Ultra DMA 66 is the new standard. 66 meg/sec is nice to have, especially considering the fact that cheap, integrated UDMA/66 controllers will be standard on motherboards in the future (e.g. Abit B06).
SCSI is kind of a pain, and very expensive. A high capacity SCSI drive can often be 4x as expensive as a UDMA/66 drive, not to mention the hugely expensive SCSI2 controllers...
Additionally, USB is rapidly replacing SCSI as the peripherial connector of choice, so IMHO SCSI is a dieing technology.
I'd be interested to see when IBM makes this new technology commerically available, and whether or not the higher density will reduce seek times/rpm significantly.
1. Also spelled "/. effect"; what is said to have happened when a website being virtually unreachable because too many people are hitting it after the site was mentioned in an interesting article on the popular Slashdot news service. The term is quite widely used by/. readers, including variants like "That site has been slashdotted again!" 2. In a perhaps inevitable generation, the term is being used to describe any similar effect from being listed on a popular site.
D&D elves (can't say much for AD&D, I still have my 1979 edition DM's Manual thou:) have less hit points than humans, and this can only be attributed to being smaller/shorter. I think Gary Gygax had balance in mind when he made D&D elves physically weaker than humans... why play a human when there are no physical advantages over higher intelligence classes like elves?
Tolkien on the other hand had no such balance issues to contend with, as he was not creating a game but a fictional universe:)
I'm one of those that believes is virtually impossible to do fantasy well on film
Hrm, I think The 13th Warrior looks pretty good. Michael Crichton, despite spending too long on the played out ER, is a frist rate director.
Then there's The Lord Of The Rings Movie comming out god knows when, but it looks excellent. According to Imladris They are considering casting Uma Thurman as Eowyn and Cate Blanchett as Galadriel (yummy).
I think we'll start seeing high quality Fantasy Movies due to the successes of syndicated TV shows such as Xena... What has been missing in the past was high quality CGI and money. You need the computer generated images for the special effects, and the money to spend on A Movie actors and directors.
Stephenson is excellent. He makes Bruce Sterling's books look like 3rd grade writing. I couldn't even get through Islands In the Net not to mention how lame Difference Engine was.
On Stephenson's novels:
Snow Crash was everything that William Gibson wish he'd written, and I imagine Gibson is feeling pretty threatend right about now, especially since he hasn't written a good book since Neuromancer. Virtual Light was the last Gibson book I purchased, and I won't be spending any more money on Mr. Gibson.
Diamond Age pretty much sucked in my opinion. The book's whole paradigm (ick, hate this word, but it's apt here) is centered around a "Victorian" future, mostly based in China (gag). Needless to say suspension of disbelief wasn't acheived in this novel.
Cryptonomicon was litterally the best sci-fi book I've ever read. And that's putting it in the company of Sturgeon, Heinlein, and Niven. Nobody today in any genre can touch this book. And that includes Orson Scott Card, who in my opinion peaked with Ender's Game, by the way, I'm already yawning a couple pages into Ender's Shadow. Card lost me when he ruined the ender series with Speaker for the Dead, I mean come on, it should have been called Ender the Pussy Goes to the Planet of the Pigs. Subsequent books in this series were equally lame.
If you have not purchased Cryptonomicon you are definately missing out. For you Linux geeks, Stephenson has done a nice job of selling the OS in this book, granted he calls it Finux for legal reasons (not sure why, not like Torvalds gives a crap about free publicity).
It's taken the successes of the open source movement to cast adequate light onto the inadequacies of our current corporate based software development system. It's hard to imagine that people can be creative and productive outside a regimented, authoritarian profit driven environment, given the lack of historical perspective common among today's population. However, Leonardo Divinci didn't need a supervisor, his creativity and genius were governed by his enlightened sense of man's purpose, and no doubt the incredible joy one attains through the creative process. Of course the Medici family, his primary benefactors, would stop by occasionally. However, despite all the tales of poisoning and treachery, they were actually pretty good bosses - having been the financial engine that fueled the Italian Renaissance.
Today the Medici's would have set up an office and secretarial pool right inside Leonardo's studio. He would have been flooded with memos and diversity training seminars. Tortured by all too often incompetent project managers, and forced to put up with a general environment of mediocrity. Who's to say whether the Renaissance would have ever taken place if Leonardo had been forced to undergo the same working conditions software engineers are forced to contend with today?
Is it any wonder that mediocre, bug infested bloatware is the end product of such a system? On the other hand, look at the open source community. That's where the real Renaissance is taking place, and it's about time. It's also no wonder why this community is in abject terror of the corporations swooping down on them and corrupting the entire process. The sad thing is, their fears are not groundless...
The Motorola thing is not set in stone. There has been no agreement.
AMD owes Motorola BIG TIME this is going to happen. Motorola is also looking for any excuse to close all it's old high labor cost U.S. fabs soon, and outsource production entirely. This is probably one reason it formed a partnership with AMD awhile back and shared its highly valuable copper technology with AMD.
AMD could not put out a 2GHz processor by Christmas of this year. At best, they could perhaps clear a little over 1GHz.
No KIDDING. exaggeration is a literary technique used to show absurdity, and to emphasize points, it's clear that I did not in any way predict that AMD would release a 2GHz CPU this year.
In no way would AMD be screwed if the KX133 never appeared. There's no palpable benefit with it. With their current chipset, future Athlons would still be faster (in some cases significantly) than competing P6 (the processor family which includes the Pentium III) offerings.
Faster yes, but there is virtually no marketing, and most OEMs are not selling or advertising Athlon systems. Gateway is not going to make any more AMD systems for instance. Here's a revolutionary idea: people buy things they know about. A lot of people don't know about the Athlon because it's not highly visible in consumer markets now. When the KX 133 comes out it will sell well be because of all the features that will be offered with this chipset. However, the CPU will become less and less important to 3D gamers as the majority of CPU intensive rendering will be done by geometric co-processors on the new generation of graphics cards coming out this month. For the non-gaming educated "build it yourself" market, the best & cheapest solution is a dual-celeron SMP set up for Linux. I personally plan on buying a Athlon because I have no need for SMP and win 9x doesn't even support SMP.
Transmeta? You're joking! The Transmeta cpu will only have its details announced in November!
If you had read the patents on this (as I have) you too would be impressed. I MUCH prefer RISC processors (such as my G3) to CISC x86 processors. If I weren't into gaming I would buy a G4 and load Red Hat Linux 6.0 on it, but since there aren't that many games for Linux & Apples I have to buy an x86. However, Transmeta looks like it might be a 64-bit CPU capable of dynamic reprogramming of the microcode, which would enable the CPU to switch back and forth between x86 and 64-bit RISC in REAL TIME.
And that sure as hell is worth waiting around for, ESPECIALLY since I already have to wait till November for the KX 133.
VIA is going nowhere fast with Cyrix and Centaur. VIA "let go" almost half of Cyrix's team, and a lot of the rest left on their own.
Duh. Everyone knows cyrix chips can't compete (*although the MSN free computer deal sold a hell of a lot of them). However, what VIA did acquire was Cyrix's modern fabrication infrastructure. This they can use to produce a high quality, cheaply made, competitive chip, that they could dump on the U.S. markets for half the price of what current CPUs are selling for. If they don't follow this strategy, I'd be quite amazed.
VIA isn't making modifications to the AMD750 chipset. They have their own chipset design that happens to work with the same processor.
Current Athlon motherboards are a marriage between the AMD 750 Northbridge chipset, and the VIA southbridge. However, it's pointless to argue that in the process of making the KX 133 there will be "no" AMD 750 northbridge designs incorporated into the KX 133. Why should VIA go to the trouble of redesigning a perfectly functional 200 MHz FSB? Of course, I don't work for VIA, nor do you I imagine, so we'll have to wait till November to see what the actual composition of this chipset will be.
AMD lets other companies make chipsets for their platforms *because* they believe it to be beneficial in the long run.
No kidding. I know "why" AMD is letting VIA take over the chipset design, it's because it's cheaper to do this, which is also why a lot of other companies use Taiwan for the same reason, it's is also why Kathy Lee gets here clothing lines made in sweat shops in El Salvador. I'm not arguing with why, I'm saying that I don't like it because Taiwan has proven that it is not dependable, and may not be Y2K compliant, and it has proven with the DRAM chip dumping back in June that it is not trustworthy. I suppose how you feel about this all depends on how you feel about high paying manufacturing jobs leaving the U.S. in droves. I personally do not like this, but I'm not going to vote for Pat Bucannan any time soon either. However, I buy U.S. products when they are of good quality and competitively priced with foreign products. I do this out of a sense of national pride and a desire to contribute to the success of American Industry, and also in the knowledge that the manufacturer's warrenties will be honered, there is no such assurance with foreign products nor is there adaquate technical support. If you don't agree with this, try e-mailing manufacturers in Taiwan for information regarding their products. You_will_not_get a response.
AMD isn't moving their Fab to Dresden. They're making an additional fab in Dresden to complement the Austin fab. Merely "moving" their fabrication plant would be an amazingly boneheaded move on their part, since it would not benefit them at all and would incur an insane cost.
hey genius, what happens when AMD switches to copper and.18 micron fabrication in a few short months, hmmmm? You think a practically broke company will spend another billion they don't have upgrading their aging Austin fab to.18 micro production? Give me a break. So building the Dresden fab DOES constitute a move. Try to explain your "theories" to soon to be laid off Texas AMD plant workers haha. And even if they keep this fab open, it'll still be scaled way way back, before it's sold off entirely sometime next year. IMHO, AMD can't compete with the Celeron in the lower end markets.
If Taiwan suddely were wiped off the face of the planet, AMD's ability to make processors and chipsets WOULD NOT BE AFFECTED AT ALL. Not true. AMD has no plans to make an equivalant of the KX 133 should Taiwan production fail. And should it fail (not likely now according to recent reports) AMD would not be able to compete with Copermine systems running on 810e or Apollo Pro 133 boards. This would translate to a huge loss of market share and very bad things for AMD. It kills me that people don't take into account APG 4x's importance to the computer community (not to mention integrated UDMA/66 controlers which Abit already offers on the Be6. Specifically the Gaming comunity which is huge. If AMD/VIA can't meet this demand, Intel/Abit/Asus will, and is, all that is required now is the release of the 700 MHz Coppermine with on-die L2 cache and.18 micron. The fact that Athlon doesn't have SMP support is also a big draw back now, but that's another matter.
Following your line of logic, AMD ought to get in the ram business as well.
I never suggested this. Micron has had the U.S. SDRAM market locked down since it aquired Texas Insutruments, and a large tariff wall was errected against Taiwanese DRAM chips (which were being dumped on the US market for $4 a pop, $1 less than the production cost of U.S. made DRAM). Besides, I'm very happy with my Corsair PC133 memory, which is much superior to Samsung or any generic PC133 SDRAM comming out of Taiwan.
We all know that Intel is creating a new type of ram, and they probably won't liscense it out.
Ahh, actually Rambus created RDRAM, and Intel holds a portion of the patent, and it's already been created. However it is pretty much worthless as it only has a16-bit bus to the FSB, while SDRAM has a 64-bit bus. RDRAM also crashes when the total amount of RAM exceeds 512 MB, which is the reason for the delay of the 820, so they could strip out a RIMM slot, leaving a staggering total of 2.
I have serious doubts that AMD would be able to make a chipset of the same quality of a VIA chipset.
AMD can and does make chipsets. The 750 chipset currently used for Athlon boards already includes the 200MHz Alpha EV6-based FSB. VIA is not going to change this. What VIA is going to do is integrate:
1) UDMA 66 support on the motherboard so you won't need a PCI controler (the same thing that Abit already offers with the Be6 BX boards) Why is this important? For one, Linux has trouble distinguishing between a Promise UDMA/66 controller and an adaptec SCSI controller, which is highly annoying if you'd like to run both; and
2) AGP 4x, which contrary to your assertion, will be used in the near future. The new nVidia GeForce 256 AGP 4x card is comming out early this month for instance. By the way, APG 4x fast writes circumvent system memory and speed up all data transfers from the CPU to the graphics card, which is a huge performance gain.
I never wrote that VIA made bad chipsets, I wrote that Taiwan's production has been flaky recently, and I'm not sure that they can deliver products the_are_required_for_the_continued_survival_of_AMD in a timely fashion. AMD has no problem making Athlons, there is an excess of Athlon CPUs, the prices are dropping because the motherboards aren't good enough yet, so people like me aren't buying the CPU. This equates to AMD losing money.
Not only did they lose money this quarter, they are 2 Billion Dollars in debt to the bankers. However, the majority of US corporations are leveraged to the hilt, so this is not unusual. Bankers enjoy owning everything and everybody, they only get pissed when you fail to make payments.
First of all, AMD's reliance on VIA for future modifications to the 750 chipset makes me very nervous. Despite VIA's recent successes with the Apollo pro 133 beating the 820 to market, Taiwan has been very flaky recently. With 3 major power outages, and the wholesale dumping of DRAM on US markets, and now the earthquake, AMD is pretty much screwed if VIA doesn't deliver. And it's sad, nobody knows what's going on with the high tech industry in Taipei. The closest thing to a credible sounding report I had to get off a tech site in Moscow of all places.
So what does it mean to AMD if VIA can't deliver on the Apollo KX133 chipset? It means that you give Intel a chance to get back in the market with 700 MHz Coppermines in November. It also means that you reaffirm the general sense that AMD can't deliver it's products in a timely manner. Although waiting for the KX133 rewards consumers with lower CPU prices as the OEM market has demonstrated drastic drops in Athlon CPU prices this month, it prevents AMD from signing lucrative OEM contracts at a critical time.
In the consumer markets, people a waiting for AGP 4x, and will settle for an Apollo Pro chipset and a Pentium 3 rather than wait 2 months for VIA to release the same product for the Athlon. Personally, I don't plan on buying any more Intel products due to their shameless attempts to strong arm Taiwanese manufacturers into not making Athlon motherboard, the bogus Rambus fiasco and Intel's bribery of Gateway to stop making machines with AMD CPUs.
Essentially, AMD is making mistakes that they _Could_Have_Learned_from Intel. For instance, Intel makes its own chipsets, and charges people royalties to use them. AMD has virtually out-sourced its chipset design and fabrication to VIA who recently acquired Cyrix. Now, you've got to ask yourself, how dumb can the execs at AMD be? And you have to be pretty suspicious about how long it's taking VIA (pre-earthquake estimate for the KX133 release was November) to get out a decent motherboard for the Athlon CPUs, as the changes they'll have to make are hardly drastic. Current Athlon boards already have the Alpha 200 MHz bus, already support PC133 SDRAM, all that VIA needs to do is slap on the AGP 4x components and onboard UDMA/66 which is technology they_already_have. You have to wonder if the aquisition of Cyrix has made them a little less eager to see AMD survive, after all should AMD go bankrupt, that would leave the entire low end PC market at their disposal.
AMD's moving of their main Fab to Dresden was a smart play, as is the production of Motorola G4 chips (and indeed the partnership with Motorola whereby AMD has access to Motorola's copper CPU technology), However, why not shift the whole operation to Germany? Why put yourself at the mercy of VIA, and the Taiwanese?
To be blunt, AMD could put out a 2 GHz CPU by Christmas and still be screwed if VIA is significantly late with the KX133. I for one will not wait forever for this board, especially with all the information out now on the Transmeta CPU.
I don't think that this is the right place to output your angst at the female gender.
Heh! And it's the right place to hold a National Organization for Women rally?
You know it's amazing how some people can politicize just about anything. Open Source = free = sharing = non-political.
I had a lot of trouble breaking into the industry due to the backward, sexist attitudes of many of the traditional "blue chip" software houses.
Hmmm. Could it have been your attitude perhaps?
Watch us gather in number, it's already happening.
Perhaps you'd feel more comfortable in Communist China where people are repressed for real, because it sure must take A LOT of energy to keep such a healthy case of paranoia alive in a free market society:)
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SCSI is kind of a pain, and very expensive. A high capacity SCSI drive can often be 4x as expensive as a UDMA/66 drive, not to mention the hugely expensive SCSI2 controllers...
Additionally, USB is rapidly replacing SCSI as the peripherial connector of choice, so IMHO SCSI is a dieing technology.
I'd be interested to see when IBM makes this new technology commerically available, and whether or not the higher density will reduce seek times/rpm significantly.
1. Also spelled "/. effect"; what is said to have happened when a website being virtually unreachable because too many people are hitting it after the site was mentioned in an interesting article on the popular Slashdot news service. The term is quite widely used by /. readers, including variants like "That site has been slashdotted again!" 2. In a perhaps inevitable generation, the term is being used to describe any similar effect from being listed on a popular site.
Tolkien on the other hand had no such balance issues to contend with, as he was not creating a game but a fictional universe :)
Hrm, I think The 13th Warrior looks pretty good. Michael Crichton, despite spending too long on the played out ER, is a frist rate director.
Then there's The Lord Of The Rings Movie comming out god knows when, but it looks excellent. According to Imladris They are considering casting Uma Thurman as Eowyn and Cate Blanchett as Galadriel (yummy).
I think we'll start seeing high quality Fantasy Movies due to the successes of syndicated TV shows such as Xena... What has been missing in the past was high quality CGI and money. You need the computer generated images for the special effects, and the money to spend on A Movie actors and directors.
On Stephenson's novels:
Snow Crash was everything that William Gibson wish he'd written, and I imagine Gibson is feeling pretty threatend right about now, especially since he hasn't written a good book since Neuromancer. Virtual Light was the last Gibson book I purchased, and I won't be spending any more money on Mr. Gibson.
Diamond Age pretty much sucked in my opinion. The book's whole paradigm (ick, hate this word, but it's apt here) is centered around a "Victorian" future, mostly based in China (gag). Needless to say suspension of disbelief wasn't acheived in this novel.
Cryptonomicon was litterally the best sci-fi book I've ever read. And that's putting it in the company of Sturgeon, Heinlein, and Niven. Nobody today in any genre can touch this book. And that includes Orson Scott Card, who in my opinion peaked with Ender's Game, by the way, I'm already yawning a couple pages into Ender's Shadow. Card lost me when he ruined the ender series with Speaker for the Dead, I mean come on, it should have been called Ender the Pussy Goes to the Planet of the Pigs. Subsequent books in this series were equally lame.
If you have not purchased Cryptonomicon you are definately missing out. For you Linux geeks, Stephenson has done a nice job of selling the OS in this book, granted he calls it Finux for legal reasons (not sure why, not like Torvalds gives a crap about free publicity).
Today the Medici's would have set up an office and secretarial pool right inside Leonardo's studio. He would have been flooded with memos and diversity training seminars. Tortured by all too often incompetent project managers, and forced to put up with a general environment of mediocrity. Who's to say whether the Renaissance would have ever taken place if Leonardo had been forced to undergo the same working conditions software engineers are forced to contend with today?
Is it any wonder that mediocre, bug infested bloatware is the end product of such a system? On the other hand, look at the open source community. That's where the real Renaissance is taking place, and it's about time. It's also no wonder why this community is in abject terror of the corporations swooping down on them and corrupting the entire process. The sad thing is, their fears are not groundless...
AMD owes Motorola BIG TIME this is going to happen. Motorola is also looking for any excuse to close all it's old high labor cost U.S. fabs soon, and outsource production entirely. This is probably one reason it formed a partnership with AMD awhile back and shared its highly valuable copper technology with AMD.
AMD could not put out a 2GHz processor by Christmas of this year. At best, they could perhaps clear a little over 1GHz.
No KIDDING. exaggeration is a literary technique used to show absurdity, and to emphasize points, it's clear that I did not in any way predict that AMD would release a 2GHz CPU this year.
In no way would AMD be screwed if the KX133 never appeared. There's no palpable benefit with it. With their current chipset, future Athlons would still be faster (in some cases significantly) than competing P6 (the processor family which includes the Pentium III) offerings.
Faster yes, but there is virtually no marketing, and most OEMs are not selling or advertising Athlon systems. Gateway is not going to make any more AMD systems for instance. Here's a revolutionary idea: people buy things they know about. A lot of people don't know about the Athlon because it's not highly visible in consumer markets now. When the KX 133 comes out it will sell well be because of all the features that will be offered with this chipset. However, the CPU will become less and less important to 3D gamers as the majority of CPU intensive rendering will be done by geometric co-processors on the new generation of graphics cards coming out this month. For the non-gaming educated "build it yourself" market, the best & cheapest solution is a dual-celeron SMP set up for Linux. I personally plan on buying a Athlon because I have no need for SMP and win 9x doesn't even support SMP.
Transmeta? You're joking! The Transmeta cpu will only have its details announced in November!
If you had read the patents on this (as I have) you too would be impressed. I MUCH prefer RISC processors (such as my G3) to CISC x86 processors. If I weren't into gaming I would buy a G4 and load Red Hat Linux 6.0 on it, but since there aren't that many games for Linux & Apples I have to buy an x86. However, Transmeta looks like it might be a 64-bit CPU capable of dynamic reprogramming of the microcode, which would enable the CPU to switch back and forth between x86 and 64-bit RISC in REAL TIME.
And that sure as hell is worth waiting around for, ESPECIALLY since I already have to wait till November for the KX 133.
VIA is going nowhere fast with Cyrix and Centaur. VIA "let go" almost half of Cyrix's team, and a lot of the rest left on their own.
Duh. Everyone knows cyrix chips can't compete (*although the MSN free computer deal sold a hell of a lot of them). However, what VIA did acquire was Cyrix's modern fabrication infrastructure. This they can use to produce a high quality, cheaply made, competitive chip, that they could dump on the U.S. markets for half the price of what current CPUs are selling for. If they don't follow this strategy, I'd be quite amazed.
Current Athlon motherboards are a marriage between the AMD 750 Northbridge chipset, and the VIA southbridge. However, it's pointless to argue that in the process of making the KX 133 there will be "no" AMD 750 northbridge designs incorporated into the KX 133. Why should VIA go to the trouble of redesigning a perfectly functional 200 MHz FSB? Of course, I don't work for VIA, nor do you I imagine, so we'll have to wait till November to see what the actual composition of this chipset will be.
AMD lets other companies make chipsets for their platforms *because* they believe it to be beneficial in the long run.
No kidding. I know "why" AMD is letting VIA take over the chipset design, it's because it's cheaper to do this, which is also why a lot of other companies use Taiwan for the same reason, it's is also why Kathy Lee gets here clothing lines made in sweat shops in El Salvador. I'm not arguing with why, I'm saying that I don't like it because Taiwan has proven that it is not dependable, and may not be Y2K compliant, and it has proven with the DRAM chip dumping back in June that it is not trustworthy. I suppose how you feel about this all depends on how you feel about high paying manufacturing jobs leaving the U.S. in droves. I personally do not like this, but I'm not going to vote for Pat Bucannan any time soon either. However, I buy U.S. products when they are of good quality and competitively priced with foreign products. I do this out of a sense of national pride and a desire to contribute to the success of American Industry, and also in the knowledge that the manufacturer's warrenties will be honered, there is no such assurance with foreign products nor is there adaquate technical support. If you don't agree with this, try e-mailing manufacturers in Taiwan for information regarding their products. You_will_not_get a response.
AMD isn't moving their Fab to Dresden. They're making an additional fab in Dresden to complement the Austin fab. Merely "moving" their fabrication plant would be an amazingly boneheaded move on their part, since it would not benefit them at all and would incur an insane cost.
hey genius, what happens when AMD switches to copper and .18 micron fabrication in a few short months, hmmmm? You think a practically broke company will spend another billion they don't have upgrading their aging Austin fab to .18 micro production? Give me a break. So building the Dresden fab DOES constitute a move. Try to explain your "theories" to soon to be laid off Texas AMD plant workers haha. And even if they keep this fab open, it'll still be scaled way way back, before it's sold off entirely sometime next year. IMHO, AMD can't compete with the Celeron in the lower end markets.
If Taiwan suddely were wiped off the face of the planet, AMD's ability to make processors and chipsets WOULD NOT BE AFFECTED AT ALL. Not true. AMD has no plans to make an equivalant of the KX 133 should Taiwan production fail. And should it fail (not likely now according to recent reports) AMD would not be able to compete with Copermine systems running on 810e or Apollo Pro 133 boards. This would translate to a huge loss of market share and very bad things for AMD. It kills me that people don't take into account APG 4x's importance to the computer community (not to mention integrated UDMA/66 controlers which Abit already offers on the Be6. Specifically the Gaming comunity which is huge. If AMD/VIA can't meet this demand, Intel/Abit/Asus will, and is, all that is required now is the release of the 700 MHz Coppermine with on-die L2 cache and .18 micron. The fact that Athlon doesn't have SMP support is also a big draw back now, but that's another matter.
I warrent the settlement is well below the staggering about of corporate welfare Intel recieves annually.
I never suggested this. Micron has had the U.S. SDRAM market locked down since it aquired Texas Insutruments, and a large tariff wall was errected against Taiwanese DRAM chips (which were being dumped on the US market for $4 a pop, $1 less than the production cost of U.S. made DRAM). Besides, I'm very happy with my Corsair PC133 memory, which is much superior to Samsung or any generic PC133 SDRAM comming out of Taiwan.
We all know that Intel is creating a new type of ram, and they probably won't liscense it out.
Ahh, actually Rambus created RDRAM, and Intel holds a portion of the patent, and it's already been created. However it is pretty much worthless as it only has a16-bit bus to the FSB, while SDRAM has a 64-bit bus. RDRAM also crashes when the total amount of RAM exceeds 512 MB, which is the reason for the delay of the 820, so they could strip out a RIMM slot, leaving a staggering total of 2.
I have serious doubts that AMD would be able to make a chipset of the same quality of a VIA chipset.
AMD can and does make chipsets. The 750 chipset currently used for Athlon boards already includes the 200MHz Alpha EV6-based FSB. VIA is not going to change this. What VIA is going to do is integrate:
1) UDMA 66 support on the motherboard so you won't need a PCI controler (the same thing that Abit already offers with the Be6 BX boards) Why is this important? For one, Linux has trouble distinguishing between a Promise UDMA/66 controller and an adaptec SCSI controller, which is highly annoying if you'd like to run both; and
2) AGP 4x, which contrary to your assertion, will be used in the near future. The new nVidia GeForce 256 AGP 4x card is comming out early this month for instance. By the way, APG 4x fast writes circumvent system memory and speed up all data transfers from the CPU to the graphics card, which is a huge performance gain.
I never wrote that VIA made bad chipsets, I wrote that Taiwan's production has been flaky recently, and I'm not sure that they can deliver products the_are_required_for_the_continued_survival_of_AMD in a timely fashion. AMD has no problem making Athlons, there is an excess of Athlon CPUs, the prices are dropping because the motherboards aren't good enough yet, so people like me aren't buying the CPU. This equates to AMD losing money.
So what does it mean to AMD if VIA can't deliver on the Apollo KX133 chipset? It means that you give Intel a chance to get back in the market with 700 MHz Coppermines in November. It also means that you reaffirm the general sense that AMD can't deliver it's products in a timely manner. Although waiting for the KX133 rewards consumers with lower CPU prices as the OEM market has demonstrated drastic drops in Athlon CPU prices this month, it prevents AMD from signing lucrative OEM contracts at a critical time.
In the consumer markets, people a waiting for AGP 4x, and will settle for an Apollo Pro chipset and a Pentium 3 rather than wait 2 months for VIA to release the same product for the Athlon. Personally, I don't plan on buying any more Intel products due to their shameless attempts to strong arm Taiwanese manufacturers into not making Athlon motherboard, the bogus Rambus fiasco and Intel's bribery of Gateway to stop making machines with AMD CPUs.
Essentially, AMD is making mistakes that they _Could_Have_Learned_from Intel. For instance, Intel makes its own chipsets, and charges people royalties to use them. AMD has virtually out-sourced its chipset design and fabrication to VIA who recently acquired Cyrix. Now, you've got to ask yourself, how dumb can the execs at AMD be? And you have to be pretty suspicious about how long it's taking VIA (pre-earthquake estimate for the KX133 release was November) to get out a decent motherboard for the Athlon CPUs, as the changes they'll have to make are hardly drastic. Current Athlon boards already have the Alpha 200 MHz bus, already support PC133 SDRAM, all that VIA needs to do is slap on the AGP 4x components and onboard UDMA/66 which is technology they_already_have. You have to wonder if the aquisition of Cyrix has made them a little less eager to see AMD survive, after all should AMD go bankrupt, that would leave the entire low end PC market at their disposal.
AMD's moving of their main Fab to Dresden was a smart play, as is the production of Motorola G4 chips (and indeed the partnership with Motorola whereby AMD has access to Motorola's copper CPU technology), However, why not shift the whole operation to Germany? Why put yourself at the mercy of VIA, and the Taiwanese?
To be blunt, AMD could put out a 2 GHz CPU by Christmas and still be screwed if VIA is significantly late with the KX133. I for one will not wait forever for this board, especially with all the information out now on the Transmeta CPU.
Heh! And it's the right place to hold a National Organization for Women rally?
You know it's amazing how some people can politicize just about anything. Open Source = free = sharing = non-political.
I had a lot of trouble breaking into the industry due to the backward, sexist attitudes of many of the traditional "blue chip" software houses.
Hmmm. Could it have been your attitude perhaps?
Watch us gather in number, it's already happening.
Perhaps you'd feel more comfortable in Communist China where people are repressed for real, because it sure must take A LOT of energy to keep such a healthy case of paranoia alive in a free market society :)