Athlon 64 Debuts

SpinnerBait writes "AMD launches their Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX chips today and there is a full analysis with benchmarks up at HotHardware. Interestingly enough, Intel pulled a fast one (literally) and released a new breed of Pentium 4 chips with 2MB of on board L3 cache, just in time to boost their performance in the benchmarks for this launch. Regardless, the performance levels for AMD's new flagship look very strong." Tom's has a story, or Tech Report, or see info straight from AMD.

Comments

Re:competition always good

[James Lewis]

I wish I had mod points so I could mod this one down. God, the whole "welcome our new xxxxx overlords" is getting so old. Try something original please.

Patent royalties

[yerricde]

Add -m64 to you march flags then emerge -e world

The practical algorithm for color correction is patented in several jurisdictions, and the patent holders refuse to license the patents royalty-free. Gentoo can't emerge an app unless the app can be redistributed royalty-free. Do you claim that any application containing a patented algorithm is not a "serious APP"?

Bad day?

[Frobozz0]

Someone woke up with a case of the grumpies.

The "patents"

[yerricde]

I don't see that claimed anything about patented algorithms not making for serious apps.

I wasn't referring to patents per se. I was alluding to the flaw in the "recompile everything" solution that Gentoo fans like to repeat, the fact that not all programs can be recompiled. Proprietary apps cannot in general be recompiled unless the copyright owner feels that recompiling the app for another architecture and hiring additional technical support staff would increase his net earnings. In some cases, the publisher will recompile it for you for the price of another seat of license.

Here's where my comment about patents comes in: Not all programs even have a free replacement. For example, look at the GIMP vs. Photoshop debate, where the patents encumbering CMYK and color space conversion are the main barriers to improvement of free software to the point where the print world would consider it.

automagically 64-bit-optimize [] a fairly large number of existing apps [] (Like PostgreSQL, Apache, OpenOffice, XFree86, GIMP, etc)

I'll give you GIMP, as some of its filters could benefit from CPU improvements, but a few of the apps you said would improve on x86-64 are in fact disk-bound (OOo and PostgreSQL), RAM-bound (GIMP or anything else that deals with large data sets), network-bound (Apache and Mozilla), video-bound (XFree86), or even human-thought-bound (any program used interactively by authors of works), and can't be made significantly faster by increasing CPU speeds. Some apps (such as Apache) can't run in homes due to contractual restrictions on residential Internet access.

Wow!

[Penguinshit]

Could you imagine a whole Beowulf cluster of t$#*ds;lkASEFP NO CARRIER