1) As the article stated, AMD has to price the Athlon frequency for frequency. They are going to have to price the 1.3 GHz Athlon below the 1.3 GHz Pentium, not the 1.5 GHz Pentium 4. 99% of consumers look at frequency for performance, not some other benchmark. This is good for Intel, and bad for AMD; AMD has higher performance per frequency, but they don't know how to market this. Unless AMD educates consumers, gigahertz will continue to be the benchmark. IMHO, they cannot change this since they don't have the credibilty of Intel.
2) The Intel brand is one of the most valuable brands in the world, while AMD is comparatively unheard of. The Pentium 4 itself is a very good brand, because of the marketing campaign. So, the P4 has an automatic price premium above Athlon. Thus AMD has to undercut the P4 price, or they won't sell any (except to zealous AMDroids who are willing to pay a premium for Athlons - and this is a miniscule percentage of the market).
I think this is good for Intel; but it probably hurts AMD a lot more than it helps Intel. This will continue to put enormous price pressure on their ASP, which they cannot afford to lose (they have lots of debt and little cash, while Intel has something like $15 billion in cash and almost no debt).
The advantage of Iomega over CD's is that you can use it as a hard-drive in that you can edit a file inline. On a CD you have to re-burn the CD when you change a file.
IMHO, the main advantage of CD's are that they are portable (every computer has a CD reader), and probably more reliable.
Re:Let me be a karma whoring p4 lover...
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· Score: 2
You are, unfortunately, horribly misinformed. A PC800 Rambus based P4 system does approximately 3.5x better than a PC2100 equipped Athlon system. The PC800 Rambus has a peak bandwith of 3.2 Gb/s and the PC2100 has a peak bandwith of 2.1 Gb/s. The memory subsystem is only 50% faster, yet performance of the whole system is 350% faster. Thus, the speedup does not derive from the memory system, but the CPU (mostly due to prefetching, large lines, etc.) In fact, there has been almost no speedup observed on an Athlon system going from SDR to DDR (which has something like 2x the bandwith), since the Athlon cannot take advantage of the extra bandwidth like the P4 can.
Your statement about Athlon/P3 outperforming P4 on FP is just plain FUD. P4 is the second fastest CPU in the world in FP (and the fastest in INT, by the way); the only thing faster is the very fastest speed grade Alpha. Let's have a look at SPEFfp2000:
Exactly how many shares of AMD do you own which causes you to spread lies about competitor's performance?
Re:I've been steering people clear of the IV
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· Score: 2
I do have the Intel branded motherboard (850GB). In a two year-old generic ATX case which housed a Pentium 100. As I said, I did change the power supply (for the new connector), but the chassis itself is no problem. The motherboard fits fine in any case.
Re:Let me be a karma whoring p4 lover...
on
Pentium IV study
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· Score: 3
Dude, he said scientific computing, which is memory intensive by definition. The P4 cleans up this because its memory system is so much faster than P3/Athlon. He's not playing video games, he's doing real computation.
Oh, btw, redo your benchmark taking price/performance into account...
For starters: he said the P4 slaughtered the UltraSparc III. Have you priced one of THOSE recently? Hint: they're much more expensive (and rare!) than P4 systems.
Second: One of the departments in my company bought a bunch of $40,000 HP workstations. They also bought one $1,500 P4 system. They did benchmarks and found for THEIR APPLICATION, the $1,500 P4 was 3.5 times faster than the $40,000 HP. I'll leave the price/performance for this one as an exercise for the reader.
Third: For price/performance on SPECfp, the P4 does VERY well. It is about 10% slower than an 833MHz Alpha, and about 1/5th the price (it is faster - and cheaper - than all other speed grades of Alpha). Additionally, it is cheaper and faster than any other RISC machine.
Fourth: people who need the highest performance (i.e. P4 level memory and FP performance) usually pay a huge premium. In this sense, the P4 is a bargain (especially after the price cuts).
Re:Say NO to SCAMBUS..uh, RAMBUS
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Pentium IV study
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· Score: 2
The P IV requires RAMBUS, much more cost with little or no performance benefit
Dude, have you seen any P4 memory benchmark? They outperform SDR and DDR based Athlon and P3 systems by a factor of three or four - all thanks to the memory subsystem.
The emulators.com article is easily debunked. Anybody who judges cache size (particularly, L1 cache size) as an indicator of CPU speed is even more clueless about how computers work than those who judge CPU speed by megahertz. Of course, McComas also made the same mistake.
If the P4 even has any SMP circuitry, what makes you think it was ever debugged by Intel? Not to mention the lack of SMP chipsets.
Well, for starters, according to almost all industry rumor sites (the register, amdzone, etc.), dual P4 is going to be launched within a matter of weeks.
The temperature at which a P4 throttles is really high. I forget exactly, but I think it's something like 60 degrees (it's listed in the spec). The highest I ever got mine to run is up around 40 degrees. Basically, it never throttles unless your heatsink falls off.
Re:I've been steering people clear of the IV
on
Pentium IV study
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· Score: 2
This is FUD. I built my P4 system into a two-year old generic ATX case, which previously had a 100 MHz Pentium in it. The only thing I needed to change was the power supply (which you likely would need to do if you got an Athlon also, since it has such high power requirements).
This is incorrect. Intel has 84% of the market, and AMD has 14%. Contrary to popular belief, Intel actually gained market share in 2000. The real market change is that Intel has almost completely captured the sub-$1000 market (it now has approximately 95% of it now, and had less than 50% in the 1998 timeframe). AMD has shifted away from the low-end into the mid-tier (where it has about 25% share - by far its largest share of any segment). This has been good for AMD because it has given it a higher ASP. Intel still has a virtual monopoly on high-end, X86 workstation, servers, and mobile (I don't know where you get 20% share for AMD in mobile; AFAIK it's less than 5%).
Intel's main strength is its manufacturing capacity. Intel has 7 or 8 fabs, and AMD has 2 (which is not enough to feed more than 20% of the market at current demand, which puts an upper limit on their market share). It would be in AMD's interest to continue to trend toward higher-end and leave the low end (but high volume) to Intel.
Interestingly, despite the fact that the Celeron is more than double the price of the equivalent Duron, Intel has a virtual monopoly on the sub-$1000 market, which makes me very seriously question AMD's marketing abilities. The Celeron is smaller (i.e. cheaper to manufacture), while the Duron has a relatively high opportunity cost (manufacturing Athlon's). Intel has been quietly cleaning up on this market (low margin, but very high volume), while AMD has almost complete lost it.
Intel's biggest weapon is its 0.13um process on 300mm wafers, which is coming early next year. This technology literally quadruples the capacity of a fab (AMD won't have 300mm until FAB35 is completed, which is projected to be in 2005). This means that one single Intel fab has the double the capacity of all of AMD, _and_ it lowers prices. Basically, Intel will be manufacturing tiny 2.5GHz Northwood's in tremendous quantity at a lower price than AMD's 1.5 GHz Athlon's (or whatever they will have in early 2002). I'd be pretty surprised if AMD didn't go back into negative earnings by Q3'01, and shocked if not by the Q1'02.
A truly wonderful example of this kind of thing are the early works of JRR Tolkein. The early history of the Silmarillion is absolutely fascinating and a wonderful example of the development of a literary theme. That's a work that wasn't published for over 50 years after it was started, but some of the earliest drafts still exist. Because those drafts are available, it's possible to see how it developed. Will the same thing happen when authors write everything in Word and write over old versions every time they change anything? How about if they're still very careful about keeping copies of early drafts but the formats change so much that they can't be read anymore?
Enter VMS, which automatically saves every version of a file, until you manually delete them. If Unix had not wiped out VMS, everybody would have every file they ever worked on.
Word actually does have a versioning feature which saves every version you worked on if you enable it.
My OS is going to have infinite versioning and journalling capabilities, so you can undo any change you ever made (not just on "file save" boundaries). When VMS was developed the typical hard drive was under 100 MB, and now that they sell 100 GB drives for a dime a dozen, we have the room to save everything. Why current OS have usage models which encourage people to delete everything is beyond me.
Er, Visicalc was never an IBM PC program - it was an Apple II program. It changed its named to Lotus 1-2-3 when it was implemented on the IBM.
Another thing: although TCP/IP was (I believe) first implemented on Unix/C, it certainly wasn't the first networking protocol. DECnet certainly precedes it, and I'm sure there are others which are older also.
Apparently Hemos is trying to divert the fact that VA Linux (the parent of Slashdot) has its OWN pile of class action suits, alleging securities fraud. Of course, the difference is that Microsoft has billions of dollars of cash on hand, and makes a couple of billion dollars in _profit_ every year. VA Linux, on the other hand, is in debt hundreds of millions of dollars, and loses tens of millions of dollars per quarter. So who do you think will be sued out of existence first? How will be out on the streets first begging for a REAL job - Gates or Bates? My money is on VA Linux going bankrupt far sooner than Microsoft.
MS just went along for the ride. MS was in the right place at the right time, that's all.
Really? I thought Microsoft was successful because of their business practices. Now you say it's just luck? You'd better give Judge Jackson a call, and explain this revelation to him so he knows that he should reverse his decision on the antitrust suit!
Dude, information wants to be free, they can't charge $30 a year for something which is free to provide. You can encode any Salon article as a number. So it's like they're charging for numbers! What a scam! We can just put the articles on Freenet and remove the ads - they won't be able to catch us that way.
Hardly a relevant topic. The main source of copyright controversy on the internet is Napster, and almost all of the violations committed on Napster are with recently copyrighted material. Nobody's getting rich off old copyrights from the 1920's or 1930's - 99% of stuff being traded on Napster is from the past couple of years. The length of copyright is not an issue at all in the matter.
Be sure you have this straight: Congressman Boucher supported the anti-spamming bill, so he is in favor of massive government regulation of the internet. He believes that the government has the right to tell people who can send mail to whom, and what the content of the message should be. He wants more government regulation of the internet, wants to take more rights away from the users, and hopes to make the government have bigger, more overreaching control of the internet.
I have been wondering this also. Have free speech organizations such as the ACLU had any comment on this? Clearly, spam laws violate the first amendment. There is a very fine line between sending unsolicited e-mail to sell a service, and to send an e-mail for a political cause requesting donations.
The bottom line is: what right does the government have dictating who can send e-mail to who, and what the content is? That's exactly what a spam law does.
Not really. Practically every single significant record label is in the RIAA. There are only 5 majors, but there are several hundred labels in the RIAA. The only ones who aren't are the type of labels where the operation consists of some guy in his garage pressing a couple dozen seven inches of each title.
I hope you're joking. For starters, I believe music is illegal in Iraq (or is that Iran?). Second, the government is highly oppressive and there is no freedom of speech in Iraq. It is illegal for newspapers to write anything but the best things about the government. Any government this totalitarian would be completely against any sort of 'free for all' communication system, like Napster, which could be used for all sorts of subversive activities. The US is *by*leaps*and*bounds* the most free country in the world, and if their government doesn't like it, other countries would be significantly more against it.
I won't bother showing you the power specifications (which show that P4 uses much less power than Athlon) or the spec and stream benchmarks (which show P4 signficantly outperforming the Athlon, about 2x on specFP, and about 3x on stream).
But as far as the assertion that Intel is an awful place to work, this is easily debunked by looking at Fortune's Best Places to Work list, where Intel is #41, ahead of every computer company including the ones you listed - HP is all the way down at #63, and Compaq and IBM aren't even in the top 100.
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There are several problems with this:
1) As the article stated, AMD has to price the Athlon frequency for frequency. They are going to have to price the 1.3 GHz Athlon below the 1.3 GHz Pentium, not the 1.5 GHz Pentium 4. 99% of consumers look at frequency for performance, not some other benchmark. This is good for Intel, and bad for AMD; AMD has higher performance per frequency, but they don't know how to market this. Unless AMD educates consumers, gigahertz will continue to be the benchmark. IMHO, they cannot change this since they don't have the credibilty of Intel.
2) The Intel brand is one of the most valuable brands in the world, while AMD is comparatively unheard of. The Pentium 4 itself is a very good brand, because of the marketing campaign. So, the P4 has an automatic price premium above Athlon. Thus AMD has to undercut the P4 price, or they won't sell any (except to zealous AMDroids who are willing to pay a premium for Athlons - and this is a miniscule percentage of the market).
I think this is good for Intel; but it probably hurts AMD a lot more than it helps Intel. This will continue to put enormous price pressure on their ASP, which they cannot afford to lose (they have lots of debt and little cash, while Intel has something like $15 billion in cash and almost no debt).
The advantage of Iomega over CD's is that you can use it as a hard-drive in that you can edit a file inline. On a CD you have to re-burn the CD when you change a file.
IMHO, the main advantage of CD's are that they are portable (every computer has a CD reader), and probably more reliable.
You are, unfortunately, horribly misinformed. A PC800 Rambus based P4 system does approximately 3.5x better than a PC2100 equipped Athlon system. The PC800 Rambus has a peak bandwith of 3.2 Gb/s and the PC2100 has a peak bandwith of 2.1 Gb/s. The memory subsystem is only 50% faster, yet performance of the whole system is 350% faster. Thus, the speedup does not derive from the memory system, but the CPU (mostly due to prefetching, large lines, etc.) In fact, there has been almost no speedup observed on an Athlon system going from SDR to DDR (which has something like 2x the bandwith), since the Athlon cannot take advantage of the extra bandwidth like the P4 can.
Your statement about Athlon/P3 outperforming P4 on FP is just plain FUD. P4 is the second fastest CPU in the world in FP (and the fastest in INT, by the way); the only thing faster is the very fastest speed grade Alpha. Let's have a look at SPEFfp2000:
833 MHz Alpha 21264 - 571
1.5 GHz Pentium 4 - 549
1.33 GHz Athlon - 414
1 GHz Pentium III - 304
Exactly how many shares of AMD do you own which causes you to spread lies about competitor's performance?
I do have the Intel branded motherboard (850GB). In a two year-old generic ATX case which housed a Pentium 100. As I said, I did change the power supply (for the new connector), but the chassis itself is no problem. The motherboard fits fine in any case.
Dude, he said scientific computing, which is memory intensive by definition. The P4 cleans up this because its memory system is so much faster than P3/Athlon. He's not playing video games, he's doing real computation.
Oh, btw, redo your benchmark taking price/performance into account...
For starters: he said the P4 slaughtered the UltraSparc III. Have you priced one of THOSE recently? Hint: they're much more expensive (and rare!) than P4 systems.
Second: One of the departments in my company bought a bunch of $40,000 HP workstations. They also bought one $1,500 P4 system. They did benchmarks and found for THEIR APPLICATION, the $1,500 P4 was 3.5 times faster than the $40,000 HP. I'll leave the price/performance for this one as an exercise for the reader.
Third: For price/performance on SPECfp, the P4 does VERY well. It is about 10% slower than an 833MHz Alpha, and about 1/5th the price (it is faster - and cheaper - than all other speed grades of Alpha). Additionally, it is cheaper and faster than any other RISC machine.
Fourth: people who need the highest performance (i.e. P4 level memory and FP performance) usually pay a huge premium. In this sense, the P4 is a bargain (especially after the price cuts).
The P IV requires RAMBUS, much more cost with little or no performance benefit
Dude, have you seen any P4 memory benchmark? They outperform SDR and DDR based Athlon and P3 systems by a factor of three or four - all thanks to the memory subsystem.
The emulators.com article is easily debunked. Anybody who judges cache size (particularly, L1 cache size) as an indicator of CPU speed is even more clueless about how computers work than those who judge CPU speed by megahertz. Of course, McComas also made the same mistake.
If the P4 even has any SMP circuitry, what makes you think it was ever debugged by Intel? Not to mention the lack of SMP chipsets.
Well, for starters, according to almost all industry rumor sites (the register, amdzone, etc.), dual P4 is going to be launched within a matter of weeks.
In other words, they're having problems moving them out, so they are going to slash prices.
So that's why AMD almost always cuts prices first?
The temperature at which a P4 throttles is really high. I forget exactly, but I think it's something like 60 degrees (it's listed in the spec). The highest I ever got mine to run is up around 40 degrees. Basically, it never throttles unless your heatsink falls off.
This is FUD. I built my P4 system into a two-year old generic ATX case, which previously had a 100 MHz Pentium in it. The only thing I needed to change was the power supply (which you likely would need to do if you got an Athlon also, since it has such high power requirements).
This is incorrect. Intel has 84% of the market, and AMD has 14%. Contrary to popular belief, Intel actually gained market share in 2000. The real market change is that Intel has almost completely captured the sub-$1000 market (it now has approximately 95% of it now, and had less than 50% in the 1998 timeframe). AMD has shifted away from the low-end into the mid-tier (where it has about 25% share - by far its largest share of any segment). This has been good for AMD because it has given it a higher ASP. Intel still has a virtual monopoly on high-end, X86 workstation, servers, and mobile (I don't know where you get 20% share for AMD in mobile; AFAIK it's less than 5%).
Intel's main strength is its manufacturing capacity. Intel has 7 or 8 fabs, and AMD has 2 (which is not enough to feed more than 20% of the market at current demand, which puts an upper limit on their market share). It would be in AMD's interest to continue to trend toward higher-end and leave the low end (but high volume) to Intel.
Interestingly, despite the fact that the Celeron is more than double the price of the equivalent Duron, Intel has a virtual monopoly on the sub-$1000 market, which makes me very seriously question AMD's marketing abilities. The Celeron is smaller (i.e. cheaper to manufacture), while the Duron has a relatively high opportunity cost (manufacturing Athlon's). Intel has been quietly cleaning up on this market (low margin, but very high volume), while AMD has almost complete lost it.
Intel's biggest weapon is its 0.13um process on 300mm wafers, which is coming early next year. This technology literally quadruples the capacity of a fab (AMD won't have 300mm until FAB35 is completed, which is projected to be in 2005). This means that one single Intel fab has the double the capacity of all of AMD, _and_ it lowers prices. Basically, Intel will be manufacturing tiny 2.5GHz Northwood's in tremendous quantity at a lower price than AMD's 1.5 GHz Athlon's (or whatever they will have in early 2002). I'd be pretty surprised if AMD didn't go back into negative earnings by Q3'01, and shocked if not by the Q1'02.
A truly wonderful example of this kind of thing are the early works of JRR Tolkein. The early history of the Silmarillion is absolutely fascinating and a wonderful example of the development of a literary theme. That's a work that wasn't published for over 50 years after it was started, but some of the earliest drafts still exist. Because those drafts are available, it's possible to see how it developed. Will the same thing happen when authors write everything in Word and write over old versions every time they change anything? How about if they're still very careful about keeping copies of early drafts but the formats change so much that they can't be read anymore?
Enter VMS, which automatically saves every version of a file, until you manually delete them. If Unix had not wiped out VMS, everybody would have every file they ever worked on.
Word actually does have a versioning feature which saves every version you worked on if you enable it.
My OS is going to have infinite versioning and journalling capabilities, so you can undo any change you ever made (not just on "file save" boundaries). When VMS was developed the typical hard drive was under 100 MB, and now that they sell 100 GB drives for a dime a dozen, we have the room to save everything. Why current OS have usage models which encourage people to delete everything is beyond me.
Er, Visicalc was never an IBM PC program - it was an Apple II program. It changed its named to Lotus 1-2-3 when it was implemented on the IBM.
Another thing: although TCP/IP was (I believe) first implemented on Unix/C, it certainly wasn't the first networking protocol. DECnet certainly precedes it, and I'm sure there are others which are older also.
The rest seems pretty much spot-on, though.
Apparently Hemos is trying to divert the fact that VA Linux (the parent of Slashdot) has its OWN pile of class action suits, alleging securities fraud. Of course, the difference is that Microsoft has billions of dollars of cash on hand, and makes a couple of billion dollars in _profit_ every year. VA Linux, on the other hand, is in debt hundreds of millions of dollars, and loses tens of millions of dollars per quarter. So who do you think will be sued out of existence first? How will be out on the streets first begging for a REAL job - Gates or Bates? My money is on VA Linux going bankrupt far sooner than Microsoft.
They probably couldn't afford the airfare to Chicago.
Looks like they're overrating your performance:
SPECfp2000 of 900 MHz Athlon is 248
SPECfp2000 of 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 is 549
So, your Athlon is 48% as fast as the Pentium 4. The Pentium 4 is well over twice as fast as your Athlon.
MS just went along for the ride. MS was in the right place at the right time, that's all.
Really? I thought Microsoft was successful because of their business practices. Now you say it's just luck? You'd better give Judge Jackson a call, and explain this revelation to him so he knows that he should reverse his decision on the antitrust suit!
Dude, information wants to be free, they can't charge $30 a year for something which is free to provide. You can encode any Salon article as a number. So it's like they're charging for numbers! What a scam! We can just put the articles on Freenet and remove the ads - they won't be able to catch us that way.
Hardly a relevant topic. The main source of copyright controversy on the internet is Napster, and almost all of the violations committed on Napster are with recently copyrighted material. Nobody's getting rich off old copyrights from the 1920's or 1930's - 99% of stuff being traded on Napster is from the past couple of years. The length of copyright is not an issue at all in the matter.
Be sure you have this straight: Congressman Boucher supported the anti-spamming bill, so he is in favor of massive government regulation of the internet. He believes that the government has the right to tell people who can send mail to whom, and what the content of the message should be. He wants more government regulation of the internet, wants to take more rights away from the users, and hopes to make the government have bigger, more overreaching control of the internet.
I have been wondering this also. Have free speech organizations such as the ACLU had any comment on this? Clearly, spam laws violate the first amendment. There is a very fine line between sending unsolicited e-mail to sell a service, and to send an e-mail for a political cause requesting donations.
The bottom line is: what right does the government have dictating who can send e-mail to who, and what the content is? That's exactly what a spam law does.
Not really. Practically every single significant record label is in the RIAA. There are only 5 majors, but there are several hundred labels in the RIAA. The only ones who aren't are the type of labels where the operation consists of some guy in his garage pressing a couple dozen seven inches of each title.
I hope you're joking. For starters, I believe music is illegal in Iraq (or is that Iran?). Second, the government is highly oppressive and there is no freedom of speech in Iraq. It is illegal for newspapers to write anything but the best things about the government. Any government this totalitarian would be completely against any sort of 'free for all' communication system, like Napster, which could be used for all sorts of subversive activities. The US is *by*leaps*and*bounds* the most free country in the world, and if their government doesn't like it, other countries would be significantly more against it.
I won't bother showing you the power specifications (which show that P4 uses much less power than Athlon) or the spec and stream benchmarks (which show P4 signficantly outperforming the Athlon, about 2x on specFP, and about 3x on stream).
But as far as the assertion that Intel is an awful place to work, this is easily debunked by looking at Fortune's Best Places to Work list, where Intel is #41, ahead of every computer company including the ones you listed - HP is all the way down at #63, and Compaq and IBM aren't even in the top 100.