AMD Beats Intel in CPU Sales 532
glockenspieler writes "As reported by Ars Technica, for the week ending April 24th, AMD accounted for 52% of desktop CPU sales. Granted its just one week but perhaps this indicates that AMD is really building momentum in the desktop market. So, when will Dell begin carrying AMD?"
It has to be said. (Score:5, Funny)
Netcraft confirms it: Intel is dying.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit already beleaguered Intel microprocessor community today when Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] (and Netcraft) confirmed that AMD sold more processors than Intel for the week ending April 24th. Coming on the heels of a recent survey which indicated people like saving money when buying a computer this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along: Intel is collapsing in complete disarray.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict Intel's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Intel faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Intel because Intel is dying.Things are looking very bad for Intel. Their offices are dark, the tomb-like sepulchral atmosphere is all that remains. Intel continues to lose market share, red ink flows like a river of blood.
The Intel development team is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house. All major surveys show that Intel has steadily declined in market share. Intel is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Intel is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers and hangers-on. Intel continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Intel is dead.
Fact: Intel is dying
Re:It has to be said. (Score:5, Informative)
AMD outsold Intel in RETAIL desktop sales. Dell is obviously not retail. Here's a better read [forbes.com].
Missed? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd bet on "omitted". There's a lot of anti-Intel sentiment around here, afterall, and people will skew whatever they can to make the "good guys" appear to be winning.
Re:Missed? (Score:3, Interesting)
People go back and forth between intel and AMD just as quick as they will between ATi and NVIDIA.
intel has not been a bad guy since they pressured THG, and since THG eventually sold out to them, there is really no one left claiming intel is bad.
Re:It has to be said. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It has to be said. (Score:4, Insightful)
If by "marketing" you mean "bearing prices significantly lower." I'm not trying to say that more expensive means "better," but I will venture to say that different people like Intel or AMD for different reasons. Why do people in the retail market like AMD? Because it's cheaper, and when they ask sales people who are desperate to make a sale if there's any difference, the sales people (who are also AMD fanboys, when they're not being Mac fanboys) tell them no.
I'm not going to take a side in the Intel/AMD war. My desktop is a P4 and I love it. My server is an AMD Athlon, and I love it too. All I'm saying is that in the retail market-- and yeah, I've worked there-- people "like" AMD because it's cheaper, not because they have any clue about quality.
Re:It has to be said. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It has to be said. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It has to be said. (Score:4, Insightful)
When you are talking about something as finite in it's intended function as a CPU then the requirements can be easily quantified and separated.
While they are numbered for clarity the order of importance depends on the user and the system being built.
1. Compatibility. Will it run the code I want it to run?
2. Speed. How long dose it take to complete task X ?
3. Temperature. Do I need a dedicated AC, a heat sink or something in between?
4. Price. How many dollars do I need to spend for this chip and it's "support infrastructure" (RAM, Motherboard etc..) ?
5. Power consumption.
For most users, All current AMD and iNTEL desktop chips are equal on points 1, 3 and 5. (Not that there aren't differences. They just don't matter).
With items 2 and 4 being the entire basis of choosing a chip the equation comes down to "How fast can my system run if I spend $250 on the CPU?"
PS: If it was up to me reviewers would abandon the "AMD's 3GH chip vs iNTEL's 3GH chip" comparisons and adopt "AMD's $900 chip vs iNTEL's $900 chip" matchup. It's how _I_ Shop for CPUs and until someone convinces me of a problem in this approach I will continue to use it.
Re:It has to be said. (Score:3, Informative)
But I am happy to see this. I've never used anything but AMD and Cyrix in my own home systems. Intel really has a problem with the 64-bit Pandora's box: they could write off Itanic, creating tens of billions in losses... or they could stick with x86-32 on the desktop (which is what they are planning) and risk losing Dell
Re:It has... Intel Lost My Vote long ago. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It has to be said. (Score:5, Insightful)
Joe Consumer never "puts together" his computer or upgrades his CPU. Joe Consumer buys prepackaged systems with Windows XP preinstalled.
Personally (and probably a lot of
Re:It has to be said. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and lots of corporations and government entities buy Dell as a matter of course. Nonetheless, the fact is that AMD now has better technology in many ways (especially multiway Opteron boxes, which aren't retail either;). AMD is gathering momentum, and Dell would do well to not ignore it...or it will finally start to lose some marketshare over time.
Remember, Dell wasn't always #1...and another entity will be sometime down the road.
It's also quite telling that Intel was forced to adopt the AMD64 instruction set (even if it's calling it something else). ;-)
Re:It has to be said. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It has to be said. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the principle of it. Good shot in the arm for AMD.
As far as all of you bashing AMDs chipsets and processor quality, aside from the fact you're probably not able to fully substantiate your claims.... you're again missing the point. If there was no AMD, a 3.06 GHz CPU would prob still be $1000, like things were 6 years ago (price for bleeding edge CPUs, not 3.06GHz 3 years ago).
Re:It has to be said. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It has to be said. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not serious... (Score:3, Informative)
Kjella
If Ruiz had his way (Score:5, Interesting)
According to AMD CEO Hector Ruiz, it's only a matter of time until Dell puts Opteron in their servers [forbes.com]. Of course, that's news to Dell, who are currently an exclusive Intel shop and haven't announced any change in that policy.
If I were the CEO of a chip company looking to court one of the most successful PC makers to use my processors, I probably wouldn't do so with a comment like this:
"I've always thought that Dell does not like to be a leader in technology, that they were a strong follower...But I didn't realize they were going to be dead last"
And yet that's what Ruiz said at a recent press conference.
Err (Score:2)
Re:If Ruiz had his way (Score:5, Insightful)
Which probably indicates that AMD has resigned itself to !Dell for a decent period into the future.
Re:If Ruiz had his way (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If Ruiz had his way (Score:5, Insightful)
Statistical outlier (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Statistical outlier (Score:4, Informative)
-m
Re:Statistical outlier (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Statistical outlier (Score:5, Insightful)
You're joking right? It's well documented that the A64 Chips are notably cooler than any Northwood P4 over 3.0 GHz. We won't even get into the Prescott - AKA PresHOTT to the more cynical.
You can now get an A64 2800+ for the same price as a P4 2.8.
Re:Statistical outlier (Score:3, Interesting)
As much as I like AMD, I doubt they'd more than double market share in a single quarter because Athlon 64 barely made a dent in Q4 2003 (I thought it was released late Q3 2003), so its introduction wouldn't quite seem to account for this.
Also, it says "desktop" but there's still "mobile" and "server" markets.
Re:Statistical outlier (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the point for AMD is that for the first time as far as we know they have actually surpassed Intel in sales in any significant portion of the x86 CPU market.
Re:Statistical outlier (Score:5, Informative)
"Desktop PCs with processors from Advanced Micro Devices outsold desktops based on processors from Intel in U.S. retail channels for the week ending April 24, according to research released late last week from Current Analysis. "
The very first line in the original article.
"Wintel" is not a valid term anymore (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:"Wintel" is not a valid term anymore (Score:4, Funny)
Name Change? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Name Change? (Score:2)
Re:Name Change? (Score:5, Insightful)
486, Pentium, Xeon, Itanium... (Score:4, Informative)
I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)
Only on desktops. Intel still owns the laptop market by a wide margin, especially as AMD is completely ignoring the low-power market. Remember, laptops are now over 50% of all PC sales.
Doubly interesting that this is despite Dell (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Doubly interesting that this is despite Dell (Score:4, Informative)
The Irony... (Score:3, Interesting)
Intel's strength has always been its ability to drop prices for large customers to levels below that of its competitors. For AMD to become a Dell supplier, it would have to lower its prices to the point where they were not only unprofitable but probably bleeding money from an opened artery.
Intel might not want anything more than AMD to make an offer to Dell that they can't match. Even if it didn't kill AMD, it would put AMD in the place where Inte
Re:The Irony... (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't care. (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows sells more computers with their OS on in then anyone else, are they better?
Opinions aside, all that will matter to me when I build my next PC is proformance and price.
duh.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I try to be as savvy as possible concerning my purchases - and I just can't afford to buy a 32 bit Intel chip when I can get a 64 bit AMD chip for comprable costs
keeps you thinking...
Re:duh.... (Score:3, Insightful)
You can get a nice athlon xp barton 2500+ (1830 mhz) running to 3200+ almost easily with nvidia's nfoorce line of motherboards. Thats a $75 dollar cpu... Also shuttle makes a solid mobo an-35n ultra that has all the little bells and whistles of a standard mobo thanks once a gain to nvidia putting multiple features (lan, 5.1channel sound, ide controllers) in once chip and making it cheap ($55 at ne
Re:duh.... (Score:3)
There are many things that the xp3000+ would be faster in and others it'd be slow in. For an overclocker like me i haven't bother looking at it because the 2500 will typically go beyond it anyway. Cost is similar to a celeron which be tons slower.
Long time coming, but cool (Score:4, Funny)
It's so beautiful...[wipes away tear]
Laptops (Score:5, Informative)
But critics point out that:
"improved wireless support" for a chipset? WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
Will someone please tell me what the hell a chipset has to do with wireless? It's bad enough when Intel bullshits through their teeth about the whole Centrino thing(namely that you've gotta have a special CPU to take advantage of wireless), but it's even worse when analysts and reporters start actually perpetuating the same crap. Wireless is slow enough that you don't need anything even remotely special to "take full advantage"; 33mhz PCI is plenty damn fast enough to handle 8MB/sec or so.
This harks back to the MMX bunny-suit guys claiming that MMX/P2 make the internet work better/faster...
Re:"improved wireless support" for a chipset? WTF? (Score:3, Informative)
Germany = Good (Score:5, Insightful)
I like buying hardware that makes me feel good about the working conditions of the people manufacturing the product.
Re:Germany = Good (Score:2)
Re:Germany = Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Intel are also producing in Europe (Score:4, Informative)
$$$$ is everything (Score:2, Interesting)
the real question is: (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want a machine with an AMD CPU, go to someone else. Dell is hardly the end-all-be-all of desktop computers. Yes, they're huge. No, that doesn't mean they're the best, are the least-expensive or have the best service. They're merely the most-popular.
Re:the real question is: (Score:2)
When Microsoft starts selling Linux...
For Instance (Score:4, Informative)
Need more horsepower... the Opteron 4-way boxes (HP 4-way [hp.com]), crush the Intel Xeon's [anandtech.com] (as do the two ways [anandtech.com]) in most web and DB benchmarks. Oh yeah, they are usually priced comparably or cheaper than the Intels as well.
The end of high margins on CPUs. (Score:2, Troll)
There's a big change coming to the CPU industry. One of the major graphics chip manufacturers is about to put an x86 CPU in their chipset. This cuts out the CPU vendors entirely.
How about Extreme Editions... (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz 800FSB 512KB: $279.00
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz 800FSB Extreme: $910.00
Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz 800FSB 512KB: $412.00
Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz 800FSB Extreme: $1,139.00
A grand for a CPU... man, I thought those days were long over...
Dell already carries AMD stuff. (Score:5, Informative)
Overclockers heaven (Score:4, Informative)
I know I was one of them.
That factor alone may be why AMD was on top.
Product offerings Vs. Public Opinion (Score:2)
Oh! (Score:4, Funny)
Perspective.. (Score:2, Informative)
Amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's true and if it's not some fluke.
Even more so if you could consider that native Windows for [i]AMD-64 won't be available until Q4 according to His Billness at WinHEC. [theinquirer.net]
Some are seeking pure performance with Linux servers running AMD-64 natively, but even the broader market of Windows users for server and desktop seems to find AMD price/performance compelling even if they're restricted to running full time in 32 bit compatability mode.
Does the intel bong carry any more market weight? (Score:3, Insightful)
Dell (Score:2)
What *I'm* curious about is ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Talk about making statistics say anything. (Score:5, Insightful)
For the two seconds ending 3:22:05 04 May 2004, AMD sold one processor and Intel sold none, giving AMD 100% market share and Intel 0%. Sure it's only two seconds, but perhaps this indicates that AMD is really building momentum!
This one-week stat means little or nothing since: a) it discounts all notebooks which are primarily Intel, and b) it's only talking about the US retail channel. So it ignores the fact that the #1 PC maker in the US (Dell) only sells Intel, and it ignores the massive number of corporate purchases that are mostly Intel. Besides, maybe this wasn't an average week for the industry. Maybe Best Buy was back-ordered on their best-selling Intel part and it skewed the stats.
This is analagous to Tom's Hardware reporting that ATI beats the new NVidia chip in Battlefield 1942 at 640x480 with FSAA disabled and it "could indicate a growing trend!"
Re:Talk about making statistics say anything. (Score:3, Informative)
*Used* to be primarily Intel! Have you checked Best Buy, Circuit City, or any other big chain that sells computers lately? You'll have just as many, if not more, AMD than Intel.
I noticed this when I went to purchase my laptop last year and saw that they were pretty much ALL AMD. When I checked with other stores to compare prices, I noticed the same thing. Best Buy actually had more AMD than Intel, but the others had the same amount of both.
Interest
AMD selling more than Intel, isnt that like... (Score:2, Informative)
ATI taking the video performance crown, or
Apple dominating the online music sales market, or
BSD breaking internet transfer speed records, while dieing.
or AMD making a chip faster than 2.2GHz even though they can keep rating the old ones at 3x00 numbers.
Nah. Must have been a NASA engineer moving a decimal point wrong.
GO AMD! Your cheap parts rock for us poor college gamers!
Big Deal (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, AMD doesn't begin to have the same quality balance sheet that INTC does. AMD is impressive for being able to compete in CPU performance and sales, but it has a very long way to go to really challenge Intel as a business.
AMD brings some thunder (Score:4, Interesting)
Intel ruined my parade a bit as they undercut and lowered prices. AMD, however, is still taking it to Intel, and things look good in the 64-bit market.
Were I to sell that stock now, I would lose money. However, I'm hanging onto it because I'm confident in AMD as a company, both marketing wise and technology wise. You don't take on Intel in one year, just like nobody will take out Harley Davidson, Victoria's Secret, or Microsoft quickly. It took Wal-Mart a LONG time to take over, and now look at K-Mart.
My point is that I think AMD is doing things right. I see value in this company still. I'm still using my Athlon 550 as my main processor, about 4.5 years old and still doing everything I need. Go AMD! Can't complain about competition in a standards-based environment
Re:AMD brings some thunder (Score:5, Informative)
You can make money off AMD by riding the highs, but not as a long term investor.
Re:AMD brings some thunder (Score:3, Informative)
Intel's 5-year graph [yahoo.com]
Amd's 5 year graph [yahoo.com]
It would be bad if AMD completely destroyed Intel (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD keeps Intel honest (sorta), and likewise, Intel keeps AMD honest. It would be bad for either one to drop to less than 10% market share, because the consumers would lose out.
On Distributed.net AMD shows to be the fast CPU (Score:5, Interesting)
Who's using intel anyway? (Score:3, Informative)
AMD is IMO a no-brainer for the most desktop users. I havnt bought a intel based machine in god-knows how many years.
A few people I've know, mostly non-tech people and a certain 150 kg MCSE
Currently I only own AMD and Via based boxes, and I'm very satisfied.
So.. why would anyone want to use intel?
Power Management... (Score:5, Interesting)
Power Management.
Yes, AMD's chips have a lower MAXIMUM than Intel, but AMD has a problem, when their CPUs are idle, they still use up just as much power, and put out just as much heat. This is because a HALT won't do anything on an AMD (not without the FSB hack).
There is a hack for this though... Programs like FVCool can idle a chip (the electricity and temp savings are tremendous) but it's a hack that should not be required... It also does not work on most AMD motherboards, and has serious side-effects on some (network being disabled, sound distortion, other PCI cards failing, etc.).
It would seem AMD solved the problem in their AMD64 line with MHz throttling, but I don't have first-hand experience, so I can't say if it too will require odd hacks. I certainly hope not.
In any case, the 32-bit AMD is seriously lacking in power management, and I continue to consider using Intel chips for that reason alone... A few dollars more is no big deal when it will average half the power usage...
Re:Power Management... (Score:5, Informative)
My (ugly) Shuttle SN85G4 uses an AMD64 3200+. I use it mostly for working on and running my chess program. When I first bought it I was freaked out when I did: cat
Re:Power Management... (Score:5, Informative)
> when their CPUs are idle, they still use up just as much power, and put
> out just as much heat. This is because a HALT won't do anything on an
> AMD (not without the FSB hack).
Bullshit.
This was fixed on Barton a year ago.
And all the Athlon 64's have Cool and Quiet which really drops processor use down. THIS IS NOT THROTTLING, as throttling cuts the processor speed when the processor gets too hot for the cooling solution (a problem with Intel P4s) and cuts the speed to compensate just when you most require the speed. Cool and Quiet cuts the speed when you don't require it, so general operation will be at 800MHz on a current generation A64 because most people don't use the extra power.
Slightly OT: Why not AMD? (Score:3, Insightful)
Once upon a time, you were told not to buy AMD chips because of the bugaboo about them not being "100% Intel compatible" or somesuch.
Since then, I've owned at least three, if not more, AMD chip based machines, from an early K5, to two current machines, an Athlon 1600 and a 2000+ in my wife's laptop. I've never, ever, seen a reason not to trust an AMD chip. Granted, we don't do that much with them, but all of the things that we have done have worked pretty well.
The benchmarks seem to make them an excellent choice in terms of price/performance. I'm curious: is there really any reason, anymore, to avoid an AMD chip?
Re:Slightly OT: Why not AMD? (Score:3, Informative)
Once upon a time AMD chips were known to have power/heat issues, heatsink problems, etc. I know my K6-2 seemed to crash a lot more than my roomate's equivalent Pentium (although it certainly didn't have to be the processor).
These days AMD has no such problems. Most people choose a processor for a variety of reasons :
I've considered AMD cpus in the past but... (Score:3, Troll)
I've heard way too many horror stories (incompatibilities galore and other bogus things) from friends and acquaintances fighting to get things stable: personally I've always bought and recommended the best asus boards I knew about (P2B, CUSL2-C, P4T, P4C800-E) and never ever had a problem.
The day AMD decides to enter the chipset business and proves that they can deliver a rock solid solution is the day I'll consider their CPU, until then I'll take the $ penalty and buy Intel because, after all, a few hundred extra $$$ are worth my peace of mind many times over (I tend to keep my computers for a long time and I'm past the age where fiddling to get things working is interesting).
Re:I've considered AMD cpus in the past but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I would love to buy an AMD processor, if only it would work with intel chipset based motherboar
Re:I've considered AMD cpus in the past but... (Score:5, Informative)
You know, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (say, a little over a decade ago), Intel was not a chipset house. Yes, I know you find it hard to believe, but Intel chips ran perfectly stable on non-Intel chipsets for quite some time. The only reason Intel started getting serious with their chipset marketing was because they had the momentum, and saw the opportunity for growth. They banked on selling "reliability," and made a killing.
As for AMD, I suppose you didn't notice that they released TWO chipsets for their Athlon line? There was the AMD 750 "Irongate," the first chipset available for the Athlon. There was also the AMD 760, which besides being rock-solid, was also one of the earliest DDR platforms available for the Athlon, and supported dual processors.
There's only one thing wrong with AMD making chipsets: unlike Intel in the mid 90s, they lack the momentum to maintain both businesses. AMD only made the 750 and 760 lines to give their new platform legitimacy, and to attract other chipset makers.
To keep the 3rd-party chipset makers on board, they have ceased to compete (to avoid, say, the 3rd-party discontent like that seen on the Nintendo Gamecube). AMD's CPU market is so much smaller than Intel's that, if they made a serious effort to compete in chipsets, they would drive away competitors...and that is not good for AMD's long-term.
As for The Athlon 64, what's wrong with VIA and NVidia? Just as the release of the K7 brought legitimacy to AMD, time has brought legitimacy to VIA. And as for NVidia, if their chipsets aren't stable enough for you, then nothing is. The NForce series is rock-solid, and high-performance.
Re:I've considered AMD cpus in the past but... (Score:4, Insightful)
When Grand Prix Legends was released, it only supported RRedline and Glide APIs (Rendition and 3DFX cards) for hardware acceleration. I should know, I played Grand Prix Legends on my Hercules Thriller 3D, and it was outstanding.
Three years after release, Papyrus released an unofficial Direct3D "beta" patch. I would not be surprised at all if this was only tested on a small segment of hardware, and possibly uses extensions or tricks proprietary to nVidia cards, as they were "the" card company without peer when this patch was released. Times have since changed.
Don't blame ATI for an unsupported patch for a game released 6 years ago. That's just wishful thinking. Do you expect your ATI card to magically run Glide games as well?
Let me give you an example of something you COULD rightfully get pissed off at ATI about. Let's say your ATI card couldn't play GLQuake, which was designed to be card-agnostic, so long as the card supported OpenGL properly. That would be unforgivable, even if it was some almost completely abandoned extension that Quake required...because it's a STANDARD, and the GL Quake renderer was well designed.
Unfortunately, you won't get an opportunity to rip on ATI's drivers in that case. My Radeon 8500 still playes GLQuake fine with zero glitches, 8 years after it was originally released. This is something that Matrox certainly couldn't do. Now THAT's what you expect from good drivers.
Bout friggin time too! (Score:3, Funny)
New Marget Segments (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this is probably an accurate reflection of Intel's current strategy. The Desktop CPU market isn't showing much more growth (nothing like the boom years before the internet bubble burst) and Intel is looking for new markets.
Their new market, and I think they are right, is Mobile. Ever heard of Centrino? People are starting to want more than just clock speed. Portability, Battery Life, Hyperthreading and other new features will distingush processors (Intel will soon switch to processor numbers instead of clock speed). The majority of Slashdot readers might not fall into this category, but I think many users want a light, portable, and dynamic laptop instead of a desktop.
I would just be happy if all my computers could bootup or shutdown in under 5 seconds :)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Intel and AMD ALWAYS compared unfairly... (Score:5, Insightful)
But what the hell is the real benchmark? PRICE. PRICE. PRICE.
When you can get a 3.2ghz P4 for $410 and an Athlon XP 3200+ for $200, AMD is a better deal. The +/- 5% performance is nothing. AMD will always beat Intel in terms of price/performance - except for the few instances where an Intel chip would overclock well.
Review sites should compare Intel and AMD in terms of price for processor. Like, they review the top processors for each company, then the $400 range, then the $200 range, then the $100 range, etc.. It's not like someone says 'I need either a 2.8ghz P4 or a 2800+ Athlon. A 3.2ghz will not do.'
I am so sick of seeing Anandtech, Ars Technica, Tom's, etc, etc reviewing processors and then saying something to the effect of, "After exhausting review of the two processors, it seems Intel pulls out ahead in 57% of the benchmarks. Therefore, in this case, we recommend Intel." But, the Intel CPU is twice the price. The way CPUs are reviewed is kind of like a car review magazine reviewing cars solely on engine displacement while the $30,000 difference between random GM and random Mercedes is ignored..
The CPU marketplace is fucked up.
My Next System -- Are You Listening Dell? (Score:3, Insightful)
However...
The next system I intend to buy will be an Athlon64 from somebody. Are you really listening, Dell?
Re:If this is not the first post... (Score:5, Funny)
we are waiting
Re:Since when is Dell the entire PC industry? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Correlation != Causation (Score:2)
Re:And in other news... (Score:5, Informative)
Heat comparison [anandtech.com]
Check out that "Load Temperature" chart. What's that? Intel's at the top and the Athlon's are at the bottom? Even at idle temps, the Athlon64 comes in under or even with the P4s.
Re:And in other news... (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, had to post that or my head would explode.
Re:What's wrong with Intel? (Score:5, Informative)
For starters, I recently graduated from UC Berkeley. My last class was CS152 where the students form their own groups and design a CPU of their own. http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs152
I like good designs. I like tech where people put a lot of work into making it work better and more elegantly than is actually necessary. I admire it when a design just speaks about it's designers and says "we know our shit and we know how to do it good." And to top it off, I'm willing to pay for it....but I can't complain when it's cheap
In short, my problem with Intel is that they're no longer using good engineering to sell. They've switched to marketing bullshit.
The Pentium 4, from an architecture standpoint, is a brute force method of pushing the clock speed for no reason other than to let the marketing guys say "ooh, 3 ghz." The long pipeline is what gives it that ability. The power consumption from the extra flipflops needed to form each pipelining stage and from fliping them so fast makes those huge ass heat sinks necessary. An Intel P4 uses up more physical resources to run simply so they can try to sell more for less performance.
Take a look at the PowerPC and the Athlons. AMD's marketing-speak numbers actually reflect a generally equivalent (yeah yeah, there are always variations, but it's still generally close enough) to the P4's computation power. Sure the Athlons give out ALMOST as much heat, but they're still less than the P4. The lower clock rate helps too in making the system stable since it's easier to have gates that latch/hold correctly at slower speeds (duh.) Less radio interference. You don't need to overclock everything on the board or rely on perfectly placed wires to avoid interference. Heck, it's easier and cheaper to design almost everything else on the board and chipset because of this AND STILL GET THE SAME OR BETTER PERFORMANCE. And the PowerPCs? Looking at Apple's machines, most of them still don't have direct CPU fans. They can use the same chips in the laptops and the desktops. No "mobile" version necessary. Heck, in certain cases, a 500Mhz G4 will actually beat out a 3Ghz P4, although those cases are specialized. (like distributed.net)
All of their "innovations" which they advertise don't really mean anything. MMX was a joke even as far back as the P200s. To execute a MMX instruction, you have to do a bunch of stuff to clear out your registers before you can use the instruction. Unless you had a lot to do, you might have just wasted the gains of the instruction on the prep time since you'll probably have to commit a bunch of stuff to memory which takes a while. NetBurst (the super duper long pipeline) doesn't make your internet experience better, it just increases your instruction latency (which I admit doesn't matter much when you're clocking 3ghz) and cause your CPU to croak on a branch prediction oopsies.
There's a good reason why the current Centrino/PentiumM chipsets are based off a P3. It's because it was a more respectable design than the P4 in almost every way except marketing speak. It was more power efficient. It also had a higher IPC count. (instruction per cycle) The 1ghz P3 beat out all the 1.6-1.8ghz P4s on introduction and so they just scrapped the P3s soon after because it didn't help their marketing. What kind of company scraps the better product?
The P3, by the way, should have been named the P2a or something since all that was changed was a few instructions and the cache size. But hey, 3 sounds better than 2.
Finally, the majority of developers no longer do optimizations by hand. So the "slight processor/OS incompatibility" shouldn't ever happen since almost every compiler for x86 is aware of both processors. The instruction set is the same. If the output is the same, it doesn't matter who's processor did it as long as 1+1=2 and 0xffffffff + 0x00000001 = (either 0 or an exception or whatever was specified by the ISA) Though,
Re:I'm glad (Score:3, Insightful)
A good AMD motherboard costs about the same as a good P4 MB now days. That makes an AMD system still cheaper.