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The Near Future of Intel
wh0pper wrote to mention a Design Technica story about the near-term future of Intel. They've been getting beaten in the press pretty soundly by AMD of late, and at the Intel Developer's Forum they did their best to convince attendees they were on the comeback trail. From the article: "It wouldn't be IDF if there wasn't a solid performance message. This time, Intel clearly had AMD in their sights. By a series of their products' massive performance improvements, Intel hit the ball back into AMD's court. With Microsoft's Vista operating system coming out at the same time, Intel showed how they have the higher performing solution. Clearly, we won't know until final systems ship. But Intel presented their case strongly, suggesting they can match AMD, if not beat them."
I RTFA and it is severly lacking on substance.1 6
Here is Anand's updated benchmarks.
http://anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=27
If I could get an Athlon 64 3500+ (Venice Core :D) with 1.5GB of DDR400 RAM, 200GB ATA100 HD, DVD+RW 16X, an insane number of USB ports, etc, for less than $600, and add two serial ports and a good hardware modem for about $14, reuse a Soundblaster Live! or Aureal Vortex 2 (yes, really), into the end of last year, after not being able to have any computer upgrades since 1999 (Yay for Pentium 3), I don't think anyone else would have any excuse for AMD's price point. The only lower-end point is the ATi IGP graphics (which don't have a hardware T&L unit), but that can be upgraded at some point once PCI-E cards are cheap, and it can play most newer games still pretty smoothly, including Half Life 2.
Ironically, it is slower in Freespace 2 (the new open source engine with fancy effects anyway) and SWAT 4, mostly for the lack of hardware T&L. Especially with relatively basic lighting effects in newer games, you can "feel" it slowing down as the CPU has to handle it. But a system amazingly over the top for modern gaming and heavy programming and other usage, that's quite a lot cheaper than how much you could get even a slightly usable system in 2002. I wish they made an AGP to PCI-E or even AGP to PCI adapter so I could use my Geforce 4 Ti4200-8X, which has absurdly reliable performance.
Plus there's the fact that it uses so little power, and runs about 32C stable, while under heavy gaming/compiling prolonged usage, with about 30C when not having to do much, amazingly quiet as well.
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
Oh geez, this clown. For those of you who don't know, Rob Enderle is the troll of trolls. He will go on various forums and make outrageous statements seemingly to do nothing more than pick fights. I can't tell you how many times I've seen him make personal attacks on people. Then, once he's done trolling, will write articles on how vapid the open source community is. The sad part is he's supposed to be a "professional" with a consulting company. I wouldn't believe a single word that comes out of that mans mouth, whether true or not. Get a different source for your facts...
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Games read data WAAAAY more than they write data.
and games manufacturer's are still going to want everything loaded off CD to attempt to prevent copying.
Darned near every game I have loads all the big data onto the hard drive for speed. A few games require the original CD be in the CD drive during gameplay. That type of scheme is generally unecessary for online games, where you're authenticated by other means, so the situation is generally improving.
The idea of caching frequently used stuff to a flash drive is good - I hope Apple and other OS vendors pick it up.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
1) Floating point performance wars - Before AMD came out with the K6 processor, Intel had the floating point crown and neither AMD nor Cyrix could compete. Although AMD and Cyrix had inexpensive intel-compatible processors, most people used their cpu's for low-end desktops.
2) That all changed when AMD released the K6 processor with an excellent floating point unit. Then the war became a Mhz slugfest between AMD and Intel in which Cyrix was marginalized. Intel reached the 1000Mhz mark first with the P3 but AMD wasn't far behind with the Athlon.
3) AMD changed their approach with the Athlon focusing on P3 crushing performance regardless of the actual clock speed. Intel kept the Mhz focus with the P4.
4) AMD released the hugely successful 64-bit Athlon that dominated the P4 even though the 64-bit Athlon operated at a much slower clock speed. Intel lost much market share in the desktop and server market to the new 64-bit Athlon and the new 64-bit Opteron processors.
5) Intel finally realized that the educated consumer didn't care about raw Mhz anymore, they switched to their own performance number rating scheme.
6) The latest oil crisis hits the world and consumers become more energy conscious. Many computer enthusiast websites point out how much energy Intel processors demand and how little AMD processors demand in comparison. Intel and AMD respond by making their processors more energy efficient and cooler running.
7) Dual-core processors are released from both companies trying to squeeze more performance out of their aging cores. The Intel processors can't scale as well with multiple cores due to the already high energy and cooling demands of their processor cores. AMD gains further ground in this area.
And that's where we are today. AMD has seriously damaged Intel's marketshare with some excellent products. Intel is feverishly working on new products to get that marketshare back. The benefit is that we will see very good products from the 2 companies over the next 12 to 24 months.
ConsultingFair.com