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.75 GHz Athlon Released
News.com is reporting that AMD has released a new 750 MHz Athlon. The chip is quite pricey ($800 in lots of 1000), but should be available before the year is over. Jerry Sanders says AMD is having a strong quarter. Cnnfn.com also has an article about the release of the chip, and also mentions that a 533 MHz K6-2 was released.
I'm all for technology advancing, really. Everything's getting smaller faster "better", and that's just beautiful. But this really screws up bragging. It just sounds weird to say "Yeah, I just bought a P5 1.25" "Pfft, I've got a 1.3, loser"
The article makes a very minor mistake. They imply that the speed advantage has something to do with clock-rate, and of course, it has nothing to do with that. Other than that, it's a good article, though I'm not sure that the Intel stock price had anything to do with this development DIRECTLY.
Intel has had a close-to-be monopoly for all too long, and AMD is the best chanse we have to change that.
I've already done my part, I've strongly advocated the buy of Athlon-based computers for the software developers where I work, and hopefully they'll come (I'm not in IS, but they usually listen to what we developers have to say ;)
So, all you tech-people with a chance to make a statement out there - you _are_ helping AMD in breaking Intels monopoly, right?
(and if you ask me, yes, Athlon is the better CPU also ... if it wasn't, I wouldn't recommend it ...)
it's in my head
There is a very nice review of the new 750Mhz Athlon over at http://anandtech.com
The review states that the new Athlon's external L2 cache does not run at 1/2 CPU speed but rather at 1/2.5 of CPU speed. So L2 cache dependant programs don't perform quite as well on the 750Mhz Athlon as anticipated. According to the review, the processor's FPU marks are (of course) faster than it's 700Mhz brother, but does the extra cost justify the minimal performance increase?
Many people would say no (including me), but remember that the consumers don't care about the internals of the processor, but rather care about the Mhz rating... That's why both Intel and AMD have pushed out 700+ Mhz processors already, even though their previous roadmaps show that they weren't going to push out those processors until Q1 or Q2 of 2000.
Anywho... just to inform you guys about the difference in the L2 cache...
This is just more proof that AMD has finally got something working well for once. Rumours have it that AMD could release 1GHz Athlons whenever they want, but they want to upset Intels "750MHz" day in January (the 10th) by releasing it then (or an 800/900MHz Athlon.
The Athlon is a much better design than the PIII. Now it is 0.18micron it should run cooler too. I would estimate that a 750MHz Athlon was around the equivalent of an 800MHz+ PIII.
Of course, there is the motherboard availability problems, but they are out there now in ever increasing numbers. The technology is old enough now for most of the early problems to have been ironed out.
I would like to see the spec figures for the new Athlon. Should provide interesting reading. I noticed that the FP figures for the 733MHz PIII were an abnormal jump higher than the normal PIII figures. Of course, if you really want power, then get an Alpha!
Of course, AMD has yet to concentrate on the SMP versions of the Athlon. When these arrive, Intel might start looking wistfully at its high end server market.
I am glad for this competition in the 'popular' CPU market, as it really drives prices down. Intel are on the losing end at the moment, but I imagine that they will have their day again. I don't think it will be with Itanium or IA-64 though. AMD have their own 64-bit expensions to IE-32 which they are creating, and the compatability _with speed_ issue might sway a lot of people towards AMDs offering rather than Intels EPIC monstrosity. Shame that such a old unwieldy ISA is still alive though.
I remember about a year and a half ago when Motorola confidently predicted that there would be 1GHz PPCs by the end of 1999. Strange that the one company you wouldn't have thought would have got there are within a hairs breadth of this goal.
It's nice to see that AMD is keeping ahead of Intel in the speed wars, but not so nice to see they seem to be pushing up into the same sort of price bracket to do so. One of the GOOD things about the AMD Vs Intel wars was that it was acting to push prices for chips down; I don't really *want* to be forced into buying the latest and greatest chip at enormous expense, just so I can play the latest games; I would much rather have a chip at a price I can afford, that is just below the leading edge
That said, the tiny little trailer that points to the new 553MHz K6 at a reasonable price is a much more welcome sight....
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-=DaveHowe=-
But this year there have been at least three companies that went practically overnight from being the standard that all others were measured against to being rather pathetically looking has-beens. Microsoft is in deep shit. Most people consider 3Dfx thoroughly beaten by nVidia in the current generation of cards, and from what I have seen in their next generation cards nVidia will continue to widen the gap. They are finally beginning to handle enough polygons to give realistic outdoor scenes with "real" trees. What is 3Dfx boasting about? Putting four identical old technology chips on a new board, which wastes memory and requires a separate power line in to the card. A buffer that can give you blurred motion lines? Whopee, that must be fun all of five minutes. And now AMD finally getting everything right, including the timing of the launch.
But even if the upstarts are current media darlings they are still fighting an uphill battle. They have less money to throw around on advertising and continued research, and they must make a lot of profit and contine to win consumer loyalty or they risk falling back into obscurity.
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Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
In case anyone is interested, here are links to the technical specs pages for the Athlon and the K6-2
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-=DaveHowe=-
...what with all the problems they've had this year - the fiasco over Camino, then the Processor Serial Number thing (the E.U. is considering banning serialed P3's altogether, of course) and serious shortages of its high end processors.
AMD, on the other hand, has the fastest Mhz processor (good for PR, even if the speed increase is only a few percent) and is selling its lower end processors as fast as it can crank them out.
Could it be that we finally have competition in the processor industry? (faint)
There's a good review of Intel's year at The Register.
Gerv
At http://www.hardocp.com, they have an article on how to remove the casing around the AMD Athlon processors and expose the `slug' and the cache chips. But if you choose to leave the casing on, any SECC1 cooling fan will cool those suckers down!
.18 micron process, the chip `should' run cooler than the 700Mhz .25 micron Athlon. But in any case, those things radiate 90+ watts of heat, which is a lot for a processor, but not as bad as some of the DEC Alpha, Pentium !!! 600+ Mhz, and the newer SPARC processors. The Alpha's can radiate over 120 watts of heat. Hey! With a dual processor Alpha system... I might be able to make some toast, since it does tend to toast x86 systems running Linux ;)
There is supposed to be several articles on how to convert a SECC1 or SECC2 alpha heatsink to fit on a bare Athlon processor, but the article isn't done yet.
Since the processor is manufactured using the
How are they cooling these fast chips it must be more than multiple fans and heat sinks. Difficult to tell - the cooling information should be Here, but that seems to only go up to the 700. I suspect they haven't gotten around to updating that bit yet, or Marketing are outstripping Production - just like at Intel :+)
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-=DaveHowe=-
To add to this: HZ is a measure for frequency. It is equivalent to the SIS unit 1/s (s is second) or one per second. A MegaHerz MHZ is 1000000*1/s or 1000000HZ. GigaHerz just adds a factor 10^3.
Simple
Jilles
You should be aware that most of the technologies used in the Merced architecture (which you should be aware is now called "Itanium") were previously pioneered in architectures like PA-RISC. 64-bit architectures in general have been around for a long time, too. RAMBUS was developed outside of Intel by Rambus Incorporated.
Intel is bringing these technologies to the desktop market, which is not a bad thing, but there are no recent indications of any special ability to innovate, as none of these technologies originated with Intel.
The only reason AMD has currently stuck with implementing ia32 clones has been that they have not been in a secure enough situation to do much else (although, they have made some interesting technological advances even in implementing their clones). If they manage to gain a reasonably comfortable position in the market, they will finally be able to take the same kinds of risks.
Based on past performance (cheaper processors, better designs, less bastardly behavior, less bungling), I would much rather have a financially secure AMD in the role of introducing newer technology to the desktop market, rather than Intel. That is why I (and I suspect many other slashdot readers) choose to support AMD.
I think the Linux community has a tendency to favor the underdog, regardless of facts or the situation...
I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but I think some critics (read: you) of the "Linux community" (read: slashdot posters) have a tendency to blindly take Intel PR material at face value, regardless of the facts of the situation.
DNA just wants to be free...
Is it AMD that is just pushing out processors, which, despite their speed, are not technological leaps forward
I wouldn't call the equivalent Intel chips "technological leaps forward" myself. I think that AMD has done an awful lot of technological work. The Athlon is a much better design than the Pentium III and is therefore faster, cycle for cycle, than a P3, and that was at 0.25micron. Now it is at 0.18micron, so it is cooler and faster. AMD aren't resting on their laurels though. They are using their Lightning Data Transport to provide very fast interconnects between SMP Athlons, which will mean an even greater increase in power!
Intel has always produced good products and is on the verge of pushing past the outdated i386 architecture; AMD is, on the other hand, what it always has been, namely, a company which lags 1-2 years behind Intel.
Intel designed the i386 architecture, and it was outdated when it was designed. Since then Intel has created such 'innovations' as MMX and motherboards that aren't futureproof (because they change their processors so new processors won't work on old boards). AMD did imitate originally, but now they innovate - witness their 64-bit extensions to x86 (sure, a crock, but x86 is here and everything runs on it, and I think it will be here for another 5 years at the very least).
Intel haven't done much RAMBUS stuff - they can't get it to work properly. Putting a lot of money into a company to produce RIMMs is a lot different. Would you call Apple a company that was innovative in the TFT LCD screen market? No.
Anyway, the true innovation was done in the 80's by ARM and the '90s with the Alpha. Altivec is another great innovation. Itanium is NOT an innovation, it is the bastard child of VLIW and predicated execution, and done in a horrible way that people will laugh at in years to come. Anadium (my name for McKinley) might be better, but by then Alphas will have risen, with the £100m advertising campaign that Compaq are going to do for it!
Oh, for cheap, low-cost Alphas...
I was happy to see the AMD commercial for two reasons:
1. IMO, the TV commercial means that AMD is finally reaching the masses (the people that wouldn't buy anything excpet that "Intel Inside" sticker). Making Intel shake, and continue to lower prices.
2. I finally got AMD's pronunciation of that stupid marketing nickname. Better than pentium, that's for sure.
-d9
From what I have gathered reading the reviews on the web, it looks like AMD is having problems with the onboard cache at speeds over 450 MHz in the K6-3, so they are speeding up the K6-2 to keep in competition with the Celery chips from Intel. I hope that we will see the K6-3 chips speed up when the Athlon moves its L2 cache on die.
Anyone know if Abit is going to do an Athlon board? I really like their MBs. I'm going to do a BP-6 for now, but would like to have Athlon as an option down the road.
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page.
I agree totally with you on the price war being a awesome thing for us little people. =] But, I can't say AMD is trying really to screw consumers with the pricing of their K7. I think they are excellent prices. You might forget that AMD is much much smaller and has much much more riding on the K7 then Intel has on the P3. Intel can afford to screw up a bit here and there (820, rambus, etc, etc) They have the market(mind)-share and the spare cash to do this with.
On the other hand, AMD really doesn't. They are taking (took?) a major gamble on their K7 chip. I wish AMD the best of luck with their business, and hope everything pays off for them. I wouldn't mind paying 200$ for a K7-500 or so, because I know the chip is worth it. I've read the articles, reviews, etc. I've also seen it in action, so I know my 200$ would be going to something worthwhile.
On the other hand (I'm on my third hand now) Intel charges more Mhz for Mhz on their chips then the superior (IMHO) K7. Why? Because they can. Because they know people will pay for it. AMD can't afford to think like that.
Anyway...That's just my 2 pennies worth.
but, you cant get more then 450mhz, now can you?
I'd really like a 10Ghz Athlon, but it just aint gonna happen
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"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
infact, its about 10 - 15x as much :)
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"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
you don't need a book on multithreading, I used some in a simple sample program I wrote make a function in the format
UINT functionName(LPVOID pParam)
then call AfxBeginThread (functionName,&pParam);
pParam is the paramiter you can pass. If you want you can make it a pointer to a class, and call a 'run' function or similar (its not quite as simple as Java, where you interface runnable, then make a new Thread instance, and start it but its close). Look up the help on AfxBeginThread (Its in afxwin.h)
I don't know how to do it in linux, I think it involves the 'fork()' function, or somthing. but you were talking about MS-flight sim, so I guess you're a windows user
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"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
- A.P.
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