Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
This arguement is getting very tiring. The availability of the new intel chips is a nonissue:
The new Intel Duo-core 2 chips have been over-clocked to 3.7 Ghz on several sites. Intel can produce them and they are on their way.
At 3 Ghz the performance of the new Intel chips put the best AMD chips to shame. Intel has a huge performance lead.
AMD has no response....maybe a light at the end of the tunnel with quad cores in 2008.
I have seen several examples where AMD management has not been honest about these issues.
AMD is going to get it's a** kicked.
Intel stock or some other investment is a better bet right now.
OT Cree
The recent dip in Cree share price is a buying opportunity.
Cree has no debt, 250 million cash, roughly 1 $/share earnings and very interesting future growth prospects as more applications for high brightness LEDs are developed and LED lighting becomes more widely used.
The only issue I see is significant competion from several other companies. But so far Cree has been able to keep up to or ahead of the competion in terms of technology advances - unlike AMD.
Off Topic - LED lighting
Since this is an investment board you may want to have a look at Cree which is one of the producers of high efficiency LED technology.
Here is a good comparison of current lighting technology:
http://www.berkeleydaily.org/text/article.cfm?issue=07-07-06&storyID=24583
"A conventional light bulb (incandescent) is about 16 lumens per watt (lm/W) and a tungsten bulb is about 22 lm/W. A fluorescent lamp may range from 50-100 (average of 60) lm/W so it’s not hard to see why we like the fluorescent so well.
LED’s have gotten about 22 lm/W in the past but in 2003 bulbs were tested at 65 lm/W and this last year we saw a test of an LED that was at 131 lm/W. This means that you will soon be able to get as much light out of an LED for about 1/7th the cost.
This technology is clearly growing quickly and if I were much on investing, I’d be looking to major developers of LED home lighting as an investment. You see, in today’s homes, lighting is a major power user."
"Now, there are a few problems. They’re not cheap. The equivalent of a common bulb is currently about 20 bucks so that’s 20-80 times the cost of bulbs down at ACE but I guarantee that these will be dropping rapidly.
If you consider that it costs about 25 cents a day to run a 100 watt light bulb and that it will cost about 4 cents a day to run a similar LED lamp, it’s not too hard to figure out that you’re going to save the cost of the bulb in a fairly short time and go on to saving loads over the twenty years that it’s running."
32 bits will still run Windows Vista Premium:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,196131,00.html
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/capable.mspx
A Windows Vista Premium Ready PC includes at least:
1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor1.
1 GB of system memory.
A graphics processor that runs Windows Aero2.
128 MB of graphics memory.
40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
DVD-ROM Drive3.
Audio output capability.
Internet access capability.
There seems to be more emphasis on a decent graphics card than a fast processor. Laptops with integrated graphics will have problems and it will be difficult to upgrade the graphics unlike a PC.
While they feed on software upgrades and new PC sales, Microsoft can't afford to get too far ahead of their mass customer base.
Thanks for the well thought out and classy responses to the Dell news.
The only thing I would add is that you are comaparing Intel's Core Duo which is 32 bits with AMD's Turion chips which can run 64 bit software. It's not an issue for most customers right now but this will eventually change. In the meantime some customers will purchase AMD based laptops because they are 64 bit capable.
When will a 64 bit Intel mobile chip be available and what kind of power will it require?
The next year will be very interesting.
Buying a laptop today (not 2,3 or 6 months from now):
Being an AMD shareholder I started out shopping for a Turion ML or MT laptop. I was looking for something with 15.4" WXGA, DVD RW and a decent video card (no intergrated graphics).
I checked Future Shop, Best Buy, Costco, The Source and all the local smaller retailers and what I found was mostly Semprons and Turion ML 30, ML 32 and a few ML 37.
Here's a current example from Future Shop:
HP DV5130 $1,400 can ($1,230 USD)
15.4" WXGA Brightview
Turion ML-37 2.0 Ghz
120 Gb @ 4200 rpm
1 GB ram
6 cell battery
128 MB ATI 200M video
XP Media center
Verses Dell Inspiron 6400 Laptop $1,219 can ($1,072 USD)
15.4" XGA TrueLife
T2300 (1.66 GHz Core Duo)
80 GB 5400 rpm hard drive
1 GB Ram
6 cell battery
ATI X1300 128 MB video
XP Media Center
The 2 Ghz Turion will be faster on some applications but for the price difference the Dell could easily be upgraded to a 2 GHz Duo Core.
Right or wrong, I starting thinking about how my existing desktop computer chokes on simple multitasking such as a virus scan or writing a DVD while surfing the internet and I decided that two cores (within a similar or lower power envelope) would probably be much more beneficial than 64 bits on a single core.
So I ended up buying a Dell laptop.
Core Duo looks like a pretty impressive chip. Here is a review showing a Core Duo T2400 (1.8 Ghz) slightly outperforms an AMD X2 3800 (1.8 GHz) desktop:
http://www.bleedinedge.com/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=51&Itemid=26
I am a long term AMD share holder and I was impressed enough to buy a Dell Inspiron 6400 Laptop:
15.4" XGA TrueLife
T2300 (1.66 GHz Core Duo)
1 GB Ram
80 GB 5400 rpm hard drive
ATI X1400 video card
9 cell battery
XP home
Currently selling for $1319 canadian ($1160 USD) including shipping. I was unable to find anything comparable in terms of performance and value.
It only has 32bit capability but I tend to think that 2 cores will be more beneficial for my usage than a single core Turion at 64 bits for some time to come.
This Laptop runs very cool, silent and fast with good battery life.
I have been watching SUNW with interest for a while. SUNW is starting to look pretty good. I don't own any yet - any advice? Do you think we are near the bottom:
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=6050017
It might be this:
SOURCES CLAIMED chip company AMD has several X86-based Geode products on the boil, codenamed Castle, Snowmass and Dragonfly.
...
The Dragonfly's plans seem more advanced. This 90 nanometre processor will clock at 1.3GHz at four watts, 1.1GHz at two watts, and 800MHz at 1.3 watts.
It will support SSE1, SSE2, MMX, the NX bit, and the much vaunted Microsoft Longhorn security. It will also have an integrated DDR-2 memory controller, supporting 533 and 666MHz speeds, four PCI Express controllers, and even boot from NAND.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20871
The latest 90um Sempron chips with the 754 socket perform very well, particularly when over-clocked. The larger cache and dual channels of the true 939 Athlon's don't seem to be that significant:
"Another appealing aspect of junior Sempron for Socket 754 models is their excellent overclockability. Our tests show that Semprons on the new 90nm Palermo core can add up about half their frequency at overclocking, to clock rates about 2.5GHz. For example, we managed to give our Sempron 2600+ a 56% frequency boost and the performance of the system subsequently grew by 35% in average and became comparable to that of systems with Pentium 4 3.4E and Athlon 64 3500+ processors."
"Summing up the results of these tests we should acknowledge that the reduction of the cache memory to 128 kilobytes in processors of K8 architecture doesn’t affect the performance too much. In our tests the processor with a 128KB L2 cache is in average only 1.2% slower than its analog with twice the size of the cache and less than 6% slower than the model with an L2 cache of the maximum size. Thus, you shouldn’t worry about the small amount of cache memory when choosing a Sempron for your Socket 754 system."
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/sempron-2600.html
The future looks bright for apple:
"Now that everybody has the iPod, they're sort of thinking 'Gee, do I really need this virus-ridden Windows thing? Maybe I can jump on the other platform and be a little more secure,'"
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050112.gtapplejan12/BNStory/Front
Amd breaks away from SOXX
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=^SOXX&t=1y&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=amd
I was at some meetings and sales presentations last week to choose a company wide standard "mill wide information system".
One of the sales reps from TietoEnator (a Swedish based IT company with 14,000 employees) stated clearly that they had no plans to support Itanium for their mill operating information software (MOPS 3i). They have recently transistioned from Alpha historian servers to servers with windows operating systems and they also mentioned that they were working towards Linux support.
Also, during informal discussions with one of our "IT" guys he mentioned that Intel's X86 - 64 bit support was rumoured to run poorly relative to AMD's version.
http://www.tietoenator.com/
For individual users it's small potatoes, but if we look at the world wide market, power consumption becomes quite significant:
For 30 million new Intel systems, averaging 4 hours usage per day, the power difference could amount to 3.5 billion kwh per year or 400 megawatts - if my calculations are correct.
The shift to PDA's and laptops will also help.
How many PCs are out there? Environmentally every little bit helps.
One of the key statements for me was:
BM: Same everything. Same chips, same everything. We run apps on 32-bit Windows, and then take those same apps and run them on 64-bit Windows, and you'll get about an 8 percent performance improvement on average
I remember long heated discussions here several months ago where the intel fans were trying to claim 64 bits would not improve performance. 8% is a pretty significant boost in performance.
Sun sets 2-way record with Opteron:
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040511/sftu152_1.html
OT - I disagree
The link to common electrical misinformation was very informative and interesting. It reminded me of why the internet can be so amazing and why I spend hours reading these mostly useless posts.
As far as I know "sdwalks" remained at Raging Bull and never posted under that name over here.
He last posted on RB Dec. 21
http://ragingbull.lycos.com/mboard/boards.cgi?board=AMD&read=117591
Interesting interview with with AMD’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing, Mr. Henri Richard regarding Athlon 64 FX 51:
http://firingsquad.com/features/amd_henri_richard_interview/
WBMW - This is what Dan must have meant when he said "Ha Ha Ha":
Comments on SPECmanship courtesy of Eachus (fool.com msg):
But here is a sample from what is available, three 4 CPU results for XeonMP 2.8 GHz, Opteron 846, and Itanium2 1.5 GHz:
Dell PowerEdge 6650 4x2.8 GHz XeonMP, Zeus 4.2r2, SPECweb99_SSL = 2177
AMD Appro 4144H 2.0 GHz Opteron, Zeus 4.2r2, SPECweb99_SSL = 3399
HP Integrity rx5670 4x1.5 GHz Itanium2 6M, Zeus 4.2r2, SPECweb99_SSL = 3702
Looks like the Opteron does significantly better than the Xeon, but not as well as the Itanium2. Or does it? The devil is always in the details, and I am going to choose just two:
Dell Xeon:Memory 16 GB, Disk Subsystem 1 36GB, 4-18GB 15KRPM drives
AMD Opteron:Memory 32 GB, Disk Subsystem 3-18GB 15KRPM Ultra 320 SCSI DrivesHP
Itanium2:Memory 32 GB, Disk Subsystem 3x73GB (15K RPM) 1x36GB (15K RPM) 15x18GB(15K RPM) HP VA7100 disk array
The XeonMPs have to cope with PAE overhead, but apparantly on this test it is worth it to have the "extra" memory. The Opteron test system used PC2100 memory instead of PC2700, but I think we would find that is the same issue as with the Xeon--you could use PC2700 memory but less of it, and more main memory is more important for this benchmark than fast main memory. This is not surprising since this is a database benchmark and caching data from disk is going to have a high payoff.
But look at the disk system for the Itanium2! The AMD system uses only 54 GBytes of disk, and the Xeon system twice that, so why does the Itanium2 system have so much disk storage, 525 Gigabytes, almost ten times as much as the Opteron system? Since the SPEC requirements for documentation are pretty good, we can find:
HP:
(73 GB) disk used for OS
(73 GB) disk used for doc_root
(73 GB) disk used for the file_set which is mounted read-only
(36 GB) disk with largefiles, behind used for post.log
HP VA7100 disk array with dual controllers (A6188A) with high performance enabled for web log# web log file system is striped using 64K stripes over 10 LUNs and mounted with largefiles and behind options
Work it all out, and what that really says is that the web log is spread over ten disks. Since during the test the web log is effectively a write only file, this probably means that the web log writes are always to the (probably 2 Meg) caches that are part of the individual disks.
Would you set a system up like that? Not me. In fact notice that the html files are mounted read only! It would be much cheaper to buy more CPUs. Is this normal SPECmanship or carried to extremes? That is up to you to judge. I just note it as part of the liberal dose of salt I take with these tests.
There are some SPECmanship games everyone is playing. Dell either didn't know about the trick of mounting the html files as read only or it didn't help on their system. (Since they put the fileset and logs on the same RAID0 volume, it may be that the RAID controller they used didn't support multiple volumes per disk--or that may have resulted in a lower score.
Link for Spec results:
http://www.spec.org/web99ssl/results/web99ssl.html
Original post by Eachus:
http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=19916881
Interesting 3 part read regarding SuSE's 64bit Linux OS:
http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=m&board=4687810&tid=amd&sid=4687...
http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=m&board=4687810&tid=amd&sid=4687...
http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=m&board=4687810&tid=amd&sid=4687...
Flash Demand up
It looks like AMD will be up today:
http://www.forbes.com/2003/10/03/cx_ah_1002amd.html?partner=yahoo&referrer=
Itanium's market viability is questionable:
http://www.sun.com/executives/realitycheck/reality-021803.html
What I meant by FUD was the strong competion from Intel which Elmer points out in many of his posts. I agree that Intel has very good products and excellent marketing. Although AMD's product mix is recently looking better, Intel controls pricing and they have enough cash to bankrupt AMD.
I expect that when AMD finally releases Opteron Intel will drastically lower Zeon and Itanium pricing to eliminate any price/performance advantage.
Thanks to Spokeshave
This board is impressive! Knowledgable, on topic posts are so refreshing; it reminds me of the fool a couple of years ago. The FUD is diconcerting (Elmer, in particular), but I still have faith that AMD will kick Intel's ass someday.
I migrated from the fool to RB when the fool started charging for message board access. I have been lurking with the odd post at RB for the past year. This board is so much better.
Keep up the good work!