Intel vs. AMD

[Emc2]

Wow, you guys, you know the AMD Ahtlons are cranking up to over the 1,000mhz mark!

Actually, I could care less. AMD and Intel can shove their little war over expensive silicon where the sun doesn't shine. I am wondering, and probably will wonder for a while, what drives these two companies to make an expensive thing that has no practical use to the every-day computer user?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but who needs a super computer besides the ultimate gamer or possibly a corporation tracking a few million things a day? I certainly don't. Do you? I'd be happy with a pentium II 450 as much as I would be with an Athlon 650mhz+.

If you think about it, besides gaming, there's not much use for a super computer. (SETI, Rc5, and such purposes aside)

[BBA]

It's just for gaming and bragging rights to me.

Of course, I'm running dual overcolcked coppermines right now. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif

[ghostface]

heh, it wasn't that long ago a p2-450 was top notch. heck, we'll prolly need the 1ghz to run winme and whatever version of office that comes out.

[pickel]

That's the difference between driving a 4 cylinder rice burner and a Big Block Chevy. I prefer the latter, myself.

[Wiz]

keep in mind that a athlon 1000 barely beats a P3 850

[Dputiger]

NOT when you put SDRAM in that Pentium III it doesn't. Running on the same type of RAM, the Athlon beats the Pentium III. And once DDR SDRAM comes out, it'll smoke it again, no matter how much expensive crappy RAM Intel shoves in their machine. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[jad1097]

The question should be why not! Could you imagine running todays apps on a 486?


I kind of a small block Chevy guy myself. A bit of tweaking and a small block will, well you know pickel.


Hmm Win Me runs sweet on my K6 3-400 ghostface. Better than Win98 ever thought of.

[wtp]

the point in technology is that no matter what, (unless you're a billionare like Bill Gates) is that you CAN'T catch up. IF you can, you would have to sell a hella lots of old stuff, to have it replaced by the new stuff. This applies with CPUs.

wtp

[This message has been edited by wtp (edited 06-21-2000).]

[Warthog]

Even for gaming, the game won't utilize that much speed and processor power. Sure, it will load super fast and not have any slowdowns, but the graphics won't keep improving. I would like to see a game made to run on a 1ghz system, max amount of RAM, highest video card and 21in. monitor with high resolution. If I forgot something, feel free to add to the list. The game would be incredible. Nowadays, gaming companies make games for systems that were top notch 2 years ago. They have to, or else the majority of the market wouldn't be able to run them.

Warthog

[Krymson]

They have to keep pushing that barrier so The old cpus become cheaper. In a few years 1 gigahertz cpus will become as cheap as pentium 75's are today. As The hardware improves, so will software, in a attempt to catch up and use all that the hardware has to offer. Games will be more immersive, we might even have like a VR operating system, that would be really cool.

[hai]

Why do normal users need faster processors every a couple of years? That's simply because of bloatwares like M$ office suit coming from the evil Micro$oft corp. According to Moole's rule, the size of every M$ product doubles in every 18 months, or roughly 100 times per decade. You have to keep up.

[Dputiger]

The whole 'bloatware' idea is pretty ridiculous. I've run Office 97 on a Pentium 60 with 32 meg of RAM. My copy of Windows 98 takes up about 400 meg of my 6.4 gig hard drive (and no computer made today sells with a hard drive that small). My OS takes up 6% of my hard drive. So the idea that computers have to get faster because of Microsoft is just ****. If THAT was true, my Pentium Classic (200 Mhz, no MMX) couldn't run Windows 98. It's less than 20% as fast as the current fastest system.

Mainly, though, the technology gets faster to drive gaming--and games will continue to look better, at the very least. After all, the best game made today doesn't truly look 'real'. But, push the technology hard enough, and something more like a Star Trek Holodeck begins to look more possible--at least, from the display side.

[BBA]

Dputiger...

I was just reading where you say the Athlon beats the P3 when SDRAM is used...where did you see that?

Anything above 750MHz seems the P3 pulls ahead no matter what...and really so if a BX chipset board is used. The BX pretty much is the ruler of performance, especially at 133MHz.

It's was supposedly due to the L2 performance of the P3 scaling up, and L2 scaling down in timing on the Athlon at higher frequencies. I guess the Thunderbird changes that though.

[Dputiger]

I'd have to look--I remember reading it quite a while ago, so it could have been prior to the Athlon 750.

The T-bird does seem to fix the cache trouble, though, you're right about that. I'll look around--I know my strong impression was that running SDRAM even now the Athlon was within a hair of the P-III--but I could be wrong.

[hai]

HDs are **** cheap, however, RAMs aren't cheap. The prices of SDRAM are twice as much as they were one year ago and all games/applications put twice as much as ram requirement as they did 1-2 years ago.

[jad1097]

BBA take a look at this if you have not seen it yet. http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q2/000623/index.html


hai have you check the price of sdram lately? You are incorrect. SDram is going for less than a dollar a MB. Thats about that same as it was last year. YOu can get 128MB for under $110!

[BBA]

Interesting. The AMD almost equals the P3 at 1GHz. Pretty good.

I wonder if the Athlons are still more expensive than the P3's are. ( Last time I checked the P3 1G was about $250 less than the Athlon 1G )

I'll look again.

[falcompsx]

this has been said before but....
neener neener neener...mines faster then yours!

[falcompsx]

oh yeah, ghostface, WinME runs faster and more stable then win98 ever dreamed! I'm using it daily right now, it it rocks! No driver problems too! All 98 drivers work on ME! ONLY problem is i can't use online banking because of IE 5.5. the site won't accept my browser version http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/frown.gif oh well. It took 4 versions of win9x to get a stable one, well nearly stable.

[Emc2]

My point was missed by almost all of you. Why build a faster processor just so today's programs will load 4.3 seconds faster? Why not find a more practical use? In two or three years an Athlon will lose value, and be as much as a pentium II chip is today. (Actually, they used to be even less than they are these days).

I see all of it as pointless. It's going nowhere. People will be spending more money to feel secure that they have a decent computer, when in all actuality if there were no such thing as a 1,000mhz computer, most of us would be happy anyways.

[Warthog]

I'm about to get a new computer. I want to have this computer for 3-4 years - basically as long as it can play most games, I'll keep it. The parts I chose for this system are parts that will (hopefully) be half way decent in that time span.

THAT is why I am choosing high end equipment for my computer.

Warthog

[Emc2]

The point, Warthog, is that I believe AMD and Intel could both spend their efforts better; on something a little more than speeding up a chip.

[Dputiger]

Hmm. Emc2, I'm not sure what you mean by 'practical.'

The truth is, the average computer gamer is no longer a 13 year-old boy. He (or she) is 28, has a full-time job, and can be of any nationality (though more whites and Asians own computers than blacks and hispanics). Almost 50% are female. He (or she) surfs the Internet frequently, purchases a game or two a month, and uses the computer as a recreational tool as well as a word processor and data base.

To me, this sounds like a pretty 'everday' person. They aren't overclocking their chip by 200%, and they probably don't know what FSB stands for, but they like to be able to play some good-looking games on the computer.

This is not unique to computers. When you get right down to it, no one really needs a big television, more than one phone (if that), air conditioning, nice automobiles, or powerful stereos and radios.

In fact, all of these devices have been improved for only two reasons: To increase entertainment and improve efficiency (which are often linked). There are very few people who, in fact, require a computer to do their job. Likewise, humanity survived for tens of thousands of years without cars or air conditioning. But all of these products have been developed to increase the efficiency of how people worked and to give greater entertainment value.

To me, that's as practical as you can get.

[hai]

I purchased one stick 128MB SDRAM for about $58 last summer. 64MB SDRAM was as low as $25 at pricewatch last year.

[hai]

You will never have a CPU too fast if you are an engineer. It's very common to take days to do some serious 3D computation and optimization.