Actually the Phenom IIs are were/are very nice chips, sure they can't go on a clock for clock showdown with a Sandy but frankly the bang for the buck was and is insane, and for those of us that need real cores and not HT there really is no comparison.
The sad part is the former CEO (see my previous post for the link) killed the Phenom line KNOWING that Bulldozer was a dud, even though the Phenoms were getting damned near 100% yields. you see what REALLY killed AMD was the former CEO, if he'd have listened to the engineers and kept BD strictly as a server chip and kept the stars cores while they went back to something like the K8 (As Intel did with the P3 to make the Core series) they could have righted the ship, as they could have bolted another couple of cores onto Thuban or even offered a "two chips one socket" Phenom using the same platform as the Opteron and kept people buying, but he was determined to cut costs even if it meant slitting their own throats.
The real bitch is the BD design gets really poor yields, that is why they are priced so stupidly, whereas with Phenom Ii there was damned near 100% yield usage. A bad core? boom its an x4, bad Cache? Then its an Athlon. They could take a single Thuban and cover damned near the entire Phenom and Athlon lines and as a bonus core unlocking meant many would buy the lower SKUs as well as the high end, in the hopes of getting an unlockable chip. BD on the other hand has such poor yields, and the only chip worth having in the lot is the highest SKU, which means they are stuck with warehouses full of X8s with cores dead because nobody wants the FX 4s or 6s, so they just can't move them. If you'll notice after the initial reviews the price on the FX 4s and 6s have fallen like stones and continue to fall, nobody wants them is why. So you can blame the former CEO, he torpedoed the company.
Not to mention there has been some bad blood between Intel and Big Blue going back 35+ years, back when Intel refused to sell them the right to second source the 386 like they did the 286, which is why IBM hung onto the 286 so long and ended up with the cloners eating their lunch.
IBM has always liked top to bottom solutions, this would give them their own X86 line to steer towards better server performance and as others have pointed out AMD does have plenty of loyal customers so they could sell chips and GPUs to the general public as well as complete solutions. it might actually be a pretty good fit. the only thing that would give me pause is the ATI line, but since it makes good money and GP-GPU is quite useful in servers i could see IBM telling the engineers "You guys just keep doing what you're doing, keep up the good work" and letting things stay as they are with that division, as the radeon cards have always been competitive.
MAN would that be fucking sweet as cherry pie! Imagine a Steambox with an AMD quad APU and an embedded version of Linux to give it maximum performance, and you could have every desktop and laptop have Steam pre-installed with a "Steam level" sticker that would tell you which games run good OOTB. Oh you want to play TF2? Well the Steam sticker says this unit is a Steam lvl 2, that covers TF2 and anything based on the Source engine so you're good.
Gabe could boost PC gaming, give us a viable alternative to windows as a gaming platform, even take a chunk of the living room, and with Steam have your account seamlessly transfer with you where ever you went, from your desktop to the laptop to the tablet, sadly i doubt he'd do it but its a hell of a nice idea.
Look at my other posts on this thread, you'll find a nice new Phenom quad kit for just $150 after MIR and the Phenom X6 for just $106 with NO rebates.
If it were me I'd slap that Phenom X6 in a nice board that will hold plenty of RAM and has at least one if not two PCIe X16 slots and enjoy. That's what i did, grabbed the 1035T at just $100 and paired that with a nice Asrock gamer board they had on sale for $45. Since software development hasn't kept up with hardware in quite awhile i figure i have several years to enjoy this X6, hell even as i type this I'm listening to music AND have the songs volume leveling AND transcoding a couple of hours worth of videos AND have nearly a dozen tabs open in dragon, not only does not have any lag but frankly it feels no different than when i'm just surfing, everything is instant and smooth.
So grab one while the getting is good friend, prices are dirt cheap and a good quad or hexacore will last you for quite a long while. Hell I handed down my 3 year old Deneb quad to my youngest when i got the hexacore, he plays his games pretty much constantly and even on those big MMOs that Deneb with 8Gb of RAM just keeps coming back for more.
a little bit of advice for those buying AMD or...well pretty much ANY CPU, and it is this: the stock coolers SUCK ASS so get this N520 instead as no matter how many hours I slam my Thuban it never gets above a max 128f, and that is with a case where I don't even have an exhaust fan as i wanted the system quiet. It has 5 heatpipes and fits just fine in any mATX case, rare for heatpipe coolers, and at $40 with a tube of Arctic Silver well worth the money. I have slapped one of these in every PC in my family, 5 in all, and even in my dad's shop that just sucks dirt like mad the N520 just keeps right on cooling, great for any chip, be it AMD or Intel.
Actually they did see which way the wind was blowing, see my previous comment with a link to an ex-AMD employee who talks about how the previous CEO did a slash and burn on the company which is why they are in dire straits now.
Some of the engineers he gave the pink slip to was working on the successor to Brazos, which just FYI kicks the snot out of Atom in low power devices on performance, it would have been a sub 20w quad core with a 7250 GPU baked in. Considering the fact that even now, with no updates to speak of in nearly 2 years (all they did was slightly, and i do mean slight, less than 200Mhz, increase the clocks on the original design) that OEMs are still buying Brazos chips for their laptops and nettops i'd say they would have sold 'em as fast as they could crank 'em out.
So what happened? Sadly what has happened far too often in this country, the previous CEO did a slash and burn to give the stock a short term bounce, which i'm sure he cashed out when it was at its peak. Since so much money (over 400% of GDP and rising) has been forced into the stock market by the government its more like Vegas than investing and as long as you can make the numbers look good for a quarter or two you can get a bounce. For another example see Circuit city, the CEO fired all the employees that were good sellers (since they got paid more) and cashed out when the stock bounced, of course no good sellers meant no sales and the company tanked.
Until the financial bubble bursts (which frankly will make the great depression look like a software glitch) I suspect we'll see more and more of this behavior, slash and burn, cash on the bounce, walk away while the corp crashes and burns. If anybody wants to see how badly distorted the market is right now here is a video with the numbers starting at around the 3.30 mark. It'll be a damned shame if AMD goes under, but sadly i feel they won't be alone as more CEOs kill corps for short term gains.
I'm afraid the problem Alexander is that all the talented engineers were given the pink slip by the previous CEO who did a classic "slash and burn" on the company, so all you'd be getting is a shell NOT the teams. The Athlon64 guys? GONE. Phenom guys? GONE, Bobcat? GONE, he fired ALL the real top talent for computer layouts which is why the performance on Bulldozer was worse than Thuban, Thuban was the last chip laid out by hand while BD was computer designed.
Uhhh..correct me if I'm wrong but i thought the reason they took a writedown first quarter was them selling the last of their GloFlo shares, am I mistaken? From what I read AMD and GloFlo weren't getting along and AMD got rid of the last of their shares so they could use TSMC for the smaller chips and only use GloFlo for the desktops. I know TSMC made the Bobcat APUs and I may be wrong but I think they also made the Liano and Piledriver APUs used in laptops, whereas GloFlo was making the Phenoms and the Bulldozers.
Dude buy one of the E350 units, they are cheap, low power, and a hell of a lot nicer than the Atom. i have built several of these for use as office units and they are happy as clams, its completely silent. it makes a hell of a low power file server or HTPC as well, hell i'm even quite happy with the Asus EEE E350 i replaced my full size with, so much lighter while playing 1080p over HDMI when I'm visiting friends.
Check out something like this model for $120 just add RAM (up to 8Gb) and any drives you like. its quiet, cheap to buy and own, hell it even supports a PCIe card if you want more performance but since I already play 1080p I don't know what you'd really need the card for, maybe an eSATA card?
I'm sorry but I have to agree your "facts" are HIGHLY misleading, like how much good is ECC gonna do you in a laptop? And the ONLY non Xeon chips they have are a few low end i3s, that's it. Where are the i5s? The i7s? that's right, you can't have it because Intel "pre-cripples" and have going back years now. Contrast this with AMD where ALL the chips, even the E350 APUs, support ALL the technologies, including ECC and VT. Hell my little E350 netbook even holds 8Gb of RAM, Intel to this very day pre-cripples the Atom at a pathetic 2Gb which is just a joke.
To use a/. car analogy its like someone said "I need a vehicle similar to this Dodge to haul my loads" and you say "We have one of those!" and show him a boat. Sure it might haul the load in question but its really not gonna do him much good on the freeway now is it? the i3 is simply too weak for any of the work being discusssed here and moreover Intel knows this which is why they don't sell i5s and i7s with ECC, just as they won't sell you an Atom that will take over 2Gb, its to force you to be upsold if you want what should be a very basic standard feature.
Hell that is nothing, i built a fricking gaming PC for my oldest using an AMD hexa, the final cost? $420 after MIRs. Man you can NOT beat that price! I mean you can buy Phenom quad kits, NOT Athlon but honest to God Phenom II quad kits for $150 after MIR and that includes 8Gb of RAM, just add whatever HDD or SSD you want and any cheap burner. Hell you can buy the hexacore chip for $106 with NO rebates now how in the hell you gonna beat THAT kind of bang for the buck?
This is why I've been sticking with AMD, frankly most people just aren't gonna slam even an Athlon triple core, and the prices have been so low i can build people damned nice machines and still make a decent profit and they are HAPPY, damned happy, for the performance they are getting at that price. I also put my own money where my mouth is, not only is my entire family using AMD desktops and laptops but I've been selling AMD exclusively in the shop the past 5 years and people are happy as clams.
Its gonna suck balls if AMD goes tits up, especially for those that need real cores instead of HT. I'm just glad I got myself a 1035T, those 6 cores just chew through transcodes while giving me cores left over to multitask, you just can't beat having 3 cores for transcodes, one for my music playing, and a couple for browser threads and background tasks. Even with a couple of hours worth of transcodes running in the background my music never skips, the computer never feels like its under load, it just keeps cranking.
But the ONLY thing Intel uses of AMD that is known is X64, whereas AMD uses the patented up the ass X86 instruction set. So basically unless a court rules in favor of AMD (quite unlikely) then Intel can simply refuse to approve the sale and hold them over a barrel until they get a completely one sided deal in their favor.
unless a miracle happens i say buy up those sweet and cheap AMD chips while you can, because once AMD is gone its gonna be high end ultra chips and assraping prices all the way. Luckily software development hasn't kept up with the hardware in some years so those $110 Thuban chips should give you good performance for quite awhile. Hell as I'm typing this I'm listening to music and transcoding a couple of dozen videos for a neighbor and not only does this Thuban not feel laggy, its got cores to spare which is nice thanks to Turbocore speeding the cores that the transcode is running on while dropping the speed of the cores down that aren't needed.
The problem, which was brought up when they spun off their fabs, is that due to the way the Intel/AMD licensing agreement was written access to ALL of Intel's patents and the cross licensing deal will be null and void if they sell, which means that the X86 part of the business would be worthless as Intel would probably want insane levels of money to renegotiate, as other than X64 there really isn't much in AMD's portfolio that they use.
So that basically leaves ATI, and while they still make kick ass graphics cards i don't think that niche is gonna be worth the kind of money the investors and creditors are gonna want to squeeze out of AMD so...yeah they're fucked, better buy up them cheap AMD chips while you can because once they are gone its gonna be just like before when Intel was all alone, one big pile o' suck.
I really wouldn't put much stock in that list friend, it SAYS it was updated this month yet they have the 1100T listed as a $300 chip and the 10xx chips at nearly $200, whereas I've been buying 1035T and 1045T chips for around $110-$120.
When you look at the ACTUAL prices, not what is listed there, you can get some truly insane deals on AMD, we're talking $50 Athlon 3.3Ghz triples, $60 for the quad, $70-$80 for the Phenom II standard quad, $90 for BE, and $100-$120 for the X6 chips.
So when you look at real world prices it honestly doesn't matter if Intel is getting 50% faster performance per core because you are paying double or better for that 50% performance boost.
I'd still buy 'em if I was you, its not like all that FOSS code is gonna disappear and too many corps support Linux on servers for them to let the code rot, so I'd say your safe as houses.
Hell I'm still buying AMD across the board even though I sell Windows desktops and laptops, the bang for the buck is still incredibly high and for Joe and Jane Average even an Athlon triple core is frankly overkill for the kind of work they have for their system to do. And on the gaming front my boys and I are quite happy with our AMD systems, we have two Thubans and a Deneb quad and they just crank through the latest games no matter how many fireballs and particles are thrown across the screen. heck all three systems cost less than one upper midrange Intel gaming setup so i have no problem recommending them to those that want to game without breaking the bank. Finally the AMD E350 units make kick ass low power HTPCs and office boxes, i have switched several offices over and the employees just love 'em, they can actually talk on the phones and not hear a single sound out of their office box while still running anything they need to run, its nice.
So if it were me I'd buy 'em, 32 cores should give you plenty of power and the money you save can go towards more RAM which you of course can never have too much of.
Actually there agreement with Intel over the X86 IP is null and void if they sell, so frankly all that is left is the actual properties. Its just a sad day, but after the previous CEO gutted the company it shouldn't be surprising.
Man i hope everybody likes assraping prices, because once AMD closes their doors its gonna be ultrabooks and high end chips only from Intel, mark my words. And what happens to the GPU division? they still make pretty kick ass cards, hopefully it'll get spun back off as ATI because i'd hate like hell to have only Intel and Nvidia, man talk about screwed.
Actually the company was already dead sadly, the former CEO completely gutted the company by firing ALL the chip designers for lousy software automated chip layouts, killing the next gen of the promising chips like Bobcat, and killing Thuban when he knew that bulldozer was gonna be a dog.
Let us just hope somebody buys them and turns the company around, they could do just as Intel did by going back to their K8 design and doing to it what Intel did to the P3 that became Core, because if they close their doors get ready to get royally fucked by Intel. You think their chips are high now? Wait until they have ZERO competition, hell the ONLY reason you have the Pentiums and Celerons is to keep a foot in the low to mid markets, no AMD? You won't find anything but Ultrabooks and $600 chips, mark my words.
Its a fucking shame, that's what it is, just a fucking shame. the Thubans still have a hell of a bang for the buck as do the Athlon triples and quads and work great for almost any task. I'm just glad i got my Thuban when i did, it should last me for a good 3 or 4 years and maybe by then this whole mess will have straightened out for the better.
One final thing, for those that are cheering ARM as its "anything but win tel"? Enjoy your black boxes suckers, Apple is showing the future there, locked down black boxes where you can't add shit, upgrade shit, and you throw it in the trash and buy another every couple of years because you can't even add fricking storage space to the damned things. don't think android will save you either, there are already several locked down Android devices out there, remember Android is based on GPL V2 and NO GPL V3 is allowed, that is so they can "TiVo trick" your ass.
Frankly I look at the future and i don't know whether to be sad or fucking disgusted, because it looks like we are gonna go back to the 80s, with everything proprietary, and damned if consumers don't line up to get screwed with a smile on their stupid faces...damn, just...damn.
Won't work as the quirks are dependent on the hardware and a generic VM simply won't function properly. For an example take i76, a great game from which a lot of the "cars with guns" ideas came from. When it was written it used the chip clock as a timer for in game events, this was to help lower the amount of CPU cycles because it had so many objects, bombs, bullets, missiles, that had to be calculated. Now if you load this onto a Win95 VM? Oh it'll start alright, and you'll actually be able to play the first two levels fine, after that though halfway through the third level is a jump that you will NEVER MAKE as an in game event is required to happen at a certain time and because it doesn't recognize a modern CPU's clock, even with something like MoSlo running the event never happens and you can't go any farther.
So you see what we need is NOT a high level emulator like a VM, but more of a DOSBox style low level emulator that will provide emulation of the standard components of the time. Probably the perfect emulation would be of a PIII 733Mhz, with a Soundblaster 16 for audio and your choice of a VooDoo II or Nvidia GeForce 4 for the graphics. Now this of course would cost more overhead, as you are going to emulate hardware and translate its calls into something a modern system can understand, but frankly its the only way to get a LOT of the great Win9X era classic to run short of the company releasing the source so it could be recompiled with the hacks replaced. But just off the top of my head I can tell you MechWarrior 3, Final Fantasy VII, and i76 all don't run worth a crap even in a VM, even VMWare simply doesn't simulate the hardware to a point that these classics will run correctly.
You sure can Jaruzel, here is how it works...you set up the RAMDisk to be the same size as the unusable RAM, in your case 800Mb and change, and set it to run on boot. Then you simply point any programs you want sped up, from your browser to windows temp itself, to use this RAMdisk as the place to store their temp files. Since RAM is soooo much faster than even the fastest SSD any reads and writes to the RAMdisk are practically instant so you can turn that lost RAM into something you can actually use.
You still might want to pick up a copy of Windows X64, simply because XP is only supported until 2014 and you can get win 8 (shudder, give me Win 7 any day of the week) for just $40 until Jan 17th so even if you stick with XP for now at least you'll have a migration strategy in place, you can also use Start8 to give Win 8 the Win 7 start menu, doesn't fix all the UI problems but it does help.
Now for as to showing you how here you go and unlike most RAMdisk software this one is 100% free with no size limitations simply download the software (link provided0 and follow the instructions, it couldn't be more simple. After you are finished voila! You will have another drive listed in windows made of the 800Mb of RAM that had been sitting there wasted.
If you don't mind spending a little money to get more out of that RAM I'd suggest that you simply bookmark the previous link and go download the trial of eBoostr as it not only allows you to use what it calls "hidden RAM" aka the RAM Windows can't see but it gives you most of the advantages of Readyboost, such as pre-caching a copy of most used programs into the RAMDisk so they'll launch quicker, without you needing to do anything yourself, once its installed its pretty much "set and forget" as it'll take care of everything on its own.
But whichever way you go you'll be able to actually use that 800mb instead of just having it go to waste, enjoy!
I can tell you APK that since i have so many units coming through the shop i have tried Win 8 on just about every variant of desktop and laptop, the verdict? there is only ONE place where the touch centric UI actually works as well as the Win 7 UI, and that is on a 12 inch netbook. On a screen that small the decidedly low res textures of the apps looks fine, since its only a bobcat APU the fact that Win 8 is single program centric doesn't matter, and the hack that is "Hybrid boot" actually shaves a couple of seconds off boot time, but frankly its "Everything on the GPU!" design kills what little performance gains you see over Win 7 by keeping the GPU constantly blasting.
Now that Sinofsky has fallen on the sword trying to save his boss that leaves only one person for the board to blame and that is Ballmer. When you add up the fact that he blew TWO BILLION DOLLARS on win 8 advertising and gained ONLY 4 million is sales, that adds up to $500 for every $40 sale which is ironically the same results they got on WinPhone 7, and the fact that Acer and the rest of the OEMs have announced they are "delaying" (read canceling) the WinRT tablets, which was the whole damned reason MSFT pushed a touch centric UI abortion onto Win 8 in the first place?
Well its not hard to see the writing on the wall, i predict after a disastrous Xmas the OEMs will demand to get Win 7 licenses and Ballmer will be gone in less than 3, i also predict now that old Snickerdouche is gone they'll bring in the business team guys (which if the scuttlebutt is true its the same team that gave us the excellent win 7) and Ballmer will be relegated to the sidelines until he decides to "retire". as a final insult he will trot out lies about what a "hit" Win 8 was (just like how he counted WinXP "downgrades" as Vista sales) along with what a "success" his mobile plans were, and then MSFT will either bring up someone in house, most likely from the profitable business or server divisions, or possibly bring back Ozzie or Allchin to right the ship.
Oh and one final thing about what you call the "Win9X UI" which I've always called WIMP which i'm sure you know what it stands for, the simple fact is despite what the apologists say the WIMP metaphor is NOT OLD, it has simply had 30 years to be refined into the perfect design for a keyboard and mouse which guess what? that is over 97 fricking percent of Windows sales! Its not that "people hate change" which is another excuse that apologists use, its more like replacing a steering wheel with a pair of Caterpillar sticks and saying "Its new! You are a Luddite if you don't embrace the new hotness!" while ignoring that having caterpillar controls in a car IS A STUPID IDEA and is in every single way WORSE than what we had before!
In the end it simply shows old Snickerdouche and his boss Ballmer simply didn't understand or didn't give a fuck about what worked and sadly show no fucking clue about the most basics of UI design! To me you can provide no more perfect example of why Win 8 was a POS than the way metro does the left and right swipe. Now why is that bad, tablets do that right? Well how do you hold a tablet, like a book right? And what do you do with a book, turn the pages correct? Well since NOBODY holds their monitors in their laps, even on laptops this makes no fucking sense! The CORRECT way to design this would have been to have VERTICAL and not horizontal scrolling, as this is how one scrolls pages on a PC and thus would feel natural and smooth. just try doing the left and right swipe on a non touch laptop with a trackpad and feel how damned unnatural and annoying it is!
And I agree there were several good features in Win 8, though sadly there is just as many things designed to fragment the userbase (IE, DirectX exclusives for example) but its like someone giving you a sandwich that is 90% shit and 10% delicious ham...would you eat it? of course not, its covered in shit! And that in a nutshell is Win 8, its a few bits of delicious ham smothered in thick piles of feces.
The reason we stayed with 32bit for so long was simply the fact that even on workstations 16bit limitations just weren't an issue because the prices were so damned high on memory.
You have to remember that even when win95 came out systems with 4Mb-8Mb of RAM were quite common which is why its system requirements were so low because the price of RAM then was so ungodly high. To put it in perspective your average $10 tracphone has several times more RAM and memory and on average would be three or four times faster clocked than what we paid a couple of grand for then.
So having the chip itself be 32bits really didn't matter back then, hell the 286 only had a 6MHz at release and maxed at 25Mhz, so while the 386 may have allowed 32bit mode frankly your average desktop just didn't have the resources to really take advantage.
Sigh, its obvious you don't understand what "XP Mode" actually is so I'll break it down. while the HOST OS is Win 7 X64, XP Mode is NOT 64bit, its nothing more than a full version of XP pro running in a VM that has been integrated into the OS so that while it LOOKS like its running on win 7 X64 in actuality its no different than running XP in VirtualBox or VMWare or any other Virtual machine, okay?
Try it for yourself, 16bit programs run just fine in XP Mode, I should know as I had some customers that had truly ancient software they were running in XP and would need time to migrate, once installed in XP Mode in win 7 X64 all the software runs just as it did on XP because that is what it is running on as far as the program is concerned.
Bottom line? If it ran on your average XP office box (last i looked XP Mode doesn't support hardware acceleration so its not good for gaming) then it will run just fine in Win 7 XP Mode.
WinXP Mode in Win 7 X64 is simply an XP 32 bit VM, so it would basically solve his problem right there, end of story.
That said there are ways to actually use more than 4Gb in 32bit windows,there is using PAE in the server versions or my personal favorite RAM Discs. Simply have a RAM disc set to run at startup and use it for the OS and programs temp files and it'll give that 32bit Windows a serious kick in the pants.
But when all is said and done it sounds like this guy just didn't do his homework, XP Mode in win 7 X64 sounds like what he is after.
And all the major European players in WWII that the USA had boots on the ground (which was the whole damned point before everyone went pedantic) are...drumroll...in the fricking EU! I have heard of grammar nazis, but country label nazis?
There is really nothing to "hope" for one way or another. We are just now getting games with the OPTION of using DX 11,why? because MSFT fragmented their own userbase by refusing to backport to XP so the game companies made sure to keep supporting DX 9.
When triple A titles cost close to 100 million you do NOT cut millions of potential customers, you simply can't afford to. i have NO doubt you won't be seeing squat supporting DX 11.1, except maybe one or two MSFT games which will probably be just X720 ports. who cares? win 7 is supported until 2020 and there are simply too many gamers that won't take Win 8, not to mention many of the devs have said they don't care for it either, so mark my words, Win 7 is the new XP, Win 8 the new Vista.
I've found if you stay a couple of generations behind you can get excellent bang for the buck without breaking your wallet. For example I've had the HD4850 for a couple of years now, paid a grand total of $75 for a 256bit card that was nearly $300 when first released. Come Feb I'll be moving to an HD6850, it'll be around $90-$100 by then and again 256bit only with GDDR 5 instead of 3 and I have no doubt it'll be good for a couple of years if not longer.
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Actually the Phenom IIs are were/are very nice chips, sure they can't go on a clock for clock showdown with a Sandy but frankly the bang for the buck was and is insane, and for those of us that need real cores and not HT there really is no comparison.
The sad part is the former CEO (see my previous post for the link) killed the Phenom line KNOWING that Bulldozer was a dud, even though the Phenoms were getting damned near 100% yields. you see what REALLY killed AMD was the former CEO, if he'd have listened to the engineers and kept BD strictly as a server chip and kept the stars cores while they went back to something like the K8 (As Intel did with the P3 to make the Core series) they could have righted the ship, as they could have bolted another couple of cores onto Thuban or even offered a "two chips one socket" Phenom using the same platform as the Opteron and kept people buying, but he was determined to cut costs even if it meant slitting their own throats.
The real bitch is the BD design gets really poor yields, that is why they are priced so stupidly, whereas with Phenom Ii there was damned near 100% yield usage. A bad core? boom its an x4, bad Cache? Then its an Athlon. They could take a single Thuban and cover damned near the entire Phenom and Athlon lines and as a bonus core unlocking meant many would buy the lower SKUs as well as the high end, in the hopes of getting an unlockable chip. BD on the other hand has such poor yields, and the only chip worth having in the lot is the highest SKU, which means they are stuck with warehouses full of X8s with cores dead because nobody wants the FX 4s or 6s, so they just can't move them. If you'll notice after the initial reviews the price on the FX 4s and 6s have fallen like stones and continue to fall, nobody wants them is why. So you can blame the former CEO, he torpedoed the company.
Not to mention there has been some bad blood between Intel and Big Blue going back 35+ years, back when Intel refused to sell them the right to second source the 386 like they did the 286, which is why IBM hung onto the 286 so long and ended up with the cloners eating their lunch.
IBM has always liked top to bottom solutions, this would give them their own X86 line to steer towards better server performance and as others have pointed out AMD does have plenty of loyal customers so they could sell chips and GPUs to the general public as well as complete solutions. it might actually be a pretty good fit. the only thing that would give me pause is the ATI line, but since it makes good money and GP-GPU is quite useful in servers i could see IBM telling the engineers "You guys just keep doing what you're doing, keep up the good work" and letting things stay as they are with that division, as the radeon cards have always been competitive.
MAN would that be fucking sweet as cherry pie! Imagine a Steambox with an AMD quad APU and an embedded version of Linux to give it maximum performance, and you could have every desktop and laptop have Steam pre-installed with a "Steam level" sticker that would tell you which games run good OOTB. Oh you want to play TF2? Well the Steam sticker says this unit is a Steam lvl 2, that covers TF2 and anything based on the Source engine so you're good.
Gabe could boost PC gaming, give us a viable alternative to windows as a gaming platform, even take a chunk of the living room, and with Steam have your account seamlessly transfer with you where ever you went, from your desktop to the laptop to the tablet, sadly i doubt he'd do it but its a hell of a nice idea.
Look at my other posts on this thread, you'll find a nice new Phenom quad kit for just $150 after MIR and the Phenom X6 for just $106 with NO rebates.
If it were me I'd slap that Phenom X6 in a nice board that will hold plenty of RAM and has at least one if not two PCIe X16 slots and enjoy. That's what i did, grabbed the 1035T at just $100 and paired that with a nice Asrock gamer board they had on sale for $45. Since software development hasn't kept up with hardware in quite awhile i figure i have several years to enjoy this X6, hell even as i type this I'm listening to music AND have the songs volume leveling AND transcoding a couple of hours worth of videos AND have nearly a dozen tabs open in dragon, not only does not have any lag but frankly it feels no different than when i'm just surfing, everything is instant and smooth.
So grab one while the getting is good friend, prices are dirt cheap and a good quad or hexacore will last you for quite a long while. Hell I handed down my 3 year old Deneb quad to my youngest when i got the hexacore, he plays his games pretty much constantly and even on those big MMOs that Deneb with 8Gb of RAM just keeps coming back for more.
a little bit of advice for those buying AMD or...well pretty much ANY CPU, and it is this: the stock coolers SUCK ASS so get this N520 instead as no matter how many hours I slam my Thuban it never gets above a max 128f, and that is with a case where I don't even have an exhaust fan as i wanted the system quiet. It has 5 heatpipes and fits just fine in any mATX case, rare for heatpipe coolers, and at $40 with a tube of Arctic Silver well worth the money. I have slapped one of these in every PC in my family, 5 in all, and even in my dad's shop that just sucks dirt like mad the N520 just keeps right on cooling, great for any chip, be it AMD or Intel.
Actually they did see which way the wind was blowing, see my previous comment with a link to an ex-AMD employee who talks about how the previous CEO did a slash and burn on the company which is why they are in dire straits now.
Some of the engineers he gave the pink slip to was working on the successor to Brazos, which just FYI kicks the snot out of Atom in low power devices on performance, it would have been a sub 20w quad core with a 7250 GPU baked in. Considering the fact that even now, with no updates to speak of in nearly 2 years (all they did was slightly, and i do mean slight, less than 200Mhz, increase the clocks on the original design) that OEMs are still buying Brazos chips for their laptops and nettops i'd say they would have sold 'em as fast as they could crank 'em out.
So what happened? Sadly what has happened far too often in this country, the previous CEO did a slash and burn to give the stock a short term bounce, which i'm sure he cashed out when it was at its peak. Since so much money (over 400% of GDP and rising) has been forced into the stock market by the government its more like Vegas than investing and as long as you can make the numbers look good for a quarter or two you can get a bounce. For another example see Circuit city, the CEO fired all the employees that were good sellers (since they got paid more) and cashed out when the stock bounced, of course no good sellers meant no sales and the company tanked.
Until the financial bubble bursts (which frankly will make the great depression look like a software glitch) I suspect we'll see more and more of this behavior, slash and burn, cash on the bounce, walk away while the corp crashes and burns. If anybody wants to see how badly distorted the market is right now here is a video with the numbers starting at around the 3.30 mark. It'll be a damned shame if AMD goes under, but sadly i feel they won't be alone as more CEOs kill corps for short term gains.
I'm afraid the problem Alexander is that all the talented engineers were given the pink slip by the previous CEO who did a classic "slash and burn" on the company, so all you'd be getting is a shell NOT the teams. The Athlon64 guys? GONE. Phenom guys? GONE, Bobcat? GONE, he fired ALL the real top talent for computer layouts which is why the performance on Bulldozer was worse than Thuban, Thuban was the last chip laid out by hand while BD was computer designed.
Uhhh..correct me if I'm wrong but i thought the reason they took a writedown first quarter was them selling the last of their GloFlo shares, am I mistaken? From what I read AMD and GloFlo weren't getting along and AMD got rid of the last of their shares so they could use TSMC for the smaller chips and only use GloFlo for the desktops. I know TSMC made the Bobcat APUs and I may be wrong but I think they also made the Liano and Piledriver APUs used in laptops, whereas GloFlo was making the Phenoms and the Bulldozers.
Dude buy one of the E350 units, they are cheap, low power, and a hell of a lot nicer than the Atom. i have built several of these for use as office units and they are happy as clams, its completely silent. it makes a hell of a low power file server or HTPC as well, hell i'm even quite happy with the Asus EEE E350 i replaced my full size with, so much lighter while playing 1080p over HDMI when I'm visiting friends.
Check out something like this model for $120 just add RAM (up to 8Gb) and any drives you like. its quiet, cheap to buy and own, hell it even supports a PCIe card if you want more performance but since I already play 1080p I don't know what you'd really need the card for, maybe an eSATA card?
I'm sorry but I have to agree your "facts" are HIGHLY misleading, like how much good is ECC gonna do you in a laptop? And the ONLY non Xeon chips they have are a few low end i3s, that's it. Where are the i5s? The i7s? that's right, you can't have it because Intel "pre-cripples" and have going back years now. Contrast this with AMD where ALL the chips, even the E350 APUs, support ALL the technologies, including ECC and VT. Hell my little E350 netbook even holds 8Gb of RAM, Intel to this very day pre-cripples the Atom at a pathetic 2Gb which is just a joke.
To use a /. car analogy its like someone said "I need a vehicle similar to this Dodge to haul my loads" and you say "We have one of those!" and show him a boat. Sure it might haul the load in question but its really not gonna do him much good on the freeway now is it? the i3 is simply too weak for any of the work being discusssed here and moreover Intel knows this which is why they don't sell i5s and i7s with ECC, just as they won't sell you an Atom that will take over 2Gb, its to force you to be upsold if you want what should be a very basic standard feature.
Hell that is nothing, i built a fricking gaming PC for my oldest using an AMD hexa, the final cost? $420 after MIRs. Man you can NOT beat that price! I mean you can buy Phenom quad kits, NOT Athlon but honest to God Phenom II quad kits for $150 after MIR and that includes 8Gb of RAM, just add whatever HDD or SSD you want and any cheap burner. Hell you can buy the hexacore chip for $106 with NO rebates now how in the hell you gonna beat THAT kind of bang for the buck?
This is why I've been sticking with AMD, frankly most people just aren't gonna slam even an Athlon triple core, and the prices have been so low i can build people damned nice machines and still make a decent profit and they are HAPPY, damned happy, for the performance they are getting at that price. I also put my own money where my mouth is, not only is my entire family using AMD desktops and laptops but I've been selling AMD exclusively in the shop the past 5 years and people are happy as clams.
Its gonna suck balls if AMD goes tits up, especially for those that need real cores instead of HT. I'm just glad I got myself a 1035T, those 6 cores just chew through transcodes while giving me cores left over to multitask, you just can't beat having 3 cores for transcodes, one for my music playing, and a couple for browser threads and background tasks. Even with a couple of hours worth of transcodes running in the background my music never skips, the computer never feels like its under load, it just keeps cranking.
But the ONLY thing Intel uses of AMD that is known is X64, whereas AMD uses the patented up the ass X86 instruction set. So basically unless a court rules in favor of AMD (quite unlikely) then Intel can simply refuse to approve the sale and hold them over a barrel until they get a completely one sided deal in their favor.
unless a miracle happens i say buy up those sweet and cheap AMD chips while you can, because once AMD is gone its gonna be high end ultra chips and assraping prices all the way. Luckily software development hasn't kept up with the hardware in some years so those $110 Thuban chips should give you good performance for quite awhile. Hell as I'm typing this I'm listening to music and transcoding a couple of dozen videos for a neighbor and not only does this Thuban not feel laggy, its got cores to spare which is nice thanks to Turbocore speeding the cores that the transcode is running on while dropping the speed of the cores down that aren't needed.
The problem, which was brought up when they spun off their fabs, is that due to the way the Intel/AMD licensing agreement was written access to ALL of Intel's patents and the cross licensing deal will be null and void if they sell, which means that the X86 part of the business would be worthless as Intel would probably want insane levels of money to renegotiate, as other than X64 there really isn't much in AMD's portfolio that they use.
So that basically leaves ATI, and while they still make kick ass graphics cards i don't think that niche is gonna be worth the kind of money the investors and creditors are gonna want to squeeze out of AMD so...yeah they're fucked, better buy up them cheap AMD chips while you can because once they are gone its gonna be just like before when Intel was all alone, one big pile o' suck.
I really wouldn't put much stock in that list friend, it SAYS it was updated this month yet they have the 1100T listed as a $300 chip and the 10xx chips at nearly $200, whereas I've been buying 1035T and 1045T chips for around $110-$120.
When you look at the ACTUAL prices, not what is listed there, you can get some truly insane deals on AMD, we're talking $50 Athlon 3.3Ghz triples, $60 for the quad, $70-$80 for the Phenom II standard quad, $90 for BE, and $100-$120 for the X6 chips.
So when you look at real world prices it honestly doesn't matter if Intel is getting 50% faster performance per core because you are paying double or better for that 50% performance boost.
I'd still buy 'em if I was you, its not like all that FOSS code is gonna disappear and too many corps support Linux on servers for them to let the code rot, so I'd say your safe as houses.
Hell I'm still buying AMD across the board even though I sell Windows desktops and laptops, the bang for the buck is still incredibly high and for Joe and Jane Average even an Athlon triple core is frankly overkill for the kind of work they have for their system to do. And on the gaming front my boys and I are quite happy with our AMD systems, we have two Thubans and a Deneb quad and they just crank through the latest games no matter how many fireballs and particles are thrown across the screen. heck all three systems cost less than one upper midrange Intel gaming setup so i have no problem recommending them to those that want to game without breaking the bank. Finally the AMD E350 units make kick ass low power HTPCs and office boxes, i have switched several offices over and the employees just love 'em, they can actually talk on the phones and not hear a single sound out of their office box while still running anything they need to run, its nice.
So if it were me I'd buy 'em, 32 cores should give you plenty of power and the money you save can go towards more RAM which you of course can never have too much of.
Actually there agreement with Intel over the X86 IP is null and void if they sell, so frankly all that is left is the actual properties. Its just a sad day, but after the previous CEO gutted the company it shouldn't be surprising.
Man i hope everybody likes assraping prices, because once AMD closes their doors its gonna be ultrabooks and high end chips only from Intel, mark my words. And what happens to the GPU division? they still make pretty kick ass cards, hopefully it'll get spun back off as ATI because i'd hate like hell to have only Intel and Nvidia, man talk about screwed.
Actually the company was already dead sadly, the former CEO completely gutted the company by firing ALL the chip designers for lousy software automated chip layouts, killing the next gen of the promising chips like Bobcat, and killing Thuban when he knew that bulldozer was gonna be a dog.
Let us just hope somebody buys them and turns the company around, they could do just as Intel did by going back to their K8 design and doing to it what Intel did to the P3 that became Core, because if they close their doors get ready to get royally fucked by Intel. You think their chips are high now? Wait until they have ZERO competition, hell the ONLY reason you have the Pentiums and Celerons is to keep a foot in the low to mid markets, no AMD? You won't find anything but Ultrabooks and $600 chips, mark my words.
Its a fucking shame, that's what it is, just a fucking shame. the Thubans still have a hell of a bang for the buck as do the Athlon triples and quads and work great for almost any task. I'm just glad i got my Thuban when i did, it should last me for a good 3 or 4 years and maybe by then this whole mess will have straightened out for the better.
One final thing, for those that are cheering ARM as its "anything but win tel"? Enjoy your black boxes suckers, Apple is showing the future there, locked down black boxes where you can't add shit, upgrade shit, and you throw it in the trash and buy another every couple of years because you can't even add fricking storage space to the damned things. don't think android will save you either, there are already several locked down Android devices out there, remember Android is based on GPL V2 and NO GPL V3 is allowed, that is so they can "TiVo trick" your ass.
Frankly I look at the future and i don't know whether to be sad or fucking disgusted, because it looks like we are gonna go back to the 80s, with everything proprietary, and damned if consumers don't line up to get screwed with a smile on their stupid faces...damn, just...damn.
Won't work as the quirks are dependent on the hardware and a generic VM simply won't function properly. For an example take i76, a great game from which a lot of the "cars with guns" ideas came from. When it was written it used the chip clock as a timer for in game events, this was to help lower the amount of CPU cycles because it had so many objects, bombs, bullets, missiles, that had to be calculated. Now if you load this onto a Win95 VM? Oh it'll start alright, and you'll actually be able to play the first two levels fine, after that though halfway through the third level is a jump that you will NEVER MAKE as an in game event is required to happen at a certain time and because it doesn't recognize a modern CPU's clock, even with something like MoSlo running the event never happens and you can't go any farther.
So you see what we need is NOT a high level emulator like a VM, but more of a DOSBox style low level emulator that will provide emulation of the standard components of the time. Probably the perfect emulation would be of a PIII 733Mhz, with a Soundblaster 16 for audio and your choice of a VooDoo II or Nvidia GeForce 4 for the graphics. Now this of course would cost more overhead, as you are going to emulate hardware and translate its calls into something a modern system can understand, but frankly its the only way to get a LOT of the great Win9X era classic to run short of the company releasing the source so it could be recompiled with the hacks replaced. But just off the top of my head I can tell you MechWarrior 3, Final Fantasy VII, and i76 all don't run worth a crap even in a VM, even VMWare simply doesn't simulate the hardware to a point that these classics will run correctly.
You sure can Jaruzel, here is how it works...you set up the RAMDisk to be the same size as the unusable RAM, in your case 800Mb and change, and set it to run on boot. Then you simply point any programs you want sped up, from your browser to windows temp itself, to use this RAMdisk as the place to store their temp files. Since RAM is soooo much faster than even the fastest SSD any reads and writes to the RAMdisk are practically instant so you can turn that lost RAM into something you can actually use.
You still might want to pick up a copy of Windows X64, simply because XP is only supported until 2014 and you can get win 8 (shudder, give me Win 7 any day of the week) for just $40 until Jan 17th so even if you stick with XP for now at least you'll have a migration strategy in place, you can also use Start8 to give Win 8 the Win 7 start menu, doesn't fix all the UI problems but it does help.
Now for as to showing you how here you go and unlike most RAMdisk software this one is 100% free with no size limitations simply download the software (link provided0 and follow the instructions, it couldn't be more simple. After you are finished voila! You will have another drive listed in windows made of the 800Mb of RAM that had been sitting there wasted.
If you don't mind spending a little money to get more out of that RAM I'd suggest that you simply bookmark the previous link and go download the trial of eBoostr as it not only allows you to use what it calls "hidden RAM" aka the RAM Windows can't see but it gives you most of the advantages of Readyboost, such as pre-caching a copy of most used programs into the RAMDisk so they'll launch quicker, without you needing to do anything yourself, once its installed its pretty much "set and forget" as it'll take care of everything on its own.
But whichever way you go you'll be able to actually use that 800mb instead of just having it go to waste, enjoy!
I can tell you APK that since i have so many units coming through the shop i have tried Win 8 on just about every variant of desktop and laptop, the verdict? there is only ONE place where the touch centric UI actually works as well as the Win 7 UI, and that is on a 12 inch netbook. On a screen that small the decidedly low res textures of the apps looks fine, since its only a bobcat APU the fact that Win 8 is single program centric doesn't matter, and the hack that is "Hybrid boot" actually shaves a couple of seconds off boot time, but frankly its "Everything on the GPU!" design kills what little performance gains you see over Win 7 by keeping the GPU constantly blasting.
Now that Sinofsky has fallen on the sword trying to save his boss that leaves only one person for the board to blame and that is Ballmer. When you add up the fact that he blew TWO BILLION DOLLARS on win 8 advertising and gained ONLY 4 million is sales, that adds up to $500 for every $40 sale which is ironically the same results they got on WinPhone 7, and the fact that Acer and the rest of the OEMs have announced they are "delaying" (read canceling) the WinRT tablets, which was the whole damned reason MSFT pushed a touch centric UI abortion onto Win 8 in the first place?
Well its not hard to see the writing on the wall, i predict after a disastrous Xmas the OEMs will demand to get Win 7 licenses and Ballmer will be gone in less than 3, i also predict now that old Snickerdouche is gone they'll bring in the business team guys (which if the scuttlebutt is true its the same team that gave us the excellent win 7) and Ballmer will be relegated to the sidelines until he decides to "retire". as a final insult he will trot out lies about what a "hit" Win 8 was (just like how he counted WinXP "downgrades" as Vista sales) along with what a "success" his mobile plans were, and then MSFT will either bring up someone in house, most likely from the profitable business or server divisions, or possibly bring back Ozzie or Allchin to right the ship.
Oh and one final thing about what you call the "Win9X UI" which I've always called WIMP which i'm sure you know what it stands for, the simple fact is despite what the apologists say the WIMP metaphor is NOT OLD, it has simply had 30 years to be refined into the perfect design for a keyboard and mouse which guess what? that is over 97 fricking percent of Windows sales! Its not that "people hate change" which is another excuse that apologists use, its more like replacing a steering wheel with a pair of Caterpillar sticks and saying "Its new! You are a Luddite if you don't embrace the new hotness!" while ignoring that having caterpillar controls in a car IS A STUPID IDEA and is in every single way WORSE than what we had before!
In the end it simply shows old Snickerdouche and his boss Ballmer simply didn't understand or didn't give a fuck about what worked and sadly show no fucking clue about the most basics of UI design! To me you can provide no more perfect example of why Win 8 was a POS than the way metro does the left and right swipe. Now why is that bad, tablets do that right? Well how do you hold a tablet, like a book right? And what do you do with a book, turn the pages correct? Well since NOBODY holds their monitors in their laps, even on laptops this makes no fucking sense! The CORRECT way to design this would have been to have VERTICAL and not horizontal scrolling, as this is how one scrolls pages on a PC and thus would feel natural and smooth. just try doing the left and right swipe on a non touch laptop with a trackpad and feel how damned unnatural and annoying it is!
And I agree there were several good features in Win 8, though sadly there is just as many things designed to fragment the userbase (IE, DirectX exclusives for example) but its like someone giving you a sandwich that is 90% shit and 10% delicious ham...would you eat it? of course not, its covered in shit! And that in a nutshell is Win 8, its a few bits of delicious ham smothered in thick piles of feces.
The reason we stayed with 32bit for so long was simply the fact that even on workstations 16bit limitations just weren't an issue because the prices were so damned high on memory.
You have to remember that even when win95 came out systems with 4Mb-8Mb of RAM were quite common which is why its system requirements were so low because the price of RAM then was so ungodly high. To put it in perspective your average $10 tracphone has several times more RAM and memory and on average would be three or four times faster clocked than what we paid a couple of grand for then.
So having the chip itself be 32bits really didn't matter back then, hell the 286 only had a 6MHz at release and maxed at 25Mhz, so while the 386 may have allowed 32bit mode frankly your average desktop just didn't have the resources to really take advantage.
Sigh, its obvious you don't understand what "XP Mode" actually is so I'll break it down. while the HOST OS is Win 7 X64, XP Mode is NOT 64bit, its nothing more than a full version of XP pro running in a VM that has been integrated into the OS so that while it LOOKS like its running on win 7 X64 in actuality its no different than running XP in VirtualBox or VMWare or any other Virtual machine, okay?
Try it for yourself, 16bit programs run just fine in XP Mode, I should know as I had some customers that had truly ancient software they were running in XP and would need time to migrate, once installed in XP Mode in win 7 X64 all the software runs just as it did on XP because that is what it is running on as far as the program is concerned.
Bottom line? If it ran on your average XP office box (last i looked XP Mode doesn't support hardware acceleration so its not good for gaming) then it will run just fine in Win 7 XP Mode.
WinXP Mode in Win 7 X64 is simply an XP 32 bit VM, so it would basically solve his problem right there, end of story.
That said there are ways to actually use more than 4Gb in 32bit windows,there is using PAE in the server versions or my personal favorite RAM Discs. Simply have a RAM disc set to run at startup and use it for the OS and programs temp files and it'll give that 32bit Windows a serious kick in the pants.
But when all is said and done it sounds like this guy just didn't do his homework, XP Mode in win 7 X64 sounds like what he is after.
And all the major European players in WWII that the USA had boots on the ground (which was the whole damned point before everyone went pedantic) are...drumroll...in the fricking EU! I have heard of grammar nazis, but country label nazis?
There is really nothing to "hope" for one way or another. We are just now getting games with the OPTION of using DX 11,why? because MSFT fragmented their own userbase by refusing to backport to XP so the game companies made sure to keep supporting DX 9.
When triple A titles cost close to 100 million you do NOT cut millions of potential customers, you simply can't afford to. i have NO doubt you won't be seeing squat supporting DX 11.1, except maybe one or two MSFT games which will probably be just X720 ports. who cares? win 7 is supported until 2020 and there are simply too many gamers that won't take Win 8, not to mention many of the devs have said they don't care for it either, so mark my words, Win 7 is the new XP, Win 8 the new Vista.
I've found if you stay a couple of generations behind you can get excellent bang for the buck without breaking your wallet. For example I've had the HD4850 for a couple of years now, paid a grand total of $75 for a 256bit card that was nearly $300 when first released. Come Feb I'll be moving to an HD6850, it'll be around $90-$100 by then and again 256bit only with GDDR 5 instead of 3 and I have no doubt it'll be good for a couple of years if not longer.