AMD's Barton is here (Athlon XP with 512KB cache, 3000+ rating)

[Asher]

Atta boy, Mark! Rebel, rebel!

[MarkG]

it's a simple price/perfomance issue

[Asher]

The price delta between Intel and AMD on the high-end desktop is non-existant these days.

[MarkG]

well i never shopped anything from the high-end. it's silly to buy something that will be 40% cheaper in 6 months.

[Asher]

So why do you buy computers at all?

[MarkG]

the silliness is reduced as the total amount you spend is also reduced. in fact, below a certain level it becomes silly not to buy something

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by MarkG
well i never shopped anything from the high-end. it's silly to buy something that will be 40% cheaper in 6 months.

In fact, the price on the P4 3.06GHz HT has dropped remarkably fast - from $900 to just a bit over $600 in around 2 months.

[Rasbelin]

Erhhmm... the price vs. quality ballance is better for AMD's processors. IMHO.

Compare the average prices in Finland for the 4 CPUs by AMD and Intel which should in theory represent the same performance class as the competitor's model. You may notice that I get about the same perforamance for a cheaper price by AMD, plus the mobos are slightly cheaper. So that's why my choice is AMD.

[Wraith]

Haven't read the review yet, but at least you're quoting a reputable source for once ^_^

--" Seeing as how the desktop Hammer chips have been delayed now (again) towards the end of 2003, things don't look too cheery for AMD again this year..."

I wouldn't go that far. The server line, Opteron, is still on track. It's quite possible that the desktop delays were to keep more production available for Opteron. Early rumors indicate it generating rather more interest than expected.

--"Both Intel and AMD have hot-as-hell processors out now for the high end."

Only one of the reasons I wouldn't ever buy the latest-released processor from any company...

--"Also, Banias (called Pentium-M formally) is going to be launched March 12th."

It will be very amusing to see how Intel handles the marketing for this after all their "Mhz Matters" advertising.

--"Hey, Asher, I'm wondering, since I've got 512 meg of RAM in my computer, do I really need a page file in WinXP or Win98?"

Not sure about 98, but from what I've seen XP (or 2K) wants at least some swap file space, no matter how much RAM you have. At 512 you can probably set it pretty low, but not totally off.

--"Nu-uh, most professionals use Microsoft Paint."

For 3D work? Right...

--"It's AMD that has a very spotty history and jumps for joy every time a chip works."

You might want to go back and check on what rev those clawhammer demo chips were...

Wraith
"It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning."
- Calvin

[Rasbelin]

Actually the delay seems to be caused by the fact that the introduction of DDR-II has been delayed, so AMD doesn't want to release a 64-bit CPU that uses old memory technology. But of course some of the delay might be caused by the production of Opteron CPUs.

[Thue]

Originally posted by Asher
Also, Banias (called Pentium-M formally) is going to be launched March 12th. It's an all-new processor design (first ever for a mobile chip) that shuts down parts of the chip and motherboard when not in use to save battery life.

Apparently some notebooks with Banias chips will last about 6 hours on one battery...

Performance is pretty impressive as well: http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20030205/index.html

I would be happy if they would incorporate some of these improvements into their desktop processors, instead of just going for performance at any price. For what I do my current Celeron 400 is "fast enough" (not that I won't upgrade when I have a bit more money), but I would be interested in a CPU with lower power consumption/less heat generation/small fan required.

[Wraith]

--"Typical Thermal Power P4 3.06GHz: 81 W
Typical Thermal Power Athlon XP 3000+: 74.3 W"

Asher, if you got these from Ace's you've misread their table.

They list 74.3W as the max power for the Athlon (typical as 58.4 W) and 81W as the typical power for the P4 (with +/- 105 W as the max).

--"I was slightly surprised by how much the Athlon got hammered in the SpecViewPerf benchmarks, though."

You're also being disingenuous here. Ace's concludes that the difference is in the Quadro driver optimizations (heavily P4, not at all for Athlon), not in the processor.
Note that they say:

And if you investigate the reviews which feature SPEC Viewperf and use a Geforce 4 Ti4600 as the OpenGL videocard, you will see that the Athlon will beat a similar Pentium 4 in many situations.

Wraith
"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them."
-- Isaac Asimov

[Asher]

Originally posted by Wraith
I wouldn't go that far. The server line, Opteron, is still on track. It's quite possible that the desktop delays were to keep more production available for Opteron. Early rumors indicate it generating rather more interest than expected.

The Server Line won't help AMD much, it'll help some.

But I remember hearing about how much Athlon MP was going to do for the company, and that tanked pretty badly in terms of sales. I wonder how many companies will actually adopt Opteron seeing how poor support AMD has given to Athlon MP...

Not sure about 98, but from what I've seen XP (or 2K) wants at least some swap file space, no matter how much RAM you have. At 512 you can probably set it pretty low, but not totally off.

With a couple of registry entry changes, you can turn off the pagefile and it'll keep all of the OS files in the RAM.

For 3D work? Right...

I guess I should have been more obviously sarcastic.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Rasbelin
Actually the delay seems to be caused by the fact that the introduction of DDR-II has been delayed, so AMD doesn't want to release a 64-bit CPU that uses old memory technology. But of course some of the delay might be caused by the production of Opteron CPUs.

I thought DDR-II was delayed because there's no desktop chips that'd use it.

DDR-II is in production at very high clock speeds (GeForce FX uses it at 500MHz * 2 = 1GHz), much more than the DDR-II for desktop would require. Intel doesn't plan to support it until the end of the year on the desktop either. And since neither AMD nor Intel will support it till year-end, it was delayed...

[Asher]

Originally posted by Wraith
Asher, if you got these from Ace's you've misread their table.

They list 74.3W as the max power for the Athlon (typical as 58.4 W) and 81W as the typical power for the P4 (with +/- 105 W as the max).

Oops. I could have sworn I had the figures right, but the table disagrees with me right now.

You're also being disingenuous here. Ace's concludes that the difference is in the Quadro driver optimizations (heavily P4, not at all for Athlon), not in the processor.
Note that they say:

That's all well and good, but if the Quadro drivers have SSE2 optimizations or something like that to help give the P4 a huge boost, the lack of SSE2 in the Athlon XP isn't really an excuse for the lack of performance.

And if the recent Quadro drivers provide a large boost like that, it's only a matter of time before Nvidia brings that down to their UDA for consumer chips...