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Athlon Reviews
Since the NDA was lifted early this morning, several sites have released reviews of AMD's new Athlon chip (coming in 500, 550, 600, and 650MHz versions). The first was Bill Henning's CPUReview site. He
reviewed the Athlon 600 and has several nice things to say about it. Next up is The Upgrade Center's review, and two more submitted by kimmo, the first at Ace's Hardware, and the second at AGN Hardware. Next, Magnetism submitted a link to Tom's review. Finally, as submitted by pmmay, the ZDNet review. To finish, an article at the SJ Mercury that discusses AMD's strategy for the chip market (thanks to Greg Miller for that one). Update: 08/09 12:31 by J : Thanks to The Evil Dwarf from Hell for links to the AMD Benchmark Page, which even has SPECint and SPECfp scores, and to an anonymous reader for the Ars Technica review.
Again you forgot the Geramn Computer Mag c't. They have a very positive review (Athlon's gonna kick some butf) and very good benchmarks. Check it out here. ;-)
Oh and do not forgot to pop in your babelfish - it is in German
Apple keeps touting the G3 as a "Pentium Toaster", saying it beats the pants off of the PIII at the same clock speed. Now AMD seems to be saying that they can do the same. Are there any benchmarks out there doing G3 vs. K7^H^HAthlon? Methinks that could get interesting....
Juiced? Or Not?
People've been saying that for years, if not decades, and it hasn't happened yet. Both the architectures you mention have standard machines for normal end-users out... Corel's Netwinder, in ARM's case, and, as for PPC... well... can you say "Apple Macintosh"?
The problem is that massive base of x86 application code out there, with which any new platform must be binary-compatible in order to stand a chance. With luck, free-source software will change this, by allowing source-compatibility rather than binary-compatibility to be the key.
Try one of these:
LinuxPPC
Yellow Dog Linux
As far as I can tell (I haven't used either), LinuxPPC is a general purpose distribution, along the same lines as Red Hat, Open Linux or Debian GNU/Linux. Yellow Dog is more targetted for the server market.
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Open mind, insert foot.
The K7/Athlon can be overclocked. Check out the Kryotech info towards the bottom of this site:
AGN Hardware: Athlon Review
They're looking at having an Athlon system running at 1GHz by November. My take is AMD has no problem with overclocking, as long as it's clearly labelled as such.
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Open mind, insert foot.
Never said they'd have to. "Free source" doesn't mean "no binaries". What it means is that people who do know enough to install packages from source can install them on their platform of choice, making tweaks as necessary to get them to compile... and then roll the results up into an binary RPM or some such that ordinary users can learn to install.
Yeah, Intel could drop their prices by 70% and continue making a profit. That's *why* AMD needs the K-7. They can't compete with Intel in the low-end desktop market that they currently hold, because Intel is able to drop their prices to undercut AMD, sell the Celeron at a loss, and make up the difference on overpriced Xeons.
Enter the K-7... performance that smacks the Xeon, Hz for Hz, plus a higher clock, and more scalable to boot... all with a price tag an order of magnitude lower. The K-7's not aimed at the low-end desktop market, it's aimed to take the high-end x86 server market, where all the money is, away from Intel in one fell swoop. With a little help from Compaq (Compaq == DEC && K7_mb == Alpha_mb), and if the new Dresden fab can keep up with demand, they just might be able to pull it off, too...
And didn't Kryotech already have a GHz K-7 prototype running? I could have sworn I saw an article about it here a month or two back...
Don't forget that Intel still runs the market.* AMD is going to price and clock these things so that they're just a little cheaper and a little faster than Intel.
*Intel's got business desktops locked up with the Intel Inside marketing program - IIRC, this is the biggest chunk of the market. Even if AMD produced a chip that was 2x the speed and 1/2 the cost, you wouldn't see a Dell "Optiplex" or a Compaq "Deskpro" with an AMD chip until the vendors could get out from under Intel.
Furthermore, I don't see much general corporate demand for the new CPUs. They've already got enough CPU for MS Office and Win2000 and standard businessy stuff, so cheaper chips are going to rule the day.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I thought people bought Xeons to get the big cache, which is where the big performance gains come for certain types of operations (databases, for example). The K-7, as it stands, doesn't really hold up to the Xeon.
Admittedly, Intel forces folks who don't need the cache to buy Xeons, because the normal PIII only goes 2-way. So there's some market there.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.