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AMD Planning 1GHz CPUs
idan writes "This ZDnet article article indicates that AMD is opening a fab
that will produce 1GHz Athlon CPUs." I'm sure it's pure coincidence that AMD is making this announcement so soon after Intel announced their "real soon now" 1100 MHz "Athlon Killer". Do we get to call this one the "Athlon Killer Killer"?
An interesting point brought out in one my courses here at school... When analyzing algorythms you're not supposed to "consider" the machine it will be running on. If you think about it, it makes sense.
A really fast machine running an n^2 algorythm will still be running an n^2 algorythm. When you reach a certain (often relatively small) set of data, you will SERIOUSLY notice how laggy the system is performing. Doubling the speed of the processor doesn't mean that you can double the amount of data you give to an n^2 sort before the time it takes is greater than before. It's a mere fraction of that.
People will continue to program the way they're used to. People will program in a manner to scale, if they need to scale! If they don't need to, then they won't (why bother wasting the extra time?). I don't know about most programmers, but for me programming is an ego trip. My goal is to get the slickest smallest fastest most bug free piece of code out there. Now, I realize that there are many coders out there that don't think like that but the thing is they'd code using the n^2 algorythm anyway.
...and another diversion: in some cases an n^3 algorythm will outperform an n^2 algorythm (other examples can be made); you also have to consider the data set you use. If KNOW you're going to use a data set smaller than "1" (one is a relative term, where the two functions intersect; it may be a rather large number if one algorythm is measured in minutes and the other seconds) then then n^3 would be the better choice.
I seriously doubt this will change the way code is written...
"The failure of the Athlon"? I know it's hard to find Athlon Mobos, but isn't it a bit too soon to call it a failure?
(my apologies to The Register staff for 'deep linking'...)
--
E2 IN2 IE?
Intel knew that AMD's fab 30 would be officially opened today and then we hear some silly rumor about Willamette coming out early Q1 at 1100MHz. Well, it ain't. Check your sources. Even the Register has recanted on their earlier post about this. Most likely, Willamette won't see the light of day until Q1 2001. And to be slightly off topic for a moment, there was another announcement on the Register earlier this week that states that Athlon 1000MHz (NOTE: this is NOT 1GHz - 1GHz=1024MHz) will be ready 10 January 2000. The problem is that Intel gets the press and ignorant people think that they are breaking new ground when the truth is that AMD already plowed that furrow. AMD is out in front on this one - problem is that unless you do your research, you'll never know it!
I'm sure if you asked Intel, they would tell you they'd be perfectly happy if AMD would stop making faster chips.
Or did you mean to write AMD?
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Merced is an entirely new architecture. Not x86 or any semblance thereof. It is called IA-64, and is actually being developed in a co-venture with HP. However, it also has what many have hinted is very slow x86 emulation. Also be aware that Merced (Itanium) has been in development for several years, and was originally slated to be introduced in *1998*. Most likely the technology they spent so much time/money developing has been surpassed by improvements in the x86 field to the point that to make this processor viable and competitive, let alone the new king of the road, a complete reworking/rethinking is required. Originally Merced was to be released at 500MHz, which in mid-1998 would have been incredible. If that's all it can run at now, it would be kind of hard for Intel to convince consumers that clock speed really doesn't matter after a decade of convincing them that clock speed is all there is. Especially when AMD has 700MHz Athlons on store shelves *NOW* and that on .25um process with continued ramping and now a .18um die shrinkage to boot! FURTHERMORE, it'll take a whole new opsys to run on this processor, since it deviates from any existing architecture. I'm not holding my breath for Itanium.
I guess that you don't keep up on the news very well. AMD made the announcment about FAB 30 (the new plant in Dresden) and the 1GHz K7 at least two monthes ago. At the time I don't think anyone thought that they were serious because they had not yet proven that they could actually deliver the 500,550 and 600MHz in quanity. Now that hey have done that everyone is rehashing the old news like it is new trying to make it look like AMD is reacting to the RUMOR that intel may ship a 1.1GHz cpu in Q1 2000. It is infact intel that is trying to radically alter it's roadmap inorder to try and compete on performance with AMD.
as we need faster throughput. Face it, chipsets aren't as interesting to consumers. As long as consumers buy machines based on procesor speed, manufacturers will continue to sell junk with fast processors. Just how useful is a 1 Ghz chip when the memory runs at 100 mhz and the system is using an IDE disk controller.
some really bad bugs(by bad i mean something like the F00F bug)
The F00F bug only really was at all serious on a server which is running untrusted code. While this is certainly a bug, it's not one that will affect a large quantity of the people using this chip. Furthermore once someone smart enough thought about it, it became easy to fix/work-around in software. The Pentium's FDIV bug is probably a better example of a bad bug.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
IBM is selling Aptivas with 550Mhz Athlon processors. The pricing seems competative with a similarly clocked Pentium 3. I went to Dull and te Cow Place...neither had any Athlon systems....
Blar.
0.18 micron is the trace width of "wire" inside the processor's core. It is a lot smaller than .18 mm.
I'm willing to bet that if tomorrow, AMD said they were working on a 2GHz CPU, intel would announce a 3GHz CPU the next day. They're just playing one-upmanship, which is easy to do with vapor. But in SILICON, AMD still kicks intel's butt today.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yeah, there were some links on the article for the 1100 MHz Intel chips mentioning the AMD fab plant (which has been doing copper prototypes since June or July) and their plan to get a GHz chip out by 1st quarter of 2000, maybe the end of January. The news is old. Intel is the frantic reactionary here, not AMD
Have Intel been giving us their best - hardly likely - until now, no-one's pushed them, so they've been able to deliver lower cost, lower performing processors as "state-of-the-art", simply because no-one could show us, the consumers, otherwise. Now that AMD have finally "made it", they're being forced to bring out the more advanced processors - IA-32 (Williamette) launch pushed forward 9 months as an example.
AMD - without a doubt - they've been struggling to keep in the market, as a smaller, less well financed and therefor less well financed company, they've had no choice but to put forward their best just to keep up with the market - AMD chips have until recently been renowned for not being very overclockable - because they ran close to their maximum performance levels already. With the release of the Athlon, they've finally caught, and surpassed Intel - and now Intel are being forced to change tactics in order to compete with the people who could quite possibly steal the "PC clone performance kings" title from them. Much kudos to AMD for what they've managed to achieve.
As an aside, I opened up an OLD PC the other day (I can't remember what it was, but I do know it was OLD) and a large number of the chips were labelled with Intel AND AMD logos - together, on the same chips - kind of hard to comprehend considering the way Intel and AMD are now so fiercely competitive....
Didn't you just answer your own question? Re-read those two lines.
Also, how would the advent of 1GHz CPUs allow code bloat to increase at a quicker rate than it already is increasing?
-A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Actually, I'd say the Celeron is the perfect example of a company rushing a product out the door to "fill" a need.
The first Celeron's released had no L2 cache. They were DIRT SLOW. It was nothing but a PII without a case nor the L2 cache on the processor slot. It was designed to compete with AMD and Cyrix at the low end. Which it didn't (not having an L2 cache really killed performance; not as bad for games, as those often have L2 misses anyway).
Months later, the intel guys re-released the celeron with 128k L2 cache running at chip speed. I don't think they even thought about the overclocking potential of the sucker, or think that it's performance would approach/beat that of their "cash crop" processor (the PII).
Intel didn't take it's time, it just threw something out the door hoping to put a rival out of business.
If I were to plug one of them into my box right now, most of the cycles would be admittedly unused.
:) ( http://www.distributed.net)
Do you have unused cycles? What kind of person are you? Everybody should donate their unused cycles to distributed.net!
--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
Good to see the old pattern is still working like a champ:
Announcement: New faster/better/bigger XYZ!
Response 1: Do we really need faster/better/bigger? Most consumers don't need it! And I'm the first person ever to ask such a profound, socially-conscious question!
Response 2: I bet that makes a lot of heat. Hyuk, hyuk!
Response 3: Huh, I bet that would make a kickass Beowulf cluster.
Repeat responses 1, 2, and 3 as necessary. Presto, automatic Slashdot conversation generator.
MJP
Don't try that "protecting the children" shit you people use to keep the tits and bad words off my TV. --Seanbaby
Is this guy a moron?
I picked up some AMD stock 2 or 3 years ago when it became clear that Cyrix was on its way out. Since then, AMD has gone from a "catch up and take a piece of the low end market" to what we saw today, charging Intel head on. I'm still down about 25% on my investment. Cool CPUs don't make the stock price go up, earnings reports do.
-Barry
BTW: Did anyone else do a double take on "1.9 billion"?
Uhm.. That's also AMD's fault. IIRC, they're making the chipsets that the mobo companies need. And not olny are Athlons in short supply, so are the chipsets!
D'oh!
After checking out this story a little bit, I bought stock in AMD. A few reasons:
1.) Right no AMD is ahead in the race. Pretty impressive for company with something like 1 billionth (give or take) Intel's market cap.
2.) Even if Intel takes the lead with their "Athalon killer" AMD's production of the athalon has shown that they can now compete with Intel as equals, sort of.
3.) If Intel DOES rush up the production of their 1100 mhz chip, it will result in a production and distribution nightmare. I would bet on one or two recalls too. Conversely, AMD has almost flawlessly executed production for all of it's recent releases. If THEY say they can rush their 1Ghz, I tend to believe them.
4.) Buying Mote or IBM won't make me money off the G4, which I'd still rather have than any of these. Despite the fact that I'm using a second rate Pentium Laptop, I'm a Mac Man at heart.
-- I don't really have anything useful to say. ~Tuts
We need it so that we can crack root in 10% of the time. duh. =]
What?
It blows my mind that people publish such error filled articles. As many have pointed out, they blew the definition of a micron (I suspect they really intended to say a micron is a thousand of a millimeter since most people have a feel for a millimeter and a factor of 1,000), but I have yet to see anyone say that 0.18 micron technology does NOT mean that the transistors are now 0.18 microns apart! Far from it! All that means is that the finest lines they draw are 0.18 microns, when drawn. Usually, only the gate length is this size. I even saw a post that said the wires connecting the transistors were going to be 0.18 microns wide. That would be one of the slowest CPUs ever made since the RC time constant would kill you! If you make it to the metal layer with your wire, it is going to be WAY bigger than the gate width to reduce the resistance. OK, enough of my rambling, just wanted to point out another REALLY STUPID comment from the author who obviously has never dreamed of layout an IC.
(Disclaimer: I have worked for both AMD and Intel, although am not currently employeed by either)
We call it the vapourware killer
I don't know about that CAR thing, I think that the overall quality of certain factors with cars has declined greatly since the "japanese invasion".
Now, we have a trend towards smaller, lighter cars, which offer much less protection in collisions. Now we have a trend towards front-wheel drive cars which reduces your control at high speeds (really only matters to racers), and acceleration off the line. Now we have a trend towards smaller engines which are packed with all kinds of electronic equipment and emissions systems, which helps the environment, but reduces overall performance and reliability, and when performance is made up for with more gadgets, reliability suffers, and when more engineering goes in to the reliability issue, you get a much higher cost, not only original purchase price, but also maintenance.
Car owners in the 60's and 70's had things much better. Or will you argue with the tens of thousands of VW enthusiasts who still drive their 60's and 70's era air-cooled rear-engine rear-wheel-drive cars, and get 20-30 miles per gallon?
You can see the same trend sort of taking hold in the intel product line; $4k Xeons with four-pound heatsinks, versus $300 Celerons, which probably cost the same to manufacture (cache-memory considerations aside). A Celeron is like the front-wheel-drive econobox of CPU's. And if intel has their way, the whole chip industry will become the same way.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
A micron is a 1,000th of a meter
Last I checked we called that a millimeter. Can you even image a chip done in 0.18mm?
--
Two GHz speed x86 chips means twice as much heat wasted and twice as much microwave radiation!!!
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
are you sure? thats real small.
I don't want to be repetitive and say the same thing that so many have already said. Instead, this is simply a "confirmation" that yes, AMD did announce works of an Athlon clocked at 1GHz without supercooling to get fabricated this year. It's very old news. I do like seeing Intel trying to say they are better by adding 100MHz to that number, when in fact an Athlon 1GHz will perform just as well or better than a 1.1GHz Intel (P3, whatever, etc.) CPU.
The scariest thing about this is that I am still using 366MHz, and my cousin still has a Pentium 100!!! Sheesh, I'm just hoping for maybe 550MHz in my near future! People out there are raving about 1GHz, this is getting too silly. I would like to go back and say that our CPUs are all fast enough now, and the market should start concentrating on all of the other things slowing us down (hard disks, busses, memory, etc.)
I'm done.
yeah
the 1ghz athlon was announced a month ago. Just not the info about the new fab plant.
Ooops, Yeah I mixed them up, but Intel..AMD..same point applies to both of them anyway, but sorry for the confusion.
Reminds me of the BBS quote wars (remember?)
> this
> > is
> > > getting
> > > > out
> > > > > of
> > > > > > hand
> > > > > > > !
:-)
--
Well, personally, I'd like a 2GHz chip, just to get Word fired up in a reasonable amount of time.
What's a reasonalble amount of time?
Fast enough so that by the time it comes up, I can still remember why I started it.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Who is it that falls for these "announcements." Of course AMD is working on a 1GHz chip, that's what chip manufacturers do.
I can understand, a little anyway, why it makes sense for software manufacturers to promote vapor ware. After all, they are trying to keep you from buying into their competitors completely incompatible system. AMD and Intel, on the other hand are making products that are essentially drop in replacements for each other.
Does the average consumer care where his wheat was grown? Heck no. Soon they won't care who made their processor either. It will all be about speed and price.
I'd like to write some cool TV ad's for AMD. maybe some lame ass dudes in bunny suits driving some weird, silly auto being blown by some hot sports car with a guy looking back at the bunny suits, shrugs and thinks "Freaks..." Seriously, I'd be REALLY nice to see arrogant Intel put in their place for once. AMD has worked hard and deserves the recognition from both the media, HW manufacturers (HELLO, ASUS??) and ultimately, the consumers. GO AMD!
I'll be using this 166MHz CPU until I die... damn I need a job. GOD DAMN RICH WHORES!
(grr I'm mad, and I know this will be moderated down, so I posted AC hahaha)
Forem :)
http://www.bullnet.com
Everyone already knew this. It's been known that
the Athlon scales *VERY* beautifully, and that once the Dresden Fab30 comes online, they'll easily ramp up to 1Ghz.. it's why Intel is scrambling. Kryotech has been saying they'll sell thier SuperG 1Ghz (cooled) Athlon by december, and Fab30 is due to be online by the first week in 2000. So where's the news?
Now, alls AMD needs to do is make a better CHIPSET (or VIA, whichever comes first), one that supports SMP and more than 512k cache. I'm a supercomputer/scientific researcher. And i write tight code no matter how fast the processor goes.
What do I see in my future? Clusters of Athlons and Alpha's for now, and multi-threaded hardware beyond that. Funny, unless EPIC really surprises me, Intel is nowhere in my future... hmmm..
--ps, i still think AMD should buy the Alpha and it's designers.
PianoMan8
- --
"I Hate Quotes" -- Samuel L. Clemens
Their...their...their!!! and carRot! THERE!! Damn, I wish geeks would figure out how to spell! loose != lose choose != chose their != there fair != fare damn != dam My apologies to those who did not grow up in the most illiterate industrialized nation on the planet.
I'm always a little wary of this sort of stuff. Faster processors *do not* always mean greater productivity or even speed. Coders will become even more slack as a result of this, Im afraid.
:)
There is really something to be said for developing on a slow machine and spending a fair amount of time *optimising*... I hope the Linux kernal hackers dont get caught up in this and start bloating the kernal (ack!).
Anyone who has seen recent (1998-1999) Commodore 64 demo will know what I'm saying. You wouldn't believe what they do with a 1Mhz processor these days, and its all due to *optimising*...
Now, running well optimised code on a 1Ghz processor, well, thats something different
Simon
The real linux_penguin has Slashdot ID 101961. Anyone else is an impostor. Including Bruce Perens.
Okay, I found the above post mildy amusing, and as such I feel it should have gotten a rating of +1, funny. I can understand that some people have different opinions.
:)
But who the fuck decided on "Interesting"? I'd choose "Troll" over "Interesting" for that article.
Moderate me through the floor if you see fit
"Binaries may die but source code lives forever"
-- Unknown
SkyHawk
Andrew Fremantle
Has anyone noticed that when you use programs that let you create programs or web pages from templates such as front page (shudder) the code created is mainly filled with useless babble. Because computers are becoming bigger and faster Software can be written really sloppy and people don't notice because the machines are now fast enough so it dosn't make much difference. It would be interseting to see how much programming code has deteriated since the days when people had to hack away at pragrams at MIT in the 60's.
That's because it's probably actually going to be 666.6666_, which rounds up to 667. Just like a 99.99999_ MHz chip (33.333_MHz bus tripled), was really sold as a 100MHz.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
class CPUs { // In Mhz
$popularity;
$speed;
function CPUs($speed) {
$this->speed = $speed;
$this->popularity = 1000;
}
}
$intel = true;
$pentium = new CPUs("1100");
$amd = true;
$athlon = new CPUs("1000");
for( ; $intel && $intel->popularity != 0; $athlon->popularity++, $pentium->popularity--) {
$athlon->speed += 100;
}
$intel = false;
return ($winner = "amd");
-- Get your free Mini Mac http://www.FreeMiniMacs.com/?r=14209873
Oh please, they were all ripped off the old WWiV source in the beginning anyway, so why not just stick with it. ;)
:-)
True, but then again there were a lot of WWIV spinoffs. Telegard 2.7i... wow the memories.
... then Renegade ripped off Telegard, and all that good stuff.. God I miss those days!
Andrew
(just fitting the requirement that something be in the comment box)
Athlon's are FAR from being in short supply, atleast here in Canada suppliers have THOUSANDS of them, motherboards for them are in short supply.
Noway - Forem predated WWIV.
Gotta love hitting break - dropping to the CLI, modifying code and variables and typing...
resume
hehehe
http://www.bullnet.com
Do I really need this? Well, AoE II really lags down at times on my 64MB P2-266. And I wont even go into the performance of 3d games like Descent3, Unreal Tourney, etc... So I'd say that I'd really like one! (or at least more ram, too bad its so f****** expensive!)
-JeremyH
Kinda off topic, but does anyone have any info about the Asus Athlon motherboard that was supposed to, according to asus, be released in September?
I have also heard from informed sources that they have had *very* good results with the preliminary Athlon batches from the Dresden fab. One of the later reports claimed that AMD engineers had sucessfully run multiple CPUs in the 900Mhz range with nothing more than large heatsink and fan cooling units from "rough" pre-production wafers.
;)
These comments are about a month and a half old and I've heard no more specifics. If this is an indication of production quantity yield, then I think AMD will finally get some of the rewards they have worked for so long and hard.
p.s. For the folks that whine that people don't really need a 1Ghz cpu, I still have a fully functional 486-33 with 4megs ram and a 200meg HD that was quite fast when it was new. I'll trade it to you for that P-III 500 that is way too fast for your applications. Then you can run your apps at a more relaxed pace. Watch the apps grow in size and complexity for a couple of cpu generations and you won't be confused about the need or desire for faster systems...
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
You're right to some extent. About as right as this guy a little bit farther down the stream which contribution has "Race to the GHz, chasing the wrong carrot" for its title. Obviously the youngest programmers being educated using fast processors will not necessarilly be sensitive to algorithms's complexity, at least not experimentally. That's for the human impact of such high core frequencies BUT the performance of a computer is something more complex and maybe some more thought (and more money) should be dedicated to the design of faster memory busses and memory chips.
What's the point of running at 1GHz if an L2 cache miss stalls you for (wild guess) 20 cycles? Assuming that a program running on a 1GHz CPU is reading from memory sequentially word by word (32 bits words) and causes an L2 miss every four accesses with the latency stated above, what would be the actual number of loads executed per second?
1000E6*(4/23)=173E6. We may be better off doing some data prefetching to minimize the cost of a cache miss...
Going on means going far, going far means returning. Tao te Ching
I didn't mean failure in the sense that nobody was buying it, but the Athlon was talked about as if it was going to be a major competitor to the Pentium III. The Athlon failed to even come close to meeting this goal, that is what I meant by failure. The Athlon will certainly be around for a while, and people will continue to buy them -- I did not mean to imply anything to the contrary.
Read this and THIS and I'm sure you'll look at it a bit differently.
"Last words are for fools who haven't said enough." - Karl Marx
Overclocking an Athlon involves soldering the chip. No. Just... no. Tempting, but no way am I taking a soldering gun to one!
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
He was quoting the ZD article which explains that a micron is 1,000th of a meter.
Here's ZDnet: A micron is a 1,000th of a meter.
Here's The Musician: Last I checked we called that a millimeter.
See the thread now?
--
Infuriate left and right
...And just when I was getting hopeful to get some day a 666MHz 'InHell' chip, they're entering the next decade! Darnit, gotta make some overclocking on my Pentagram motherboard >;E
//SaVa
Which failure of the Athlon ??? Just have a look at SpecINT results. Athlon is competitive with the Alpha Mhz for Mhz, and is near the top. In fact the Athlon could be currently the second fastest microprocessor that ever existed on planet Earth (the first being the Alpha). Of course for floating point, the Athlon is well behind the Alpha, but the main point is that the gap is closing between RISC systems and IA32: comparing the 49 SPECfp for the latest Alpha to the 13 SPECfp for the PIII-550, one might choose to go for the Alpha ; but compared to the 22 SPECfp of the Athlon-650, one could seriously hesitate.
(not to get too OTP) Yes, since processors get faster, coders dont need to optimize as much. But still, you fail to see the full potential of 1GHz. Not only will it be good for games (especially non-GPU's), but good for servers, slow algorithms (namely compression), and the like. Who cares about optimization anyhow??? With faster CPU's comes sloppier code, but that means that the programmers dont work as much, therefore (somewhat) lowering the prices/increasing their pay/hour.
There arn't many fabs that can manufacture at .18um using copper interconnects. IBM is one of the few, and their fabs are tied up making PPC chips for motorolla.
The second reason is capacity. AMD's austin fab is a pretty decent sized plant, but it can't make chips fast enough. They want more capacity, so they made a plan that can fullfill that...
A third good reason is that they don't depend on third parties to make the chips. It'd really suck if, say, intel bought out the fab that was making AMD's chips for them...:)
I need this. Some applications just aren't fast enough on a 300 mhz processor. I have a recording studio where we record to a PC hard drive. Noise reduction on a 350 mhz machine takes about 15-20 minutes per track. On a 1 Ghz machine, this would only take 5 minutes or so. Big difference. Could turn a 2 hour mixdown into about half an hour.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
It's really a 286 Killer,Killer,Killer,Killer,Killer,Killer,Killer,K iller,Killer,Killer,Killer,Killer,Killer ,Killer.
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
Will the intel chip be SMP? Does anyone know of any SMP Athlon boards. In particular I want 4 wayers
Not necessaerily, although i do take my hat of to the Developers of the ARM.. quite a nice CPU from what I've read but i've never had the chance to work with it.
;)
What I was talking about was multi-threaded hardware such as Tera (www.tera.com) is working
on. Very good Integer performance, almost linearly scalable. As for floating point i dont know that much. But it's probably whats going to be the "next big thing" in supercomputers that will filter it's way down to the micros...
PianoMan -- Still waiting to invent the Vector Co-Processor.
- --
"I Hate Quotes" -- Samuel L. Clemens
The radiation produced by consumer devices like computers and cellular phones is so low compared to natural and other man made sources, you shouldn't even consider it. In fact, you get much, much, much more radiation (albeit at lower frequencies) from your monitor than your CPU. Also, I'm not totally sure but I think the FCC has strict requirements for radiation/interference from class C devices even in the microwave bands.
That depends on the frequency of the radiation. The eye is particularly sensitive to very short wavelength radiation (UV and above), and not so sensitive to microwave frequencies. Basically, the only effect microwave radiation has on any human tissues is heating. And at microwave frequencies you need extremely high field intensities (like in a high power waveguide or resonant cavity) to produce any measurable heating. It's funny you mentioned this. I just read in the Oct issue of Scientific American that a biochemist from Lawrence Berkeley NL named Robert Liburdy intentionally faked the results he published in a landmark paper in 1992. His paper was one of the first (or the first) scientific studies of the effects of low level (ie. not enough to produce heating) electromagnetic fields on cells. It turns out he falsified his findings to show that the low level radiation affected his cell cultures. Other scientists trying to pinpoint cellular effects of low level radiation have found nothing. So despite the best efforts of many scientists to find justification for their paranoia, nobody has found any link between low level radiation and any form of cancer.Now, it is obvious that radiation at extremely high field intensities (e.g. in a microwave oven or standing in front of a big radar) as well as very high frequencies (X, Gamma, cosmic rays) can cause cell damage. However, there is no reason to believe that low level radiation from everyday products like computers, TVs, cellular phones, etc. will do you any harm. I know lots of colleagues (and some of their mentors) who have spent practically their entire careers in radar/antenna test chambers absorbing low level microwave radiation with no ill effects.
I'm staying with my trusty ol' P200, at least until Transmeta out-does AMD and Intel (well, maybe not, but we can still pretend). Can I get on a waiting list for the very first Transmeta Linium (let's make up our own names!) CPUs yet?
sup
I've got this dual Celeron 550 compressing MJPA video with both processors maxing out the local buss. With 1100 MIPS they'll do only 15 frames/sec of 640x480. The problem isn't the MIPS but this 100Mhz buss. We need at least a 300Mhz bus before CPUs become useful. Anyone else benchmarking video capture on their Athlons?
This chip has been out for a couple of months,
and is way beyond anything Intel has to offer.
It is seriously better than the PIII in all
respects. You're saying that you DON'T mean
failure in the sense that nobody is buying them.
Then WHAT are you trying to say?
There are three things Amd tried with the Athlon:
1. Creating a chip that would better the latest
intel offering.
-Check! Done... better in both floating point and
integer operations.
2. Creating a chip whose design would have a lot
of headroom for future revisions and speed.
-Check! Done... the design can supposedly go far
over 2 GHZ. And is supposedly not that difficult
to move over to 64bit.
3. Creating a chip that sells far better than
intels (to make AMD profitable).
-This one has a bit to go.. The processor _IS_
better, but Intel has better yield, and motherboardmanufacturers enough.
FigWig makes a good point about microwave radiation. How could anyone see his post as flamebait?? As the clock frequency increases, even the very short traces on a circuit board can be very efficient antennas. A quarter wave antenna at 33 Mhz is just under 2.5 metres in length. But at 1000 Mhz a quarter wave antenna is only about 7.5 centimetres in length--in the ballpark for cirucit board traces. I don't think I'd want to run one of these without the case cover screwed down tightly. Even then, consumer grade computer cases are not that good at sheilding EMI at frequencies of 1000 Mhz. Circuit board designers are going to have to work very hard to minimize radiation at the source. Microwave radiation is a health hazard. The most common effect of long term low-level exposure is damage to the cornea of the eye. And some studies have linked long term exposure to certain cancers--although the debate seems to be open.
If ZDNet were out by a factor of a 1000 on the die technology, maybe they were also out on the speed. Maybe AMD will be producing terahertz chips, or more likely only a 1MHz chip :(
no time, no sig
I love the smell of vapour in the morning. Is this the "fog of battle" people talk about? Seems fitting after a vapourwar. Probably a good chance of rain afterwards too. "HA! I disperse olfactory vapour in your general direction!" Ok, time for bed now.
This whole thing is getting out of hand.
I liked that comment i saw yesterday, it went
something like this:
"Nice, but do i need to install it in my freezer?"
...Athlon :-)))
Then came the...
...BendOverIntelon ?
Oh please, they were all ripped off the old WWiV source in the beginning anyway, so why not just stick with it. ;)
:)
Sides, they're still around, which is more then I can say for alot of the cloners.
You have opened a 286-er or 386-er. Up to somewhere around 93 AMD was manufacturing under licence. After that it modified the 286 core and the 386 core to improve performance (by about 5-10% over intel) and boosted the frequencies compared to Intel. Then the war began as we know it.
;-)
Actually AMD has so far bested Intel sooner or later on every compatible category, the problem being that by that time Intel was delivering the "new bigger and greater". Though quite often it was worse than the AMD top of the line for the old design. Compare a P5 at 60 with an AMD X5 at 166 for example
Every time intel actually took on a war with AMD for a compatible product it lost. Examples are numerous: 386 vs am386, 486 vs Enahcedam486 and X5, P5 vs K5-PR series, MMX vs K6, P6 (PPro, PII, PIII) vs k6-2/K6-3. So I guess it will NOT win this time. It will have to deploy the new latest and greatest (namely IA64) in order to win. And then the cycle will start a new. The interesting part being that now the timing GAP between them is much much shorter.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Even The Register who first reported the 1.1GHz Willamette noted it is a rumour, and likely to be untrue. Besides, The Register had the 1GHz Athlon story before the Willamette, so there is no way it would have been sparked by the Willamette "announcement".
Even if the Willamette thing was true, I'm not sure it would be good idea. Shipping a CPU nine months early probably means that it has not been tested very througly, and will therefore contain a lot bugs. No CPU is 100% bug free, but insufficient testing could mean that even some really bad bugs(by bad i mean something like the F00F bug) might slip trough.
Sun's SPARC provides nice evidence of this; they are selling lots of systems for high end database and web applications not because the SPARC architecture is vastly superior to its competitors, but because the rest of the system is fast.
On a PC, the real "critical component" is the motherboard, as that tends to be a determinant of such things as:
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Athlon, the Immortal
-k
I love it when something runs great that far below the official spec (what is it now? 200Mhz PII/64MB RAM?).
well you can still use cryo stuff to speed up your system
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
A look at the CPU info center charts here show that the Alpha is still almost twice as fast as the Pentium III and Athlon at SPEC INT. Benchmarks mean very little but its such a shame this wonderful processor isn't getting the headlines, machine architecture and recognition it deserves.
The original proponents of Capitalism did not envision _competition_ as some kind of almighty driving force. This did not happen until sometime before the anti-trust laws, when the government and media began a campaign to undermine the roots of capitalism. With acceptance of competition as primary, the government has been free to persecute business in an arbitrary fashion, if they fail to "compete" properly. Somehow the government hasn gained the wholehearted support of the American people on this fallacious belief. Even CEO's buy into it. Now we view "anti-competitive" countries as some kind of evil that must be stamped out. BUt I assure you, our founding fathers had no such vision. If their vision had been preserved, we would now live in a much less competitive, much happier, much richer, world. It's not about competition, its about thinking and acting to the best of your ability, regardless of others. Competition is for the man who can't stand on his own two feet.
What do I see in my future? Clusters of Athlons and Alpha's for now, and multi-threaded hardware beyond that. Funny, unless EPIC really surprises me, Intel is nowhere in my future...
Not so fast there - put 2 + 2 together. Multi-threaded hardware, right? That means SMP on a chip, right? That means: transistors/mip matters. Well, as far as I know, the crown for best transistors/mip rating in the business goes to ARM - guess what Intel is heavily involved in?
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
And really, what does the average user need more than 640k of ram for?
.^
^.
the trend for the last couple years has been a return to large, gas guzzing SUVs. The air in Los Angeles was the cleanest in 50 years, but thanks in large part to massive sales of SUVs over the last couple years, this year will have worse air.
the ford expedition weights over 3 tons and get TWELVE miles per gallon.
blech.
yes, as anyone who's read tomshardware.com's writeup has noticed, you can overclock an athlon by desoldering some surface mount resistors and changing their relative locations. HOWEVER, I can' think of any way a motherboard could get around the clock and multiplier settings of the resistors on the chip (and I should know, I've designed a processor before). anyone who tells you there is a motherboard that can do this is wrong. anyway, the arrangement is similar to intel's multiplier-locked chips (sy033 et al), but you can still change it with some effort. for the same reason you can't overclock those chips using _whatever_ motherboard, you can't oc an athlon with motherboard tricks.
All the advertising for computers that I've seen focuses on the idea of getting more information faster, learning more, etc.
/real/ thing they have: SPEED. Show the Bunny People (tm) getting run over by a scantily clad female in a fast car or something.
Ads for any other kind of product all appeal to masculinity by featuring seductive females, fast cars, and loud music.
Intel ads have a little people in neon suits dancing around like idiots with a little jingle at the end. I don't know how the hell this has been one of the most successful ad campaigns in recent history.
Intel claims the P3 makes "the internet go faster," which is nothing short of a blatant lie. AMD needs to flaunt the one
While Intel advertises the speed of the internet (which looks more like CAD in their commercials), AMD should be advertising the amazing performance with shots of violent Q3 timedemo's and gorgeous women.
Nix absolutably seriousness.
I don't have my stat book here, but the Expedition does *not* weigh >3 tons. Even the Lincoln (sp?) rolling apartment block is only about 2-2.5 tons.
Does have shitty millege, though.
-jcl (no password on this machine)
can anyone say "quake skins"? add a flight recorder and whamo! instant ads and loads of fun.
Note that i would LOVE a 1GHz computer (and plan to buy around an 800MHz Athlon after Christmas to upgrade my p2-233) but in reality i don't need the power (i *want* it, but try explaining why i need it to someone who doesnt use a computer regularily, and thinks doom is the best PC game out there)
OK, let me give you a different example to prove linux_penguin's point. I work with a group of very good software engineers, they all came from systems engineering - so they are all low level bit twiddlers by mentality; but they also all came from an 100% OO based system - so they truely know when to use an object and when not to. In the good old days they all wrote in C/C++ were they all produced really good code, with great performance.
Part of this group were early adopters of this thing called Java (back in the 1.0 days) the other part of the group didn't move over to Java untill very recently and started right out on IBM's JDK. The new guys are still good developers (they didn't rust while still working in C/C++) but they have no problems at all coding something like:
String foo;
...
if (foo.equals("")) {
...
while the original java people become violently ill at even seeing that code and replace it with:
String foo;
...
if (foo.length == 0) {
...
There really isn't much difference, and from a purely OO standpoint the first is better. But those who remember the pain of running under 1.0 without a JIT won't waste even that small amount of overhead.
When it comes to java, if you want a fast product at the end of the release cycle: FORCE the developers to run in interpreted mode ONLY. (let test, performance and marketing groups use the JIT - just not the developers.)
It has been observed that exponential-time algorithms (requiring, say 2^n steps on input of size n) can be executed in linear time by the following procedure:
Wait 1.5*n years, while the speed of computers increases by 2^n. Execute the algorithm in unit time.
With all the focus on these Gigahertz chips, does that mean that those of us with small budgets will finally be able to afford the 600Mhz chips due to drastic price reductions?
What we *really* need is to dump the whole x86 volcano-architecture, and go with the fastest chips we can possibly make..
:)
:-)
If everybody were already running open source on portable operating systems, all you'd need to start using a better chip is a new compiler. (Take linux.. it runs on all sorts of wacky equipment.. even those mac thingies
Using open source now is protecting your *future* investments and choice.
(heehee, tell that one to your boss
I think ZDNet just reported it *after* reporting the Intel announcement to give the impression that it was a defensive reaction by AMD.
I read about 1+Ghz silicon from AMD first from a Register article first on the 15th.
So who is countering who here?
--bill "Why is it, that all the fools play for the other team, and there are more of them?"
Why is this off topic?
>What about all the people who need something low power? It will drive
>prices down for other chips, but who needs a 1ghz cpu for home?
If you want something low power, and don't mind switching architecture, you can always try a PowerPC G3/G4. Runs nice and cool. It'll be a while before they reach 1 GHz though.
Of course, clock speed isn't everything.
The computer hardware industry is always striving to supply the users with BBF (Bigger, Better, Faster) hardware. Memory speeds increase, hard disk seek times get lower, 3D refresh rates get higher and network cards are now capable of spewing out more data a second than most people generate in a week!
The BBF factor is a driving force that has been instigated by the consummer. Okay so companies like AMD and Intel don't spend billions of dollars on R&D becuase they are just nice people - they do have a business to run!
I would love to see this sort of computing power available for use within my company but I know that I will have more spare clock cycles than I know what to do with!
I think that the only reason that will stop me from purchasing one of these chips when they come to market will be the limitations on usage caused by the 100Mhz internal bus. Give me a bus that will run at +500Mhz with one of these chips and you've sold them to me. But then I'll want faster hard drive access times and a faster graphics accerator to rendor my images and buy the time I have all these upgrades perfectly tuned and installed I'll do something stupid and install an OS and a few apps an test some beta code and before you know it all the power of my wonderful machine has been wasted due to poor code.
In short what I think I am saying is that the hardware developers should look to work much closer with software vendors in order to ensure that the latest chip has OS and Apps ready optimised in order to maximise on the efforts of both the hardware and software vendors.
BBF - The driving force behind every industry!
As it stands, disk is the bottleneck in almost any real-world application.
It doesn't involve soldering if you have the correct motherboad. Doesn't the Asus K7M (for example) allow overclocking in the BIOS and with some motherboard dip switches?
Granted I can't seem to buy them here, but I did read a review of it somewhere.
Chris, who forgot his ID and password.
We don't need them (at least not anytime soon) but Intel does. In the sense that, in order to apease thier shareholders, they have to be on the leading edge of the CPU market. If they don't come out with one then the next guy will, Intel will be 'behind the ball' and that doesn't help thier stock value.
Having already complained about the problems this kind of race can engender (see the Athlon Killer link above), it is nice to see the market place working to please it's customers, and offer them the 'best', rather than using the M$ dictatorship commerce model. Ofcourse, the question is, are they giving us the best?
In a lot of ways, it is like the time when Japanese cars quickly replaced those produced by complacent American car companies. Maybe now, the processor market will see a jump in quality and a dip in price.
Then again, its just as likely that we will just see a rise in quality along with a corresponding rise in price. But hey, I guess supply and DEMAND is part of capitalism too.
14 digits of Pi are all we need.
I'm not surprised that AMD had a gig chip in the pipes, but I am surprised that they were on the ball enough to get the announcement out so fast. Their press people must have been jumping to get this out before the markets open today. I can't wait to see how much the price drops on the already existing processors because of this. Still not believing that the Intel chip will come to fruition. Let's just see which one is vapourware.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
Oh man, I just can't wait until someone tries to immerse this thing in a tub of canola oil or something equally silly to see how fast it will go.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Oh no! Here comes another nostalgic thread about BBSes.. sniff sniff..
:(
:)
I miss Telegard hacks
-Greg
or should I say
-NÉßÜ£Æ!-
[CiA/BROkEN]
hehe
--
More megahertz is more polygons, pure and simple. Floating point speed is the key limitation to what we can do in games these days, and limits all aspects -- from doing transforms for polys to nifty effects like lighting.
:)
The real point of offloading generic tasks like geometry and lighting onto the graphics board is to be able to do crazy, highly specific features on the CPU. Games will only get wilder and wilder. Great things are to come!
...
Oh, you wanted to get work done? I can give you a 386 for free that will run LaTeX, lynx, mutt, gcc/g++, gdb, and everything else you need to be productive
Remember that the Copper process AMD is using was designed by Motorola. Motorola though they could roll out the Copper (.16 Micron) G4's but they learned that there are inherent problems with such a new process. The high power requirements (over 2 volts in shipping Macs, a lot for copper processors) tends to indicate that Motorola is having real problems with yields.
:-) Not a G4 :-(
I think it is also important to note that it took IBM about 6 months to move the entire G3 line over to copper, and IBM is considered on of the most advanced fabricators. Also remember that Intel is still about another year away from copper chips. Moving to copper is a STILL a big technological hurdle that AMD hasn't proven they are entirely ready for.
Sure AMD's Athlon will reach 1GHz very soon, the project lead did work on the Alpha after all. I do, however, think the transition to copper will not be as smooth as AMD makes it out to be.
Written on a Mac
Has anyone noticed that AMD stock is not doing much? I mean, with all these announcements and especially with Intel going down you'd think someone would take a chance on AMD. I guess they're worried that AMD won't be able to supply enough product. Just seems silly that a market that'll jump at any company with dot-com in it's name won't back a very strong contender for the consumer desktop CPU market. Well I'm gonna buy some AMD soon...if it tanks it tanks, but it's something I gotta do.
Blar.
Strange how far ZDnet is behind The Register. This news has been out for weeks! Though I suppose they post less unsubstantiated rumors on ZDnet!
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
This goes along with the countless millihertz (mHz) clock-rate computers you see advertised everywhere. Actually, a decent function generator (analog test equipment) goes down to 1 mHz, and a few made by Hewlett-Packard go down to one microhertz. Yes, one million seconds per cycle. Not simple to know whether the output is stuck, or working, at that frequency! Nicholas Bodley // nbodley@tiac.net
Does the world really need 1Ghz processors?
;)
Well, i know *i'd* like one, but in reality, what does the average user need with 1 GHz (atleast at the moment anyway)?
While i am sure game designers are leaping for joy at the excessively fast calculations these processors wil do (and the resulting impact on gaming), we as yet don't *need* that power. Afterall, Some of the best looking games coming out will run nicely on 300Mhz
Obviously certain roles are perfect for these processors.....servers spring to mind....but for the average home user, it really isn't needed (once again, however, i wouldn't complain to owning one
no, cooling a system does NOT make it faster. at cooler temperatures, digital circuits settle into a higher or lower state _faster_, but the CLOCK speed will stay the same unless the temperature of the crystal itself changes (which is usually physically located somewhere else, although not always, and actually decreases as temperature decreases but not by much). no, you can't overclock an athlon with fancy motherboard tricks for the same reason you can't overclock an sy033 with fancy motherboard tricks. the processor won't run at a higher clock speed when the clock is set on the chip itself. in any event, it's not that hard to remove the plastic case, and use desoldering braid or some such to remove the smd resistors, and solder tape to solder them where you wan them. again, I refer you to tomshardware.com's site, which neither of you obviously read, since it has a great writeup on the performance of the athlon and how to overclock it
heh.. and I feel poor :) I'm still sitting here, writing this on my Pentium 166 MMX .. and it has served me VERY well. I couldn't run Unreal if my life depended on it, but it wasn't that great anyway -- all eyecandy. HalfLife runs fantastically, as do most (if not all, minus unreal) other games.. do I need a 1Ghz chip? No.. but when they come out, I assume the prices on P2s and P3s will drop like a rock, so I'm going to wait..
,-----.----...---..--..-....-
' CitizenC
' "Bug? That's Not A Bug, That's A Feature!"
`-----.----...---..--..-....-
Maybe Rob should add radio buttons to "Post Comment" form:?
;)
( )Do we really need faster/better/bigger? Most consumers don't need it!
( )I bet that makes a lot of heat. Hyuk, hyuk!
( )Huh, I bet that would make a kickass Beowulf cluster.
( )This is vaporware!
( )Oh my God I want one of those so badly!
( )This isn't news, I saw this before.
( )[]
Would save a lot of readers a lot of time! And then we could have checkbox in preferences:
[ ]Ignore standard replies.
(I'm only half joking, BTW
Jón
You forgot "it's != its" and "too != to", but the main thing is that there are about a dozen errors of grammar or spelling that are repeated over and over again and corrected over and over again on Slashdot. Some people say they'll speak however they damn well please when you correct them, most take corrections silently and try to correct their speech, and others don't care one way or the other. I've accepted the fact that I'll never make everyone care about proper language. Some people just use language like John Q. Macuser uses computers: as a tool to get a job done without studying it, learning the names of all the parts, and understanding every nuance of its operation. I no longer consider that a sign of stupidity. (Well, I try not to).
I still cringe when I see "it's" in place of "its". I can't help it. My mind involuntarily forks off a "register language error" process and my attention is divided for a moment. It's like noise on the channel and it makes it a harder for me to read the message.
Perhaps a solution could be made with a bit of code. Perfect understanding of natural language texts by a machine is a distant goal, but we don't need to aim that high. If a filter could spot "probable abuses" of a select few words and alert the poster, giving him or her a quick rundown of the proper usage, then the situation would improve drastically.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
In terms of pure clock speed, they probably are giving us the best that they can, but clock speed is not the whole story.
... I'm just using PowerPC as the example I know the best.
The clock speed is the most visible part of the specification of a chip whereas other things like cache size/speed and bus speed are not so obvious to the less technically inclined.
Clock speed being the obvious identifier for marketing, what has happened? There is this race to get the highest number possible before the 'MHz'. Now increasing the clock speed _does_ make the chip faster (all other things being equal), but there's bound to be tradeoffs, and are they doing this at the expense of being able to increase the cache size/speed that might actually make the chip perform better?
For an example of this (admittedly for a different architecture), I was looking at buying a Macintosh or clone a couple of years ago (about the time the clones got killed), and compiled a big list of all the PowerPC models, their CPU, clock speed, bus speed (where I could find it), and cache size/speed, and MacBench scores. I was surprised to find that the cache size/speed was the biggest determinant of MacBench CPU (non floating-point) speed.
Then the G3 machine came out, where the G3 is essentially a 603e with better caching, and a 233 MHz G3 performed comparably with a 350 MHz 604e (which is in many ways a superior chip) simply because the G3 has a fast (for those days) backside L2 cache.
And then of course (still in the PowerPC line) there's things like Altivec, which don't increase the clock speed at all, but in many cases can significantly increase performance.
Oh, and please note that this post is staying out of the minefield of comparing x86 and PowerPC performance/MHz
So while Intel and AMD might be offering you the fastest clock speeds that they can, they might not be selling the 'fastest' chips possible, because it's high MHz and not performance that markets the best.
.
What you people are failing to realize is that AMD is simply "betting the farm" on their Athlon and this new manufactoring plant. If this flops, look for AMD to either go under, or be bought.
Read the info about how AMD is financing this plant, it seems they are unable to afford it as is, and are taking a huge risk.
This article has made me see AMD in a new light, and I now finally see what they are trying to do, and it is very respectable.
The sad thing is that Intel is smart enough to not be too far behind, if behind at all. AMD is in for the fight of its life with their Athlon going against Intel's best.
I am also curious why AMD built their plant way over in eastern Germany. Maybe they can get cheaper educated labor?
EC
EverCode
Excuse me? I sent you this submission _LAST WEEK_
I'll prolly get moderated down, but what gives? between this, & the redundant posting of news stories lately, this place is startin' to goto hell...
Tom
We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately. -- Ben Franklin, July 4th, 1776
Do you know how long it takes to render an 1 hour long 3D animation on this box? it will take _WEEKS_, do you know how long it takes to encode an 1 hour long MPEG-1 system-stream video with this beast? it will take _DAYS_, do you realy think 3D animators and media people enjoy waiting that long to get thier work done? :-) I'm sure most of us serious computer users agree with me on that.
First of all, I have no problem with Dresden opening a new .18 micron fab. Good for them. Yay.
.18 micron?
Why did AMD feel the need to open a brand new factory? Aren't there _already_ fabs that can do
In Taiwan: yes (several)
in the USA: yes- WaferTech, (others??)
Maybe AMD felt the need to start from scratch because their new process really different. Oh well. Anyhow, go AMD! wooh!
The rumour mill is feeding this post, so take it as you will.
.18um and copper interconnects right now). They've been producing samples of K6-2/K6-3's using a .18um process using copper interconnects for the last few months.
.25um process (I find it remarkable that they were able to get to 700 air cooled).
.25um chips; it is VERY reasonable to expect AMD to be able to produce 1ghz chips soon after bringing Dresden online.
AMD has been working on their Germany plant for quite some time (last couple of years). From the moment I've heard of it, it was always AMD's goal to produce chips in huge quantities using state of the art technology (being
Within the last few weeks, rumour had it that they had been producing sample K7's the Dresden plant and sent stuff back to Austin for "verification" (ie: look over each nanometer [or whatever they do] to make sure everything is good).
To me, this article seems to indicate that everything is looking good in the verification process, and they're confident enough to start ramping up to full production (or begin preparations to ramp up).
Word is soon after the 733mhz cuMine process is released AMD will drop prices (which I think they just did actually...) and release a 750 mhz version. This, incidentally, is still on the
Kryotech has systems running at 900mhz using current
My 2c.
I think the word "announced" should be stricken from this post. First: Intel hasn't announced anything -- the register quoted an 'anonymous source', not exactly a press release. Second: AMD hasn't announced anything either, except that they're holding a dedication ceremony at the plant and that they are EXPECTED to make an announcement about the 1ghz Athlon then. Don't exactly get yourself whipped into a frenzy, both of these "scoops" reek of over zealous online journalism.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this announced a few weeks ago. On this very site?
"To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth, and that was Philadelphia." -- Sun Ra
If you build it, they will use it.
In reality I bet a lot of us have Celerons or PII, possibly PIII processors. You non-Intel users don't feel left out, you know what I mean, right? Anyway, I don't really *need* a Celeron, but it sure runs a lot nicer than my P200, ya know?
In short, in order for progress to be made, you have to progress.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
What about all the people who need something low power? It will drive prices down for other chips, but who needs a 1ghz cpu for home?
For all of those saying that it allows programmers to do more, do you know how much sloppy programming will arise? Visual basic will start to rule the land. People will start using bubble sorts not seeing the effects as quickly on large sets, such as n^2's. The uninformed people. People will start programming in ways that won't scale.
Perl is a great solution, but we see have migrated from c to perl and the backlash of running slower cgi's or high memory requiring mod_perl.
And no.. the gigahertz processors will bring about a great thing for the scientific and multimedia world. I recognize that quickly enoguh.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
If Intel, or AMD, can a 1000+ Mhz CPU out the door withen a few months, then why is the merced taking so long?
Soldering is how most people do it now. There is a little device that connects to an Athlon that can set its MHz, but it hasn't been released. A few motherboards are starting to add the ability to overclock the athlons from the BIOS, all will get it one day.
I find it interesting that people would believe a source known to be inaccurate, about a topic that is highly questionable. Especially when no one else is reporting it.
The supporting technology for gigahertz just isn't ready yet. It's going to be a while before motherboards and software can really use it and be worth while to a 'normal' user. However servers are another story.
My source? A 4 way Xeon toaster.
Both of these corrupt Capitalist companies, Intel and AMD are scamming us comrads by making these small increments to their microprocessor in the hopes that the they could scam us to release our hard earned $$ so that we could get a 10% improvement. Who do they think they could brainwash besides those MicroSerfing, Gates worshippers who would gladly hand out $2K for a new box so that the machine boots in 300sec instead of 310sec.
We must resist all temptations by these Capitalist devils into tricking us to upgrade our 6502 and 4040 CPUs. We cannot let them keep buying Islands for their mistresses while sucking our commune dry. We have no desire to have our pong to run at 10,000FPS. We've embraced Linux in part to go back to our roots of using the computer for the sake of using it by getting rid of all the excess crap that just hinders us. We should not fall into these Warlords' trap which would only enslave us into their lifetime upgrade cycle.
We would have to physically slash-dot these evil monster capitalist swine headquarters and release all their propriority secrets that they use to scam us with. Once all that is out, we could implement it and upgrade at anybody's free will. We've lead the revolution in the software field with just the power of the commune, now lets lead the hardware revolution and free the whole connected world.
Code Free, Compute Free, Upgrade Free. Comrads uprise.
ZZZ
Celeron is a perfect example of a company taking there time, optimizing design and fab, and turning out a cooler running/tighter chip(read:over clockers delight). I just get the feeling that the GHz milestone is going to be so tempting that some companies will be rushing them out the door before the work is done.
The last time a company shipped there chips to early, we ended up with a 5 volt 60MHz Pentium that wasn't pin compatible with any other Pentium that could actualy do math. In light of these mis-steps, I hope AMD and Intel have there eye on quality first.
When it comes to new technology, the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Actually a micron is one millionth of a meter, or one thousandth of a millimeter, being a contraction of micrometer, where micro is 1 * 10^-6. (that was one times ten to the minus six).
You are not me, therefore you are not important
All they're saying is that they plan to make a 1GHz chip at some point. Great. I bet they plan to make a 2 GHz chip at some point too. They like to make these announcements to give the impression of "any day now" but they're talking next year, maybe.
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they