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AMD's Next Generation Processor Technology
Esekla writes "AMD has released info about their upcoming processor technology. The press release claims that they're producing circuits that run 30% faster than any other published benchmarks using "Fully Depleted" Silicon-on-Insulator and AMD's metal gating technology and actually has a good bit of technical detail for a press release."
Seriously, I can't tell the difference between my 800mhz and 1.6 barely.
If nothing else, this should pump up my AMD stock.
Does anyone know if this is press-release hype or a real breakthrough? I'm not a semiconductor expert. But my suspicion is, real breakthroughs generally don't get announced in marketing press-releases on Yahoo Finance.
I'm not a process guy, so could someone explain why they're claiming metal gates are better? I was under the impresson that metal gates were more compatable with high-k gate oxides, but I didn't see any mention of non-SiO2 dielectrics. And on that note, does anyone know if AMD is trying out any low-k dielectrics for the interconnect?
I also noticed that one of the lines in the slide said something to the effect of, "Mesa isolation was used to keep things simple". Does this mean that they just did that for the one test wafer to keep things easy, but it'll be no problem once we get the process into production? Or are we talking about something that's still many years in the future?
Let's hope that these new chips are as inexpensive as current AMD processors.
Or at least as heat efficient! (Badum-dum psshh)
I am a filthy pirate.
if only they started *producing* those chips 30% faster...
well, one can only hope...
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
Hold on, let me cancel that oil-heater I just ordered. After reading these specs, I can only imagine how much energy this baby uses. Come this winter, my AMD is going to provide me all the heat I need
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Like, how long do we have to wait for the Silicon to deplete?
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
As a fellow /.'er has already indicated, processor speed improvements is very exiting. What I wanna see is a yearly increase of 30% on I/O speed. I'd rather have a super-fast bus and a new 50-ns-access-time storage technology than a 10 GHz processor.
Yay!
"Emerging research shows that SOI and Strained-Silicon can be integrated within the same fabrication process to achieve additive benefits."
So, 30-35% faster + 20-25% faster.
Mmmm...
Wow, they must have circumvented UN Resolution 1441 in buying that depleted silicon from the depths of Niger's black market.
WAR AGAINST AMD
Never argue with an idiot, he'll just lower you to his level and beat you with experience.
one (Boston) winter, I heated my dorm room quite adequately with a Sun 4/260, also using five big 2GB SCSI drives to fine-tune temperature. warm as hell.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
this benchmark improvement thing rings a bell.
XD
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
Hearing about Intel getting smacked around is only slightly less satisfying than hearing about Microsoft getting smacked around.
In all seriousness, It's great that AMD keeps pushing thier technology. If we had the same OS competetion that we have in CPU technology, well... Our OS would be a lot better.
My Ass hurts.
they're producing circuits that run 30% faster
Not to worry, the next generation of Windows will no doubt be that much slower.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It's been my experience that people expect you to be able to do more. Work twice as fast? They want twice the output.
I work in the 3D department of a television production studio, and the better the equipment we get, the more demanding the clients are. Often enough it's even worse - we might show a new feature we couldn't do before because the rendering times would be too long, but instead of taking 3 or 4 times the amount it would have, the new hardware brings it to 1.5 or 2 - it still takes longer, it's just that now we can do it.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
While your theory would seem true on its face, you have run straight into Gates' Law: software will exponentially decrease in effective speed while exponentially increasing in install size, effectively canceling the more troubling consequences of Moore's law. This, as you can imagine, means that compile times would stay about the same. So don't get too excitied about seeing your friends more just yet.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I find that better equipment usually means we can produce in the same amount of time, higher quality things. But we can not produce the same quality things in less time.
Has NetBSD been ported to it yet?
As you may or may not know, IBM originally developed Silicon-on-Insulator technology and licensed it to AMD. Here is the whitepaper: http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/bluelogic/showcase/soi/ soipaper.pdf
This is the same technology that was used to make the Power4 processor, and will also be used to make the upcoming PPC970: http://www-916.ibm.com/press/prnews.nsf/jan/06C1F2 11F9B1C24B85256ADF006163AF
AMD has recently built a new state-of-the-art fabrication facility in Dresden to produce the chips, known as "Fab 30": http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1773
I hope together IBM and AMD will continue to update their manufacturing process to keep on par or perhaps once again surpass Intel.
Wow, AMD sure is pumping out those chips fast. It seems like just yesterday they were announcing the Barton core. Now they've already got a new chip. In my experience, you should never buy the newest stuff anyway. Wait a few months, then buy it when the price goes down.
To make a long story short, shouldn't we be working on exploiting the technology that we have, as opposed to improving on technology that we haven't even fully used yet?
You donâ(TM)t have to worry about your current (pun intended) non-fully-depleted silicon oxide chips.
So you donâ(TM)t need to go shopping for a lead ATX case.
I think the full depletion increases insulation so the layer can be thinner.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
Had you of followed their short advice, then you would have made good money.
As I read this I'm thinking the whole time of the enormous, nasty globs of dusty, cold solder that make up my 1978 Commodore Pet's motherboard.
SOI, shmeSOI. I say we get back to centimeter processes-- much easier to hack.
...nowadays I think that the last component of a PC which needs speeding up is the CPU. Many other components act as a brake on the real-world efficiency of systems; one particularly close to my heart is the cache size. Most computational problems which I come across are too large to fit in less than 2 Mb; therefore, on processors which have a much lower clock speed than x86 offerings, but a much larger cache, I get much better results. The Sparc III series is a good example; the clock speed is around 500Mhz (maybe higher on more recent versions), but the 4 Mb instruction cache & 4 Mb data cache (IIRC) mean that the sort of numerical problems I solve can fly. Of course, it could be argued that this is due to the superiority of the SPARC architecture over x86, but you get my point.
I'd be interested to try out one of the new Pentium M processors (as found on Centrino platforms); I understand they have 1 Mb caches, and this may give them quite a performance boost for numerically-intenstive stuff.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
I'm i on the right track here?
FRA: STFU GTFO
And it has 64bit registers and memory addressing...just like the SPARC
Your 5400 rpm ata-33 hard drive. Seriously though, people put way too much emphasis on CPU and not enough of storage speed.
So how does this translate into GHz? Intel is kicking butt in the marketing arena. AMD needs to ratchet up consumer perceived speed through high GHz to battle Intel. Great technology and metal gates are optional.
--- I'm Green Hornet's sidekick not Inspector Clouseau's!
I've got a Computer Shopper in front of me from 1993. On the cover is a reasonably high-end system, for 1500 bucks. Today, one can buy a reasonably high-end system for 1500 bucks.
At the time, it took a couple of minutes for windows to boot, on a 486-33. Today, it takes a couple of minutes for Windows to boot, on say a 1.6 GHz P4. Yes, it's doing a lot more, but it's taking just as long as it did a decade ago.
I probably need to crack my physics books for this, but I thought the work function of a metal was the amount of energy needed to free and electron from the metal (a la, the photo-electric effect). So I don't see how that could possibly have an affect on the transistor action. Any physics students out there?
You mean Athlon ZP 4000+? Maybe just in time for Duke Nuke'm Forever.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It means you can get more work done so your boss will give you more work.
I miss the days of compiling a small program and having time to run to 7-11 and get a soda.
When will the 5Ghz AMD/Intel CPU's arrive? I needed one 3 years ago.
And a 3D Optimized Graphics card with lots of very high speed memory would be nice aswell. Current cards top out at around 450Mhz...I want one that runs at 10Ghz...NOW!
A 3Ghz Opteron would be more like 4500+
So you mean I can run my 32-bit openGL apps on opteron and don't have to port my apps. I also run renderman on redhat linux and would like to shift all this to a 64-bit platform. Would switching to a new CPU (AMD) affect my software? I want to more power but don't have time to port my apps.
Yeah, it sure sounds to me like they're not competing with Intel anymore.
Do not read this sig.
And even though it's runs a lower clock speeds, it is very efficient, like the Pentium M processors, with the same size cache (1MB).
A 1.8Ghz Opteron runs better than the Athlon 3200+ even though the FSB is 266Mhz.
I want a processor with twice the speed for half the price I paid for my current one.
I hope AMD leap-frogs Intel, so that Intel has to leap-frog AMD, which will require AMD to leap-frog Intel, which will...
Dopant profile and gate geometric effects on polysilicon gate
Gate Length Dependent Polysilicon Depletion Effects
Also EETimes has another interesting article with more information about AMD's presentation at the 2003 Symposium on VLSI Technology in Kyoto, Japan.
Nice to see AMD working to be innovative.
On the other hand, some of the terminology used sounds like they came straight from a bad breast implant procedure.
"fully-depleted Silicon-on-Insulator"
Another term for "Your artificial knockers have sprung a leak"
"Strained-Silicon"
Another term for "God, those are humongous Jugs!"
...now it'll only take half a day!!!
Disclaimer: I use Gentoo
I upgraded to a Dual Athlon with server specs for everything...Power Supply, Memory (ECC), MB, etc...
The computer is super stable, and with compile times reduced, I make a few changes to a prototype in Java then compile in seconds, what used to take minutes.
No more avoiding compiles, means less bugs to track from more testing.
join #trolls on SlashNet to practice your trolls without worry of pesky ops banning you
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but AMD signed an agreement to develop these sorts of things with IBM. If that's the case, I wonder if these techniques will translate over to PowerPC processors ...
Here's a small article describing their relationship.
The press release claims that they're producing circuits that run 30% faster than any other published benchmarks
But the question is: are these real %% or is it 30+ performance marking?
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
And do some video editing (esp. compressing it to MPEG-2 or DivX)
You'll change your tune.
With some of the more advanced video compression algorithms (DivX for example - Yes it has legit uses, great for distributing home videos to relatives.), a 10% increase in CPU speed can mean an hour or two off of your compression time.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
A little question about processors etc. We all know that a system is generally no faster than the sum of its components. So if you have a crappy bus then having a 2.6Ghz Athlon isn't going to get you much better than a 1.8Ghz... but how about things like Video?
/w a slick video card (hardware rendering) machine kick ass over a 2.x Ghz machine using software rendering? Is this due to crappy software-renderer coding, or optimization in the graphics chip not inherant to the main processor? I mean, shouldn't I be able to go and sink lots of money into a fast-fast-fast processor, and then skimp on the video card and let the CPU take up the slack? Why doesn't it work this way?
I can go out and buy an AGP card, decent on-board RAM, outdated GPU. If current video cards run at, say 500Mhz, and this card is antiquated etc etc...
Why will a 1.4Ghz
Just a curiousity, because it seems even when I buy that shiney fast CPU it equal nice times compiling kernel, crap games w/o a good Video Card.
I did some scientific computing work a few summers ago.
:)
At that time, my new iPaq (Not the PDA, the business desktop system type that seems to be relatively unknown) was competitive with some much more expensive (but 2-3 years old) high-end computing hardware. My boss was impressed at how well the $1000 system he bought for his summer intern performed. And that system was only 500 MHz.
1 month into my internship, I started running simulations on that machine. Some only ran for 10 minutes, but each batch would include 20-30 runs that got progressively longer. The final runs in a batch would be over a day each - To collect the one dataset I needed to work with took over a month of total CPU time.
With a modern $600ish system I could finish those computations in *under a week*
I wasn't storage-bound. My end data from each batch was only a 200x200 matrix.
Yup. 1 day or more to generate a 200x200 matrix.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It's about time that AMD got some recognition for their work, and, more specifically, their R&D. 3DNow! was miles ahead of MMX, and the Athlon was vastly superior to the P3. The AthlonXP in turn beats the P4, Mhz for Mhz. The widespread opinion is that AMD processors are the poor-man's Intel. "Good, but not as good". Hopefully the new Opertron (it will be amazing if the Itanium does nearly as well in the 64-bit marked) and announcements like this will help redress the balance. And show that marketing budget isn't a measure of CPU quality.
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
I would think that they'd almost HAVE to use these in conjunction to get any benefits.
While they may be able to get 30-35% improvement for PMOS alone, and 20-25% for NMOS (or was it the other way around?), if implemented in a chip, improved PMOS transistors without improved NMOS would result in almost no maximum speed improvements. (It would likely improve power consumption, but not as much as the speed benefit of the transistor itself.)
This is because any given gate involves both NMOS and PMOS transistors. The most basic gate type is an inverter, which consists of one NMOS and one PMOS. Improve only one and you'll improve either the turn-on or turn-off time of the gate quite a bit, but not both (You'll get some improvements to both, but it will be unbalanced). So the unimproved time will be your speed barrier. Use both technologies and you're improving the whole gate, not just half of it.
What I would love to see is if someone could come up with a gate architecture that could provide great improvements in fan-out capability with minimal penalties in gate delay. (Fanout is why memory speed hasn't kept up with CPU speed - The larger the memory gets the more loaded the address drive lines get, and high fanout = slow speed.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Many mention that processor speeds are irrelevant these days, because there are so many other bottlenecks in the system. I will agree that we should leave processors alone for now and work on the other issues to see any real gains.
Unfortunately, the other industries are market driven, and there are too many people who stroke off to Overclocker Weekly centerfolds of the Latest Greatest Processor(tm).
What we *really* need, is to completely pitch the entire x86 platform and start over from scratch. You all realise that x86 is just kludge on top of kludge on top of kludge, right?
A brand new, well-thought out 64-bit design with either SCSI or SATA, immensely fast busses and all that rot. Of course, that'll never happen, all because of $$. They would only be able to sell that system to the computer knowledgeable, which (as we know) comprises a small percentage of the market.
The rest are just duped robots that respond to marketing.
"hmmm..., if the Athlon XP 3200+ actually operates at 2.2Ghz, then, assuming the new chips start at 2.2 Ghz, we can market them as 3200 * 130% or 4160. Heck, just round it up to 4200+ "
Without modern CPUs, home video editing would not be practical (and hence the market for DV camcorders would be much smaller.)
You obviously haven't tried compressing 2 hours of video into DVD-quality MPEG-2, let alone trying to compress it into DivX to send home videos to some relatives.
Would we really need more than 800 MHz on a home computer? I have a 1.7 GHz P4 laptop, and a 1.1 GHz Athlon. Upgrading to a Barton 3000+ (2 GHz or so actual clockrate, but much more efficient per clock than my current TBird) would take my 14-hour encoding jobs down to 7 hours. A difference between taking most of the day and running while I sleep.
And reencoding 1080i HDTV recordings into a more managable size... yikes... I've had 24 hour encoding jobs before.
So my suggestion: Go buy a DV camcorder, or an HDTV tuner card. I guarantee you you'll be desperate to upgrade that poke-ass 800 MHz machine in under two weeks.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
i'm tired of this. from now on, as a consumer, i want old crappy stuff.
i want LESS Megahertz, LESS Ram. and i want it to cost A LOT!
I'm serious. Computers today are a pain in the ass to use and that's because of the klunky keyboard, mouse and screen interface. What the average user needs is a video interface like on the "hal2000" from 2001. I'd like to simply ask my computer to do something and walk away or have it remind me that I mis-placed my car keys or call me on my cell phone and tell me about
some cange of plans
I want a computer that I can't see. One that I don't even think of as a "computer".
One sign of a mature technology is that you forget
about it. How many electric motors do you own? I'd bet over 50. Fans, starer moters in you car(s) airconditioning systems and on and on.
Computers should be like electric motors they just work and you don't think about them.
For that we will need at least a 1000X more computer power to run that "no PC on my desk" interface. We will be there in about 50 years.
Every 10X or 100X increase lets us use computers for a new purpose notjust do the old jobs faster. Video editing was not even done in the 1960's not at any price.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Having the best for a given generation but running half a generation behind isnt a huge accomplishment.
And quit reading /.
You're quite right, you can't change the work function of a pure metal - but if you have a blend of materials, they will have to equilibrate, as the energies of the electrons in one material will have higher energies than the electrons in the other. Therefore, electrons will move from one material to the other like water flowing downhill, until the average energies of the electrons in the material are uniform between domains (or atoms) of the different materials. This yields a single Fermi level, which is described as the average energy of the electrons in the material. By varying the quantities of the materials (here, nickel and silicon), you can change the fermi level of the material, thereby changing the work function of the material. So, while you can't change the work function of a pure metal (you'd have to apply an impossibly obscene amount of charge to do so), you can make different blends.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Well, I must be hellucinating then because my AMD box has been running flawlessly for over 3 years now!
Tonight on irc.slashnet.org in #Forum Hemos, Cmdr Taco will be hanging out answering users' questions.
CmdrTaco has hemoroids?!
Amen to this post. My success rate with AMD is about 75%. A lot of this isn't AMD's fault as I've found numerous motherboard manufacturers generally produce inconsistent results. I consider success to be a system build with no hiccups nor system freezes once the OS is installed.
My success rate with Intel is 99%. And I use Intel chipsets and motherboards.
Why can't AMD make their own motherboards?
Buy an NForce2 motherboard from Asus or Abit or Shuttle and you'll change your tune very quickly.
1: AMD Athlons are cooler than P4s that perform equivalently. The old "AMD is hot" mantra came from PIII vs Thunderbird. It's not true any more.
2: Via is hardely "Mickey Mouse". How about ATI or NVIDIA? Asus? Abit? Shuttle? Chaintech? Aopen? Are they all "Mickey Mouse" too? You can buy an Athlon motherboard from every major manufacturer except Intel.
3: The Athlon is not crap. It is STILL one of the highest performing architectures on the block. The new XP3200+ beats the P4 3.06 in quite a few tests. It can't quite match the new Canterwood chipset with the P4 3.0C GHz, though.
4: Millions of Athlon systems all over the world have been operating flawlessly for years. Andnadtech, for one, uses Athlons in their servers. HardOCP did, but they switched to Opteron recently. Your reliability may suck. That is the exception, not the rule.
Your post is a troll. And I have three Athlon systems that have been operating fine for years.
No no no! You don't get it! FIRST POST NIGGERS is the name of a new super duper cool hacking group! Are you down with FPN muthafucka? Da First Post Niggaz gonna fuck your GF, format your shitty Gentoo box and kick you in tha teeth!
First Post Niggaz in da HOUSE!!!
Besides, it's more fun spending countless hours tweaking the snot out of my PII bios and os than upgrading my box. Yeah, I can't play games more graphically demanding than NetHack and Redhat 9 is a slow memory pig which could make Gandhi drive his cane through the monitor in frustration... but hey, I could learn more patience. And anyone who says a 33.6 modem isn't fast enough doesn't appreciate the beauty and simplicity of bare text. I don't need to look at images on the web, and I have the luxury of making a grilled cheese sandwich or making a few important phone calls while a web page loads.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
..something that Intel was championing and AMD/IBM were saying was not the way to go (Silicon on Insulator being the right direction).
Now looks like AMD is going BOTH ways...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There is no alloying in thermocouples. Two different metals are welded together at the measuring point. It operates on the principle that a predictable voltage is generated that relates the temperature of the measuring junction to the reference junction (i.e. the connection to the measuring device).
I've said it before and i'll say it again, when it comes to multimedia proccessor speed is irrelevant. I/0 throughput and proccessor independance is what you want. Only people doing 3D raytracing or who are serving up large Databases or scientific modeling need more proccessor speed. Drop the C and kep the PU.
Don't mention the NForce around these parts. We Linux users don't exactly like the NForce since we can't use em without jumping through hoops. You have to download a closed source network driver... without being able to access the network.
And my T-Bird+VIA chipset at home has NEVER been stable. But on the other hand the Durons at work have run flawlessly. So stop being an AMD fanboy and deal with em as just another vendor selling products. Some are good, some not.
Democrat delenda est
So the best gamers' GPU now may have to be matched by a P4 well over 100GHz.
...in the sense that a thermocouple does sort of work on the same basic principle, in that one of the metals donates electrons to the other, so that they have the same Fermi level at their junction. If you had used semiconductors instead of metals (you wouldn't, but still), you'd have a region where the materials electrically "alloy," in that there would be a depletion region where the electrons have energies different than either material individually. But you're right of course, there's no alloying in a thermocouple in order to create a good junction, and metals don't show a depletion region or bandbending over any measureable distance.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Not to mention that the Pentium was already available in 1993. The 486-DX33 was certainly not a high end machine at the time.
Have you been up for 36 hours or something? Your numbered vomit sounds like the sort of stuff I expect of those who started programming in the world of multi-MHz processors. What the hell do you know of computing or programming philosophy when you started out driving a Cadillac? Well here's the real scoop and it's not very complicated:
1. Anything can be done better through optimal specialization but the more specialized it becomes, the more likely it is to become obsolete. Standardization is the attempt at preventing obsolescence and encouraging optimization. Duh.
2. The latest versions of almost all applications have enhanced value when compared to their predecessors. That additional functionality didn't come for free. It required more code.
3. somwhere back in the late 70's, many of us that had started out programming Z80s figured out that machine language was not the way to go. It produced the fastest, smallest code, but it took a long time to write, debug and enhance. We began to build "high-level" languages and libraries of common functions. And that's where it all went to hell. We began to trade off application code size and speed against development speed (read that as cost). Darn that TANSTAAFL principal applies in software engineering too!
4. As the technology advanced, the functionality of the applications did too. And the new versions keep coming faster and faster (guess why).
5. C++ has absolutely NOTHING to do with the performance of today's software (You've just got to lay off the PCP).
if your encoder has option to lower it's priority to idle level (like screensavers are) then it wouldn't noticeably affect quake2.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
30% improvement is good and everything, but I was really hoping for a real leap in CPU speed. I think they should take a step back to take a step forward. Perhaps change the whole architecture of processing. What about taking larger commonly used instructions and letting the cpu do it in hardware. like instead of 1453+ pop and add instructions, just have a single "high level" instruction to do something at hardware level. Similar to graphics hardware. Or if this is stupid, what about other CPU approaches other than that of the current approach?
What we *really* need, is to completely pitch the entire x86 platform and start over from scratch.
Be my guest, then. Go and create a "brand new, well-thought out 64-bit design." Then convince someone to build your brand new, well-thought out 64-bit computer. Then give us a brand new, well-thought out operating system that can run on it. Then convince all those software companies and programmers to port all the software we can run on Windows, Macintosh and/or Linux to your brand new, well-thought out platform. Then convince all those dupes who respond so well to marketing that your brand new, well-thought out system will do things so much better than their PCs and Macs. Oh, and be customer-friendly and quick to respond when people have trouble operating your brand new, well-thought computers...
Puny humans.
Visit me on the web at Permanent4.com.
'high-end scientific numerical work'
Well, as a game developer you should already know, games simulating reality will incorporate as much of this numerical work as possible. This means not just physics, but AI and other simulation stuff.
Ther is no limit to the amount of CPU I could use immediately to make a game better. This ranges from implementing more intensive algorithms to simple immediate things like dialing the depth of your pathfinding A* up or increasing the resolution of your cloth patches...or just keep dialing simulation timesteps down and play with stiffer systems.
"Don't mention the NForce around these parts. We Linux users don't exactly like the NForce since we can't use em without jumping through hoops. You have to download a closed source network driver... without being able to access the network."
OH MY GOD! You have to download a *CLOSED SOURCE* driver from NVidia! Oh the horrors! Your Linux machine will probably see the closed-source driver and not work just because it is closed-source! And the hackers will hack your machine because its closed source and you cannot reverse engineer-h4x0r the protocol driver interface!
My T-Bird+VIA is quite unstable too. Games crash very frequently sometimes, usually installing chipset drivers helps, but not always (after formats I mean); and sometimes I get blue screens too. Horrible. VIA has a crappy pci subsystem too, but since I'm not running RAID it doesn't matter so much. I'm trying out Intel next (/w raid).
Ok troll, perhaps YOU enjoy the delicious irony of needing a closed source network driver installed to make the network interface work so you can download the network driver..... Or more likely have a spare 3c905 around to stuff in long enough to get the driver, but either way it is BS. Like they can have something OS fscking original in a network interface in this day that they can't release programming specs for it? And yes, closed drivers ARE a major pain in the ass, been there done that and ain't going there again willingly.
Democrat delenda est
The biggest stability problem I've had came out of Redmond, not AMD. I've even managed to get W98SE to run stably in this box the last few months.
I find my experience more believable than your rant.
Tech Public Policy stuff
RedHat 8 installed fine on my NForce system. I had to get special drivers for networking and sound, but otherwise everything worked out of the box.