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I see this bad pattern for AMD where their new desktop chips are introed too late for back to school and too late for xmas shoppers. They should have introed the A64 early even in limited quantities to produce the halo effect that's badly needed. They made the same mistake with the TBred.
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J, Chill man, since when am I a new alias? I just post selectively.
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wbmw, like I said, QS is not perfect. I am not sure what your beef is especially since you agree that a perfect measurement is not likely to appear. What did you want AMD to do? Concede the market to Intel because their Mhz wasn't as high as Intel's? They did the best they could and it turned out ok. As far as the consumer goes, buying based on QS is not that bad. You'll get a fairer approximation of system performance that way than thinking than the moving target of Intel Mhz. Mhz in the intel world means nothing because the P3, P3 celeron, P4, P4 celeron, all perform differently at the same Mhz. I think it's time for this thread to die :)
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wbmw, Quantispeed is a lot better than PR ever was and it has already outlasted it. PR was very deceiving because the Cyrix cpus that used it had really sucky FPUs. The same cannot be said about all the QS rated Athlons. They usually perform as rated. And the QS rating on the Opteron/Athlon 64 will probably hold well also. I don't think anyone is saying that QS is perfect or that Mhz is perfect but as we all know there will never be a perfect rating system so please stop arguing about this.
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HIghly unlikely when Itanium chips are > $2K a pop. Also the clock speed is still lower than P4 and Athlon. Where's the benefit?
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Those are fighting words from IBM.
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Semi, my crystal ball must have been "foggy". As usual, AMD did not execute. If they had they would have been above $7 still. Barton is late ( should have been here last Q ). Hammer is late. The only reprieve they've had is that Intel slowed down their intros of new speed grades so that the Tbred could catch up a bit.
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I am in my depressive mode right now. If I were you I would write some puts when it gets in the 3's. I'll probably do that myself and then get out on the upswing ( Hammer intro ).
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Are you kidding me? Why would you? It will have to retest its lows. I would wait until then. I don't see AMD going upwards until AFTER the release of hammer.
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wbmw, another Hammer slip. Time to start looking forward to the K9. Hopefully it won't be another dog :)
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$273 is VERY lucrative for AMD, in fact anything over $100 is VERY lucrative for AMD.
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I am talking about DVI HDCP which is a new emerging standard. It uses the standard DVI connector but there is interface logic that goes along and Intel is providing the chipset for that.
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Search for DVI HDCP Intel, you'll see.
Go here, they're all complaining about DVI-HDCP
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=ed6e47e4b2ceaeef92f6b83a8020fe8f&threadid=205970
Well, the concerned consumers were complaining that Intel is not licensing their DVI interface to 3rd party manufacturers that could make adapters to work with older HDTV sets that don't have it ( so early HDTV buyers are stranded ). Anyway, I think Intel will make tons of $$$$ on this since everyone in Hollywood, gov and Cable/Sat business is pushing this standard and most HDTV manufacturers have licensed it already. Intel will make $$$$ on each set sold for many years to come...
fyi: Intel's tentacles are spreading. I was researching HDTV systems this week and I found out that there's an emerging DVI standard for these Tvs that's wholy owned by Intel and they are very stingy about licensing it to anyone else besides TV manufacturers. It looks like Intel will make mint on each HDTV sold for many years to come.
wbmw, I wasn't even talking about the scores. I was merely absorbing the info on all the improvements that were made to the core in addition to the 64 bits and memory controller. I was under the impression that the rest of the core was a regular Athlon. That does not seem to be the case. Were you under the same impression? Maybe you should re-read the article and skip all the benchmark BS just concentrate on the architectural discussion ( to save yourself some time ).
Later...
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Interesting Hammer Article. Good Reading. It seems that the Hammer is more than just a 64-bit Athlon with a built-in memory controller.
http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/amd-hammer-family/index.html
EP, ROTFLMAO........
p.s. I liked the ad. All they are saying is that this CPU will make your software run faster than previous CPUS. There's nothing misleading about that unless it turns out that the Athlon64 is not faster than previous athlons.
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I disagree, I distinctly remember early athlon benchmarks not being too impressive. I don't recall the exact details but I think it had to do with bios settings/timings not the chip itself.
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wbmw, see my other response.
Thanks
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wbmw, you can say that, but I recall the early Athlon samples not being too impressive and then BOOM! Intel got caught with their pants down. I don't remember exactly what was turned off with the Athlon but the performance of the early samples was definitely underwhelming compared to the performance of the production cpus. Of course, whether or not the early Hammer prototypes are affected by a similar castration is all speculation on our part. Maybe you are correct and the performance we're seeing from them is all we can expect from the production cpus. My vote is on them being a slightly detuned version of what we'll get soon....
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Meant to say Hammer's IPC is 166% of P4's
Thanks
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So, that's only 166% better IPC for the Hammer prototype.
I think Banias will be targeted to the thin&light notebooks, right? It really depends on how much lead Intel has over AMD in the .09 process. I've been to some retail stores the past few weeks and AMD has a healthy presence in the notebook market ( and not too shabby in the desktops either ). We all know that if Intel has more than 6 months lead on .09 then things can get ugly for AMD since .13 products cannot compete with .09 products especially in power sensitive segments.
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EP, whatever they do, it has to help AMD. I have faith in intel marketing. Maybe there's some angle that none of us have dreamed of where High Mhz is good and High ipc is good but AMD is no good.........
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fingolfen, that's close. The Katmai P3 was a glorified PII. I never considered it a newer cpu but you are correct regarding it being out when the .25 Athlon came out. The Coppermine beat the higher speed Athlons until the TBird came out because of the on-board cache. Regardless of the details, AMD was never far ahead of AMD it was more like flip-parity-flop between the two companies.
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Semi, The original Athlon was not a home run either. It beat the P2 and It brought AMD parity with Intel ( only because Intel brought out the coppermine ) and eventually ( after over 1 year ) it beat the P3 in Mhz. Hammer is a bit more serious than that since it will make inroads in more markets at its introduction.
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AMD Raises Fourth Quarter Sales Expectations
Thursday December 5, 9:04 am ET
Anticipates Sales Approaching $700 Million, an Increase of Around 35 Percent, On Stronger Than Expected PC Processor Demand and Continued Strength in High-Density Flash Memory Device Demand
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/021205/50107_1.html
EP, AMD could have made another choice like come up with a low-ipc high Mhz design like the P4.
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wbmw, so, how do you account for all the time it has taken to bring this new core to fruition? It has taken nearly twice as long as the original K7.
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wbmw, no joke, the Barton will only be out there for 3-4 quarters. My guess is that the first adopters will be the DIY and some white-box oems. According to the Intel faithful, that's where most of AMD's sales come from anyway since the big oems have few AMD skus. Am I wrong?
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wbmw, the integrated memory controller is an advantage but certainly not the only one they have. Do you think that if the only features that the Hammer series has over the Athlon series is the integrated memory controller and 64-bits it would have taken AMD this long to release?
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wbmw, I agree somewhat. If you connect to a dual channel DDR-II and have 1MB L2 you make up for some of the shortcomings of an external memory controller. Isn't that what Intel is doing? Pumping up the FSB and dual channel? It seems to be working for the P4.
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subzero, I agree that AMD cannot keep quantispeed ratings the same when the Intel CPU performance is a moving target. What I meant to say is that they'll probably have a benchmark suite ready for server apps and use that to derive a quantispeed rating for the opterons. Now, I believe that AMD gives a cpu a quantispeed rating based on the PROJECTED Thunderbird performance but they definitely want to position their cpus against the Intel lineup. I am sure that when they come up with a 3000+ rating it will match well against the 3000+Mhz Cpu that Intel will be shipping at that time.
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I would guess, 5-10 million AThlons were sold @ those speeds. I don't know what % of that is DIY but most DIYs would probably upgrade to Bartons.
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wbmw, it seems that the current crop of Tbreds are unlocked. What that means is that they only "suggest" to the MB which multiplier should be used. If you use a MB that allows you to change it you can. A lot of the Socket A boards have that feature.
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I am not confused, the Athlon 64 can go to memory through an external memory controller using the HT bus. I remember reading about it. The Athlon 64 is not limited to using the built-in memory controller. Whether or not anyone will built a MB that utilizes an external controller remains to be seen.
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