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But what of the P3?
Pointer writes "It seems that John Spooner, of PC Magazine, thinks that the Pentium III isn't going to cut it with the IT pros--here's why. "
Give ya a hint- its green.
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Intel's been through the same pricing cycle dozens of times. All of their chips start out priced through the ceiling so they can gouge the early adopters for all they can get. In a few months, they release the next version for mucho bucks and drop the prices on the previous version to a more reasonable level, and so forth.
The pentium III will be very affordable by the end of the year and dirt cheap by late 2000. One has to wonder how many chip designs Intel has basically ready to go. If it weren't for AMD, you can bet Intel would spread their releases out a lot more and keep prices a lot higher.
My understanding is that the costs of manufacturing processors are weighted very heavily toward research, design, and setting up the factories for a new model. Once everything is set to go, the marginal cost for each processor is very small (almost like software). I could be wrong, but this would explain why a processor can sell for $700 when introduced and $100 two years later.
Anxiously waiting for one of these.
But why contribute to the dominance of Intel's x86 architecture? Why not buy Alpha instead?
-- John Goerzen
AMD necessarily goes by Intel's decisions on instruction sets. Support creative competition as well as financial competition!
Until AMD supports SMP and increases their FPU performance.. I'll continue to run with intel. AMD is good though.. but they're not quite there yet.
Actually, I'm not so glad I use AMD because I got one of the buggy K6-233s. :(
This article is a standard ZD find-and-replace job the print everytime Intel puts out a new chip. IT managers don't pay a premium for the latest and greatest. Duh.
Of course, wait until the four way PIII Xeons comeout. Coming to an NT print server near you!
I bought two AMD-based machines recently, and they both work well - the latter one was almost a Celeron but then I heard about the PSN 'Big Brother Inside' fiasco and decided on an AMD.
Does anyone know a good email address within Intel for telling them why I bought AMD?
i can't say i understand the laws, but it seems like intel is intentionally trying to drive competitors out of business, using income from one product catagory to maintain (or achieve - i don't know the percentages) a monopoly that is definitely not in the consumers interest. is there any hope of action, or is perfectly legal for intel to keep its prices artificially low...
I am looking at buying a another system, and want to go k6-2 so i can use the open socket 7. anyone know if amd is long term planning on supporting socket 7, or are they going to abandon the consumer and go to a proprietory slot a for everything in the future (if that is the case there really isn't much of a difference amd vs. intel)
>Aren't you glad you use AMD?
>Dont you wish everyone did?
Don't you wish half of everyone did?
lytles@neaccess.com
as a matter of fact, i dont think _everyone_ should buy AMD. they are having a seriously hard time keeping up with current bookings, and they dont have fab capacity to support direct competition with the evil empire. AMD's one fab against Intel's worldwide support base...? nah.
Hmm, what other names relect the excitment this chip will create? Extra Chunky? Brown Bag?
siegler@citilink.com
Perhaps Windows2000 will make a PIII a necessity. But if the W2K problem is a dismal failure, Intel will have a harder and harder time trying to convince consumers that a PC is worth more than $2000 to fit their needs.
It took me a few moments to realize
that you meant money with Green.
Perhaps you should realize that the
rest of the world is not colourblind
In the computer industry progress has traditionaly
done this.
#1 first charge people who need the speed. Such as graphic artists, the IT market.
#2 Gamers who can afford extreamly nice hardware.
#3 General computer use, such as word proceesing, spread sheets. General office use.
#4 schools
Now that 2-4 are generaly happy with cheaper hardware. And possibly even #1 graphic artists really dont need a PIII to run photoshop. (3d rendering of course there will never be enough cpu for that) Esp considering people are useing other oses besides microsoft that really dosent require a new level of cpu per version of software, because of this I think intel is going to get the shaft on this one.
While much of what you say is true there is a fly in the ointment. Those consumer-grade graphics chips are half of the 3D solution. They offer great pixel draw speeds but deliver half-baked 3D command sets and virtually no speed up in geometry and optimizations. So a fast CPU is still necessary (faster than the PIII will ever even hope to be) in order to achieve real-time full-screen 30fps+ 3D. The main processor does the work that these cheap graphics cards neglect. This is floating-point intensive work and the Alpha does it best. Intel's processors stink big time here.
Please tell me that either AMD and/or Compaq/Digital is going to help out with the core-logic chipset. I'm not intending to flame or troll or anything, but frankly, I'm not too impressed with the alternate Super7 chipsets.
I'd much rather have a chipset designed by the
people who made the chip, than someone else...
Intel probably won't be interested, since they are concerned with keeping competitors away. But IDT and Cyrix would gain from economies of scale, and a saving in R&D. Unless they plan to just stay with Super7, in which case they won't have to spend any money on developing a new platform, but they'd still lose on economy of scale, if the K7 lives up to the hype and sells as well as AMD is hoping.
> capability [increased graphics processing]
> unless you're playing games," said Kimball
> Brown, an analyst at Dataquest Inc., in San
> Jose. "To me, it comes down to clock speed, and
> that's why people would want it."
This is why you should never hire MIS graduates to be your IT managers. After all, clock speed means zilch when compared to a real measure of speed like MIPS.
The article does make some decent points about the problems with modern PCs. I think SGI's probably gone further in the last few months than Intel has in the last ten years to correct these problems -- the way the Visual PCs handle things internally is awfully impressive.
Dear SGI: I'm sorry I accused you of becoming Just Another Wintel OEM.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Posted by Assmodeus:
seems we pulled our nicks from the same piece of literature, only i modified mine a bit to make it original... oh well.... another worthless tidbit...
If not for AMD, Intel would be selling us slower CPUs at higher prices. Every purchases of an AMD CPU helps to keep Intel honest and the CPU market competitive.
Support the Rebel Alliance, buy AMD CPUs!
Aren't you glad you use AMD?
Dont you wish everyone did?
When P3 will ship, Intel will stop making P2s, and people than want to stick with Intel will have to go for P3.
(That's exactly what happened with Pentium -> P2. Many people would buy plain Pentium if they still were manufactured...)
Ummm.. What? Where?
Measuring processor speed in MIPS still doesn't tell you much about real performance, i.e. how fast can your applications run. Every benchmark is an artificial test, and measures of MIPS are among the most artificial.
>, they'll be as worthless as MMX (well MMX is
:)..
>nice for my distributed.net client, but that's it)
You wish
http://www.distributed.net/FAQ/rc5-6 4-faq.html
How come a Pentium with MMX isn't any faster than a Pentium without MMX?
This has a similar answer as the FPU question above. In short there seems to be no way to apply any of the MMX instructions to our advantage. Right now none of the Bovine clients attempt to make use of MMX and we believe any use of the MMX instruction set will result in slower clients rather than faster ones. However, like the FPU question, there has been some recent discussions that suggest that this may not necessarily be the case (MMX instructions are also pipelined separately from integer instructions). If anyone can develop an RC5-64 core that takes advantage of the Pentium's MMX instruction set for an overall client speed boost we would be very interested in hearing from them! To aid in your efforts the x86 core code has been made available and can be downloaded from http://altern.com/rguyom/.
SB.
Give me an AMD K6-2 or a Celeron, that's what I've been building our new systems with at work, for the average business user who runs MS Word, Eudora, and surfs the web, those processors are more than fast enough, and there is no reason to spend an extra 400 dollars for Katmai New Instructions, they'll be as worthless as MMX (well MMX is nice for my distributed.net client, but that's it) for mainstream business users, only really useful for 3D Gaming in my opinion. I was all-AMD until the Celeron's debuted, I'm not into the politics, just the price/performance ratio.
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
Check out Tom's Hardware Page for comparisons of the performance of K6-2 processors and Intel processors on popular games. The K6-2 is slower at floating point than Intel chips, and that's exactly the wrong thing to be slower at for a game machine.
Disappointing, since AMD is much better at designing chips than Intel, but still true.
I can say that the AMD processors perform much better than anything Intel has made. For apps, who cares about speed? When you're online or typing in a WP, disk access is usually your greatest bottleneck. But IF you want to play games, buy AMD. If you get a newer K6-2 (with an MX core), there's even a program that will remap your L1 cache to improve your graphics speed by up to 70%!! (My system is a straight 300Mhz K6-II with a 4MB RIVA 128, but the 3D bench goes head-to-head with a 400A Celeron/16MB TNT)... I'm just holding out on the k6-3.
Asmodean
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
Even with hard disks going for well under $100/GB, this PC week article is a waste of space.
The PIII may not offer much that people will use right now but it will be adopted because it is the future of the mid-range x86 line. To the extent that people want high end desktops, this chip will be bought simply because intel will offer no alternative.
More interesting, from my point of view, is a news.com article that observes that AMD systems are dominating in the retail channels.
Water's wet. What else is new.
Assuming AMD and Cyrix remain the price will drop the PII cost a fortune when it first came out.
By next year you will have a PIII or equiv on your desktop. This is because you can never have a PC that is fast enough - I remember 40MB hard drives and the 32MB limit. As long as Windows swells, Intel will build faster chips and those of us who use Linux will benefit. This maybe the only upside to Windows; fast cheap chips.
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
unlike Cyrix for instance... I'm still bitter about a Cyrix 166+ I used to have, unstable buggy mofo. I taught it good tho, I gave it to my parents, thus banishing it to an eternal life of WINDOWS! Hehe, yeah but seriously, buy AMD if you can, Intel is waaay too expensive. Definitely not worth the extra cash. A Celeron might be ok, but unless you need the better quake3 performance, go AMD. I've got a k62-350 on a FIC motherboard, but I think I'd wait for the k6-3 or k-7. The k-7 will apparently use DEC Alpha style motherboards. Besides Intel wants to kill overclocking, we can't have that can we???