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AMD

Athlon XP1900+ -- Faster Than A 2GHz P4? 299

Posted by timothy from the speed-rather-than-fastness dept.
doormat writes "AMD releases their AthlonXP 1900+ Processor today, thats 1.6GHz. And it seems like its enough to topple the P4-2.0GHz, even in Quake 3 Arena!! AMDMB has a review of it." Ian Bell points out an AMD press release on the new processor. I love watching my old Athlon get slower every day ...
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Athlon XP1900+ -- Faster Than A 2GHz P4? More

Athlon XP1900+ -- Faster Than A 2GHz P4?

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  • Tom's Hardware Has It Also! (Score:4, Informative)

    by robvasquez ( 411139 ) on Monday November 05, 2001 @10:15AM (#2522101)
    http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q4/011105/index. html [tomshardware.com]

    Wait 20 seco....SHUTUP!

    • the register....Re:Tom's Hardware Has It Also! (Score:5, Informative)

      by leuk_he ( 194174 ) on Monday November 05, 2001 @12:20PM (#2522788) Homepage Journal
      AMD Zone [amdzone.com] gives this summary at the end of its review: "No architectural or marketing changes with this release ... expect the previous CPUs to decline in price ... expect a bit higher performance and power consumption."

      Anandtech [anandtech.com] agrees, saying the chip will not offer any significant extra performance over the 1800+, so early adopters need not sweat too much about being left behind. The site believes that AMD is currently the performance leader on desktop processors.

      VIAHardware.com [viahardware.com] reckons users could be just as well off picking up the 1800+ at 1.53GHz and simply overclocking it to 1.6GHz. Users already owning a high-speed XP chip are better off waiting for the next upgrade on the platform to significantly increase performance.

      Tech Report [tech-report.com] has some extensive benchmarking, putting the 1900+ slightly ahead of Intel's P4 2.0GHz in most of them, while SimHQ.com [simhq.com] gets very excited about the new chip.

      Amdmb.com also has a piece showing the expected five to six per cent performance increase. [amdmb.com]
      • Now I need to call my local shop and have them change the quote they're working on :)


        I thought we were going dual 1800 XP's, since the MP only went to 1.2. But this morning, checking the price of this chip, I discover 1800MP's all over the world, for a small price increase.


        So what do I do??? Dual 1900 XP's? Dual 1800 MP?


        This system is for smashing numbers and making sure that my code doesn't bring down the system before running it on the heavy iron (hey, bring down the beowolf or the SP2 too often and they get mad :).


        or is a 1900 MP likely to be hot on the tail of all this?


        hawk, who has to have the money spent by year end

  • Public perception of processor speeds (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chocky2 ( 99588 ) <c@llum.org> on Monday November 05, 2001 @10:16AM (#2522105)
    One thing I've noticed over the last year or so when talking to non-techie friends/family is that many people with relatively little knowledge of IT as a whole are starting to realise that the processor speed, however it's being measured, is far less important than the vendors want them to think.

    The end result of Intel and AMDs battle of "my processor's faster than your processor" seems to be that people are saying "I don't care" - as they realise that there 'obsolete' PII is actually perfectly capable of doing all the things they use their PC for and that only graphics people and the hardest of hardcore gamers actually need 1.5 to 2GHz.

    • Re:Public perception of processor speeds (Score:4, Funny)

      by led ( 3096 ) <pmiguel.maquina@com> on Monday November 05, 2001 @10:29AM (#2522150) Homepage
      Sure, but us techies like to have as much power as possible, I did a amusing thing the other day wich was only possible with my Athlon 1.3ghz I pointed my webcam at myself a made a movie of me while playing quake... try that in a PII....
      And of course EVERYBODY likes to have a faster computer just to get more seti packets in....

      • I pointed my webcam at myself a made a movie of me while playing quake...

        Yeah? Well give it up! Did you have your tongue hanging out the side of your mouth? Did you weave left and right IRL to avoid getting hit? This could be very entertaining!

      • Actually... that is the current marketing scam of ATI and Matrox. They are advertising this stuff called "head casting", where you have a webcam pointed at yourself.. and it generates a texture of your face and maps it onto your character in a realtime 3d environment.

        It of course, updates so that your expressions are actually seen on the 3d model.

        They promised that this will be used for games in the future, although currently I do not see this happening. They do have an instant messager based on it, however...

        http://matrox.com/mga/archive_review/oct2001/zdn et _millg550.cfm
    • It's not just processor speeds anymore. People are satisfied with most components now.

      It's not like the old days, jumping from CGA -> EGA -> VGA -> SVGA, or from monochrome to color. There's not a big need for consumers to go get 19+" monitors when the 17" are nice enough for most people. Likewise with hard drives. It far less likely that a regular consumer will fill up the 30GB drive that's standard now.

      The manufacturers have realized this for awhile. Hard drives, video cards, memory, and every other component is now marketed as "making the internet faster".

      The sad thing for the industry is not only the current economy, but also that new hardware isn't going to be as revolutionary as it once was.

      It all comes down to the "Killer App" syndrome. There's no need for new hardware until new software is available to take advantage of it. And without a need for new hardware, the hardware manufacturers don't have any immediate need to spend lots of time and money on R&D.

      New software needs to come first. I tend to see that most programmers are busy enough playing catch-up with all the new stuff available, implementing new communication APIs and what not. I'm sure a lot just haven't had time to do anything revolutionary.
      • Agreed. The really unfortunate part is that we have such great machines everywhere now, they are practically ubiquitous. The problem is the pipe - the promise of broadband is still a bit half baked. I'm not saying broadband sucks or anything, I have a cable pipe at home and I'm running a 100Mbps LAN and 11Mbps WLAN in my home - who would have thought of that 5 years ago? I'm just saying that the next round of killer apps require a more reliable, much higher bandwidth infrastructure, and a better last-mile solution that is lower in marginal deployment cost.


        If this makes no sense at all, forgive me - but my vision here is that high resolution, high quality, full motion video streams are capable of being supported by modern desktop hardware. But we still don't have the kind of pipes we need to push this data around. I still don't have a high quality, easy to use, secure, ultra-reliable videophone setup on my desktop. I can trade pictures and MP3s, perhaps the killer app of the last 2-3 years but the DMCA and heavyhanded industry tactics have greatly suppressed this revolution. Also annoying ISP policies regarding running "servers" in the home have made it harder to move toward a fully network-aware home, with remotely accessible services. I think these are all potential killer apps, limited by the pipe and legal morass rather than desktop hardware right now (if anybody has a Tivo and has played with running httpd and downloading extracted MPEG streams, you know how fscking cool this is and how many people would LOVE to play with such a toy, share shows with friends, archive and edit video on their computer, etc.).


        Or maybe another type of application will come along - interactive, immersive VR? I don't know, again, there's pretty damned good hardware there. Quake3 and other modern FPS games show a huge amount of possibilities for this stuff. But it's still only used in games. I haven't yet had a "virtual meeting" with a vendor on eBay to negotiate prices, or anything like that.


        These are just my stupid futurist ideas. Some of the applications are really waiting on the pipe, not the hardware. There may be other apps just waiting on the law. I don't know if there are any apps waiting on the hardware, but who knows, somebody might come up with something.

        The Semantic Web is an application waiting on standardization, infrastructure and software that I think has the potential to become REALLY cool (yeah, I know, Tim Berners-Lee is somewhat disliked by a lot of the /. crowd, and he's pushing Semantic Web stuff out his ass, but I'm still a believer). I don't think that requires any more pipe or hardware to build out the infrastructure and, like the WWW, is a technology that becomes fundamentally more useful as it is more widely adopted and more information is accessible in RDF/Ontology format.

  • 1900 1800 (Score:2, Insightful)

    by pacc ( 163090 )
    I don't doubt that the XP1900 is faster than
    the P4 2GHz, but at amdmb there's only a test against it's smaller brother the XP1800.

    Wheres some real tests comparing it to the P4 : )
  • ...I was planning on buying an 1800+ series processor today. With the 1900+ out its price will undoubtedly be driven down, since it's no longer the bleeding edge of performance.

  • Nuts... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by BoarderPhreak ( 234086 )
    This insane race that Intel is in is getting a little tedious at this point.

    I'd rather they waited a a little in between releases, rather than every couple of megahertz.

    I'm not saying that speed is bad, but do we have to have a release for every chip?

    -- Don't believe the megahertz myth!

    • Not a *couple* MHz (Score:3, Interesting)

      by athlon02 ( 201713 )

      We're not talking a couple of MHz, we're talking 130MHz for the AthlonXP 1800+ over the TBird 1.4GHz and 70MHz of the 1900+ over the 1800+. When you consider we're still barely in the GHz range, MHz still matter! If they released on every few 100 KHz that'd be different, but until we get up to say 15GHz or more MHz makes a difference, especially considering AMD's IPC over Intel's. But I'll step off the soapbox before I slip ;)

      I guess you do have a point though... for bleeding edge people they won't care, but Intel and AMD are competing businesses in a big market, so they can't afford to slip behind each other, it's a vicious game.

      • True, true. It is a vicious cycle indeed, and like the other poster said, if it induces a price war, who are we to argue? :)

        I guess I'd just be a bit scared to invest in a PC right now since you could be outclassed rather quickly. Not that this wasn't always the case, but at least you knew you had six months or so. Now it seems like there's a new chip out every or every other month!

        But like with any hardware purchase, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and go for.

        MODERATORS - This isn't offtopic you stupid assholes...

        • I guess I'd just be a bit scared to invest in a PC right now since you could be outclassed rather quickly.

          What? You don't 'invest' in a PC, you buy one to do some job for you. If it's fast enough, then who caares if someone has a faster one.

        • MODERATORS - This isn't offtopic you stupid assholes...

          I've always refered the direct approach: MODERATORS - Mod me up as insiteful you fucking morons...

      • Yeah that's right an astounding leap of 4.9% is a questionable bump.
        Back in the PII/200 days that would have been like releasing PII/210. Yeay!
      • > We're not talking a couple of MHz, we're talking 130MHz


        To put this in perspective, when I got hear a year and a half ago, that difference is the entire speed of the machine sitting on my desk when I got here a year and a half ago, a 133 pentathingy with 160M. (yes, I know speed isn't linear, but when you consider the memory subsytem is four times as fast, uses less cycles as well, and is 2 or 4 times as wide, as well as cache & fpu . . .)


        hawk, now using a 1G laptop and waiting for his dual athlon workstation

  • Payola ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tmark ( 230091 ) on Monday November 05, 2001 @10:21AM (#2522118)
    Now, I know have the hype comes from the readership here, but I just keep wondering why AMD and a few other companies like Transmeta get covered here so lovingly. Is it because Slashdot readers don't like frontrunners ? Is there something inherently open-source-dogma-friendly about the corporate philosophies about AMD and Transmeta (though I doubt it, I am sure their lawyers are or would be as agressive about patents and infringements as Intel) ? Surely it can't be just about performance - Transmeta lacks sorely, and I cannot imagine the day when Slashdot posts an article crowing with glee about how the P8 trounces the AMDXP6400 or whatever.

    • Re:Payola ? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by larien ( 5608 )
      The thing is that AMD has generally been beating Intel for about 2 years (since the Athlon came out, basically). The last 6 months have seen Intel make a comeback, but AMD has clawed in front again with the XP range.

      As far as price/performance goes, AMD are beating Intel quite handily, and now they're even beating them on plain performance.

      The transmeta thing is hairier; they have a damn fine product, but it doesn't have the performance to compete with even mobile Celerons and Intel have done a fair bit of work on Speedstep to reduce the power consumption of their mobile chips. If nothing else, Transmeta have forced Intel to re-evaluate mobile priorities.

    • Re:Payola ? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ishark ( 245915 )
      It's not payola it's "kill the monopoly". Microsoft gets bashed for its dominant position and attitude. Intel gets bashed for its dominant position and attutide. The day Intel has 10% of marketshare and AMD starts putting out crappy CPUs you can bet that Slashdot will be covered with Intel info.
      Another explanation could be that you tend to get quite a lot of (dis)information about the big players in the classic media, so the new (internet) media plays more on the less-known facts with a "balancing" effect.

    • No... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      We just like things that don't suck. AMD's processors suck far less than Intel's because they go much faster at the same clock speed as Intels do, and they cost a lot less. Transmeta's processors don't suck because they are implemented with some really cool technology with potential that we have barely begun to explore. Intel's rather passe unless you're talking about the Itanium in which case the alpha was at least as cool a 64 bit processor a decade ago.

      • Transmeta's processors don't suck because they are implemented with some really cool technology with potential that we have barely begun to explore.

        Well, they do suck, but they also have cool technology. However, this magical "potential" has been totally explored. I would prepare yourself for Transmeta to always suck as a replacement for Intel or AMD. It's possible that they might find a niche market if they can get the price low enough.

        Emulation of instructions will NEVER compete with dedicated hardware for instructions. Mark my words -- they will always suck when it comes to performance.

        • Re:No... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Tassach ( 137772 )
          Mark my words -- they will always suck when it comes to performance.


          Depends on what you define as "performance". Raw number-crunching speed, MIPS, FLOPS, etc. isn't the only CPU statistic that matters. Transmeta has done a pretty good job of meeting thier stated engineering goals. They didn't set out to make the fastest processor - they set out to make one with much lower power requirements.

          Saying that a Transmeta processor "sucks" because it's slower than an Athalon is like saying a Honda Helix sucks because it's slower than a Corvette. You could just as easily say that the Corvette sucks because it takes 4x as much fuel to make the same trip. Or you could say they both suck compared to a 4WD Pickup because they can't haul a trailer, go offroad, or carry a lot of cargo.


          I wouldn't expect Transmeta to displace AMD and/or Intel in the desktop market, but I do expect them to be able to compete and excel in the portable and embedded computer market.

          • Depends on what you define as "performance".

            I was thinking in terms of "price/performance ratio", not just raw performance. But still, even when you factor in power consumption, it's advantages are not that much better than the latest Intel low-power chips.

            When you also factor in that the processor is far from the biggest power consumer in a laptop, Transmeta is just not going to be a player there, either.

            As for the embedded market, that's where I think Transmeta has a shot. It's possible that due to the simpler nature of their processor, they might be able to get the price low enough to be a contender. But again, that's where their only hope lies -- in niche markets. The technology is interesting and unique, but the advantages are just not there for them to be dominant in any particular market.

    • there something inherently open-source-dogma-friendly about the corporate philosophies about AMD and Transmeta (though I doubt it

      It's not just Slashdot, it's the zealot personality in general. There's the perception that AMD is both the underdog and a grassroots organization run out of a cabin in Topeka, and more power to them for going up against Evil Intel (tm).

      Of course the simple truth is that AMD is also a hulking corporation, just like Intel, so Slashdotters should hate them just as they hate any other company trying to make a buck.

    • Re:Payola ? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by alexburke ( 119254 )
      It's really quite simple: a fully-x86-compatible processor that, clock for clock, blows the "original and best" x86 processor out of the water performance-wise.

      If that isn't News for Nerds, I don't know what is...
      • I wouldn't say out of the water... price performance wise, maybe, but AMD has only slightly inched ahead in the performance race. Intel will leapfrog them again soon, and AMD will leapfrog Intel soon after that.
    • Now, I know have the hype comes from the readership here, but I just keep wondering why AMD and a few other companies like Transmeta get covered here so lovingly. Is it because Slashdot readers don't like frontrunners ?

      There is some of that. Any news-like coverage likes to see things get shaken up a bit. There may also be some Intel specific hate though. Like hate for trying to suppress documents (see undocumented intel, and also the original Appendix H or which ever the hidden one was). Oh, don't forget hate for them insisting Randall Schwartz was prosecuted...

      Oh, and I rather hate the x86 instruction set. Which makes me rather torn about the x86-64 vs. iTanic thing...

      few other companies like Transmeta get covered here so lovingly

      Well, doesn't Linus work there? Plus it is a neat idea, even if it doesn't seem to be working so well.

    • While Intel has a fab on the ethnically cleansed land of Al Faluja [palestineremembered.com] I will never buy a Intel CPU or knowingly buy a product with any Intel parts in it.

      Some may go on about the fact that AMD's fab in Texas is built on Indian or Mexican land, but those Indians or Mexicans weren't driven off while the Geneva Convention, Hague Convention, the IDHR or the UN exited.

      The fact is that until Israel permits the return of Palestinian refugees (to both Rump Israel & the Occupied Territories) & returns all illegaly expropiated lands its in contravention of the Geneva Convention (A49P6), the Hague Convention (1906C), the IDHR & dozens of UN resolutions.

      Now as Intel did not lease or purchase the land its Israeli fab is on, from the people with the internationally recognised legal title deeds to that land (Palestinian refugees mostly living in Egypt) its an illegal fab on ethnically cleansed land. So I'm not ever going with Intel.

      BTW a good percentage, if not most P4s are made in that Israeli fab.
    • I apologize in advance because this long-winded post is certain to wind up being moderated off-topic, but I think your comment raises a serious issue that's at the base of Slashdot.

      Slashdot culture, and to a large extent tech/geek culture in general, shares a big slice with the society of anti-establishmentarians (what a horrible word, BTW). For whatever reasons (and everyone has their own), a large group of Slashdotters would rather see the establishment torn down than to ally themselves with it.

      I know people who think this way, and I undertsand the idea, but I disagree with it. There is a lot more to be gained by changing a system from within than by ripping the entire thing down and starting over. (For the sake of the argument I'll ignore the obvious long-term benefits of an all-out revolution.) The anti-globalism movement that Katz writes about, and draws 1000-comment articles from, could do a lot more good by having its ragged protestors attend a university and rising within a company than by hurling molotov cocktails at its gates.

      With regard to Linux vs. Windows, even Linus said, "Eventually the revolutionaries become the established culture, and then what will they do?" I'll tell you what they'll do: they'll get mad at some small detail within the newly-established culture and use it as a reason to launch another jihad against it. Because that's what they like to do. They're not interested in actually doing anything themselves, they just like to protest things others have done.

      To a large degree they behave like children. When faced with a problem, adults will evaluate the system they live in and make decisions within that system to solve the problem. Children, on the other hand, whine and throw temper tantrums until some resolution is reached--the parent relents or the child is disciplined. In these cases, we're seeing a bunch of petulant children throwing a fit because someone has offended their ideals and they feel justified in running through the streets assaulting people because of it.

      So how does this relate to the Athlon? There's a sense of forgiveness on Slashdot for the new Athlon XP naming system. "Yes, it's wrong," the average Slashdotter might say, "but they had to do it to fight against Intel." So it's okay for the underdog to play dirty, but had Intel invented this naming procedure they would've been villified on Slashdot from day one. And if Athlon eventually gets the upper hand in the chip war and Intel becomes the underdog, expect a switch of allegience from the disestablishmentarians simply because Intel is no longer the establishment. That is the definitive danger of this thought process. No one can ever rise to the top because the moment that they do, they become the new establishment.

  • quake iii (Score:2, Redundant)

    by Anonymous Coward
    i just love how quake 3 has become the benchmarking programming for any video card that comes out now...
    maybe they should design the cards to work better in quake 3 and ignore the other...oh wait, i think someone may have already done that...

  • Doh I got the old one yesterday (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rushuru ( 135939 ) on Monday November 05, 2001 @10:24AM (#2522126)
    Argh!

    I had just finished downloading the athlon xp 1800 yesterday.
    Great now I have to download the new one over my 28.8k modem :/

    What? You mean it's not a piece of software?

  • Toppling the P4? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by underpaidISPtech ( 409395 ) on Monday November 05, 2001 @10:26AM (#2522133) Homepage
    Nice editorial work guys.
    I saw a review comparing an Athlon 1800 and a 1900.
    I didn't see a single thing in there that mentioned the P4 being outperformed or toppled.
    Just unsupported speculation.

    • Re:Toppling the P4? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Znork ( 31774 )
      Yep, sortof weird editorial, considering that most benchmarks have even the XP 1400+ beating the P4 2GHz on some tests. The XP 1800+ has already been pretty consistently outperforming the P4 2GHz, so the 1900+ would at most be taking over the lead in the very few benchmarks that Intel has had a small lead in.

      Of course, according to the shootout that Tomshardware had, on the most important test of Linux kernel compilation (:)), every AMD from the old Athlon 1400 to the XP 1800+ beat every Intel up to the 2GHz one.

      And thats even without factoring in the price difference on CPU, motherboard and RDRAM. Or the ethical considerations of purchasing Rambus ram.

      My next computer will be my first AMD without a doubt :).
      • You state the obvious. We all know that that AMD is outperforming the Intel. My next box will no doubt be running an Athlon and DDR mobo with at least a G of RAM. I just hope I don't have any hardware compatibilty problems like I did in the past with AMD. My overpriced Intel setup has never caused problems throughout upgrades (esp. video cards!)

        I was simply pointing out that the linked articles and the post itself were entirely misleading. Now you've got +3 Insightful for linking to articles that support the originally unsupported article heading --- and your responese completely failed to recognize the artificially inflated premise behind this entire "news item".

        Congratulations.
  • Originally I bought a Slot A motherboard.... Then the chip makers decided to go socket. I could buy a new mother board, but everytime a New chip comes out.... I will have to buy a new mother board. I buy a new motherboard but it's only good up to a certain MHz. So when I buy the new chip. I need a new board again.....

    Someone stop the insanity!

    Linuxrunner


    • Well, that's why you get a nice, cutting-edge motherboard, that supports more memory and a higher processor speed then you need. Sure, you might not be able to afford it, but in the future, the price will drop.


      Extra credit if you check out AMD/Intel's roadmap, to see where they are going to take the chip.


      Do your homework, your componets last longer then.

    • Many Mobo makers (at least, those that work with AMD chipsets) appear to plan ahead when they design the board and BIOs, in that while the initial revision of the board might only support up to a given CPU, but as the newer CPUs (which they knew were in the AMD pipeline, just not when) are released, they can release BIOS upgrades that allow the newer chips to be used on the older motherboards. If you are actively swapping out your CPU every time there's an upgrade, you can probably get a year's worth out of a brand new mobo.

      Plus, with the cost of the mobo outweighed nowadays by CPU and video card costs, it's rather reasonable to update your mobo when you get a new CPU

  • But wait... (Score:5, Funny)

    by dmccarty ( 152630 ) on Monday November 05, 2001 @10:27AM (#2522138)
    ...they didn't test it on quack3.exe.


    • If the AMD enginers can design a 'processor' that detects what application is running, *and* cheats on the performance, then Intel doesn't have a showballs change in hell.

  • If this Ghz race remains the main focus for AMD and Intel, we might need Quake 25 Thunderdome just to keep up benchmarking. I am not convinced that a few Mhz is instantly better, but you can never have enough Quake engines :)
  • Oh yawnny yawn yawn!

    A few more MHz here, a few more there, so what?

    Admittedly with one of those new Athlons and 0.5G of RAM, Nautilus might be half-way usable ;-)

    Seriously, apart from a few more FPS while fragging how much of a difference do those few extra clock cycles actually make?

    [My pondering could be said to be jealousy, as my main computer is still a P166, but my XFCE/Evolution/Galeon combo works like a dream on it...]
    • Seriously, apart from a few more FPS while fragging how much of a difference do those few extra clock cycles actually make?

      C'mon, we're talking about major speed boosts that increase the processor performance by up to 5%. Wait..five percent. Geez. That's a far cry from the days when we jumped from a 33MHz 486 to 66MHz. These twiddles aren't even worth discussing, especially as a bad driver could kill performance by 50% or more.

  • Confused about AMD strategy... (Score:3, Informative)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Monday November 05, 2001 @10:30AM (#2522157)
    Back in the days of modems (anyone remember those?), US Robotics was a company that you could always go to when you wanted the fastest modem on the market. In a way, you could say "nobody got fired for adopting US Robotics". An ISP that selected US Robotics as their vendor knew where they were going, and they'd have the best speed. Customers would stick with that ISP because they knew that they'd have the fastest connect rates. (Okay, mind you, locked into a propriatary format and vendor.)

    AMD is known for having the lowest cost. Period. Rarely ever are they more expensive than Intel. But I get confused about Athlon's strategy. They're not going to have the fastest CPUs for long periods of times, so for something like computer manufacturers, you're not going to select AMD for performance machines (even though they may currently be "on top") because you know it isn't going to last.

    I suppose I'm getting far off on a tangent here, but I think AMD would be far more successful if they could continually be known for creating the best performance processor. Then, hardware vendors would be far more likely to adopt their processor and chipsets.

    But I don't have my finger anywhere near the pulse of this market. Am I just plain silly?


    • Hell, that's why I bought an athlon.. AMD chips have a reputation for being faster, on average, than Intel chips, especially for 3D gaming. Now, factor in the bang for the buck factor along with a little bit more screwing with to make work nicely, and the choice for me was a no brainer.. athlon..

    • Its possible you are indeed just plain silly. While the chips are now so fundamentally different that doing a direct speed comparison is difficult, in the vast majority of benchmarks there have only been brief periods of Intel leading the speed race ever since the release of the first Athlons. On the 3DMark numbers (check Tom's review of the 1900+ for details) every single one of the Athlon XPs beats the 2GHz P4, even the 1500+ one.

      Personally, I think that when Intel rush out another couple of MHz in an attempt to catch up its not going to last either - I really don't see your argument about Intel being an accepted leader in the performace field.
    • Yes, I remember those days. And IIRC, for a while, ZyXEL was te company to turn to for the fastest modems, and the most features as well.
    • Indeed. AMD need a clear message to send out to people.

      "60% the cost, 90% the performance"

      Pretty much as fast, a heapload cheaper. They are not going to be 'the fastest' long term in the foreseeable, but they ARE pretty much up there now.

      If I bought a PIII 600 or 700 back a while it makes NO difference now, they are both old machines way behind the curve. 20%, even 30% better performance is only desirable at the time. Pretty soon the machines are seen as roughly equivalent as they both start to offer less than half the performance of new machines.

      This is a more complex message than 'FASTEST' but a whole lot more useful
      • Speed doesn't matter. The generic brand of macaroni and cheese could claim "60% the cost, 90% the cheese" (actually in the case of macaroni, I think it's closer to 25% cost, 100% the cheese), but most people will still choose to pay the premium for Kraft. Intel's the same way. It's brand is so much stronger than AMD's that almost everybody chooses to pay a premium for it.

    • AMD used to be getting by on the "just as good as Intel but costs less" line of marketing.

      In the last year AMD has been going on the "As fast if not faster and still costs less than Intel" marketing.

      The marketing tack AMD appears to be taking now is "we're our own company with our own product and it's great" (without so much as the incidental mention of that other processor company)

      This is the direction AMD has to go, to get out of Intel's shadow. The upcoming Hammer line of processors is a bold move in that direction -- with the advantage of having built in backwards hardware compatibility -- which departs clearly from the 64 bit architecture Intel has chosen. With ~20% of the market, though probably mostly in Europe and Asia, AMD should be making testing these waters.

      All that aside, you as a wise consumer, should choose the CPU that's "right" for you. By "right" I mean speed, efficiency at your primary task, with reliability and support to meet your standards. A difficult decision, really, considering most buyers get suckered by a minimum wage salesman on a commission and make important decisions truly uninformed. Lucky for most of them that you really will not miss the mark by too much, whatever you buy, though customer support is usually where people meet their grief, so consider that a primary factor over speed, etc., unless you're a bold, devil may care, geek who provides your own customer support and get the rest off the net.

    • The idea isn't just for AMD to be the cheapest. If they were consistantly 6 monthes behind Intel, but always offered a lower price, they would simply be regaurded as 'dicount chips'. They want to be known for offering comparable quality for a better price. The only way they will be seen as comparable to the market leader is to beat them on every benchmark... after all, they have a prejudice to overcome.
    • AMD's problem in the corprate environment is that up until now they have always had problems of some kind or another. In the beginning it was mainly speed. Remember back in the 486 days even the top of the line sucked. Even if you had a 486 DX2 66 it still took forever for Windows to load up and that was the ebst there was. AMD had some trouble marketing their less powerful solution, though obviously enough people bought them.

      So then we have the Athlon which by and large seems to beat out Intel per clock. The problem is that the Athlons have, till now, had pretty crappy motherboards. When they first came out thre was the AMD 750 which had positively abysmal memory performance and problem with the AGP bus such that it basically only worked at 1x. Wonderful. So here comes VIA to the rescue with the KA133 chipset. Except that STILL had problems. I bought one and could not get it to work with my GeForce for love or money. So the KT133 and so on come out. All of which still seem to have issues.

      Now finally with the 760 chipset it seems that AMD has a good, solid platform to run it's chips on. Now it's just going to take some time for trust to build in bussinesses. Until the 760, I wou;dn't recommend an Athlon to anyone, including the people I work for. It is just going to take some time for AMD to start winning IT people over. It's one thing to use an Athlon in your home system where, if it goes down you're inconvienced but that's all. IT's quite another to use one in a server that gets you screamed at by 400 people every time it has a problem.

  • Too bad . . . (Score:2, Informative)

    by acceleriter ( 231439 )
    . . . AMD lost so much street cred using that PR-rating like scheme. If they wanted to deemphasize clock speed as a measure of performance, picking "model numbers" <wink, wink, nudge, nudge> that look a lot like clock speeds in MHz wasn't the way to honestly go about it.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Too bad . . . (Score:2, Insightful)

      by elflord ( 9269 )
      But did they really lose credibility ? I don't think anyone's accuing them of dishonesty, or of overstating the numbers. If anything, they've been taken to task for understating them (since the 1800+ beats the P42G on most benchmarks)

    • Re:Too bad . . . (Score:2, Insightful)

      by TheShadow ( 76709 )
      Bullshit. They could have just thrown away their superior design and created a shitty CPU like the P4 and made it run at 2+Ghz so that they could compete in the moron space that Intel has a hold on.

      Instead, they decided to change the model number and explain to people (an prove it with benchmarks) that their CPUs have model numbers that match the performance of an Intel CPU running at that clock speed.

      If that helps AMD market their product and pull in more money that could be used in their R&D department to create an even better product next time. Well, then that would be great. At the end of the day, AMD is a company like Intel, that has to make money. Luckly, the AMD people want to do this by putting out a quality product. Intel is content with winning the marketing war.

  • other reviews (Score:3, Informative)

    by nilstar ( 412094 ) on Monday November 05, 2001 @10:47AM (#2522220) Homepage
    There other reviews of this 1.6GHz processor at AnandTech [anandtech.com] and at AMD Zone [amdzone.com] and at VIA Hardware [viahardware.com]. Check them out.

  • Y.A.A.A or Y.A.L.A (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GISboy ( 533907 ) on Monday November 05, 2001 @10:51AM (#2522236) Homepage
    Ok, Yet Another Lame/Appropriate Analogy:

    Considering the last time a topic such as this compared the Intel's best P4 to AMD's best Athlon.

    The Car/Engine analogy was used to no end and many valid points were made, but noboday really put it into a conclusive and easy to understand "package" that the Average Joe User could understand.

    Recall, if you will, the movie "The Fast and the Furious" as the analogy of Intel vs AMD saga.

    Remember the scene at the end with the race between the souped up Honda and the Toranado?
    Intel's P4 is akin to the Honda, as it has a lot of "high-RPM's" and "high-tech" under the hood (i.e. 2.X Ghz and Rambus et al).
    The Athlon is like the Toranado(?) and American Muscle car that had the "High Torque" and "lower-tech" that relied on brute force (i.e. 'superior' FPU and Large cache and the blower is similar to DDR-SDRAM in a way).

    The end result of the race at the end of the movie was that they (for the most part) tied.

    The current Intel/AMD debate is very similar, in that you have all this high RPM/low torque (intel) vs old school High Torque/mid RPM's (AMD).
    • The difference is that a Honda is incredible engineering. Sure, the S2000 is no Porche or TT, but it's a lot cheaper too! The other Honda models run GREAT even with peak tourque being so high in RPM's - they are huge innovators in the consumer car engine business. Flash to P4, and this is a horrible analogy. The P4 was made for marketing numbers. Honda wasn't saying, "Hey, maybe if we increase the peak RPM we can advertise that our cars can handle 8000 rpm's!" It was pure engineering on Honda's part, and pure BS on Intel's part.
      • It is marketing on Honda's part too. Increasing the RPM's on their engines allows them to claim higher ratios of power per liter (which they do), regardless whether or not that power is useable or not (it isn't).
  • Ok, so I don't keep up with hardware. At all. I just buy a new machine every few years if there's a game I just have to play :) This time around it was quake 3, and I ended up with a lovely abit KT7 and an Athlon 900 T-bird.


    So...


    Does the XP chip require a new m/b or will it work in what I have?


    Flame away, I don't care, I have better things to do than monitor every change in the PC world.

    • The KT7 won't fly at all, or won't be stable. Sorry.

      I've got a KT7A-RAID myself, and the Palominos aren't supported on card revisions <1.3. I was planning to get a palomino, but I have a v1.0 board. Bleeech.

    • Because of a hardware issue, all KT7* motherboards before rev 1.3 will not work with XP processors. Abit has released a new bios for v1.3 and newer motherboards that give it XP support. Since you probably don't have the KT7a model, and a fairly "old" processor, I'd assume yours is a pre-v1.3 model.

      Check for the rev on the motherboard to be sure. Or, if you feel lucky (or careless like I did, since I didn't read their warning at the top of the page and got the 1.3 bios since it was the top one), try flashing your board with the 1.3 compatible bios and see if it works or not. It said it wasn't compatible with my board and simply dropped back to a dos prompt. No damage done though.

      See Abit's bios page [abit-usa.com] for details.

  • Nooooooo! (Score:2, Funny)

    by erlando ( 88533 )
    I just bought my AMD Athlon XP1800+ and now they release the XP1900+?! I could've had a 70 MHz faster processor if I'd only waited a few weeks! Why oh why didn't I wait? Think of all the time I would have saved if only my processor was that fast!

    My world is in ruins..

    Nothing to see here...

  • Old Athlon Getting Slower? (Score:5, Funny)

    by base2op ( 226729 ) <spambait@bunkergate.org> on Monday November 05, 2001 @11:00AM (#2522268) Homepage
    I love watching my old Athlon get slower every day ...
    Leave it up to a filthy corparation like AMD to send out signals to slow down their older processors when they release a new one. I'm stickin' with Intel.


  • to help you heat your house for the winter...Those AMD guys are ok with me.

  • Wasting our time (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ioman1 ( 474363 )
    The MHz race is getting a little rediculous at this point if you ask me. Processors are coming out faster than we can keep up with. Compitetion used to be good for the consumer, now it is abusing the consumer. People will want to stop upgrading at all for fear of missing a newer processor.

    • Processors are coming out faster than we can keep up with.

      So stop keeping up with them!

      Keeping up with processors isn't any different than memorizing any other sort of ephemeral trivia. Just start ignoring the press releases, and it'll be just like giving up TV: you won't miss it. Unless buying/speccing PCs is part of your job, you do not need to keep up-to-date with the latest trivia.

      Then, when the day comes that you need a faster box and you think upgrading the hardware is the way to go, and you want to stay within x86: here's what to do:

      Surf the net for a couple of hours, to get familiar with what is currently out. Then:

      Buy a $200 to $250 processor. The dollars are everything. The clock speed, model number, etc. is trivia that you don't really need to know, except for purposes of motherboard compatability.

  • did it really take only two minutes to compile the latest linux kernel? that's just insane, not that I compile kernels all that often, but still two minutes for a kernel compile is quite impressive. I forget how long it takes on my 1Ghz, probably 10 or 20 minutes and I thought that was fast.
  • When AMD gets headlines by introducing a new processor chip that runs only 70 Mhz faster than the previous chip, you can bet their marketing has been/will be successful.

    AMD has an advantage. Unlike the old Cyrix PR ratings, these chips really do outperform their intended Intel counterparts. Maybe its just me but I don't think this would be news unless the 1800+ 1900+ etc. rating system was working its way into the minds of the consumer
  • That's it. I've had all I can takes, and I can takes no more. This is a message to all of you that write reviews and occasionally do up graphs.

    GRAPHS THAT DON'T HAVE A BASELINE OF ZERO ARE MISLEADING.

    In the VERY FIRST GRAPH, the numbers show a 6fps difference, but the bars seem to indicate a 100% performance increase of the 1900+ over the 1800+.

    If you don't start at zero, your proportionality is lost. You can no longer eyeball the graph and get a rough feeling of what the difference between the test subjects is. You have to read the numbers to be sure, and that defeats the whole purpose of the graph!

    You should be able to roughly analyze performance (or whatever) WITH NO NUMBERS ON THE GRAPH. This is why pie charts are useful. A small slice is small. You don't have to look at the number to see that it's a small piece of the pie.

    In conclusion: do the damn graphs up right, or don't bother with them. You aren't conveying any actual information if you do it wrong.

  • Stability Ignored (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    No one ever wants to flat out say that the motherboards for AMD chips are a lot less well supported than the motherboards for Intel chips because they're so busy cheering for the underdog.

    But if you dig deep into, say, Tom's Hardware Guide: Another factor is the stability and product quality of a system: while all Athlon processors suffered from occasional instability in our tests, the Pentium 4 platform ran without a glitch. (http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q4/011031/xpvs p4-15.html [tomshardware.com])

    Now, for me and I'm guessing a lot of people, system stability is far more important than a few percent performance increase. Since these machines are so closely matched and overpowered anyway, I'd like to see more emphasis on other factors like stability. More than a single sentence buried in one review, anyway. If these things are crashing during the tests, I want to know about it with a big red X on the graph...

    Or just the chance to stop having to download freakin' 4-in-1 drivers for my KT7A...
  • I guess this means my GPF screens will pop up that much faster, so I will lose less work when my wordprocessor/spreadsheet/morpheus pr0n sessios gets whacked. When they finally reach 10ghz, I wonder if the CPU will tell me "Don't even bother firing up Word, I'm going to crash in 7 seconds".

    Seriously, why pump out faster cpu's when they provide nil benefit ? Yes, I do have an Athlon 1000 running anywhere between 1200 and 1466, depending on my mood. I have no idea what to do with it, I actually bought it just to out-clock my buddies (until one smartass bought a water-cooling system - that's cheating). My Geforce2 is still maxxed out, even my previous Celeron was able to push it to the limit. My hard drives are still slow, and I have better things to do than buy more drives to widen my raid-0 stripe. It's already quite clear that the CPU is no longer the most important part of the computer, yet they still bust their asses trying to produce bigger numbers just to bleed us dry of our hard-earned money. We need better memory, better hard drives, better cd-roms, better video cards, better everything, but not CPUs.

    I think that AMD and Intel should help out Micron, NVidia, Maxtor, etc. We've reached a point where faster processors just don't yield much more performance, but if they would be wise enough to pitch in and actively work on the other functional parts of a PC, the entire system would become more efficient, not just some over-hyped core that overheats 2 zillion times per second while waiting for an i/o transaction.

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