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Coppermine vs. Athlon
SaDan writes "I checked out a comparison of the new Intel Coppermine processors and AMD's Athlon chips at Tom's Hardware Guide last night. It's kind of interesting, and I thought others would be curious about how Athlon stacks up against Intel's latest offering. "
it still pushes AMD to improve their design, perhaps to the point that the K7 can also be used in portable devices. i think that the major appeal of intel's newest processors will be in the laptop arena. it would be awesome to have the same power in a laptop as on the desktop with an x86 processor.
i really hate to say it, but it's getting to the point where it can be cheaper to buy a new system than to upgrade an older one (especially with DRAM prices so high.) of course, with the introduction of new processors and technology, older (obsolete?) models become much cheaper, and hey, a better processor is a better processor. competition is good, as long as the competition doesn't force either company out of business. that would be bad.
(Of course, anyone that should be considering these high-end processors should be competent enough to know that performance is only positively correlated with the number of MHz. They don't run lock-step...)
(Of course, there aren't many really-high-powered laptops; there was only ever one Alpha-based laptop, few SPARC-based, and such... I agree with others that availability of faster AMD chips in the K6 series is more important at this time...)
(I half-expect to see a report from VA-Linux Systems some time soon...)
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
The main thing that AMD has gained out of this whole Athlon thing is respect. Real respect. Not just, "Gee, since I'm a very poor geek, I'm going to put an AMD chip in my box."
To illustrate: my college's career fair was just a few days ago. AMD was there. They have been there in the past. In the past, only die-hard computer engineering hardware geeks talked to them. This year, however, as they had Athlon processor periphenalia and even a couple actual processors (none of which they were giving away) there was a line. I'm talking about a long line. Everybody wanted to talk to teh AMD guys. I waited in it for over twenty minutes then decided that since hardware doesn't make me feel an extreme amount of joy inside I would go talk to someone else.
Bright Young Minds (at least, I think that's what we are) are taking notice of AMD and are intensely interested in being hired by them. This seems like a Good Crowd to have on your side when speculating on the future.