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Cringley on Intel, AMD, and PIII
Isochrome writes "Robert Cringley has written an interesting article on Intel and PIIIs at I, Cringley.
It is high level, but covers some interesting ground, like Intel's historical licensing, attempts to push the proprietary Socket 1, and what to do with all its cash. He describes the company's slow decline due to age and size.
"
hey now,
As more evidence of the "decline", take a look
at the beta of intel. If you calculate on a rolling 1 year daily basis (as opposed to 5 years of monthly data) you will see a pronounced decline
over the past 3 years.
Psst...
Since you have so much idle time on your CPU, may I suggest you look at Distributed.Net
Funny that he didn't go into the privacy issue.
Well the article was more about Intel than about
the new chip.
Pay-per-view, coming soon to a web site near you...
So when will gcc support these nifty new instruction sets?
DG
I just went from a K5-166 to a K6-350 a few weeks ago (also needed a new motherboard and PC100 memory).
The major CPU-eating thing I use it for is video game emulators, which really do need the extra speed--Twin Cobra under Mame only occasionally skips noticeable frames. (Plus the occasional large compile, and occasional web page which uses Javascript that takes several seconds to lay out under Netscape 3). Overall, my system seems about twice as fast, but I am using 100 Mhz bus speed and I increased speed more than you.
--Ken A.
I would suggest the AMD k6-2 but I would use a faster chip, like the 300 Mhz. If your mobo doesn't supprot it, drop the 100 bucks and get a super 7. The prices on the AMD chips should to double or triple your current system for about 200 bucks. and you can even use all your current software and memory.
AMD is the way to go.
I agree, it would be nice.
I don't think we can expect it from Cygnus any time soon, however.
On a related tangent, check out Cygnus' announcement of enhanced PII support in GNUPro. It sounds pretty nifty. Unfortunately what they're calling "MMX Support" only extends to the assembler, not the compiler itself (ie, you can embed MMX instructions in your code as assembly, but the compiler will not translate C statements into MMX-using assembly language).
-- Guges
Where did he get a price of $2.5 billion for a CPU fab? Ronler Acres, the new fab Intel just opened in Hillsboro, Oregon cost $4 billion.
Intel's major line of business is not designing microprocessors, it's manufacturing them. Whatever the price of the microprocessor, Intel is set for the foreseeable future to manufacture them more cheaply than its competitors, hence it should do okay.
And Cringely says:
"With shortened product cycles making the downward price curve for processors steeper than ever, and
competition from AMD and Cyrix pushing prices down, Intel has to expand into new areas like networking and microcontrollers."
Wrong. Intel has moved into these areas to make use of its older fabs, which would otherwise go to waste. This isn't a sign of desperation- it's a sign of efficiency.
The K6-3 is really a K6-2 with 3DNow / MMX enhancements. AMD has said so. They even renamed the chip. The one you want to look out for is the K7 which should be out end of first quarter or beginning of second quarter.
I just upgraded to a K6-2 400 from a K6 233 and it's pretty sweet. The K6 replaced the P133 in my other box.... The AMD's have excellent price/performance ratio.
It just hit me how they can get away with this.
The PIII has higher clock speed that PII. If you have a (shudder) Winmodem (lots of people do) you'll theoretically get better performance because the extra cycles make up for the overhead of the winmodem.
Posted by Wildcard78:
Interesting article --- kind of seems to be abruptly ended... but otherwise, I found it to be an interesting look at Intel.
Kind of hope that the P-III 450's and 500's go *WAY* down in price so that I can upgrade my current slot-uno mobo without having to upgrade to the 440JX Camino chipset and its expensive RDRAM modules... hmmm, I wonder.... nah...
Also, hope K7 comes out soon and hope it does what ppl purport it to do. That way, I can run 2 PC's side by side. One for Linux, the other for BeOS, Solaris, MT (err NT), and Win98.
Oh well... enough rambling...
Out.
Cringely is incisive and appears to be right on target in this piece. It's a damn fine read, although I suspect that a high-level market-based overview like this glosses over the alliances and deals that really make big business work. He hits on several of those (AMD + Microsoft being the big one); it would be nice if a followup piece were to look at the interests of Lucent and IBM relative to Intel and what might take place in a more open marketplace (i.e. one where cross-platform Linux support ala Oracle makes competition something other than a high-end phenomenon... a future which is most assuredly NOT a certainty...).
Anyways, it was a great way to start my workday.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Cringely articles come out on Thursdays, usually around 4:00 PM PST.
--
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
they made it official when they put on this ridiculous commercial claiming that the pentium III makes the internet faster... how the fuck??? are they giving away cable modems with each purchase or something????
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
--
And Justice for None
you guys misspelled his name like 1000 times on that article/comments :)
I planning my next computer upgrade, and I am leaning towards an AMD chip. I would be upgrading from a P200 MMX to a AMD K6-2 333. Has anyone had experience with both of these chips and the performance they give? I'm using a Supermicro motherboard and I'm trying to put off buying a new motherboard for a while. I'd really appreciate any first hand info I can get on AMD chips especially from someone who is using them on a Supermicro motherboard.
Thanks in advance,
Rand
Hey,
just had to comment that Cringley made some factual errors in his article...
"... when AMD introduces its K6-3 chip."
Umm what does he mean, "when"? It's out, and has been since Monday last week! Of course, Pricewatch has had prices for the P-III for over a month - a chip that isn't out yet. Yet, it took them two days to get pricing for the K6-III up...
"Besides, there isn't any software that yet
supports those 70 extra P-III instructions,"
Yeah - Direct X 6.1, Dragon's Naturally Speaking, PhotoShop 5, that's no support at all. While I realize that it's thin support on a platform most of us revile, it is support.
"and there probably won't be for months or years,
a la Intel's thinly supported MMX instructions or AMD's even more thinly supported 3D-Now. So wait a few months, let the AMD chip appear, then see what happens to prices."
Umm - MMX is actually pretty well supported. And, some people curse it because it impacts FPU performance which has become somewhat more important with the advent of games like Quake. A large number of video encoders/decoders under the Windows platform actually make extensive use of MMX instructions.
Oh - and 3D-Now! even more thinly supported than SSE! Come on! It's been out since June 1998, and has a number of (mostly multimedia and game) applications that support it. In addition MetroWerks CodeWarrior supports it directly.
Wait a few months for the AMD chip...? The K6-III which I assume he's still talking about, because there is no mention of the K7, is already out!!!
Why is it so hard to get accurate, factual reporting on technical topics in mainstream media?
- Porter
I've said it before. Intel used to be a chip manufacturer. Now they're more a marketing company. "Hey, we have the PII 450 out, Let's introduce the PIII way before it's ready!"
Bend over, Point to your anus, and tell Intel: "This way in."
Accipiter
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
How about a keyboard that isn't so cheap that it feels like it's made of cardboard.
$1000 CPU + $5 keyboard + crappy power supply + flickertron monitor = crappy computer (but that's what folks are selling to the poor ignorant masses.)
The computer industry will regret burning people by saving pennies on the components just so they can afford Intel's high margin CPUs.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
.. on cnet tv yesterday...
...
....
.. when will they have a 200 or 400 mhz 128 bit wide system bus...
I rarely use my cpu computing power as it is..
here is when it gets used...
1) printing 720x720 dpi color pictures on my epson printer using ghostscript.. my cpus (dual P233) get maxed out at 99% for a minute or so.. but I do not do this all the time.. maybe just once a week
2) scanning.. and using the gimp.. neither max my cpus thou there is stress on my system..
3) can't think of what else I do to use those cycles.. but last night I did so somehting that had then at the 90% range
my system has bog downs in the I/O NOT the cpu.. I have a 66mhz system bus, 33 mhz pci bus... althoug I do need to get an agp graphic port.. I think that 450Mhz is a bit more power than most people need or can use
I want a FASTER (both system and pci) bus
pci is still 33mhz on most systems and agp is 33mhz too
so what if you have a 100mhz system bus. you still have bottleneck in getting the data from the HD or the network or the video card....
and yes computer have more than one bus in case you did not know. the system bus is the one that the memory and cpu sit on and this is then connected to the isa, pci or agp bus...
come on guys give me speed in other parts of the system..
Only 'flamers' flame!
Steve Woz said in his 1998 Wired interview that the Commodore 64 had all the computing power any home user would need. Computers are fashion. If your neighbors, the Joneses, have Windows 98, then your stale Windows 95 will never do.. :-)
Whatever you think about Microsoft, their use of year version numbers was a great (marketing) idea. Software that automatically obsoletes itself. In 1997, Windows 95 was already old news even though there was no Windows 98 yet!
cpeterso