AMD Back in the Black

XaXXon writes "CNN reports that AMD had a profitable quarter for the first time in over two years. According to the story this is mostly because of their 64-bit line of chips (both Opterons and Athlon-64). AMD has forced both HP and Intel to change long-standing plans of only supporting Itanium, with HP coming out with Opteron-based systems and Intel releasing chips mimicking the 32/64-bit behaviour of the Opteron. According to the story, 64-bit processors are better than 32-bit ones because 32-bit processors 'can't take advantage of more than 4 megabytes (sic) of memory at a time.'"

Comments

Does AMD have anything to compete with Centrino

[MountainMan101]

They're chasing big boys market at the moment with 64-bit, but do they have something for the laptop market to match Centrino.

Re:Does AMD have anything to compete with Centrino

[Brian Stretch]

Centrino: marketing-speak for a Pentium-M CPU (Pentium 3 on steroids), Intel chipset, obsolete Intel 802.11b WiFi chip, and $300 million ad campaign.

AMD: Mobile Athlon 64, variety of chipset vendors, variety of 802.11g chip vendors, no Centrino marketing tax. Thus you can buy eMachines Athlon 64 3000+ widescreen notebooks with high-end video chips from Best Buy for $1300 after the usual rebates. If you're reading Slashdot you'll get great battery life; if you're playing UT2004 you won't, but you'll get better performence than the Pentium-M can deliver.

Go, Go AMD

[JamesP]

Way to go AMD. Intel is eating dust on this one...

The problem is, Intel went from an Engineering company to a marketing company. Let's just hope it doesnt became a lawsuit comapny...

In related news

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD has made deep cuts in their CPU prices, probably pre-emptively.

I don't think intel has to worry.

[SmallFurryCreature]

I am currently installing gentoo on a dual opteron server as well as a 1u celeron machine that will contain backups. No suprise that there is a performance difference but the gap is gigantic. Same with better specced dual P3 and P4 machines. Even the dual Xeon P4 is left behind easily.

HOWEVER, the dual opteron contains an intel raid and soon an intel network card. And I must say that installing the pentiums in the past was an awfull lot easier.

Price/performance opteron is currently the clear winner, its giganctic cache and better memory structure heads above the same price Xeons. As far as support and quality of the hardware goes. Intel all the way. Sadly for intel the bubble has burst and web companies cannot afford the Itanium. So Opteron it is.

But AMD has been on top before and they always managed to screw up. Intel screws up to but somehow manages to keep making money during the down times. AMD is not so lucky.

Re:AMD HEAT PROBLEM

[dave-tx]

The K6-II+ and K6-III+ are fantastic processors for low-heat applications, because they were intended to be used in notebooks. I ran my email/web/firewall on a K6-III+, overclocked to 550MHz, for years. It was cool, quiet, and so freakin' stable that I would reboot it every couple of months just for kicks.

On the other hand, I had a dual Athlon-MP machine that was like an oven. Really nice computer, but it had to go, because it made my computer room too hot.

I, too, am looking forward to an Opteron-based system in the future. As a former AMD employee, they'll always have my financial support as long as they continue to produce innovative products.