Slashdot Mirror
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 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"?
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.
I can imagine initially much more expensive chip,s because the chances of the chips being produced at existing plants using existing equipment is pretty slim, so new manufacturing plants will need to be built, or at a minimum modified
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.
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?
Does anyone know if this is press-release hype or a real breakthrough?
Neither - it's incremental improvement. That's how most progress is made.
Your 5400 rpm ata-33 hard drive. Seriously though, people put way too much emphasis on CPU and not enough of storage speed.
Larger cache = larger failure rate at production time = higher price. They are selling Opterons for $hundreds, not $thousands.
You must have a really crappy system then, because my WinXP workstation goes from power-on to logon in about 20 seconds total. That's a far cry from the 3 minute bootups of yesteryear.
And FYI: you can build a reasonably fast system for less than $1,000, whereas a decently fast system in 1993 ran more like $1,500 - 2,000.
You can build a more top of the line system for $2-4k these days, whereas a top of the line system in 1993 ran more like $3-6k.
Computer people suffer from "The Good Old Days" syndrome just as much as everyone else.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
I like AMD as much as the next guy (running an 1800 XP), but I'm not sure why Intel needs to be defeated... good company, good products.
Intel doesn't need to be defeated, just "competed".
Intel (and every other company) simply needs to be in competition, in a hotly-contested race to produce high quality products for the lowest price in a well-informed marketplace
Absence of competition permits, even encourages companies to produce lower quality products because they can charge high prices for them [1[PDF]][2[PDF]] and make a greater profit doing so.
If Intel hasn't done this so much yet, then it's to their credit, but without competition, nothing will prevent it from happening in the future.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You must have a really crappy system then, because my WinXP workstation goes from power-on to logon in about 20 seconds total. That's a far cry from the 3 minute bootups of yesteryear.
Yeah, but how long until it actually logs in? That's a typical MS gimmick. They only measure from power on to logon prompt appearing.
It was incredibly obvious on NT 4.0 workstations. The logon box pops up, but the TCP/IP stack isn't even up yet. You get to type your login info 45 seconds after power on, but you still can't use the machine for another 90. Longer if you have to wait for all it's system tray stuff to load (chat clients, anti-virus, etc).
The problem is that larger caches (which are good for server/high-end computational work) generally mean higher latencies (or ridiculously expensive chips *cough* Sparc *cough*), which is bad for more 'normal' performance measurements (desktop/office/gaming etc).
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))))
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?
True, I'm still waiting for single ATA drives that actually max out more than an ATA 66 cable at ALL times. Hard drives are by far the weakest link in modern computing. When the average ATA drive can sustain 150MB+ for every single transfer then we might actually start to notice the difference in speeds between a desktop that has the fastest and lowestest cpu's sold.
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.