Intel Snags PC Mhz Crown Back From AMD

textral writes "The Adrenaline Vault is running an article about Intel announcing the new jewel in its crown, the 800mhz PC, again foisting the 'fastest processor on the market' belt away from AMD's 750mhz Athlon. " Its fun watching the big boys do battle over silly little things like megahertz. Every time they up the ante, my poor P2 feels slower and slower. Jerks.

Not exactly true...

Over at Ace's Hardware [aceshardware.com], they've got a news item about AMD's forthcoming announcement of an 800 MHz Athlon, supposedly today as well. And (AFAIK) unlike Intel, AMD's supposed to be able to be shipping them in volume very soon. Intel's still got volume problems, especially with the 800 MHz chip.

Re:Who is shipping volume?

AMD hasn't announced an 800MHz chip yet. The fastest they've announced is 750MHz, and those are quite easy to find. The Register was saying last week that actual systems with the 800MHz PIII won't be available until *March*. They're not shipping them in volume today, just sampling them to top-tier manufacturers. So if you ask me, they're still behind AMD.

AMD strikes back wih 900 MHz

I just found http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/gs-20.12.99-00 1/> [heise.de] saying that AMD demonstrated two version of their CPU running 900 MHz, one who aluminium and one with copper interconnections. Well, the article is in german, so ask some babelfish to translate!

Irrelevant due to Architecture

When the Athlon was first released, Toms Hardware [tomshardware.com] did a very detailed write up on the architecture of the Athlon, and how it relates to the PIII.

You can find that article here [tomshardware.com]. To summarize, this advancement from Intel is basically irrelevant, as AMD could (probably) have 1GHz Athlons on the market already, the Athlon is designed to run at those kinds of speeds, and has a (in their opinion) dramatically superior architecture to the PIII.

Tom mentioned somewhere in the article that AMD would probably do to Intel what Intel had been doing to them for years, which was to one-up whatever speed they come out with. Watch for AMD to beat this by 50MHz or so pretty soon...

Anthony

Is this good?

This is like cars that do 0-60 in 2.4 milliseconds and can go up to 250mph.

It just doesn't matter to most people, at least practically-speaking. As people pointed out in a recent discussion [slashdot.org], even though it doesn't matter, people will still buy the hottest chip around. Very much like how people buy the greatest SUVs, the fastest Porches, etc.

But consider that VW [vw.com] does well with their "0-60? Yes." advertisments [vw.com]. How long will it be until a processor company pops up with a similar ad campaign? I give it 12-18 months.

And I'll get one, too, because I don't need the latest, greatest hardware. 'Cuz I run Linux. :)

You actually want an 800 mhz processor?

Intel cannot afford to announce only the processors they can do volume on. If they did AMD would have a small lead in MHz number. Then manufacturers like Gateway and Dell would think about rolling out AMD based machines. By announcing fast chips, whether there is volume or not, Intel strings these guys along just enough (OK, co-marketing money helps too) to keep them from making any significant investment in Athlon machines. We have already seen Compaq and others introduce Athlon machines, if Intel cannot keep the MHz crown, AMD might get a foot hold with all the big US manufacturers. Intel would not want that.

The flip side is that AMD has probably been holding back a little bit to maximize revenue from each step up in MHz.

Re:Yeah!!

Microsoft already comes out with pretty decent innovations. Like it or not, microsoft has lots of competitors.. netscape, aol, real audio networks, all the unices out there.. There is alot more then the average linux zealot recognizes.

And if windows 2000 isn't technologically advanced as you would expect, then i can't imagine how linux could appear to be superior or even competitive..

Directory Services, USB, High Speed networking, good multi proc support, standard application base, good web server performance, stability improvements (my nt servers now run longer then my linux boxen on todays hardware.. but if i throw linux on my trusty old p2 systems, its vice versa).

So yeah, in this case the AMD and Intel is working for the customer.. as true for Microsoft and all its competitors.. the best man will win and has been winning. And as for choice, i choose Sun Solaris for my databases, NT for my file servers and linux for my development boxes. And now i get to choose which CPU i want to use. Too bad AMD hasn't released its Multiproc systems yet, or announced any developer chips for 64bit systems..