It's just more convenient then having to load 20 different programs I suppose.:)
Actually, it does save some time, as you don't have to spend significant portions of time getting all of the different debuggers/editors/compilers/linkers/ to work together. It also removes the extra time required to find problems with those things because you forgot to change a line in the makefile...
For what it's worth, Visual Studio 5 and above offer similar functionality (works similar to one of the old tree-based "explorer" windows [not internet explorer...]). I agree, it is a VERY nice feature.
Version 6 also offers some really nice things in the editor. Say you have this code...
int hello(CString bla) { return bla.tolower(); }
When you type the "." in the bla.tolower() line, a listbox will pop up showing all of the members present in bla. Very handy if you don't remember exactly how to spell a function. If you're just looking for a function, or wonder what it does, you can click on one of the functions in the list and it will display the comment lines above the function (also very handy if you're just piddling around).
You can also "finish" the statement by hitting tab or starting a parenthesis (similar to hitting tab on the shells which do similar things for filenames).
When you type the "(" of the function, it will show you the function definition(s), which allows you to see what variables need to go where (which is also handy for the nasty windoze functions which require something like 30 parameters or whatnot).
For Linux development, it is probably one of the best packages available.
This is so funny... The first thing they teach you in any "research" class is to find multiple unbiased sources.
What does microsoft do?
Gets all of it's info from either itself or "pc week magazine" (aka: zdnet, microsofts magazine in a pocket). Citing the "midcraft" results, the "oh it's too much of a pain to apply 20 someodd security fixes" debockle, and a number of other things...oh the pain. Some professor at a university isn't going to sleep well today...and the person who taught that FUDers ethics class...oh my.
With all the secret agent men, contingency plans for contingencies which may or may not have contignency plans, and the number of really smart people they pay just to "think" about a problem and find a solution, I find it difficult to belief they'd be dumb enough to try to gained unauthorized access into a "high level" type machine/network from their own network. If they were really going to do such a thing, they'd setup an account with sprintlink or something...
But on the other hand, it's the little things that separate one program from another.
If you were using two programs, that performed exactly the same function with one having a few extra things thought out, which would you use?
I spent an hour or two last night working on the config box in my senior project (write a screensaver... woo, complicated;). The time can be adjusted via a slider. Now, if I wanted to be lazy all I had to do was put in a slider and be done with it. But I also have an edit field that puts the new time in it. You can also type time in the edit field. You can type 45s, 30, 120 [2 mins], 1m, 1:30m, 2:30 [2 min, 30s], etc. Sure I could have kept it simple and just put seconds there; most people probably won't notice. But people will probably notice it's not there on another package after using mine.
Re:Intel is behind this thing for sure
on
700 MHz Athlon
·
· Score: 1
This post is wrong on so many levels I'm not going to even bother writing 10 pages about it...
Intel started creating it's own chipsets out of GREED, not to "rid the world of unstable chipsets". This intent was made clear when they refused to liscense the slot-1 design to 3rd party companies for a large span of time.
VIA makes some *awesome* chipsets. I can't remember the last time I saw a board with a VIA chipset on it have a problem.
Following your line of logic, AMD ought to get in the ram business as well. We all know that Intel is creating a new type of ram, and they probably won't liscense it out. So amd had better start working on it's own ram type as well that it will produce in house, otherwise it will have to depend on outside companies to produce ram that will work with it's cpu's.
AMD has decided NOT to get in the chipset market because it DEPENDS upon support from 3rd party manufacturers. I have serious doubts that AMD would be able to make a chipset of the same quality of a VIA chipset. On top of that, they would have to FURTHER divide their production facilities between chipsets, k6's, and k7's. They don't want to make chipsets! They won't make as much money off of them as the extra k7's they could stamp out!;).
You question the length of time to get a K7 chipset by VIA? "minor" changes? The bus design is COMPLETELY different. The EV6 bus is a completely different animal, far more advanced than the design intel uses for it's stuff. And alot more complicated.
If VIA really wanted the low end market to itself, all it would have to do is stop producing Socket 7 chipsets that'll work with the k6. I'm sure they wouldn't have too many problems doing that... It'd be silly for them to drive their major source of revenue out of business; the low end market has very little profit in it, if any. That's why amd has been loosing so much money lately.
I also must, who is waiting for AGP 4x? WHY? Nothing uses it.
The page has several interesting links to projects they've been working on. A few even include playable games (a kind of hocky game and tron). These people know their stuff:). (the tron game is still kicking my butt even after an hour -- the hockey game I can beat on occasion however, but some of those AI dudes kick my butt...)
How many problems with "software problems" have you experienced with a DVD player personally?
How many times have you bought a DVD disc and had to return it because it didn't work correctly? How many DVD discs have you ever bought?
Me? Zero. None. Nada. Zip. Every disc I have ever bought works perfectly. All 40 of them. Double layer, double sided, extra audio tracks, special videos, menu transitions, scene selections, the works. Not a glitch.
Just because your DVD player is 2 months old doesn't mean that it 100% complient with spec. You think IE 5 is totally complient with all of the standards it claims to support?
You ended up buying a player that was rushed out the door with the though "ah, nobody 'll ever use that feature in a DVD". Guess what, you found one that did.
The fact that the disc works great in some players, and other players have the exact same problem (reported over and over again) only confirms that it is a hardware/player specific problem and not a "screwup" on the disc.
And where are you getting this "grainy" crap from? The special features showed some artificating, as did the menu, but the movie itself was GREAT!!! (the intro is also one of the coolest I've seen on a DVD).
I had 13 people crammed in my tiny dorm room watching this movie at volumes that could be heard at least 4 floors away if you want any testimonials to the quality of the DVD on a good player.
I just checked on my player... there is an option in "other settings" that can be set to "Pan & Scan" -- however it doesn't just chop the sides off of the picture as I assumed it did.
I guess it's a preference to decide which "movie" to play on a disc with both movies.
That is somewhat frustrating...
Not that I care myself (letterbox is the only way to go... Just need to get one of those 50" lcd screen thingies to go with it;).
If the "black bars" really bother you that much, many DVD players have an option you can change which will force the movie to be full screen. It's the same thing you'd get from most VHS movies. (The panasonic A110 does anyway)
That'll work for you until you are able to afford a tv that looks like a mini-movie screen:).
I own a Panasonic A-110 DVD player and had zero problems watching the movie (I think I've played it through at least 2 dozen times -- I might be a bit obcessed;).
The video quality was always superb. The extra features/intro menu shows some mpeg artifacts, but to be quite honest there is SO MUCH STUFF crammed on this disc it was probably done so they could fit it.
The layer change appears to occure right after Morpheus and company begin their journey to see the oracle (the scene change between circling around the phone and leaving the building). It has to be one of the faster layer changes I've ever seen (which means they planned the layout of data rather well). The layer change took less than a second, where it normally takes between 2 to 5 seconds.
Not once in my viewing did I see a glitch. The audio never popped. The extra features all worked wonderfully (the follow the white rabbit feature is an interesting idea...).
The only problem I had was stuff in my room was rattling a bit too much during some scenes (I had the volume turned up to such a level that it could be heard 5 floors down, so that's to be expected -- one of these days I'll get the guts to turn my amp up past the 4th notch;).
The problem isn't with the DVD. The problem is with the players that won't play it. Alot of the "this is why DVD's will never catch on" and the "shoulda gotten a laserdisc" talk is like saying "windoze crashes too much, shouldn't have bought an AMD chip" and "damn, shoulda gotten a mac instead".
It's silly. DVD's are the best thing to happen to "home theatre" since VHS.
I can't remember one time Atari did something right under Tramiel control.
From the 800 to the 512ST to the TT030 to the Falcon'030 to the Jaguar -- all were awesome pieces of hardware for the time they were introduced, but they went nowhere due to the way the Tramiels managed the company; there was no "drive" in the company. It was more of a hobby for them than a business.
By comparison, AMD has the drive and the awesome hardware to make a run for the "title" as it may be. Intel is actually helping AMD as well, in it's attempts to own the chipset market.
Actually, this makes it alot harder to remark chips... Before, all they needed to do what slap a new label on the chip.
If it can be done by software: Now they'll have to put it on a board, boot, run some software, turn off the power, take it out of the board, then relabel.
If it has to be done via the goldfinger connector: Now they'll have to take off the cpu case, put a dongle on the goldfinger connector, put the case back on, then relabel. And if you ever take off the case you can tell it was not running at the rated speed.
There are dozens of other variations that I can think of on what has to be done, but regardless, it just increased the amount of time needed to remark processors exponentially.
For the person who wants to be on the bleeding edge of speed (and as a result) is always monkeying with the internals of their machine, taking the case off of the cpu and putting it back on is nearly trivial...IMO.
Re:OC'ing... Why is the clock multiplier locked ?
on
Athlon Reviews
·
· Score: 1
It's not multiplier locked, however it isn't as simple as changing a jumper on the motherboard anymore (and isn't as easy for chip remarkers to relabel a chip either).
In order to OC the sucker you have to take the processor case off and figure out how to change the settings via the goldfinger pins.
No, I don't know how to do this. But I'm sure some enterprising individual will figure it out in the near future and let the world know;).
Hmm... I know of a few cituations where it is extremely helpful. The business I work for puts a program called TimBukTwo (or something that sounds like that) on all of the machines shipped out to sites.
It aids the helpdesk people, because they can dial in and watch what the associate is doing. So the "I can't print" problem can be fixed relatively easy. You call up the site, turn on observe, tell them to try again, and see a dialog box appear saying the printer is out of paper. "Put paper in the printer." (Yes, stupid things like this do occure; you don't get the brightest people at $5.50/hr).
It get exponentially handier when you need to investigate a problem. For example, say some associate walks into their store in the morning to a blue screen. Now say this happened at 500 other places that same day (at the same time nonetheless...apparently while "rebooting").
(NT BITES!!!!:)
It also happens on these machines that you have to have EVERYTHING turned off, because people who go "hey, I've got a computer at home I can fix this myself" tend to really Fck things up... The few weeks where it was possible to turn the software off about half the sites had it off...
K7 isn't competing with Xenon processors. Where I work quad xenon servers power a database engine with serves/updates/does stuff with a database which requires an 80gig raid to serve (One freeking server is as big as my desk...yipes).
This is just one of the BO servers.:)
Those IS managers couldn't give a crap about what runs in their servers. They do care about what company they buy from. Sears buys ALL of their stuff from IBM. Sears doesn't care what's in the machine, just as long as it's from IBM. Hell, most of their machines still run OS/2 (not even OS/2 warp)... (the other biggie I notice is HP; they make some nice server boxes worth drooling over...).
K7 is targetted and the mid to high end of the consumer market. If it were targetted for high end business use, AMD wouldn't have bothered with FP performance (hello, most businesses don't care about FP -- that's why BUSINESS benchess stress the int performance of a processor). On top of that, if AMD were really targetting the high end server market, they would NOT lauch it without an SMP motherboard/chipset.
Celeron for you, is probably better. But you'll have to buy something new next year to play the new games. Don't play games? Then why did you even bother with the Celery? Get a $50 k6. Hell, my k6/233 does everything well except play the new games (and it isn't THAT bad either, if you like average framerates of 15fps (in Q3), which some people around here claim near the max the human eye can see... [which is also bs but I digress]).
In addition, last time I checked, intel was making a profit by dumping the Celerons and charging $600/pop for the 450+ PII/PIII's.
...some people... I mean come on! Do you HONESTLY think that the rest of the world's opinion is confined to what YOU see? If that's true, we're all in trouble... then again, I have been noticing an increasing number of complete dolts during my morning commute lately...;)
I have read more info from "neutral" sources lately, but this is the only one I know offhand (I don't bookmark every cool tidbit I find about the K7:)
http://unreal.epicgames.com/
The interesting quote is (by "Tim"):
The AMD Athlon Rocks!
My new 550 MHz AMD Athlon (K7) just clocked a jaw-dropping 68.5 Unreal timedemo at 1024x768, running on a Voodoo3 3000 card. Even more telling, at no point did the frame rate ever drop below 38.0 fps. That's astounding, considering the intense lightmap and geometry usage in the timedemo level. Even while playing Unreal Tournament's most texture and polygon intensive level (Shane Caudle's DmGothic), the frame rate hardly ever went below 60 fps.
The Athlon's 128K L1 cache is awesome for memory-intensive games like Unreal. Operations like visibility determination, which thrash on the Pentium III's 32K cache, now run at full speed on the Athlon. This CPU truly shows a generational performance improvement, like going from my old 486 to my first Pentium.
When I saw AMD's K7 spec, I was pretty skeptical. The K6 had been hyped up, but in reality it was slower for Unreal than a Pentium II of comparable clock rate, due to its poor non-SIMD floating point performance. The K7 claimed to fix all of that, and debut a new architecture with 3 execution pipelines. I decided to wait and see, without getting my hopes up.
Bottom line: I waited, and now I have seen! The Athlon is clearly the fastest x86 CPU at any clock speed.
Re: Performance of K7 -- we'll just have to wait until it's out to declair that:). I personally think they can charge more, if reports of it's FP performance are true. But I'm glad they're not:).
Re: Intel able to win the Mhz race -- the K7 is shipping at 600mhz, and reports are that it doesn't run hot at this speed. It is rumoured that AMD will be releasing 700mhz/750mhz versions before the new year. On a.25um process. AMD doesn't NEED to shrink to a smaller immediately if this is true.
Several sites are already projecting what the clockrate of the PIII would need to be, in order to beat the K7. Most of the figures say that the PIII needs to hit somewhere between 750-800mhz to beat a K7/600.
Slashdot Mirror
This would be a valid concern if the person writing the article actually received revenue from the banner clicks...
Which I must admit, I don't know the answer to...
It's just more convenient then having to load 20 different programs I suppose. :)
Actually, it does save some time, as you don't have to spend significant portions of time getting all of the different debuggers/editors/compilers/linkers/ to work together. It also removes the extra time required to find problems with those things because you forgot to change a line in the makefile...
"Source Browser"
For what it's worth, Visual Studio 5 and above offer similar functionality (works similar to one of the old tree-based "explorer" windows [not internet explorer...]). I agree, it is a VERY nice feature.
Version 6 also offers some really nice things in the editor. Say you have this code...
int hello(CString bla)
{ return bla.tolower();
}
When you type the "." in the bla.tolower() line, a listbox will pop up showing all of the members present in bla. Very handy if you don't remember exactly how to spell a function. If you're just looking for a function, or wonder what it does, you can click on one of the functions in the list and it will display the comment lines above the function (also very handy if you're just piddling around).
You can also "finish" the statement by hitting tab or starting a parenthesis (similar to hitting tab on the shells which do similar things for filenames).
When you type the "(" of the function, it will show you the function definition(s), which allows you to see what variables need to go where (which is also handy for the nasty windoze functions which require something like 30 parameters or whatnot).
For Linux development, it is probably one of the best packages available.
My 2c
This is so funny... The first thing they teach you in any "research" class is to find multiple unbiased sources.
What does microsoft do?
Gets all of it's info from either itself or "pc week magazine" (aka: zdnet, microsofts magazine in a pocket). Citing the "midcraft" results, the "oh it's too much of a pain to apply 20 someodd security fixes" debockle, and a number of other things...oh the pain. Some professor at a university isn't going to sleep well today...and the person who taught that FUDers ethics class...oh my.
With all the secret agent men, contingency plans for contingencies which may or may not have contignency plans, and the number of really smart people they pay just to "think" about a problem and find a solution, I find it difficult to belief they'd be dumb enough to try to gained unauthorized access into a "high level" type machine/network from their own network. If they were really going to do such a thing, they'd setup an account with sprintlink or something...
But on the other hand, it's the little things that separate one program from another.
... woo, complicated ;). The time can be adjusted via a slider. Now, if I wanted to be lazy all I had to do was put in a slider and be done with it. But I also have an edit field that puts the new time in it. You can also type time in the edit field. You can type 45s, 30, 120 [2 mins], 1m, 1:30m, 2:30 [2 min, 30s], etc. Sure I could have kept it simple and just put seconds there; most people probably won't notice. But people will probably notice it's not there on another package after using mine.
If you were using two programs, that performed exactly the same function with one having a few extra things thought out, which would you use?
I spent an hour or two last night working on the config box in my senior project (write a screensaver
This post is wrong on so many levels I'm not going to even bother writing 10 pages about it ...
Intel started creating it's own chipsets out of GREED, not to "rid the world of unstable chipsets". This intent was made clear when they refused to liscense the slot-1 design to 3rd party companies for a large span of time.
;).
VIA makes some *awesome* chipsets. I can't remember the last time I saw a board with a VIA chipset on it have a problem.
Following your line of logic, AMD ought to get in the ram business as well. We all know that Intel is creating a new type of ram, and they probably won't liscense it out. So amd had better start working on it's own ram type as well that it will produce in house, otherwise it will have to depend on outside companies to produce ram that will work with it's cpu's.
AMD has decided NOT to get in the chipset market because it DEPENDS upon support from 3rd party manufacturers. I have serious doubts that AMD would be able to make a chipset of the same quality of a VIA chipset. On top of that, they would have to FURTHER divide their production facilities between chipsets, k6's, and k7's. They don't want to make chipsets! They won't make as much money off of them as the extra k7's they could stamp out!
You question the length of time to get a K7 chipset by VIA? "minor" changes? The bus design is COMPLETELY different. The EV6 bus is a completely different animal, far more advanced than the design intel uses for it's stuff. And alot more complicated.
If VIA really wanted the low end market to itself, all it would have to do is stop producing Socket 7 chipsets that'll work with the k6. I'm sure they wouldn't have too many problems doing that... It'd be silly for them to drive their major source of revenue out of business; the low end market has very little profit in it, if any. That's why amd has been loosing so much money lately.
I also must, who is waiting for AGP 4x? WHY? Nothing uses it.
I probably ought to note that I really really suck at the game, so someone who can play it well might not have as many problems as myself ;).
The page has several interesting links to projects they've been working on. A few even include playable games (a kind of hocky game and tron). These people know their stuff :). (the tron game is still kicking my butt even after an hour -- the hockey game I can beat on occasion however, but some of those AI dudes kick my butt...)
How many problems with "software problems" have you experienced with a DVD player personally?
How many times have you bought a DVD disc and had to return it because it didn't work correctly? How many DVD discs have you ever bought?
Me? Zero. None. Nada. Zip. Every disc I have ever bought works perfectly. All 40 of them. Double layer, double sided, extra audio tracks, special videos, menu transitions, scene selections, the works. Not a glitch.
Just because your DVD player is 2 months old doesn't mean that it 100% complient with spec. You think IE 5 is totally complient with all of the standards it claims to support?
You ended up buying a player that was rushed out the door with the though "ah, nobody 'll ever use that feature in a DVD". Guess what, you found one that did.
The fact that the disc works great in some players, and other players have the exact same problem (reported over and over again) only confirms that it is a hardware/player specific problem and not a "screwup" on the disc.
And where are you getting this "grainy" crap from? The special features showed some artificating, as did the menu, but the movie itself was GREAT!!! (the intro is also one of the coolest I've seen on a DVD).
I had 13 people crammed in my tiny dorm room watching this movie at volumes that could be heard at least 4 floors away if you want any testimonials to the quality of the DVD on a good player.
I just checked on my player ... there is an option in "other settings" that can be set to "Pan & Scan" -- however it doesn't just chop the sides off of the picture as I assumed it did.
;).
I guess it's a preference to decide which "movie" to play on a disc with both movies.
That is somewhat frustrating...
Not that I care myself (letterbox is the only way to go... Just need to get one of those 50" lcd screen thingies to go with it
If the "black bars" really bother you that much, many DVD players have an option you can change which will force the movie to be full screen. It's the same thing you'd get from most VHS movies. (The panasonic A110 does anyway)
:).
That'll work for you until you are able to afford a tv that looks like a mini-movie screen
I own a Panasonic A-110 DVD player and had zero problems watching the movie (I think I've played it through at least 2 dozen times -- I might be a bit obcessed ;).
...).
;).
The video quality was always superb. The extra features/intro menu shows some mpeg artifacts, but to be quite honest there is SO MUCH STUFF crammed on this disc it was probably done so they could fit it.
The layer change appears to occure right after Morpheus and company begin their journey to see the oracle (the scene change between circling around the phone and leaving the building). It has to be one of the faster layer changes I've ever seen (which means they planned the layout of data rather well). The layer change took less than a second, where it normally takes between 2 to 5 seconds.
Not once in my viewing did I see a glitch. The audio never popped. The extra features all worked wonderfully (the follow the white rabbit feature is an interesting idea
The only problem I had was stuff in my room was rattling a bit too much during some scenes (I had the volume turned up to such a level that it could be heard 5 floors down, so that's to be expected -- one of these days I'll get the guts to turn my amp up past the 4th notch
The problem isn't with the DVD. The problem is with the players that won't play it. Alot of the "this is why DVD's will never catch on" and the "shoulda gotten a laserdisc" talk is like saying "windoze crashes too much, shouldn't have bought an AMD chip" and "damn, shoulda gotten a mac instead".
It's silly. DVD's are the best thing to happen to "home theatre" since VHS.
Apparently the tech docs for the K7 say that there is support for 16mb of L2 cache.
I can't remember one time Atari did something right under Tramiel control.
From the 800 to the 512ST to the TT030 to the Falcon'030 to the Jaguar -- all were awesome pieces of hardware for the time they were introduced, but they went nowhere due to the way the Tramiels managed the company; there was no "drive" in the company. It was more of a hobby for them than a business.
By comparison, AMD has the drive and the awesome hardware to make a run for the "title" as it may be. Intel is actually helping AMD as well, in it's attempts to own the chipset market.
Actually, this makes it alot harder to remark chips... Before, all they needed to do what slap a new label on the chip.
If it can be done by software:
Now they'll have to put it on a board, boot, run some software, turn off the power, take it out of the board, then relabel.
If it has to be done via the goldfinger connector:
Now they'll have to take off the cpu case, put a dongle on the goldfinger connector, put the case back on, then relabel. And if you ever take off the case you can tell it was not running at the rated speed.
There are dozens of other variations that I can think of on what has to be done, but regardless, it just increased the amount of time needed to remark processors exponentially.
For the person who wants to be on the bleeding edge of speed (and as a result) is always monkeying with the internals of their machine, taking the case off of the cpu and putting it back on is nearly trivial...IMO.
It's not multiplier locked, however it isn't as simple as changing a jumper on the motherboard anymore (and isn't as easy for chip remarkers to relabel a chip either).
;).
In order to OC the sucker you have to take the processor case off and figure out how to change the settings via the goldfinger pins.
No, I don't know how to do this. But I'm sure some enterprising individual will figure it out in the near future and let the world know
Not nearly as much as it spends on medicare + social security...
So because MS writes software to perform a certain function, then I can't write software that performs a similar function.
People like you are why Apple sued Microsoft over "look and feel"...
Hmm... I know of a few cituations where it is extremely helpful. The business I work for puts a program called TimBukTwo (or something that sounds like that) on all of the machines shipped out to sites.
:)
It aids the helpdesk people, because they can dial in and watch what the associate is doing. So the "I can't print" problem can be fixed relatively easy. You call up the site, turn on observe, tell them to try again, and see a dialog box appear saying the printer is out of paper. "Put paper in the printer." (Yes, stupid things like this do occure; you don't get the brightest people at $5.50/hr).
It get exponentially handier when you need to investigate a problem. For example, say some associate walks into their store in the morning to a blue screen. Now say this happened at 500 other places that same day (at the same time nonetheless...apparently while "rebooting").
(NT BITES!!!!
It also happens on these machines that you have to have EVERYTHING turned off, because people who go "hey, I've got a computer at home I can fix this myself" tend to really Fck things up... The few weeks where it was possible to turn the software off about half the sites had it off...
K7 isn't competing with Xenon processors. Where I work quad xenon servers power a database engine with serves/updates/does stuff with a database which requires an 80gig raid to serve (One freeking server is as big as my desk...yipes).
:)
... [which is also bs but I digress]).
;)
This is just one of the BO servers.
Those IS managers couldn't give a crap about what runs in their servers. They do care about what company they buy from. Sears buys ALL of their stuff from IBM. Sears doesn't care what's in the machine, just as long as it's from IBM. Hell, most of their machines still run OS/2 (not even OS/2 warp)... (the other biggie I notice is HP; they make some nice server boxes worth drooling over...).
K7 is targetted and the mid to high end of the consumer market. If it were targetted for high end business use, AMD wouldn't have bothered with FP performance (hello, most businesses don't care about FP -- that's why BUSINESS benchess stress the int performance of a processor). On top of that, if AMD were really targetting the high end server market, they would NOT lauch it without an SMP motherboard/chipset.
Celeron for you, is probably better. But you'll have to buy something new next year to play the new games. Don't play games? Then why did you even bother with the Celery? Get a $50 k6. Hell, my k6/233 does everything well except play the new games (and it isn't THAT bad either, if you like average framerates of 15fps (in Q3), which some people around here claim near the max the human eye can see
In addition, last time I checked, intel was making a profit by dumping the Celerons and charging $600/pop for the 450+ PII/PIII's.
...some people... I mean come on! Do you HONESTLY think that the rest of the world's opinion is confined to what YOU see? If that's true, we're all in trouble... then again, I have been noticing an increasing number of complete dolts during my morning commute lately...
I have read more info from "neutral" sources lately, but this is the only one I know offhand (I don't bookmark every cool tidbit I find about the K7 :)
http://unreal.epicgames.com/
The interesting quote is (by "Tim"):
The AMD Athlon Rocks!
My new 550 MHz AMD Athlon (K7) just clocked a jaw-dropping 68.5 Unreal timedemo at 1024x768,
running on a Voodoo3 3000 card. Even more telling, at no point did the frame rate ever drop below 38.0 fps. That's astounding, considering the intense lightmap and geometry usage in the timedemo level. Even while playing Unreal Tournament's most texture and polygon intensive level (Shane Caudle's DmGothic), the frame rate hardly ever went below 60 fps.
The Athlon's 128K L1 cache is awesome for memory-intensive games like Unreal. Operations like visibility determination, which thrash on the Pentium III's 32K cache, now run at full speed on the Athlon. This CPU truly shows a generational performance improvement, like going from my old 486 to my first Pentium.
When I saw AMD's K7 spec, I was pretty skeptical. The K6 had been hyped up, but in reality it was
slower for Unreal than a Pentium II of comparable clock rate, due to its poor non-SIMD floating point performance. The K7 claimed to fix all of that, and debut a new architecture with 3 execution pipelines. I decided to wait and see, without getting my hopes up.
Bottom line: I waited, and now I have seen! The Athlon is clearly the fastest x86 CPU at any clock
speed.
Congratulations go to AMD.
Re: Performance of K7 -- we'll just have to wait until it's out to declair that :). I personally think they can charge more, if reports of it's FP performance are true. But I'm glad they're not :).
.25um process. AMD doesn't NEED to shrink to a smaller immediately if this is true.
Re: Intel able to win the Mhz race -- the K7 is shipping at 600mhz, and reports are that it doesn't run hot at this speed. It is rumoured that AMD will be releasing 700mhz/750mhz versions before the new year. On a
Several sites are already projecting what the clockrate of the PIII would need to be, in order to beat the K7. Most of the figures say that the PIII needs to hit somewhere between 750-800mhz to beat a K7/600.
Food for thought.