Emachines 64-bit Athlons Now On Sale

tomhudson writes "According to zdnet, emachines, the company geeks like to make fun of, finally has a toy we'd all like to get for Xmas -- an Athlon64 on the cheap :-)"

Comments

finally has a toy we'd all like to get for Xmas

[Pingular]

No. eMachines are TERRIBLE. My dad bought one a while back, it's the cheapest piece of crap ever. You can't upgrade ANYTHING in it (hard-disk, memory, gfx card, processor, NOTHING). It's noisey, the components are cheap, and if this 64bit is the same, I'd hate to have one.

A little idea...

[mgcsinc]

Wow, they seem to have managed to jack the price for their cheesy PC's up about $300 by slapping a nice big 64-bit label on one... and oh will consumers bite. Seriously, does no one else see this as simply a marketing gimmick, considering the tech-averted nature of their base market?

Where is it?

[tim_m]

I give up. Looked all over at their website and can't find the T6000 anywhere. Is it such a quiet release that eMachines doesn't want to give any details about it at all?

I like emachines

[jdavidb]

I'm okay with emachines; they make cheap little boxes. May main home machine is a 300 MHz celeron emachine running Linux. (RedHat until last night, when I installed Debian.)

Emachines

[the_real_rs]

..Have great products for the price. There not all that bad. My mom and dad have one and its going on three years now. if your in a money bind and need a computer with software Emachines is the best bet. But now you can get a 64 bit machine cheap.

Why do we make fun of them?

[El]

My father bought 3 emachines for various family members. Within a year, none of them were working. I don't know where they get their parts, but I suspect it's from other companies reject piles. There has got to be a reason why these machines are so cheap -- and quite frankly, my time is too valuable to waste it on flakey hardware.

Emachine with 64bit Athlon

[El]

Isn't that sorta like a Chevy Vega with a supercharged V8?

The Processor may be 64bit the OS is not

[pbug]

Here is the link at best buy http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1067390 092896&skuId=6186156&type=product How long will it take for MS to come out the 64bit Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition. The say first quarter next year. But we all know about these timetables how tend to change.

Re:Why?

[Amnesiac1]

Doesn't eMachines use pretty much the same commodity parts everyone else is using? What's the big technical difference between an eMachines system an a Dell or a Gateway that makes the eMachine so shameful?

You are correct with regard to hardware

[brokeninside]

But does the eMachine come with equivalent software? Granted, iTunes can be downloaded free for Windows, but what about iMovie, iCal, development tools, etc.

revamp

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently no one has read the recent business week about emachine's new CEO. He plans on making emachines a competitor in the higher end pc market. This obviously is a first step. Emachines sucked before, but I would not be suprised to see them put out some nicer/cheaper alternatives in the mid to high end market.

My gripe about AMD64: mobo limits on RAM

[buck68]

I've been reading about the AMD 64 bit processors with great interest. I really like many of the things AMD has done in the x86-64 designs. But the one thing that blows me away is that many of the "desktop" mobos for AMD 64 still only allow a maximum of 2 or 4GB of phyisical RAM. What the hell is the point of a 64bit architecture if you can't use more of the address space than with IA32 processors? Surely not 64bit math?

I would think that machines with 2-16GB of RAM would be the natural zone where AMD64 starts to really do things that are a pain in the ass on IA32. As far as I can tell, few of the current AMD 64 motherboards fall into that space. Bah.

Re:My gripe about AMD64: mobo limits on RAM

[DeadInSpace]

But the one thing that blows me away is that many of the "desktop" mobos for AMD 64 still only allow a maximum of 2 or 4GB of phyisical RAM. What the hell is the point of a 64bit architecture if you can't use more of the address space than with IA32 processors? Surely not 64bit math?

There is more than just a larger address space. 64 bit math can help, and so can the 8 extra general purpose registers that AMD added.

But even with 'only' 4 GB of RAM, a larger address space helps.

• First of all, applications never get the full address space (at least, not on x86, on some archs it's different). On Windows, they get 2 GB, on GNU/Linux, they get 3 GB. On both OSses, this can be enlarged somewhat, but that incurs a performance penalty. So, for individual apps (such as heavy image or video editors), having 4 GB of RAM on x86 isn't useful.
• Adding to the problem above, not only physical memory is mapped to the applications address space. Memory mapped files and paged out memory are too, for example. That means that using 8 GB of memory for a single app (4 GB RAM, 4 GB swap) is impossible on x86 but possible on x86-64.
• Once again adding to the address space pressure is memory fragmentation. If, assuming a 3 GB address space, an application allocates 3 1 GB blocks, and frees the outermost two, it only uses 1 GB; this 1 GB resides in the middle of its address space, leaving 1 GB available before it, and 1 GB after it. That means the application could not allocate a 2 GB block anymore. (Apps that have such memory demands not rarely do some internal memory management, but that isn't exactly ideal)

Those are a few of the largest problems you can encounter when you're pushing the limit of your address space. Increasing the 4 GB address space has merits even before you have a system with 4 GB RAM.

There also are practical reasons for the absence of inexpensive motherboards that can handle more than 4 GB, too. 2 GB PC2700 or PC3200 DIMMs don't exist yet to my knowledge (and if they do, they're insanely expensive), so you're stuck with 1 GB DIMMs (which aren't cheap either). That means that to have more than 4 GB, you need more than 4 memory slots. And that's a problem. The high frequency signals of todays memory are sensitive to crosstalk, capacitance, timing issues and termination, especially with so many traces. For normal, unbuffered DIMMs, 4 memory slots on the same memory controller is the very maximum if you're to stay within specifications. Just adding more slots won't work.

A solution is adding more memory controllers, but that's expensive and impossible on Athlon-64's without altering the CPU. Another solution is using registered memory (which takes part of the load of the memory controller), but that's both slower and more expensive.

For more RAM, the best option is to wait until manufacturers can stuff more bits in a chip. Most other tactics are facing severe problems.

Close

[Groo Wanderer]

They broke NDA and will get bitch slapped by AMD. The price is higher than you will find it for in less than a week, so buy early, buy high.

-Charlie

Re:Caveat Emptor

[FatAlb3rt]

proof: heat sink and fan being pulled off of athlon64 and p4 (big d'load - 20MB)

oh, and shame on you for not chastizing him for putting two A's in athlon.

Re:Why so quiet?

[zerocool^]

Having previously worked at a best buy, I can tell you with ABSOLUTE certainty that the quality of the computer would NOT have stopped eMachines from advertising it.

Rather, I'd imagine that their stock is limited to 10,000 units or so, and so they don't want everyone in the world getting pissed off at them for not having it in stock, and best buy issuing 40,000 rain checks.

Trust me on this one. In fact, I'm fairly confident that 10,000 is probably a pretty close number. Say, they keep 2000 for sales via their website and sell best buy 8000. Divide by 450 best buy stores... ~18 computers per best buy. If that's all they can get, they don't want to advertise it, as 18 comptuers at best buy will be sold in an hour, now that we're down to the crunch.

During the last few days before christmas, usually we ended up turning the pricetags around for computers that aren't in stock, so as we don't waste our time selling and customers don't waste their time buying. Usually, by christmas eve day, all but 2 or 3 cards are backwards, and the ones that arent are the relatively expensive ones. And even those get snatched up as people come in looking for gifts and what not.

Yeah. Low stock.

~Will