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Hardware

New GHz Competitor In Processor Market Soon 93

Posted by timothy from the wouldn't-"andre"-be-a-nice-name-for-a-processor? dept.
pug23 writes: "CNET has an article about the Samuel 2, [a 1 Ghz-plus] processor which Via plans to begin production on in the first half of next year. More competition in this area can only be a good thing. Apparently they introduced the Samuel 1 (at speeds between 500 and 600 MHz) in June, but have been marketing it primarily in Russia, India, China and Eastern Europe."
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New GHz Competitor In Processor Market Soon More

New GHz Competitor In Processor Market Soon

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  • Well, this is supposedly a new design... (Score:3)

    by Sir_Winston ( 107378 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @08:43PM (#863625)
    You're talking about benchmarks for the current Cyrix III chip, which performs miserably. The reason it performs worse at over 500MHz on FPU intensive apps than a lowly K6 300 is that the Cyrix IIIs FPU is clocked at only half the core speed, so in that light the chip wouldn't do badly at all if the FPU were clocked at the same speed as the rest of the core--its performance is good considering this and the fact that is has no L2 cache whatsoever. If the whole core operated at 1GHz, and it had at least 128k of on-die L2, it would be a great budget chip. But that's not going to happen because of problems with the current FPU reaching high speeds, which is why they need a new design.

    But the article makes a significant mistake--its author thinks that this will be a move by VIA/Cyrix into the high-end, making the classic mistake of equating clockspeed with performance. But VIA itself is quoted as saying "Samuel 2 will expand our market, moving into notebooks and information appliances"--not high-end markets. But as a mobile or appliance processor, even a 1GHz Samuel of the current design would do well, even with the FPU clocked only at half speed, considereing that 400-600MHz notebooks are still the lion's share of the notebook market, and the appliance market still uses 180MHz WinChip 2's through low end old Celerons. Not bad for those uses, at all, even a high performance choice for those markets--especially when you consider that laptops don't run at full clock speed unless plugged in or under heavy load, whereas the Cyrix chip can run relatively cool at rated speed. Weird calling a Cyrix chip 'cool', isn't it, considering that you used to be able to fry eggs on the old Cyrix MII.

    As for that point made at the start of this thread about "who needs a GHz processor anyway"--considering that the wholesale price of 1 GHz Athlon Thunderbirds was just dropped, and will probably drop again within a month or 2, it'll only be a few months before a 1GHz Athlon can be bought for about $500 or less. Then, when we can afford them and get them, we'll realize how useful it is to have that kind of power to encode MPEG-2 video in real time with a cheap capture card at the same quality it usually costs to have special high-end hardware cards for, how nice it is to make MP3s quickly, and how great it is to playback MP3 files while doing heavy work without having the processor overtaxed enough to distort the playback. That much power may seem like too much to need for everyday stuff, but once you get that much power I bet your everyday habits might just change to accomodate your new abilities. I know mine changed when I moved from 100MHz 486 to a 400MHz K6-2, and I bet they'll change again when I get the cash to fly the Thunderbird. Even if all you'll ever use it for is turning on all the eye candy in Enlightenment or whatever you like to use, without a big performance hit, you can't complain that prices are dropping so steadily that a consumer will soon be able to afford a 1GHz machine--price cuts are good, period.

  • It was 1-6, not 16.

    --
  • AMD was just like VIA in pentium days except they didnt have a market share in io chips. Who knows, the Samuel 5 might be the next Athlon..
  • Dual 500MHz only beats a 1GHz single PIII by 100%? They're slipping, last year they showed a single processor G4 appearing to be twice as fast...

    This doesn't prove anything but the uselessness of benchmarks. Give me a week and both machines and I'll write you a benchmark (and a real-world application too, if you like) that shows a 1GHz Athlon taking half the time of the G4. The dual-G4 500MHz Mac is outdated right now - why? Because you have two equally poor choices for software to run on it. One is MacOS 9, known to all as perhaps the lamest currently supported operating system available. This heap of crap STILL hangs when the network is waiting for something to happen.

    On the other hand there is MacOS X - possibly Apple's saviour, but in their latest developer release, DP4, (I am signed up, get all their developer mailings) it leaves pieces of font on the desktop when you move icons around! Amazing...

    And then there is the almost universally despised and counter-intuitive Aqua look and feel, the hated Dock, which you can only disable with AppleScript tricks, and an uncertain release date. Going on their past performance it will never ship. And hey, it's summer... where's the public beta?

    By all means buy your new toy - but if you rely on an OS from Apple, WAIT until you see OS X released, stable and to your liking. Of course if LinuxPPC is what you're after, and you don't mind x86 incompatability (only an issue with very few apps) go ahead - as soon as Apple get around to shipping these boxes of course. Outpost, for one, are still showing them as PREORDER. Of course you might be a sucker, ready to spend the money anyway, in which case you are doomed to become one of those sad, defensive Mac wankers, perpetually defending a bad purchase.

    The most exciting news from Apple recently might be the new keyboard. They can certainly make great hardware, and if the new one is the same as the old G4 standard then it will work just fine on my non-Apple USB systems too. Too bad it too is unavailable as of right now.

    I like Apple hardware a lot, but their software could have been written BY particularly stupid monkeys - FOR particularly stupid monkeys.
  • Disable the FPU in the BIOS or in the Linux kernel. Remap to another device, if possible. Finally, we can rid of some of the obsolete Legacy design. I'd like to see 1*one*1 motherboard without the damn PIO/UDMA EIDE interface and with two extra PCI slots!<br><br><br>
    viva HVD scsi! viva HVD scsi! viva HVD scsi!
  • That should have read "faced" not "faces"
  • You've got AMD's products mixed up. Take a look at their product line here [tomshardware.com].

    The AMD Duron is the Celeron competitor. It has 64K L2 cache.

    The AMD Athlon (Thunderbird) is the PIII (Coppermine) competitor.

    Supposedly, we will see an Athlon Thunderbird with more on die cache, and that will be the Xeon competitor. (The "Athlon Professional" I think)

    The Sledgehammer, being a 64 bit chip, will most closely compete with Intel's Merced (Itanium) or McKinley.

    cot

  • Sammy, this sounds like Bible Class (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is there dust on your bible? I hope not.

    Our reading from 1 Samuel 1:20,

    When Elkanah had sexual relations with his wife Hannah, the Lord remembered her. She conceived , and at the end of her term bore a son whom she called Samuel, since she had asked the Lord for him.
    Ok, there you have the origin of Samuel. Now let's have a look at 2 Samuel. Open your family bible to 2 Samuel 2:2,
    So David went up there accompanied by his two wives, Ahinoam of Jezreel and Abigail, the widow of Nabal of Carmel. David also brought up his men with their families and they dwelt in the cities near Hebron. Then the men of Judah came there and anointed David king of the Judahites.
    There you have the origins of 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel in a nutshell. Now back to your regularly scheduled sinful lives.
  • Tyan plans on releasing a dual athlon motherboard [slota.com], based on the AMD 770 chipset in the 4th quarter this year, codenamed "dolphin"

    Arun

  • Such complex design. Keep it simple:

    1. Check for body odor. If body odor is found, shower every day and use deoderant.

    2. Check to make sure belly is not hanging over belt. If it is, start exercising.

    3. Check to make sure your job does not involve french fries. If it does, get a better job. You don't have to be a Rockefeller, but you at least have to be able to convince women that they won't end up living in a van. Women hate that.

    4. Check to make sure you are not underconfident.

    5. Check to make sure you really want to settle down. Visit the suburbs, and ask yourself if you're really ready to live there, because you know it will happen if you get married and have kids.

    6. Whatever you do, I repeat, *whatever* you do, don't try to figure out women like the last guy said. If women could be figured, believe me, somebody woulda done it.

  • Well to be fair the Mac hardware does have a superior architecture to the dated-x86 and the PPC chips are faster per mhz, but it's hardly fair comparing them.

    I'm guessing that the filters chosen were very floating point intensive, and obviously smp enabled.

    As for your point about macs ageing, they do and they dont. Apple computers do maintain a remarkably large degree of compatibility across their entire product line, in that you will find that new software (provided they still compile it for the old 68k chip) will run quite happily on a 10 year old mac (slowly of course). I have a powerbook 100 (16mhz 68020 i think) and it's perfectly adequate for word processing and from a useability point, it's 1989 hardware running OS7 is still very very similar to OS9. Now if you compare windows 3.0 with windows 2000 you will notice all the similarities - they both have windows for a start :)
  • scuse me for offering my view on this subject... for the future I will be sure to any worthwhile comments as anonymous coward as you did to respond to me...

    cripes

  • I think it's brilliant that via are producing processors. Sure this generation wont be the fastest on the planet but I can see where via is headed.

    Think system integration. Look at the VIA-GRA mobos with built in modem, networkd, sound and vga (not to mention regular IO). With a reasonable processor design via will be able to integrate more and more of the system into smaller components.

    This will help the low end PC market (since your average high street buyer will be tempted by a 1ghz pc for $600 when intels is about $2000).

    It should certainly give the celeron a run for it's money in the low-end high street field (since chipset integration might well make the cost of the cpu negligible). Then we have AMD stealing ahead at the middle -> high end market - in the UK i'd reckon at least 60% of pcs sold on the high street are AMD.

    It's starting to not look so good for intel since they appear to be loosing the home market. Certainly they still have the business market, but once they've lost home users they'll loose the rest too.
  • The winchip was a great chip for the market it was aimed at - For business use and home pc's, they were cheaper than an intel or k6, and far more stable & supported than k5's or anything cyrix had. For games or anything intensive it bombed, but could easily keep up with an equivalent intel on business apps/web surfing/etc.

    It wasn't exactly barebones either, the only thing it was lacking was native 16-bit support (hence *win*chip)... it was still capable of running dos & 16-bit apps, just very badly. The only other downside i can remember was the 60mhz bus...

    also, they did have MMX on all models, and 3d-Now was added on the winchip-2.


    Walter H. Trent "Muad'Dib"
    Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe, IMHO
  • Chip prices are almost always given in batches of 1000 (smallest amount a reseller can buy from amd). However, because of the heavy competition (Pricewatch [pricewatch.com]), and because bigger oem's pay even less, within a couple weeks of a price drop, consumer prices are usually either very close or slightly below that number.

    Walter H. Trent "Muad'Dib"
    Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe, IMHO
  • That should be a 3 instruction co-processor, called the copper. And one of the instructions, skip I think, was very rarely used. I was generally used to perform palette changes per scanline, making lovely graduated backgrounds which made the Amiga appear to have many many more colours than it really had. Lionheart was a game with an 8 colour foreground, and an 8 colour background, yet using this graphics co-processor it looked absolutely lovely.

    Anyway, there is an argument for reasonable optimisation of code - using good data structures and algorithms for example. On the other hand, as you point out, too much optimisation spoils the broth, you end up with hard to read code because of these optimisations, which is bad, and bug hunting becomes more difficult. When you can assume that processors will be 2x as fast when the game you have just started writing is finally released, if you get it running decently on current hardware, then it will scream on the new hardware.

    And the most popular paint program was DPaint, and that was written in C. It was slow as a dog in some operations though, so some optimisation was in order! Of course, optimisation was a necessity in the 8 and 16 bit days, either for space (erk, only has 64k/512k) or speed. But there is nothing wrong with well-written assembly, as long as it works - it just takes longer to develop, so it is usually only used in graphics/audio drivers themselves, as opposed to the games/apps themselves.

  • This looks like the Cyrix Jalapeno (Which I thought was cancelled...) Still, by the time this hits mass production it will be incredibly out of date. Standard for the recent Cyrix processors (Ironic really, because back in the 486 days they were bigger than AMD).

    I remember very similar things being said about the first Japanese 64K DRAMs, which were made by simply reproducing the mask of 16K DRAMs four times. Lame, huh?

    Now look at the balance of power in the DRAM market. But actually, I think that *we, the geeks* are the big winners when more players come to the processor party, and frankly I don't give a damn on which side of the Pacific the balance of power lies.
    --
  • The bad news here is that Photoshop and a few of it's kin are the only pieces of software that take advantage of the second G4.

    I won't buy a Mac until work with PC Video cards.. maybe they will convince the mfg's that it will be really easy to port linux drivers to OS X. Oh, and give me a 2+ button mouse with a wheel, too!

    SpookyFish
    ----------
    Government Controlled Healthcare:
    The compassion of the IRS and the efficiency of the Post Office... at Pentagon prices.
  • why does everyone always blame the marketing?

    i think stef is a perfectly good quake 2 player.

    almost as good as me
  • http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-2434476.html? tag=st.ne.1002.srchres.ni

  • PPC chips are faster per mhz than P3 chips. However, those blazingly fast speeds that Apple touts are result of Photoshop being optimized for the Altivec instructions.

    This proves two points:

    1) Never judge a processor by the number of mhz. Apples are faster per mhz than Intel. And I doubt this new Samuel 2 will be anywhere near as fast as an Intel chip.

    2) Don't trust benchmarks from the manufacturers, they're always tweaked versions of the programs. The filters that Apple uses to compare to Intel have been tweaked to take advantage of Altivec. To do the test correctly, you would need a dual processor board with two 1000mhz P3 chips with a version of Photoshop that has been tweaked for the Intel chip.

    Always do a little research before buying your next chip. Decide what you will be using it for, and buy the best chip per dollar value that you can reasonably afford. I just do gaming. So a $120 Celeron 566 overclocked to 933 is plenty fine for me.

  • Re:1GHz Samuel won't be that great... (Score:3)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @07:08PM (#863646) Homepage
    It's disappointing that the Tom's Hardware article doesn't contain an architectural block diagram of the CPU, or much information about how much gets done per clock. This thing seems to perform like the architectural equivalent of an original Pentium built in National Semi's latest fab.

    The big architectural break was between the Pentium and the Pentium Pro, remember. That's when mass-market CPUs started looking like supercomputers inside, with serious superscalar architecture. The PII, PIII, and their low-end friends are all basically Pentium Pro derivatives. (The AMD chips are quite different.)

    Designing one of those superscalar beasts is a big job. It took Intel upwards of 1000 people to get the Pentium Pro design to first silicon. But recycling some old design in a modern fab is easy. Maybe that's what Cyrix did. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this; those superscalar engines are power hogs and take a big die, because there's a lot of stuff in there all going at once. It may turn out this is a reasonable way to make midrange CPUs. And it gets them that all-important "1GHz" label.

  • A big reason that Intel has the high end market is that at this moment, AMD does not have a dual processor chipset. Without a dual processor chipset people will have to go with intel to get more powerful boxes to run their businesses off of. A second reason is that AMD didn't have a server class chip such as the PIII/II Xeon. It's really a combination of things. AMD has spent its time on building up market share so that they can use their profits to develop chipsets and chips for the server/high end market.

    Businesses are also a cautious lot. They really want to make sure that AMD chips are stable and can be counted on in "the long run." Since AMD just recently (in the grand scheme of things) emerged into the market as a true competitor, businesses are waiting to see how they fare in the desktop market and also whether AMD runs out of steam. AMD has had stability problems in the past and businesses are not going to forget so easily. When the multiprocessor chipsets do come out, businesses will eye them with suspicion and wait to mare the stability is there before relying on them to handle their critical applications. Hopefully, AMD can pick up the ball and have the dual chipset rock.

  • What if Moore's Law stopped? (Score:4)

    by skoda ( 211470 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @07:18PM (#863648) Homepage
    Regarding more high-speed CPU production, the poster wrote, "More competition in this area can only be a good thing." Is it really? Yes, competition drives down prices, which I like. But sometimes I wonder... What would happen if CPU speed progressive much slower than it does today, and the speed increases had to be accomplished via more sophisticated programming? What if hardware change was slow enough, that developers had to finesse every last bit of performance from the machine? Consider the lowly video-game console. The first gen. of games on those things are interesting, and look decent. By the third or fourth gen. of games, you might think someone secretly upgraded your console. Instead, locked into an unchanging hardware profile, developers learned sweet-nothings to whisper into the console's ears, in order to coax out greater performance. And, without losing system stability (maybe even increasing it?) If nothing else, might we have more stable OS's and apps that crash less? The time I would save from a rock-solid system would probably be greater than that from tripling the system speed.
  • even if they manage to release an 1 GHz chip, it's probably gonna be PR-1000 aka "equivalent to a 1 Ghz Pentium III"

    First off, the PR ratings were based on the integer speeds of the original Pentiums (P5), not P6 chips.

    And second, actually no; Via specifically changed their Cyrix III over from the Joshua core they had developed in-house over to the current "Samuel" core purchased from Centaur, not because the Samuel core had better performance, but because it offered similar performance at higher clock speeds. Thus, the Cyrix III is being marketed at its actual clock speed, not its P5 equivalent. So interestingly enough they corrected their marketing-driven bunk with some ill-concieved marchitecture changes.

    Thus, this chip really will be clocked at 1000 MHz--but will only offer the integer performance of a PIII 800 (and the floating-point performance of a 486SX, but that's another story).
  • The US government maintains export controls on any processor with a performance of greater than 2 gigaflops, making it slightly difficult for some high tech companies and government agencies in India, China, and Russia to purchase high end Intel chips. By being a Taiwanese company, Via can potentially grab a huge, rapidly growing market from Intel and AMD, which may have legal difficulties selling chips from even their non-US chip fabs to these countries.

    Incorrect, and absolutely irrelevent anyways. First off, those export restrictions were lifted a few months ago. And second, current Cyrix III's have their FPU's clocked at only half the chip speed, making the FPU performance of a CIII 550 roughly equivalent to that of a 6-year old Pentium 200 [aceshardware.com], or of a theoretical Athlon 90 or so. Rumor has it the FPU will be running at full clock speed by the time they hit 1000 MHz sometime early next year, but even then you're talking maybe "Athlon 400" performance, possibly worse. And even then, it appears it will only be any good at single-percision FP, not the double-percision which the export controls are concerned with.

    In other words, nowhere near worth an export control. And nowhere near worth sticking in anything this side of a web pad, either. Frankly, this chip is just not very good.
  • Remember your historical perspective. When the WinChip came along, Intel was still selling the 486 on the low end. WinChips kicked 486 ass, and when the 486 got retired the WinChip you could get for the price of a low end Pentium was significantly faster because you could afford a higher speed WinChip than Pentium, for the same price point. I can remember wishing I'd gotten a computer with a WinChip instead of my Intel 100MHz 486 DX4--the first and only Intel processor I ever owned, and I'd feel guilty about having it now that I know how predatory Intel is, if it weren't for the fact that I bought it second-hand and so didn't give the $$$ directly to Intel.

    Getting back to the VIA/Cyrix chips, even though they're not useful for my own purposes, I'm glad they're around. A Cyrix III 533 would be good for the appliance market, if only they could price it low enough. And if they can get the FPU to run at the same frequency as the rest of the core, and slap an L2 on it, it could be even more useful in laptops. But the key here is competition--we went from having a market with 4 or 5 x86 competitors, to a market with only 2. Now, at least if VIA can pull it together, we'll have 3. This is important to keep pressure on Intel, else prices would never come down as they've been doing lately--we'd still be paying about a dollar per MHz on even lower end P!!! chips, yuck. Now, AMD is whomping Intel on both the high end and the midrange, and if VIA plays its cards right, it could take over the low end since AMD is abandoning the K6 lines (except in notebook K6-2+ chips).

  • Let's face it, the moderation system gives too much power to a bunch of idiots. The best idea so far for a moderation system overhaul is to hire away the Helpful Daikatana Monkey [oldmanmurray.com] and give him unlimited moderation points.

    MJP
  • It's disappointing that the Tom's Hardware article doesn't contain an architectural block diagram of the CPU, or much information about how much gets done per clock.

    Check out the review at Ace's [aceshardware.com]. It doesn't quite contain a full block diagram, but does a much better job than Tom's at discussing the architecture of the chip.

    The summary: whether to try to keep die size/power consumption low or because they didn't have the expertise, Centaur (later bought by Cyrix later bought by VIA, the ones who actually designed this chip) decided to keep it very simple. Thus, the chip is in-order, with a relatively deep pipeline (11 stages), relatively large 128 KB L1 cache (it needs it to try to make up for the fact that as an in-order chip it needs to sit and idle while waiting for any memory accesses), and just 4 execution units--2 SIMD, 1 ALU and 1 FPU.

    The good news: it's just 76 mm^2 (on a not-very-good ".18 micron" process), consumes very little power, and runs cool enough to forego a fan. The bad news: no L2 and a half-clocked FPU mean laughable performance as a desktop or even a laptop chip. It might do ok compiling kernels and web browsing, but anything requiring a decent cache or any FPU at all (i.e. playing games, encoding MP3s, anything involving 3D, and even plain old office apps) and you're better off with last year's Celeron or K6-2.
  • Ok so the chip will perform slower regardless of speed <or not, depending on whom you read here>. But the decision seems to have been based on Fab yield. Ummm.. cheaper chips that may <or may not> run somewhat slower than latest/greatest coming out of the oven at rock bottom prices. And the design and the track record leads one to believe that at least the possibility of computer-on-a-chip designs are in the pipeline. What does this add up to? Sounds like practically disposable mid tier performance PC's in a very small form factor.

    Hey I want cartons of those !!!
  • Pardon me if i missed somthing, but first half of post you bassically imply intell makes better processesors(not saying they do or don't), and imply you have a reason to know these things. Yet you then talk about VIA competing against Cyrix....................

    just pointing out how that sounds.
  • Dont know, i`ve forgotten.
  • It's ironic that people rush to denigrate other countries for being backwards or stupid and end up sounding like some sort of idiot themselves.

  • Judeo-Christian conspiracy!! (Score:3)

    by jabber ( 13196 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @04:18AM (#863658) Homepage
    In and effort to instill proper family values amonth the computer-using community, the Christian Family Coalition, in an unprecedented foray into high-technology and inter-faith healing has announced a complete line of CPUs for the home user. Here's some features of the upcoming processors in the series:

    * Moses: Has only 10 opcodes, burned directly into the silicon using patented "Finger of God" lasing technique.
    * David: All web content appears as though run through www.askjesus.com.
    * Maccabee: No irrational number mathematics permitted. No division by zero and no infinite loops. You must take all results on Faith.
    * Joshua: Linux runs fine on this chip, but BSD will definitely NOT. Something about an inappropriate logo...
    * Aaron: Any LONG pointers are immediately truncated. Pointers of unauthorized programs are set to null.
    * Solomon: You can just FORGET running SATAN to scan your networks.
    * Ruth: Children's games featuring the Telle-Tubbies crash inexplicably.

    A new, 64-bit series of CPUs has also been announced. Features are unclear, but twelve distinct processors have been listed.

    * Peter: Rock-solid performance. Water cooled.
    * Thomas: The availability of this chip is somewhat doubtful.
    * Judas: Special purpose hardware for network 'honeypot' machines. New, silver-based transistors.
    * James I, James II, Matthew, Mark, Andrew and the rest are noted are general purpose and peripheral control processors at this time.

    It's a consipiracy I tell you.
  • At the Mac Expo two years ago (when they were introducing the iMac), they were showing off the first hints of Mac OS X. Up on stage Jobs conducted a "network race" between OS X and NT, downloading a 300mb file or something. He goes on to make a big deal about how optimized their network code is.

    So here they go, the OS X box chugging along admirably faster than NT. But then about a half way through, it just stops! NT plods on to completion while everyone laughs and Jobs looks embarassed.

    This ranks up there with Bill Gates' BSOD on TV. =)

    (so that's just irrelevant, but...) Be careful of Apple's benchmarks. They call their machines *supercomputers*, which is one of the most ridiculous exaggerations I've heard out of a computer company in a long time...
  • There is a theoretical maximum as to how fast the processors are going to be using current tech.

    Meaning you can only make the circuitry so small before the juice running in them just jumps all over the place and well we arent exactly close but we arent a far cry from that either, so with current tech there is a theoretical limit which would 'break' moore's law (except you can just cluster the heck outta stuff for more power..

    Now then, Quantum computing and other advances may make this a moot point however, what if we dont get there soon enough? You mean we may have to optimize code again? Well if that became the case I think the software industry would fall over, because huge corporations like MS already dont spend enough time debugging their software.. *ugh*

    Anyhow
    Jeremy


    If you think education is expensive, try ignornace
  • One comment that sorta goes along with along with the whole dual-processor theme: MS-Windows(x) has never been particularly good at utilizing multi-CPU archticture (OK, to be accurate, is basically sucks). As MS-Windows(x) market share starts to fall (rather inevitable) to Linux (and maybe BeOS;-), this is going to become even more important.

    I also suspect that, from a cost standpoint, it will be far more effective to run a set of dual (or quad) last-months-processors than one SOTA Mhz monstrosity.

    I will even go out on a limb so far as to say seperate processors are inevitable (Go Amiga!). The current architecture on Intel's and AMD's products attempts to bring some RISC-like properties to what is becoming an mind-numbingly complex CISC. This is the reason Sparcs et al hold the high end (just, and falling).

    Of course, as a software type myself, it really requires code written to take advantage of the architecture, and currently most (common programs) are designed for the standard one-CPU x86 machine. OTOH, there are a number of UNIX progs for which this is standard. Only time will tell which approach will win ...

  • Tom's hardware really doesn't like this chip as a power desktop chip, which is what most people look for in any GHz chip these days. It has an absolutley atrocious FPU and no L2 cache. On the other hand, it's designed to run without a fan which could make it an awesome laptop chip, assuming they put in Crusoe/AMD style power saving features. As bad as that FPU is, at a GHz it would be more than made up for by sheer speed in most business applications, as laptops tend to be used for.
  • Well considering the benchmarks [ixbt-labs.com] of the VIA/Cyrix/IDT Samuel 1 at 533Mhz, it'll need a 1Gig just to keep up with the 500 Celeron. So it's really a case of just enough rather than too much power.

  • Jalapeno? (Score:3)

    by Mr. Flibble ( 12943 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @05:41PM (#863664) Homepage
    This looks like the Cyrix Jalapeno (Which I thought was cancelled...)

    Still, by the time this hits mass production it will be incredibly out of date. Standard for the recent Cyrix processors (Ironic really, because back in the 486 days they were bigger than AMD).

    It seems obvious that VIA is going after the "low cost market", but it seems that they are doing it in an unusual market... Perhaps to appease Intel so they can keep compatiblites with their Motherboard chipsets?

    In any case, if it works out, it could create a brand loalty in those areas, after all, with the amount that Intel chips are overpriced, a "discount" chip like this could really bring computers in a ubiquidous fashion to all these areas. VIA sure seems to think so. They look to be going for volume in a new market. I hope that they can pull it off.

    I would say that the odds are good though, with a weak FPU I cannot see the chip gaining any popularity in Western Europe, Taiwan or North America.

    Still, never mind anything else, competition is a good thing!
  • There was a run-off comparaison of Intel vs AMD 1 Ghz processors already way back in march by PC World:
    http://www.pcworld.com/p cwtoday/article/0,1510,15637,00.html [pcworld.com]

    However the reality now is that the Intel 1 Ghz CPI is still sold only on paper why you can already buy 1 Ghz AMD [frostys.qc.ca] over here in Canada, meaning this has been long on sale in the States as well.

    I fear this CPU won't stand much chance against the giants. Intel and AMD have been undercutting each other's prices for several months now, meaning they are ready to sacrifice profits for market share, at least for now. Article on this is here:

    http://slashdot.org/articles/99/0 8/22/1728232.shtml [slashdot.org]

    --
    Kiro

  • Smaller chips cost less because more can be made per silicon wafer, the material from which semiconductors are produced.

    Any idea on a price? Cheaper then intel or what ?
  • Every time Intel or AMD introduce even faster chips that run at even faster clock speeds, other competitors (IBM,VIA, etc) seem to be compelled to anounce:"We will have a 1Ghz chip too... in the first quater of the next year", and, of couse, then delay it to the end of the last quarter of that year when it absolutely will not matter.

    Cyrix' CEO (I am not sure if he still has that position now at VIA) affirmatively promissed a "1Ghz CPU by the end of 1999" in early 1999 in an interview with the Maximum PC magazine. Where the hell is that 1Ghz CPU for god's sake?
  • I mean maybe this will keep Intel and AMD on their toes. Well Intel is already on their toes, but but having a noose around it's neck and standing on a chair on it's toe's isn't what I meant. This COULD be just what AMD needs to keep them innovating and the chips coming. Hell Intel may actually have to release something that isn't using the overclockers tricks... :)

    But seriously... I think if this actually does have any chance to stand up it will have to belly up to the bar with the big boys (AMD and Intel) and start selling. Unfortunately by the time the VIA Samuel chip comes out it will probably already be yesterdays news. By that time if we look at Intel's predictions (Yah right those will ever come to be correct) they should have 1.6 or 1.7 Ghz chips by them. But if we look at their track record of releases, well let's just not touch that... Too easy. Am I wrong or was the Samuel one of Cyrix's chips (not sure, but I know the Joshua was) and those had atrocious (sp) FPU's. That equates to a bad gaming chip, but ok office app performance.

    But we can hope that this will have something revolutionary in it somewhere (doubt it) and maybe it will even make Intel start sweating even more (like they'll ever show that to the public). AMD still is #1 in my book especially after the drop in prices that happened this week and the one that is supposed to happen last week. I mean let's face it 1 Ghz chips to the public (not in 1000 bunches) for under $600 WOW. While intel's chip was $1,200 for the same speed. :cough: wallet molestation :cough:

    Yhcrana

  • Serious integration possibilities... (Score:3)

    by syates21 ( 78378 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @05:42PM (#863669)
    While these new CPU's may not have the horsepower to compete head to head against AMD or Intel's best in a pure CPU comparison, they could certainly take advantage of the fact that Via is probably the premier mobo chipset manufacturer right now.

    You could get some amazingly small form factor, power machines if they smash their mobo chipset, the CPU, and say a graphics chip into one big "Slot-1"-sized unit.

    Maybe they could out make the guts of a machine to out-"cube" Apple, if it's really as low power as the article makes it sound.

  • export controls on high end processors (Score:5)

    by aat ( 106366 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @05:39PM (#863670) Homepage Journal
    The US government maintains export controls on any processor with a performance of greater than 2 gigaflops, making it slightly difficult for some high tech companies and government agencies in India, China, and Russia to purchase high end Intel chips. By being a Taiwanese company, Via can potentially grab a huge, rapidly growing market from Intel and AMD, which may have legal difficulties selling chips from even their non-US chip fabs to these countries.

    Arun
  • > The new chip represents Via's first attempt to challenge Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, and Advanced Micro at the high end of the computer chip business.

    has the pc trade press looked at all the chip makers out there? Since when are x86 xhips high end chips? I would think Compaq's Alpha and IBM's POWER3 (and 4) would far outclass these 'high end' chips.

  • Speed isn't everything (Score:4)

    by Signul 11 ( 221173 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @05:45PM (#863672)

    We can't be blinded by the fact that these are GHz chips. Who knows how good of a processor they are? When the WinChips came along, they tried to say that they would be able to create a cheap, competitive chip by just reving upthe speed and not adding any of the 'fancy' aspects of the other, high-end, processors from AMD and Intel (they offered a barebones processor, we're not talking about just no MMX or 3D-Now! or whatever).

    How good are these processors, and are they just trying to win us over with large numbers?

    And just as a side note: I couldn't help but read about where they've released their chips already and be reminded about the '16 processor hardware solution' for seti@home that appeared on /. earlier. . .

  • If architecture does not matter, you are better off with Alpha and G4 processors.

    If you need x86 processors for scientific applications, the Athlon will crush anything.

    I have an Athlon 500 -- very unoffically, it rates at ~625 MFLOP. If it scaled perfectly, export restrictions would kick in at ~1.6 GHz.

    Cyrix (ahem) Via processors should not be any threat, and seeing how sample > 1 GHz processors have started trickling out of Intel and AMD fabs, those restrictions will have to go away... quickly.

    Are Intel and AMD lobbying for a change to the law yet? If not, they better get started -- government does not work nearly as fast as modern PC processors...

  • IOpener type appliances. If these chips really are on the crappy side, they'll be cheap and consequently put into just such machines, i'd imagine...
    I could handle that.
  • I kinda agree with you, eventually AMD and VIA will most likely take the low end market away from Intel. AMD will the Duron will fill the Intel Celeron spot once Intel drops the celeron. While VIA will probably take the the role AMD had back in the K6 days.
  • I have notices that most people seem to "oh" and "wow" over the newer faster processor speeds in straight hertz. I have always watched as people compare these new processors when they finally get fully released. Intel seems to always be better in the end.

    If you really look at the processor's ability Intel spares nothing for the sake of cost. Speaking as a person who works in the high end computer market I find that Intel is always the processor you see on the high end computers. Although I always get lots of argument, I think Intel just has the lock on high end processors.

    But to get back on subject a little, is Via trying to make a run on the high end processor market or are they trying to compete with AMD and Cyrix? I think it will be interesting to see whether they are able to compete in either of the markets.

    The article mentions getting into the laptop market. However I think the Transmeta processor that uses variable power will take over the laptop market. I'm curious for what market Via will get into, please let me know what you think.
  • *Samuel* is just not a good name for a processor. It will fail, for bad marketing reasons.
  • I don't know if you are serious, but I'll give it a try. Of course I am not a karma whore so I won't try THAT hard....


    1. Focus on developing yourself and developing something that girls will want. Girls like guys who have something going for themselves or who seem like they do. They know when something is good and they'll make sure they try and get some.(Or at least they will think about it)


    2. Don't be desperate. Thats the number one thing to drive chicks away. If you look like you DON'T need it, thats when you get it. Thats the way it works.


    3. So how do you implement #1? Focus on your strengths. The fortunate thing is that they are a lot of different girls out there and they like different things. Quiet girls, wild girls, freaks and everything in between. So in a sense it doesn't matter WHAT you have going on as long as its SOMETHING to differentiate you from the crowd.
    So in summary, YES being a master of code does impress SOME girls, so you if thats your strength don't dispair. (But if you are in highschool all bets are off!) They are people out there looking for EXACTLY your qualities so make sure they can see them loud and clear(in a positive way of course).


    4. Going back to part 2. This sounds touchy-feely but I suggest you develop your self-esteem. If you don't think that you are a worthwhile person and that your life is fulfilling people will definately pick up on that. I can't help you much here, as volumes have been written on this very subject. But as the saying goes, "Fake it till you make it." If you act like something is true very often you come to believe it. Psychologist William James famously advocated this. ("Feeling follows action" was how he put it.)
    Project confidence and contentment and people will sense this. Note: This is definately not the same as arrogance which will definately turn a lot of people off.(Surprisingly enough SOME girls like arrogant guys - go figure)


    5. I would suggest that you really try to understand women. Try to think like them, understand how they feel. Its obvious that men and women are very different in terms of what they value and how they go about things. They are a lot of resources that try to describe these differences. In any case, I feel that without really being able to empathize in general, WHY women do certain things or feel a certain way you will be trying to fight an invisible enemy. Going for the grand gesture when a simple hug or phone call would do, ie. screwing up. I suggest you read women's magazines, websites etc, get a lot of friends of the opposite sex and really try to understand them and what they want. As far as what do women want, that subject is so broad and controversial that I cannot go into it here. Short answer: They want EVERYTHING, right now! (just kidding)


    6. Finally your success in this as in anything else will depend on how much effort you are prepared to put into it. If your spend your days and nights hunched over your monitor and posting to /. your chances of success are very slim. You have to take chances and risk a bunch of rejections if you are really want to get hooked.( I am assuming you want a long term relationship. If you want just want sex, I am sorry to dissappoint you. I doubt that you have the qualities to get "cute girls [to] jump into [your] arms and say "Fuck me now!" " Neither do I for that matter. Girls aren't stupid you know!)
    Basically you have to do activities where you'll meet people in a positive way(Hiking, classes whatever). Just try to meet people and have fun.


    7. Lastly I would hope that you realise that having a SO is no minor undertaking. Basically you'll have to do a bunch of stuff to make her happy and there will be fights and "issues" and all kinds of crap. Of course there are 'compensations' but you should know what you are getting into(if you've really never had a girlfriend). So if you like to code all night and sleep all day, this may not really be compatible with your ambitions.


    So in summary: Find out what they want, and give it to them. I hope this has been of some help.


    PS: Of course I am just a 21 year old geek so take all this with a grain of salt. All of the above points have worked for me, however YMMV.

  • Ex-Cyrix employee speaks (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10, 2000 @07:49PM (#863679)
    This is a WinChip made by the Centaur design team. All Cyrix employees have left VIA. Cyrix III is __NOT__ a Cyrix design, but a Winchip. The original Cyrix III was to be Joshua but the yields were too low, so instead VIA substitued the WindChip design, which sucks worse than Joshua did. The head of the Centaur team said that he'd have a 1.2 GHz chip by using an 18 stage pipe. Unless he has extremely good branch prediction, an 18 stage pipe is mainly idle on an x86 since in x86 there's a jump every 3-4 instructions, which causes a pipe flush if mispredicted. I expect this CPU will suck big-time, perhaps even to the extent people will realize that MHz is not performance (although the PR rating Cyrix used wasn't either at the end of its life).

  • The export controls are hilarious. I was totally ROTFLMAO, when upgraded my Intergraph workstation at work with an Intense3D WildCat 4000 graphics card. The card came with a sheet detailing export restrictions. The card was probably restricted because it has a 3 GFLOPS geometry accelerator ;) How long until you can't export the newest nVidia offering to China & co. ? M$ might lose some lucrative markets because of export restrictions...

    Cheers,
  • flaimbait... FLAIMBAIT.... FLAIMBAIT???

    ahem moderator... pull your head out of your ass, no wait......... leave it, suffocate for all I care

    Jeez

  • It sounds to me like a great marketing idea. The average luser doesn't really have a clue about how fast a system is, or the fact that 500MHz is more than enough to read email and surf the web. They think that MHz=power. So, if you can make a chip that runs at 1GHZ cheaply, even if it only runs as fast as a 700MHz, you will sell units.

    So, if the price of the VIA GHz chip is comparable to an Intel @800, even if it DOES perform like Intel's 700, they get a good market angle. Hell, they'll probably sell them in systems that are comparable in price to 900MHz systems.

  • Re:Err, PowerPC? AMD/Intel/Via 1 GHz Smoked? (Score:4)

    by ToLu the Happy Furby ( 63586 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @10:21PM (#863683)
    Jobs' presentation provided a Photoshop (TM) shootout between a dual-processor 500 MHz Power Mac G4 and a single processor 1 GHz Pentium. As expected, the PowerPC finished the test in about half the time it took the PC.

    That's because the test was, as expected, rigged. That is, it only used a certain set of filters which happen to run faster on PPC than on x86. It would be quite easy to pick a different set of filters and "show" that the PIII is faster than the G4 clock-for-clock on Photoshop. (Not to mention the fact that Photoshop is perhaps the only mainstream program better optimized for the Mac than the PC.)

    A fairer Photoshop benchmark (and using Photoshop as your sole benchmark is pretty shortsighted, to say the least) is PSBench [geocities.com], which runs not 3 specially selected filters like Steve did, but a full 21. The results? A 500 MHz G4 is a bit slower than an 800 MHz P3. A dual 500 MHz G4 is probably not much faster than a 1 GHz P3, and certainly no faster than a (cheaper) dual 800 MHz P3.

    For a rather exhaustive look at G4 vs. x86 benchmarks, try here [jc-news.com]. The upshot? A G4 500 is maybe as fast in raw integer and FPU speed as...a PIII 400. That is to say, the G3 was about equal with the PII clock-for-clock; however, the Coppermine PIII's have since added some stuff which the G3/G4 can't match--namely, a much faster L2 cache and 133 MHz FSB.

    Where the G4 really shines, of course, is in those programs which can take advantage of AltiVec--and indeed, those are about the only benchmarks you'll find on that page. (You won't, however, find any gaming benchmarks, because the Mac would of course be "unfairly" limited by its lack of good graphics cards.) In raw SIMD-plus-FPU, a 500 MHz G4 performs about as well as...well, it depends, but a fair guesstimate would be a PIII 750 or an Athlon 650. If you look at the page, you'll find that the Mac wins quite a few benchmarks, and that one or both of the x86 chips wins most of them, and that the margins of victory vary widely.

    Suffice it to say, though, that even if you do run Photoshop all day, the performance of Apple's hardware is not a good reason to buy a Mac. With the exception of Seti@Home and RC5 (but not OGR!), there is a significantly cheaper PC which will run any program faster. This isn't to say there aren't other good reasons to buy Macs. But when one platform's top chips double in speed in a year, and the other's only go up by 50 MHz, you can bet that the first platform is going to be faster.
  • Insightful post. One addition:

    considering that the wholesale price of 1 GHz Athlon Thunderbirds was just dropped, and will probably drop again within a month or 2, it'll only be a few months before a 1GHz Athlon can be bought for about $500 or less.

    Dunno if you heard, but the price of the 1 GHz TBird is going to drop to $539 on Monday [aceshardware.com]. So rather than a few months until it's about $500, you only need to wait 4 days...

    And one nitpick: while the chip we're talking about is supposed to be a redesign, it won't be much of one. Rumor has it the Samuel 2 will add an improved (i.e. fully clocked) FPU and 64 KB of L2 cache. We'll see. While both of these are very badly needed improvements, the fact is that the Samuel 2 will still be a very simple in-order chip trying to compete with the massively superscalar and agressively out-of-order designs of AMD and Intel. As such it just might end up being a great chip for cheap low-power devices, due to its small die size, but it has no chance of offering a viable (pun intended?) alternative for the desktop.
  • My argument was really based around the point that in 1986 apple got the desktop metaphor pretty much spot on.

    Sure it's got nice pretty 3d bits now but at the end of the day they got it right and whilst they have pulled off some amazing trickery to switch machine architetures in the middle it's all worked well.
  • Are Via chasing after the Golden Ghz just to sound competitive? Would they achieve a better processor if they spent they money it's costing to squeeze 1hgz out of their current technology on actually improving the technology? If the chip claims 1ghz, people can't help but compare it to someone else's 1ghz chip, and Via will be 'stained' as a cheap, low-performance chip - they same way Cyrix was. But if they made a 500Mhz chip that beat a 750Mhz Athlon - well - that would be VERY different. That would get them the name they NEED.
  • This topic must have come in from the very-old-news-department, because it's been tossed about for months already

    Cyrix' CEO (I am not sure if he still has that position now at VIA) affirmatively promissed a "1Ghz CPU by the end of 1999" in early 1999 in an interview with the Maximum PC magazine. Where the hell is that 1Ghz CPU for god's sake?

    The keyword left out of the /. article was Samuel is a CYRIX processor.

    Nice post guys.

    Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000
  • The Alpha is more powerful than Pentium III, but not by as much as you'd might think; most of its advantage for supercomputing comes from its superior bus.

    Actually, the main advantage of the Alpha comes from the fact that it is not held back by requiring compatability with the x86's god-awful stack-based floating point registers. That's why a GHz PIII can equal a 733 Alpha 21624 in SpecINT, but gets blown away on SpecFP by a factor of 2.5 or so. The superior chipsets of the high end RISC-based set help quite a bit too, of course, though that advantage is partially matched as far as SPEC goes by Intel's incredible (and non-functioning for most other code) compilers.

    As for Sledgehammer and Willamette, they hope to narrow this gap by trying to replace the x87 FPU stack for most code with the double-percision capable SSE2, and by moving to wider buses with faster DRAM. On the other hand, the 21634 and Power4 look remarkably good, and ought to extend the high-end chips' lead for quite some time.
  • IIRC, this is the son of Joshua, the previous failed design. Joshua, coincidently the name of the computer in WarGames. What next, the Transmeta HAL9000?
  • ...and yet the Amiga community faces jokes such as, "what's the difference between a Boeing 747 and an Amiga... an Boeing only crashes once."

    Between 1985 and 1993, the Amiga hardware platform was essentially frozen. Yes, there was the Amiga 3000 and whatnot, but most people bought 7.14Mhz 16-bit MC68000 machines.

    And you had people bend over backwards to get amazing things done in that platform. One of the most popular paint programs, DigiPaint, was written in assembly language. Some games were written to partially run on the 10(?) instruction graphics processor (the Amiga was a non-symetric multiprocessor machine). People some how managed to fit all this onto an Amiga 500 and still have things run semi-smoothly. Yup, all things considered it was fast.

    But, alas, it still crashed. Sorry.
  • Hmm... isn't it interesting that he didn't use SSE-enhanced filters, which would be a fair comparison?
  • Hmm... won't work with PC Video cards? Like the ATI Radeon, GeForce 2MX, or the Voodoo 5 5500? Take a look around. The mac has a good selection of video cards.
  • d00d, if those $3 "original Macs" are functional, *get some*! They're bound to be collector's items soon! Some time ago I saw the market price for the Mac Classic quoted at $200, and it may have actually gone *up* since then.

    Hmm... I want a C64 tho :)
  • 1) check

    2) hmmm.. not quite where it used to be... but not hanging yet.. check

    3) big huge mutha fawkin CHECK!

    4) ditto #3

    5) oooo... nah.. I like being 22 and single.. how about I just get laid instead?

    6) I tryed to figure a woman out once.. but I'm feeling much better now..


  • Why does via think that no L2 cache is a good thing? I know that it costs a lot but Intel learned really quick when the first Celerons really sucked.

    What was it that i always heard about history and repitition?

  • Looking at the Samuel review by Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com], I don't think that you can call a 1GHz Samual "competitive".

    The 533 Samual may have been overclockable to 733MHz, but even then it couldn't beat a Celeron 500! This is what Van Smith had to say:

    "We thought the floating point performance of the original Cyrix III was poor, but the new Cyrix III has a staggeringly poor FPU. To achieve the feeble FPU potency of a 500 MHz Celeron, the Cyrix III would have to run at greater than 1.6 GHz!"

    Geez, the Samual has to run at 1.6GHz to be equivalent to a Celeron 500. 1GHz doesn't sound so great to me, even if it is overclockable. It'll probably do okay for simple integer-based applications like business suites, but gamers will stay away from the Samuel for a while. Thankfully, we still have AMD to turn to as an alternative to Intel... so competition so far is good (AMD's going to drop the price of their 1GHz Thunderbird to below $500... can you say SWEET!)

  • Unless I am wrong that will only be for batches of 1000... but I could be misinformed
  • I wonder if one was using Linux and the floating point emulation if they could best the onboard FPU of the chip.
    Maybe this chip is a reason for people to still be making math co-processors...

  • Err, PowerPC? AMD/Intel/Via 1 GHz Smoked? (Score:3)

    by 2quam4 ( 207152 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @06:06PM (#863699)
    Jobs' presentation provided a Photoshop (TM) shootout between a dual-processor 500 MHz Power Mac G4 and a single processor 1 GHz Pentium. As expected, the PowerPC finished the test in about half the time it took the PC. I haven't had an Apple since //e. With Power Mac's current performance and the 'coolness' of OS X, I really might get a new toy soon. However, I recently browsed a Goodwill ComputerWorks store for the heck of it and found it to mainly be a graveyard of Apples (original Macs $3). The site of the eventual fate of most Macs was scary, but I just don't see a dual-processor 500 MHz Power Mac G4 being out-dated any time soon (?).

  • Re:Vapor, more vapor (Score:3)

    by leiz ( 35205 ) <leizNO@SPAMjuno.com> on Thursday August 10, 2000 @06:07PM (#863700)
    even if they manage to release an 1 GHz chip, it's probably gonna be PR-1000 aka "equivalent to a 1 Ghz Pentium III" Of course, benchmarks will show it to be a bit little slower than a PIII in integer performance and more like a 500 mhz celeron in float point perf.


    Zetetic
    Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.

    Elench
    A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.
  • Dont forget that vaporware gets the most publicity.

    Remember the seti@home pci card? Big hype, no product. Cyrix's Jalepeno was passed as quickly as real jalepenos. It was supposed to make Cyrix a serious company again.

    We'll see, but i have my doubts
  • Ok, I have to address this. I'm really getting fucking tired of people complaining about apple not having a 2 button mouse.

    Ok, first off, APPLE ISN'T THE ONLY FUCKING COMPANY THAT MAKES MOUSES. MicroSoft makes a very good optical mouse with 5 BUTTONS. And guess what, it works with a MAC! Secondly, company likes MacAlly and Kensington sell 2+ button mouses with wheels that are completely customizable!

    God dammit, if I hear one more idiot talk about "ApPle NEDZ mo0re then 1 mOuSE ClICkeR", I am going to fucking go nuts and shoot midgets. Then eat them. So fuck off and die.
  • Hopefully, AMD can pick up the ball and have the dual chipset rock.

    I think consumers (eventually) will go for SMP. I know I have been wating for SMP for some time. I would rather buy a new AMD system than an Intel. Mind you, I am thinking about waiting even a little longer... The Sledgehammer looks quite good, with its x86 compatibility and 64 forward looking ideas I think its going to come out strong. Since I only use Linux/BSD now (Ok, I use Windows whenever Warren Spector releases a new game...) SMP has become a big issue for me.

    I don't think AMD will drop the ball on this one, they are moving cautiously, the Sledgehammer is their "Xeon", and what a chip it is! They have also just released their "celeron" chips as it were (thunderbird) and are spreading themselves slowly across the market.

    The dual processor will come soon, I think Chipzilla is in for a beating (at least I hope so!)
  • Too bad you can't stick more than one Athlon in a box at a time, huh? Where as you can fit even 2 lowly celeron's into a motherboard and climb upwards from there. If you're doing anything really demanding, and require x86 for it's cost effectiveness, your only choice is Intel, due to the SMP-ability of them...
  • No, unfortunately, optimizing code does not make it less buggy. On the contrary, it tends to make it more buggy and less flexible. Knuth famously said "pre-optimized code is the root of all evil"; it's considered good programming practice not to waste effort optimizing code unless you absolutely have to. Time spent optimizing code is time not spent fixing bugs.

    You'll note that first-generation video games on consoles are rock solid stable, also :). So games can't really get more stable than they are already.

  • If I remember correctly, Steve said that the Intel version of Photoshop had been optimized to use the MMX instructions. Still, when I look at FP performance, I am interested in the speed of the general purpose, double precision instructions that are going to be generated by a C or FORTRAN compiler, not oddball multimedia intructions.
  • I think this is a good thing to produce a cpu that "mops" the low end of the market. Look at the popularity of the celeron and now the AMD Duron. It will make intel worry a little bit and that's good for the market. I also liked how Via took over the chipset market from intel.
  • FYI - "is Via trying to make a run on the high end processor market or are they trying to compete with AMD and Cyrix?" Via bought Cyrix and has essentially killed the Cyrix name. So no, they aren't trying to compete with Cyrix :) For the next comment, I would like to compare the CPU war with the old video tape wars between VHS and BetaMAX. I would liken Intel to the VHS and AMD to the BetaMAX. In that battle, the best didn't win. They only reason VHS won was due to marketing and brand recognition. To say that Intel always comes on top is very arrogant. Intel CPU's don't compare to the likes of an Alpha, but neither does it compare to an AMD Athlon. The only reason the AMD Athlon performs a few points better than Intel is because almost every compiler out there is optimized for the Intel achitecture and not AMD's. This isn't to say that Intel makes a terrible product, actually they make a very good product, it is just recently that Intel has been caught standing on there heels.

  • Wrong. Now that we've come to the 32 and 64 bit generations of platforms, we've seen the first releases of a number of games (Including Driver and GT2) ship with bugs which are later fixed. In fact, you can get your GT2 disc replaced if you want to be able to finish the whole game.

    I've also had a number of playstation games actually hang on me (Driver, mostly) so I don't want to hear any nonsense about first generation or any generation console games being 100% stable. I've also seen arcade games freak out and then work properly after a reboot, and traditionally those things are supposed to in effect reboot themselves (soft reboot, of course; no POST, of which the initial intro is a part) between players.

  • Ok that will work;)

    However, I have to disagree with you on the last point. It is true that it is hard for men to understand women, but there is a difference between being totally clueless and being semi-clueless.

    Anyway, to each his own .....

  • haha! Glad to see all that advice wasn't for nothing.
    No its ok, I was just bored anyway. Good luck with the "counselor".....

  • If you are basically using your computer for browsing the web, does it really matter whether you have a 1 Gig cpu?


    I guess you didn't try out Netscape 6 PR2.
  • Slashdot isn't the only site making grade school spelling mistakes in its articles. Even Bloomberg has laid off their proofreader:

    "... and growing market share," said Wong, who's firm has a "strong buy"...

    This should of course say "whose".

    This news is sort of exciting, but recall that VIA owns Cyrix, and Cyrix chips have historically been very poor products. I do recognize the quality on my VIA KX133 chipset though, so maybe times are changing.

  • The Alpha is more powerful than Pentium III, but not by as much as you'd might think; most of its advantage for supercomputing comes from its superior bus. Similarly, the Alpha and the Athlon are suprisingly well matched, as the Athlon uses the Alpha bus; but, of course, the Alpha is designed as supercomputing equipment. The POWER3 and POWER4 chips are less powerful than you might suspect, probably around or below an Alpha -- IBM's machines run so quickly because they so bloody many of them hooked together which such absurdly wide/fast busses. Of course, when the 21364 rolls into town, it should blow the doors off the T-bird; but but the SledgeHammer/Williamette may be ready by then.

    The reason (Beowulf) clusters have become common in recent years is that only recently have the 'desktop' chips started run fast enough to compete against the generally more powerful chips from the big iron companies. It's like the G4/Pentium situation (a gHz G4 would spank a gHz PIII, but no such beast exists), except even more so.

    -_Quinn
  • and to add to that: 1ghz processor soon = first half of next year? the is probably from 5 to 11 months. i haven't looked at processors lately but i thought 1 ghz is not really a huge deal any more, and after half a year i would think that amd and intel would probably be past that area. but i guess it would have a different market as the previous poster said so maybe it doesn't really matter....
  • I dunno what you're talking about, Intel shortages. Pff.
    I got a great deal on 500 1Ghz P3s straight from Ingram Micro... only $450,000. Those cleanroom-suit guys delivered the palette straight to my door.

    BTW, anybody want to buy 499 1Ghz P3s?

  • Re:export controls on high end processors (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They should just be honest about it and brand this processor as the Sadaam.

    Hey! Think about a Beowulf cluster of these things... (Iraq, India, Pakistan already have, many times over....)

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