As is par for AMD, this advance is an impressive improvement over what their contendors at Intel are doing (especially lately). As is also par for AMD, though, these transistors produce a great deal of heat. One of my co-workers once worked at another semiconductor firm which experimented with a similar technology, and said that the heat generated by these things is astronomical. (That should come as no surprise to overclockers, who know that the faster you run it, the bigger your heat problems become.)
It is pretty obvious that AMD has some big heat issues. After all, Tom's Hardware was able to cook an AMD CPU and motherboard all at once just by removing the heatsink from the chip. Heat is a serious concern with these things.
However, I am optimistic that AMD can solve whatever problems there are with this technology and bring it to the consumer eventually. Hopefully that will happen before Intel uses their size and budget to crush AMD permanently.
After the initial euphoria from being able to let my family use the phone again after a loooong weekend, I noticed a few differences in my new AT&T service:
My IP address had been switched and my hostname is considerably simpler (if as cryptic) as before.
Ping times are much better to most sites. I'm getting 15ms to yahoo right now.
Bandwidth appears to be capped around 768kbit down, 64kbit up. But I have not gotten less than 768kbit down on any of the several downloads I tried this evening (that included an apt-get update and 2.4.16 source tarball).
I can't see netbios broadcasts from my neighbors anymore, but their connections are verifiably up. Good.
DNS resolution is slow, so apt-get bind and set yourself up a caching nameserver.
DHCP seems flaky. My neighbors had 169.254 "windows autoconfigure" IP addresses until they entered their new IP manually.
Calling support is futile. It either disconnects or gives me a busy signal.
Overall I'm very happy this didn't take a lot longer. I was popping Prozac Friday night.
Slashdot Mirror
As is par for AMD, this advance is an impressive improvement over what their contendors at Intel are doing (especially lately). As is also par for AMD, though, these transistors produce a great deal of heat. One of my co-workers once worked at another semiconductor firm which experimented with a similar technology, and said that the heat generated by these things is astronomical. (That should come as no surprise to overclockers, who know that the faster you run it, the bigger your heat problems become.)
It is pretty obvious that AMD has some big heat issues. After all, Tom's Hardware was able to cook an AMD CPU and motherboard all at once just by removing the heatsink from the chip. Heat is a serious concern with these things.
However, I am optimistic that AMD can solve whatever problems there are with this technology and bring it to the consumer eventually. Hopefully that will happen before Intel uses their size and budget to crush AMD permanently.
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