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I know this is horrendously off-topic, but the subject has already been broached and the space above was becoming too crowded to properly reply.
Vegetto34 said:
besides an amd running at that speed would overheat the second you turn it on, amd's have(will have) a bad habbit of burning out, my friend's room gets so hot he turns his a/c way down
If an AMD running at 1 GHz would, in fact, overheat the second it was turned on, AMD will have released a bunch of paperweights. The fact is that 1 GHz AMD processors DO work and come with (even in OEM form!) heatsink and fan. You neglect the fact that, without these, PIIIs would ALSO overheat. Unless your friend is running a massive parallel array of 1 GHz Athlons, his room is NOT going to overheat and he does NOT have to turn down his A/C. They only dissipate (at 1 GHz) 65 watts of heat which is twice what the PIII 1 GHz does, go to the following page to see the stats:
http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm
If turning on a 100 watt lightbulb (which dissipates 95% of its energy as heat) causes your friend to turn down the A/C, your hyperbolic statement might have credence.
Vegetto34 said:
4. Intel is now using RDRAM(rambus) which is 5 to 10x's faster than PC-133, on a higher note amd is not going with RDRAM since it doesnt want to go bankrupt for research on motherboards for it.
Scott Noveck said it right. BENCHMARKING tests prove that RDRAM is slower. Sure, it might be running at 600-800MHz, but that's just catching up to SDRAM running at 133 MHz. And you hit it on the nail when you said that AMD doesn't want to go bankrupt (well, almost). RDRAM is so incredibly expensive (as are the motherboards for them) that no one is willing to use it. Scott's right, go to www.tomshardware.com and read the articles: "Dissecting Rambus" and "Rambus Revisited"; they're the first ones under the Motherboard heading. You raised the issue of heat earlier; RDRAM "could be used as a replacement part in an EZ-Bake Oven" as Van Smith says. Read the article and warn your relatives away from buying RAMBUS stock (which incidentally fell by $70 because of Tom's Hardware punching holes in Rambus' fabled performance, as you'll learn if you read the articles).
Vegetto34 said:
6. Intel supplies numeric math co-processors and last time i checked, amd didnt
Separate math co-processors ended for good on ALL x86 processors (irregardless of manufacturer) with, I believe, the 386SX.
Vegetto34 said:
7. and now were down to amd's "wonderful", "great", and "what makes amd go over the top", its ""FLOATING POINT OPERATIONS"" which are ONLY used for JAVA!!
Remember, this is what Intel (and benchmarks) used to say made the Penium great as compared to AMD's (and Cyrix's and IBM's 6x86) products: a better FPU. Back about 3 or 4 years ago, well before Java was a particularly important language. The Athlon's superior FPU is no small reason for its PIII-beating performance.
Vegetto34 said:
first of all where did you ever get that info? amd.com?
A better question is, where did you get yours? You have a few true points, (200 MHz FSB of Athlon) but one heckuva lot of errors and unsupported assertations. Educate yourself, here's a good starting point: Thomas Pabst's Athlon review. It is fairly objective (despite the title) and it explains why the Athlon's architecture is better than the PIIIs (with the exception of the Coppermine's on-board L2):
http://www7.tomshardware.com/ cpu/99q3/990809/index.html (watch out for the space)
Ars Technica (www.arstechnica.com) also has quite a few good (albeit technical in the extreme) articles explaining the Athlon's superior architecture.
Vegetto said:
3. RAMBUS is benchmarked ALOT higher that sdram, and it is about $7 a meg, and it requires it's OWN motherboard, the ¡820 and the cc820 intel motherboards!(Intel did make it PC-100 compatible LATER) while sdram requires some form of EPROM or other kind of bus, called a memory translator hub, which is non-existant in RAMBUS...
Like I said, read "Rambus Dissected" and "Rambus Revisited" if you will continue to quote these fictional (or Intel, or Rambus, or perhaps Mr. Edelstone's memorandum, which are essentially fiction as well, as you'd discover if you'll read the second article) sources and discover the REAL benchmark results. As for pricing, go to www.pricwatch.com as "Rambus Dissected" suggests and figure out which one is a better bargain, RDRAM ($600 for a 128 MB stick, and you need two of the suckers at a time!) or SDRAM ($80 for a 128 MB stick, and you only need one). Paying that much for no performance gain strikes me as idiotic. When you consider that the REAL measure is the transfer rate, SDRAM's successor DDR-DRAM (twice the transfer rate) and QDR-DRAM (FOUR times the transfer rate) at almost unchanged (from SDRAM) prices, DDR- and QDR- DRAM are far better alternatives to RDRAM.
Vegetto34 said:
oh, and where did you ever get any "real-world" benchmarks, if you have an athlon you wouldn't know...
Ouch. That was a cheap shot against Scott. But go to Tom's Hardware and look at "Rambus Revisited" to see the difference in rambus performance on INTEL's PIII versus SDRAM's.
Vegetto34 said:
10. Microsoft is fixing to help Intel out... With their new video game system, it has a p3 600 coppermine that can pull 300 million polys a sec...
You mean Intel's undercutting of AMD's offer to Microsoft for the X-BOX in the final stages by virtually giving away the 600s? The 300 million polys a sec sounds like a VIDEO CARD performance figure. Actually, NVidia's specially engineered X-Box card, if I'm not mistaken. Search Ziff-Davis News (www.zdnn.com) for X-BOX and you'll find all of this there. PCG doesn't have a monopoly on gaming system news, you know.
Vegetto said:
15. tell me if you think a p2 400 is slower than an amd 380..
No. Why? Athlon's debuted at 500 Mhz. Okay, that was dumb of me (couldn't resist, sorry). But if you want benchmarks proving the equivalent of what you propose, nothing shows it better than Tom's Benchmarks. No, not ones designed to show off Athlon, but more general, objective ones. Check out the article "Performance Showdown Betwen Athlon and Pentium III" available at:
http://www7.tomshardware.com/ cpu/99q3/990823/index.html (again, watch out for the space)
I have to admit some parity has been established by the new Coppermine, but as soon as Athlon-2 (Thunderbird) hits the shelves in second half, this advantage will be eliminated and the Athlon's superior architect will show through.
Vegetto34 said:
overclocking reduces processor life and you loose your warranty,
So? The fact that you CAN do it (Intel's locked theirs) and do it EASILY (and have fairly good stability) with a Golden Fingers Device (www.amdxtreme.com) means that you can buy a cheap AMD (you can boost performance by 25-50% depending on what chip you start with), oc it and get a top of the line processor. So what about the warranty? Will you honestly still use the same system in 10-15 years (average processor lifetime) anyways? Performance gain... drool... But seriously, oc'ing is bad if you have no experience, are worried about screwing up, and have only basic knowledge. DON'T OVERCLOCK UNLESS YOU'VE GOT A DARNED GOOD REASON AND BETTER SKILLS!
Vegetto34 said (whew, almost there!):
do you have a clue what the difference is between L1 and L2??
According to the Geek.com (www.geek.com) technical glossary:
L1 Cache is: ...cache that's on the CPU, [physically on-die, the Athlon has 128kb, the PIII including Coppermine has 32kb] usually meant for holding instructions as they get executed. Sort of a death row for instructions.
L2 Cache is: ...cache memory that sits between the L1 cache of the processor and main memory. [You appear to already know the stats for this.]
Whew, that's one heck of a post. I just hope it doesn't get deleted. I know my tone might have been a bit... excited at times, but don't take it personally. Anyhow, as Scott Noveck suggested, read up on it: it'll do you good. Anyhow, time for sleepy time...
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