All of VIA's processors, including the VIA Cyrix III actually have absolutely nothing to do with Cyrix other then the name. They're all based off of various revisions of the IDT/Centaur core, originally called the "Winchip".
Now, the downside here is that the old Winchip core was about the only socket 7 processor that had a WEAKER floating point unit then the Cyrix chips did (Cyrix weren't terribly bad, usually about on-par with the Pentiums by clock speed, though not by PR rating... mind you, the Pentium had a rather poor FPU to begin with).
Anyway, I don't know if VIA plans on improving the performance of the FPU on their "Eden" chip or not. I know that they're planning on improving the FPU for their next generation of "Cyrix" labeled desktop chips. Either way, this isn't exactly going to be a top-notch gaming system by any stretch. For users looking for laptops with FPU power AND low power consumption, one of the Ultra Low Voltage PIII's is probably your best bet.
I've seen the Mandrake installer. I've used the Mandrake installer (I used Mandrake as my Linux distro for over a year.) And Mandrake Installer, you're no OSX.
Well, I haven't installed OS X (I'd much rather spend $800 on really fast PC hardware then $2000 on slower Mac hardware), but I'd imagine that it's fairly slick, probably similar to what you would find with a modern Windows installer.
I have used Mandrake installer, and I DID have some trouble with it. Obviously, I'm a reasonably techie-type person who does the odd bit of programing and only ever builds custom systems for myself, so I know that if I'm having some trouble getting the installer working I'm not going to be the only one.
That being said though, it's important to note that a lot of the problems I was having with the Mandrake installer were things that I flat out could NOT do with a Windows installer (and, I'd assume, MacOS X). It was mainly related to having 6 different partitions split across two hard drives with at least 3 (and later 4) different operating systems installed (Win2K, Linux, DOS, and for a time, FreeBSD). Windows might have installed fine all on it's own, but it certainly wasn't going to allow me to boot up my Linux partition, no matter what I possible did. Mandrake caused me some trouble, but it DID allow me to boot up both my Windows partition AND my Linux partition (and my DOS and FreeBSD partitions, which were both sitting on a different hard drive).
So really a lot of the "problems" with Linux are the typical issues that people have always had with Unix type systems, they're powerful. Being able to do more means that you're going to have more options. More options means more potential points of difficulty.
(Yes, I am replying to my own post.. I often like to talk to myself!:> )
I should probably point out that the Macs start looking a whole lot more attractive when you look at laptops instead of desktops. The fastest PC chips are never available in laptops and laptop chips cost more because PC processors (particularly the Athlon and especially the P4) consome quite a bit of power. On the other hand, laptops in general are always very expensive for what you get when compared to desktops, but for those that need the mobility it's obviously worthwhile.
One of the big problems here though is that, relative to PCs, Macs have very slow processors. Yeah yeah, I know Steve Jobs likes to try and convince everyone that a 2MHz Mac will outperform a 20GHz PC, but in reality, the G4 is only marginally faster, clock for clock, then a PIII, about on-par with an AMD AthlonXP. The downside? The fastest G4's are running at 867MHz, the slowest AthlonXP's are running at 1.33GHz.
The end result is that the Macs have reasonably good components but slow CPUs as compared to most PCs. The Dell's and Compaq's of the world, on the other hand, have very fast processors and generally piss-poor other components.
All in all, you definitely DO spend a lot of money on a Mac, considering what you get. None of the components in even the high-end Macs are truly top-notch components, at best they're above-average stuff, unless you customize the system yourself (where you get REALLY expensive systems, because the markup on high-end components from OEMs is HUGE, regardless of whether it's from Dell or Apple).
PS. Anyone who actually believes Steve Job's comments about the speed of G4's should try and find ANY industry standard benchmark. ANY of them! Every major CPU out there today has SpecCPU 2000 scores EXCEPT for the Macs. Reason? Third-party SpecCPU scores haven't been too hot for Macs. There's a very good reason why Apple ONLY uses Photoshop, because it's the absolute easiest benchmark in the world to "prove" that any given architecture is faster then another. Apple's benchmarks show that the G4 is faster then the P4 in Photoshop, while Intel's benchmarks show the exact opposite. Neither of them is lieing, just using different benchmarks.
I'm with Rogers as well (Rogers-sorta@home?) in Guelph (Ontario) and have often managed more then 1.5Mbps downstream. Actually a bit over a year ago I was fairly consistantly getting 2.5Mbps down/512Kbps down, and the speed from/to good servers reflected that almost exactly. This year things aren't quite as fast, but I'm still managing about 2.0Mbps down, though only about a bit over 256Kbps upstream.
Now, that being said, this is all still on the @home network for the most part. Rogers is gradually shifting their service from @home to their own network, and my area is probably due to be changed over a bit after the holiday season (they're currently working on the Toronto area, see this page for details). It remains to be seen just how fast things are after that.
In comparison to DSL though, I think that in Guelph at least, the cable modems are still a touch faster. I have a number of friends getting Sympatico High Speed DSL, and their download speeds are typically a tiny bit slower then what I'm getting on cable, more like 1.0Mbps or maybe 1.5Mbps downstream (not too sure what upstream is like, but probably only 128 or 256Kbps). Still, both work pretty well, all things considered. No horror stories like I've heard some report.
Just a little FWIW for anyone who's wondering, the following current AMD chips support SSE:
AthlonXP
AthlonMP
Athlon 4 Mobile
Duron chips of 1GHz and faster (and new 900 and 950MHz chips)
Mobile Duron chips at 800MHz and greater
Presumably any future AMD chips will also support SSE. To date, none support SSE2 (as found in the P4), though rumor has it that this will show up in the Hammer series of AMD chips to be released in about a year.
Everybody should know by now that not all XXXMhz chips are created equal. This is particularly important for a Crusoe processor, a design which does not emphasize raw computing power [transmeta.com].
And of course, everyone knows why Transmeta doesn't emphasis the raw power of the Crusoe, becuase it doesn't have any raw power TO emphasis! Transmeta is selling by far the slowest x86 processor out there, so it would be utterly stupid to try for them to say that power is important! It would be like Geo trying to convince people to buy muscle cars!
The dual-BX boards might be fairly cheap, but there also rather dated, in that they've been discontinued for about a year now and Intel hasn't made a new processor that will work in these boards in a while either. The fastest chip that will work in a dual-BX board is the 1GHz PIII, which is quite a bit slower then most of the chips in the comparison article. The system itself is also limited to a 100MHz bus speed (assuming you don't overclock your BX chipset), as compared to the 133/266MHz DDR bus speed of the AthlonMP or the 100/400MHz QDR bus speed of the P4 Xeons. Combine that with lower speed memory, and the system just isn't in the same performance catagory at all.
In any case, the Dual-AthlonMP boards aren't really all that expensive. The Tyan TigerMP sells for a bit over $200, and there are a couple new dual AthlonMP boards coming up from a few other vendors that are likely to be cheaper still. For comparison, the dual P4 Xeon boards in the article, based off the i860 chipset, start at $550 and go up from there.
Now, as for stability, that's another question altogether. It would be real nice if it were actually possible to measure how "stable" a system is without requiring a few months of use. Unfortunately that isn't likely to happen. Intel boards have traditionally been very stable (and the 440BX chipset mentioned above is an excellent example of this, probably the most stable platform ever released for a PC), but even they have had more then their share of ups and downs recently. I think the fact that none of the major OEMs are selling servers based off P4 Xeons is perhaps somewhat telling that they aren't 100% certain about the reliability of new Intel platforms any more then they are about new AMD platforms.
Minor update to the above.. The @home DNS servers seem as though they are working for me once against, though reposnse times for pings are up in the 800-1000ms range. Of course, I've since installed a caching DNS server on my end of things, so I'm not all that worried..
Well, it looks to me like they're gone. I'm a Rogers@home customer, and was just on-line a few minutes ago when all DNS querries started failing for me. Trying to ping the @home DNS servers that I had been using and didn't get any response. I don't know if they're truly off, or just that they've blocked off the Rogers@home people or what.
On the upside, Roger's own new stuff seems to be working. Just checked my DNS entries on the Linux ip-masq box and it seems to have picked up brand new DNS severs to use. After a quick change to my workstation settings I was back up and running.... err, at least walking at a brisk pace. It looks like this change over was rather last-minute for Rogers, and some of their servers are still a touch sketchy. E-mail is working fine (though I only send through their servers, not receive), but usenet has been up and down for the past few days. A couple days ago I wasn't getting much at all, I believe due to DHCP server problems, but it seems to be working again.
Not really that big of an issue for AMD, mostly this is just an improvement over the idea of SOI, which AMD will begin using before Intel does. What does this mean? Just that AMD, Intel, IBM will continue to leap frog each other with any given technology, though for the most part all three are likely to be pretty darn close when it comes to the end result.
As for Transmeta, unless they can get their performance up to par in a big hurry, they aren't going to go anywhere fast. The difference between the power consumption of the Crusoe and some of the ultra low-powered chips that Intel is putting out now amounts to little more then noise when compared to the power consumption of the hard drive and monitor, and the very fastest Crusoe's are quite a bit slower then chips that have been long since discontinued by Intel (and AMD, and even VIA).
Transmeta might simply be proving that VLIW just does not work in practise when it comes to general purpose CPUs (DSPs are another story).. This of course, is very bad news for Intel, since they could very well be proving the same thing with their Itanium.
1) The idea of "lossless" compression.
2) People who are declared snobs because they hate compressed audio.
The difference between "loseeless" and "lossy" compression is actually very simple. Lossless compression means that your output is EXACTLY recreated from the input. With lossy, this is not the case.
What does this mean for audio stuff? Well, first of all, ALL audio has some form of lossy-ness to it. Analog signals can NEVER be exactly reproduced due to the very nature of what an analog signal is. The very best analog equipment can reproduce a signal so closely that no one will ever be able to tell the difference, but it's still lossy equipment. As you might have guess, CDs are a lossy compression format.
Where lossless compression comes into place is when you have digital signals. Being quantitized, a digital signal can be exactly reproduced. The lossless audio compression being talked about here takes your basic 44.1KHz, 16-bit signal and stores in a different format. When you go to play these files, the system can exactly recreate that 44.1KHz, 16-bit signal 100% accurately.
So, is this exactly lossless from the original artists recording? No, certainly not. Then again, neither is a CD, a record, or any other possible format that anyone could possibly ever imagine. However it is lossless as compared to the CD.
As for the snobbiness of audiophiles, I'd like to see someone do a rather interesting study. Get a bunch of people who claim that they are audiophiles and ask them to tell the difference between a well encoded mp3 file (256kbit/s or some such thing) and the original CD. Play the mp3 file and tell them that they are listening to the CD, then proceed to play the CD file and tell them that it's the mp3 file. Ask them which sounds better to their ears. I'd be VERY surprised if less then 90% of these "audiophiles" would say that "CD" (really mp3) sounded better then the "mp3" (really the CD). Sure, some really can tell the difference, but there are a lot more people out there who truly believe that they can tell the difference when they really can't. Are these people "snobs"? Not exactly, pretty much every person on the planet has at least one thing that they believe they are better at then they really are.
Uhh.. is "real soon now" accurate enough? Chips these days use a LOT of power, and that power has to be dissipated as heat. AMD's highest power chips are up in the 60-70W range, ie about the same as a light bulb. Have you ever tried to touch a lightbulb while it was turned on?! But it only gets worse from there. Intel's P4 chips actually produce more power, up ranging from about 60-80W for the 2.0GHz P4 (the P4 has somewhat more variability, and somewhat poorer documentation, when it comes to power consumption). However, Intel's Itanium takes the cake for the time being. Topping out at 130W, the top-end Itanium is a REAL monster when it comes to heat. This is why you aren't going to see any 1U Itanium servers any time soon!
If you dig deep into Tom's Hardware Guide, you'll also find that Tom is a nutcase that knows VERY LITTLE about computers. He also has a VERY short temper and tends to paint in a good light whatever company is giving him the red-carpet treatment for the month. Tom runs his site for ne purpose, to make a LOT of money, and he does VERY well at that. He probably has one of the most profitable non-pr0n sites on the net.
Anyway, as far as stability goes, VIA, SiS and ALi chipsets have always had more ups and downs then Intel chipsets. Intel hasn't been perfect either, both the i810 and i820 had horrible problems when they first came out (and the i820 never really did go anywhere), and even the old 440LX chipset had it's share of problems. However by and large Intel has been fairly consistant with their chipsets, while the Taiwanese guys have been a bit more over the map.
Another MAJOR issue when it comes to stability of a system is market share. Intel traditionally had the most market share when it came to chipsets, so the third party sound card, video card, NIC, etc. manufacturers test their products against Intel chipsets first and foremost. Testing against VIA, ALi and SiS chipsets used to be a secondory objective at best. Now, I know that some people will jump on this and say that if VIA doesn't work exactly like Intel it's VIA's fault, but really that ain't always so. As the old saying goes, "Standards aren't". VIA and Intel could follow the PCI spec exactly to the word 100% of the way and be TOTALLY incompatible. Actually that's just what happened when PCI first came out, though now things are much better. Still, there are a lot of cards out there that have buggy drivers which only work due to some quirk in some chipsets, and when paired with a different chipset that doesn't have said quirk, things go wrong. Case-in-point, the "VIA" data corruption bug that was caused by buggy Sound Blaster Live! drivers.
Don't worry, the next "Dell will use AMD" rumor should be un in a few weeks. How do I know? Well simple, it's been almost 6 months since the last one, and EVERY 6 months somebody out there starts a rumor that Dell will use AMD processors. To date, none have been true.
As for Jerry Sanders, that guy cracks me up. Listening to him talk about Intel is like listening to Larry Ellison talk about Microsoft. Not always 100% accurate, but he sure knows which side he's cheering for and doesn't care if everyone else knows as well. Quite a change from Intel's drab, politically correct "we don't comment on competitors product" line:>
The "junk motherboards coming out of Taiwan" make up most of all motherboards sold, INCLUDING those that Dell uses. Virtually every company either is based in Taiwan or outsources their production of motherboards to Taiwain or China. This includes the Intel motherboards that Dell uses.
Dell using Intel exclusively has a lot to do with the way that they sell all their systems as custom-built setups. They try to eliminate as many variables as possible and outsource as much testing as possible. This is why they use exclusively Intel processors sitting on Intel motherboards using Intel chipsets. It's not so much that these are better/more stable, just that Intel does all the compatibility testing for them so that all Dell has to test is things like video cards, hard drives, sound cards, etc. If AMD wants to sell to Dell they would probably have to get some OEM to produce "AMD" motherboards for them and sell Dell kits of processors+motherboard+chipset. Of course, this doesn't fit in that well with AMD's business model.
That being said, VIA, ALi and SiS have had more then their share of ups and downs in the past, while Intel chipsets have usually being pretty consistent. I'm personally looking towards the new nVidia chipsets for AMD to see how that changes the landscape of things.
Simple answer as to why they don't use Alpha or StrongARM, Intel doesn't like non-Intel instructions sets. They have some good reasons for this, ie it keeps control over the instruction set in-house and prevents them from getting screwed over by some other company. I suspect that there may also be a bit of political/marketing type stuff going on as well, in that having their own instruction set means that they have much more control over who produces competing products.
In any case, StrongARM will continue to live on, under the X-Scale name, and Intel does have some rather impressive plans for these chips. Alpha will be put to rest. A bit of the technology might be incorporated into the Itanium line, but probably not much since the two designs are quite different. The real thing that Intel gained through the whole Alpha deal with Compaq was that they acquired some of the brightest CPU designers around and some very good compiler writters (the latter being VERY important for the Itanium).
Minor correction, they never used WWII fighter jet names, it was always cars. The "Spitfire" was a small, low cost and apperently not particularly reliable (ie AMD made a bad choice in names?), sports car produced by Triumph. The "Spitfire" plane might have been a lot more well known, but that wasn't what the chip was nicknamed for.
The 1.7GHz Xeon processors that you use at work are not P4's though, although to be fair, the option to use Xeons should have been mentioned in the initial article. It is perhaps important to note though that the current Xeon (such as the one that you have at work) is essentially identical to the current P4 except for the different socket used and the fact that it has been validated for SMP use. The actual processor core is the same.
That being said, the price tags of the P4 and the Xeon shows a definite difference between the two chips. Combine that with the fact that Xeon boards are quite expensive, and for the time being they require fairly expensive RDRAM memory, and you get a rather costly setup. However, in situations where cost doesn't matter as much as performance (which is what the original article was trying to get at), the dual Xeon would definitely be the closest competitor to the AthlonMP.
Now, as to just how close of a competitor the Xeon is to the AthlonMP, well, if you read this article at Ace's Hardware (one of the very few hardware websites run by people who actually know what the heck they're talking about), you'll notice that dual 1.2GHz AthlonMP's match or beat the dual 1.7GHz Xeons pretty much across the board. The high-end workstation market is one area where AMD currently has Intel beat solidly in terms of raw performance, and pretty much trounces them in price/performance. Of course, that hasn't stopped Intel from maintaining 95%+ of the high-end workstation marketshare... but I digress.
iObjects Dadio operating system for digital music players supports OGG Vorbis files, so at least some hardware players out there could in theory play them. To the best of my knowledge, Iomega's HipZip is the only players actually using this operating system at the moment. That being said though, I'm pretty certain that the processor used in the RioVolt will support the same operating system, though the rest of the hardware likely does not. That means that should SonicBlue decide to do so, the RioVolt could potentially be upgraded to support OGG as well.
As far as actual processing power goes, most of the portable digital music players out there should be capable of playing OGGs, the format shouldn't take much more or less processing power then MP3, and would be very comperable to any of the other "new" compressed audio formats (WMA, AAC, etc.). The problem now is two-fold. First, a lot of the old portable audio players used ASICs which can't be reprogrammed. Fortunately almost all of the new ones I've seen come out these days have moved to either a straight DSP or an ARM processor, both of which are reprogramable. Other then that, it's just a matter of someone actually adding the code to these players. Not exactly something that could be done in a weekend, but given that the OGG format is OpenSource in straight C code, porting it shouldn't be TOO hard.
For me personally though, I really can't tell the difference most of the time. A good quality encoder for either mp3 or ogg should produce fine sound when used in the 160kbps range. I prefer the OGG format for political reasons, but that's somewhat beyond the scope of this discussion:>
I'll second that, I've got a cable modem through Rogers (cable co. up here). $40CDN a month (~$27US) for 2.5Mbit/s down and 0.5Mbit/s up, and yes, we really do get those speeds with a fair degree of regularity. I don't often see many 300KByte/s downloads from a single site (though I have hit some, a few months back my Debian updates used to come in at that speed, REAL nice!), but getting two sites at 150Kbyte/s each is certainly not unheard of.
I also have friends in the area that are getting DSL through Sympatico (Bell Canada's ISP). Same price, peak performance isn't quite as high, but the system does often get up to 100Kbyte/s from a single, well connected site.
Ohh, and all of this is in a city of only 100,000 people (Guelph). This summer I actually got slighly faster cable modem performance while living in Sudbury (also only about 100,000 people) through their cable co. (subcontracted through local ISPs). What was really interesting about that though was that they had begun offering cable modem service to all the small northern communities in the area. Several of the cities were only 2500 to 5000 people.
Long story short: broadband definitely CAN work, and work well, even in fairly remote communities.
The difference between the two would likely be pretty negligible in terms of performance, though some applications might benefit a bit more for one architechture over the other. The Athlon (especially AthlonMP/AthlonXP) is a more powerful processor core and has 4 times as much L1 cache, but the PIII-S has a slightly higher clock rate and twice as much L2 cache. End result, probably not much difference.
If I were to pick one for performance, it would probalby be the dual-Athlons, due mainly to it's bus architechture. The dual-PIII's use a 133MHz, 64-bit wide shared bus. The Athlon's use a pair of independant 266MHz (err, 133MHz DDR to be specific), 64-bit wide idependant buses, one for each processor. So, while the dual-SDRAM banks would normally be slightly faster then a single DDR channel, the PIII system ends up getting bottlenecked from chipset to processors. In the Athlon system the chipset has plenty of bandwidth to the processors and can make more effective use of the memory bandwidth available.
As mentioned above though, a simple "Not much difference" is enough to answer the original question. Price is likely to be pretty comperable as well when you factor in the cost of processors, motherboards and ECC Registered memory for either system.
Err, umm.. you might try re-reading your sources when quoting them. The heat generated by a processor is a 100% direct relation to the power consumption of this chip (seeing as your processor doesn't give off any light/sound/other form of energy.. or at least mine doesn't:> ).. In other words, if one chip draws 70W of power and another draws 88W of power, the only way for the second chip to run cooler is that it has a better heatsink+fan and/or better case cooling. Now,if we can read beyond Intel's somewhat confusing new "Thermal Design Power" to figure out how much the chips actually use, I think you'll see that the Athlon and the P4 draw damn near the same amount of power for roughly comperable performance levels (ie a 1.4GHz Athlon and a 1.8GHz P4). Typical power draw for the P4 is a tiny bit lower (roughly 60W vs. 66W for the Athlon), with a maximum real-world draw being about 72W for the Athlon and slightly higher for the P4, and the maximum theoretical power being about 74W for the Athlon and 89W for the P4. As you can see, the P4 has a somewhat wide range of temperatures then the Athlon, but really heat is a non-issue when comparing these chips.
Now, when compared to the Athlon or P4 to a PIII, well that's another story (hence the reason why it took AMD over almost two years to get laptops using Athlons and it'll take Intel a while to get a P4 for laptops out).
FWIW, anyone interested in knowing where these numbers are from, check out AMD's Athlon PGA datasheets (where they quite nicely and clearly provide the above numbers) or Intel's Thermal Design Guidelines for the P4 (where the info is presented in a somewhat convoluted manner which requires a bit of reading and guessing from graphs).
Interesting FWIW, the i845 (Brookdale) chipset that Intel is shipping for SDRAM support has full DDR support built in already, several motherboard manufacturers have already demoed i845 boards using DDR memory. However, Intel will be disabling DDR support until Jan. 2002. Official reason, from what I've heard, is that the DDR stuff isn't fully functional yet. Unofficial rumor is that Rambus has got Intel by the balls (albeit by a quickly loosening grip) due to some legal/contractual deals. ie Intel produces a DDR chipset now and Rambus sues them for patent infringment (though it's becoming increasing clear that intelligence will prevail and Rambus will get their *sses thrown out of court for the whole SDRAM/DDR litigation thing).
On the subject though, IMO Intel DESPRATELY needs a DDR chipset for the P4. Though sales of this chip have picked up significantly, they're still less than Intel's initial forcast, and I think that a lot of it has to do with RDRAM. SDRAM gets rid of that problem, but then saddles the P4 with another problem, ie a 5-25% performance hit (with the largest performance drop coming in the areas where the P4 had previously been the strongest). End result is that it makes the Athlon look like quite an attractive platform from the performance side of things. Where previously the top speed grades of Athlons and P4's were pretty much neck and neck, with PC133 SDRAM the P4 looses quite badly in all but quite rare cases.
RDRAM has it's ups and downs. Yes, it does offer more bandwidth per pin then DDR does, however it requires more control, power and ground pins to go along with the data pins. End result? Both RDRAM RIMMs and DDR DIMMs are 184 pins, and one RDRAM RIMM offers up to 1.6GB/s while a single DDR DIMM offers up to 2.1GB/s of bandwidth. RDRAM in the P4 is dual-channel though, so that number doubles in this case.
However, on top of this whole bandwidth issue there are MANY downsides to RDRAM. First off, the whole idea of the low-pin-count was to reduce the cost of producing motherboards and chipsets, but since you need two seperate 400MHz DDR channels to get decent performance from an RDRAM system (as the i820 painfully illustrated), the end result has been chipsets and boards that are MORE expensive rather then less so. Case in point, MSI just recently released the first 4-layer dual channel RDRAM board of any company (as far as I know), all other RDRAM boards are 6-layer ones, which apperently adds ~$15-$20 to the cost of these boards. DDR boards, meanwhile, are mostly 4-layer boards, and SDRAM boards are almost exclusively 4-layer products.
In addition to that there's also the much publicized latency issue (though RDRAM doesn't really have much worse latency then DDR SDRAM, to the point that a good RDRAM chipset will have lower latency then a crappy DDR chipset any day). There's also some issues with RDRAM being essentially a serialized I/O port being used as a bus (hence the requirement for cRIMMs to fill up empty RIMM sockets), which causes some bad transmission line-type problems.
All in all, RDRAM is a great technology for some uses, but the PC isn't really one of those uses (at least not now). The Sony PlayStation2? Now that's a perfect example of where RDRAM makes perfect sense. But a PS2 is VERY different from a PC..
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All of VIA's processors, including the VIA Cyrix III actually have absolutely nothing to do with Cyrix other then the name. They're all based off of various revisions of the IDT/Centaur core, originally called the "Winchip".
Now, the downside here is that the old Winchip core was about the only socket 7 processor that had a WEAKER floating point unit then the Cyrix chips did (Cyrix weren't terribly bad, usually about on-par with the Pentiums by clock speed, though not by PR rating... mind you, the Pentium had a rather poor FPU to begin with).
Anyway, I don't know if VIA plans on improving the performance of the FPU on their "Eden" chip or not. I know that they're planning on improving the FPU for their next generation of "Cyrix" labeled desktop chips. Either way, this isn't exactly going to be a top-notch gaming system by any stretch. For users looking for laptops with FPU power AND low power consumption, one of the Ultra Low Voltage PIII's is probably your best bet.
I've seen the Mandrake installer. I've used the Mandrake installer (I used Mandrake as my Linux distro for over a year.) And Mandrake Installer, you're no OSX.
Well, I haven't installed OS X (I'd much rather spend $800 on really fast PC hardware then $2000 on slower Mac hardware), but I'd imagine that it's fairly slick, probably similar to what you would find with a modern Windows installer.I have used Mandrake installer, and I DID have some trouble with it. Obviously, I'm a reasonably techie-type person who does the odd bit of programing and only ever builds custom systems for myself, so I know that if I'm having some trouble getting the installer working I'm not going to be the only one.
That being said though, it's important to note that a lot of the problems I was having with the Mandrake installer were things that I flat out could NOT do with a Windows installer (and, I'd assume, MacOS X). It was mainly related to having 6 different partitions split across two hard drives with at least 3 (and later 4) different operating systems installed (Win2K, Linux, DOS, and for a time, FreeBSD). Windows might have installed fine all on it's own, but it certainly wasn't going to allow me to boot up my Linux partition, no matter what I possible did. Mandrake caused me some trouble, but it DID allow me to boot up both my Windows partition AND my Linux partition (and my DOS and FreeBSD partitions, which were both sitting on a different hard drive).
So really a lot of the "problems" with Linux are the typical issues that people have always had with Unix type systems, they're powerful. Being able to do more means that you're going to have more options. More options means more potential points of difficulty.
(Yes, I am replying to my own post.. I often like to talk to myself! :> )
I should probably point out that the Macs start looking a whole lot more attractive when you look at laptops instead of desktops. The fastest PC chips are never available in laptops and laptop chips cost more because PC processors (particularly the Athlon and especially the P4) consome quite a bit of power. On the other hand, laptops in general are always very expensive for what you get when compared to desktops, but for those that need the mobility it's obviously worthwhile.
One of the big problems here though is that, relative to PCs, Macs have very slow processors. Yeah yeah, I know Steve Jobs likes to try and convince everyone that a 2MHz Mac will outperform a 20GHz PC, but in reality, the G4 is only marginally faster, clock for clock, then a PIII, about on-par with an AMD AthlonXP. The downside? The fastest G4's are running at 867MHz, the slowest AthlonXP's are running at 1.33GHz.
The end result is that the Macs have reasonably good components but slow CPUs as compared to most PCs. The Dell's and Compaq's of the world, on the other hand, have very fast processors and generally piss-poor other components.
All in all, you definitely DO spend a lot of money on a Mac, considering what you get. None of the components in even the high-end Macs are truly top-notch components, at best they're above-average stuff, unless you customize the system yourself (where you get REALLY expensive systems, because the markup on high-end components from OEMs is HUGE, regardless of whether it's from Dell or Apple).
PS. Anyone who actually believes Steve Job's comments about the speed of G4's should try and find ANY industry standard benchmark. ANY of them! Every major CPU out there today has SpecCPU 2000 scores EXCEPT for the Macs. Reason? Third-party SpecCPU scores haven't been too hot for Macs. There's a very good reason why Apple ONLY uses Photoshop, because it's the absolute easiest benchmark in the world to "prove" that any given architecture is faster then another. Apple's benchmarks show that the G4 is faster then the P4 in Photoshop, while Intel's benchmarks show the exact opposite. Neither of them is lieing, just using different benchmarks.
I'm with Rogers as well (Rogers-sorta@home?) in Guelph (Ontario) and have often managed more then 1.5Mbps downstream. Actually a bit over a year ago I was fairly consistantly getting 2.5Mbps down/512Kbps down, and the speed from/to good servers reflected that almost exactly. This year things aren't quite as fast, but I'm still managing about 2.0Mbps down, though only about a bit over 256Kbps upstream.
Now, that being said, this is all still on the @home network for the most part. Rogers is gradually shifting their service from @home to their own network, and my area is probably due to be changed over a bit after the holiday season (they're currently working on the Toronto area, see this page for details). It remains to be seen just how fast things are after that.
In comparison to DSL though, I think that in Guelph at least, the cable modems are still a touch faster. I have a number of friends getting Sympatico High Speed DSL, and their download speeds are typically a tiny bit slower then what I'm getting on cable, more like 1.0Mbps or maybe 1.5Mbps downstream (not too sure what upstream is like, but probably only 128 or 256Kbps). Still, both work pretty well, all things considered. No horror stories like I've heard some report.
Just a little FWIW for anyone who's wondering, the following current AMD chips support SSE:
AthlonXP
AthlonMP
Athlon 4 Mobile
Duron chips of 1GHz and faster (and new 900 and 950MHz chips)
Mobile Duron chips at 800MHz and greater
Presumably any future AMD chips will also support SSE. To date, none support SSE2 (as found in the P4), though rumor has it that this will show up in the Hammer series of AMD chips to be released in about a year.
Everybody should know by now that not all XXXMhz chips are created equal. This is particularly important for a Crusoe processor, a design which does not emphasize raw computing power [transmeta.com].
And of course, everyone knows why Transmeta doesn't emphasis the raw power of the Crusoe, becuase it doesn't have any raw power TO emphasis! Transmeta is selling by far the slowest x86 processor out there, so it would be utterly stupid to try for them to say that power is important! It would be like Geo trying to convince people to buy muscle cars!
The dual-BX boards might be fairly cheap, but there also rather dated, in that they've been discontinued for about a year now and Intel hasn't made a new processor that will work in these boards in a while either. The fastest chip that will work in a dual-BX board is the 1GHz PIII, which is quite a bit slower then most of the chips in the comparison article. The system itself is also limited to a 100MHz bus speed (assuming you don't overclock your BX chipset), as compared to the 133/266MHz DDR bus speed of the AthlonMP or the 100/400MHz QDR bus speed of the P4 Xeons. Combine that with lower speed memory, and the system just isn't in the same performance catagory at all.
In any case, the Dual-AthlonMP boards aren't really all that expensive. The Tyan TigerMP sells for a bit over $200, and there are a couple new dual AthlonMP boards coming up from a few other vendors that are likely to be cheaper still. For comparison, the dual P4 Xeon boards in the article, based off the i860 chipset, start at $550 and go up from there.
Now, as for stability, that's another question altogether. It would be real nice if it were actually possible to measure how "stable" a system is without requiring a few months of use. Unfortunately that isn't likely to happen. Intel boards have traditionally been very stable (and the 440BX chipset mentioned above is an excellent example of this, probably the most stable platform ever released for a PC), but even they have had more then their share of ups and downs recently. I think the fact that none of the major OEMs are selling servers based off P4 Xeons is perhaps somewhat telling that they aren't 100% certain about the reliability of new Intel platforms any more then they are about new AMD platforms.
Minor update to the above.. The @home DNS servers seem as though they are working for me once against, though reposnse times for pings are up in the 800-1000ms range. Of course, I've since installed a caching DNS server on my end of things, so I'm not all that worried..
Well, it looks to me like they're gone. I'm a Rogers@home customer, and was just on-line a few minutes ago when all DNS querries started failing for me. Trying to ping the @home DNS servers that I had been using and didn't get any response. I don't know if they're truly off, or just that they've blocked off the Rogers@home people or what.
On the upside, Roger's own new stuff seems to be working. Just checked my DNS entries on the Linux ip-masq box and it seems to have picked up brand new DNS severs to use. After a quick change to my workstation settings I was back up and running.... err, at least walking at a brisk pace. It looks like this change over was rather last-minute for Rogers, and some of their servers are still a touch sketchy. E-mail is working fine (though I only send through their servers, not receive), but usenet has been up and down for the past few days. A couple days ago I wasn't getting much at all, I believe due to DHCP server problems, but it seems to be working again.
Oh well, so far so good (knock on wood).
Not really that big of an issue for AMD, mostly this is just an improvement over the idea of SOI, which AMD will begin using before Intel does. What does this mean? Just that AMD, Intel, IBM will continue to leap frog each other with any given technology, though for the most part all three are likely to be pretty darn close when it comes to the end result.
As for Transmeta, unless they can get their performance up to par in a big hurry, they aren't going to go anywhere fast. The difference between the power consumption of the Crusoe and some of the ultra low-powered chips that Intel is putting out now amounts to little more then noise when compared to the power consumption of the hard drive and monitor, and the very fastest Crusoe's are quite a bit slower then chips that have been long since discontinued by Intel (and AMD, and even VIA).
Transmeta might simply be proving that VLIW just does not work in practise when it comes to general purpose CPUs (DSPs are another story).. This of course, is very bad news for Intel, since they could very well be proving the same thing with their Itanium.
I find two things funny:
1) The idea of "lossless" compression. 2) People who are declared snobs because they hate compressed audio.
The difference between "loseeless" and "lossy" compression is actually very simple. Lossless compression means that your output is EXACTLY recreated from the input. With lossy, this is not the case.
What does this mean for audio stuff? Well, first of all, ALL audio has some form of lossy-ness to it. Analog signals can NEVER be exactly reproduced due to the very nature of what an analog signal is. The very best analog equipment can reproduce a signal so closely that no one will ever be able to tell the difference, but it's still lossy equipment. As you might have guess, CDs are a lossy compression format.
Where lossless compression comes into place is when you have digital signals. Being quantitized, a digital signal can be exactly reproduced. The lossless audio compression being talked about here takes your basic 44.1KHz, 16-bit signal and stores in a different format. When you go to play these files, the system can exactly recreate that 44.1KHz, 16-bit signal 100% accurately.
So, is this exactly lossless from the original artists recording? No, certainly not. Then again, neither is a CD, a record, or any other possible format that anyone could possibly ever imagine. However it is lossless as compared to the CD.
As for the snobbiness of audiophiles, I'd like to see someone do a rather interesting study. Get a bunch of people who claim that they are audiophiles and ask them to tell the difference between a well encoded mp3 file (256kbit/s or some such thing) and the original CD. Play the mp3 file and tell them that they are listening to the CD, then proceed to play the CD file and tell them that it's the mp3 file. Ask them which sounds better to their ears. I'd be VERY surprised if less then 90% of these "audiophiles" would say that "CD" (really mp3) sounded better then the "mp3" (really the CD). Sure, some really can tell the difference, but there are a lot more people out there who truly believe that they can tell the difference when they really can't. Are these people "snobs"? Not exactly, pretty much every person on the planet has at least one thing that they believe they are better at then they really are.
Uhh.. is "real soon now" accurate enough? Chips these days use a LOT of power, and that power has to be dissipated as heat. AMD's highest power chips are up in the 60-70W range, ie about the same as a light bulb. Have you ever tried to touch a lightbulb while it was turned on?! But it only gets worse from there. Intel's P4 chips actually produce more power, up ranging from about 60-80W for the 2.0GHz P4 (the P4 has somewhat more variability, and somewhat poorer documentation, when it comes to power consumption). However, Intel's Itanium takes the cake for the time being. Topping out at 130W, the top-end Itanium is a REAL monster when it comes to heat. This is why you aren't going to see any 1U Itanium servers any time soon!
If you dig deep into Tom's Hardware Guide, you'll also find that Tom is a nutcase that knows VERY LITTLE about computers. He also has a VERY short temper and tends to paint in a good light whatever company is giving him the red-carpet treatment for the month. Tom runs his site for ne purpose, to make a LOT of money, and he does VERY well at that. He probably has one of the most profitable non-pr0n sites on the net.
Anyway, as far as stability goes, VIA, SiS and ALi chipsets have always had more ups and downs then Intel chipsets. Intel hasn't been perfect either, both the i810 and i820 had horrible problems when they first came out (and the i820 never really did go anywhere), and even the old 440LX chipset had it's share of problems. However by and large Intel has been fairly consistant with their chipsets, while the Taiwanese guys have been a bit more over the map.
Another MAJOR issue when it comes to stability of a system is market share. Intel traditionally had the most market share when it came to chipsets, so the third party sound card, video card, NIC, etc. manufacturers test their products against Intel chipsets first and foremost. Testing against VIA, ALi and SiS chipsets used to be a secondory objective at best. Now, I know that some people will jump on this and say that if VIA doesn't work exactly like Intel it's VIA's fault, but really that ain't always so. As the old saying goes, "Standards aren't". VIA and Intel could follow the PCI spec exactly to the word 100% of the way and be TOTALLY incompatible. Actually that's just what happened when PCI first came out, though now things are much better. Still, there are a lot of cards out there that have buggy drivers which only work due to some quirk in some chipsets, and when paired with a different chipset that doesn't have said quirk, things go wrong. Case-in-point, the "VIA" data corruption bug that was caused by buggy Sound Blaster Live! drivers.
Don't worry, the next "Dell will use AMD" rumor should be un in a few weeks. How do I know? Well simple, it's been almost 6 months since the last one, and EVERY 6 months somebody out there starts a rumor that Dell will use AMD processors. To date, none have been true.
As for Jerry Sanders, that guy cracks me up. Listening to him talk about Intel is like listening to Larry Ellison talk about Microsoft. Not always 100% accurate, but he sure knows which side he's cheering for and doesn't care if everyone else knows as well. Quite a change from Intel's drab, politically correct "we don't comment on competitors product" line :>
The "junk motherboards coming out of Taiwan" make up most of all motherboards sold, INCLUDING those that Dell uses. Virtually every company either is based in Taiwan or outsources their production of motherboards to Taiwain or China. This includes the Intel motherboards that Dell uses.
Dell using Intel exclusively has a lot to do with the way that they sell all their systems as custom-built setups. They try to eliminate as many variables as possible and outsource as much testing as possible. This is why they use exclusively Intel processors sitting on Intel motherboards using Intel chipsets. It's not so much that these are better/more stable, just that Intel does all the compatibility testing for them so that all Dell has to test is things like video cards, hard drives, sound cards, etc. If AMD wants to sell to Dell they would probably have to get some OEM to produce "AMD" motherboards for them and sell Dell kits of processors+motherboard+chipset. Of course, this doesn't fit in that well with AMD's business model.
That being said, VIA, ALi and SiS have had more then their share of ups and downs in the past, while Intel chipsets have usually being pretty consistent. I'm personally looking towards the new nVidia chipsets for AMD to see how that changes the landscape of things.
Simple answer as to why they don't use Alpha or StrongARM, Intel doesn't like non-Intel instructions sets. They have some good reasons for this, ie it keeps control over the instruction set in-house and prevents them from getting screwed over by some other company. I suspect that there may also be a bit of political/marketing type stuff going on as well, in that having their own instruction set means that they have much more control over who produces competing products.
In any case, StrongARM will continue to live on, under the X-Scale name, and Intel does have some rather impressive plans for these chips. Alpha will be put to rest. A bit of the technology might be incorporated into the Itanium line, but probably not much since the two designs are quite different. The real thing that Intel gained through the whole Alpha deal with Compaq was that they acquired some of the brightest CPU designers around and some very good compiler writters (the latter being VERY important for the Itanium).
Minor correction, they never used WWII fighter jet names, it was always cars. The "Spitfire" was a small, low cost and apperently not particularly reliable (ie AMD made a bad choice in names?), sports car produced by Triumph. The "Spitfire" plane might have been a lot more well known, but that wasn't what the chip was nicknamed for.
The 1.7GHz Xeon processors that you use at work are not P4's though, although to be fair, the option to use Xeons should have been mentioned in the initial article. It is perhaps important to note though that the current Xeon (such as the one that you have at work) is essentially identical to the current P4 except for the different socket used and the fact that it has been validated for SMP use. The actual processor core is the same.
That being said, the price tags of the P4 and the Xeon shows a definite difference between the two chips. Combine that with the fact that Xeon boards are quite expensive, and for the time being they require fairly expensive RDRAM memory, and you get a rather costly setup. However, in situations where cost doesn't matter as much as performance (which is what the original article was trying to get at), the dual Xeon would definitely be the closest competitor to the AthlonMP.
Now, as to just how close of a competitor the Xeon is to the AthlonMP, well, if you read this article at Ace's Hardware (one of the very few hardware websites run by people who actually know what the heck they're talking about), you'll notice that dual 1.2GHz AthlonMP's match or beat the dual 1.7GHz Xeons pretty much across the board. The high-end workstation market is one area where AMD currently has Intel beat solidly in terms of raw performance, and pretty much trounces them in price/performance. Of course, that hasn't stopped Intel from maintaining 95%+ of the high-end workstation marketshare... but I digress.
iObjects Dadio operating system for digital music players supports OGG Vorbis files, so at least some hardware players out there could in theory play them. To the best of my knowledge, Iomega's HipZip is the only players actually using this operating system at the moment. That being said though, I'm pretty certain that the processor used in the RioVolt will support the same operating system, though the rest of the hardware likely does not. That means that should SonicBlue decide to do so, the RioVolt could potentially be upgraded to support OGG as well.
As far as actual processing power goes, most of the portable digital music players out there should be capable of playing OGGs, the format shouldn't take much more or less processing power then MP3, and would be very comperable to any of the other "new" compressed audio formats (WMA, AAC, etc.). The problem now is two-fold. First, a lot of the old portable audio players used ASICs which can't be reprogrammed. Fortunately almost all of the new ones I've seen come out these days have moved to either a straight DSP or an ARM processor, both of which are reprogramable. Other then that, it's just a matter of someone actually adding the code to these players. Not exactly something that could be done in a weekend, but given that the OGG format is OpenSource in straight C code, porting it shouldn't be TOO hard.
For me personally though, I really can't tell the difference most of the time. A good quality encoder for either mp3 or ogg should produce fine sound when used in the 160kbps range. I prefer the OGG format for political reasons, but that's somewhat beyond the scope of this discussion :>
I'll second that, I've got a cable modem through Rogers (cable co. up here). $40CDN a month (~$27US) for 2.5Mbit/s down and 0.5Mbit/s up, and yes, we really do get those speeds with a fair degree of regularity. I don't often see many 300KByte/s downloads from a single site (though I have hit some, a few months back my Debian updates used to come in at that speed, REAL nice!), but getting two sites at 150Kbyte/s each is certainly not unheard of.
I also have friends in the area that are getting DSL through Sympatico (Bell Canada's ISP). Same price, peak performance isn't quite as high, but the system does often get up to 100Kbyte/s from a single, well connected site.
Ohh, and all of this is in a city of only 100,000 people (Guelph). This summer I actually got slighly faster cable modem performance while living in Sudbury (also only about 100,000 people) through their cable co. (subcontracted through local ISPs). What was really interesting about that though was that they had begun offering cable modem service to all the small northern communities in the area. Several of the cities were only 2500 to 5000 people.
Long story short: broadband definitely CAN work, and work well, even in fairly remote communities.
The difference between the two would likely be pretty negligible in terms of performance, though some applications might benefit a bit more for one architechture over the other. The Athlon (especially AthlonMP/AthlonXP) is a more powerful processor core and has 4 times as much L1 cache, but the PIII-S has a slightly higher clock rate and twice as much L2 cache. End result, probably not much difference.
If I were to pick one for performance, it would probalby be the dual-Athlons, due mainly to it's bus architechture. The dual-PIII's use a 133MHz, 64-bit wide shared bus. The Athlon's use a pair of independant 266MHz (err, 133MHz DDR to be specific), 64-bit wide idependant buses, one for each processor. So, while the dual-SDRAM banks would normally be slightly faster then a single DDR channel, the PIII system ends up getting bottlenecked from chipset to processors. In the Athlon system the chipset has plenty of bandwidth to the processors and can make more effective use of the memory bandwidth available.
As mentioned above though, a simple "Not much difference" is enough to answer the original question. Price is likely to be pretty comperable as well when you factor in the cost of processors, motherboards and ECC Registered memory for either system.
Err, umm.. you might try re-reading your sources when quoting them. The heat generated by a processor is a 100% direct relation to the power consumption of this chip (seeing as your processor doesn't give off any light/sound/other form of energy.. or at least mine doesn't :> ).. In other words, if one chip draws 70W of power and another draws 88W of power, the only way for the second chip to run cooler is that it has a better heatsink+fan and/or better case cooling. Now,if we can read beyond Intel's somewhat confusing new "Thermal Design Power" to figure out how much the chips actually use, I think you'll see that the Athlon and the P4 draw damn near the same amount of power for roughly comperable performance levels (ie a 1.4GHz Athlon and a 1.8GHz P4). Typical power draw for the P4 is a tiny bit lower (roughly 60W vs. 66W for the Athlon), with a maximum real-world draw being about 72W for the Athlon and slightly higher for the P4, and the maximum theoretical power being about 74W for the Athlon and 89W for the P4. As you can see, the P4 has a somewhat wide range of temperatures then the Athlon, but really heat is a non-issue when comparing these chips.
Now, when compared to the Athlon or P4 to a PIII, well that's another story (hence the reason why it took AMD over almost two years to get laptops using Athlons and it'll take Intel a while to get a P4 for laptops out).
FWIW, anyone interested in knowing where these numbers are from, check out AMD's Athlon PGA datasheets (where they quite nicely and clearly provide the above numbers) or Intel's Thermal Design Guidelines for the P4 (where the info is presented in a somewhat convoluted manner which requires a bit of reading and guessing from graphs).
Interesting FWIW, the i845 (Brookdale) chipset that Intel is shipping for SDRAM support has full DDR support built in already, several motherboard manufacturers have already demoed i845 boards using DDR memory. However, Intel will be disabling DDR support until Jan. 2002. Official reason, from what I've heard, is that the DDR stuff isn't fully functional yet. Unofficial rumor is that Rambus has got Intel by the balls (albeit by a quickly loosening grip) due to some legal/contractual deals. ie Intel produces a DDR chipset now and Rambus sues them for patent infringment (though it's becoming increasing clear that intelligence will prevail and Rambus will get their *sses thrown out of court for the whole SDRAM/DDR litigation thing).
On the subject though, IMO Intel DESPRATELY needs a DDR chipset for the P4. Though sales of this chip have picked up significantly, they're still less than Intel's initial forcast, and I think that a lot of it has to do with RDRAM. SDRAM gets rid of that problem, but then saddles the P4 with another problem, ie a 5-25% performance hit (with the largest performance drop coming in the areas where the P4 had previously been the strongest). End result is that it makes the Athlon look like quite an attractive platform from the performance side of things. Where previously the top speed grades of Athlons and P4's were pretty much neck and neck, with PC133 SDRAM the P4 looses quite badly in all but quite rare cases.
RDRAM has it's ups and downs. Yes, it does offer more bandwidth per pin then DDR does, however it requires more control, power and ground pins to go along with the data pins. End result? Both RDRAM RIMMs and DDR DIMMs are 184 pins, and one RDRAM RIMM offers up to 1.6GB/s while a single DDR DIMM offers up to 2.1GB/s of bandwidth. RDRAM in the P4 is dual-channel though, so that number doubles in this case.
However, on top of this whole bandwidth issue there are MANY downsides to RDRAM. First off, the whole idea of the low-pin-count was to reduce the cost of producing motherboards and chipsets, but since you need two seperate 400MHz DDR channels to get decent performance from an RDRAM system (as the i820 painfully illustrated), the end result has been chipsets and boards that are MORE expensive rather then less so. Case in point, MSI just recently released the first 4-layer dual channel RDRAM board of any company (as far as I know), all other RDRAM boards are 6-layer ones, which apperently adds ~$15-$20 to the cost of these boards. DDR boards, meanwhile, are mostly 4-layer boards, and SDRAM boards are almost exclusively 4-layer products.
In addition to that there's also the much publicized latency issue (though RDRAM doesn't really have much worse latency then DDR SDRAM, to the point that a good RDRAM chipset will have lower latency then a crappy DDR chipset any day). There's also some issues with RDRAM being essentially a serialized I/O port being used as a bus (hence the requirement for cRIMMs to fill up empty RIMM sockets), which causes some bad transmission line-type problems.
All in all, RDRAM is a great technology for some uses, but the PC isn't really one of those uses (at least not now). The Sony PlayStation2? Now that's a perfect example of where RDRAM makes perfect sense. But a PS2 is VERY different from a PC..