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AMD Hardware

64 Bit Athlon Notebooks Hit the Market 399

Posted by michael from the now-with-32-free-bits dept.
Omega1045 writes "Our friends at News.com.com.com are reporting that one of the first notebooks powered by the 64 bit Athlon will be made by (drumroll, please) eMachines. Slashdot has mentioned eMachines venture into 64 bit Athlon technology before. You also might note from this past press release that eMachines claims to be the 3rd biggest PC maker in the US. Hopefully this will have the dual effect of pushing the new chip into the market, and keeping it afforable of laptop junkies like me."
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64 Bit Athlon Notebooks Hit the Market More

64 Bit Athlon Notebooks Hit the Market

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  • Upon hitting the market (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:09PM (#8002798)
    The heat from the laptop caused the market to catch fire, which at this time is still burning.

    • Re:Upon hitting the market (Score:5, Informative)

      by ruiner5000 ( 241452 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @09:35PM (#8004702) Homepage
      Perhaps this would be funny if it was anyway true. G4 and P4 laptops generate far more heat than Athlon 64 laptops. And well, also Athlon 64 laptops have not just hit the market, they have been available for several months. This is only the first on available from a Tier 1 vendor, and also in Best Buy. Not to mention it was not CNet/ZDNet that broke this news. It was www.AMDZone.com.

  • good for everyone (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ArgumentBoy ( 669152 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:11PM (#8002825)
    I don't have much need for a 64 bit laptop, but I welcome this because it will naturally drive down the prices of what I might actually buy. Way to go, eMachines.

    • Re:good for everyone (Score:5, Informative)

      by hendridm ( 302246 ) * on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:19PM (#8002919) Homepage

      > I don't have much need for a 64 bit laptop

      I think I could find something to do with it [bestbuy.com]. 64-bit, 802.11g, USB2 and Firewire, vertical scroller (essential!), and my favorite: a built-in 6-in-1 media reader. The price is right too. Mmmmm... I don't like AMD stuff, but this thing could quickly make me a convert.

      • Re:good for everyone (Score:5, Insightful)

        by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:31PM (#8003065) Homepage Journal
        It comes with Win XP...can XP do anything 64 bit??
      • The one thing I hate about my Powerbook is its 1280x854 LCD resolution. I want to squeeze as many lines as possible in my terminals, and these shallow "widescreen" displays suck at it.

        With this eMachine, I lose another 54 pixels, ugh. I want my 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 like Dell's UXGAs.

      • Re:good for everyone (Score:5, Funny)

        by addaon ( 41825 ) <addaon+slashdot@nOsPAM.gmail.com> on Friday January 16, 2004 @06:22PM (#8003503)
        I think I could find something to do with it

        From linked site: Weighs 7.5 lbs/1.5" thin

        Me too. It would make a good foundation for a bird house.

        If you house albatross.

    • Re:good for everyone (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @06:52PM (#8003716) Homepage Journal
      Actually I'm holding out for IBM to make a nice PPC970 laptop with Linux pre-installed. That could be very nice indeed.

      Surely such a thing has to be coming - it would be the ultimate biochem/math/physics/engineer laptop, a community that already uses linux quite widely, and would actually appreciate and know what to 64bits.

      Jedidiah.
  • For the k8t800m chipset or ati mobility 9600 on said laptop???

    I've got about $1500 and an urge to upgrade.
    • I think XFree86 4.4 will support the new Mobility Radeons - I'm not sure about the ATi drivers. As for the chipset itself, as long as it has a VIA VT8235/VT8237 southbridge, it will be supported IDE/SATA/AGP-wise by the latest 2.6 kernels. I doubt you'd have any problems loading a 2.6-enabled distro onto that machine.

    • Ati drivers (Score:3, Informative)

      by irokitt ( 663593 )
      The ATI integrated drivers, which include the Mobility 9600, play very well with Linux. Certainly a switch from the past ATI driver issues.

  • price (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rogabean ( 741411 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:11PM (#8002834)
    Quote:
    "Hopefully this will have the dual effect of pushing the new chip into the market, and keeping it afforable of laptop junkies like me."

    This is the only part I can see as a plus to this. However I would take a guess that it will do little to the latter, in that most companies know E-Machines general reputation with the people who would be first in line to buy a 64 bit laptop, so I don't forsee that they will try to compete with E-Machines in the price category for some time.

    • Re:price (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Apparently you remember the eMachines of 3 years ago, not the one of today. Amazing that a company does so much to change their business model, yet some look blindly at the past and presume they still do something else...

      So will the G5 PowerBook (if and when it comes) from Apple errantly claim the same thing the G5 PowerMac did?

      • Re:price (Score:2, Insightful)

        by rogabean ( 741411 )
        True E-Machines have tried in the past few years to change. They have restructured their business model, but the stigma of 3+ years ago still sticks with them. I just was pointing out my opinion that the other leading OEM's will use this to their advantage to keep prices up as long as they can. The same way they use anything else to keep prices up.

        How many people on here would really fork over the cash to give E-Machines another chance? I know would not, no matter what they do.

        (yes this is an opinion, but

    • Re:price (Score:5, Interesting)

      by garcia ( 6573 ) * on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:19PM (#8002920)
      You know, for all the bad things that I hear about e-machines I can't find a single problem with the one I have been using since 11/2002. It has been up, without fail, running Linux since that day (only down for routine kernel upgrades).

      Sure it was cheap, came with a bunch of crap I didn't really need, but it was a gift and it works fine.

      The people who are going to be first in line to purchase a 64bit laptop are going to purchase an e-machine because that's who's offering it currently. I don't see Dell coming out saying they are, do you? In fact, I have better success with my e-machine than I did with my Dell laptop. After dealing with Dell for that particular machine I will *never* *ever* buy from them again.

      I would go with the e-machine without a hesitation.

      • I've said it before, I'll say it again (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Theatetus ( 521747 ) * on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:32PM (#8003072) Journal

        eMachines are just a crappy as Dells or Gateways but you avoid the brand tax with them. Unlike Dell and Gateway, eMachines doesn't pretend it's selling you some top of the line system but is honest about the fact that you're getting the house Chianti, as it were.

        • eMachines are just a crappy as Dells or Gateways but you avoid the brand tax with them.

          With Dell you get a three year 24 hour warranty. While Dell has never serviced my laptop warranty claims within 24 hours, they often get them within 48. And they will replace parts until the machine works.

          • Re:Dell -- it is all about the warranty (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Jeremy Erwin ( 2054 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @08:25PM (#8004314) Journal
            With Dell you get a three year 24 hour warranty. While Dell has never serviced my laptop warranty claims within 24 hours, they often get them within 48.

            So Dell promises, but it can't deliver. Interesting.

            • With Dell you get a three year 24 hour warranty.

              Yes, but you use up that 24 hours on hold will Dell support in a lot less than three years. I've spent six hours on hold over various calls spread over weeks and talked to people on three continents just trying to buy a spare loptop battery - I wouldn't have perservered so much, but I'd made the mistake of giving them my own credit card number, they charged up front - and I wasn't goping to let go until either the battery came through or I got my money back (

      • Re:price (Score:3, Insightful)

        by cymen ( 8178 )
        Right now eMachines is just like Hyundai was a year or two ago--new products, better quality, etc. but with a poor reputation due to their past. eMachines went through a drastic change in management. Their machines today are much better than what they used to sell.

        At least that's the buzz...

        • Re:price (Score:3, Informative)

          by ortholattice ( 175065 )
          Here's my experience.

          My company bought an eMachines 333cs from 1999. It was cheap, $400. It came with W98, and when we put NT on it locked up every few days for no good reason. Later I heard this was a frequent problem, and this is probably one of the reasons the machine was considered crap. Anyway around 2001(? or whenever 7.1 came out) I put RH7.1 on it (stripped down to bare bones for security), rebuilt the kernel to 2.4 so I could do iptables and iproute2, and configured it to be an ARP proxy trans

  • Hurray (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sarojin ( 446404 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:11PM (#8002835)
    for 30 minutes of 64 bit computing

  • I think eMachines gets a bad rap (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ilsie ( 227381 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:13PM (#8002862)
    The only experience I've ever had with eMachines are two systems- one was my sisters' old P-166 machine- it lasted for 3 years without a hitch, till I blew it up by trying to put Win98 onto it (long time ago :)

    The other one is one of those widescreen eMachines Athlon laptops- my friend bought it a while back- it's a really solidly made machine that has had no problems so far. YMMV

    • Re:I think eMachines gets a bad rap (Score:5, Informative)

      by SacredNaCl ( 545593 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @06:06PM (#8003379) Journal
      I've had good experiences with them as far as reliability. I still have a 500is that runs fine, it's been abused in nearly every way possible and upgraded as much as it can possibly be upgraded without throwing in a powerleap kit. Many of the upgrades were listed as not possible in the service manual, but http://e4all.info/ has more information (on older ones) and the upgraders forum has a lot of people that have tried everything they can to make them still useable beyond their years. Most of the older ones can at least be upgraded to 512MB with very careful ram selection. That has kept the old 500is useable, even if it is slow. It's perfectly fine as another box to have up to surf the web and what-not. I have some even slower hardware taking care of other task as well.;-)

      There are many things that were cheap in a lot of their older (and still in their present) models. (A lot of them are the typical things that the big makers skimp on. Severely under rated power supplies, proprietary power supplies, POS modems that have no excuse for existing in any machine, if they come with a network card replace it with something else, ram modules that may or may not be worth keeping [though they seem to be getting away from the awful ram they were putting in a few years ago]... These are not severe issues in most of them, but the proprietary power supplies in them are a pain to work around if you are going to cram a mess of drives in them. Don't expect Emachines to give you a pin out for the power supply either.) I've not known anyone who had one of their laptops though.
      The biggest disppointment with Emachines is *support*. The one thing that you may have trouble with is getting support for new OS's that comes out down the road. Emachines is somewhat unreliable about supporting their hardware beyond the OS it was shipped with. This can be very bad news in a laptop, and it can be awful news if you ever have to have your laptop worked on for warranty work.

      I haven't heard the kind of horror stories I've heard about Compaq laptops in terms of getting them worked on, but based on my experiences with them ...it's still a gamble on future OS's.

      It's very hard to top Compaq for the worst possible hardware, worst possible support, worst ownership experience, worst batch of proprietary hardware...in "consumer grade" products. Emachines is well above that fold for the price range they are in. Even with the corners they cut, it's never going to be as unpleasant as that to own one. For the price range they are in, they are decent enough.

    • I have an EMachines laptop.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by tinrobot ( 314936 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @07:40PM (#8004081)
      I think it's the M305 or something. It was the first one they offered. Bought it at Best Buy for about $1000. Had better graphics and more memory than the others in the price range, which is why I bought it in the first place.

      So far, it's been a trooper. It's rock solid and reliable, battery life is good. It's also fairly thin and easy to handle. I like the widescreen a lot, as it makes the whole laptop less deep (every inch counts when you fly coach.)

      I love it. If this one ever gives out, I'd buy the 64 bit one in a second.

  • Laptop for college (Score:2, Insightful)

    by 3V1LDaemon ( 727824 )
    This is a good sign. I have to get a laptop for college next year, and i want to get a decent laptop for a good price. This will hopefully drive down the prices of the other notebooks. Anyone headed for college or forced to get a laptop for work will see this as a blessing.

  • Good. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cK-Gunslinger ( 443452 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:15PM (#8002877) Journal

    I'm glad to see some OEMs going away from the relatively expensive, and in the case of the Celeron, weak Intel architecture. You can build a heck of a General-Purpose / Gaming / Development machine based on AMD CPUs for next to nothing. You can easily put together an AMD64 3000+ / Radeon 9600 / 19" monitor system for under a grand.

    I hope to see more PC makers go this route. Diversity is good. Now, if they would start considering alternate OSes as well...

  • emachines are crap (Score:2, Informative)

    by Reivec ( 607341 )
    I would never buy an emachine. I love AMD and all, but back when I was in high school my school bought several hundred emachines and about 35% of them were DOA due to faulty power supplies. You would think with a percentage that high emachines would be aware of this problem, yet they were selling them anyway. Pretty bad business if you ask me.
  • It will feel like a 386 with all the spyware, adware, and fun animated cursors.

    eMachines: When 300 services battle over your network connection just isn't enough.

    • Because, you know, people who are shopping for 64-bit laptops aren't capable of reinstalling whatever OS comes with the laptop. I'm guessing XP Home? I would imagine most users who would buy such a thing are "Power Users" and would wipe the machine for XP Pro or Linux anyway.

      Oh and my first computer (as in one I purchased for myself) was an emachines 366id. Its still working perfectly in the room next door for my father's business. It didn't have any spyware on it when it came .... it had ME but well t

  • Battery (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mieckowski ( 741243 ) <mieckowski@@@berkeley...edu> on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:17PM (#8002892)
    It has a "high-capacity 8-cell LiIon battery." Still, no mention of batter life in the specs. Hmm, I wonder why?
    • When they were doing the testing, nobody had an egg-timer on hand
    • This is a desktop replacement machine. Most users will always run it on AC power. Batteries are an afterthought. They're useful if you need to power up the machine and check on something without messing with the AC adapter. If you want to watch DVD's through a cross country plane flight, you want a smaller machine that fits on the tray table anyway.
  • If you want to actually use 64 bit software on these processors, you currently need to run Linux. How are the Linux drivers for this flavor of ATI? Most new ATI hardware is not supported - never mind support via 64bit drivers. Need a AMD64/NVidia laptop.
    • According to their web page "eMachines recommends Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP"

      Does Microsoft have anything 64-bit ready? Seems silly to recommend XP for this new 64-bit laptop.

      • I don't get why everyone mentions this. Yes, this CPU can support 64-bit operation, and no, there is no 64-bit Windows OS yet, but who cares? This CPU is also among the fastest 32-bit processors out there. It's not like you are "wasting" the 64-bit-ness by not using it. Those extra registers can't be used to feed the homeless or anything. So what? You buy a machine that very fast, and you get the "bonus" of being able to run future (or current) 64-bit OSes on it, one day. Why do you see the glass as
    • I just bought an eMachines Widescreen Athalon Laptop with ATI, despite all of my geeky senses telling me not to. Many people have sucessfully gotten Linux running on this same model, including Slackware. You can download the drivers fairly easily (I had all of them--for Linux, XP, and 2000-- downloaded within twenty minutes)

      eMachines carries with it a very undeserved reputation and I feel bad for those gun shy folks who can't see that they really are putting out good, solid products now. This laptop is
    • I believe Gentoo will run on this box...may have to do the 2.6 kernel...I was asking on the forums if there was support for this chip. The answer seemed to be yes...but, you had to jump through some hoops.....
    • How are the Linux drivers for this flavor of ATI? Most new ATI hardware is not supported - never mind support via 64bit drivers. Need a AMD64/NVidia laptop.

      I attempted to configure a friend's Gateway M505 for Redhat 9; this has the same Radeon 9600. The XFree86 ATI driver does not support this chipset; the closed-source ATI driver for the desktop 9600 didn't work too well - I guess we finally got it working with acceleration and antialiasing turned off. I've heard some people claim that ATI cards are be

  • If you think that's impressive... (Score:3, Funny)

    by invid ( 163714 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:17PM (#8002901)
    you should see my Lego version!

  • Heat and power? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ducomputergeek ( 595742 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:18PM (#8002905)
    I've been working with 64-bit chips since 1998 (DEC ALPHA systems and now G5's) and there has always been problems with heat and power. What's the battery life going to be on one of these machine?

  • Great, but should I wait before going 64 bit? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Wingit ( 98136 ) <mrericdjohnson AT gmail DOT com> on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:19PM (#8002916)
    I live in a Pentium 350 world and home and have been limping along, quite happily actually. I admin a Win2K network at work so keep one foot planted there, and have been learning and living on a steady diet of Linux the rest of the time. While eMachines don't thrill me, I am thinking more and more that I should postpone any upgrades until I can truly dive into the 64 bit world. I realize I will be stuck running plenty of 32 bit applications, but is my wait worthwhile? I am really getting the itch to get into serious gaming again but (obviously) my current system is not up to much more than the Ultima Online I played for 5 years. Perhaps this question fit better as an Ask Slashdot question, but I didn't feel it was worthy to stand on its own so I welcom your comments.
    • Well, you can always dual-boot a 32-bit Windows and a 64-bit Linux/BSD. Then you can enjoy 64-bit goodness whilst still dipping a toe into your favorite games. And the Mobility Radeon 9600 that's in this laptop should go a long way towards making this laptop suitable for gaming. The processor won't hurt, either... ;)

  • Athlon 64 in laptops (Score:2, Informative)

    by SoulVoid ( 31148 )
    VoodooPC has been selling 64-bit laptops for 2-3 months now with decent battery life for what your getting. Check out the M:855.

    http://www.voodoopc.com/systems/notebook.aspx
    • Check out the Aviator -AX6
    • But, this one seems to be specced out similarly to the Voodoo Envy M:855:

      CPU:
      Voodoo: Mobile Athlon 64 3000+ (2.0 GHz, 512KiB L2) (other configs available, but I am attempting to get it as close as possible)
      eMachines: Mobile Athlon 64 3000+ (2.0GHz, 512KiB L2)

      GPU:
      Voodoo: Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro w/64MB RAM (technically, since it doesn't have 128MB or more RAM, it's not Pro)
      eMachines: Mobility Radeon 9600 w/64MB RAM

      HDD:
      Voodoo: 60GB Travelstar (optional - adds $93.27)
      eMachines: 60GB

      CD:
      Voodoo: 2x DVD(+/-?)R

  • 'been there, done that (Score:3, Informative)

    by dago ( 25724 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:20PM (#8002932)
    Yep, and my Tadpole is already 64bits for yeaaars (UltraSparc).

    Oh, and btw, in Europe, you can buy Packard Bell Athlon 64 based laptops ...

  • Old news.. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Snotboble_ ( 13797 )
    A Danish company called Amitech [amitech.dk] has had an Athlon 64 powered notebook since August 13 2003.

    It does however suffer from the 90W power drain that the regular Athlon 64 imposes, so don't move too far away from that power outlet.

  • eMachines laptop? gross! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Monkey ( 16966 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:22PM (#8002951)
    Not everybody shopping for a 64 bit notebook would buy something cheesy like an eMachines laptop.
    VoodooPC has been selling their high end m:855 [voodoo.ca] for some time now. Based on the Athlon 64, it also has ATI Mobility 9600 Graphics Pro chipset.

  • Not impressive (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mieckowski ( 741243 ) <mieckowski@@@berkeley...edu> on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:22PM (#8002956)
    Bah, I'm going to hold out for a dual 64 bit laptop. With a RAID array.
    • Well, you could get the dual part if you cram a certain Mini-ITX board (VIA made one of a board for their next model of C3 that took TWO of them) in a laptop case, and someone makes a 12-pound P4 DTR that has a RAID array. However, if you've got a laptop that can take an extra HDD, CD-ROM, or extra battery in a bay, play with software RAID.
    • Bah, I'm going to hold out for a dual 64 bit laptop. With a RAID array. And hookers!

  • Bum rap (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SuDZ ( 450180 )
    Now I know the big deal is to hate Emachines but do many of you have experience with them? I knew a lot of people in my area were buying them because the price was low (friends and students) because that was all they could afford. At first I had the same feeling of "eek, I have heard bad things", but once they got them setup and running they really had no issues with them. I mean they were using them for what they were designed for. Things like email, IM, web browsing and minor games. These things lasted fo

    • Re:Bum rap (Score:3, Informative)

      by dexterpexter ( 733748 )
      I agree. As I posted earlier, I bought an eMachines Widescreen laptop and have been completely satisfied by it. I had no problem finding the drivers for it, I found members of the Linux community who had successfully developed ATI support, and even better: it has a 3.5 hour battery life which is much greater than most of the laptops I have seen. Unlike some of the other AMD-powered laptops, mine does not overheat and it has handled everything that I have thrown at it beautifully. I take that back: it c
    • Not sure. I have an eMachine I use for a staging server, $400, which has work near perfect. The only problem I've had was after 1 year the power supply fan stop working. This machine takes abuse. It runs apache and mysql, plus has to handle my perl scripts which pegs the processor normally for 2 days straight. Most of the time it's hitting swap, since ( up to seven days ago ) it only had 128M of RAM. However it keeps chugging along. For a cheap server (non-HA) it's pretty good.

      They arn't the coolest lookin
    • Let's put it this way: this post had my interest piqued until they mentioned the laptops were made by eMachines. Kiss of Death. If you are seriously looking, make sure you find out what the architecture really is like. This was the issue with eMachines desktop computers: they usually made small, mini-ATX machines whose power supply you could guarantee would burn out. Maybe things have changed, but I support our staff at church, and this is what they had on all their desktops until recently. They are o
  • here [bestbuy.com]

    Some highlights- 60GB hard drive, 512MB PC2700 RAM, Mobility Radeon 9600, 15" widescreen display

  • VoodooPC already has one (Score:4, Informative)

    by obsid1an ( 665888 ) <obsidianNO@SPAMmchsi.com> on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:26PM (#8003007)
    VoodooPC [voodoopc.com] has been doing this for over three months [earthweb.com] already.

  • hypersonic has been selling one as well for a whil (Score:3, Informative)

    by Siniset ( 615925 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:27PM (#8003016) Homepage Journal
    hypersonic pc [hypersonic-pc.com] has been selling one for a while as well. They seem to be pretty decent machines, might by one with my tax refund. -siniset

  • What's the warranty? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by phr1 ( 211689 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @05:29PM (#8003042)
    Laptops, especially bleeding-edge ones that run hot, have a high failure rate. I've owned about 6 laptops in the post-Pentium era (earlier ones ran cooler and were more reliable) and four of them have needed warranty repair after more than a year of service. With a 1-year warranty I'd have been SOL. With a 3-year warranty, you're more covered, and the machine is almost obsolete after that long anyway, so it's time for an upgrade if it breaks. These days, only higher priced laptops tend to come with 3 year warranties any more, probably because the failure rate is known to be so high.

    I guess if this eMachines thing has a 1-year warranty you can get an "extended" warranty from Best Buy for a few hundred bucks more. I'd definitely advise doing that. But it means you have to figure it into the price of the machine.

  • How can they call the notebook M6805? What a strange misleading name! Are everyone too young to remember the Motorola 6805 microprocessor [textfiles.com]? Are they sure the notebook uses a 64-bit microprocessor?
  • Why not just make it a desktop in laptop form? Save $$$ on hardware and you get the smaller form factor. Sure you can't take it with you, but that's what custom welded racks of battery backups on a large diesel-powered cart are for.
  • I'm sure myself and many other New Englanders welcome these smaller, yet powerful, space heaters given the subzero temperatures we're having to endure.
  • Perhaps for some people, a laptop is just another way to buy a flat screen to use in the home near an outlet, but a 64-bit CPU sounds to me like it is for a server, so what am I missing?

    This Athalon 64 (especially CISC) laptop sounds like it will be a power hog among other things, making the laptop not portable enough to be worthwhile. It doesn't sound like one I want on my lap. Not only should it be small and light, but the battery has to last a few hours to be worth the trouble.

  • Shuttle already has an Athlon 64 Cube [shuttle.com], which is cheaper, more rugged, and has a heatpipe...

  • When the first story about the 64 bit desktop machine from eMachines broke, I looked on their website and it was noticeably absent from the products section. It is still not there and neither is this new laptop. I'm guessing I'm just stupid and missed where it said that they're only selling these models through Best Buy or something like that. It just makes me wonder about the quality if they won't even show them on their website. I'm having trouble coming up with a similar occurrence anywhere else. Fo
  • For a major manufacturer to sell a laptop without the MS tax. I want a linux laptop, but refuse to pay a premium for it at a smaller manufacturer(I can't afford the premium) , especially since I should be saving money by not paying for windows. I also want fully compatable hardware in my laptop, no windows only wireless, no non-standard power features(or at least release the specs so linux drivers can be made), and a video chipset/card that has quality linux drivers(like nvidia). Whats so hard about not for

  • Houston, we have a problem: XP Home? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jerkychew ( 80913 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @06:02PM (#8003334) Homepage

    Looks like this laptop comes with XP Home installed. Now, I'm no expert, but does XP Home even support a 64-bit proc? I know it'll at least run in 32-bit mode, but what's the point? If your OS can't deal with the newer instructions, why not just get a 32-bit Athlon at a higher clock speed?

    I looked on MS's XP Home system requirements page [microsoft.com], and it makes no mention of 64-bit support - XP 64-bit version [microsoft.com] looks like a totally different product.

    • The AMD64 chips aren't just "64-bit" they run significantly faster than the 32-bit AMD counter parts and Intel friends. Even as we speak, the 3400+ which is about $380 USD is as fast as the $700 p4 3.2 EE. One of the areas that the chip shines is gaming as well. There is a 64-bit version of XP Pro in the works. The one featured on their site is a different product built for the Itanium architecture.

  • WTF is Sun waiting for? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by haggar ( 72771 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @08:01PM (#8004190) Homepage Journal
    I see more and more systems with Opterons and Athlon 64s coming to the market. And all that while, Sun, who would have all the best interest to make some Opteron systems available ASAP, are dragging their feet.

    Sun really needs to get these low and midrange Opteron servers out as soon as they possibly can, while HP is in the Itanium mess! HP was hoping for the Itanium to hit the mass-market and be real cheap to manufacture. Instead, they have by their hands a CPU that's even more expensive than the PA-RISC. If Sun had a shred of strategic insight, they'd be selling cheap 4 and 8 way Opteron servers with Solaris x86-64 right about now.

    I am a huge Sun fan, actually, but some of their management moves seem to be ridicolous (Cobalt aquisition anyone?).
  • This is not one of the first Athlon64 laptops. I have had an Athlon64 laptop [hypersonic-pc.com] for almost two months, and they [voodoopc.com] have been available since late October/early November 2003.

    If the market doesn't catch fire, your desk or legs will...

    This is not true at all. The laptop runs at 800MHz 95% of the time (whenever the full 2GHz is not needed). At that speed, the CPU has a peak heat dissipation of 35W, and a typical output of 28W. This is well below Pentium IV laptops, and is below the peak output of most Pentium-M chips at their full speed.
    Even at 2GHz, it outputs at most around 85W (max theoretical heat output). Compare this to laptops with the Pentium IV Extreme Edition (available from many vendors), which has a typical heat output of over 100W--and that is at idle! Don't even ask about power usage when actually doing something.

    I get a good 3 1/2 hours of battery life on a single charge. That is pretty damn good for a laptop which is more powerful than 95% of the full desktop processors out there, including my own. When it runs at full speed all night, the mouse pad and right side of the keyboard get fairly warm, but not to a point that it makes the machine uncomfortable to use. Warmth is comparable to the Dell Latitude D800, which uses a Pentium-M.

    Unfortunately, it does not support dual batteries, and has no modular optical drive bay (the DVD drive is set when the machine is assembled), but these aren't major issues for most people. It also has a rather bulky power supply for the use of A/C power, complete with its own tiny cooling fan. This does not help the weight, which is already nearly 8lbs with battery. Ah well--it's more powerful than my desktop, reasonably light, and is MUCH smaller than certain 12-lb Pentium IV [powernotebooks.com] laptops. One often wonders if manufacturers have a different definition of "lap" than the rest of us.

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