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The Chip That Changed the World: AMD's 64-bit FX-51, Ten Years Later
Dputiger writes "It's been a decade since AMD's Athlon 64 FX-51 debuted — and launched the 64-bit x86 extensions that power the desktop and laptop world today. After a year of being bludgeoned by the P4, AMD roared back with a vengeance, kicking off a brief golden age for its own products, and seizing significant market share in desktops and servers."
Although the Opteron was around before, it cost a pretty penny. I'm not sure it's fair to say that the P4 was really bludgeoning the Athlon XP though (higher clock speeds, but NetBurst is everyone's favorite Intel microarchitecture to hate). Check out the Athlon 64 FX review roundup from 2003.
Not really sure what you're smoking. It's much easier to put together a computer (including a gaming computer) these days than it was 10 years ago. We don't really have to worry if we need PC-133, PC-2700, DDR1, DDR2, etc.. There's no need to choose between AGP, PCI, or that new-fangled PCI-Express, much less whatever multiplier is involved. Hard drives are straight up SATA now, and it doesn't matter if you choose a disk or SSD type. The graphics cards themselves aren't even as important since the console cycle has pretty much bottlenecked as a result of developers focusing on those consoles first and foremost. We don't need to do much more than make sure the motherboard is either an Intel or AMD socket.
In fact, about the only real difficult decision you might need to make these days is finding a computer case that has enough room to use a modern video card.
And then you end up either with an i7 4770 which has a locked multiplier, or a 4770K which doesn't do VT-d. Then you realize that there is no Intel CPU that'll do both. So then you start looking at AMD, in the hope that they don't pull shit like that with their CPU models. And then you're way over your hour or two budget.
They swooped in when Intel was being stupid, made the best chips in the world... then committed suicide and
If, by committed suicide, you mean that suffered when intel bribed people like Dell not to use the clearly superior products and so lots out on many billions of sales and hence the crucial R&D advantage, then yeah sure suicide.
Assisted suicide.
Like assisted like throwing a healthy happy person off a clifff.
haven't built a competitive chip in 3 years. Sad times...
Depends what for. For games, intel seem to be better IF you're prepared to buy a separate GPU. If you look on the Linux, not Window centric benchmarks, the top end AMD ones often lie somewhere between the top end i5 and the top end i7.
Sometimes they lose out sometimes thy beat the i7s.
For the kind of stuff I do, they're very competitive.
But if you play skyrim, then no. But an i5 and an external graphics card.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Oracle's Enterprise database costs $47,500 per processor core. There is no way in heck that I'd choose AMD over Intel when I have to run more cores to get the same performance.
Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise costs $6,874 per processor core.
AMD has a heavy investment in the server space. They should negotiate lower per-core license costs in these cases; license parity with Intel is throwing them out of the data center.
As the developers of x86-64, they should have a patent portfolio to do serious damage to 64-bit x86 systems vendors. Use it.