualify their boards and more chipset manufacturers will have to qualify their products as well, even if they can already meet 400MHz operation. Will the performance impact really justify the costs that all parties incur by moving to yet a new FSB in less than, what, 6 months?
Unless mankind redesigns itself
From HardOCP [H]ardNews 6th Edition posted on Wednesday April 30th, 2003:
Athlon 3200+ Coming:
The Athlon 3200+ with a 400MHz FSB is on the way in the next two weeks, according to C|Net. It'll be interesting to see how well the processor overclocks at that high of a bus speed...it didn't seem to hamper the new 800MHz FSB Pentium 4, which many people were worried about too.
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Hello, Slashdot user. My name is Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you.
I already have trouble cooling my XP1900 without having it sound like a jet engine. With a slow fan and decent heatsink, my CPU still sits around 48 degrees C. I'm afraid to think how hot this thing would be. How can anybody productively use a computer with a fan that is as loud as an engine idling?
Is that a real poncho? I mean, is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?
With faster processors we get less efficient programs. 10 Years ago you could do internet/email/word processing/spread sheets with just a 33MHz Intel 386 with 16 MB RAM. Today you need for the very same things a Pentium IV with 2 GHZ and 128 MB RAM. There are some niece applications which need a lots of CPU Power like Quake or Nurmerical Simulations, but must Joe Adverage apps don't really need it. The programs need it due to sloppy coding. And the faster CPUs gave rise to the OOP paradigm. While it primarily is a nice theoretical concept for safer and more secure program, it's used these days just for code-bloat and GUI overload. Inpedendent studies show that in fact 73 percent of all "OOP" code is just imperative with C++ class bloat added.
Further the higher compiler and debugger speeds introduced much more sloppy coding styles. In the 60/70ies the computers of the Apollo program hadn't a single computer crash, which is completely unthinkable these days. The reason why the NASA is keeping old 8080 Intels in their shuttles is that they won't get decent code quality form modern processors these days.
Personally I think that the whole CS community must rethink their position towards computers speeds. Instead of the todays faster-is-better point we need a paradigm change towards just-as-fast-as-necessary.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Hey. Marketing people love to trumpet all kinds of fantasy based figures when they talk about CPU spead.
The troth is that the only CPU mesure that matters is how long dose it take to rip and encode a DVD to DivX (One of the few tasks that still taks hours.) or whatever application YOU run which YOU feal is too slow on whatever system you have now.
And for comparison, Athlon 3200+ vs iNTEL 3.2 GHz is not what matters. What matters is iNTEL's $500 CPU vs AMD's $500 (or $100 CPU).
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
or did others stop caring a lot about speed somewhere around 1Ghz?
-- My Weblog.
I work from home, and have a network of 5 PCs of various specifications. You can tell when they are on because the floorboards in the hall vibrate, never mind the noise they make.
I have recently invested in a VIA EPIA-M10000 motherboard. It is very, very quiet.
Sure, it isn't as fast as the latest P4 or Athlon, but it plays DVD (with hardware support), DivX, and MP3 media without any problems. Quake 3 runs well.
More importantly, I can run all my business applications without any noticable loss in speed.
I'm going to ditch my other boxes and buy some more of these EPIA systems. It's the quiet life for me.
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
What's the real clock speed of this beggar?
So my advice is for not buying a computer with Atlhon XP 3200, as your upgrade roadmap will be locked. It is better to buy a computer with a slower (and cheaper) Athlon, and wait untill the price drop to buy an Atlon XP 3200. Or wait for the release of Athlon 64 - it will be an excelent computer for video edition, 3D rendering and games like Unreal Tournament 2003 or Doom III.
The best thing about a 400 MHz FSB being available on an Athlon chip?
The 333 MHz FSB chips will drop in price!
10 Years ago you could do internet/email/word processing/spread sheets with just a 33MHz Intel 386 with 16 MB RAM. Today you need for the very same things a Pentium IV with 2 GHZ and 128 MB RAM.
.mod playing on my 386 without skipping.
I still use my p133 for many tasks, irc, email and personal server.
Web browsing on a 386/33, never did it, I had a 386/40. It was VGA (640x480 w16 colours), It was slow, the pages were simple. It was the only thing I could do at the time.
Now I browse with many windows, 24bit colour at higher resolutions (rarely anything as pathetic as 1024x768).
I can play mp3's without skipping a beat, along with movies. I was glad to get a
We've come a long way, we do have overkill for many applications, but it isn't all waste. I think too many people who complain aobut how excessive it is today forget how relatively wimpy it was before it became mainstream.
Does anyone else remember how cool it was to have a 486 that would dir a directory listing faster then you could read it?
Have I really put off the upgrades for that long? There are FSB's faster than my processor? The funny thing is there is so much latency loading a lot of the modern software you really don't appreciate it! Outlook XP takes just as long to load as OE did back in 97. The xfer speeds have definitely improved (a _lot_) but rendering websites takes as long if not longer than it did 10 years ago (unless yer a fellow dillo user!). I should quit complaining; I'm as thrilled about bus speeds improving as the next guy (I do a good amount of hw irq intensive stuff) but jeez, It would be nice if avg. joe could see the improvements too and not just those of us compiling kernels on the weekend. So much of the hype causes aunt Ethel to upgrade every year with no appreciable speed improvements. But then I guess auth Ethel's never heard of a front side bus...
AMD CPUs outperform Intel CPUs at similar frequencies. That's why AMD stopped marketing their processors based on their frequency. In some benchmarks, an Itanium running at 900 MHz outperforms 3 GHz Pentium IVs. Once upon a time, before clock multiplying, MHz meant more than it does now. But even in the 8-bit days, a 6502 running at 1 MHz would perform similarly to an 8086 running at 4.3 MHz.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
The troth is that the only CPU mesure that matters is how long dose it take to rip and encode a DVD to DivX (One of the few tasks that still taks hours.) or whatever application YOU run which YOU feal is too slow on whatever system you have now.
With enough processing power and memory maybe more people would run spell checkers.
(yes, I'm an evil bastard who can't ignore the chance to take a cheap shot)
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper