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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.