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Intel's Anti-Athlon Campaign
levendis wrote to us about Ars Technica, who is currently running a feature piece about Intel's FUD-like attempts to bash down the Athlon. The chip-wars have gotten pretty bloody this time around, with all of the hype behind Coppermine and the Athlon - what do you folks think about all of this?
But, haven't you read? The favorite site for "reliable" sources announced a few hours ago:
"Andy Grove is expected [later today] to reveal a Q4 launch for Willamette at 800MHz, going up to 1100MHz in Q1 '00."
at
http://www.theregister.co.uk/991028-000023.html
Anyhow, Intel's lack of PC manners make me mad as a hatter.
Like elections in the US.
The moderator on this topic just did one of 2 things. 1-it showed censorship, because the question was posed.."what do you think". 2- the moderator knows this opinion to be the truth and is bashing the author. In either case, it doesn't show excessive intellegence or fairness on the part of the moderator. When asked "what do you think?" ALL opinions are on topic. Just a reminder. :)
My dogma ran over your Karma....My Karma's a Greyhound: ugly, but strong. -You may think you know what, but I know who
I don't know, WIndows 2000 is due to be released soon.
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As much as you (and I) may want to "give the finger to Micros~1 and Intel", ultimately the market will usually adopt products that meet the needs of the consumer.
Take the Celeron for example, when the K6-2 came out, I couldn't wait to buy one. 100MHz bus, 3dNow instructions, a super chip at the time. Problem was that it ran hot. Sure you can cool it, but still, it ran hot.
The original Celerons were obviously a huge flop. Consequently, no one bought them and Intel was forced to add the L2 cache. In the mean time, AMD increased its market share at the low end.
A strange thing happened though once the Celeron 300A hit the market: People found out that it was a great chip. It overclocked exceptionally well. It ran relatively cool (unless overclocked). And, perhaps most importantly, it gave users an easy upgrade path all the way to Intel's newer P2 and P3 chips. Consequently, lots of folks (including me) that support AMD (I owned the stock) left AMD for the Celeron. Why? Value. Celeron was just a better value for me.
The author of the original article had to confess that he was writing the article on an overclocked dual-Celeron system. Value.
Don't insist that I buy something to give anyone the finger. I will probably own a K7 at some point, probably when motherboard bus speeds and memory increase to make it a worthwhile upgrade to my overclocked Celeron 366. I certainly recommend the K7 to friends and family since its a better VALUE. Few people will buy it to make a statement.
Dave
but I was right that having a deeper pipeline means it's easier to fab high clock speed parts
:)
Very true. After the first swapping of terms I should've realize you meant pipelined rather than superscalar with regards to the fabbing
The cache certainly helps, and the Athlon will soon have an onboard cache to match.
I heard the q3 tests are better on a Coppermine because i. the Geforce drivers are optimised for Intel ii. (may be related) the q3 tests were using the SIMD instructions rather than 3DNow.
If you look at the rest of the benchmarks the Athlon is clearly a superior chip.
The bottom line for AMD is can it ship Athlon in quantity with reliable motherboards ? If it can then some of the bigger boys may actually consider using it.
Dell, Gateway, Compaq etc aren't frightened by Intel what they are frightened about is not being able to deliver PCs in volume. The one thing that generally wins Intel over to these big players is its reliabilty for shipping CPUs in volume. AMD in the past have been bad at that, but it does look like they are getting serious. They have a superior CPU - it looks a hell of a lot more scalable than the PIII core - and with the new fab coming on line they may just deliver the volume side too.
Right now the Athlon can kick the pIII's ass, but this happens with every x86 generation. AMD puts out n+1 x86, where n is the current intel generation, but intel comes back a few months later with somthing better, the k5 was far better then a 486, but pales to a pentium. a k6 is better then a pentium, but dosn't really hold up to a pII/PIII. the Athlon beats the pants off a p6, but...
But the problem for intel is, AMD is currently at the top of the heap performance wise (even for servers, where intel's cash cow xenon's reside). So for people who care about speed and nothing else Athlon is the only choice. AMD can charge whatever they want on the chip, and for once have a good quarter. Intel on the other hand looses money. Intel isn't worried about dying, but they are worried about loosing money in the iterem..
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
speaking from the persective of someone living in the states: america notorious for rooting for the underdog and believeing that its cause is just and rightious. i know people who no next to nothing about the open source movement who love it when i show them sights like kmfms. and no matter how much fud they here from microsoft, they just think of it as opressive lies. i think the same things can be said with the athlon. the athlon is a great chip (albiet very hot), but still a great chip. people who don't know anything about the athlon are going to get turned off due to intel abbrasive attitude. i think the fud will backfire. at least i hope it does. maybe i'm just way too paraniod, but when i hear a company insult another and say that thier product is what i need to buy, i rarely believe it.
The actual item of interest is what Intel chooses to do about this. Naturally, they can't conceed
:)
defeat without serious economic results (unfortunately, Money seems to drive the market more than
performance).
Money IS the market: it's all about 'shareholder value.' Performance, customers, whatever - they don't care, all they have to do is show a greater profit next quarter than they did in the last.
Intel has billions of dollars cached away, if they were serious about this, and, of course, they weren't under such scrutiny by the feds, they would just give p3's to everyone in their stockings this year.
You gotta think way outside of what we do when you're examining issues like this, and remember, all large corporations are driven by pure evil. That's just the Way It Is.
Again, I hate it when companies do this, but: one, can you blame them and two there's nothing I
know that can be done (if you know something please tell me!).
Uhm.. it's easy: Don't buy intel processors. Hell, don't buy anything. _We_ are the reason this boom economy exists, the more crap they put out there, the more we buy. You want it to stop? Stop it. As soon as those Xeons sit on the shelf and gather dust, the whole economy changes. I'm ready for it; I'm sick of paying a buck fifty for a gallon of gas.
--
blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
Okay - other than the obvious limp dick syndrome of Intel (and they don't know how to be good loosers) I think the real reason they are so scared is because of the impending disaster there corp may have if AMD takes over the x86 market. Intel have a new instruction set on the IA64. They have said the IA64 will only give you (from what I remember) about a 20% gain over your regular intel chip on programs that have been compiled for their x86 intruction set. This is the same sort of boot you got when you dumped your EDO RAM and installed SDRAM (ie not a whole lot). So they will want you to buy the software compiled with the new IA64 compilers - which the speed difference Intel have said will be significant. Now if everyone is happy sticking with the x86 instruction set because they like their AMD gear - guess what - 5 years of research goes out the window!! Only a few units of a CPU nobody but the server market wants, and AMD kills their Goliath. Pity there's no open source CPUs :( Intel should IMHO just chill - work hard and prove they are the best - competition after all is a healthy thing. BTW how many K7 motherboards are available? Anyone wanna make a list and maybe put it on the main slashdot page? Tomshardware had a good review recently, but they named only 3 - surely there's more than that!
A 1 word opinion espousing a vague concept which does not have an immediate relationship with the subject at hand. Is, IMHO, offtopic. Apparently this was the moderator's humble opinion as well.
The Illiminati were refrenced in the artical, next time, read before you post.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Socialist countries? You mean, like England? (Home of the computer, the transputer, the steam engine, the dirt-repelling paint, the jet engine, the jump-jet, the clockwork radio, optic memory, anesthetics, etc, etc)
Fascinating, what all these poor, pathetic socialist countries can come up with, without the "benefit" of rampant capitalism. It makes you almost stop and ask yourself "what, exactly, have all these capitalist countries actually produced?"
I don't want to get into any political debates, but honestly, I don't see much difference between the US and Japan in terms of stolen technologies, "acquired" ideas, and blatant copying. I =DO= see that American corporations have a habit of rewriting history to delete inconvenient originators. I'm sorry, but whilst that's not illegal, I'm not exactly going to keep my mouth shut over it, either.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Wargames [image of Matthew Broderick hacking WOPR]...
And King's (Quest)...
a motherboard in turmoil cried out for a hero.
[Intel person in colored environmental suit whirling sword about] She... is Xeon. A mighty processor forged in the heat of a 5V Pentium...
The power... [imagine Xeon chakram hurled by Intel babe in a leather hooded lab environmental suit, bouncing off of several walls in a flash of sparks... cutting an Imac in half on return bounce]
The passion... [Xeon guts Athlon CPU with aluminum heatsink sword]...
The CPU ID [Xeon looking back at you, raising one eyebrow, like she knows the viewers every move]...
Her courage will change^H^H^Hrge your credit card!
...since a bunch has already been said, but here is something a lot of us might be forgetting - at least in the US market.
Lets look at both the average consumer and the large corporation.
Most households which would buy a computer have bought a computer. My parents finally put a 286, bought in '90, to rest and bought a new computer. They were happy with it, it did everything they wanted and finally stuff started to die and they - finally - bought a new one.
when I was home during breaks and holidays through college, teaching them how to use a computer was one thing, now they are re-learing absolutely everything and I'm 1,000 away working - it is a whole hellova lot harder...
Anyways, what's my point. The average household has purchased a computer by now and they expect to get a bunch of years out of it - not the six months propellor heads (like me) expect to get out of a machine. My parents had their computer for almost nine years. They, like most computer quasi-pseudo-non-literate people see a really fancy TV when they look at a computer. They expect it to last them about 9 years... Yes, now they are on the internet, and yes they now find it really cool, but there is little technology has to offer them in terms of hardware that their Pentium III-450 (or even if they had only a Pentium I-166) would not be able to offer them. They are not writing code, making cad drawings, or playing quake 'til 3AM or their eyes fall out (which ever comes first). They, like most America, has what it needs - something to surf the webwith, something to do their taxes on, and something to play solitare with (since everyone knows you can't use a real deck of cards anymore).
They will not purchase an Anthalon.
From the business side...
Businesses just finished dumping money into Y2K compliance for every single system. In most cases, desktops which posed a possible threat to Y2K compliance were chucked, and computers were upgraded. Businesses spent the capital on absolutely everyhing. Here's a hint - only tech industries need the latest and the greatest machinery, and they probably don't really either.
What I'm saying once again, is that expect not too too many Anthalons to be bought for corporations (or at least not as many as AMD would LIKE to be bought).
What does this really mean? Hardware has fast outgrown itself - dangerously. While I hate marketing -especially intels, intel has recognized this and has worked to establish a desire to still upgrade (don't get on the internet, get into it). At best, people with early pentiums and late 486s will buy it and donate their old ones to good will (oh yeah and avid gamers will chuck theirs too, and try to sell their old crap on ebay - since they have to have the latest and greatest pc).
What I'm talking here is at best trickle down economics for PCs. The ones who loose are the chip manufacturers - hands down.
So, if AMD is banking everyting on the Anthalon, kiss them goodbye. If intel thinks that their going to continue to get a better market share - guess again. If a tech recession is going to happen, this is where it will start.
You say you want a revolution?
Indeed. Say "fsck you" and go buy your Athlon.
It's maybe on par with a Pentium III, and will never, ever bench equivalent to a Xeon, but you can feel all tuFF and kewl knowing you bucked da man.
" Initially rumor had it that Asus would be releasing their K7 board(s) in the US in November but would be using a different company to market them so they didn't "insult" Intel. "
That would be Falcon. Kind of a big name with the gaming set.
The average buyer has no clue about performance and will believe the FUD that is shouted the loudest
Not necessarily. I think the average consumer measures performance. Granted, it's on a purely MHz-rated scale, but they do. They may not know that an Athlon is faster clock for clock than PIII (in fact it's likely they don't know). I don't see the FUD-factor as being all that strong here. Whoever has the most MHz will be seen by most consumers as being the fastest.
Isn't this illegal? I remember in history class something about railroad companies giving certain companies preferential treatment with regard to shipping of goods. They would make the small guys (or the out of favor guys) wait forever to get their stuff transferred, charge them way more than they charged their friend-companies, etc. Sorry I don't remember any more of this, but it must ring a bell with someone.. This is illegal, is it not? You can't charge customer A $500 because he's your friend and you get kickbacks and you have lots of contracts with him and then charge customer B $5000 because your friends are in competition with company B, can you? I mean, come on? This is absurd. NDAs or not, these are unfair business practices and the government should look into it. Customers will suffer because of this.
>>I mean, based on everything I've seen, it's a far superior chip for far less money. C'mon - the Athlon is impressive, no doubt. But it's not "far superior for far less money". At same clock speeds, the Athlon provides a *few* more fps in Quake3. But the P3 is faster in Photoshop. And the price differences aren't that drastic - in some clock speeds, the Athlon is cheaper. In others, the P3 is.
My choice won't be limited. Because I choose Intel when it comes to x86 processors. Then I get to choose one of a half dozen options in my price range.
The biggest mistake I made this year was buying that K6-2 system that now sits unused in the corner of my office. It sucks and I am sorry for buying it.
Sorry, the Alpha is completely irrelevant for 95% of the PC users out there.
Exactly. The word-of-mouth factor here is especially useful because a lot of people who aren't knowledgable about computers have a friend or relative who is, and will ask their advice about a computer purchasing decision. They'll ask who makes the best stuff, and if the advisor is indeed knowledgable they'll tell them the AMD not only offers the fastest products, but offers the best bang-for-your-buck on the high end (and maybe low-end, but they've got competition with the Celeron). So word of mouth can work wonders even if the average consumer doesn't initially know the Athlon is better.
The situation is a little different with corporations, though. But I think that companies have seen that AMD's chips are reliable and less expensive than Intel's. And now, the chips are more powerful than the PIII family, and are being produced in quantity. The only problem I see, which is not a small one, is the fact that many major OEMs aren't building Athlon systems (for example Dell). This might hurt Athlon sales in the corporate market.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/991026-000001.html
I have to return some videotapes...
This is the major problem AMD faces.
>This is exactly what I would expect from MicroSoft, not Intel.
Intel has been getting away with being the ``good cop" of the Wintel alliance for years, but they can be just as sleezy & cut throat as their Redmond ally. The book _Inside_Intel_ documents a number of these practices, which apparently consists of -- but is not limited to -- screw your competition, screw your partners, & screw your employees.
Then again, name me one major high tech company that doesn't practice these kinds of treatment; _Inside_Intel_ is equally harsh on AMD.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
For unexplained reason a coppermine by ALL rights is slower than an athlon 700 vs 733 (athlon vs Coppermine). Then why can the coppermine do q3test on a geforce QUICKER? huh? It had me scratching me head. but then I heard about the intel compiler optimizations and it all made sense. Ahhh. They are playing dirty with hardware makers.. *sighs* Dudes. Athlon I dont know how muchj longer you can do stuff at a loss but get Fab30 up and PLEASE get the 1gig mhz chip out first. I know mhz isnt everything. but in the market and WHO gets there first IT IS. Get it out there SOON. Intel is already playing some nasty tricks. Same way microsoft did netscape. except in a much more quiet and subversive way. jeremy
Marketing is more important than product in many ways. What good is having a better product if no one knows about it or buys it? Combine that with M$ tactics that they are using on AMD and if something doesn't happen the only ones buying Athlons will be the geeks. AMD needs some good marketing...if they can even afford it. All their eggs are on one basket. Athlon fails, AMD fails. You know what happens when AMD fails, complacency. For those who point out the Alphas. They are immaterial because they don't run windows 95/98 and cost too much. That will change only when linux wins on the desktop. Oops wasn't I supposed to say if. :) Paul
All I know is that once upon I time, I purchased an AMD chip/motherboard combo, mainly because of the price (I was a student at the tme.) I had no problems with it either, until Command and Conquer was released.
Well, try as I might, Command and Conquer would not run reliably on my system. If I chose sound, the mouse wouldn't work. If I disabled sound, the mouse would work, but I wouldn't be able to hear if I was being attacked. This was a royal pain in the butt. Anyone who's played Command and Conquer will agree that sound is a somewhat important and/or helpful thing to have in this game.
After many frustrating attempts to get it to work, and several messages to Westwood support, I gave up. A couple weeks later, Westwood added a section in their Command and Conquer FAQ describing my problem, and stated that it was an issue only with those people that owned a system with an AMD CPU.
Now, a lot of you are probably saying "so what, it's just a game". Well, yeah, it is just a game, but my point is it's just one program out of many that "could" have a similar problem. The end result now, is that I have not bought any other CPU since then, aside from one made by Intel.
Note, Intel may have a good reason for using FUD tactics against AMD now, but that still won't make any difference to me. My problems with that one game have done enough damage to my impression of AMD, that it will still take some time before I take the plunge and buy another of their CPUs.
or winchips...mmm...winchippy
Quite so!
I recall seeing an announcement for the K6-IIIp 380 MHz a while back, but never saw much in the way of notebooks, except for a smattering of the "lower end" sumo size and weight variety...
I really was hoping for something nice from AMD in that arena.
Now that Celeron's and PII's are gobbling up the low end desktop away from the K6, the Athlon has but a short window to shine like the star it is before the magical marketing bean 1000 MHz Intel chips eat everyone's lunch. AMD has suffered so many loss making quarters that it's doubtful they can stand many more rounds in the ring with the 800 lb gorilla.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Every day on my way home from work I see this huge billboard. Last month it was American Beauty. Before that, iMac. Right now, it reads:
ATHLON: The fastest CPU in the world.
Between that and all the writeups that are being done, it sounds like publicity to me...
Of course, I haven't watched TV since the Athlon came out so, I don't know, maybe Intel has the edge in TV ads.
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
AMD is planning on releasing the Athlon for notebooks sometime next year.
The Register mentioned it in a piece recently here.
Unfortunately this is very far from the truth. The average buyer has no clue what they are actually buying. They go with what the big brand copanies tell them is good. As long as the big coperations have control over the media the process of facts and well informed people making new trands is always going to be slow.
I've been trying to convince the pointy haired managment in our company to go with ATHLON for months. To them Intel for CPUs is like Rolex for watches they won't look at facts and listen to reson. FUD is God.
There is also another factor. Even though Intel is clearly behind, their chips are still decent. Meaning the difference is not easly noticable by the uninformed masses. Therefore it will take time, time which AMD doesn't really have.
A few years back, at a North Texas PC Users Group meeting, a nice young lady from Intel gave me an "Intel Inside" badge. I treasured it. At the time, my home computers had Harris, AMD, and Texas Instruments CPU's. I still have Intel competitors in most of my equipment. Price rules, other features are minor considerations.
There's really no need to get nationalist here, as far as I can see.
... but where is its creator currently employed? You guessed it ... here in this evil capitalist empire ... (/sarcasm)
... so don't whine about the parts you don't like unless you're prepared to do without the parts you do.
... I think that can only augment discovery and useful invention. But I guess you'd just call that 'stolen technology, acquired ideas, and blatant copying'...
First off, Britain is not really terribly socialist. But that's really neither here nor there. What's really more relevant is your list of inventions, and how you seem to have missed my point.
Yes, the computer, the steam engine, anesthetics, and many other useful inventions have come out of Britain. But that was effectively prehistoric as far as the current pace of technological advance, particularly with regard to microcomputers, which is what we're talking about, right!?!
The computer may have been invented in Britain. But where is all the current activity taking place? In this 'rampant capitalist' country. Where are Intel, AMD, Sun, and for that matter, Cicso, Lucent, and other companies where the current rash of improvements and innovations being made? Smack-dab in the middle of the a capitalist economy!
Of course, you're right, Linux was not created in the US
It is only in a successful capitalist free market like that in the United States where we have this fascinating ecology of technological companies and opportunities, because it is in an environment like this that people have easy access to talent (note the massive influx of technology talent from elsewhere to the US) and capital (look at the sheer amount of venture capital in the markets right now). Most of the interesting stuff that's taking place is taking place here.
That was my point. This ecology of tech companies flourishes because of the freedom of the market. The marketing and such that you appear to disdain so greatly is part of that ecology. So far, it's been a really successful environment
Also, out of curiousity, I guess you're a big fan of intellectual property law, then, eh? I personally feel that people should be free to innovate on other's ideas
By that logic, only Britain should have computers, steam engines, jets, anesthetics, etc., right? They thought of it first!
darkmagus
Well if you think that everything I said is company policy that is quite messed up. I'm still a student and don't even know if I want to work here when it comes time to get a full-time job. First of all when I'm talking about Q3 I don't care what you think is the fastest. That is why I stated that it would be MY choice, because that is what I play. If it were other game like Unreal, I'd get an Athlon. I'm not saying bad about Athlon, it is a great chip. I also don't see where your getting some of the ideas from that second quote in your reply. What I said is the truth. AMD is selling their chips way to cheap. That is why they lose money. Its a bitch to push into a market dominated by one company. And I think the competition is good. People would be unmotivated to get off their ass and make faster stuff. As far as companies milking products for money... That is business. It has always been like that and always will be.
When The original pentium came out I will tell you intel wasn't smart they should have gone risc and dumped that poor hacked implimentation because Intels chips aren't bad but they are a middle ground chip. They do not have the power of Alpha's or Sparcs and lack the versitility and speed of PPC's and Mips. Close in speed but limited in implimetation. Not a bad chip for the user but horrid for pc companies to deal with. Athalons are very fast and good but at a price and they are the future of x86. Intel is responsible for big losses in IBM and Compaq because of changing chip prices and speeds. Intel is costing the consumer and the PC maker and I do not like it
Well, that several thousands $$$ is an investment in a multi-purpose entertainment device.
Umm.. it's just a tv with a nice picture. I thought my PC was a multi-purpose entertainment device. I can play music on it, games, surf the web, watch tv, watch a movie, and even do real work! And it costs less than an HDTV. (although the picture is a few inches smaller)
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
And The Register is known for its accurate information...
lol
the size of the corporate ego is growing exponentially. they will cause their own downfall.
Sorry but you are wrong about this fact : Intel invests 5 times more money than AMD on R&D (right, I forget where I read this info, so don't believe me if you prefer). AMD is a struggling company. That's why "anti-monopolistic" users, like most Slashdot readers, NEED to help them and buy their CPUs.
I will personally buy an Athlon system next time (the "A500" shortcut will even remind me of my old Amiga! =)). I really like fair competition : I'll be proud to say that my computer is an Athlon running Linux.
Always support the outsiders. And the world will be a far better place to live in.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to build my own K7 based system. I want to support AMD to keep competition on Intel and I have been waiting months to shell out the money for an K7 based system. I keep waiting because of all of the talk about motherboard problems. Or is just this FUD?
I'm going to have to buy a prebuilt system. I want it to be a K7. The problem is that the better known companies like Compaq and Gateway 2000 have dumped AMD products for Intel (correct me if I'm mistaken). Can anyone suggest a reliable manufacturer of prebuilt K7 systems?
Thanks.
I mean, based on everything I've seen, it's a far superior chip for far less money.
But they've got a lot of cash to spread FUD with, so I'm sure they'll try. In some ways this can backfire, in that people wonder WHY they are so worried about Athlon - and then check it out.
Will in Seattle
Maybe I'm mistaken, but isn't AMD going to use Slot B on their SMP mobo's? Seems like I've heard of chipsets being designed to handle both K7 and Alpha.
However, it's cheaper to throw mud at your opponent and try to grab their sales. A price-war helps with this, too.
It's classic economics. Short-term gains look better than long-term progress.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They can't make their CPU's compatible with the standards that Intel uses for SMP, so they follow a standard that isn't owned by one company. The PowerPC CPU's use the same standard.
1 word: illuminati.
Last time I spent real money on hardware, I did that exact thing: I bought a box with an AMD processor. Unfortunately for AMD, I am nowhere near starved for cycles yet so I have no reason to buy an Athlon anytime soon.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
tomshardware.com has an editorial on the same thing...
http://www.tomshardware.com/blurb/index.html
I haven't read the Ars Technica article yet, but the tomshardware.com focuses on the idea that intel is strong-amring the tiawan board makers into not making boards for the athlon, lest intel withdraw their support for the company. Worth the read.
"The chipset (EV6) is the same. However, the slot for an Athlon is Slot A. The 21264 Alphas use Slot B."
I'm probably going to be moderated down for repetition, but isn't a Slot B Athlon in the works for SMP machines?
They prove themselves to be in no way better than Microsoft with mob like tactics. (Hmm, you want to make motherboards for the Athlon? YOu have a nice business, would me a shame if something would happen to it).
Not if Intel kills AMD. THen our choices will again be limited.
Of course since the K6 cpus totally blow at RC5 even this score is a huge jump for AMD.
Buhahaha! MS overvalued? They make billions in cash profits every quarter. If you want to look at vastly overinflated stock look at Redhat and Amazon, neither has much of anything in physical assets and neither has ever turned a profit.
Well the chip market is expected to grow 15% this year. That is certainly less than previous growth rates, so I am sure they are starting to feel the need to be stealing some market share back.
I am of the opinion that Intel somewhat gave AMD a nice market share in the low-end/low-profit business last year just to keep the regulators of their back. They are pretty shrewd. Plus, when they started taking heat, they simply settled out of court instead of losing face like Microsoft in a drawn out court battle.
Well asus may be scared but FIC isn't. I really wanted a k7 when they came out, but it was impossible to find a MB for it here. I was finally able find people selling the FIC SD-11 for about $150. Let's just say it's very nice. Check out http://www.cpureview.com/rev_k7-linux1_a.html . 1.44Mkey/sec @ rc5 and 37 seconds @ the povray test! BTW the povray test was 10 seconds faster than windows on the same machine :)
-- Segmentaion Fault (core dumped)
But it's well worth reading yesterday's opinion piece Athlon no threat to Intel World dominance, and today's follow-up story to get one's feet back on the ground.
Intel's market share is overwhelming. Albeit sadly, that isn't going to change any time soon. (With or without the "Itanic" :g )
Intel already has a hard time fighting AMD.
1.Coppermine is slightly faster in integer due
to full-speed L2 cache, but *much* slower in
FPU at same MHz level. Think games.
2.AMD's CPUs are cheaper, and available, somewhat.
3.Mobos for AMD chips are there, Cumine boards
are very very rare so far (time advantage again
for AMD). What's more, bad press about i820's
bugs will stay in people's minds.
4.AMD has Dresden running in the calibration
stage, it has been announced that starting
from Q2/2000 this Fab30 will be pushing 900+
MHz 0.18 copper Athlons into the channel.
I hear people talking they're waiting for those
new chips, especially since AGP 4x/UDMA100 and
VCDRAM capable chipsets and mobos will be available by then.
Either Intel lowers prices for Coppermine soon
and fast (well once they're actually available),
or they are in for a Rohrkrepierer.
Well, to answer this honestly, the Athlon requires much more voltage than a coppermine. It also produces much more heat. This is simply unacceptable in a notebook. AMD is more worried with stealing Intel's market in the high-end business machine/workstation, game box, and low-end server than worrying about laptops at the moment.
wolf31o2 Developer, Gentoo Linux Games Team
I don't like AMD, but because they out-and-out stole their chip designs right up to the Athlon. I'm never one to knowingly give a thief my money so I didn't buy AMD. Along the way I've seen many flakey AMD machines, right up thru their K6 series. BUT...
That was then this is now. Don't hold a grudge because your AMD chip back in '95 didn't work right. It was a great argument against AMD then, but it just sounds bitter now.
If I ever get to play with an Athlon and can confirm these amazing benchmarks firsthand and can see it run stably; I'm there. This is a new chip created honestly with ingenuity not thinnly vailed theft.
To sum up my rambling, the Athlon marks a new era for AMD. Give 'em anohter chance, I'm going to.
One thing Intel is not is running scared. They have a cash cow of a business, and they are diversifying to find more ways to make money (anybody notice the way they are buying up networking equipment companies?). They have a ton of cash, almost no debt, and a ton of market share. They can afford to stumble every now and then (the Pentium floating point bug comes to mind).
What I don't get is all the INTEL SUCKS rhetoric flying around. Intel got to the top by running a smart business and making very good processors. Instead of bashing Intel for no longer being #1, why not be happy about the fact that they've got some serious competition, which will maybe drive R&D a little harder, and drive down processor prices from both companies?
Sorry if this has been said in the past, but I think this Might be and Interesting point.
/., Toms, sharky etc) to purchase their product. I fell that AMD is just going to Sit back and wait for Intel to Shoot themselves in the foot, and then take over a fiar share of the market.
... or is it... ;)] And now, because of this, the Linux community has a VERY high respect, and they are finaly getting the respect/marketshare they deserve. And this all was done out of respect... not because of a Huge ad campaign, or some juiced articles on MSNBC..
The way that Intel and AMD are fighting this out is alot like the way Micrsoft is fighting the Linux community. What Intel is doiong is using their reputation as a well known chip maker to try to push out a product that in some cases (If not many) is far Superier than their own Chip. However AMD is not really fighting. They are Relying on people that 'Care/Know' (ie. people that read
People Run Microsoft products not because they have to, But because they don't know any better. And truely, people that Run Linux (mostly)Don't do it because they hate Microsoft/Bill Gates/Etc, but because they researched and know it is a better product and more reliable.. [Please don't bust my chops for that statemeant.. I know it is opinion...
What I'm trying to get at here, is that, AMD is playing it cool.. And I feel that because of this, they know they have a Damn good product... And becuase of the History of they way the Computer market works, I think Intel is going to Mudsling themselves into a position where they are no longer respect as the "FPU Kinds..."
So in conclusion, I feel that INTEL is going to Put themselves in a rut because of AMD; just like the Linux community has the potential to put microsoft in a rut.
Anyone see what I'm saying?
-- Miker
AMD has already made a chipset of their own, VIA is almost done with their chipset and there are 27 known mainboards that are in development or shipping now for the Athlon. Even if mainboard companies stop production of their Athlon mainboards, AMD has the capability to produce thier own mainboards.
.18 copper Athlon right now. They aren't because they realize that Intel is stumbling over themselves right now and AMD can afford to sit back and wait a while. In the meantime, Fab30 get's all the bugs worked out. However, AMD cannot afford to pull a Camino like Intel did.
Besides, Fab30 is online. I fully believe that AMD has the capability to start shipping a 1GHz
At any rate, Intel, just like Microsoft, is not going away any time soon. They are still going to be a major player for a couple years to come at least, even though they are getting their butt kicked right now.
In several of Mark Twain's writings, he talked about "the mob" -- people that just band together and form a ruthless bunch because they are too afraid not too (see Adventures of Huck Finn chapter's 21 & 22). I think he calls them "cowards". I'm not saying anyone here is a coward, just part of a mob that they don't know how to stop sometimes. Someone shouts "So-and-so is trying to kill such-and-such" and everyone takes off with pitchforks, torches and knives to rally against the person pointed out as "evil" today.
I'm not saying a lot of this isn't true -- but damn it, business is business. If you can't stand a little heat in the business world (hell if you can't stand competition period) then you don't belong -- go back to doing something that you *can* do, like picking daisies or berries or something that doesn't recquire any form of mental stress.
Just don't complain about a company that has huge amounts of extremely loyal customers playing "dirty" when you are only a small pebble in a large field. Go out and start your own company that will defeat Intel, if that's what you really desire. Intel's doing MAN's work, making money. Doing that takes being a real man that makes real man decisions...
In my personal opinion, I'd like to get an AMD Athlon, just 'cause I'm curious about it's architecture and would like to see how good it runs.
I think, The consumer should encourage competition. For quite sometime, Intel had a monopoly on the PC processor market. Now I am happy that AMD has better processor than Intel. So next time, when I buy a PC, I know, I am not been ripped off because of monopoly.
Siva
>Nor will there be...ever. Until the K7, AMD has
>never included multiprocessor support in their >x86 designs
*sigh*
This again.
Yes, the K6 (and the M2) have multi-processor support. No, it's not the same standard as intel (for which they would have had to pay royalties), and noone ever made a chipset to support it. But the support is there on the chips (Cyrix & AMD even used the same standard, but I forget what it was called)
If Intel and Windows Didn't have competition, we probably would be stuck in the age of the 486 and DOS. Thankfully, competition weeds out the crap (like Moderation) and keeps the developers on their toes.
Don't knock the competition AMD is getting. Hopefully it will be good for the consumer in the long run. Look at how our processor line competion has benefitted us (G3, G4, Athlon, Pentium III, k6-2, et cetera), in a relatively short period of time.
Dan Noe http://resonator.physics.sunysb.edu/dan/
"The Intel Pentium III processor is more than just a processor" -- it's also a marketing campaign!
The chips are there. I have seen them in the local shops. When the new Athlon AGP4x DMA66 chipsets come out, I'll will be getting one! AMD really whips the llama ass! (Think WinAMP)
See, the K6 design just wasn't very superscalar. For those who don't know what that particular buzzword means, it refers to how many stages the pipeline is divided into. More stages means the processor does less things in each clock cycle, which means you can fit more cycles in a second
.18 micron should help out their manufacturing prowess (smaller processes mean that you can fit more chips on a wafer. This means your yield of chips is better, since if the area is smaller it's less likely the part will contain a defect caused by material impurities.) This also means your cost of production goes down, so AMD's profits should be improved.
Actually, the word you're looking for is pipelined. Pipelining is the technique of dividing the processing work into several stages, so that you can decrease the size of a clock cycle (increase the MHz). The term superscalar refers to how wide the processor is, as to opposed how deep (pipelined = depth, superscalar = width). As in, if I can fetch and execute 4 instructions per cycle, then it's order-4 superscalar. If an instruction takes 10 cycles to execute, then the pipeline is 10 stages deep (actually, this is a simplification since superscalar CPUs typically have multiple, diversified execution units, and different execution units have different number of pipe stages) The width is pretty much independent of the pipeline depth.
So, say we have an order-two superscalar CPU (as a plain Pentium MMX is). Then you might have something like this (note this is not the actual Pentium, but a generalization):
Stage 1 - Instruction Fetch
Stage 2 - Instruction Decode 1
Stage 3 - Instruction Decode 2
--
Integer 1 | Floating Point 1
Integer 2 | Floating Point 2
---------- | Floating Point 3
--
Stage 4 - Writeback Results
In the example integer operations take one less cycle than floating point. The above processor is two wide (ie Stages 1 thru 3 deal with two instructions at a time), so is order-2 superscalar. The pipeline depth would probably be considered to be 7 (3 fetch/decode + 3 FP execute + 1 writeback)
You may be right about the K-6 pipe depth, I don't know offhand how many pipe stages it has. The P6 family (Pentium Pro, PII, PIII) is pipelined to the hilt, so you are correct in that Intel's chips are heavily pipelined. I just looked it up (I have a draft chapter about the P6 of my prof's book, the chapter was written by the P6 architects), and the diagram they give has 8 stages in the front-end (instruction fetch/decode), 3 on the back-end (instn retirement), and varying amounts in the middle (3 for basic ops, 6+ for multi-cycle ops, 5 or 9+ for various memory ops). So 14 is probably around a minimum as far as pipeline depth goes. I've heard Willamette is far deeper.
As far as how superscalar-ness effects the manufacturing, becoming more superscalar is unlikely to be helpful. It actually increases the compexity of the CPU by a large amount, and thus will require more silicon area. More area generally leads to lower yields -> more manufacturing difficulty.
It's more likely that AMD simply was inexperienced with manufacturing in the past, and had some bumps to get over. Their new fab, and the move to
One other quick note:
On the one hand, it happens to be true that the recent trend toward graphics cards with GPUs takes a good deal of the advantage off of the Athlon's superior floating point performance
True to an extent, but there are still a lot of FP calculations involved in games and other apps, that aren't handled by the transformation engine of the GPU. So floating-point performance is still very important.
it doesn't beat the Athlon, either.
AMD has been swinging for years, but they finally made contact with the Athlon, and Intel wasn't able to make the counterpunch. We salute the new champ, because AMD wins in price and performance...
--
E2 IN2 IE?
First, AMD didn't steal their designs. They had a licensing deal with intel for all designs based around the original x86 core (this was all chips through and including the 486). The K5 is a 486 with some serious tweaking (which is why it paled next to a real Pentium but did very well against a 486. The K6 was NextGen's chip, rightfully used because (surprise) AMD bought NextGen.
Second, I owned a 486dx4-100 (AMD) and a K6-233. Neither have given me stability problems. Of course, C&C had a patch out already when I played it on the dx4, so that was probably fixed between the two.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
"What does the average consumer want? A cheap, easy-to-set-up all-in-one word processor/game console/internet application."
You're right about that, but I think you are forgetting one thing - your television isn't very good when it comes to surfing the internet or for wordprocessing - the resolution simply isn't good enough - for this to happen, HDTV is needed...
The latest issue of Wired has a very interesting article about Sony, which indicates that this is exactly where they want to go with the PlayStation. I've certainly got more faith in Sony to make a truly consumer oriented game/info device than in Microsoft doing it. Let's face it, it's not OK (if you have a choice, that is!) for your TV, stereo, game machine, internet appliance etc to barf and throw up a BSOD! Kind of wierd how people expect their entertainment devices to be reliable, but accept their PC being flaky!
:-(
Of course Microsoft (market cap. $450B) could always buy Sony ($60B) if they do end up owning the infotainment business...
Makes me wonder what an MS-AIBO would do when it crapped out...
You must have never run an Alpha system. Many distributions are very broken on the Alpha. Some things refuse to compile, other things compile fine then core when you execute them. Not to mention hardware support isn't what it is for the x86 systems.
The only way I'm going to run another Alpha is to buy one from Compaq with Tru64 on it.
I give Linux another year before Alpha gets to the level x86 is at now.
wolf31o2 Developer, Gentoo Linux Games Team
So long as Intel insists that "the fastest chips are for the 31337 with deep pockets", the rest of us will say "fsck you" and go buy Athlons. And that's fine with me. I mean, chips are a commodity right? Who cares what brand label is on 'em so long as they're fast and cheap.
Intel is running scared. AMD clearly has as good or BETTER products priced reasonably. After all the garbage they(Intel) have put on the market in recent years to cover their screwups, 386sx, 486sx, some of the celerons and/or pentium II, I guess they just had to stoop to the FUD thing. Seems like deja vu to me (the name Microsoft rings any bells here ?? )
MY 2 bits
Clive DaSilva Email: clive.dasilva@gmail.com Ubuntu 18.10 Kernel 4.18
OK, now I may be completely off base here (if I am please let me know), but I was under the impression that the Athlon was designed to use the same slot and chipsets as the Alpha. This would mean that all motherboard manufacturers (that is, the ones that already make Alpha m'boards) would have to do is replace the BIOS. At the very least there would be off-the-shelf parts to use, instead of having to start from square one.
Like I said, I might be completely misguided here...
Comments Welcome!
bp
woxy.com - Bam! The Future of Rock and Roll
Nest year Athlon mobo's will come in SMP config. The chip and bus is designed for eight CPU's.
With the CTL+ bus the Intel chips use all CPU's share the same bus. Effectively dividing the bandwith and Mhz. Two CPU's on a 100Mhz bus is essentially two at 50Mhz each.
The Athlon is designed with each CPU connected to the EV6 system bus. Two CPU's on a 200Mhz bus is two at 200Mhz each. With the PC133 RAM, this goes to two at 266Mhz each etc.
Imagine a four processor system with the equivalent of 25Mhz per Intel, or 266Mhz to each of four Athlon chips. OOOOOOH YES!!! Imagine the speed difference at eight chips...WOW!!!
AMD is kicking Intel butt.
Head on over here and then see what you think.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Does anyone know if anyone is putting out an Athlon MB with ATA/66 connectors on it? I've looked around, but haven't found one yet. For some reason I haven't been able to boot to my ATA/66 drive with a Promise ULTRA66 card. They couldn't figure it out either. So, I figure I'll just buy a new MB with ATA/66 onboard. Since I'm definitely interested in the Athlon, I thought I'd look for an Athlon board while I'm at it. Anyone seen what I'm looking for?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
>They've been appealing to the average ignorant >consumer by spreading FUD and marketing fluf for >years now, and it's worked for them (look at how >they've beat down other chips and systems >producers i.e. VIA, Alpha, IBM, cyrix just to >name a few) in the past.
No. The Alpha was targeted for a completely different audience (top-end servers and labs).
VIA, IBM, Cyrix: they just make bad products - more bugs and compatibility problems than Intel's or AMD's solutions. Also, incompatibility with a lot of software (anyone with a Cyrix processor must have run a "Cyrix patch" of somesort), the "Power Rating" (translates to "I can't produce high Mhz CPU's that run cool) and their poor(est)FPU performance just killed Cyrix. Nothing else involved.
I think this article was a big flame against Intel. There are quite a few things in there that are totally made up. The name Coppermine is like all other code names. It is either a lake, river, mountain, or city somewhere in one of the states that Intel has a location. One would have to know about copper manufacturing technology and a bunch of other crap that most have no idea about. The speed and Pentium are what is marketable. Not the code name. Intel did not change the name if the IA-64 chip from Merced to Itanium. Merced is the code name for the chip. Like every other chip, it sells as something else. And finally Intel is not afraid of AMD. I heard that from management. For a bunch of reasons. Intel has the technology to ram up over 1 GHz if they have to. Not to mention that they still a majority of the market share, that if they had much, they would be considered a monopoly. And finally even if AMD can continue to out perform Intel's chips, they cannot at this time manufacture them. The wafers that AMD uses would probably wouldn't be used in an Intel Fab. Now everyone will probably just think that since I'm working at Intel that I'm pro-Intel. That isn't true. I'm pro whatever is the fastest chip. Doesn't matter to me. Right now it would be the PIII 700Mhz, because Q3 runs fastest on that. I think most of AMD loving people don't realize that everytime you buy a processor from them part of the company is coming with you. Think of a supply and demand curve. They can't supply, but are still pricing low, which means that they lose money. Lots of it. Intel, like all other companies, is based on business. If you don't make money you don't have a business. If AMD and Intel had a 50/50 market share their prices would probably be the same. But anyway... that's just my opinion.
I don't like strong-arm, quasi-legal, neo-soviet business tactics.
Neither do I, but I like the Strong ARM
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
K5 and maybe M1 and M2 had the potential to run in SMP, K6 (and derivates) does no longer support OpenPIC.
Hmm.. so they want a cheap 'puter, but they'll shell out several thousand for an HDTV? It's probably not an immediate problem for Intel. Not for a few more years at least.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Try http://greenville.compzone.com
wolf31o2 Developer, Gentoo Linux Games Team
On that note, I'm running a K-6-III right now. I love it. I would recommend it to anyone. (It was better than CATS!) ;)
Werd.
The average consumer only cares about:
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Intel is NOT running scared. I wish they were (I use AMD stuff in many of my machines). Does the elephant run from the mouse? I fables, maybe, in reality, not a chance. THey might be annoyed by AMD's persistance, and bothered by their nice chips, but they are NOT by any stretch of the imagination running anywhere....and I highly doubt that they are scared at this point either.
Werd.
It seemed like only a matter of time before something like this happened, and Intel probably knew this too.
The actual item of interest is what Intel chooses to do about this. Naturally, they can't conceed defeat without serious economic results (unfortunately, Money seems to drive the market more than performance).
As I see it, Intel is scrambling to produce a product that will compete with the K7 and K7 based systems. However being extremely rushed, they are making mistakes (on both processors and chipsets).
This is all to be expected. It's obvious that Intel is worried. and I guess spreading FUD is one course of action that can be used to counter this threat.
whether we (as in SlashDot Readers) agree with this or not is a separate issue with whether or not it works to save Intel from economic failure.
Personally, I can't stand companies who do this. However, there is not much I can do about it. When it comes down to it, consumers are the ultimate judge to who wins or loses, since they shell out the cash to buy the products. This is definately nothing new to Intel. They've been appealing to the average ignorant consumer by spreading FUD and marketing fluf for years now, and it's worked for them (look at how they've beat down other chips and systems producers i.e. VIA, Alpha, IBM, cyrix just to name a few) in the past.
Again, I hate it when companies do this, but: one, can you blame them and two there's nothing I know that can be done (if you know something please tell me!).
-Too Lazy to create an account
I think Intel needs devote more money into development rather than creating FUD about how much better their chip is than the K7. If you look at Coppermine's FPU performance, it is way behind the K7's FPU performance. I believe the K6 was a head of the pentium's FPU (and didn't have that FP error found in the early P5)
AMD hasn't spent the money that Intel has on propaganda. They spent it to develop a product that would beat the competitors and they have succeeded in their primary goal. They know Intel will come out with a better chip, but they will be right on their heels. After AMD introduces a better chip, Intel will be quick to release a better one... and so forth.
I have always used Intel processors but I have decided that I will seriously look into a AMD chip when it comes time to replace this motherboard.
Dammit.
www.bridgeschool.org
Back to your regularly scheduled program.
Yup.
In order for ADM to not only survive (and I would argue that Intel is going to make sure they do), but to prosper, they need to really break into the high-end chip market. Where they have made their mark... the low-end, is not where you want to be. Profits are so slim at that level, and it is almost a losing venture.
Even so, I'm amazed even now how many @webtv.com addresses I see.
--
www.bridgeschool.org
HTML are not my native tongue. I not speakingly it goodly.
While the performance issue is true, there is a major price barrier to be broken for Alpha to be feasable as an Intel/AMD replacement. I have an Alpha, but I wouldn't say it is a performer (AlphaStation 233 anyone?)
Alphas are better when you get into complex multi-threaded applications. Most of the power gets wasted on a workstation, unless you're doing some very intense graphical work. It is much simpler to get maximum performance out of an x86 box, fire up q3test.
Alphas definitely scale better than Intel boxen. AMD has yet to get its Athlon Ultra out to the market, so SMP support is not there. Even on a top-of-the-line system, Intel only has 8-way Xeon boxen. Compaq has 14-way 21264 boxen, before it even goes to the TruCluster boxen.
Our company was looking at upgrading our aging AlphaServer 4100, so I have done quite a bit of research on Compaq's new offerings, as well as many Intel boxen.
wolf31o2 Developer, Gentoo Linux Games Team
The phrase: "With Athlon AMD finally got Intel"
;-)
Hmm.. I got quite a big experience with both AMD and Intel based machines. Intel's are mostly Celeron's frankly -> i.e. in the same price range with K6, K6-2, K6-III.
Well, in almost every case AMD "old" chips are snappier and, well, more "pleasant" to use than Intel's. That's purely MHO, of course. But benchmark (compilation etc..) times are with me mostly. Not that I would trust them
Especially, it's noticable when you have your software compiled with K6 optimization - K6 and Pii are quite different architectures. K6 is more advanced as far as I can understand them.
Frankly, my dream machine (x86) for every task for today would be dual K6-III, but sadly there's no such MB's.
Of course some difference comes with 3d games. Yet again - your videocard means more here than your CPU.
And anyway I don't play them.
Hmm, seems as if my old alpha 533MHz used only something like 90 W (including the MB) - only enough to fry one egg, no bacon 8^) But way hotter than any other chip, that's for sure... too much heat = bad. The multi-proc Alphas are quite toasty (keeps the room^H^H^H^Hhouse warm in winter).
As for performance/MHz, the FPU in the Alpha is generally considered far superior to the Intel FPU at the same clockrate. Plus, my 533 was built in the spring of 1997 - (insert rambling about RISC vs CISC) - (retort about how chips are no longer CISC or RISC)...
just my $.01999999999 (Intel)
$.02 (Alpha)
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
then why the mud slinging?
...will be an Athlon based system. I support AMD 100%, if for no other reason than Intel pulling that stupid processor ID crap a few months ago. Not to mention this WebFitters garbage. If AMD actually has a faster chip, which it certainly sounds like they do with the Athlon, then my decision is that much easier.
Long live AMD!
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I must say. Though you can say that Intel is ramming you by disabling the multiprocessing features of the cheap versions of their chips, they aren't. (Hey.. I feel like it's wrong too, but it's not.)
You view it this way because you know, technically, that a cut trace inside the chip is the only thing separating your cheap chip from a chip at 5x the price (hypothetically).
However, take the Celeron for example. Intel *NEVER* claimed that the Celeron supported multiprocessing. It was hackers that figured out they used the same core as the PII, and that they would, in fact, work in a multiprocessor board. This is great for the hacker, but not part of Intel's business model.
Whatever happened to that russian chip that was hyped a few months ago, the e2k or whatever? It was supposed to be leaps and bounds ahead of any Intel/AMD processor and now it's pretty much disapeared. anyone know what happened to it?
I'm not sure how much truth is behind the allegations that Intel is trying to convince Asus NOT to make boards for AMD processors. If this is true, though, I would definitely throw that in the category of *evil* business practices. In my opinion Asus makes the best quality boards with some of the fastest bus speeds for the best prices around. I won't buy anything that isn't an Asus board. And there are alot of people that agree with me, especially AMD consumers.
If Asus doesn't make a board for the Athlon, it will hurt AMD bad. Lots of people won't be able to get the Asus/AMD combination that we have all come to love in these past few years. This could be *BAD* for AMD.
"I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing, Egon. What do you mean by bad?"
./adam12
alpha will still be better than intel/amd when the .18ucopper athlons come out q2 2000 and the itanium/merced,can anyone say 21364..........
What I find increasingly funny - there is currently no _real_ reason for the mass market to use these chips.
Come on, except for gaming, today there is no *home user* software needing the processing power offered by these current chips.
Sure, there are always bigger, fatter, more feature-rich versions of your favourite office software just around the corner, but consider this - AMD and Intel have vastly overtaken the gap between processing power and processing needs, far more than they used to a few years ago.
I myself still run Win95 and Linux on a P75 Toshiba Libretto with 32 MB Ram. Works like a charm and I even do some of the web database development for my clients on it. My clients may then use big servers with hairy chests for the live server, but even as a developer, I do not have to have a BIG computer when testing my small projects.
Since a few years, I made a habit of only buying computer parts that just went "out of fashion". By buying outdated material, I get the kind of computing that is below average today, but that was incredible 6 or 9 months ago. For a nice price, of course.
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
Uhhm... hello? Do you even know what you're talking about??? All motherboard makers use Intel chipsets in their boards. Intel is the only supplier of the BX chipsets. If you are not convinced, read up about the artificial BX chipset shortage. This story appeared everywhere. And Tom's Hardware and The Register provided the explanation of what was happening...
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Well, that several thousands $$$ is an investment in a multi-purpose entertainment device.
It's already well demonstrated that the average consumer is more than willing to shell out this kind of $$ for home entertainment.
It's also well demonstrated that the average consumer is NOT willing to shell out this kind of $$ for a computer, internet access be damned. Hence, $400 computers.
When PSX II comes out, the PC is toast, my friend.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Nevermind the fact that Intel (god forbid) has to play catch-up for once in its life, or that coppermine has nothing to do with copper junction technology. Nevermind that I'm writing this from a p133 because i'm a poor college student. The real winners in this situation are you & me & everyone who buys a computer in the near future, as anyone who's checked out the celeron and other non-top-shit processor prices lately can attest to. --cabr1to--
----------
I like Intel products. In the past year or so, they've been very fast, and very reliable. Nonetheless, I'm pleased to see a changing of the guard, so to speak.
.18 micron manufacturing process, did the on-chip cache thing, and STILL the Intel chips, with significant speed improvements, were still ONLY AS FAST AS THE AMD CHIPS. When you stop to think about this, you realize that AMD has a .18 micron fabrication plant in the works, has engineers working on these solutions, and as soon as they release the Athlon-II, (or whatever they want to call it) Intel will again be up a creek, only this time they may not have a chip coming out on which to hedge their bets.
AMD has released a superior product, no questions asked. As soon as the Athlon was released, thousands of testers went out and compared it to the existing Pentium III processors, and the Athlon kicked butt in every test, not only beating Intel in equivalent MHz rating, but often beating out superior MHz Pentium chips.
So Intel got scared. The Athlon was much, much more than they expected. Intel was used to being able to charge more than AMD did for their chips, because Intel chips were "the fastest". Not anymore. Now that AMD has AT LEAST equally fast chips on the market, Intel realized that people might buy faster chips for less money. There goes market share!
This is where Intel really looks silly. They pulled out all the stops, started there
The sad part here is that Intel's reaction is to try to choke AMD out of business. For the first time consumers are wildly impressed with AMD's product, and AMD hasn't fumbled of their own accord. So Intel, having no recourse, hits the motherboard manufacturers. Unfortunately, AMD has few motherboard manufacturers in its camp. So the motherboard manufacturers are all holding their collective breaths, waiting to see if the Athlon catches on before they irk Intel by producing a board. (Note: Asus unofficially has the K7M motherboard produced, but you will find no mention of it on their website.)
This is a sad situation for we capitalists. I, for one, want to invest in an AMD K7 chip. They're fast, reliable, and kick-ass. But Intel has made my life difficult. Shame on them.
Intel lost the preformance crown. And I don't see them getting it back. Hopefully in 2-5 years they'll have swapped, with Intel being the underdog and AMD the big giant, and the same cycle will start over.
Maybe because power dissip. in excess of 100W is not cool (sic).
Or maybe Alphas are not so impressive in performance/MHz.
The problem with price is that it's always a function of volume. The more you sell, the cheaper you can sell it for. If your volumes are in the thousands, your per component cost is much higher. It's a tough battle.
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
Damn.. you want to talk about hype and FUD, screw Intel. Sony has everybody beat these days on that score. :D The fact that they have a slashdotter saying that the PS2 would beat out the iMac, cheap PCs, EVERYTHING else is awesome in its scariness. It's still a console, even if Sony wants it to be something more.
AMD's finances have been distressed before and they always seem to manage to pull through. If the motherboard and third party chipset issues can be sorted out and AMD can sell the parts they have demonstrated they can make it will go along way to ameliorating their balance sheet woes. The average selling price (ASP) of the K6 line is well below $100 while ASP of the K7 is well above $100. Granted the K7 costs a bit more to make than say the K6-2, but the big difference is the K7 is perceived as a very desirable processor rather than something someone buys because they cannot afford a Pentium III.
If something unforseen happened that threatened to throw AMD into chapter 11 I'd bet dollars to donuts that you would see Compaq, IBM and HP get together and jointly invest $1 billion or so in return for an equity stake. Intel sells about $20 or $25 billion of CPUs per year and Compaq/IBM/HP probably account for at least $5 billion worth of that. If AMD went under how much do you think Intel would charge them then? Beyond the monetary fallout would be the shift in power in favour of Intel. As much as I'd like to watch Mike Dell finally discover that Intel doesn't have friends just interests, we don't need another M$.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
From what I've heard (word of mouth), AMD is getting an amazingly low scrap rate on the K7's. So much, in fact, that they have been able to drop prices and not affect their profit margin. This also means more chips for do-it-yourselfers. Originally, I heard that AMD wouldn't even *consider* selling to VAR's until at least December. As of a month ago, several local places have them, and at reasonable prices--not to mention about 25% less than those aluminummines =P
Well, to answer this honestly, the Athlon requires much more voltage than a coppermine.
Not quite right. My understanding is that Athlons run at about 1.65 volts or thereabouts, and you actually have to reduce (!) the voltage a bit when overclocking (I think I saw this on Tom's site). Coppermines use a similar supply voltage, down at least 0.5V from Intel's older 0.25u process.
However, power consumption is another matter entirely. Current Athlons draw 60 watts or thereabouts, which is far too high for a notebook.
What I'm curious about is how AMD can produce reliable chips on their 0.25u Al process running at such a low voltage, and why Intel cannot. Any ideas?
People buying high-end workstations and servers generally don't build their own. Most people with 3+ grand to blow on a machine are doing it because they really need a high end workstation/server for work and don't have time to mess around with DYI. Corporate customers buy assembled boxes from known companies, usually with service contracts. Even if you can get motherboards, AMD can't live off of the super duper hard core gamers market (i.e. the guys who'll blow a few grand building the ultimate quake box).
A quick look at http://www.zdnet.com/computershopper/ (not where i shop but where lots of "tyical" customers shop) shows the following brands of PIII Xenon Workstations: Compaq, HP, IBM, MidWestMicro and SGI
and for servers: Compaq, Dell, HP, IBM, MidWestMicro and Vision Computers.
for Athelon Workstations the list is a bit different: 1st ACS Computers, Amtron, Axis Systems, Cyber Max, Micro Trends, MidwestMicro, Multiwave Technology, Royal Computer and Xxera.
And there is no listing of Athelon Servers.
- bridgette
AMD is important from an idealogical standpoint. I have two Linux boxes at home that have zero Intel or Microsoft components in them. And I like that very much. Every time I use those machines, I'm reminded that I voted for choice with my dollars, and that keeps me voting (like the $3500 ballot I cast when I bought the parts for my K7/600 system a couple weeks ago).
I don't like serialized CPUs. I don't like strong-arm, quasi-legal, neo-soviet business tactics. I don't like to be told what I want. I don't like paying a mint for CPUs just so I can fund some mindless "Our CPU makes the Internet better" campaign.
You like giving Micros~1 the finger? Well Intel ain't much better than them. So give them the finger too and get AMD and Via and Linux all together. If you do, you're casting your vote for freedom, choice, quality, advancing technology and lower prices.
P.S. The "major motherboard manufacturer" the Ars article mentioned is Asus and the mobo in question is called the K7M. Gamer's Depot has a review, as do many other sites. See AMD Zone for more news about all things AMD. And slota.com has a complete list of all the Slot A motherboards. Which makes it an interesting comparision to AMD's list.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
On Ars, just below this story is one on these Coppermine CPUs. Intel has disabled any SMPness for the PGA models. No doubt they want you to spend a few grand on two real P3's. My only advice, is for all you anti-AMD pushers to think which company has a better model for hardware. Intel likes to threaten motherboard makers, disable various overclock/SMP features in chips just to thwart the gamer/hacker, spread this FUD like 3DNow is only for games, but SSE is for every app.
I'd swear I've seen this same behavior in the software world too, but I just can't think of who it was...
I don't know if it's because I've followed the OS wars more closely than the hardware wars, but it seems to me like there's less impact to be had on the public with FUD. After all, the average buyer will only care about three things:
Price
Performance
A good household name they can recognise
It's not like the Intel chips have anything like fancy shmoozy GUI's or little singing paperclips. Right now, Celeron and Athlon are names people are beginning to recognise. Most people figure that they can go for a cheaper chipset if it's more or less the same quality, because they don't need high-performance machines, just something that can play Quake III reliably well.
Let's face it: Intel is seriously losing ground, and their last hope is to milk for all they're worth the people who want that silly "Intel Inside" sticker because they figure it means quality.
Cause otherwise, they lost already.
"Knowledge = Power = Energy = Mass"
once AMD gets their new fab finished in dresden .18 micron they will kick the shit out of the iEmpire.
and they can fab stuff with copper tech at
sub
they're already becoming a big enough nuisance
to make intel release a chip without it's
proper mobo ( the i820 ).
and the merced...er...iTanium ( where-the-hell-is-it-tanium ) will not impress anyone a year and a half from now.
let them keep spending all that money on FUD. Eventually all the IT purchasing managers will realize that if they spend that much money on the FUD, how much are they spending on R&D?
[%- PROCESS life -%]
Throughout history, competitors have spread FUD. When faced with superior or equivalent technology, many companies are faced with a difficult decision: improve their product, or spread FUD about their competitors. As spreading FUD is certainly much more cost efficient than designing a newer product, many companies will opt for this route. Although the processor market has for the most part remained exempt from this (exempting the current fixation of the consumer on mHz ratings), FUD is certainly to be expected. Of course Intel is scared. The processor market is huge. To lose even a few percent of their customer base is a large hit. If Athlon were merely equivalent in performance, things would be different. But when a competitor produces a better product, Intel gets scared, or at least its stockholders do.
forget these x86 chips, just buy a nice Alpha
A nice Alpha will run circles around both of these chips anyday. Now that Compaq is putting resources towards Alpha Linux, I think it will have even more of a footprint in the market.
(Then again, this only works if you dont consider cost to be an issue)
It's unfortunate to say the least. But unfortunately, AMD has had a history of plain out being second best. From the K6 onward, expectations were high, but yields and speeds were a little lower then what it took to unhorse Intel. The price may have been right, but that didn't mean AMD was ever the best of the best.
Then comes Athlon. A serious ass-whipper of a product. But the only real advertising AMD has going is word of mouth. And all along, Intel has built a pride reputation. Intel Inside actually MEANT something, and while the quality of commercials has certainly degraded (Better on the internet my A$$), the reputation for making the best of the best still stands among the largely unwashed and ininformed.
Only for once, Intel has real competition. And they've responded twofold, first releasing an Athlon killer, and now through marketing. That's twice as much as M$ ever did.
It's still despicable. I respect them for responding to competition with a better product, but FUD just sucks. However, it's the way the business world works. You might not win with JUST marketing or JUST with a better product, but hell, you'll do better with both.
Intel is pushing your third bullet into new territory by claiming that Pentium III has special features for "enhancing your Internet experience" (whatever that means*).
The average AOL-esqe consumer will fall for it, certainly. Yay marketing.
--Joe(* Note: I know it refers to using SSE-enabled plugins to view content on special websites. Plugins are just another opportunity for my browser to crash -- they do not 'enhance my Internet experience'. If a site requires them, I just visit a different site.)
--
Program Intellivision!
Anyhow, the comparisons of the Athalon VS PIII on Tom's show that the Athalon is signifigantly faster than Intel - Even in the Floating Point arena! The floating point arena is where Intel has always remained king. Go AMD!
I guess I will always root for the underdog. :P
Sosumi. just kidding. DONT!
Spreading misinformation is evil, offering the facts is righteous.
People like to bash companies when they're abusing their position. Only successful companies have a superior position to abuse from. People like to bash evil companies that also happen to be successful.
Microsoft is evil, as evinced by their actions. People like to bash them. Apparently, when Intel has competition, they act the same way, and are therefore evil. We just didn't know it before because of their x86 monopoly. (Sometimes monopolies are okay, when the entrance barrier is high, which it was in the past. Now it's lower, and Intel is starting to feel the effects.) Remember, Intel's products *are* overpriced. That was AMD's biggest gripe against them in the first place.
Releasing benchmarks is always better than offering no real information at all besides "I'm better". That just turns into a shouting match. However, if no one can set up a fair test platform that can approximately reproduce said benchmarks, then the benchmarks are just as bad, and should be responded to with accurate benchmarks.
Intel should be condemned for making it harder for their customers to find the right information. Say that your new processor is 20% faster than a PIII/whatever, instead, and remind them that you're Intel, or something, but don't lie to them.
Intel is trying to hold onto its monopoly, and not in a graceful fashion. They aren't used to real competition. Sound like Microsoft yet?
---
pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Do you really expect Intel to come out and say "Oh the Athlon is better then our p2/3 line" ? That would be like Linus making a public speech about the shortcomings of linux and not using words like "But we're working on it (tm)" "It'll be in the next release (tm)" Cyrix and AMD used to publish that their last generation processors were on "par" with Intel's offerings, what they didn't tell you was that there are no SMP boards for their offerings, their FPU stunk, etc etc. Such is the buisness world folks. There are no "innocents"
AMD has "A" chipset. VIA is delaying their Athlon development in anticipation of i820. Athlon motherboards, though produced by numerous companies, are still heartbreakingly scarce outside of OEM channels.
If AMD produced a 1 Ghz chip, GREAT! Copper interconnects? Stellar! What's it run on right now? A 100 Mhz DDR bus (which is how they get the "200 Mhz bus" claim) with PC100 RAM, AGP2x, and UDMA/33?
Many of the businesses I work with tell me that until the K7 platform drops an SMP board on the market, they aren't interested.
Which brings us back to "Weird Al" and it being "All about the Pentiums". Name recognition. Until AMD can successfully break the name recognition that Intel has with it's Pentium line, AMD's going to be coming in second. Ever ask a semi-computer literate person what kind of computer they have? OR have them ask you what sort of computer you have? "Is it a Pentium"?
No it doesn't mean people don't buy AMD-based systems. The price of them attracts people. But most of their thinking tends to involve their computer universe revolving around Intel.
In addition, for low end serving and productivity, many IT departments still swear by Intel. And the Celeron has taken away the price issue that AMD held over Intel with their K6 line. The old "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" mindset.
Hopefully, now that AMD has amputated parts of itself to gain some cash, they can start turning a profit. They need to do it soon. Because they're hemmoraging money the way a hemophiliac would after being dropped into a swimming pool filled with razorblades.
In addition, AMD has a massive problem. They need to retool their next generation of K7's to use an on-die cache, as their current on-board cache architecture will leave them with two options.
In some hardware boards, some people are talking about K7's with 1MB of on-die cache as consumer-grade chips. NOT going to happen. For a clue, let's look at the current P3 die and the Coppermine die. The core's are virtually identical (SOME tweaking has been done).
The trans count has tripled! Why?
So a quarter meg of cache runs about 18M transistors. Tack that onto an Athlon core and we're talking 42 million transistors. Tough to guarantee good yields for right now, but still possibly doable.
But when we move up to 1MB of cache or 2MB we run start running into MAJOR problems.
Now 95 million transistors is REALLY not economically feasible for AMD. Even with a shrink to the .18 micron process. The manufacturing process will shrink transistor size by roughly 28%. But the die compexity will for the 1 and 2MB chips would grow by a factor of 4 and 7 respectively. The actual cores themselves would be 3 and 5 times as large as the current Athlon is. And the Athlon core is already HUGE by any measure.
Ah well. Here's hoping that the competition continues.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I this is a good sign for Athlon. If Intel didn't think Athlon was going to do anything to its market share, it would just ignore the chip and let it sit in low-end PCs. AMD still has to overcome the FUD, but now the media will give them some serious attention.
so, i have read this latest piece, i have seen a lot of the hype for both chips. it seems to me that they're headed for different markets. intel wants the home user and the internet experience, while amd wants the high end technical market that would have bought an Alpha before. it's a shame that mere mortals like myself cannot afford this technology, but its trickle down effect is certainly welcome.
jose nazario jose@biocserver.cwru.edu
For any Canadians out there (like me) these guys who are just outside of Toronto, have three different boards in stock: the Asus K7M, Microstar 6167, and the Gigabyte GA-71X. They're not too cheap though. :(
Neil Young and his wife Pegi formed a charity that helps handicapped kids harness technology to increase their ability to communicate. Which is a pretty cool and worthy thing. They hold a charity concert every year, and Neil ropes some heavyweight acts to help out (including the Who this year, CmdrTaco!).
This year, it will be cybercast (on Oct 30 and 31st), with some sort of agreement with Yahoo and Intel. If you go to the Intel page, it looks like you *MUST* have a Pentium III to check out the webcast. I was miserably contemplating how much that sucked, when I decided to check out the Bridge School site at http://wwww.bridgeschool.org , where I found that you could access the concert with the normal streaming plugins. It's good that Intel is getting involved with charity work, but kind of pathetic when they blatantly tie it to a push for more market share.
You know, I really find it amazing how much people like to bash successful companies.
:)
First, the very idea that Intel could prevent every single one of the 150+ motherboard manufacturers from building an Athlon board is silly. A good portion of these motherboard manufacturers don't even use Intel parts (other than the CPU) on their boards making them completely independent from Intel. The high costs and lack of availability have more to do with demand and costs of building and producing the motherboards.
Second, I'd like to say that Intel is doing nothing immoral. They have a product which is no longer the fastest but they want to maintain public perception that it is. There's nothing wrong with this. They didn't pull an Apple and put out junk benchmarks that show their CPU 8x faster than the Athlon. In fact, as far as I could tell from their little search engine, their web site has no mention at all of the Athlon.
Third, marketing an inferior product heavily to drown out AMD is not evil. If the consumer is stupid enough not to do research when it comes to buying a very expensive little piece of hardware, then so be it, but Intel shouldn't be condemned for doing what every single other company on the planet would do in their place.
Sure, the underdog is always rooted for (at least in the US), but this sort of article posted to slashdot makes it sound like Intel is some sorta evil minion of satan using Microsoft-like business practices. Frankly, as far as I can tell, Intel is just trying to keep itself associated with quality & speed until the Itanium launch.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong...
--
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
I happen to own an AMD DX4-120.
It even owns P-75s
=]
To me, their fears seem justified assuming PSII is everything it's hyped to be.
It's still "only" a console. But does that really matter these days? How many people are playing games on their Palm Pilots? How many are screaming for e-mail, web and general networking support?
Look at what Apple and NEC are putting out. They're practically consoles now, except for an excessively long boot process and unstable OS.
The fact that you can't open up a console does not render it useless as a home PC (or even a light work terminal). I'd argue it makes it a better home PC, as today's $400 computers tend to be disposable anyway.
--
I have to agree with your thoughtful comment, yet disagree with your general advice. I would not buy an Athlon simply because it is made by a competitor of Intel. I'd buy it because right now it's still smoking coppermine. I think the real irony is all the FUD that Intel lined up against AMD's Irongate motherboard. Where can I buy me a camino chipset again....?
A
Or maybe you should do your homework. Both of your comments are completely false. Alpha was screaming past Intel/AMD for years...too bad they were not advocated like they should have been. I guess those flashy Intel commercials and worthless PC rags really do work as marketing tools. Maybe I'm just cynical. Long live Alpha!
AMD is currently going for the high-end to help bump up their ASP (average selling price). ASP is a good indicator of a chip companies' profitability, and the Athlon will definitely help them (I think pre-Athlon ASP was somewhere below $70ish).
Athlon was designed for speed, not economy of power and heat. Their K6-2/3 have been gaining them market share in the notebook arena this past year, and that design (while not the screamer Athlon is) is much more suitable to notebook requirements. I wouldn't expect to see an Athlon portable until they start putting the L2 cache on-die.
I've been following the news on both chips closely for months now, and I have to say, most of the stuff that AT article talks about Intel spreading as FUD, I'd never heard.
As for technology... well, Intel chips are cheaper, they're about %10 slower, but they don't use copper [%10-%15 speed bost supposedly], and they have half the bus speed. So you tell me, which chip is superior? The big card the Athlon MIGHT have is multi-processor, but it's too damn expensive! They're only targetting the workstation market. :(
I have to say, I really just don't get the PC hardware industry. That is to say, in my heart of hearts, I have close to no doubt that Intel seriously pressured all the mobo manufacturers not to make/market Athlon boards, and, gross as that is, I of course understand it.
.18u copper (i.e. like the metal) parts. From what I've heard, they'll hit 1 GHz about 2 months faster than Intel (I read that AMD'll prolly get there in 2/00, Intel in 4/00), and the gap should only grow. After all, unless you believe the Register that Intel's gonna launch Willamette in December (Note: Are they nuts?!?! On second thought, this wouldn't be the first time the Register has inexplicably been unable to understand the difference between taping out and being available from Dell...) then you have to accept the fact that Intel will be stuck with an amazing-for-its-time (remember, Coppermines have the same core as a PPro from way back in 1995) but still less scalable, not to mention not copper, core until probably next fall. Point is, it's a pretty safe bet that the Athlon will be the faster chip for the next 9 months. And even safer that it'll be better price/performance.
What I don't get is, if that indeed happened, why has none of them just come out and said so? Honestly, this isn't as stupid as it looks. Let's count the reasons why not:
1. The Athlon is a superior product. Yes, a 133MHz bus Coppermine on an i820 mobo is just about at parity as far as performance/MHz goes. (Benchmarks I've seen--a lot of sites had prerelease i820s they used for testing (with only 2 RIMM slots filled of course)--put the CMines faster at office type stuff, the Athlons whipping up on FPU benchmarks and rendering type stuff, and the two about even on Q3ish stuff, which at this point is not yet optimized for the Athlons new FPU pipeline and expanded 3DNow set.) But the only reason AMD's pausing at 700 or 750 MHz for now is because they're ramping up their
2. People know this. Certainly if there are enough people who know what they're doing and want speed for mobo manufacturers to build high quality boards specially for overclocking, and even dual Celeron boards, then there's more than enough market to justify making Athlon boards.
3. AMD is not having any production problems. While this may surprise the ignorant among us who just assumed that AMD was a bunch of blubbering idiots for not being able to keep the K6's up to MHz with PIIs, it's really no surprise at all. See, the K6 design just wasn't very superscalar. For those who don't know what that particular buzzword means, it refers to how many stages the pipeline is divided into. More stages means the processor does less things in each clock cycle, which means you can fit more cycles in a second. The downside is higher latency when a prediction misses, but as it turned out, branch prediction is good enough that deep pipelines/high MHz works better than low latency/low MHz. So anyways, the K6 designers guessed the wrong solution to that one, and ended up with a 6 stage pipeline in comparison to the P6's 13 (IIRC) stages. Hence, the fact that AMD was able to stay within one or two speed bins of Intel for all that time is actually a testament to the high quality of their manufacturing capabilities. As for that huge shortage this February...well, consider the fact that up until a couple months ago, AMD had exactly one fab, and a small one at that. Intel has eight. How much would you like to bet that, at one fab or another, Intel has problems just as severe as the AMD ones all the time, but you just never hear about it because they can shift production to another plant? Of course, now that AMD has a second fab, and, not only that, but a huge state of the art one, the all-eggs-in-one-basket problem is pretty much solved as well.
4. Intel has screwed the mobo manufacturers over big time. This i820 thing is a huge huge huge debacle, and it's all Intel's fault. Furthermore, no one in the industry can be happy that Intel insisted on switching over to RDRAM well before its time, either. Fact is, with proper economies of scale (that is, if the mobo manufacturers would just make the damn things), an Athlon motherboard and RAM could sell for about half the price of an i820 with RDRAM. Why anyone would be scared of burning bridges with Intel after what Intel's just done to them is beyond me.
5. Intel's under major antitrust scrutiny. I mean, if they were bullying mobo companies into shelving, overpricing, or undermarketing their Athlon boards, why on earth wouldn't one of them just pick up the phone and call the FTC? Or better yet, The Wall Street Journal?? And yet they appear to think they're in a better bargaining position if they just keep it to themselves and maybe grumble off a few anonymous leaks to hardware fan sites on the web?? Huh???
So what's going on here? I honestly don't know. On paper, and in the benchmark labs, and on the roadmaps, AMD has Intel blown out of the water for quite some time. On the one hand, it happens to be true that the recent trend toward graphics cards with GPUs takes a good deal of the advantage off of the Athlon's superior floating point performance, but you'd be pretty hard pressed to say that, from a theoretical perspective, things look anything but shitty for Intel. Except that, possibly due to nothing more than some well placed, and presumably illegal, intimidation (and not just directed at the mobo people; witness Dell and Gateway, the sort of names average people think of when they think of fast high quality computers, not offering any Athlon systems), things look just fine for them.
It's a pretty scary thought that this sort of thing could still go on right after the MS trial. But I just don't have any other explanation.
when is AMD going to get serious into the notebook market??
EVERYONE in the business world lately is salivating over more and more portability--and with that, I cannot help but notice that the leading notebook manufacturers are all sporting pentium III's. I am personally in the notebook market for myself right now, and while I would like something with pIII power, I simply cannot afford more than a celeron 466. lets just say I would do backflips if I could get an athlon in a notebook!
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
My next 'workstation' is going to be the AMD Athlon once the 1Ghz+ CPUs arrive. Both of my Linux boxes have AMD K6-2 CPUs in them, and perform beautifully. My workstation has an overclocked Celery because it runs Win98 and all of my games, er, productivity apps... Now that the Athlon performs so well, I don't need Intel for anything.
That brings me to the point that I made in the subject line. If you do not like Intel's current vapour marketing (taking a page from the Microsoft playbook?) or their overclocked Pentium Pros, make sure your next computer has "Athlon Inside". Returning AMD to profitability is the best way to bring Intel back to reality.
Viv
Since even Intel's latest coppermine technology can't stand up to AMD's Athlon, a FUD campaign makes sense (In a twisted corporate way.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Marketing as usual. Marketing is becoming very important in this newly competetive business.
In the end, volume buyers will have to look at the expense of going with Intel versus AMD.... and it isn't based simply on price versus performance of a CPU or of an entire system.
The little Intel logos and all those Intel commercials are valuable to Dell, Compaq, and the smaller players..."See the Intel logo, and you know you've got something good".... or so they say.
let 'em kill eachother over it.
GREAT! Now we are left with Cyrix!!! Yippee!
Go ahead and try to find a K7 board from Asus. It isn't easy if you live in the states. Asus apparently makes two, the K7M and the K7V, but they aren't mentioned anywhere on their US site. Initially rumor had it that Asus would be releasing their K7 board(s) in the US in November but would be using a different company to market them so they didn't "insult" Intel.
Given the quality of Asus boards I personally planned on buying one regardless, however now I hear they will be openly marketing them themselves, so perhaps there is hope for Asus yet.
Actually, that is untrue. I bought an Athlon 550 this week for $289. The equivalent PIII is still somewhere over $300. Athlon motherboards are a bit more expensive, though, so in practical terms the two are about the same price. Also, there is no Xenon cpu. It's called Xeon.
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
Depends on how you calculate it. If you include stock options (which aren't required, but they are real costs), they lost $3B last year.
I don't think so. MS doesn't have comparable physical assets- their valuation is so overinflated even Steve Ballmer admits it (!), so they couldn't possibly buy anything as big as Sony without risking a collapse of the bubble. It's not reasonable.
Oh yeah. Sony is just a mountain of credibility in software. Their copious expertise in entertainment equipment has magically endowed them with the supernatural ability to write rock solid OS and end user software in no time at all. Lest we forget, Sony was a laughing stock in the computer business till recently, and still hasn't done much to exhonerate itself. Oh, yeah, the VAIO. And the PS1. Don't make me convulse in laughter. By the time Sony finally ships that damn brain buster, mainstream PC video cards will be dancing in the same ring...like a butterfly!
Even though in a lot of respects the intel corporation can be seen as dying (they're still growing, but by less and less each year) I think AMD will have a hard uphill battle with most IT professionals that see buying a processor as a bet on future support and technology, in the past intel has always been the winner (in popularity that is) and will be seen as the safe bet. Not to mention most have standardized on one thing or another and will probably be hard pressed to change it.
I've said for years that there are only two things that really matter in this industry: Marketing and installed base.
Computer technology is so complex, and is so often hidden in a black box that you cannot open, that marketing propaganda is far more powerful then it is in most industries. Do car commercials really convince anyone that Brand X is better then Brand Y? Nope. But "Intel Inside" has left a lasting impression on the average PC buyer. I know people who work in retail. When they go to sell a PC, everyone goes for the cheaper model with the faster clock rate, right up until they hear that it doesn't have Intel inside. Then they say, "I don't want any of this AM-whatever stuff, give me the Intel Inside thingy."
Marketing works in this industry. Quality and volume of marketing is a direct function of money put into it. And guess who has the most cash? That's right, Intel.
Moving on to installed base, AKA existing market share. Basically, the more market you have, the more market you gain. Part of it is network effects, part of it is economy of scale. Because Intel owns so much of the CPU market, they continue to own so much of the CPU market. AMD is doing their damndest to chip away at that wall, but it is rather like the sea breaking upon the shore -- it takes a loooong time to gain any ground.
Oh, to be fair, there are other factors. Intel has very deep pockets, so they can afford more research, higher pay for better workers, and the old fashioned "throw dollars at it until the problem is solved" approach. And, unlike a popular software monopoly I know and hate, Intel's stuff actually works pretty well in many cases.
But "sundling" is right. AMD has bet the farm on Athlon. The other x86-clones have already fallen to the irresistible march of Chipzilla. If Athlon fails, so will AMD's CPU offerings. That leaves a single player to control the future of the most popular computer architecture in use.
Be afraid. Be very afraid. Chipzilla is far from dead.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
the biggest improvement (almost the ONLY improvement, actually) Intel made with coppermine is the cache. For some applications that can fit pretty much everything in the cache (apparantly the q3 engine fit into this category), coppermine rocks. If your main loop & data doesnt fit in the cache, coppermine is a waste of money.
he is talking about the 5x86. Which is a 486 with balls. The 586 was a real pentium class CPU
I have to return some videotapes...
Actualy, wattage is a direct mesure of the heat produced in any non-mechanical device. With an athlon, you'd need to remove 60 wats of heat, or 60 jouls of energy per second. The in order to figure the change in temprature you'd need to know the size of the case, how much ventilation there is, etc.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
But as long as the Xenon's subsidize cheap celerons, I'm happy : )
Athlons are also very exspensive anyway, moreso then a PIII, I think
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
What they are concerned about is Playstation II. If Sony can actually mass-produce the Emotion Engine, it is going to give Intel (and other chip makers) serious headaches.
What does the average consumer want? A cheap, easy-to-set-up all-in-one word processor/game console/internet application. Playstation II fits the bill. There's no OS to hassle with, no IRQ's and memory conflicts. Just turn it on and it goes. It's what the iMac dreams to be.
AMD may have come out with a superior desktop processor just at the point when it doesn't matter anymore.
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Everyone is still complacent and saying let them fight it out... The one thing we all need to remember is that if you like Intel dropping it's prices, you better buy an Athlon. Otherwise, you can forget the dropping prices as this stint of competition will be over. Don't forget that AMD has bet EVERYTHING on the Athlon. They went deep into debt on Fab 30 and they have been losing money for the last several quarters. They have even announced they are going to sell one of their non-chip divisions which is profitable for cash to continue to fund their chip business. AMD is doing well on the technical side, but if they can't succeed with the Athlon, AMD is history. If it weren't for AMD there wouldn't have been low cost Celerons available to compete with their K6-2. If it weren't for the Athlon, Pentium 3 prices would still be much higher. This is not the first round of this fight. This fight has been going on for years, so many may be complacent that it will continue. You think AMD will always be around? Trust me, you will miss them when they are gone. If they lose this round, there won't be another one. Paul
If anyone ever argues that this country is run by the corporations that exist here, simply take a look at how alike a politician is to a corporation. Both of them do what it takes to make the "other guy" look bad instead of trying to actually make a change for the good. If half the energy they spend on bashing each other would be spent on improving their work, our country would be 10 times more advanced than it is now, IMHO.
SL33ZE, MCSD
em: joedipshit@hotmail.com
SL33ZE - Artificial Intelligence is No Match For Natural Stupidity -