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Asus release of Athlon(K7) M/B
Maz writes "According to
Tom's Hardware guide Asus will release their K7 M/B at the end september. This response from Asus was attributed to the fact that "Asus received tons of mail from people enquiring about their Athlon-board." You can read the article and some of the replies from Asus for yourself. "
So you must be the Tom himself then. Yer Porsch
holdin up OK?
CC
"Pray arm me further by your reply" Winston Churchill
"Don't expect to see an Athlon in a $399 K-Mart special any time soon. " They'll have to after intel stomps them. I hate intel, but I won't buy for a company that does MORE VaporWare
www.pricewatch.com tells the whole story
There is so much noise on pricewatch it is hard
get any real data. Anyone can advertise a price, but do they actually deliver a product? Often times they don't. The excuses are out of stock, low supplies, quantity one pricing, 30% restocking fees, etc. But hey they got you to their web site...
But seriously, I'd take prowess in English more seriously if it weren't such a randomly screwed-up language.
I believe the standard internel cache on a p6 is 64k and the cache inside the k7 is 256k. I believe the k7 also has the l2 cache inside the cpu itself for fast performance. This would make a kick ass server processor but ordinary bussiness apps will not see a difference due to the way the process information.
I used to be a big fan of Tom. But now days he uses his popularity for a soapbox rather than giving objective reviews. Its rather sad the power trip this guy went on.
Oooooooooooooooo
PC world (uk) has Athlon based systems for about £1400 +vat
You can pick one up today if you really want
( I'm tempted but, I'm waiting for a biathlon)
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
>Dual Celeron 500, will run you $324 for the CPUs
;P
Didn't I read that intel are removing one of the pins to prevent users from doing this in future
Jesus, leave off with the floating point crap. It's amazing how much people will spend to say they have a different number on a spreadsheet than other people.
yes, I know AMD does not sell directly to consumers
Ok, this is a pointless post, but I can't contain myself. I've been putting off upgrading for a while now in expectation of this chip. I'm all tingley with expectation :)
So, does anyone have an idea of when we can expect to start seeing dual/quad/etc. processor motherboards for the K7^H^HAthalon?
I'd like to get an Athalon system, but my next computer needs to be a MP system (doing threaded 3D image reconstruction programming type stuff). Since I can't wait forever, do I need to get a cheapy dual celeron to tide me over?
This is good news! I really like Asus. I find their motherboards are very good quality, without being hugely overpriced. Their tech support is also very good, while a lot of other brands tend to have poor documention written in broken English [1]. It is great to see that Asus has come to their senses and will be supporting Athlon, which by all rights is the best x86 CPU yet. Great to see my favorite motherboard company supporting my favorite microprocessor company! :-)
[1] Hope that doesn't sound too nasty. Often the product is quite good, just an unforunate language barrier is in place. And in their defense, they speak English one heck of a lot better then I speak... heck, I don't even know *what* their language is called, let alone how to speak it! But alas, my fault is still my condition.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Actually what I've found amusing is this worshipping of the K7 for the last year even though there's still no definative launch date. ;)
Of course that still doesn't beat the "We hate intel!" crowd who use celerons and think they're screwing Intel over by doing so
Oops. I meant to say that "The version of 3dstudio Max didn't support 3dnow and thats why it performed twice as fast".
I should of watched my spelling.
Anyway with versions of this program that support mmx2 and 3dnow all avaiable, Tom should of tested these versions because it represented more real world situations and not some fpu benchmark. There are no programs except scientific ones that use pure fpu instructions. Multimedia has switched to katmai and 3dnow. Accelerated, the performance difference is not that great and is only around 20-33%. Remember that intel just slashed its high performance chips by 41% and its 600mhz version by 26% making the k7 the most expensive chip on the block.
I would still recommend p3's for engineers with autocad but perhaps I would recommend a k7 for a 3dstudio max artist. If it were pure fpu performance I would recommend the k7 all the way.
Intel designed mmx to make the fpu performance not that much of an issue from risc chips because mmx instructions could speed things up and make the fpu seem not as important. Other then that the chip is great. Just do not get too overboard because real world situations would show the chip only slightly faster at a much higher cost. An old 500 or 450 is now dirt cheap and can come in under $1200 pc's now that are not that far off in performance. This is why Intel slashed its prices.
People vs. the evil empire --- and the people won !
T'is a Good Thing, [tm], indeed.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
> Even if amd meets the new p3 price cuts, i have a hard time believing anyone will pay $120 (~30% @ the 500 Mhz level) extra for slightly more performance.
Ever looked at the price differential between, say, a PIII 600 and a PIII 550? Still, some people apparently buy them.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
BZZZZT! Sorry, try again!
Seems people are willing to pay for the price difference between a PIII 500 and a PIII 550, which I last saw around $200-300 at least.
You get way more performance from your extra $79 for an Athlon board than from 500-550MHz.
okay... we want to look at each of these dissimilar chips in the same light (comparing apples to apples) rather than comparing their enhanced SIMD prowress (oranges to apples). I think in all honesty that I'd like to see what the chip can do without SIMD and with SIMD instructions from both vendors - but the raw data in/out is what would excite me most, as most current EVERYDAY applications do not use the extra instructions.
Karnal
Why would you possibly care about Tom's credibility on hardware reviewing in this particular situation? If he can motivate people to get off their ass and send a letter to their favorite hardware company and get them to do something thats good for all but is only barred by piles of political crap then i'm all for it regardless of what you personally think of him. if you can advocate a good cause then the route by which you do it isnt of supreme importance.
I dont have an absloute and utter hatred of Intel where i comtemplate their doom every waking moment but i also dont want to see a scenario where we have no AMD. (exchange AMD for Intel if you want, a monopoly is still a monopoly and regardless of the 'good intentions' you had at first they tend to become corrupt over time.)
flames from an anonymous coward. Please. I've found nothing but decent, objective reviews from Tom's hardware. Of course, I haven't had the money to go out and buy everything that he's tested to see if he's right, but he seems credible.... not just blabbering mindless stats off of the box.
Karnal
I've ordered a bunch of stuff through them too .. .. not a single problem, they were friendly, helpfull and kept me up to date (through email).. ..
I've had to return some bad memory
I'm a happy mwave customer
And I'll probaby order my Athlon+MB through them as well.
... are at Ace's Hardware.
(An anonymous coward posted the link, I am reposting for those filtering less then moderation level 1.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Well lets see, mainly what computer processes do is interget calculations. This is accually what the MHZ speed is based on, how many normal operations (math/interger, or logical) it can do per second. 600 is 8% higher than the number 550... hmmm no I have no idea where that 8 came from.
FPU on Athlons absolutely screams!!! It's close to 40% faster then same-clock Intel chips. Integer performance is not as impressive though. Only 8% (?) faster then Intel.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Posted by Nr9:
says it in the topic
they should stop using mandarin and use what most people speak instead of some wa shieng shit.
Frankly, I trust AnandTech's reviews more than I do Tom's. Tom's reviews tend to be a little too soapbox'ish for my taste. Whereas Anand and his staff have a happy go lucky, say it like it is approach to testing.
Just my 2yen.
FeiYen
Suppositivly mwave is going to start selling a athlon bundle of the processor a motherboard, and fan for 700 for a 550 and 900 for 600 MHZ chip. Starting August 25. Its under catalog/motherboard bundles. Search by processor.
I've ordered a few things from mwave and found them to be fairly on the up and up, though I warn that they can be a bitch if you have to return an idem. (or yea and beware of the mwave brand ram:)
Well let's see, we have a total of three e-mails quite probably from three different people in three different groups who probably don't know what the others are doing anyways. Oh yeah, and it's on tom's site, not trusted since sometime in '98. This does smell quite dubious indeed. Does anyone honestly expect that a company is going to change a strategic decision within six hours of a random occurance/ (according to tom) slew of e-mails? Anyway I'm not planning on making a move to the K7 (I've been calling it the damn K7 for almost a year now, no need to stop) until they have both copper and smp out the door so it doesn't much matter to me.
Sorry, bad link
Good Link: mwave
How long did it take for Intel to change their minds about that new Pentium-III chip Id feature? That was a major strategic decision, with all sorts of money invested. And Intel dropped it almost instantly...
>Often the product is quite good, just an
>unforunate language barrier is in place. And
>in their defense, they speak English one
>heck of a lot better then I speak... heck,
>I don't even know *what* their language
>is called, let alone how to speak it! But
>alas, my fault is still my condition.
If you are talking about Asus, they are based in Taiwan, so presumably they speak Chinese (Mandarin to be more specific...)
You are not alone. SMP Athlon will be my next system
Thats why we have resellerratings.com, go there before you goto pricewatch and read over the top listed companies, then look for those on the price list at pricewatch, they often have the best prices (TJT) too.
One of the markets targetted by the Atlon is the server market, where the higher prices are common place.
bot you sure don't knwo what you are talking about... the p6 uses a 32k L1 cache, with a off-die 512k L2. the K7 (athlon) uses a 128k L1, with a off-die 512k L2. wouldn't have been that hard to look up the right #'s...
Send a thanks to ASUS.
OK, a little bit off-topic. But that despises Abits claim that no Athlons will be distributed this year. Look at Alan Cox diary http://194.117.157.10/diary/
:)
I don't know if he got it from AMD or if he bought one. But this means good support for Athlon in Linux. I want one too.
Look at him.
Once again the web has had an impact in "getting the secret out" and forcing people's hands. Fortunately this time has nothing to do with an intern. ;-)
sigs are a waste of space
I am much looking forward to the new AMD chips. The lame features of the p3 and the lame features of intel in general have dissuaded me from obtaining one of those. Of course, the big question is: what is the floating point performance like?
Juln
Finally some better processors than shitty intel.
-Dyl6
this is off-topic, but I don't really care...
"anything to thwart the [intel, in this case] giants"
yay athlons!
Insert mind here.
For some vague reason, Athlon's seem to be
available at Funprice.
Go to www.tomshardware.com
This guy does professionally benchmarking and he did quite some extensive tests on the k7. Floating point performacne for 3dstudio max is almost twice as fast it as for the p3. However bussienss wont function as well. Look at the cpu architecture. The k7 was designed from the ground up as a workstation/server chip. AMD's goal was to fix the fpu problem in the k6 series. With 3dnow the performanc isn't that much better. The version of 3dstudio max didn't support 3dnow and thats way it performed twice as fast.
Just go to the link and read the results. Its quite incredible.
The general consensus between the tests that have been done so far is that the Athlon/K7 has a superior FP performance to the PIII, anywhere between 8% and 40 % faster.
The best desciption is that having an Athlon is like having a PIII at a clock speed of at least 50MHz faster, but the AMD is (hopefully/probably??) cheaper.
The thing is, the AThlon should really make use of the faster memory and bus speeds that are coming up, unlike the PIII which is beginnning to bottleneck a bit.
I'm just gonna wait until decent SMP boards start coming out.
Iggy
... just ask Carl Sagan.
Find them at www.aceshardware.com.
The chip was released what, June 28 or so? Once people started listing them on Pricewatch, I called a few. They were pre-ordering them and expected to have them mid to late July. A recent inquiry, and they still don't have them at these stores.
So Asus releases a board at the end of September, it'll be what, 3-6 months before any stores get them and thus, until we get to run Linux on them. Sure it's good a bunch of companies are saying they'll make boards, but I'm not getting my hopes too high just yet.
Alex Bischoff
---
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
While true, you have to realize, new hardware is *always* expensive and overpriced. The Pentium III has been on the market for what, half a year? The Athlon is just hitting now. Even the K6 commanded some $$$ when it first hit the market. The market always sells the latest and greatest at a premium, because there are those that will pay any price for *the* very fastest.
:-)
Give them some time, and prices should come down. If they don't, *then* you can start worrying.
Of course, the Athlon is supposed to be price-competitive to Intel. Since the Athlon *beats* Intel performance-wise, I'm sure the price will remain at the high-end of the spectrum. Don't expect to see an Athlon in a $399 K-Mart special any time soon.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Me too. I've watched him for two years turn from a not bad overclock site to leader of the Arrogant Assholes.
I wouldn't trust anything he says about AMD either, you must remember he hates Intel with a passion and does ads for AMD.
CC
"Pray arm me further by your reply" Winston Churchill
You can find details on three (four with AMD's MB) motherboards on tom's hardware guide at http://www5.tomshardware.com/mainboard/99q3/990818 /index.html
That being said, I do hope that AMD does well. If for no other reason than to make Intel chips cheaper.
Someone mentioned a weak feature set on Intel chips as well. How is the 'feature set" any different on the Athlon? The only difference I can see is a slightly beefier floating point unit and 3dNOW instead of SSE.
And for performance, since the K7 core has 2.3 times the transistors of a P3 core, it had damn well BETTER outperform a P3!
Don't mind me too much. I'm just going to take a wait and see attitude.
In fact, I've seen a lot of message boards ranting about how great the K7 is going to be. But when asked who's actually going to buy one right out of the gate, it gets damn quiet.
And I repeat. Wait and see.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You might have meant "...should have watched..." Surely, we say, "should've", but "of" means other things. Typing letters to create the sounds we want is not, as some modern teaching would have us believe, the whole story. //Nicholas Bodley // nbodley@tiac.net
The 8% is with equivilently clocked chips.
You also have it reversed, it takes a PIII 600 to match a K7 550, the amount to take that 8% away.
-- "Well, Hello, Mr. Fancy-pants. I've got news for you pal, you ain't in control but two things right now, Jack and s
Superior chip done in by overpriced mobo's.
Face it, the mobo's are all priced at > $199.95
The p3 mobo's start at $79 or so.
Even if amd meets the new p3 price cuts, i have a hard time believing anyone will pay $120 (~30% @ the 500 Mhz level) extra for slightly more performance.
The high speed chipsets come at a price.
Don't get me wrong, I want one (a lot) but I'm not going to get skinned to say "Oh yeah, I have an athlon". www.pricewatch.com tells the whole story.
Hooray.
:(
Any single company utterly dominating a market is a Bad Thing. I want to see AMD do well because they're the only competition left in the x86 market (NS[?] has pulled its Cyrix chips now I believe). And competition => lower prices + faster innovation. Which is all good for us, the consumer. I don't want AMD to "smash" Intel any more than I want Intel to smash AMD, for all that will happen is that the Evil Empire will continue, and a new Dark Lord will appear.....
I intend to get a K7 box, though when I've got the money - broke atm
"Cake or death!" (E. Izzard)
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