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Hardware

Tom on the Athlon (And an Intel Conspiracy?) 138

Posted by CmdrTaco from the live-from-area-51 dept.
ninjaz writes "Tom from Tom's Hardware has published his first Athlon Motherboard Reviews, where he states "I know for a fact that Asus has designed a highly excellent Athlon-motherboard" , which Asus has mysteriously deciding against selling. This amidst rumors of Intel threats of artificial BX chipset shortages. " You conspiracy nuts are gonna love this one. It does look fishy.
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Tom on the Athlon (And an Intel Conspiracy?) More

Tom on the Athlon (And an Intel Conspiracy?)

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  • Actually, there are a couple other of ways you can put pressure on competitors which the government considers illegal. One of the most well known ones is called "predatory pricing," a situation in which a manufacturer with deep pockets sells its goods at a loss for the sake of driving a competitor out of the market. That's essentially what Netscape accused Microsoft of when IE was first released (MS responded that they were simply making the product a part of the OS, which begs the question: why make a version for Mac?). To make matters worse, Microsoft is also accused of the coercive kind of behavior you describe, by forbidding OEMs to include Netscape on their machines.

    Bucket58 is right, though. If Intel were just keeping hands-off and letting the two processors fight it out, there'd be nothing to say. The allegation is that they're going to make life hard for MoBo makers who support the K7 by saying that there's a "shortage" of a critical component of the board, and favoring compliant companies with lower prices.

    Oh, by the way, Skelly: "Now write that 100 times by morning, or I'll cut your balls off." What a great movie. :)
  • I'm not ready to believe this just on Tom's say-so, but it does seem odd that so few major mobo manufacturers seem to be turning out Slot-A boards to take advantage of the demand for what looks to be a truly superior CPU.

    I've always had good luck with AMD CPUs (not being a demanding gamer, I always found them quite satisfactory) and the only Intel CPU I ever bought (486 DX-4 100) was bad.

    I was going to at least consider a PIII for my next upgrade, but if this rumour turns out to be remotely true, I'll stick with AMD. If Intel can't get by on the excellence of its product and service to its customers, I don't want to deal with them...I'll take an honest second-rater any day over a company that feels it necessary to use every trick in the book, clean or dirty, to maintain its overwhelming market share... [which is not to say that the Athlon is a second rate product...I suspect the main problem with it will be lack of easy availability...]
  • I Agree to a degree. Here is what I see. I am some Motherboard manufacturer and the majority of my profits are from Motherboards using Intel chipsets. Intel may suddenly have a shortage because I want to profit from the "Superior" AMD chip. The issues: Can I make a stable board for the AMD chip in time to offset the possible shortage? Will there be enough AMD chips out there so poeple will buy my board? Say I assume yes to both then: Will AMD continue to produce quality and quantity for "x" number of years? If they (AMD) fail then can I establish a relationship with Intel again that would be as profitable as it was before the breakup? You get my point. If I were the only motherboard manufacture I would have the power. But with multiple motherboard manufacturers in the marketplace can I afford to take a risk of losing marketshare?
    Now here is the "beauty" of being an 800 pound gorilla. I don't have to do hardly anything to elicit this response. All that is required is that I have done it a few times before as an example for everyone else. Fear should take care of the rest.
  • The story may be accurate. I have a question to others who may know, Has shortages in key components to Motherboard manufacturers occured in the past about the time a competitor released an adequate competing product? I am not being sarcastic, I don't know the history.

  • I am actually running both NT and Linux currently on my DUAL Intel box. However I have recently started running NT in a vmware session under Linux, and the vmware session takes lots of system resources, in particular CPU. One of My DUAL CPU's is always at about 95% (they sway the task back and forth) when running this so I am looking at gettin ga more powerful machine. Thus the Athelon. If they have quads at a reasonable price, I may get a quad 600.

    Eventually I am going to have FreeBSD and Solaris in vmware, and may at times want to run several virtual machines at once. Each OS has it's +/-.

    Vmware however is more than emulation it is actually a computer within a computer. The guest OS uses its own drivers, for the most part. For example when I did NT dial up networking in the vmware session Linux ppp module was never loaded and Linux did not have access to the internet, yet NT did, and NT was the guest OS. This is good, cause it means that I can use NT drivers or Linux drivers without ever haveing to reboot the parent OS. When they improve there sound and add bidirectional parallel port interface, I'll be able to use my web cam without rebooting. Until support for my device makes its way into the kernel fully. I am estatic(sp?) about vmware. I will be buying it next month. This allows me to run al those win apps, without having to boot back and forth between window and Linux. Truthefull, the main thing I like about my Linux box is my X setup. Window maker I like the look of the windows, and the config tool, kfm, makes browsing dir's easy, and gnomepanel, I like the pager and the clock. I just can't get this look and feel in NT.

  • Back in the day, Tom was the only game in town, and I picked up a ton of knowledge from his site. Unfortunately, with the influx of a lot of competition in the hardware site game, it seems the Tom resorts to smack talking and rumor mongering to stand out from the crowd. Evidently he can't cut it as a straightforward reviewer/journalist, so he has to start some shit to get people to his site.

    Sad, sad little man.

  • You should be able to get dual Athlon's inside of 8 months, according to a source of mine that wishes to remain un-named:P. In my mind if you're running a decent OS (NT if its set up correctly, or preferable Linux) there is absolutly no reason EVER to buy a single CPU system again. Thats why my next system is going to be a dual Athlon. I personally have always been one to support the underdog, don't ask why.


  • WHAT THE HELL? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    --Ok. I'm hearing a lot of "oh, but tom's hwg sucks... don't listen to it, blah blah". That's great and everything, but there is something much more important going on. We ALL know that the Athlon is a better performer than anything intel has. Many reviews exist, and prove this point. Abit, Asus and others are NOT SUPPORTING AMD at all. Who cares what Tom's HWG says, or what your opinion of that is. As consumers, do we WANT most of the major board manufacturers to not support the best performer out there? Maybe it would be different if it were a different platform.. (take alpha for instance ;)). But AMD has all the positives and none of the negatives. Heck, they even win on price. All of you out there who care about the spirit of competition.. e-mail these board manufacturers. Tell them what you think. Tell them you want the best performance, and that you don't care about the 'intel inside' crap. I know it sounds all 'doomsday-ish'... but if we let intel control the market, things like the P-III ID code and inflated processor prices are going to stay. Do you guys remember what it used to be like before AMD and Cyrix jumped into the game? $1000+ for a good high-speed processor? Only after some fierce competition, did intel decide to release a low-cost, good performer, the Celeron. We need to fight this, and unlike the problem with Microsoft products, consumers are taking NO risks by switching brands. After all... my software, and my company's software, and my friends' software will run fine on an AMD. Lets make it happen.--T
  • Im not sure on this, but I think predatory pricing is described as when you sell something at cost (less than its real value) to force someone out of business. Selling for more than the real value is not that way because you are only asking for a little more than what you paid in labor and materials to make it in the first place.
  • >

    You touch on a relevant point here, but in the wrong way. Companies are not moral or immoral, they are amoral by design (as is all of economics, a point which every economist will remind you of as justification for their Machiavellian opinions.) In order to induce a company to take something that ostensibly represents a "moral" stance, one must make it economically feasible for them to do so. And here ends the catechism.
  • Hear hear. Way to the nail on the head. "nonethical" practices, Intel monopoly ... who cares? (and by the way, why is it such a surprise that MB manufactures might back down at making boards that support the competition? Everytime you eat at a restaurant, they only serve Coke /or/ Pepsi, rarely both ... )

    The simple fact is that the AMD processors, as the market stands right now, are the fastest, cheapest (?), best processors out there. I've seen nothing to dispute these claims, and so far, no "hidden catches" in the purchase of an AMD processor.
  • we've been trained as kids to do this, why should things change now.

    BTW: www.m-w.com [m-w.com] bookmark it, memorize it, use it when unsure.

    It's "rampant", 'Rampent' sounds like some pagan absolution ritual

    On topic opinion: Intel is in business to make money. You figure the rest out.
  • ...Tom "I know more about Quake3 than ID" , or is that Tom "Everyone else is on the take from 3dfx/Nvidia/etc..."

    The guy hardly seems like the poster boy for rational thought.
  • Well at any rate he seems "passionate" about the matter...

    On another note, does anyone know if Athlon's are gonna be able to do SMP?

    cheers,

  • FTC (Score:1)

    by skelly ( 38870 )
    A monopoly is a monopoly is a monopoly. It's time for the Federal Trade Commission to reopen a lawsuit against Intel. Doesn't Motorola or IBM make chipsets aswell? There has to be alternatives.
  • Hi,

    >On another note, does anyone know if Athlon's are gonna be able to do SMP?

    They will, and the design will allow for far better SMP systems then intel's design.
    Don't know where, but i saw a table yesterday with some data in it that suggested that a dual K7 isn't to far away.

    Bas
  • Anybody know of sites with Athlon numbers for HPC type benchmarks (Linpack-100x100, stream_d, SPECint95, SPECfp95, etc.)? Tom's data isn't terribly useful for determining if Athlon's a good processor for Beowulf-style HPC clusters...
    --Troy
  • I'm under the impression that the Athlon will do SMP, but the current chipset doesn't.
  • That's the Freedom CPU, and it's located at . However the site seems to be down at the moment. [f-cpu.tux.orghttp]

  • Ok, all you people that like to bash Tom's site should either put up or shut up. I've seen lots of posts so far claiming one thing or the other about him and his site. The ones I definately agree with are things like hard to read and slow. As for bashing his english skills, you people are flaming a guy from GERMANY about his english language skills.

    As for how non-technical he is, why not actually POST a url of a better site? I haven't seen that here yet. I'm not saying his site is the greatest since I haven't reviewed lots of other technical sites. I do believe he does a good job at reviewing hardware for gaming systems and deserves credit for being honest enough to say when he doesn't know something.

  • If the site was updated every month it would be better than it is.

    There are areas where the info is a year old. That's roadkillsville in the PC market.
  • This is also how irresponsible "journalists" (read: anybody with an HTML editor can make claims of being a journalist these days) like Blatt Grudge get taken down a few dozen notches.
  • I've send an email to ASUSTeK asking if anyone there can clarify/confirm/deny this story. When/if I get a reply, be sure it'll end up here.

    "Cake or death!" (E. Izzard)
  • (and my grammar was slightly better in the email, too. s/send/sent/ *blush*)

    "Cake or death!" (E. Izzard)
  • www.anandtech.com

    ..is a fairly respected site. I use it on occasion. Anand seems pretty dedicated, as well as being humble and level headed. (traits many claim that Tom lacks)

    As for the K7 ... I've never had doubts about it. I have always liked AMD, and they seem to have produced a truly superior design this go round. What with Merced-delays, they may be able to make a dent in Intel.

    That is, if they can get motherboard manufacturers to cooperate...

    --Lenny
  • Interesting. When I was picking components to use in LHS computers, Tom's site was one of my most valuable resources. I found that the information there was generally pretty close to what I found myself when I evaluated things myself.

    -E
  • His reviews of the K6-2 and K6-3 were not complimentary, especially slamming the slow floating point units (and noting that a Pentium 233 MMX did floating point faster than a K6-2/333). If he's on the take from AMD, it's a new phenomenon.

    _E
  • You say $100 dollars a processor like that's cheap. In reality, that's very expensive. The cost of physically manufacturing a PIII is around $50-$60. The Athlon is about the same. The K6 series is more in the $40-$50 range. There are also designs like the winchip that are made to be cheap. We're talking around $30. Like software, what you're paying for is the development cost (only for hardware those costs are much higher). If you had a processor that cost $100 to make and you sold it for $110 you would NOT make a profit.
  • HotRail is doing 4 way and 8 way SMP for the athlon.
    http://www.hotrail.com/products/index.htm

    just imagine...
  • If Intel creates a chip shortage for its motherboards, that would only accelerates the adoption AMD more as people would turn to them to fill the gap!
  • What exactly "blows" about it? It doesn't support any fancy new features like DDR ram or anything, but it was never intended to. It was designed simply to ensure that the Athlon had a chipset for its release. It does support UDMA 66, making it more full featured than intel's current top of the line chipset (the BX). It certainly doesn't have any speed problems. The AGP problems which plagued super 7 chipsets are non-existent in the Irongate. Why do you say it "blows"? And AMD plans to build on it to add new features (such as SMP, DDR ram, AGP 4x, etc.). It seems like a fine chipset to me.
  • I've hated Intel's monopoly for a long time and have avoided them ever since.

    On principle, I always avoid buying from monopolistic companies if I can help it. When a monopoly wields power over me against my will, I do not quietly accept it. Corporations should not be kings, and we should not be their subjects.

  • Technically no nothing forces Intel to do business with any other companies, however if they stop doing business with a company to pressure them into not doing business with a competitor then that's a violation of Anti-Trust Laws.
  • I was just picking a rounded off number. Besides, if you could get an Athlon or PIII 600 today for $100, how many of us here at /. would be lining up for that one?
  • They may not have moral obligations, but as they (corporations) are entities formed under the law (a law that was specifically engineered to allow for their existence), you better believe that they must act according to the law. IFF they don't, they get spanked sooner or later by DOJ. Or, if they have enough money to grease the sphincters of certain state attorneys general (*cough* Dell....*cough* Texas...) said attorneys general drop off the anti-trust lawsuits.

    When I move to Mars, I'm not going to have any of this collusive corrupt back-door action bullshit. It really annoys me. The law will make sense, and people will follow it because it makes sense.
  • Everyone seems to be missing the point. The goal posts have shifted.
    Go to the following article on Forbes digital.. ... http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/99/aug/0809/mu11.h tm

    It tells of how at the last hour, Gateway decided not to ship K7 based machines, for "purely commercial reasons".... ... read Intel offered us a good price or first in line for the Merced if we ditched AMD. Where is the FTC when you need them.


    When people buy computers these days, more often than not, they buy the box, ie Dell, IBM, HP etc etc, largely because that is where the buck stops, and the after sales support begins.

    Only the geeks actually care about what is in the box... .. when I told my mom I could build a better system together for less than she was quoted by Dell, she said that she had read that Dell computers were the best, so she was going to get one..

    Getting support from the big players is like getting endorsement in the sports equipment business, and Intel is trying to sign up exclusive aggreements with as many stars as possible to lock out AMD.

    Intel knows this, Linux proponents know this, which is why it is important to get the big players in the box market to support/provide boxes with your products in them.

    In the past, AMD shot itself in the foot, by not being able to meet demand for chips... Now that they have that, the quality and the speed problems sorted out, INTEl is shooting them.... ... if there are no motherboards, or not too many motherboard choices, there is likely to be less support for the K7 ( I agree, athlon is a silly name).


  • Not to fan the conspiracy flames but it's kind of wierd that the companies they list by name are the same ones that have Slot-A boards? Then again maybe I'm just paranoid.
  • Wow! That amazes me. After reading a huge thread here about what to do with a 486 besides let it collect dust, I'm reading posts saying that year-old PCs are "roadkillsville".

    Personally, I'm currently running a K6-200 and a Cyrix 6x86-P200+. I don't have the money to stay on the bleeding edge. I'm always at least a year behind it. So sites like Tom's are quite useful information to people like me.

    Tom's Hardware Guide is not always the best site for bleeding-edge information. But it's a great reference site for the market that I'm in.

  • If you have problems with Tom's, or are just looking for another look at hardware, you can read any of the following sites: http://www.anandtech.com http://www.hardocp.com http://www.sharkyextreme.com http://www.cpureview.com http://www.firingsquad.com I read all of these regulary, and find that if one site doesn't have what I'm looking for another one will. There are dozens of good hardware sites out there, you don't need to limit yourself to just one. These are only a sampling of my favorites. Also, yes the Athlon will be SMP capable, and since it uses the Alpha bus should be able to do 4x or 8x systems far better than XEON.
  • The "Irongate" does the job that it was meant to do -- it fills the gap until better chipsets come out. AMD has never intended to dominate the Athlon chipset market with the "Irongate". They just needed a chipset on the market when the Athlon was released, so they build a quick and dirty one.

    When VIA, SiS, Opti, etc. come out with better chipsets, I'm sure AMD will step out of the market. That's what they've intended to do all along.

  • Ars Technica seem to have just the right level of information, mixed in with some self-deprecatory humour sadly lacking on Tom's site.

    Don't get me wrong, I still read Tom's every now and then, but since he got all corporate, the articles have become unnecessarily wieldy, technical and bogged down with ads. Ars is clean, and informative without resorting to statistical overload (I mean, how many *game* video benchmarks do your have to perform...and why include the ones which were obviously CPU limited???)

    Anand is alright, I just can't take a 16 yr old kid that seriously, but he's too verbose and tries to be a bit too worldy wise sometimes...in a few years though, he'll really kick ass I think. Bright kid :)

    Daniel.
  • Who cares?
    Coppermine CPU- still not rated as fast as the K7, right? If so, it'll be close.
    AGP 4x- so do the AMD boards- did you read the article?
    Elimination of ISA- I don't want that (but one is fine). I still run my NIC's off ISA, as well as most of my soundcards. The precious 4 or 5 PCI slots in almost all mutlimedia machines I build are quickly used up. Fine if you're starting new, but I LIKE reusing my parts during an upgrade. I've got 6 systems using 4 year old ISA SB16's and ISA 10BaseT NICs...
    Memory- ya, they finally and just submitted to the fact that Rambus was too expensive and flakey yet, so they HAD to go PC133- as VIA and others said last year. How much ya wanna bet the Rambus spec will change enough by the time it's stable that the VC820 Rambus slots won't use them anyway (ok, unlikely, but screw Rambus ;).
  • Tom Pabs has NOT stated the above. Prove me wrong if you can.

    Sure, Tom has as most humans made misstakes and overreacted,
    but has ALWAYS postet corrections and apologies.

    And it's no wonder that Tom knows about Asus K7 motherboard,
    after all he seems to have close contacts at Asus.

    Read his stuff critically with a open mind and you'll see what I mean.

    If Intel is the cause for Asus not selleing their motherboard
    ( wich seems very likely ) it's not very spectaular at all.

    Hey, AMD has a goal to have a third of the workstation-market by 2001,
    wich gives Intel about half the market ( depending on what happens to
    the other CPU-chip makers ). If a motherboard-maker feels that Intel
    don't like their product and may be hostile 'cause of it, it's a little more
    diplomatic to wait a while and see.

    Heck, Intel don't need to brake the law at all, the just send a PM to Asus
    an say something like: "Maybe we should talk about how many BX-chipsets
    we will be able to ship to you this month" That would scare the hell out
    of any moterboard-maker 'cause maybe 60%-99% of their revenue comes
    from BX-motherboards.


    Rant stops here.
  • You say:
    >How many mobos would Asus need to sell to make a
    >new design profitable?

    Asus has already SUNK the money to design the board; it would be unprofitable NOT to sell it. There is obviously some reason WHY they aren't selling the board and Intel is the prime suspect.

    And furthermore, you say:
    >...and can AMD guarantee a large enough
    >production run?

    We'll see. Banks have a tendancy to invest in businesses with products that are in high demand. Athlon appears to me to be such a product.

    Now, I will add something:
    The Athlon, with the EV6 bus design, is just starting out at the beginning of it's capable operating range; the Pentium is topping out. The only thing keeping the Athlon out of the 200Mhz bus speed and above is the lack of affordable memory that will operate at such high speeds. Athlon is going to drive faster memory architecture development. Athlon is going to be the processor of choice for the forseable future (1.5 - 2years) until the Merced or McKinley chips debut. Athlon is likely to take over the multiprocessor marketshare of Intel due to it's better multiprocessor capabilities (point to point topology). These are all very good reasons, for the one company that has the most to lose, to play dirty.

    In the future, don't hobble the racehorse!
  • I agree with that attackin Id wasn't wery bright,
    BUT he did apologise didn't he?
    I don't say that an apology makes everything good
    again, but it helps.

    I can come to think of a NUMBER of sites that NEVER
    admitts anything.

    How do you think Tom is subjective? In what way?
    Towards AMD or against 3dfx?

    Martin Widmark
    Linköping Sweden
  • I feel it neccessary to reply to myself and point out I was KIDDING!! I just wanted to illustrate how easy it is to invent a mildly plausible conspiracy given a limited scope of information.

  • In Tom's defense... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I got the impression that Tom was actually NOT stating that there IS dirty play from Intel. I recall him writing something to the effect of (this is not a direct quote) "Either Intel is free of sin or plays dirty ... ... I will not rest until I've gotten to the bottom of this". In other words, he is admitting to the possibility that Intel is not involved in foul play. Granted, his speculating on the subject is bound to be taken as direct accusations by many readers who are not careful or just otherwise want to jump to conclusions. That, however, is more a problem of the individual reader than Tom. Just my opinion of course.
  • Oh hadn't you heard? Those benchmarks were FAKE.

    http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990819S00 08

    Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, Benchmarks. . . political party platforms.

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
    -jafac's law
  • I hope this is a message to all you lassez-faire assholes out there. Here we have a CLEAR CUT case of a BETTER product, getting trounced by a larger, competitor that just happens to have more cash and influence.

    Sure, Intel is a business, and their business is to make themselves and their stockholders rich. But it's at the expense of a better world for the rest of us, so if all you're interested in is money, then go to www.forbesdot.org, and post your libertarian nonsense there. For the rest of us, who are interested in technology, and advancing the state of the art, we'll keep bashing intel here.

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
    -jafac's law
  • Coke/Pepsi? Nobody gives a shit about fizzy, buzzy sugar water. We all get our caffeine high from Jolt anyway.
    But this is CPUs. The lifeblood of computers, the heart of the geek, and this is important dammit!

    or maybe I need to switch to decaf.

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
    -jafac's law
  • Sorry , did the Anonymous Coward say something? I answer I could find 200 people within 2 seconds who agree with. F
  • Actualy, for those guys that says Tom's out to crush and bash the other sites, Tom is the one who first referred me to anandtech.com as another excellent hardware resource, so y'all are full of guano.

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
    -jafac's law
  • >Money speaks much louder than whining True, but sometimes whining (not the best word) gets other people's money talking too.
  • Those were for AMD's benchmarks that they have up on their own site of course their fake but the other reviews tell the same story albeit the numbers are a little less impressive then AMD's but still better. Nobody trust's a company's benchmark of it's own product.
  • The main diffrent in the chipset is how it works internally. There are many performace sapping gliches in the BX-chipset that is non-existent in Irongate.

    And as stated, Irongate is just "temporary", to ensure that K7 had a chipset.

    VIA has their own ready right now, and will probably ship before the end of the year ( if they dare, but maybe they don't fear Intel that much ).

    Hotrail is devenloping 4-way and 8-way chipsets, and it's here the EV6-bus will really prove it's worth.

    Each processor has it own hiway to the cipset in contraire to Intels GTL+ bus, there all CPU's has to cluster on the same hiway. Not to metion that EV6's hiway has about 80% higer banwith.


    Martin Widmark
    Linköping Sweden

  • I think you mis-read the article you posted about. It says that AMD had it in their performance guide that it was optimized and they compaired the optimized versus the un-optimized.

    Maybe you should go back and re-read the article. Because it also says that other test firms say the Athlon generally outperforms the P3.

    BTW: you should always take numbers/stats/etc given by the company selling the product with a grain of salt and look to independent testers.


    --

  • I agree with you Sir.

    Why does a site HAVE to be updatet every other second? I also go for the meat, not the "appering-everywhere-news".

    I have used Tom's site for reference, and it has worked fine. And when I have found diffrences, I have sent an e-mail with CONSTRUCTIVE critics, and usually got a response back.

    Keeping "old" informtion open is very valuable, but it's not always possible. Later on such information is called history, and then are even more valuable. Hey, everyone can learn from history, how many people out there really knows human history?


    Martin Widmark

    P.S.
    Two of my machines are 486's ( Linux works fine )
    and another is a K6-200 ( Linux very sweet ).
    But my power system is a dual P2@450 and there Linux gets wild as a virgin on the hay-loft.
  • I'll echo the rest of the crowd. Tom's site is slow, hard to read, full of arrogant attitude, and occassionally he posts inaccurate misinformation and unproven rumors as if they were factual. I liked Tom's site a few years ago, but in the last year he seems to spend more time flaming people and talking about prime vacation spots than posting useful hardware info. This is an interesting story, but I'm unimpressed with the fact that most people seem to taken this unproven rumor as fact despite the unreliable source. I like Anand's. http://www.anandtech.com/ Thresh's Firing Squad does very good hardware reviews, but they don't do as many as I would like. http://www.firingsquad.com SharkyExtreme is good - although they, too, have a tendancy to print rumors ahead of facts. http://www.sharkyextreme.com Agn3D's hardware site has pretty good hardware reviews - although not, IMO, the quality of those sites listed above. http://www.agnhardware.com Then there's plenty of smaller sites that don't update as regularly that still contain useful hardware information... lostcircuits, jeff's hardware site. There's plenty of links to these sites and more at Anand's site.
  • Intel doesn't want to destroy AMD...

    Think, what would happen then? Well AMD would go for sale, and Intel can't buy them ( FTC! ).

    So maybe Motorola or IBM would buy them ( AMD is to valuable to simply vanish ) and what would happen then? Intel's worst nightmare, another company with good chips and lots of finacial backing.

    Or am I missing something? It is the only reason I can think of why AMD still exists as a lone company ( The idea comes from Kalaran at http://www.jc-news.com/pc/absorb/kalaran/intelstri kesback.htm )


    Thanks for the word
    Martin Widmark
  • I think you folks are not realizing this fact: the Intel 440BX chipset is a VERY old design by 1999 standards. After all, we saw it first way back in April 1998 on the original Intel SE440BX motherboard, which is a LONG time ago given the pace motherboard technology advances?

    You are forgetting that Intel is about to release the new "Vancouver" (VC820) motherboard with the i820 "Camino" chipset. The VC820 motherboard will sport things such as support for the "Coppermine" PIII CPU (with 256 KB of CPU-speed L2 cache), AGP 4X support, the final elimination of ISA slots and most importantly, support for both PC133 and Rambus RDRAM DIMM's.

    The latest I've heard is that the VC820 motherboard will be released on September 23, 1999; this means by Christmas, most high-end systems will be using this motherboard or equivalents from other motherboard manufacturers.
  • Nowhere in my post did I say that year old PCs are 'roadkill'. Hardware Review websites need to review hardware that is actually available at vendors, not hardware that's a year old and hasn't been available for six months. I bought a new Pentium III motherboard a month ago. I figured "what the heck, you already spent your $$ on it" and went to Tom's to see what the pundits would have to say.

    The only review was of the previous generation of motherboarboard. A review dated back last fall.

    If Tom's Hardware only aims to review hardware available solely at places like www.computersurplusoutlet.com it should be made clear up front on the site.

    BTW- 486's are good for lots of things. I have tons of them. And five generations of Pentiums too. All have their value.

  • Not necessarily.. The corporate world is very shy about trying new things. And, the general public is also very tuned to commercials on their TVs.

    The Intel Inside with the dancing bunny people and Homer Simpson as spokespersons has given Intel a huuuge amount of brand recognition.

    People look at AMD and say "Who's that?"

    Also, on the subject of BX shortages... Intel is seriously trying to push the new 810 and 820 chipsets. People havent been biting. So, what better way to switch than to create a "shortage" of the BX chipset.
    For those of you that don't remember, the HX chipset was the best chipset for Pentium processors, but Intel stopped making the HX in favor of the VX (total garbage) chipset and the TX (not much better) chipset. Intel will do whatever they deem necessary to get people off of the BX chip.
  • Regardless of what Intel does to motherboard manufacturers, AMD is still going to rock with the Athlon. There are other motherboard manufacturers out there cranking out boards other than just Asus. Just for an example, Biostar-USA has one right on their site - http://www.biostar-usa.com - look for yourself. I run a Biostar motherboard at home, we run them here at my place of employment for servers - they haven't given us any trouble. Plus, I'd just like to know where our good buddy Tom got his information for all the claims he made in that article. Has anyone been able to verify some of his claims?

    Personally, I'm going to relax. AMD's Athlon will still come out in full force, motherboards are already available, the chips probably are too if you know where to look. Everyone should just chill about the whole situation and laugh and cheer as Intel slips behind the awesome power of Athlon.
  • And? The first BX-board saw the light in April 1998... an concidering the pace coputer industry has, it's the a very old design..... New boards isn't very diffrent to those who came out six month ago.

    But enough of that, if you have already bought the board, then I guess that you can wait for a "closing" BX-board rewiev.... or why not take a look at the K7-board rewiev that Tom has... you hardly can call that old! :-)

    Seriously, I have also been frustrated over the lack of review of new BX-boards, but there are not much new about them really.

    But there should have been a roundup by now, I certainly agree with that.

  • Bad Tom! And bad Rob! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is how rumours get started, and propagated. There has been NO evidence to support an Intel conspiracy, nor did Tom provide any! Granted, through its contracts, Intel has a strong hold on the motherboard manufactureres, but this has nothing to do with efforts to crush the K7 (I won't say athlon... sounds silly.) Shame on you, tom, for spreading rumors without proof. And shame on you, Rob, for focusing on tom's obviously baseless accusations. The reviews are more than enough for an acceptable story. No need to resort to sleaze-journalism tactics in order to increase readership. (BTW : If you didn't write the summary, and just posted what was sent to you, knock the finger-waving down a notch. Sorry... ;))
  • I thought there were many non-Intel PC chipsets out there. VIA is the biggest, but there are several. Last week when I was installing a computer I just built, I poped in the motherboard's driver CD. Since the CD was made for all that company's board, there were drivers for maybe 5-10 chipsets. It was a K6 machine, however. But I know other companies make chipsets for Intel processors.
  • A while back, I heard about an open source project which aimed to design a microprocessor. I think it had some imput by Carmack of ID Software. Anyone know what happened to it? I'm assuming it was freezed because it lacked the funding and support. Maybe AMD could really kick intel by opening up their processor specs in some sort of open source license. Yes, I know, it would be quite a silly economic idea for AMD - but maybe a smaller manufacturer could give it a go?
  • First, before we all go screaming "Death to Intel" it would behoove us to confirm that Intel actually has done something wrong (which, at first blush, it sounds like they did). Independent confirmation (e.g. another manufacturer who was pressured in the same way coming forward) would be nice.

    Second, if this is confirmed and Intel is playing dirty (which wouldn't surprise anyone I don't think), we as Linux users have alot of other excellent hardware alternatives, including (but not limited to) the Dec Alpha, Sparc, and Power PC platforms. If this really upsets you, use one of the non-intel alternatives to run your OS, and let Intel know exactly why you've done so. Money speaks much louder than whining -- if unethical behavior has a negative impact on a company's bottom line, you can be reasonably sure that the behavior will change.

    On the other hand, Intel has (probably correctly) surmised that any outrage we may feel will be quickly buried beneath the euphoria and hype as we all run out to get our hands on the latest Merced, whenever it's released. In a society bent on rampent consumerism, political, ethical, and moral concerns vanish beneath the glitz of a new toy claiming our attention in the next 30 second spot.
  • Tom's little site has been printing rubbish for a long time.

    Sorry, but no-one has believed a word of it for a long time, theres no point making headines from his rubbish.

    F
  • Sounds like a job for...D.O.J.Man!

    But seriously, are we going to see an era of processor brand specific PC clone motherboards? Kind of defeats the whole purpose of being able to mix and match.

  • This is also how legitimate news stories get broken (witness the Monica Lewdinsky affair and the Drudge Report): by airing rumours and investigating them. If it's but a rumour, it gets shot down. If not, then perhaps some other /.er has info they can post about it. So relax and watch the discussion commence.
  • If your going to complain about other peoples ignorance...
  • Tom may be on track but I'll never know. I gave up trying to read his article because I got tired of reading a few paragraphs of text and then having to click and wait for another screen full of ads and frames to load to read the next page. Never finished reading his original Athlon review for the same reason.
  • Hmmm. How many mobos would Asus need to sell to make a new design profitable? ...and can AMD guarantee a large enough production run?

    The one thing about Intel is that it _will_ sell. Apparently, they can toss in processor ID weirdness and a mostly-incremental set of improvements and practically create another brand, and it will _still_ sell like mad. They could probably paint their CPUs orange, top 'em off with purple heat sinks shaped like drunk, lustful goats, and _still_ sell 'em -- in vast quantities, even if leading reviewers publicly question Grove's sanity.

    AMD's ability to pump out a large volume has been repeatedly questioned. Not its ability to generate demand -- there's enough of that at the techno-geek level, most likely -- but to fulfill it...
  • There are lots and lots of hardware sites, but the best one I've seen is Ars Technica.

    http://www.arstechnica.com [arstechnica.com]

    -Ed

  • One possibility is that Asus decided to hold back for the VIA chipset which will be out RSN - the AMD750 is an interim chipset and Asus may not have wanted to get stuck with old inventory. They may have been spooked by the chipset errata too.

    OTOH, Intel hasn't done everything they could to crush AMD yet - otherwise we'd see Celery chips with 100mhz FSB - a C400/100 is faster than a 466/66 in many things. :)

  • Tom has fallen out of grace as of lately. (It's his own fault, really.) I used to use his site as my primary for "in depth" info a few years ago. He may be biased in some ways, but as long as you use your own brain to be critical that's not too much of a problem.

    He still has some interesting articles and stuff, but I generally go to other sites for the same info. Nowadays there are so many in the genre that there's no point to use one that is a bit too subjective.

    And going up against id was just plain stupid. Can we say credibility-suicide?
  • I'd buy a heatsink shaped like a drunk lustful goat.
  • I hope this guy is smoking something because I want a K7 reeeeaaaalll badly *drools*.. ooh.. kayy seven.. hmm, nice, ppur-purty,. gimme. ;)
  • Know what would have been a perfect reply? Quoting the last paragraph of his article verbatim. The one before his, ah, retraction.

    Wow. I've seen plenty of opinionated articles from Tom before, but I always figured he was factual if a little hot-headed. I'm done with him now, and won't be recommending tomshardware any more to people looking for information before buying.
  • AMD fights just as dirty. They modified the DLL in 3DMark so that it would produce higher benchmarks on an Athlon system, and then compared those benchmarks to the normal 3DMark on Intel based systems. It goes both ways.
  • I'm saying at a loss, and you're saying for cost, but we're pretty much saying the same thing here, I think. The idea is that it's when a company sells a product so cheap that it can't make any money off it, just for the sake of driving someone else out of business.
  • Given that the "Coppermine" PIII will have 256K CPU-speed cache, I expect performance to be a bit higher than the current "Katmai" core PIII's. That plus PC133 SDRAM/Rambus RDRAM support will result in quite a bit higher performance.

    It'll be VERY interesting to see how long before VIA, SiS or Acer Labs delivers the Athlon motherboard chipsets that will support PC133 SDRAM, Rambus RDRAM, ATA66 and AGP 4X. I expect the first motherboards with these new chipsets to be available by late this year or early 2000.

    An Athlon system with PC133/RDRAM, ATA66 and AGP 4X will be lightning-fast, that's to be sure!
  • I agree with you totally. The site is a little more readable, though, if you use an ad-blocker like interMute.
  • can I get a DUAL AMD processor system thou?
  • "A monopoly is a monopoly is a monopoly. "

    Not exactly true, at least the way I think you're putting it. A monopoly that earns it's monopoly status by fair practices is not illegal. In a hypothetical situation, say you built a processor that runs faster than any processor now and than any processor made in the next ten years but only cost you 100 dollars/processor to make. You decide to sell it at 110 dollars/processor. You don't force boardmakers into signing unfair agreements or partake in other illegal practices. You soon take over the entire processor market and other processor makers go out of business. You didn't do anything wrong, you were just beating the competition with a better product (nothing wrong with that). Once you get to that status, you are usually observed (by the govt, competition, etc. etc.) but if you are doing nothing illegal, they technically can't do anything to ya. Now if Intel starts doing things to keep boardmakers from using AMD chips, then I say go ahead and go after them, but until them, wait and see.
  • What if /Tom/ is on the take from AMD? From the tone of the story, that'd make sense. See? Conspiracies arn't that hard to propagate .. ;)
  • Hi,

    >can I get a DUAL AMD processor system thou?

    Not yet, my guess, 2-3 months

    Bas
  • Eventually, if motherboard and chipset manufacturers support it. The EV6 bus is well designed for multiprocessor.

    That's the big question, though. Will motherboard manufacturers support it? Whether or not Intel is doing anything "wrong", motherboard manufacturers seem wary of releasing Athlon boards. Personally, I think that'll change when VIA gets their chipset out. The AMD "Irongate" chipset blows, and AMD knows it.

    Rob
  • Use a banner filter, I don't load a page without one.
  • Actually Tom caught some heat not all that long ago when he began running an nVidia logo saying his site was "nVidia approved" or something to that effect. He lost alot of credibility in many people's eyes with that move. Since then, I've taken everything he's had to say with a grain of salt, that is, when he manages to get around to posting something new and/or worthwhile. Tom sells a few books and gets too lazy to update his site...

  • BTW (Score:3)

    by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Thursday August 19, 1999 @03:51AM (#1738364) Homepage
    Everybody, lets scare Intel. If I have to see one more commercial with men in silvery suits dancing because their processor is so gosh darn fun, or commercial that tells me my 'processor makes the internet faster', I'm gunna cry. The word on the street is that the Merced is going to do your laundry and pay your bills for you too.

    The K7 has scored very very well in benchmarking so far (all reviews I've seen have beaten out the P3, and MSI/FIC/Giga's MBoards are apparently just as fast as AMDs referance board), so it looks like AMD has done exactly what it said it was going to do - increase FP performance. If I were in the market, I'd buy a K7 when they came out. Not only because they look like they're the head of the pack right now, but I really believe AMD deserves a pat on the back. From the looks of it, they assesed their weaknesses, and fixed them.
  • Why not have a look at Thresh's Firingsquad [firingsquad.com] then? ... very good reviews and up-to-date news too. No, I don't work for them.. I just like the site.

    /. and the firingsquad are two sites I try to check regularly. .. of course there's always the inevitable overlap in the stories though.
  • Hmm.. yea :/ .. .that's a scary thought indeed .. it's always been great for people who like to roll (build) their own PC and with hardware becoming cheaper all the time it can (hopefully) only get better.

    D.o.J Man to the rescue !!! (if it comes to it)
  • ..... that anti-Intel FUD is alive and well in Tom's hardware.

    I received a reply from ASUSTek's sales team this morning as follows:

    "It'll be released by the end of the month."

    No more, no less. "Nuff zed," as you might say.

    "Cake or death!" (E. Izzard)
  • If you think it only gets updated like once a year then you are definatly out of touch, it used to sure but now its more llike daily. Sure some parts have not been touched but then is your web site always totaly up to date...
    The more sources of information we have to look through the better the overall picture we can get by comparing stories and sifting out what we think is correct
  • There is an update [tomshardware.com] to Tom's Hardware Guide detailing the latest developments re: the ASUSTeK board.



    "Cake or death!" (E. Izzard)

  • If I was a motherboard manufacturer and Intel told me that there would be a difficulty in getting the product in the next fews months, what would that make me do?

    I think I would be looking to depend more on the Athlon chipsets, where there would be no shortage.

    The only way an announced shortage of Intel chipsets would get me to drop the Athlon motherboard, would be if Intel said something to me like, "Look, just between you and me, I can ensure that you'll have all the chipsets you'll need if you just won't ship your Athlon motherboards"

  • I believe you are thinking of AMD's curent offerings, the K6, etc. They will do SMP but it's based on OpenPIC instead of APIC. The problem is no motherboard supports OpenPIC. The K7 will very definately do SMP, and I think the current limit is 14 cpus, compared to 4 with a Xeon. Also, do to the bus design of the K7 they will do SMP *MUCH* nicer.

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