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AMD Releases Mobile CPUs
epoh writes "AMD has finally released their new (fast, affordable, slick) line of notebook processors. They are supposed to blow the Pentiums out of the water. Check out the full story. Yum. I want one. " It's a shame the K7 runs so hot. I'm sure it's just a matter of time, though.
It's too bad they'll still be so much slower in floating point calculations since they're based on the K6 family, but that won't matter at all if they're used for the applications that most laptop users will be using. I'd like to see AMD clean up in the notebook market since they seemingly have a very strong product.
When the K6s first came out I was very excited. I knew they were no panacea, but I overclocked my first 166 to a 210 using the newly available 83 MHz bus and I loved that little bad boy.
Is it just me, or is Intel every bit as predatory as Microsoft? Every time I think about that little chip company that could and how much Intel has hurt them it just makes me sick!
Andy Grove is a spawn of SATAN!
; >
AMD has been losing some key deals lately. I wonder how much longer they can last.
Those should be _really_ fast... with the 256K of on-die cache, assuming the laptops they go in have good chipsets.
Always been a big fan of the K6 family in spite of its performance shortcomings. Hell, K6/200 at work, K6-2/400 at home and soon to be another K6-2/400 running my Webserver.
Damn fine processor for the price. Heck, those 400s are down to $70 now with a fan. Hard to beat that price/performance ratio.
--Bernie
IMO I think AMD is better than Intel anyway. Let alone the price. I have a friend that has a pentium II that runs at the same speed as my AMD and my blows his out of the water all day long. I don't have a laptop yet, but when I do I plan on getting one with an AMD in just because I like to root for the underdog, but in this case it's just a better product to me. With Intel I think you only pay for a name and the wild commercials they make. With AMD you are getting some down and dirty fast computing dirt cheap. Rock ON AMD!!!
Good is never enough, when you dream of being great!
Despite my pessimism, I'd love to see AMD suceed. Let's wish 'em the best!
We know the athlon appears to be a great processor, and the K6-III wasn't bad, but will AMD be able to take the mobile market also? I sure hope so. Intel needs the competition. The next notebook I buy will deffinately be an AMD processor (right now anyways). Hopefully AMD will prove a lot of people wrong by producing faster and better than in the past. AC because I am at work, will be creating an account soon =] sexsloth@hotmail.com
Typical power consumption on both new chips (no clock speed specified) is around 12 watts, according to AMD. Not cool. Har har.
:P). sheesh. too bad intel has possession of the strongarm arch now. that was elegant.
As I sit here on my 2.2 volt OC'd celeron, mourning my dead G3, I wonder at how we free-software, open-sourceys still use or rely on this blasted, 20+ year old rube goldberg arch.
The new G4's havent even gone through manufacturing and minor design refinements, nor are they aimed at low-power environments but they still (yield issues aside) draw something like 5.0w typical/11.5 peak. And consider how power consumption varies with the SQUARE of wattage (i believe
its a shame. for my laptops, i look for the most elegant solution and designs. too bad apple doesnt exactly have real competition with powerpc laptops.
ah. sad how quake frame rates drive the market, no? i think i go soak in the tub with gottfried von strassburg's tristan. save my money for some sound system that can work while i bathe so i can enjoy my bach. apparently the world beyond maya has only gotten worse since these "enlightened times"
So if Apple releases a G4 laptop, it'll basically destroy any x86 ones. Here's hoping Motorola gets their act together. I'd rather have IBM help out, though.
It's good to see that AMD hasn't been put out of the running like so many of Intel's other competitors (like Cyrix). Granted, in many cases AMD has a superior product at a lower price versus Intel, but as stated, consumers most often look for brand recognition over technical statistics. IMO, this has been a crucial time for AMD, a time to decide it's place in the chip market of the future. Will they keep innovating, and releasing fantastic products like the K7? The answer appears to be yes. I sincerely hope that the marketing machine that is Intel doesn't destroy them. With the rapid growth of the computer market over the last few years, I think there is ample room for a lost cost, high performance chipmaker to snag it's piece of the market share from the big boys. Let's just hope they keep setting the pace...
Errr buddy ... The prices are being driven up right now due mostly to the fact that one of the largest chip producing areas was devasted this week. It has little to do with greed.
Unless God bought up a shitload of RAM before he shifted those plates. Hmmmmmmmm..
-Pika
Get your facts straight, the price hike started 2-3 weeks before the earthquake in Taiwan. I would say greed is a very accurate summarisation. But if you let an industry govern itself, capitalism will always bite you in the ass. Can you say 'industry watchdog?'
Strange. I went laptop shopping about a week ago with my cousin and there were several compaq K6-433s and 450s. For them to be released in the stores, it must have had been at least 2wks prior amb released the chips..? Anyone know when they were actually released?
What? Do they have robotic legs or something? Fill me in here.
The K7 marks a big breakaway from the past architecture for AMDs. As far as FP calcs go, AMD's Raw FPU has always been faster then Intel (compare 2 cycles to 3-5 for Intel). In the past, Intel has outperformed AMD bacuase they have pipelined their FPU. So, although AMD's FPU is more efficient on a per-instruction basis, overall for alot of calculations it is slower.
:)
However, enter the K7. It has a pipelined FPU! (with three units) So, unless Intel's new chips crank up the heat on FPU latency, I believe AMD's new chips will be around (or above) Intel's level.
Review Zone has a fairly well flused out discission of the K7's features. Enjoy
If the CPU were the only thing to run (I know, this will exagerate the differences) a battery could last up to twice as long if either the G3 or G4 spent most of its time chilling in the low range of usage. User driven tasks like word processing allow such idling to take advantage of the PPC doze and nap power conservation modes, which is appearantly how Apple can claim 6 hour battery life on the iBooks. Other tasks would certainly run it down faster by preventing either the processor or the disk from idling.
Start Running Better Polls
Since you didn't, here's the subheading of the AMD press release:
AMD is releasing high-speed K6-2 and K6-III mobile processors, not K7 mobile processors. Therefore, as indicated by the name of the processors, they use the older, less efficient FPU cores, not the new K7 design you're touting and to which you're linking.
Not only does Intel get to stay out of the DOJ antitrust warpath, we, the 'consumer' get better, cheaper chips! I think it was a serious, almost Microsoftian mistake on Intels part to junk the s7 processor scheme.(We'll make them pay for the CPU AND the MB chipset!) While they were bust pushing overpriced PII chips and Slot1 MBs, AMD has been silently stealing away market share with the K6 I/II/III, and then using that share to undercut Intel further.
In addition, I can see them hurting Intel with the incredible Athlon. Even if Intel can get stable, faster PIIIs to market, AMD will have the capacity to one up them monthly in both performance and clock speed for years!
(Forgive my toadiness. I have owned far more AMD-based machines in the last few years than Intel, and they ALWAYS give me more zip for less cash)
.sig: Now legally binding!
Okay I read the article.. I fail to see how this chip will blow Intel out of the water. K6-3s are still more expensive then celerons, and while they edge it out in non fpu related tasks they also loose in fpu related activities. Seems like a fairly balanced scale with the celeron costing a bit less. Hardly an innovative and amazing technology. As a side note... has anyone actually seen the K7 in stores? (Not web) I've been looking around Fry's electronics and see no sign of it. All this clapping of AMD on the back for defeating the "evil Intel giant" is great but all I see so far is no AMD cpus available, and Intel continues to smugly ship their cpus out while slashing prices. I think I'm beginning to see why Intel is not overly concerned about AMD, a few price cuts, AMD's inability to deliver mass quantaties of product, and presto. Any technological advantage of the K7 is nullified.
On the whole, I think that the favorable bias toward Intel has significantly lessened in the private sector. The bias I speak of is merely the blind "Intel is inherently good.. I've heard of them, and my buddy has a Pentium." For simplicity, if you divide the home computer consumers into two groups: informed and uninformed.
I think it's safe to say that most of the informed users realize the decent price:performance ratio that AMD-based systems offer. Either that, or they're already hardcore AMD or hardcore Intel, but they can usually backup their preference with reasons (quality or otherwise).
On to the uninformed clueless folks. The main factor conributing to their increasing lack of Intel bias is the salespeople that tend to not be Intel-pushing maniacs anymore. Comments like, "Well, AMDs aren't as good; they're cheap & have compatibility problems," are less common on a sales floor, as they're usually replaced with, "For a lower cost, you can get equal performance. Same thing, sometimes better, less money." Another contributing factor is that clueless people's friends are no longer saying, in response to, "What kinda computer should I buy?", "Just make sure it's a real Pentium."
There are also more AMD systems for sale, percentage-wise, on any given retail floor. That is, if Joe's PC shop is selling computers, 25-60% of them might be AMD-based, vs. 0-25% 5 years ago.
So where's the problem?
Big companies don't dig anything but `the best'. It is rare to see a highly technical person who is also in direct control of any large portion of a Fortune 500 budget. When the buyer has hundreds of thousands of dollars in a budget that doesn't have much of anything to do with their own pocketbook, they often tend to choose Intel over AMD, because at the moment, most people tend to compare it to Nike vs. Brand X Shoes. It isn't that Brand X shoes won't necessary last as long, or aren't as cool looking, but "everyone knows Nike's are the best." They've used Intel for as long as they can remember, and they also remember when AMDs tended to not be great at all. They also like the Intel guys dancing around in their jumpsuits on TV.. and they're too good to shop at Wal-Mart, so why would they buy AMDs?
So, that's my take on the whole scene: commercial folks don't dig AMD-based systems as much as the wide array of home users do. I'd love to see the breakdown of usage of AMDs across the commercial and private markets, but I think that my evaluation is a functional representation of reality in many instances (and probably common knowledge to most Slashdot folks).
and i just got a laptop with a regular amd-k6-2. i wonder if i can upgrade. oh well at least all its components are linux compatible. fawk :(
At least AMD didn't try to release a mobile Athlon. Either they realized the power consumption would be too great or they learned from INTEL's mistake when they put their processor into notebooks without testing how the casing and rest of the laptop held up the the heat. I bought an old gateway (this was a while back) laptop w/ a PII 233 and left it running for a while and when I came back the case had melted to my table. I called up gateway and they told me I had to wait until Intel gave them the assurance that their new Processor+LARGER heatsink combo + less voltage wouldn't be melting people's Gateway laptops. All in all I bet AMD will think twice about releasing the mobile Athlon (provided they get the mobile chipset engineered in the first place) until the power consumption goes down or they can manage heat better...
AMD K-7 500 - $223
AMD K-7 550 - $394
AMD K-7 600 - $494
AMD K-7 650 - $841
No $1000 processors here...
[humor] he must have been talking about those Athlon Xeon chips [/humor]
Its the IBM 590
AMD Athlon 550
96mB of RAM
25GB HardDrive
S3 8 MB video card (it does OpenGL)
Some Generic soud card... Probably Crystal *****
It gets 64 fps in Quake 2 in OpenGL - Demo2.dm2 at 640x480
the PIII 600 HP w/ 16mb of VRAM (OpenGL) and 128mb of Memory only gets 44 fps in demo2.dm2 at 640x480... I was shocked...
On my old best buy terminal it told me that the computer costs $1361.56 to manufacture
U are a FUDster and obviously have no clue. Yes. the P233 *can* beat a K6-2/450 in FP Ops, but this *only* happens on heavily Pentium optimized binaries. Please go and have a look at the FPU implementations of both K6 and P1. Sure, the K6 FP is not as good, but if you go compile and benchmark any heavy numerics code under Linux, you'll find that the Ratio is usually more like 2:3 in favor of the P1. No double FP performance here, Sir!
Do you think only US citizens read books?
I remeber this story from my younger days, as I`m sure most of the other non US readers do.
The 6 hour run time in the iBooks has more to do with the 12" monitor (rather than the 14.1" founder in the PowerBooks) than with the CPU. The displays, and the specifically the backlighting, and the hard drives are what kill the batteries.. Apple's 15" studio display requires roughly 35W, and I have no idea what it takes to spin a hard drive.. I do know that a little extra ram acting as a ram-disk can dramatically improve battery life..
The 6 hour run time in the iBooks has more to do with the 12" monitor (rather than the 14.1" founder in the PowerBooks) than with the CPU
And what about the 5hours run time of the new powerbook G4.
Also notice that future G4 used for notebook will use the SOI (silicon on insulator) technology, which would permit to clock chips 35% higher while using 65% less energy.
That would make a 3.25W typical, 7.5W peak power consumption for a 550 MHz G4. And rumors are that the cheapest G4 powerbook will cost around 1899$.
Friendly,
Sven LUTHER
Dude... I wasn't making my own certified Toms Hardware type of benchmarks... I was merely protraying that the PIII had twice the VRAM and that both the cards did OpenGL.
Actually, you're number 42. Good job, man.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
Portable market? What have you been smoking? As for my place I can see only Intel pieces running NT around.
:(
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
hello, as a real and hard AMD fan i setup an ftp site with applications optimized for k6 , compiled with the pentiumgcc , using max stable flags. packages are all RPMS. includes kernel,glibc,kde etc etc ... you can check it out at ftp://ftp.deu.edu.tr, http://gnu4amd.deu.edu.tr. have fun !
Especially considering the fact that there aren't a whole lot of people that like to do floating point intensive apps on notebooks. When was the last time you saw someone rendering a bryce 3d scene on the plane from LA to chicago?
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
> Do you think only US citizens read books?
Not at all. I just don't presume to think you read all the SAME books that we do.
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