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64 Bit Athlon Notebooks Hit the Market
Omega1045 writes "Our friends at News.com.com.com are reporting that one of the first notebooks powered by the 64 bit Athlon will be made by (drumroll, please) eMachines. Slashdot has mentioned eMachines venture into 64 bit Athlon technology before. You also might note from this past press release that eMachines claims to be the 3rd biggest PC maker in the US. Hopefully this will have the dual effect of pushing the new chip into the market, and keeping it afforable of laptop junkies like me."
I would never buy an emachine. I love AMD and all, but back when I was in high school my school bought several hundred emachines and about 35% of them were DOA due to faulty power supplies. You would think with a percentage that high emachines would be aware of this problem, yet they were selling them anyway. Pretty bad business if you ask me.
> I don't have much need for a 64 bit laptop
I think I could find something to do with it. 64-bit, 802.11g, USB2 and Firewire, vertical scroller (essential!), and my favorite: a built-in 6-in-1 media reader. The price is right too. Mmmmm... I don't like AMD stuff, but this thing could quickly make me a convert.
VoodooPC has been selling 64-bit laptops for 2-3 months now with decent battery life for what your getting. Check out the M:855.
http://www.voodoopc.com/systems/notebook.aspx
Yep, and my Tadpole is already 64bits for yeaaars (UltraSparc).
...
Oh, and btw, in Europe, you can buy Packard Bell Athlon 64 based laptops
#include "coucou.h"
Not everybody shopping for a 64 bit notebook would buy something cheesy like an eMachines laptop.
VoodooPC has been selling their high end m:855 for some time now. Based on the Athlon 64, it also has ATI Mobility 9600 Graphics Pro chipset.
I just bought an eMachines Widescreen Athalon Laptop with ATI, despite all of my geeky senses telling me not to. Many people have sucessfully gotten Linux running on this same model, including Slackware. You can download the drivers fairly easily (I had all of them--for Linux, XP, and 2000-- downloaded within twenty minutes)
eMachines carries with it a very undeserved reputation and I feel bad for those gun shy folks who can't see that they really are putting out good, solid products now. This laptop is quieter than any of the models my friends bought, has an amazing 3.5 hour battery life (three hours if running my wireless network), and has supported everything that I have thrown at it. I am pleased because my laptop outperforms the laptops my colleagues have purchased, and mine cost about $400 less.
And I agree, Linux is THE OS to test these processors out.
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
VoodooPC has been doing this for over three months already.
hypersonic pc has been selling one for a while as well. They seem to be pretty decent machines, might by one with my tax refund. -siniset
I agree. As I posted earlier, I bought an eMachines Widescreen laptop and have been completely satisfied by it. I had no problem finding the drivers for it, I found members of the Linux community who had successfully developed ATI support, and even better: it has a 3.5 hour battery life which is much greater than most of the laptops I have seen. Unlike some of the other AMD-powered laptops, mine does not overheat and it has handled everything that I have thrown at it beautifully. I take that back: it choked when I was doing some 3D rendering on it, but I think that was a function of the OS and not and hardware or driver concerns.
The laptop is very rugged. The speakers are the highest quality I have ever heard. Also, despite rumors that they are noisy, it is by far the quietist laptop I have seen.
My friends bought laptops and none of their offers the same battery life, many of them overheat, and they all have noisy fans.
I understand that eMachines has had a shifty background, but I think that it is time for people to throw down their gun shy attitudes and actually try the new products this company is putting out.
These laptops were simply *MADE* for Linux.
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
While I hold the same preferences as you, this is a dumb argument against laptops.
You can plug in a keyboard, mouse and monitor to any laptop available.
Most laptops also have docking station accessories that can maintain the key/mouse/monitor/power connections so you don't have a bunch of cables laying around.
Personally, I'd like a desktop replacement laptop that I could plug into my 22" of crisp CRT goodness and ergo keyboard. I'm more concerned about heat, vid memory and battery life for this particular laptop.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
The ATI integrated drivers, which include the Mobility 9600, play very well with Linux. Certainly a switch from the past ATI driver issues.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Not that I'm sold on "desktop-replacement," being that I am still a gamer... but I only really count my "desktop" as my actual box and the components inside. Extern stuff such as a keyboard, mouse, and CRT can still be added to a laptop. Best with a good wireless keyboard/mouse, and you save on storage space.
So yes, you can still use your 21" CRT, but the 15" LCD attached to the laptop is much more convenient when travelling... the CRT tends to be a bit heavy on one's lap.
15.4", 1280x800? You don't seem to understand that that is the industry standard for widescreen laptops.
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600? The only thing higher than it in the Mobility line is one with twice the RAM, which gets the name Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro. (Voodoo didn't actually know WHAT a 9600 Pro was at the time that they called theirs a Pro - nobody did - but it is really the exact same thing as what's in this eMachines)
512MB RAM? My school runs XP on 128, and it's still snappier than Damn Small Linux on 96. 512 is plenty for the average user.
AC-97 Audio? Sure, it's only capable of 2.1 sound, but when a laptop only has 2.0, and those speakers suck (I've read that the m:855's speakers suck ass), do you really need a high end sound card?
Paying more than $1550? Why? Voodoo's box has a pretty paint job, a DVD burner, and a 15" 1400x1050 (IMHO, that's painfully small) (on top of what the eMachines offers), for OVER $1000 more.
I've had good experiences with them as far as reliability. I still have a 500is that runs fine, it's been abused in nearly every way possible and upgraded as much as it can possibly be upgraded without throwing in a powerleap kit. Many of the upgrades were listed as not possible in the service manual, but http://e4all.info/ has more information (on older ones) and the upgraders forum has a lot of people that have tried everything they can to make them still useable beyond their years. Most of the older ones can at least be upgraded to 512MB with very careful ram selection. That has kept the old 500is useable, even if it is slow. It's perfectly fine as another box to have up to surf the web and what-not. I have some even slower hardware taking care of other task as well.;-)
...it's still a gamble on future OS's.
There are many things that were cheap in a lot of their older (and still in their present) models. (A lot of them are the typical things that the big makers skimp on. Severely under rated power supplies, proprietary power supplies, POS modems that have no excuse for existing in any machine, if they come with a network card replace it with something else, ram modules that may or may not be worth keeping [though they seem to be getting away from the awful ram they were putting in a few years ago]... These are not severe issues in most of them, but the proprietary power supplies in them are a pain to work around if you are going to cram a mess of drives in them. Don't expect Emachines to give you a pin out for the power supply either.) I've not known anyone who had one of their laptops though.
The biggest disppointment with Emachines is *support*. The one thing that you may have trouble with is getting support for new OS's that comes out down the road. Emachines is somewhat unreliable about supporting their hardware beyond the OS it was shipped with. This can be very bad news in a laptop, and it can be awful news if you ever have to have your laptop worked on for warranty work.
I haven't heard the kind of horror stories I've heard about Compaq laptops in terms of getting them worked on, but based on my experiences with them
It's very hard to top Compaq for the worst possible hardware, worst possible support, worst ownership experience, worst batch of proprietary hardware...in "consumer grade" products. Emachines is well above that fold for the price range they are in. Even with the corners they cut, it's never going to be as unpleasant as that to own one. For the price range they are in, they are decent enough.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
The AMD64 chips aren't just "64-bit" they run significantly faster than the 32-bit AMD counter parts and Intel friends. Even as we speak, the 3400+ which is about $380 USD is as fast as the $700 p4 3.2 EE. One of the areas that the chip shines is gaming as well. There is a 64-bit version of XP Pro in the works. The one featured on their site is a different product built for the Itanium architecture.
My company bought an eMachines 333cs from 1999. It was cheap, $400. It came with W98, and when we put NT on it locked up every few days for no good reason. Later I heard this was a frequent problem, and this is probably one of the reasons the machine was considered crap. Anyway around 2001(? or whenever 7.1 came out) I put RH7.1 on it (stripped down to bare bones for security), rebuilt the kernel to 2.4 so I could do iptables and iproute2, and configured it to be an ARP proxy transparent firewall/router for our office, which it still is and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
I remember when Code Red came out I ssh'ed in from home (actually to an internal Linux machine, then to the firewall - the firewall has all ports blocked to the outside) and blocked it. Remote admin is good.
The power supply fan died twice (once burned out, once frozen) and the CPU fan froze once. I now have a couple of spares of these fans for a few years to come. I have a streamer on the power supply fan to show me it's working. Except for turning it off to replace the fans, the uptime has been continuous, about 1.5 years until the first fan problem.
I have the current version of the laptop, the M5312 and have had no major problems. The screen is the best part, really nice.
Idiot,
I work as a best buy tech and see hundreds of eMachines go out of my store.
eMachines do the best job of not screwing up Windows. A hell of a lot better than HP or COMPAQ.
If you could only see a Pentium 4 HP/Compaq (stock XP install) vs an eMachine (again, stock XP install) with nearly identical specs, you would be BLOWN AWAY by how much quicker the eMachines is.
Know before you speak, n00b
WTPOUAWYHTTOTWPA
What's the point of using acronyms when you have to type out the whole phrase anyways?
Okay Naive...Because even if you go Dell, you still pay an arm and a leg for that premium UXGA display. Although they do look quite nice.
I picked up one of those vpr matrix notebooks (That also has a 1280 x 864 display) on the cheap and haven't had any problems at all to date. Personally, I think it looks great compared to all the other 1024x768 screens you see on laptops these days...And it's amazing how fast the pre-install of XP Home can vanish into thin air...All you need is a linux install cd..
Sig currently under construction. Mind the gap....
Unfortunately, the trend for laptops is that they simply stop selling old models, rather than drop the price. With today's Just In Time business model, most manufacturers simply mantain the prices and bump up the specs slightly, rather than making a big price cut.
Laptops rarely drop in price by more than $200-300 over their lives, unless you're lucky enough to find one on clearance or pick up a used one. For example, a P3 ~1 ghz laptop would probably be enough for most people, but good luck finding anything less than 2ghz these days.
That said, the last year has seen all laptop prices drop drastically from the levels they were at for the last 10 years or so, most likely due to the drop in the prices of the LCD's, so many good laptops are in the $1500 range now. ( 2 years ago, you could only get the crappiest entry level celeron/duron laptops for that price)
or is that two words?
I've never used them, but I know they carry older machines for low prices. They also carry not so old machines for not so great prices.
"Are you on some kind of medication?"
"No"
"Well, you should be."
--Bean
Not yet. But, the Athlon64 running in 32-bit mode is still faster than the fastest AthlonXP and gives the fastest P4 a run for its money.
Plus, all it takes to gain full 64-bit support is a re-install with a 64-bit aware OS. Gotta love when updating a piece of software gives you access to even more of the hardware.
Sure it runs all the existing 32-bit apps and OSes, it's just that you *can* run the 64-bit ones too.
I think it's the M305 or something. It was the first one they offered. Bought it at Best Buy for about $1000. Had better graphics and more memory than the others in the price range, which is why I bought it in the first place.
So far, it's been a trooper. It's rock solid and reliable, battery life is good. It's also fairly thin and easy to handle. I like the widescreen a lot, as it makes the whole laptop less deep (every inch counts when you fly coach.)
I love it. If this one ever gives out, I'd buy the 64 bit one in a second.
I second that. My 12" PB is fantastic. I was about to reply to the parent telling him how great my keyboard is. Doesn't match the Logitech that I'm typing this from, but it comes damned close. The small size has relegated this machine to my portable (and for the week, my main machine on my desk) as opposed to my Dell Inspiron 8200, which is huge and heavy and doesn't get nearly the battery life.
To everyone of you who bashes eMachines, let me tell you what you've been missing. Every component in an eMachine laptop is brand-name. The only thing that isn't, is the outer case and eMachine logos that emblazen it.
;). Windows XP 64-bit edition for Intel Itaniums has been available for more than a year, so it's not that far fetched to believe that an AMD 64-bit chip compatible edition would be available at this time as well. You get at Mobile AMD Athlon XP-M 2400+ Processor (with core clock speed of 1.8 GHz) [266 MHz Front Side Bus and 512K L2 Cache].
The M5312 has a 15.4" Widescreen TFT LCD WXGA panel, which is made by LG. It comes with Windows XP Home Edition, which finally gives you a real product activation code, instead of that one you'v ebeen using from the Blue Group's keygen
It comes with 512 MB DDR SODIMM (PC 2100) memory, 60 GB harddrive, and a DVD/CD-RW Combo Drive (24x10x24 CD-RW; 8x Max. DVD-ROM). The combo drive is made by Toshiba. The harddrive is probably a Maxtor (face it, they crank out a lot of drives these days). The RAM, I'm not sure about.
You get an ATI Mobility RADEON chip, that can use up to 64 MB of your 512 MB DDR system memory. I've given mine all the 64 MB it can handle, and I've never been happier. It's got a low-end sound chip, but it's a laptop. If you're serious about sound on a laptop, use a SoundBlaster Extigy for cryin' out loud! The 56K ITU V.92 Fax/Modem has a Connexant/Rockwell chip in it. The Integrated 802.11g Wireless LAN (up to 54Mbps); 10/100Mbps built-in Ethernet is hardware made by Broadcom, and works like a charm.
The Touchpad with Vertical Scroll Zone is made by Synaptics, which almost every laptop maker uses on their own models. The 8-cell Lithium-ion battery is made in China -- it hasn't blown up yet. It's only 1.36"h x 14.0"w x 10.0"d (which is damn thin for a non-Apple laptop) and weighs only 6.6 lbs.
You also get 3 USB 2.0 ports, 1 IEEE 1394, 1 VGA External Connector, 1 S-Video Out, 1 Parallel, Microphone In, Headphone/Audio Out, 1 PCMCIA Slot (Card Bus type I or type II), not to mention a load of crappy software which you can just use for coasters.
All of this for $1249.99. The S-Video out alone is enough to make you consider this laptop. USB 2.0 across all 3 ports? Slap a hub on one of those ports and you're golden.
All of those parts are bought by eMachines, who puts them in their laptop shell. Try one, you just might like it!
Perhaps this would be funny if it was anyway true. G4 and P4 laptops generate far more heat than Athlon 64 laptops. And well, also Athlon 64 laptops have not just hit the market, they have been available for several months. This is only the first on available from a Tier 1 vendor, and also in Best Buy. Not to mention it was not CNet/ZDNet that broke this news. It was www.AMDZone.com.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
This is not one of the first Athlon64 laptops. I have had an Athlon64 laptop for almost two months, and they have been available since late October/early November 2003.
If the market doesn't catch fire, your desk or legs will...
This is not true at all. The laptop runs at 800MHz 95% of the time (whenever the full 2GHz is not needed). At that speed, the CPU has a peak heat dissipation of 35W, and a typical output of 28W. This is well below Pentium IV laptops, and is below the peak output of most Pentium-M chips at their full speed.
Even at 2GHz, it outputs at most around 85W (max theoretical heat output). Compare this to laptops with the Pentium IV Extreme Edition (available from many vendors), which has a typical heat output of over 100W--and that is at idle! Don't even ask about power usage when actually doing something.
I get a good 3 1/2 hours of battery life on a single charge. That is pretty damn good for a laptop which is more powerful than 95% of the full desktop processors out there, including my own. When it runs at full speed all night, the mouse pad and right side of the keyboard get fairly warm, but not to a point that it makes the machine uncomfortable to use. Warmth is comparable to the Dell Latitude D800, which uses a Pentium-M.
Unfortunately, it does not support dual batteries, and has no modular optical drive bay (the DVD drive is set when the machine is assembled), but these aren't major issues for most people. It also has a rather bulky power supply for the use of A/C power, complete with its own tiny cooling fan. This does not help the weight, which is already nearly 8lbs with battery. Ah well--it's more powerful than my desktop, reasonably light, and is MUCH smaller than certain 12-lb Pentium IV laptops. One often wonders if manufacturers have a different definition of "lap" than the rest of us.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Can anybody report on whether Linux on x86-64 is any good?
I can. It is fucking awesome. Totally stable afaict. Only one program so far was actually incompatable with the 64 bit processor and that was Abiword, which for some reason converts between void* and a UINT32 of some sort - which is just silly. I also had to add some code to guile to make it compile but it wasn't anything significant.
There are some reviews that talk about trouble compiling X and other such things but I never ran into a single problem with that. I am using Linux64 right now and it has been up for weeks, like two or something...I only got it last month.
NR