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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?
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.
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.
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.
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