Amd are you fiddling?

[The PIT2]

Interesting link.
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990819S0008

[Maggi]

indeed ...

------------------
Cheerio,
Maggi

Asus P2B-S @ 112MHz FSB - Bios 1010 final
Celeron300A @ 504Mhz
128MB 7ns SDRAM
G400 DualHead 32MB SGRAM @ 201 MHz memory clock

[The PIT2]

If anyone wants one these and want to risk Scan Uk they have these in stock and seemed to priced nicley.

[SteveC]

top....

------------------
Cheers,
Steve

My PC houses one of these things which seems to affect some people's lives far too much...

[ALBPM]

up

[DK_]

hmmm interesting

[rickn]

smells like another PowerVR

[ALBPM]

up

[Joel]

Take away that one benchmark and it still beats the shit out of Intel.

Joel

[The PIT2]

Maybe but how reliable are the motherboards going to be. Crashing every two minutes persuaded me to get rid of the K6-2. I'll watch the forums for problems with these new babies.

[KvHagedorn]

Oh PuhLEEZE! Check out Tom's and Sharky's for in-depth reviews of Athlon. In brief, they acknowledge the fiddling, but go on to say how Intel has done far worse in optimizing benchmarks. This article smacks of high school days where the star quarterback could get away with murder while everyone else got wrung through the wringer for the most minor of offenses.
This is why good reviews use as many benchmarks as possible to give a clearer overall picture of things. Also, look at Tom's Review. He goes into detail about the architecture here, basically explaining how the Athlon MUST achieve better performance due to its advanced design. The problem, once again, is not the processor or its inherent speedyness/awesome design/quality, but compatibility. The EV6 bus is superior to intel's in design, but is difficult to implement, and relying on VIA and others (especially at this unstable time in the Taiwan region) to produce chipsets is not the way to go. AMD needs to do this themselves in order to optimize chipset to processor and get the best and most stable operation, as Intel has done with the BX and GX chipsets.

Athlon IS a better chip, but by the time it has a stable platform to match, will Intel be blowing it away once again with an IA64 based platform? Probably. Still, AMD deserves a great deal of credit for making this industry more competitive. They also deserve as much support as they can get to continue to offer this competition.

KvH

[The PIT2]

Did I detect I little frustration at the last post? I only said it's an interesting article.
One thing I would hate is for AMD to go bust but if they wish to push Intel of the top they'll need to get the Motherboard chipset manufactures 100% interested.
One thing this new chip will do is spark of another chip price war which is good for us as long as AMD survive it.

[Joel]

Here's an Athlon motherboard comparison with the 550Mhz Athlon and a G400:

plaza18.mbn.or.jp/~happy_cat/Test_2.htm

And here's another Athlon motherboard comparison:

www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/99q3/990818/index.html

And just a bit of what Tom had to say:

"Unfortunately there's only three Athlon boards available right now, but each of them is a good product. All boards passed the tests well, none of the boards showed stability problems and all boards showed good performance."

Joel

[The PIT2]

Up

[KvHagedorn]

Well, I was really just saying how Intel has bullied everyone by biasing their benchmarks shamelessly and people are afraid to bring them up on it. Tom Pabst is one of the few who would, and he also says it like it is about other Intel bullying. In the same breath he says Asus is one of the best mb manufacturers in the world and calls them chicken for being afraid of Intel. Good for Tom! AMD needs a lot of support in what they are doing, and I hope there will be enough selection in the motherboard arena to help them be a true high end competitor.

Well, I would reitierate really that I think AMD should continue to develop its own chipsets. This would bring the greatest level of compatibility with their CPUs, and btw, all those motherboards in Tom's review used the AMD 750 chipset. I have had nothing but bad experiences with VIA chipsets as far as compatibility is concerned, and that is what I was talking about. AMD wants to let others make their chipsets for them, and those others are all Taiwanese companies. Who knows if there will even be a Taiwan next year? There is every reason in the world for AMD to continue making its own chipsets. They should not shrink from this task. They could and should develop a chipset with all the features everyone wants and the stability and compatibility that they are best equipped to provide. Then maybe they could throw a little muscle around for a change.

When buying a motherboard, stability is only half the equation. That ONE mb you choose to go in your system HAS to be stable, but it also needs to have every feature you want and need. Three identical plain vanilla mbs are just ho hum as far as I'm concerned. Gamers want overclockability, others can't live without onboard SCSI, etc. For example, I was only able to find ONE motherboard that had all the things I needed. For me, it had to have 2 channel Ultra2 SCSI onboard, but I didn't want to go for a Xeon board, etc etc. Which brings up an important question for AMD.. the high end market.

Athlon would be at its best in servers and particularly in workstations where it could REALLY kick ass if there were dual or quad processor boards for it. EV6 is a superior multiprocessor bus, but where are the boards for it? Is Tyan or Asus or Super going to make a dual (or even a single) Athlon board? Server and workstation customers are pretty conservative about their purchases. If I was one of these guys, I would think twice about buying an off brand board with a VIA chipset to bet my website or corporate server on. Athlon HAS to compete in this arena. If it doesn't, AMD will have a pretty hard time of it, since this is the very arena in which it was made to compete, and not knowing who your market is gets you nowhere fast, whatever your business is.

That's why I say AMD needs to develop its own advanced chipset and push it on these high end mb companies. If it doesn't do this, Athlon will fail in the very market it was intended for. Just my two (whoops better make that five or six) cents.

Kind Regards,

KvH