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AMD

1.6GHz Athlon Computers, Via Announces KT266 chips 114

Posted by Hemos from the discussion-fodder dept.
GimpyAMD writes: " Sys has announced 1.6GHz desktop and workstation computers that use KryoTech's cooling process to achieve that clock rate with Athlons behind them. Apparently they will be out late October to November. Also, we have Via's press release on their KT266 chipset that supports DDRSDRAM ."
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1.6GHz Athlon Computers, Via Announces KT266 chips More

1.6GHz Athlon Computers, Via Announces KT266 chips

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  • Sooo.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    You're just getting settled in with that brand-spankin' new KT133 socket-A motherboard you just bought (to replace the KX133 you bought a couple of months back) ???

    Well, chuck it out! We got a new one for you...

    Lets see. We started off this year with the AMD 750 set, switched to the KX133 for a (very) modest performance boost, swtiched to the KT133 for the socket chips -- and the next wave is already here.

    Four chipset generations in one year. Must be some kind of record. :)

    At this point, the expiration date for a computer and the expiration date for a jug of milk are rapidly converging.

  • Re:Overclock? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    nope, you're just wrong.
    again.
  • There are a wide variety of compute bound tasks. They are surely less than 1% of the market, but there are plenty of scientist/engineers would love to get a machine that could run their N hour jobs 60% faster.
  • Forget DDRSDRAM. I want bitchin' fast, curiously high-bandwidth LMNOPRAM.

    God, nobody's going to understand that... ;) I need to go to bed.

  • ... Is the new Hindenberg class Pentium V chips, with liquid hydrogen cooling.

    Oops, is that a spark???? BANG!

    Oh, the humanity...

  • Cheap RAM Still Not Cheap (Score:4)

    by Christopher B. Brown ( 1267 ) <cbbrowne@gmail.com> on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @07:56PM (#767669) Homepage
    The problem with these vastly powerful CPUs is that they continue to outrace the availability of suitable RAM, in terms of cost, speed, and quantity.
    • When Pentium Pros were nicely harnessed with 64MB of RAM, it probably makes sense for something 10 times as fast to be "properly appointed" with something like 640MB of RAM;
    • These things need huge amounts of cache to run efficiently;
    • Idiot vendors will probably sell them with 128MB of RAM because that's what's not too expensive this month;
    • Most of the CPU power is outright wasted when it's spending it's interrupt time assortedly waiting for an IDE drive, a WinModem, and such.

      The killer hardware would be to have a bank of 16 "serial ATA" ports with an asynchronous drive on each port. Of course I2O would likely be better still, but that seems pretty vaprous, certainly for the consumer market...

  • If you haven't tried it already, download the NewDeal
    Office demo from NewDeal [newdealinc.com] and give it a whirl.
    Amazing what it can do on a low-end machine! There is
    even a VNC viewer available to connect to your Linux box.


  • Another name for IEEE 1394 is FireWire.

  • "Most of the CPU power is outright wasted when it's spending it's interrupt time assortedly waiting for an IDE drive, a WinModem, and such. "

    Most likely they'll use ATA100 drives. If you don't recall, from UDMA33 and up (UDMA66, ATA100), the cpu doesn't have to 'wait' on the drive like before. The controller can transfer directly to RAM and the CPU can occupy itself elsewhere, at least if it's a multitasking system.


    --
  • Hee-hee. You have no idea at all how underutilized the typical game-playing PC is

    Most every computer on earth spends more time waiting for the user than vice-versa. So yes, almost all computers are "underutilized" if you mean that they don't run at 100% CPU 24 hours a day.

    But yes, playing a game can max out many CPUs (though more recent processors have more headroom thanks to the advent of consumer-level 3d graphics chips to offload processing).

    Heck, there are games on the five year old PlayStation that outgun high-end PC games, which is damn amazing considering that the PS has about 1/3 the graphics power of a Voodoo 1

    It depends what games you're talking about -- graphics intensive games with little "math" behind them work great on consoles -- not much processing required beyond pushing polygons around.

    But there is more to the game world than first-person shooters, and a persistent war /strategy / flight simulator like Longbow spent more than half the processing power at the time on keeping track of the hundreds of units on the battlefield. Very little of the processing power was shown on the screen (but Voodoo sure made it look better!).

    Tetris doesn't require a P3, and neither does Quake 3 (it requires a decent 3d card), but you'd be hard-pressed to make a "big world" type of game on a playstation because it's about more than graphics.

    The original poster was correct, though, that games are what pushes the technology in computers (along with video). Not many other apps can actually hit 100% CPU on a P3, and have a customer base willing to shell out the cash to improve that.

    I do 3d graphics and remember the bad old days of paying $1000 for an OpenGL card with 2 megs of memory (this was like 1997, not so long ago). Thanks to 3Dfx and the game market, every consumer has 10 times that power, and it's good for us all...

    I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
    Q.Tell me what the trail was.

  • Can't wait.. (Score:5)

    by Frijoles ( 16015 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @05:45PM (#767674)
    I can't wait until we get to 1.21 GHz.. then I can run around saying, "1.21 GHz? 1.21 GHz?! The only thing capable of producing that much power is a bolt of lightning!!"

    1.21GHz!!
  • That's not one you can lay at Bill's feet. He was responsible for obtaining DOS and making it run on the hardware, but the hardware specifications (and the BIOS) were true Big Blue. Mr. Gates may have a few things to answer for, but I don't think that's one of them.
  • Well, I don't know about the first program, but it would seem to me you should be able to recompile the latter two to run on a DEC Alpha. What's stopping you? Or is there some boxed software only available for i386 that you use as well?

  • Re:This is exactly what I want (more crack) (Score:5)

    by Soko ( 17987 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @06:15PM (#767677) Homepage
    ...and this is in reference to...what? The story is about a company that uses a cooling unit (likely 50-60Lbs and a 400W power sink in itself) almost the size of the PC to overclock an Athlon to 1.6 GHz. You want to lug that around for a laptop? I can see it now:

    (On American flight 2603 to Little Rock)
    Stewardess: Excuse me sir, but you'll have to put your "laptop" away.
    Cecil: What? No way, lady, the guy next to me is using his! And he's only got a Tecra! Mine's a Sys Cold-Fusion!
    Stewardess: I know, sir, but your computer is taking up the entire aisle.
    Cecil. Computer? See, it fit's under the seat in front of me!
    Stewardess: Oh? Is THAT why the upolstery is smouldering? And that battery pack above us...
    Cecil: What? The lead-acid cells are 2 lbs under the storage capacity of the overhead bin!
    Stewardess: Actually, we need to stow those in the hazardous waste container at the back of the plane.
    Cecil: Great! No power! You have an adapter?
    Stewardess: How much power do you need?
    Cecil: Oh, about 1000 Watts
    Stewardess: That's just about how much the generator puts out for the whole aircraft. Shut it down, sir.
    Cecil: Awww, geez, it's such a nice laptop too. All the guys on Slashdot think so!
  • As taken from SYS's website:

    "The SYS Cold-Fusion desktop, the world's fastest PC, is intended for digital content creation, 3D graphics and game design, CAD/CAM, desktop publishing, financial analysis, and very serious gaming. Built around KryoTech's vapor phase refrigeration technology, the system provides unprecedented performance."

    Funny, they didn't talk about web browsing and word processing!
  • you just hit the nail on the head.

    People who buy the 1.6ghz are either trying to number crunch faster, or play games faster...

    not necessarily try to run them as servers.
  • It does effect framerate. IIRC, carmack said you get about a 20% speedup, coz all ai and stuff is moved away from the rendering cpu.... But i may not RC :-)

    Gfunk007
  • yes optimiztion is laking
    back when I used a APPLE IIGS
    computers didn't double clock rates every 6 months (or what ever)
    I used that computer for several years after it was discontinued
    and there were a group of programers in france called FTA
    (free tools association) that did some really AMAZING stuff
    by pushing the IIGS's capabitlities farther then anyone had done
    when the IIGS was in it's prime.
    It just makes me wonder what programmers would do with todays
    technology if no new advavces came out for 5 years

  • What about games? (Score:3)

    by LennyDotCom ( 26658 ) <Lenny@lenny.com> on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @05:18PM (#767682) Homepage Journal
    You left out games
    Gamers arre the people how really push the emveope.
    If it wasn't for games everyone would use a mac

  • Re:1.66GHz desktop? (Score:5)

    by Frac ( 27516 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @05:38PM (#767683)
    we really need to file this post together with the "but does it run linux?" and "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these" under the cabinet of Generic posts that pop up again and again.

    nobody said a 1.66 Ghz chip is targeted at consumers for speedier IMing or word processing.. think about it.

  • I just like how DDRSDRAM rolls off the tongue.
  • Can't wait to get my hands on one of these things ... it really is nice to see them getting a little more of the speed out of the chipset ... ... (there *is* quite a bit more till the "theoretical limit" on that set, isn't there?)

    bemis
    -if i don't get a little more sleep i'm going to delete all the firewall shit off my damned alarm clock!
  • "high-speed V-Link bus, as integrated six channel advanced audio, six USB ports, LPC bus, and integrated 10/100Mbps Ethernet and Home PNA."

    Am I just out of the loop here? Or are these just new buzzwords form somthing renamed like IEE1394?

  • I too bought a box from alienware, just recently as a matter of fact. The box would constantly hang. 100% failure rate on eq within 4 minutes. After trying all sorts of driver updates the problem finally resolved itself when I removed the WindowsMe that shipped with it and installed windows98.

    I also had this goofy problem where the redhat6.2 install had the "turn of pentium GUID" option selected in the default kernel, so it would halt on boot. I just built a kernel on my other box and dd on to boot disk to fix that. I also cannot get the SBlive linux drivers to make make sound come out the headphones jack, but works fine through the speakers. This post probably belongs on a newsgroup somewhere....
  • I think this post is a troll, but I'm intrigued by this:

    > there's a point (the "absolute processing
    > point") where the speed of a program is
    > dependent solely on the algorithm used, and not
    > on how fast the microprocessor is chugging along

    Huh? Can somebody shed some light on this "absolute processing point?" Sure, most tasks are going to be constrained by other resources, such as disk or memory bandwidth, once you pump the CPU speed up enough, but "dependent solely on the algorithm?"

    This just makes no sense to me.
  • Why is this vaporware? It's a product announcement! It's not a particularly innovative product announcement... I mean after all they are essentially just reselling Kryotech cases with their configuration of components inside -- but I can't even begin to count the number of companies that happilly announce real products a month before they begin shipping!

    They apologize at the end of the page [sys.com] because they announced back in June that this configuration was coming and only now they are able to produce them in high enough bulk to sell them. Announcing something they couldn't produce was a mistake they probably won't make again.


  • [flame type="protection"]
    I need the protection because I am posting something from Tom's Hardware Guide.

    http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q3/000711/ind ex.html

    All you need is a mechanical #2. I recommend a darker, heavier lead.
    [/flame]

    Enjoy


    ChozSun [e-mail] [mailto]
  • Gamers arre the people how really push the emveope.

    Hee-hee. You have no idea at all how underutilized the typical game-playing PC is. Heck, there are games on the five year old PlayStation that outgun high-end PC games, which is damn amazing considering that the PS has about 1/3 the graphics power of a Voodoo 1. Game developers mostly try to support high end hardware rather than getting performance out of current systems because that's what lunatic fanboy gamers buy. Seriously. I'm not trying to flame you in the least.
  • But there is more to the game world than first-person shooters, and a persistent war /strategy / flight simulator like Longbow spent more than half the processing power at the time on keeping track of the hundreds of units on the battlefield. Very little of the processing power was shown on the screen (but Voodoo sure made it look better!).

    What I'm saying--and I'm a game developer--is that a Voodoo 2 could be pushed about 5x farther than anyone has pushed it, but we're so busy playing catch-up with new cards and bad drivers that there's no incentive. So we use a new card and get a 3x speedup, even though the old card could do the same. People who get involved in the whole upgrade cycle and "my computer is bigger than yours" nonsense don't want to hear this.

    There was a popular coin-op game a few years ago--San Francsisco Rush--that still looks better than just about any racer released on the PC. What was powering SF Rush in the arcades? A Voodoo 1.

    Yes, there are other things to use CPU power for. "AI." Pathfinding. Complex animation systems. Physics. But everyone in the game business knows that you don't need to optimize too much on the PC, because everyone will upgrade. If you optimize too heavily, then fans will be disappointed because their 1GHz Athlon isn't showing any benefit over a 400MHz Pentium II.

    The end result is that many people are fooled into thinking that you need insane machines in order to do things that could be done with 10x less processing power.
  • lol, I loved that line about "If you optimize too heavily, then fans will be disappointed because their 1GHz Athlon isn't showing any benefit over a 400MHz Pentium II". That was just funny, as the athlon has so many ways to further optimize it then a P2 that such could never be the case...

    See how some people are clueless? I do hardcore software development on a PII 400 and have no speed complaints whatsoever. You can convince yourself that you need 3x the speed to do 3x less, but there's not much I can do about that.
  • The reasoning here is simple : if they're too cheap to upgrade their fossil box, they're probably too cheap to pay 40-50$ for a game, but 15$ for 5-10 games is an acceptable indulgence for those people.

    We're not talking about 33 MHz 486s here, we're talking about 300+ MHz processors. Those machines fly for Windows, Excel, Word, Photoshop, whatever. Heck, you can do high-end 3D modelling on such machines (note: a company I used to work for was doing 3D modelling on 486-based machines, because, at the time, that was the "high end"). Now we have people putting down 400 and 500 MHz processors as worthless for everything except word processing and web browsing. Why would you want to upgrade if your "fossil" is ten times faster than machines that were used for hardcore software development only a few years ago?

    Seriously, some people need to get a clue about performance. I suppose fooling yourself into thinking anything that's now brand new is slow and crappy, but you're putting down some seriously fast hardware.
  • I originally posted this comment with the subject:
    (Score: -1, Flamebait)
    and was originally intended to get some Funny mods.

    But, it seems as though either
    1. The comment censor ate the subject; or
    2. There is a bug in slashcode which caused it to be dropped.

    Guess my attempt at being a karma whore backfired eh?
  • I will not cover why higher processors help out hardcore computer users, this subject has been thoroughly reviewed in other follow-ups to your post. But why the processors help Joe Consumer is another issue entirely.

    Now, partially it is nothing more than a macho act of stupidity, and heavy marketing from the industry. For example, refrigerators have been a more or less static appliance in the home for the last ~twenty years, but still have managed to keep their price up by adding 'needed' features. But I digress.

    The processor increases help Joe Consumer get technology for the future. Software programs generally aren't developed for the top three percent of the processor market, they are developed for the mainstream. When Joe Consumer has a 1Ghz Chip under his hood, more companies will invent software to utilize it. Back in the days of 486s, technologies such as MP3 playback and photo editing weren't widely available, because the CPU wasn't fast enough for it. But as CPU speeds increase, more options come of age. MPEG-4 is here, MPEG-7 is around the corner, voice recognition software is becoming effective, and other new cutting edge CPU intensive tasks are always developing.

    The bottom line is, When Joe buys this computer, the market will invent reasons for him to need it. Mr. Consumer won't buy faster computers if they don't have any effect on his usage.

    Now while I do think that tech such as SMP and bandwidth are more useful, progress is progress. No point bitching about it. As for your statements about the need for better portable storage, I think that the proliferation of high bandwidth will keep this need to a minimal.

  • I'm well aware of the hardware limitations of the 8086 and the original PC (model 5150?). However, he did say someting to that effect (don't have the exact quote available).

  • Re:1.66GHz desktop? (Score:5)

    by sconeu ( 64226 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @05:31PM (#767698) Homepage Journal
    A 1.66GHz chip in a desktop? Who in their right mind would need that kind of computing power?

    And nobody will need more than 640K RAM. Just ask Bill Gates.
  • > A 1.66GHz chip in a desktop? Who in their right mind would need that kind of computing power?

    Game Developers (Artists: Reduce Render Time and Programmers: Compile Time)
    Engineers (CAD modeling)
    Biologists, and Chemists (Medical Imaging: Voxel processing)
    Real-Time image recognition

    And of course games.
    a) AI seems to be making use of the extra time we have with faster cpu's. AI is now actually getting 20% cpu time per frame, due to graphics being off-loaded to the 3d video card.
    b) More accurate and realistic physics.

    > Desktops have only a limited number of functions
    You have to stop thinking "inside the box."
    i.e.
    Why spend $10K for an SGI box, when an NT box is $5K. Better bang for the buck.

    > there's a point (the "absolute processing point") where the speed of a program is dependent solely on the algorithm used, and not on how fast the microprocessor is chugging along.

    For some apps, yes.

    But lets say you use an O(n) counting sort. Now if you sort 1,000,000 entries on a 500 Mhz, the 1 GHz will do the job in roughly 1/2 the time.

    Of course it's even worse if the comparision sort is O(n log n)

    Cheers

    --
    glQuake was the "killer 3D app" that got 3D into the mainstream. Pardon the pun. -- Pohoreski
  • > What I'm saying--and I'm a game developer--is that a Voodoo 2 could be pushed about 5x farther than anyone has pushed it, but we're so busy playing catch-up with new cards and bad drivers that there's no incentive.

    I'm a game developer too.

    And you're partially right, but you're forgetting about fill-rate and transforms. There are only so many triangles the Voodoo can draw per second. The GeForce has raised this number considerably. 15 Million vertices per second (don't have the numbers for the Voodoo 2, but it is considerably less. 3Dfx FAQ [user.sgic.fi] lists 80 million pixels/sec, wheresa the GeForce 2 can hit 1 Gig pixels/sec)

    What are the short comings of the Voodoo 2?
    a) Unfortunately (or fortunatly) us 3D game programmers don't want to be locked into a proprietary API like Glide, we'd rather use OpenGL or even D3D.
    b) max textures sizes are only 256x256
    c) and only 16-bit. Gotta have 32-bit all in the name of realism ;)
    d) 16 megs of texture memory
    e) no resolution above 1024x768
    f) no full-scene anti-aliasing
    Yes, all of these are "non-essential", but customers are wanting all of them.

    I agree, that the Voodoo 2 is still a sweet piece of hardware.

    > But everyone in the game business knows that you don't need to optimize too much on the PC, because everyone will upgrade.

    Again partially correct.

    But there are 2 main reasons not to optimize.
    a) It's time to ship the dam game (and start making some money off of it.)
    b) It's costing a lot of money (programmer's time) just to get another few % increase in speed out of the game.

    Of course the main argument to optimize is
    a) Lets people with slower computers have an ejoyable experience, which means more people will buy your game since they don't have to upgrade (just yet)

    I do agree, it is sad, that we just "pass-the-buck" via "get a faster computer"

    Cheers

    --
    uSA != U.S. [civil-liberties.com]
  • I have had quite a few different Kryotech PCs in my house. I first ordered an 800. Within a week or two, either the mobo or the chip had fried. Because of their proprietary chip cage, that meant dragging the whole 85-lb thing up the stairs.

    When they shipped my replacement, they sent me someone else's new 900 by accident, and graciously agreed to let me keep it at no charge. This worked for a while, and then mysteriously failed one night while I was out of town. It didn't POST at all.

    I asked them to replace it under warranty and I'd pay the difference to upgrade to the new SuperG. Again, they were amenable to this, and my 1GHz was on its way.

    I don't remember what happened this time, but it didn't work at all either. So they sent a replacement Super G, but the power supply was dead out of the box.

    By this time, of course, room-temperature 1GHz chips were widely available. It is a tribute to Kryotech that they were willing to take back the last of the Kryotech hardware and give me a full refund, but it never really worked.

    I don't think I've ever said this about anyone, but Kryotech is one company that could stand to bring their *quality* department up to where their *customer service* is!
  • For God's sake! Enough with the "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things" posts!
  • lol, I loved that line about "If you optimize too heavily, then fans will be disappointed because their 1GHz Athlon isn't showing any benefit over a 400MHz Pentium II". That was just funny, as the athlon has so many ways to further optimize it then a P2 that such could never be the case...

    Your also forgetting one thing: those arcade systems used compeltely custom hardware/software, didn't have to worry about supporting a multi-tasking OS, & some people like playing the game of being able to say "My dick is bigger than yours" by having some really expensive machine... Oh I also heard the head of Raven software's lead designer say in an interview over a year ago that "Optimizations are a thing of the past, we no longer need them as the blunt force method is more effecient". Put that all together and you have a good argument for why such machines perform so well compared to PC games.

    One alst point. Think about this, the playstation has been around for longer than say Win98 has & computers change hardware/software constantly making a 'target' platform hard to iron out where as the playstation hasn't changed noticably in all that time... That's why so many PC game makers can't see the market for their games anymore. The consoles suck up so much money at a lower cost of product that making PC games almost looks foolish... Btw just in case anyone says "Well linux doens't change that much it would make a better platform", well news flash linux chnages faster so it's even a worse platform to look at from that POV.

    Myself I'd rather have some consistant standards & more optimization in games, but such does not appear to be the case any time soon....
  • I didn't say you had to have complaints, I'm just sayig that the 1G ahty will always be faster when optimized at the same level as the P2 400... Frankly I know quite a few things I'd add in if I had 3x the power top play with... There truly are uses for the power of a 1G athy even with optimization...

    Oh and since you keep pointing at that you do 'software development' I should point out I work for a hardware website & spent 4 years learnign programming (though I dislike programming for the most part hence why I work as a network engineer) & have doen quite a bit of assmebler coding for a few 3dnow! enabled apps I made for the K6-2 awhile back (which where hand optimized by myself). Oh & if you'd read a few things I've said ehre on slashdot you'd notice I refer to programmers who don't optimize their code as 'lazy'... So thank you ever so much for putting me down after I didn't even argue against your point...
  • The killer hardware would be to have a bank of 16 "serial ATA" ports with an asynchronous drive on each port.

    Knock yourself out =) [3ware.com]

  • You could always use it for cracking RC-5 keys.

    btw /. is slippin on the RC-5 project. Keep sending in those cracked keys!
  • Yes, if you are close friends with amd(like kryotech is) and can get processors that don't have the locks.. This is all amd sanctioned..
  • I dont know about anyone else, but I am sick and tired of people even joking about beowulf clusters! People being serious about their comments was bad enough. If I see anyone type "beowulf" one more time I am going to go on a killing rampage!

  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Rogain ( 91755 )
    What I'm imagining is a cluster of your family's heads, hollowed out and made in to computer cases. Wow, that would be neato.
  • Isenhourer had the hippies.......... but really the issue here is, why are we quite while our pets are sexually abused by wandering aztecs? I hear the silent scream, and its getting on my nerves. Will you ignore bozer when his ass bleeds?
  • auh, po wittle baby 's haawaaare was badly engineered ana canna no be run onna modern systems. here's a widdle wolley-pop, now go play in da stweet.....

  • Re:1.66GHz desktop? (Score:5)

    by ActionListener ( 104252 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @05:25PM (#767712)
    You obviously haven't used Divx;) :)

    Simply playing an MPEG4 movie (e.g., using the divx plugin for Windows media player) uses most of the CPU utilization of a 700 MHz Thunderbird. Creating a 2 hour long MPEG4 movie from a DVD extracted mpeg file takes about 10 hours an the same Thunderbird system. It would probably still take several hours even on a 1.6 GHz Athlon. There is the potential for a lot of cool applications if the compression could be done "live." However, even a 1.6 Athlon is not fast enough for this.

    So, I think a lot of people in their right mind need that kind of computing power. As audio/video compression gets better, the processing power required to encode and decode will likely continue to increase.

  • What's with all the processor stuff recently?(Pentium 4 problems! Intel roadmap! 1.6 athlon!)
    Did I miss something?
    ----
  • What happens when you wish to render some transitions or other special effects? You can buy hardware to provide a limited number of transitions, or you can do it in software. Do you want a dedicated MP3 encoding PCI board, or do you want to do it from software. A faaaast CPU, capable of being a jack of all trades (but not specialised in one) is cheaper than buying 243 hardware boards. Besides, where are you going to plug in 243 cards? I say bring the MHZ on!!!!! (I for one need more CPU power). Do you wish to know why? Check http://members.optusnet.com.au/~delija/Pic01.jpg Thats why.
  • Cranking up the bus speed has never been a problem :)

  • Cranking up the bus speed has never been a problem :)

    RAM generally runs at system bus speed. SDRAM faster than PC133 (7.5 ns) is not widely available, let alone cheap.


    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
  • I was board, and built one out of 486's.
  • No were not negative on /., we just want to read about things available for purchase and use..

    Might I suggest ebay [ebay.com]? ;)
  • Yes, but the whole point of his question is that different people call it different things. Apple has a Trademark on FireWire. Hence sony calling it the i.Link, and a bunch of video camera manufacturers calling it DV-link. V-link could very well be another alias of IEEE 1394
  • uhm, you've never built a kernel on the same box that runs your x-server/display?

    just cause 'desktop' implies UI, its also allowed to run some compute-heavy jobs now and then too...

    --

  • Does this mean that you CAN overclock the t-bird chip?

    ________

  • Though Intel sure does want us to believe its incredible Pentium III can magically "enhance your Internet experience." [intel.com]

  • how intensive would it be converting MPEG4 to MPEG2 on the fly?

    am I the only one on this planet with a hardware DVD/MPEG decoder?

    FFS, stop it with the MOVs, AVIs and REAL-SHIT movie formats! I can only hardware decode MPEG2 damnit!
  • make one of em full screen, and tell me how much you like that grainy, non-antialiased mess.

    and then look at my hardware decoder in fullscreen mode - the 4+ times magnification is almost unnoticable with antialiasing, not to mention zero dropped frames and full Dolby Digital surround sound. All in a file equal or less size than some gay mov or avi which only does standard stereo and doesn't scale up to even 2x magnification without looking shitty. even software mpeg can handle 2x.
  • I'm pretty sure he knows it was watts and not hertz. The joke was that he wanted to crow about how much power it has. Power = watts = GHz in this joke.

  • Mr. Moore works out of a cubicle (hey, it's his perogative, I guess).
  • Umm... compiling large C++ projects comes to mind.
  • What... a duel Athlon? That would be nice. Now lets see if we can find a chipset/motherboard that can do that.

    Seriously though, I'm about to build up another machine (Have the case/HDD and RAID controller) that just wants to be a dual Athlon, but it seems it'll just be a dual PIII... Shame about that really.

  • Re:CPU Speeds (wrong) (Score:3)

    by MrBogus ( 173033 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @08:10PM (#767729)
    There's two Moore's Laws.

    The first (the real one) was actually uttered by Moore and deals with transistor density. Boring.

    The second was concocted by Intel's marketing department and describes their past and future plans to entice you to buy a new product every couple years, guaranteeing them a nice revenue stream. The way it's usually described is Every 18 Months the performance/price of the CPU doubles. (Substitute Mhz for performance as necessary.)
    • How long has the PIII-800 been out? Maybe 6 months tops? Certainly not more than 10 let alone 18.
    • I've never heard of Moore's Law being defined directly in relation to transistor density, until you mentioned it just now. You might be right, but I've always heard of Moore's law being the general observation that every eighteen months the available processing power doubles and the cost of memory halves. I'll blame my sources if that is wrong.

    It's a good thing that the moderators on Slashdot are smarter than you - this explains why they rated my posting as "Funny" rather than "Informative".

  • So I am a victim of marketing! What else is new?

    It just goes to show that history is a lie because history was nearly all written by marketing departments! :-D
    - Juggler (of Australia)

  • CPU Speeds (Score:4)

    by OzJuggler ( 174316 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @06:24PM (#767732)
    Dammit! It was only a month ago that I replaced my tired old P2-233 by building a NEW Pentium III 800MHz system. Now I read that in a few months you will be able to buy a 1.6 GHz CPU !!??? That's doubled in 4 months, not 18!

    And why is it that when I knock on Mr Moore's office I can hear some muffled whimpering but no-one answers the door? :)

    -Andrew.

  • I'll wait for the "regular" machines just to be safe. I purchased and overclocked (and supposedly well-cooled) machine from Alienware as my main gaming box, and the thing crashed regularly. Ended up building a machine from scratch (not overclocked, but at least properly cooled).
  • Any other manufacturers? It would be interesting if someone like Dell was doing the same thing (it'd be the Pentium II all over again).
  • No were not negative on /., we just want to read about things available for purchase and use..

    Atleast I do...

    Is there nothing cool coming currently on the market...
  • Sys Technology is pleased to announce the preliminary configuration
  • Ah, just overclock a bunch of cheap chips and supercool them with Flourinert or a similar substance. I'd like to see one of those. (How about a liquid nitrogen cooled 32-node Beowulf cluster of overclocked PIIIs?)
  • that's Thunderbird ... not Thunderbolt
  • Any brave biped can unlock his/her/its Duron/T-Bird in a few minutes using a simple pencil. Yes it works, I've done it, went from a 900mhz to 1040 in minutes, without mucking with the voltage. Just don't expect orgasmic results unless you invest in a serious heatsink/fan combo and maybe a peltier coldplate.

    On the other hand, the Celeron 667 is very sexy at 1.0ghz, and very easy to overclock too. Even more delicious is the low price and the fact that you can reuse that old BX board on which your old hosed Celeron 300a used to reside. 150$ for a gigahertz chip and around 90$ for a BX board means it costs half as much as a similar AMD setup (except you don't get that nifty DDR stuff - oh well).

    "All women are nuts. All women are equally nuts. Some women ACT normal in an effort to attract men so that they can exert their nutty self upon them, but make no mistake, ALL women are nuts. If women were normal they'd be men"
  • A sad problem with new games is that even though you may have slaved over assembly code for weeks in order to make that shimmering new strategy sim run decently on an old P200, the owners of such cpu's simply don't bother shopping for games anymore because they feel they're out of the race. They've learned not to believe those "Minimum requirements" because they're just too.. minimal. Ever tried to run Quake 2 on a P166 in software mode ? Was it playable ? Of course not. From that day on you never bought an FPS again until you swapped that old cpu for a brand new P2-400 and renewed your enthusiasm for PC gaming.

    The moral of this story is that no matter how well tuned your game might be, if you can't 100% convince the low-end users that it will run fine on their systems, then you will have wasted all that optimization time when instead you could have spent the coder's extra salary on a horde of young swedish nude masseuses in preparation for your next big seller (Fluke Nukem 12 : Slutty Cheerleaders From Mars).

    The only crop of games that still score (proportionally) with the low-end people are budget/compilation titles, think Mahjongg and Tetris). The reasoning here is simple : if they're too cheap to upgrade their fossil box, they're probably too cheap to pay 40-50$ for a game, but 15$ for 5-10 games is an acceptable indulgence for those people.
  • Easily fixed. Just get a solid-state drive for those speedy searches. Then port PovRay to an IC board for hardware raytracing. Same thing for file compression. Finally, take some valium and watch the PC speed up as your brain slows down.

  • Have you heard of games? Some people do use these things for entertainment. and no way is KryoTech or Sys trying to get the mainstream. THIS IS VERY FAR FROM MAINSTREAM. Those suckers are huge and cost a fortune, but at least they are there for those who want them. Who said it would speed up their downloads? I think you're referring to the "NetBus" on the P4 and the how the PIII would "change the Internet" if you'll recall from their ads during the SuperBowl.
  • They're just overclocking. Yes, people can think of the new designs, but you're not going to go from 1.1GHz to 1.6GHz over night unless you get one of these.
  • Well, late Oct./November isn't that bad. These were just specs, they haven't really announced it.
  • Since when? You should check your facts, all AMD's CPUs support SMP. The problem is there isn't a chipset for it, which AMD, Micron, and Via are all working on and will be out Q1 2001.
  • There's probably another issue here. I've heard of no problems at all with video editing and Athlons. That simply wouldn't make sense of your encoder not work because of a CPU. Have you tried it on another Athlon system or toyed around with your config?
  • You're definitely not out if you have a KX133 or a KT133. There's not going to be a huge difference there. But at least with AMD CPUs, you have a new chipset, instead of having to use RAMBUS, or the elderly BX chipset.
  • What vaporware? Please don't jump to conclusions. I owned a Kyrotech 1GHz Athlon last year I had it. These things are real and you can buy them if you have the costs. God, why is everyone so negative on /. boards?
  • Haha, Dell trying to help the consumer? That's not going to happen. Compaq though has made machines with Kyrotech's technology in them. Oh, also Intel won't work with them. Also, Thunderbirds aren't clocked if you know how to use a pencil :). You can unlock clocked T-Birds by marking over the bridges.
  • Does anyone know which t-bird chip is in these to reach the 1.6ghz? Also, it mentions a new chipset that takes advantage of DDRSDRAM. Will this have the traditional clock doubling that was see with SDRAM on the current irongate chipset?
  • A 1.66GHz chip in a desktop? Who in their right mind would need that kind of computing power? Desktops have only a limited number of functions: word processing, web browsing, some graphics editing, MP3 playing, instant messaging, e-mail, and PowerPoint. None of these applications would benefit from a 1.66GHz chip -- there's a point (the "absolute processing point") where the speed of a program is dependent solely on the algorithm used, and not on how fast the microprocessor is chugging along.

    It's unfortunate that companies can hoodwink the mainstream market into buying these useless "upgrades" that won't improve their computer. Remember, Joe Sixpack probably thinks that this will speed up their downloads. Does this constitue false advertising? These people are being sold products that they don't need.

    What we really need is a better portable storage medium -- floppy disks are obviously useless in an era of 10MB+ files, and the Zip drive just never caught on. Bigger hard drives and faster bandwidth would be nice, too :)

  • We all know you can over clock any proc if you cool it and tweak it. Here is what the professionals can do with manufacturer support. Better than Intel's attempt (1.13 recall) but who really cares. This affects the what? 200 people who are going to buy them?

    Now, DDRam is another matter entirely. This will be the memory standard for the next few years. We all upgrade at least once a year (It IS in your budget right?) So, this WILL affect you. Why Hemos mixed a story worthy of discussion with one worthless but still dominating the discussion is a mystery to me.

  • What we really need is a better portable storage medium -- floppy disks are obviously useless in an era of 10MB+ files, and the Zip drive just never caught on. Bigger hard drives and faster bandwidth would be nice, too :)

    What about the LS120 drive? It's fast, compatiable and chunky enough to store most people's data. I know that they've been installed in a lot of PC labs in UK universities...

    Yeah, I know it's offtopic, but... ;-)

  • WHy Why spend $10K for an SGI box, when an NT box is $5K. Better bang for the buck.

    cause i built a schweet linux box for just under $2000 ;)

  • Obviously, what we need is a dual 1.6GHz machine. No need to compromise between threaded apps and floating-point perf. apps. :)
    -----
    D. Fischer
  • Uhmmm...thanks...I think you just added another three years to my graduate 'career' :)

    "Then port PovRay to an IC board for hardware raytracing. "
    Alas, it's not that type of ray-tracing. It's lens-simulation ray-tracing, as in optical design & optimization. POVRay doesn't do quite what I need.
    -----
    D. Fischer
  • "there's a point (the "absolute processing point") where the speed of a program is dependent solely on the algorithm used, and not on how fast the microprocessor is chugging along."

    Huh? Can you explain that? Since any algorithm implemented on a computer is ultimately limited by the speed at which the electronics can execute it, it seems that programs will always scale with electronics speed, barring some other bottleneck.

    Perhaps you were think of how an algorithm scales. A common example is fast-Fourier transform: it scales as N*ln(N) (something like that) where N is the # of points in the data set. An FFT routine cannot 'beat' that scaling factor. You can't make an FFT routine that scales by N. However, an FFT can always be sped up by using faster computers.

    If that's not what you meant, can you give an example of an algorithm that cannot run any faster than a certain speed, regardless of the hardware?


    -----
    D. Fischer
  • I've got a P3 450, and in my hobby web-site coding, I use a little program that allows multi-document search-and-replace. Currently, it will S & R 300 pages in about 5-20 seconds, depending on the search string.

    I'd like that to be zero seconds, for a thousand pages.

    For my research, I use a custom ray-tracing program. Takes 20-60 minutes for some runs on this machine. I'd like the runs to be instantaneous.

    I also like to compress (zip) my data for archival purposes. Compressing 400+ MB of files takes 10-20 minutes. I wish it were instantaneous.

    I could use a faster computer.
    -----
    D. Fischer
  • The main reason is because I started on a PC, and it's not worth the effort or money to switch machines.

    Some people start off with a Alpha or other non-PC box, which can work very well. But switching to a different box mid- to late- game is not worth the effort to me.
    -----
    D. Fischer
  • I can't believe companies directly sell overcloacked machine. Won't this void the CPU warranty ? This is ridiculous. For normal use (non-gaming), today's machine are fast enough for everybody. Going beyhond specs is not recommended. The CPU might be cool enough, but you might get timing error in some circumstance. When this happens, you'll say Dammit, Windows crashed again... If the clock is too fast, gate delays will be non-negligeable.
  • Been a while since you've seen the movie. Power is measured in Watts, Not Hertz. However the deep freezer built into it may take some juice. I wonder how long it takes to get down to tempature so it can boot?
  • Quake 3 actually does have a setting for SMP machines: r_smp 1 (ONLY do this if you actually have 2 CPUs!). I'm not sure if this affects framerate, but it is an r_ cvar (rendering), so it just might. However, SMP could help on a game server (provided it's not already being used to run DivX, hehe.)
  • Once again, AMD is trying to pass 100 amps through a 12-gauge wire. Expect this system to be up in smoke in about 7 months. I plan to squeeze all 10 years out of my P3, thank you. (I also have a 386SX which is about to celebrate its ninth year in my house, and it's still working [in all its DOS 3.3 glory, hehe])

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