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Hardware

Three Budget CPUs Tested 173

Posted by timothy from the cheaper-than-saffron dept.
Steve writes "HEXUS.net are taking a look at three 'value' CPUs. The Sempron 2800+ and 3100+ from AMD (Socket A and Socket 754 respectively.) The price range of the three is fairly broad, the 3100+ coming out on top, also costing the most. Also, for those of you who enjoy cheap thrills, some overclocking has been thrown in, too." (The third chip reviewed is the Celeron D.)
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Three Budget CPUs Tested More

Three Budget CPUs Tested

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  • Let's just hope (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17, 2004 @03:40PM (#10551942)
    That their web server isn't being hosted on one.

    • Re:Let's just hope (Score:5, Informative)

      by Penguinoflight ( 517245 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @03:42PM (#10551950) Journal
      Insightful, more than funny. Just take a look at the street prices for these processors, and compare to Athlons... You'll find the faster Athlons are cheaper in the same mhz rating. Add in double the cache on Athlon, and you'd have to be an idiot to buy a "budget" cpu.
      • As a person who builds a lot of computers, I don't have a clue what you're talking about. The street prices for these processors are lower than the 512K cache versions with the same clock speeds. I buy these for all of my budget computers (anything under $600.)

      • Are any of these new releases compatible with the old 760MPX Dual Athlon Boards [Tyan S246X-series, Asus A7M266-D]?

        It sure would be mighty nice to have a little bit of an upgrade path for those platforms.

  • Let me be the first one to say (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    sempron fi

  • Better link (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17, 2004 @03:44PM (#10551963)
    ..to their more comfortable print version [hexus.net].

  • I might check those out (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17, 2004 @03:44PM (#10551964)
    I don't do any scientific computing or anything involving too much math... if these CPUs make a few mistakes here or there it won't really bother me.

  • Sempron 2800 does kick ass (Score:4, Informative)

    by ShatteredDream ( 636520 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @03:46PM (#10551971) Homepage
    I recently bought a PC from Compaq for only $445 including free s&h and it has a a Sempron 2800. I got it as a replacement for my AthlonXP 2400+ box which had its motherboard die, and I needed a drop in replacement for my CS classes to run Linux on and the PC works like a charm. It's fast, it runs SuSE 9.1 well and was dirt cheap compared to the Intel alternative.
    • Why did you buy an entirely new PC and not just a new motherboard?

      • Re:Sempron 2800 does kick ass (Score:5, Funny)

        by toddestan ( 632714 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @04:30PM (#10552167)
        Why did you buy an entirely new PC and not just a new motherboard?

        Even a bigger question, why a Compaq?

      • Re:Sempron 2800 does kick ass (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ak3ldama ( 554026 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @05:45PM (#10552499) Journal
        probably because his first computer was a compaq(i have no proof, but it's a good guess)

        a budy of mine bought a dell, even though i and others told him not to. his power supply went out during warranty, got a new one. his power supply went out again, but this time he wasn't under the warranty any more. he couldn't drop a normal power supply in, because the locations were different and he would have to cut some metal. so he purchased a new case. the motherboard also had to be replaced as his old motherboard wasn't atx. he decided to buy a new sound card since his sound blaster live was proprietary. he also had to buy new ram, but that is because his old motherboard was rdram, not really a big issue, just sold the rdram to a friend.

        anyways, when people buy these boxes that big companies like compaq, dell, hp, etc put together, they have little control of the components. thus when something dies they often have to buy an entirely new pc, and not just an individual component.

        that's just my point of view, i have always built my own boxes, of course your experience may vary. i have seen some very good mass production boxes, but that was years ago when gateway made sweet pentium mmx/pentium II stuff.
        • What kind of Rdram using motherboard isn't ATX? I haven't seen a non-ATX case in years. Hell, my P233MMX was ATX.
          • Mine wasn't. It was an HP Pavilon. Not ATX.

          • Re:Sempron 2800 does kick ass (Score:4, Insightful)

            by suckmysav ( 763172 ) <suckmysav&gmail,com> on Sunday October 17, 2004 @08:32PM (#10553328) Journal
            Almost none of the big name brands use a standard ATX layout. They want to discourage you from pulling their stuff apart and putting new parts in. If they could figure a way to make hard drives and CPU's "different" without it costing them too much to do so they would, I assure you.
        • a budy of mine bought a dell, even though i and others told him not to. his power supply went out during warranty, got a new one. his power supply went out again, but this time he wasn't under the warranty any more. he couldn't drop a normal power supply in, because the locations were different and he would have to cut some metal. so he purchased a new case.

          Same exact thing happend to my sister-in-law's dell. Her power supply went out right after the warrenty expired. I bought a standard powersupply for

      • DeVry (Score:2)

        by bstadil ( 7110 )
        Why did you buy an entirely new PC and not just a new motherboard?

        Probably DeVry

  • low priced x86 cpu/mobo/mem combos are great "extra" boxes. Something like a car pc, or mythtv, or a mp3 box like outlined in this recent story [slashdot.org], a MAME arcade, home automation, kitchen pc, toliet pc (slashdot from the throne), asterisk pbx, the list goes on and on.

  • Athalon 64's (Score:5, Interesting)

    by d3ity ( 800597 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @03:50PM (#10551998)
    Now here, I'm a hardcore AMD user, I have 5 of thier athlon xp's sitting in various forms in my house. Now what is all this business about having an Athlon 64 that does not have 64 bit capability. I just dont get it. Wouldnt an athlon 64 without 64 bit capability be an athlon XP with a new core and new socket?
    • Wouldnt an athlon 64 without 64 bit capability be an athlon XP with a new core and new socket?

      Yes.

      One of my buddies has an Athlon 64 3000+, it runs 32bit code at roughly the same speed as my Athlon XP 2800+. Unless it's just keeping an eye cast toward the future so that they can crank up the speed, I don't get why it's important to move to the new core either.

      LK

      • Re:Athalon 64's (Score:5, Informative)

        by dreamchaser ( 49529 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @04:14PM (#10552103) Homepage Journal
        It's cheaper to have your fabs only have to worry about one core.
    • The Socket 754 Sempron has very little in common with the Athlon XP. Two notable differences are the on-die memory controller and the no-excecute (nx) protection from buffer overflows.

    • Re:Athalon 64's (Score:5, Informative)

      by Wiz ( 6870 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @03:58PM (#10552035) Homepage
      Not really, the Opteron core is better than the Athlon core. If you exclude the 64-bitness, you've still got:

      1. SSE2.
      2. On-board memory controller.
      3. Higher IPC vs the Athlon.
      4. Hyper-transport.

      Remember, the Opteron is the next-gen core so it is a lot better anyway. Removing the 64-bit part is only one part, the rest is still excellent.

      Of course, not as if Windows even has a 64-bit OS yet which is what matters for a lot of people (not me tho).

      • Re:Athalon 64's (Score:3, Informative)

        by Toraz Chryx ( 467835 )
        1. That's something that could have been added to an AthlonXP, it's utilising the existing FP pathways just as SSE1 does on the AthlonXP whilst the Tbird athlon didn't have SSE at all.
        2. That's the big DING DING DING, the lower memory latency plumbed into what is largely the same architecture makes a hugeass difference.
        3. That's due to the on die memory controller more than anything.

      • Of course, not as if Windows even has a 64-bit OS yet which is what matters for a lot of people (not me tho).

        http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/evaluat ion/upgrade.mspx

        It's probably shit and I wouldn't run it (well, as a general rule I don't run windows at all), but it's available. It's only available as trial version, but it's for a year, and if you're running windows the chances are favorable you're gonna wipe your system and reinstall in about a year anyway. :/

        (Actually, it wouldn't suprise m

      • Of course, not as if Windows even has a 64-bit OS yet which is what matters for a lot of people (not me tho). Use linux! (not aimed at parent, he hinted that he uses linux. It's aimed at everyone else stupid enough to have an A64 CPU and is not using 64 bit linux!)

    • Wouldnt an athlon 64 without 64 bit capability be an athlon XP with a new core and new socket?

      Yeah, just like how a pentium 4 is like a pentium 2 with a new core and new socket... I'm not sure I get your point, the core is completely different, what more do you want?

    • It's "Athlon", you idiot.
    • The Athlon 64 chip has a lot of improvements over the old XP core. If you look at the benchmarks in the article, you'll see where the benefits are.

      Specifically, the integrated memory controller on the A64/Sempron 3100+ greatly improves throughput and latency.

      I'm running an Athlon 64 3000+ at home, and the performance is significantly greater than a 3000+ Athlon XP. I'm counting the days until MS fixes DirectX on WinXP/64 so I can fully use all the capabilities of my CPU.
  • Since Sempron is (in)directly competing with AMD's own Athlon, are we going to see changes in Athlon (eg limited to above 3000+ rating only), while Sempron stays in under 3000+?

    • Re:Athlon to change? (Score:5, Informative)

      by dougmc ( 70836 ) <dougmc+slashdot@frenzied.us> on Sunday October 17, 2004 @03:57PM (#10552029) Homepage
      are we going to see changes in Athlon
      Just so there's no confusion ...

      Sempron = new name for the 32 bit AthlonXP.
      Athlon = `new' name for the 64 bit Athlon64.

      Basically, Sempron isn't very different from the AthlonXP that we're used to (and in many cases. they're identical.) And now they'll reserve the Athlon name for the 64 bit versions. Unless I've misunderstood something ...

      • Re:Athlon to change? (Score:2, Informative)

        by mrbcs ( 737902 )
        I can still buy Athlon T-bred cores up to 3000+ though they are being phased out.

        The sempron (does it fill your hdd with pr0n?) is (according to my wholesaler)the replacement for the durons.

        A sempron 2400+ runs at the same clock rate as an Athlon 2000+ (1667) but can be changed to 2000 to be the same as Athlon 2400+ On chip cache is the same (256) and they seem to run almost the same speed. They were even the same price when they came out for me about a month ago.

      • Re:Athlon to change? (Score:4, Informative)

        by GarfBond ( 565331 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @04:27PM (#10552155)
        Except your simplistic model forgets to include the Sempron 3100+, based off of the Newcastle design. In other words, an a64 derivative :) The review itself includes a Sempron based off of the athlonxp and then one from the athlon64 line.

        It's simply Sempron = Budget, Athlon = Performance, Athlon FX = Flagship performance and price. Currently, no semprons have 64-bit, but I expect once 64bit starts taking off they'll have to put it back in.

      • Re:Athlon to change? (Score:3, Informative)

        by bersl2 ( 689221 )
        Sempron = new name for the 32 bit AthlonXP.

        The Athlon XPs with the Barton core have 512k L2, while the Semprons have 256k.
      • Unfortunately, the Sempron is neither an AthlonXP or an Athlon 64.

        The Sempron budget CPU's are derived from both Athlon XP and Athlon64 cores. However, the Sempron 2800+ is different from an Athlon XP2800+ and you would anticpate the performance would be slower due to reduced cache and other features of the Sempron.

        Likewise, the "Athlon" name on it's own is an all-encompassing name for CPU's that covers several cores, much like the "Pentium" name covering the PII, PIII and P4 CPUs. The Athlon name curre
    • The semperon is a T-bred core. The Athlons are the barton core. I think that + the FSB speeds will keep the athlon XP's seperate.

  • Celeron D voltage discrepency? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This Celeron D is only listed at 1.3v in the review and only 1v [newegg.com] on Newegg's site. I couldn't locate the correct voltage on Intel's site. Does anybody know the correct answer? Looking to build a low wattage system and this CPU seems perfect

  • Recent AMD price hike (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cortana ( 588495 ) <sam@robots.orRASPg.uk minus berry> on Sunday October 17, 2004 @03:55PM (#10552019) Homepage
    Has anyone noticed how the prices of AMD processors seem to have shot up in the last few months? My brother bought a retail Athlon XP 2800+ for £70 over the summer. Now a Sempron 2800+ is £76 and, and the Althon XP is £96. :(
    • I noticed this as well. luckily I purchaced my 2000+ and 2800+ before this hike. I was shocked to see athalons raise in price just as the 64's started rolling. Seems counterproductive. However, they may have decided to raise prices on thier cheaper products for the people like me who say... "Well, its only 20 bucks more..."

  • So... (Score:1, Redundant)

    by mlc ( 16290 )
    the conclusion is that the most expensive CPU performs the best? Anyone actually surprised by this?

    • Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by obeythefist ( 719316 )
      Actually if you looked at the benchmarks you would find that the cheaper Semprons outperformed the more expensive Celerons, and in some cases you can see the Semprons outperforming the incredibly expensive Pentium 4 CPU.

      This doesn't mean that AMD CPUs are necessarily better than Intels, I'm no rabid fanboy here. But what it does mean is that you must shop around! Look at the performance, compare it to other CPUs of the same price, before you put down your hard earned cash.

  • "Budget"? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Lord Kano ( 13027 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @04:06PM (#10552072) Homepage Journal
    Maybe I'm just too old school for this, but looking at the cost of a new Athlon 64 3000 and motherboard [pricewatch.com] is so low that I wouldn't want to compromise and get the Sempron.

    I'd prefer to spend the extra $20 or so and get the better chip.

    LK
    • Are those ECS 755-A2 mobos any good? $200 sounds good, but then I see that Fry's has a special right now: Sempron 2500 + mobo for $59.
    • I've never seen a test show the Sempron is the "better chip." I have an AMD now, but if AMD doesn't stop playing all these stupid games with their chips the next one (I'm going to get a mobile for my present mbd) will be the last.

      Semprons are only "better" for AMD's bottom line. [hardcoreware.net]

      • The differences for most of those benchmarks were pretty uninspiring 'cept for when the athlon beat everything.

        most of the benchmarks were within a percentage point in terms of performance.

        though lately i've been dreaming of a quieter machine - the mobile is looking pretty good for that.

    • Perhaps you do, but I know plenty of people who prefer the cheapest solution possible. peeling away another 20 Euro in base costs would make a small, but notable difference, especially around here where the VAT levels are downright atrocious. ( 19% ) So if I'm able to get 20 euros of with the proc, 20 with the video card, another 20 on memory, another 20 on a cheap drive and another 20 on a HD, all of it using "last release cycle" products, then I still get a very nice PC at about 100 euros cheaper.

    • Re:"Budget"? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by yem ( 170316 )
      I'd prefer to spend the extra $20 or so and get the better chip.

      The "better chip" adds extra heat/noise that some people can do without, especially if other components are doing the heavy lifting. My Sempron 3100 / 6800 GT Shuttle box runs Doom 3 at 70+ FPS 1024xHigh with 4x AA.


    • You're absolutely right. If you're running Linux.

      I'll happily make my Linux box a 64-bit system. My Sempron 3100+ box, however, is there mainly for gaming under Windows. I save $20, reduce the noise and heat problems, but still get the advantages of the higher IPC and HyperTransport, and I don't pay for functionality which I won't need.

      And the best part? If I'm wrong, and games need 64-bit capability in the future, I just grab a then-discounted Socket 754 Athlon64 chip, pop it in, and upgrade to 64-bi
  • That is the CPU I am using now. I am pretty satisfied with its performance...but I would like to know from Slashdotters who have AMD CPUs whether they too find their (AMD) performance good. I had an Athlon running at 933MHz, found that it dessipated lots of heat! I once got it to 71 degrees celcius. The Sempron, with its own fan is quieter and more reliable. The highest I have ever got it was 61 degrees celcius. I have not managed to get it hotter. Some people even mentioned that AMD CPUs always operated at
    • I have one Athlon XP 3200+ (Barton) and one Athlon 1.14GHz (T-bird)

      Athlons have always been known to dissipate lots of heat, especially the T-bird series. I have large copper heatsinks [thermaltake.com] on both of them and during this summer temperatures of 60 degrees celcius weren't uncommon. Dont need a heater during the winter though (seriously).
    • Put in in an oven that has been preheated to 500F
    • The first generation of Athlons were very hot running, which resulted in AMDs reputation for heat generation. The XP line of chips, which your Sempron is based on, run at lower voltages produce less heat. The Athlon64 chips are even cooler running.

      Depending on what "push this CPU to its limits" means to you you might consider overclocking.

    • Re:The Sempron 2800+ (Score:5, Informative)

      by tdelaney ( 458893 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @05:14PM (#10552369)
      I just put together a Sempron 3100+ (i.e. A64 core) system for a mate. As an indication of it's use, it has a 9600XT - so "mid-level" gaming - Neverwinter Nights, Doom 3 on reasonable quality levels.

      I was impressed by the performance. But I was blown away by the temperatures. After pushing it though 3DMark 2001 and Aquamark (12301 and 29381 respectively - highest score on any of our machines) it was running at 43 celsius. Ambient at the time was about 30 celsius. And this was in a system so quiet that I couldn't hear a damn thing, even with my ear right near the box (Antec).

      The new core is *much* better than the Athlon XP core.
  • I would still choose the celeron D over the AMD offerings because of all the issues Iv seen with via / sis / nforce1/2 with linux and windows. THeir drivers are really not stable and I have seen really slow hdparm scores with them. I bet if you benched these cpus in linux the celeron would be the most stable because it uses its intel chipset. I think AMD cpus are AWESOME, but the motherboards chipsets people use are junk IMHO.
    • I would agree with you on the nForce drivers (*), however, my experece with VIA has been good recently. I have an Athlon64 based system with a Via KT800 chipset that runs linux perfectly. All the chipset drivers (Networking, DMA, CpuFreq, HW-monitoring Graphics etc) are driven by open source drivers that are part of the standard 2.6 Linux kernel, without any closed source or non-standard patches.

      Having said that, It is running in 32 bit mode, rather than 64.

      On the other hand, IMHO, the situation is gettin
    • If you buy an MSI or ASUS (or Tyan but that's pricey) AMD mobo you're pretty much guaranteed good and stable performance. You'll never see a SiS chipset, and you'll only find the most stable implementations of Via, AMD or more recently, Nvidia chipsets therein.

  • In other words.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @04:22PM (#10552143)
    The other chip reviewed is the Celeron D.

    In other words: HEY SLASHDOT, TWO NEW BUDGET ATHLONS ARE OUT...oh..and that other.. Intel thing..

    Seriously though, did anyone else laugh immediately at the bias in this community? I thought it was pretty humorous...

    I'll go back to my troll hole now..
    • What's your point?

      This could be a product of one of two situations:

      AMD could actually be superior, and the /. community understands this and sees no point tiptoing around it.

      Slashdot has become populated by people who just personally like AMD.

      If the first situation is the case then why should slashdot give the Celeron equal attention? If the second is the case then even if Celerons were superior why shouldn't a community be able to talk about things it likes.

      Complaints about bias on a community newssit

      • Complaints about bias on a community newssite is stupid.

        Yeah, people don't get that for some reason. They start shouting "bias! bias!" when nobody claimed to be unbiased. It's a leftover from the olden days when journalists were taught that they should report all pertinent facts and inject no opinion, and believed themselves to therefore be unbiased. Subsequently came the assumption that the media was for that reason supposed to always be unbiased. Bunch of nonsense, if you ask me. Everyone has an axe to

    • Re:In other words.. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Vegeta99 ( 219501 )
      Of course, the contributor didn't mention the Intel chip at all, that was thrown in by the editor.

  • Just keep in mind... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ameoba ( 173803 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @04:37PM (#10552205)
    Just keep in mind that the Celeron D, being based on the P4 "netburst" architecture, has it's performance severly dependant upon memory bandwith. The 533MHz (4x133) bus on the Celeron D is a vast improvement over the 400MHz (4x100) bus on the previous Celeries .

    To get decent performance out of any P4-based system, however, it is imperative that you get a motherboard that supports dual-chanel memory, such as one based on Intel's 865 chipset. Going on the cheap and 'saving' $10-15 to get a lower-end chipset is going to seriously hurt the performance of these CPUs.

    With the AMDs, it's not so important; the SocketA chips only see about a 5% performance boost from dual-channel and the s754 Sempron, with it's onboard memory controller, can't use it at all

    .

  • price vs power (Score:2, Insightful)

    by St. Arbirix ( 218306 )
    Why don't we see many benchmarks that give a CPU a price per point rating?

    Watching a Sempron go from 1.75GHz at £50 to 2.0GHz at £75 implies a much greater value on the cheaper one. £25 is a bit of a difference. Especially if I clustered computers and could get three 1.75GHz chips for the price of two 2GHz ones.

    SPEC2004 should keep track of prices on chips and display the value of each one, that would keep my attention for chip value.

  • Athlon XP > Socket A Sempron (Score:3, Informative)

    by Danj2k ( 123765 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @04:59PM (#10552313)
    Nobody seems to have mentioned that the socket A Semprons are in fact not related to the Athlon 64 at all, and they are not a development of current Athlon XP cores either; actually, the socket A Sempron is based off of the Thoroughbred core, which is OLDER than the current Barton core. So personally I would recommend snapping up Barton-core XP chips while you still can, rather than buying these new "budget" Semprons.
    • I recently built a system for the kids to use. It was going to be mainly used for web browsing, email, dvd playback and word processing (homework).
      I get most of my components from ebuyer [ebuyer.com] and I originally wanted a fairly inexpensive Athlon XP2500+ cpu. However, as I gradually put the separate items into the cart, the damn XP2500 went out of stock, and the higher rated chips cost more than I wanted to spend.
      So reluctantly, I added a 2500 sempron instead, while worrying about the reduced onboard cache (256 in

  • 3.5GHz Celeron D - damn ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Glonoinha ( 587375 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @05:21PM (#10552415) Journal
    Honestly I'm not an AMD fanboy (even though I should be, all things considered) ... but I would say that the article glossed over the part I found most interesting : with an entry price of about a hundred bucks the Celeron D will overclock to 3.5GHz with relative ease.

    3.5GHz CPU for $100.
    Damn.

  • erstwhile? (Score:3, Funny)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @06:59PM (#10552932) Homepage Journal
    "That's been the fate of the much-maligned Celeron of late. AMD, on the other hand, has been mixing it its midrange with low-end Athlon 64s whilst also continuing with the erstwhile Athlon XP and a select range of Durons."

    "Rather, it seems that its numbering scheme has always tried to approximate the MHz rating from its erstwhile competitor's CPUs."

    Looks like the author learned a new word, how exciting for him. Although I think "competitor's erstwhile CPUs" would have made more sense.

    erstwhile
    adj : belonging to some prior time; "erstwhile friend"; "our
    former glory"; "the once capital of the state"; "her
    quondam lover" [syn: erstwhile(a), former(a), once(a),
    onetime(a), quondam(a), sometime(a)]
    adv : at a previous time; "once he loved her"; "her erstwhile
    writing" [syn: once, formerly, at one time, erst]

  • What they missed... (Score:5, Informative)

    by NerveGas ( 168686 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @08:20PM (#10553277)

    Is the Athlon XP-M 2500/2600. Unlocked multipliers, hand-picked cores, and cheap to boot. You're pretty much guaranteed that one will hit 2.3 GHz, and with good air cooling, 2.5 GHz is even possible.

    What's better, because of the unlocked multiplier, you can throw fast memory on the board, and overclock the memory/FSB as far as the motherboard will go, *then* turn the clock speed up. I'll bet that one of those would have beaten the entire lot that they tested.

    steve

  • I'm tired of these pussy names for CPUs (Score:5, Funny)

    by multiplexo ( 27356 ) * on Sunday October 17, 2004 @09:46PM (#10553641) Journal
    Celeron, Athlon, Sempron, Opteron, Pentium. I want visceral names! I want manly names. I want names with teeth, names with balls, names with a serious tude. How cool would it be if Intel announced that they were going to call their next processor "The Vindicator" and then AMD could announce one called "The Eviscerator". I'd love to own a computer that had a sticker that read "Intel Bitchslapper 960 Inside".

  • Only intel? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @10:02PM (#10553706) Homepage Journal
    Very good article. It is great that we are not living in Middle Ages any more and someone who uses Debian GNU/Linux [debian.org] can choose an architecture between IA-32, Motorola 68k, Sun SPARC, Alpha, Motorola/IBM PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, IA-64 and S/390, and in fact much [netbsd.org] more [freebsd.org] when using a BSD kernel instead of Linux, so I would expect from such a comprehensible review that it would include more than only one architecture, basically comparing apples to apples. Are they planning to add more architectures to their comparison? I really hope so because other than that it is a great review. By the way, do you know what CPU architecture I am really looking forward to? MMIX. I hope one day I will able to buy one.

    • For those who don't know what I mean, MMIX [stanford.edu] is a 64-bit RISC CPU designed by Donald Knuth [stanford.edu]:

      MMIX is a machine that operates primarily on 64-bit words. It has 256 general-purpose 64-bit registers that each can hold either fixed-point or floating-point numbers. Most instructions have the 4-byte form 'OP X Y Z', where each of OP, X, Y, and Z is a single 8-bit byte. For example, if OP is the code for ADD the meaning is "X=Y+Z"; i.e., "Set register X to the contents of register Y plus the contents of register

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