700 MHz Athlon

News.com is reporting that AMD will release a 700 MHz Athlon this week, pushing them even further ahead in the MHz race against Intel. I hope it works well, because the article also points out that AMD is still not doing well financially...

Comments

Some things...

[Graymalkin]

that AMD needs really badly at this point which would probably turn the company around.
1. A better relationship with Microsoft- Microsoft you say? How can he really think anyone needs to be friends with Microsoft? Well you need to take into account something Intel realized a long time ago. Microsoft will not go away, kinda like gum stuck to the bottom of a pair of Airwalks. Linux is great yada yada, but the linux geeks of the world don't have the mass buying power that PHB's have. 3D Now extensions in M$ products like office and maybe some special support in NT and 98 for it also.
2. An intelligent marketing director- AMD is missing something that Intel has and it's not money. According to Intel's commercials if you buy their processors you can actually move into the internet and cute bears will walk around your screen all because of the P3. All AMD has to do is get people to believe they can do some extraordinary stuff with the Athlon and when it comes down to buying a P3 system or an Athlon system Jonny and Suzy Nontechsavvy will buy the Athlon.
3. Some kind of relationship with any computer manufacturer that has TV commercials- People watch alot of TV so when they see a Dell or Gateway commercial with the AMD logo they'll think the processors are damn cool, like they do now with the P3. Intel makes a majority of their megabucks selling though computer manufacturers, learn the lesson AMD.
4. Really snazzy SMP- This fits in with all of the other suggestions. Make the SMP run really snappy with up to alot of processors, companies like Dell and Compaq will put them in their servers and then sell NT on them and put them in commercials. If AMD can keep prices low we might even see consumer SMP boxes for under 2000$ with any distro of linux or Windows NT or 2K from a said computer company. SMP is sorta like RAID in that it would work wonders in a consumer environment but never panned out and has for the most part been relagated to enterprise class machines. SMP just leaves so much room for expansion on a system, if you really need more power you can buy a second processor and you're set, no worrying if you can find a slightly faster chip to work in your system or if you just need awhile new system. Thats why I got a dual motherboard, when I need more speed I want to pay 200$ for a second processor, not have to upgrade to a while new motherboard AND faster processor. When I need a faster system still I can replace both processors and up the bus speed by 133mhz giving me a much longer life span out of my investment. This is good for Joe COnsumer. Slap the motherboard companies to get their SMP boards out AMD, you need it.
Ok that's all.

AMD's Vulnerabilities

[R. Anthony]

First of all, AMD's reliance on VIA for future modifications to the 750 chipset makes me very nervous. Despite VIA's recent successes with the Apollo pro 133 beating the 820 to market, Taiwan has been very flaky recently. With 3 major power outages, and the wholesale dumping of DRAM on US markets, and now the earthquake, AMD is pretty much screwed if VIA doesn't deliver. And it's sad, nobody knows what's going on with the high tech industry in Taipei. The closest thing to a credible sounding report I had to get off a tech site in Moscow of all places.

So what does it mean to AMD if VIA can't deliver on the Apollo KX133 chipset? It means that you give Intel a chance to get back in the market with 700 MHz Coppermines in November. It also means that you reaffirm the general sense that AMD can't deliver it's products in a timely manner. Although waiting for the KX133 rewards consumers with lower CPU prices as the OEM market has demonstrated drastic drops in Athlon CPU prices this month, it prevents AMD from signing lucrative OEM contracts at a critical time.

In the consumer markets, people a waiting for AGP 4x, and will settle for an Apollo Pro chipset and a Pentium 3 rather than wait 2 months for VIA to release the same product for the Athlon. Personally, I don't plan on buying any more Intel products due to their shameless attempts to strong arm Taiwanese manufacturers into not making Athlon motherboard, the bogus Rambus fiasco and Intel's bribery of Gateway to stop making machines with AMD CPUs.

Essentially, AMD is making mistakes that they _Could_Have_Learned_from Intel. For instance, Intel makes its own chipsets, and charges people royalties to use them. AMD has virtually out-sourced its chipset design and fabrication to VIA who recently acquired Cyrix. Now, you've got to ask yourself, how dumb can the execs at AMD be? And you have to be pretty suspicious about how long it's taking VIA (pre-earthquake estimate for the KX133 release was November) to get out a decent motherboard for the Athlon CPUs, as the changes they'll have to make are hardly drastic. Current Athlon boards already have the Alpha 200 MHz bus, already support PC133 SDRAM, all that VIA needs to do is slap on the AGP 4x components and onboard UDMA/66 which is technology they_already_have. You have to wonder if the aquisition of Cyrix has made them a little less eager to see AMD survive, after all should AMD go bankrupt, that would leave the entire low end PC market at their disposal.

AMD's moving of their main Fab to Dresden was a smart play, as is the production of Motorola G4 chips (and indeed the partnership with Motorola whereby AMD has access to Motorola's copper CPU technology), However, why not shift the whole operation to Germany? Why put yourself at the mercy of VIA, and the Taiwanese?

To be blunt, AMD could put out a 2 GHz CPU by Christmas and still be screwed if VIA is significantly late with the KX133. I for one will not wait forever for this board, especially with all the information out now on the Transmeta CPU.

Re:AMD's Vulnerabilities

[Keeper]

Intel started creating it's own chipsets out of GREED, not to "rid the world of unstable chipsets". This intent was made clear when they refused to liscense the slot-1 design to 3rd party companies for a large span of time.

VIA makes some *awesome* chipsets. I can't remember the last time I saw a board with a VIA chipset on it have a problem.

Following your line of logic, AMD ought to get in the ram business as well. We all know that Intel is creating a new type of ram, and they probably won't liscense it out. So amd had better start working on it's own ram type as well that it will produce in house, otherwise it will have to depend on outside companies to produce ram that will work with it's cpu's.

AMD has decided NOT to get in the chipset market because it DEPENDS upon support from 3rd party manufacturers. I have serious doubts that AMD would be able to make a chipset of the same quality of a VIA chipset. On top of that, they would have to FURTHER divide their production facilities between chipsets, k6's, and k7's. They don't want to make chipsets! They won't make as much money off of them as the extra k7's they could stamp out! ;).

You question the length of time to get a K7 chipset by VIA? "minor" changes? The bus design is COMPLETELY different. The EV6 bus is a completely different animal, far more advanced than the design intel uses for it's stuff. And alot more complicated.

If VIA really wanted the low end market to itself, all it would have to do is stop producing Socket 7 chipsets that'll work with the k6. I'm sure they wouldn't have too many problems doing that... It'd be silly for them to drive their major source of revenue out of business; the low end market has very little profit in it, if any. That's why amd has been loosing so much money lately.

I also must, who is waiting for AGP 4x? WHY? Nothing uses it.

Re:AMD's Vulnerabilities

[R. Anthony]

Following your line of logic, AMD ought to get in the ram business as well.

I never suggested this. Micron has had the U.S. SDRAM market locked down since it aquired Texas Insutruments, and a large tariff wall was errected against Taiwanese DRAM chips (which were being dumped on the US market for $4 a pop, $1 less than the production cost of U.S. made DRAM). Besides, I'm very happy with my Corsair PC133 memory, which is much superior to Samsung or any generic PC133 SDRAM comming out of Taiwan.

We all know that Intel is creating a new type of ram, and they probably won't liscense it out.

Ahh, actually Rambus created RDRAM, and Intel holds a portion of the patent, and it's already been created. However it is pretty much worthless as it only has a16-bit bus to the FSB, while SDRAM has a 64-bit bus. RDRAM also crashes when the total amount of RAM exceeds 512 MB, which is the reason for the delay of the 820, so they could strip out a RIMM slot, leaving a staggering total of 2.

I have serious doubts that AMD would be able to make a chipset of the same quality of a VIA chipset.

AMD can and does make chipsets. The 750 chipset currently used for Athlon boards already includes the 200MHz Alpha EV6-based FSB. VIA is not going to change this. What VIA is going to do is integrate:

1) UDMA 66 support on the motherboard so you won't need a PCI controler (the same thing that Abit already offers with the Be6 BX boards) Why is this important? For one, Linux has trouble distinguishing between a Promise UDMA/66 controller and an adaptec SCSI controller, which is highly annoying if you'd like to run both; and

2) AGP 4x, which contrary to your assertion, will be used in the near future. The new nVidia GeForce 256 AGP 4x card is comming out early this month for instance. By the way, APG 4x fast writes circumvent system memory and speed up all data transfers from the CPU to the graphics card, which is a huge performance gain.

I never wrote that VIA made bad chipsets, I wrote that Taiwan's production has been flaky recently, and I'm not sure that they can deliver products the_are_required_for_the_continued_survival_of_AMD in a timely fashion. AMD has no problem making Athlons, there is an excess of Athlon CPUs, the prices are dropping because the motherboards aren't good enough yet, so people like me aren't buying the CPU. This equates to AMD losing money.

AMD financial results.

[Matt2000]

Man, I didn't think they were in this much trouble. From the article:

"Last quarter, AMD reported a walloping $173 million in operating losses and revealed that Atiq Raza, one of its most highly regarded executives, had made a deal with Beelzebub and was recalled to the astral plane for punishment.

There was no word on how Andy Groves, CEO of Intel corp had managed to maintain his working relationship with the lord of the underworld.

Some cite his strict open door policy, while others think he may actually be the devil."


Hotnutz.com

Are we approaching microwave frequencies?

[dustpuppy]

I'm no physics wizz so correct me if I am wrong.

My understanding is that microwaves start at 1 Ghz and with CPU speed approaching those frequencies, does this mean that the CPU's will start emitting microwaves.

I'm assuming that I don't know my physics that well, because I guessing that microwave emitting CPU's would be a bad thing!

Then again, you could always cook the evening meal while you read /.

Re:Are we approaching microwave frequencies?

[Axe]

Relax. It does not just "start emitting", though emmitance does go up as GHz^4 : pretty fast.
Remember that FCC numbers on your equipment?: they mean you are safe. It is being tested for.

You CRT monitor is a much bigger source of troubles. Let's hope that 20inch LCD will come down in price before I go blind...

Re:Are we approaching microwave frequencies?

[MillMan]

there is no exact number range defined for microwave frequencies. I think general range it starts is 400mhz to 4ghz (big range I know, its there somewhere), and ends when the wavelengh goes below about 1 cm (too lazy to do the math for frequency) at which point they're called millimeter waves.

But it won't emit much as far as I know...

1) you don't exactly have 5000 watts hooked up to a transmitting antennae. The power is pretty low.

2) the cpu is totally enclosed in a metal box. Metal absorbes electromagnetic waves. Thus hardly anything escapes anyway.

Honestly, I could care less about faster Athalons

[trims]

No, this isn't a flame...

What holds my interest in the Athalons isn't the tit-for-tat clockrate match with Intel (I mean, who really cares who owns the fastest CPU this month?). What I'm far more interested in AMD producing is the SMP versions.

To me, the biggest pain-in-the-ass right now is the P3 / Xeon product split. The slot1 architecture limits me to 2 CPUs - if I want more, I have to get Xeons, which are a huge cost uplift. Here's a good example:

A Compaq 1850R and a 6400R are very similar machines in everything but the CPU architecture (yes, there are a couple of other important advantages in the 6400, but not that big). I pay about $4000 for a 1 CPU 1850R, and $1300 for an additional CPU. For a 1 CPU 6400R, it's $8000, plus $1800/CPU.

Now, if AMD can come out with a chipset/motherboard that has 4-8 slots, AND I can stick the "commodity" (ie non-Ultra) Athalons in it, well, then, GoodBye Intel! AMD needs to realize that there is a huge opportunity here at the P3 / Xeon split, a place that they can heavily exploit. All the better, since Intel will NOT be able to remedy the situation, other than lower the cost of Xeons, something they are loath to do.

Having an single architecture that will linearly scale up through at least 8 (and preferably to 12 or so) would be a real advantage to AMD. I would much prefer to see them press ahead with putting into production large SMP-capable chipsets and such than worry about getting the absolute highest megahertz CPU out.

Just in case I'm not totally clear here, what I want is to be able to use the SAME CPU from the low-end machines to the high end ones. Now, I know I'll get better performance by buying the Athalon Ultras (much more L2 cache), but I'd at least like the option of using the base Athalons, rather than be forced to use the more expensive chips, just because the manufacture want me to (that's the reason for the Slot1 vs Slot2 division - it's a pure Intel marketing decision).

-Erik

Priorities...

[Christopher B. Brown]

You're quite right that there's relatively little merit to further souping-up the CPU to the point of having something that will "melt itself through the motherboard;" that's only of merit if the CPU was the bottleneck.

That actually also implies that SMP is also of relatively little merit for the same situations, as SMP is also a solution to the CPU Bottleneck problem.

What has more merit is the notion of trying to let system components be increasingly independent of the CPU. Things like:

• A fast UART with a big buffer, maybe 256 bytes

  (Some may think I jest... Check out the buffering specs on a 16450 versus 16550...)

• IDE/SCSI with decently large tagged command buffers, to allow disk I/O to be suitably asyncrhonous.
• Battery-backed RAM, preferably with a SIMM/DIMM slot that allows the user to add arbitrary quantities.

  This would be useful in providing a way to make journalled filesystems (of which two have recently made beta releases for Linux, namely ext2 and Reiserfs) both faster and more reliable, as they could have the metadata journals written out initially to this "relatively reliable cache" rather than having it vulnerable in ordinary RAM.

  1MB of battery-backed RAM would be enough for Stephen Tweedy's ext3 implementation; doubtless other uses could be imagined for larger quantities...

• It is an attractive enough consideration that video cards have been turning into subsystems of their own considerable power.

  The increasing availability of video cards with 32MB and more of RAM implies that there's some work being pushed off to the video card.

  Extra coprocessors on the video card can't be too horrible an idea, and is consistent with things like Monster 3D boards that provide coprocessors to the "main" video card...

On the other hand, there's one notable fallacy here, which is that there is merit to moving to a system working with 128 bit memory space sizes. This is silly from at least three perspectives:

• 64 bits is already larger than what the PCI bus is designed to cope with; PCI implements a 32-bit multiplexed address and data bus.

  This is why the only systems that presently support more than 4GB of RAM on Linux are UltraSPARCs,

  There is apparently a way to support a 64 bit data bus through a longer connector slot, but that does not make for a 128 bit extension.

• It has only been recently that the 2GB addressing limitations of 32 bit systems have become restrictive sufficiently easily as to make it necessary to look at 64 bits. And 64 bits allows you to reference Rather A Lot Of Memory Space.

  Based on the rates of growth in the past, it seems reasonable to expect that 64 bit addressing will be adequate for all but highly unusual applications for the next ten to fifteen years.

  And even then, it is reasonably likely that by that time, technology may have progressed back to using some of the memory segmentation technologies of the '60s ala MULTICS to obviate the need for linear growth of adddress space.

  2^63 is approximately 4 billion billion, which is a very large value. A move to 128 bits squares that again, which provides an even more atrociously large space.

• Increasing bus sizes generally doesn't increase performance.

  By moving to 128 bit addressing, the complexity of the memory addressing circuitry increases, as do the minimum amounts of memory that are likely to get addressed for instructions. This means that programs get bigger even if they do no more than they would on a 32 bit architecture.

Enough already...

[JoeShmoe]

[rant]

Are there STILL people out there that think their processor is the bottleneck of their system?

It's everything else!!!

Remember when the 486DX2 came out? You could have a 486DX2 running internally at 66Mhz on a bus of 33MHz...or choose the 486DX running at 50MHz on a bus of 50MHz? What did the benchmarks say? The all-50-MHz system was much faster.

But, instead of spending their time improving the speed and data width of the bus, chip makers tripled the internal speed...then quadrupled... now the minimum is quintuple the speed and AMD thinks we need septupal (notice I conveniently skip the dirty one).

I fail to see why the bus systems and processors can't make the speed transition at the same time. The extra time in the CPU cycle can be spent improving data pipes between components and increasing the number of processors. Imagine if the standard system today was four, 128-bit processors running at 133MHz on a bus of 133MHz?

I say end the madness...AMD and Intel need to spend their time working on cheap, stable 128-bit SMP instead of this overwhelmingly-fast single-point-of-failure! Why 128-bit? Because if I'm going to have to throw always all my existing technology and go through another period where everything I need to run is considered "legacy" then make it worth my while and jump right to 128-bits! 64-bit is obsolete,even for game consoles. Hell, there are Windows CE portables can have 128-bit Hitachi processors (although again, nothing else in the unit is 128-bit).

I want a nice fat data pipe running at a cool, stable 200-300 megahertz. Not some processor that is ready to go critical and burn a hole through my motherboard.

[/rant]

As always, my opinion...not yours. Remember that before when you post flamebait or troll replies.

- JoeShmoe

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Well...

[trims]

I do agree with your observations that system componets have NOT kept pace with CPU advances, and indeed, there seems to be wide concensus that the main bottlenecks these days (at least in the x86 world) are off-chip.

That said, I think you are making several confusing suggestions:

• 128-bit CPUs. What you seem to be advocating is pure-128-bit, which the Hitachi chip is NOT. There is really no reason to go to 128 bits internally in a CPU - 64 bits provides more than sufficient address space (18 billion billion), and since very little requires the larger word size, the chip will be constantly doing calculations with smaller-than-optimal chunks of data. That is, most data will typically be done in 32-bit or 64-bit chunks, rather than 128-bit. What you are referring to in the Hitachi chip is the data bus width (which is indeed 128-bits wide). Internal processing is still in 64-bit chunks.
• Remember that wider data paths are more expensive than narrow ones. Chipsets cost more too. We have the current architecture very much as a result of cost pressures. Better does not always win in the market (see the Alpha as an example).
• Off-chip and on-chip data communications CANNOT be at the same rate. Since to do off-die communications you have to go alot further, you have to up the voltage, which reduces speed.
• You talk of single point of failure. Anything that you suggest will not help (simply making a machine SMP does not help redunancy in any meaningful way).

I would like to see people concentrate more on holistic system performance, but let's keep everything in perspective....

-Erik

Hardware Performance Question..

[Pengo]

Ok, right now at home I am running a AMD K6-2 350.
128meg ram, 16meg TNT, IDE.. yada yada..


At work I am running a PIII 500 with about the same setup.


this is my questions, why am I not seeing a near double in my performance? I would guess that it was ram.. BUT.. I took ram out of one of the other machines, and I am not seeing a GREAT performance increase..


Sure, my computer at work can crunch SETI@ blocks a bit quicker, but .. in reality.. in a lot of applications my AMD 350 seems to be a bit pepier...


QUICK NOTE: I am not a big gamer or 3D freak..






THIS IS THE POINT.. has anyone actually used a computer that goes that fast? (700 Mhz).. is it even worth it for the average LinuxNerd(TM) :) to upgrade?


It seems like these superfast CPU's are GREAT if you have VERY spacific needs.. (3D Rendering (ie. Games)) ... BUT, for the average user.. and the average applications.. it seems that the bottleneck is NOT the CPU..



For someone out there that has a lot of experience with a lot of different CPU's, which CPU configuration is the price to performance ratio?



Will I see more performance increase by purchasing a UW/SCSI-Controller / HD????


More Ram?


More CPU?


:) For some reason I feel like if I dump my current motherboard and go purchase a AMD-700 w/new ram.. etc. I will be disapointed....

Yes but...

[JoeShmoe]

...would you brag about a girlfriend with only one breast? "My girlfriend has a giant F-cup breast and your girlfriend only has two, evenly-proportioned C-cup breasts?"

Silly I know, but my point is that consumers can be trained to think anything is better if the advertising says it is. If they create some cute little "Puffy, the SMP doggy" all the JoeShmoes are gonna run out and ask for dual-processor systems at Circuit City and Best Buy.

Tell them they need two processors so one can access the Internet and the other can play games, or better yet...tell them they need a processor for every application they want to run. That outta put consumer demand for SMP on the laps of those boys in marketting...

- JoeShmoe

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