You underestimate the power of the enthusiast market. The original Athlon, never had huge success with OEMs. Most sales where made directly to hobbyists who built they're own machines and didn't have to worry about wrath from Intel. I don't see this picture changing with the Athlon64. Hobbyists will embrace it because of its great performance, but Intel will keep the OEM market because they're considered the standard.
Oh please, when I built my 'enthusiast' PC, I went with an Intel P4 2.4B because it was the hot overclocking chip. To this day, the hot chip is the 2.4C, because it can be overclocked with its stock cooler to 3+ GHz (1 GHz FSB). The Athlon 64 hardly changes anything. All it means is Intel has to wake up from its siesta. Prescott will be out early next year, and OCers like me will be pushing them far beyond their rated clockspeeds.
Just what fraction of the 150 million unit/year industry do you think enthusiasts account for? What about AMD?
You underestimate the power of the enthusiast market. The original Athlon, never had huge success with OEMs. Most sales where made directly to hobbyists who built they're own machines and didn't have to worry about wrath from Intel. I don't see this picture changing with the Athlon64. Hobbyists will embrace it because of its great performance, but Intel will keep the OEM market because they're considered the standard.
Problem is AMD will just be keeping most of its existing market, which does them pretty much no good what-so-ever.
Just once I would like to see Intel introduce a new chip which doesn't add new instructions to an already cluttered ISA. What a freakin' mess. This doesn't help their IPC anymore because practically nobody will take advantage of these.
I always thought the main reason why Intel added these extra instructions was precisely because it would keep AMD one step behind.
Oh please, when I built my 'enthusiast' PC, I went with an Intel P4 2.4B because it was the hot overclocking chip. To this day, the hot chip is the 2.4C, because it can be overclocked with its stock cooler to 3+ GHz (1 GHz FSB). The Athlon 64 hardly changes anything. All it means is Intel has to wake up from its siesta. Prescott will be out early next year, and OCers like me will be pushing them far beyond their rated clockspeeds.
Just what fraction of the 150 million unit/year industry do you think enthusiasts account for? What about AMD?
Yes, but up until relatively recent introduction of the i865, this market was owned by AMD. It was only because the Athlon64 was delayed and AMD had to rely on Barton for too long they lost the enthusiast market. I'm sure they'll get it back once the Athlon64 matures a bit. It's a great architecture.
AMD has 16% of the x86 market. They used to have more when the Athlon was top dog. I doubt HP's AMD sales can account for that 16%. It simply proves there are a lot of enthusiasts and small specialty OEMs out there who use AMD.
Oh please, when I built my 'enthusiast' PC, I went with an Intel P4 2.4B because it was the hot overclocking chip. To this day, the hot chip is the 2.4C, because it can be overclocked with its stock cooler to 3+ GHz (1 GHz FSB). The Athlon 64 hardly changes anything. All it means is Intel has to wake up from its siesta. Prescott will be out early next year, and OCers like me will be pushing them far beyond their rated clockspeeds.
Just what fraction of the 150 million unit/year industry do you think enthusiasts account for? What about AMD?
AMD was/is a popular choice for the enthusiast market due to price/performance ratio, but obviously it's not the exclusive choice.
The system I'm writing this post on is a P4 1.6 GHz o/c to 2.1GHz, Asus P4B533 MB, etc. It was a great choice for the price when I built it, but only because I was able to overclock it to run much faster than spec (could probably even run it higher if I was feeling adventurous). However, if I had not been able to buy this, I would have gone instead with an AMD CPU because of the price.
Unfortunately going with Intel chips has traditionally meant paying out your nose for the privilege of buying the highest performing models. My personal favorite was using a Celeron (Mendocino) 300 MHz overclocked to 450MHz on a BX board, at a time when Intel was charging over $1000 CND for their top of the line 450MHz Pentium II.
In fact, I think I even had my Celeron at 450MHz for a few months while 400MHz was the fastest Pentium II model available.
it's a SIMD unit , Single Instruction Mulitple Data : it means that for example you can do a simple vector permutaton and apply it to all the data simulataneously. For example if you have 64 bit register, you can permute 8 data of 8 bit simultaneously.
it's the equivalent of the Altivec in the PC world. MMX, MMX 2 and 3Dnow where also SIMD instructions.
A programmer dealing with SIMD in the powerpc world will just deal with Altivec, a large and nearly complete set of 162 instructions. If he optimise code for Altivec, most mac users will take benefit of this optimisation.
In the PC world there is MMX, MMX 2, SSE, SSE 2, and next year SSE3. You may add 3Dnow from AMD also.
Only the latest generation of chips has all these features, the P4, the Centrino and the Athlon 64. Next year when the prescott will ship, SSE 3 will appear.
Programmers are not interested to implement optimisations with a code that will take advantage of only a small part of the computer's park.
AMD was/is a popular choice for the enthusiast market due to price/performance ratio, but obviously it's not the exclusive choice.
The system I'm writing this post on is a P4 1.6 GHz o/c to 2.1GHz, Asus P4B533 MB, etc. It was a great choice for the price when I built it, but only because I was able to overclock it to run much faster than spec (could probably even run it higher if I was feeling adventurous).
Well, for $175 you can buy the retail box 800 MHz FSB 2.4 GHz P4 and get better performance than Intel's own top-end P4 without using an exotic cooler or messing with the core voltage. Some people are getting 3.6+ GHz @ stock voltage with their 2.4Cs (new M0 stepping).
For $100, you can get a Athlon XP 2500+ (their best overclocker). And if you want to OC it, you most likely won't get past 2.2 GHz even after upping the core voltage and slapping a big heatsink on it. And none of the other higher rated chips will be able to overclock much past 2.2 GHz either...certainly not to the point of beating a 3.6 GHz P4 @ 1.2 GHz FSB. Note that Bartons are more finicky overclockers than Thoroughbreds because of the extra cache...
The 2 GHz Athlon 64 is more than $400 by contrast, and just as limited in overclockability. Let's be generous and say it can be OC'd to 2.3 GHz. By my count that's equivalent to a Quantispeed rating of 50000000+. Can that $400 chip lay the smackdown on a $175 P4 running at 3.6 GHz?...especially in the apps the 'enthusiast' cares about?
Just once I would like to see Intel introduce a new chip which doesn't add new instructions to an already cluttered ISA. What a freakin' mess. This doesn't help their IPC anymore because practically nobody will take advantage of these.
I don't know if it's confirmed, but I've seen some leaked "roadmap", or something similar, where Intel projected 'TNI' for the Tejas processor (The Prescott's successor). You probably guessed it:
Tejas NEW INSTRUCTIONS!
As I said, it's not a confirmed rumor, but seeing Intel's track record on this, we don't have much reason to doubt it
Does anyone know how well these Athlon-64 CPUs are selling? And I mean selling as in actual systems going to consumers... We already know that the Opteron is the second slowest selling CPU right behind the Itanium. The G5s (aka: PPC970) have been selling like crazy. Anyone have any numbers?
--
Ed
They are selling every A64 they are able to manufacture, as we see more of their line switch from K7 to K8 based processors then you can make your decisions about how well they are selling. In terms of raw numbers in Q4 they will ship approximately 400,000 Athlon64s. More Opterons have been sold than Itanium1 and Itanium2 chips combined even though Itanium has been on the market since 2001(not exactly a hard target to beat).
Well, for $175 you can buy the retail box 800 MHz FSB 2.4 GHz P4 and get better performance than Intel's own top-end P4 without using an exotic cooler or messing with the core voltage. Some people are getting 3.6+ GHz @ stock voltage with their 2.4Cs (new M0 stepping).
For $100, you can get a Athlon XP 2500+ (their best overclocker). And if you want to OC it, you most likely won't get past 2.2 GHz even after upping the core voltage and slapping a big heatsink on it. And none of the other higher rated chips will be able to overclock much past 2.2 GHz either...certainly not to the point of beating a 3.6 GHz P4 @ 1.2 GHz FSB. Note that Bartons are more finicky overclockers than Thoroughbreds because of the extra cache...
The 2 GHz Athlon 64 is more than $400 by contrast, and just as limited in overclockability. Let's be generous and say it can be OC'd to 2.3 GHz. By my count that's equivalent to a Quantispeed rating of 50000000+. Can that $400 chip lay the smackdown on a $175 P4 running at 3.6 GHz?...especially in the apps the 'enthusiast' cares about?
I think we're looking at two different time periods here. AMD definately lost some of their edge over the past 6-12 months, partially because the "Hammer" was supposed to be here a full year ago (originally).
Something else to keep in mind - not all "enthusiasts" overclock the heck out of their CPUs, so traditionally you have been able to buy an AMD chip for hundreds of dollars less than the equivalent speed Intel offering. And yes, AMD has recently lost a lot of ground in this respect.
Arguments aside, it's always great when Intel migrates their chipsets to a higher FSB speed, because there are usually some CPUs in their product line that have the ability to do insane overclocks. Nice thing about this approach is that you don't end up overclocking your FSB speeds (something I've always avoided if possible for stability reasons).
Comments
Originally posted by Kecksy
You underestimate the power of the enthusiast market. The original Athlon, never had huge success with OEMs. Most sales where made directly to hobbyists who built they're own machines and didn't have to worry about wrath from Intel. I don't see this picture changing with the Athlon64. Hobbyists will embrace it because of its great performance, but Intel will keep the OEM market because they're considered the standard.
Oh please, when I built my 'enthusiast' PC, I went with an Intel P4 2.4B because it was the hot overclocking chip. To this day, the hot chip is the 2.4C, because it can be overclocked with its stock cooler to 3+ GHz (1 GHz FSB). The Athlon 64 hardly changes anything. All it means is Intel has to wake up from its siesta. Prescott will be out early next year, and OCers like me will be pushing them far beyond their rated clockspeeds.
Just what fraction of the 150 million unit/year industry do you think enthusiasts account for? What about AMD?
Originally posted by Kecksy
You underestimate the power of the enthusiast market. The original Athlon, never had huge success with OEMs. Most sales where made directly to hobbyists who built they're own machines and didn't have to worry about wrath from Intel. I don't see this picture changing with the Athlon64. Hobbyists will embrace it because of its great performance, but Intel will keep the OEM market because they're considered the standard.
Problem is AMD will just be keeping most of its existing market, which does them pretty much no good what-so-ever.
Originally posted by Programmer
Just once I would like to see Intel introduce a new chip which doesn't add new instructions to an already cluttered ISA. What a freakin' mess. This doesn't help their IPC anymore because practically nobody will take advantage of these.
I always thought the main reason why Intel added these extra instructions was precisely because it would keep AMD one step behind.
SSE: PIII (Katmai), Athlon (Palomino)
SSE2: P4 (Willamette), AMD64 (Sledgehammer/Clawhammer)
SSE3: P4 (Prescott), AMD (not yet)
The more separation Intel can get, the better.
Originally posted by Eugene
Oh please, when I built my 'enthusiast' PC, I went with an Intel P4 2.4B because it was the hot overclocking chip. To this day, the hot chip is the 2.4C, because it can be overclocked with its stock cooler to 3+ GHz (1 GHz FSB). The Athlon 64 hardly changes anything. All it means is Intel has to wake up from its siesta. Prescott will be out early next year, and OCers like me will be pushing them far beyond their rated clockspeeds.
Just what fraction of the 150 million unit/year industry do you think enthusiasts account for? What about AMD?
Yes, but up until relatively recent introduction of the i865, this market was owned by AMD. It was only because the Athlon64 was delayed and AMD had to rely on Barton for too long they lost the enthusiast market. I'm sure they'll get it back once the Athlon64 matures a bit. It's a great architecture.
AMD has 16% of the x86 market. They used to have more when the Athlon was top dog. I doubt HP's AMD sales can account for that 16%. It simply proves there are a lot of enthusiasts and small specialty OEMs out there who use AMD.
Originally posted by Eugene
Oh please, when I built my 'enthusiast' PC, I went with an Intel P4 2.4B because it was the hot overclocking chip. To this day, the hot chip is the 2.4C, because it can be overclocked with its stock cooler to 3+ GHz (1 GHz FSB). The Athlon 64 hardly changes anything. All it means is Intel has to wake up from its siesta. Prescott will be out early next year, and OCers like me will be pushing them far beyond their rated clockspeeds.
Just what fraction of the 150 million unit/year industry do you think enthusiasts account for? What about AMD?
AMD was/is a popular choice for the enthusiast market due to price/performance ratio, but obviously it's not the exclusive choice.
The system I'm writing this post on is a P4 1.6 GHz o/c to 2.1GHz, Asus P4B533 MB, etc. It was a great choice for the price when I built it, but only because I was able to overclock it to run much faster than spec (could probably even run it higher if I was feeling adventurous). However, if I had not been able to buy this, I would have gone instead with an AMD CPU because of the price.
Unfortunately going with Intel chips has traditionally meant paying out your nose for the privilege of buying the highest performing models. My personal favorite was using a Celeron (Mendocino) 300 MHz overclocked to 450MHz on a BX board, at a time when Intel was charging over $1000 CND for their top of the line 450MHz Pentium II.
In fact, I think I even had my Celeron at 450MHz for a few months while 400MHz was the fastest Pentium II model available.
Originally posted by Eugene
I always thought the main reason why Intel added these extra instructions was precisely because it would keep AMD one step behind.
SSE: PIII (Katmai), Athlon (Palomino)
SSE2: P4 (Willamette), AMD64 (Sledgehammer/Clawhammer)
SSE3: P4 (Prescott), AMD (not yet)
The more separation Intel can get, the better.
Yes it's obviously the reason, but as Programmer said, nobody will take advantage of them. These SSE thing has becoming a marketing gadget.
In opposite the Altivec unit of the PPC fly.
Originally posted by Powerdoc
Yes it's obviously the reason, but as Programmer said, nobody will take advantage of them. These SSE thing has becoming a marketing gadget.
In opposite the Altivec unit of the PPC fly.
What's sse
Originally posted by ryaxnb
What's sse
it's a SIMD unit , Single Instruction Mulitple Data : it means that for example you can do a simple vector permutaton and apply it to all the data simulataneously. For example if you have 64 bit register, you can permute 8 data of 8 bit simultaneously.
it's the equivalent of the Altivec in the PC world. MMX, MMX 2 and 3Dnow where also SIMD instructions.
A programmer dealing with SIMD in the powerpc world will just deal with Altivec, a large and nearly complete set of 162 instructions. If he optimise code for Altivec, most mac users will take benefit of this optimisation.
In the PC world there is MMX, MMX 2, SSE, SSE 2, and next year SSE3. You may add 3Dnow from AMD also.
Only the latest generation of chips has all these features, the P4, the Centrino and the Athlon 64. Next year when the prescott will ship, SSE 3 will appear.
Programmers are not interested to implement optimisations with a code that will take advantage of only a small part of the computer's park.
Originally posted by Chagi
AMD was/is a popular choice for the enthusiast market due to price/performance ratio, but obviously it's not the exclusive choice.
The system I'm writing this post on is a P4 1.6 GHz o/c to 2.1GHz, Asus P4B533 MB, etc. It was a great choice for the price when I built it, but only because I was able to overclock it to run much faster than spec (could probably even run it higher if I was feeling adventurous).
Well, for $175 you can buy the retail box 800 MHz FSB 2.4 GHz P4 and get better performance than Intel's own top-end P4 without using an exotic cooler or messing with the core voltage. Some people are getting 3.6+ GHz @ stock voltage with their 2.4Cs (new M0 stepping).
For $100, you can get a Athlon XP 2500+ (their best overclocker). And if you want to OC it, you most likely won't get past 2.2 GHz even after upping the core voltage and slapping a big heatsink on it. And none of the other higher rated chips will be able to overclock much past 2.2 GHz either...certainly not to the point of beating a 3.6 GHz P4 @ 1.2 GHz FSB. Note that Bartons are more finicky overclockers than Thoroughbreds because of the extra cache...
The 2 GHz Athlon 64 is more than $400 by contrast, and just as limited in overclockability. Let's be generous and say it can be OC'd to 2.3 GHz. By my count that's equivalent to a Quantispeed rating of 50000000+. Can that $400 chip lay the smackdown on a $175 P4 running at 3.6 GHz?...especially in the apps the 'enthusiast' cares about?
Originally posted by Programmer
Just once I would like to see Intel introduce a new chip which doesn't add new instructions to an already cluttered ISA. What a freakin' mess. This doesn't help their IPC anymore because practically nobody will take advantage of these.
I don't know if it's confirmed, but I've seen some leaked "roadmap", or something similar, where Intel projected 'TNI' for the Tejas processor (The Prescott's successor). You probably guessed it:
Tejas NEW INSTRUCTIONS!
As I said, it's not a confirmed rumor, but seeing Intel's track record on this, we don't have much reason to doubt it
Originally posted by Ed M.
Does anyone know how well these Athlon-64 CPUs are selling? And I mean selling as in actual systems going to consumers... We already know that the Opteron is the second slowest selling CPU right behind the Itanium. The G5s (aka: PPC970) have been selling like crazy. Anyone have any numbers?
--
Ed
They are selling every A64 they are able to manufacture, as we see more of their line switch from K7 to K8 based processors then you can make your decisions about how well they are selling. In terms of raw numbers in Q4 they will ship approximately 400,000 Athlon64s. More Opterons have been sold than Itanium1 and Itanium2 chips combined even though Itanium has been on the market since 2001(not exactly a hard target to beat).
Originally posted by Eugene
Well, for $175 you can buy the retail box 800 MHz FSB 2.4 GHz P4 and get better performance than Intel's own top-end P4 without using an exotic cooler or messing with the core voltage. Some people are getting 3.6+ GHz @ stock voltage with their 2.4Cs (new M0 stepping).
For $100, you can get a Athlon XP 2500+ (their best overclocker). And if you want to OC it, you most likely won't get past 2.2 GHz even after upping the core voltage and slapping a big heatsink on it. And none of the other higher rated chips will be able to overclock much past 2.2 GHz either...certainly not to the point of beating a 3.6 GHz P4 @ 1.2 GHz FSB. Note that Bartons are more finicky overclockers than Thoroughbreds because of the extra cache...
The 2 GHz Athlon 64 is more than $400 by contrast, and just as limited in overclockability. Let's be generous and say it can be OC'd to 2.3 GHz. By my count that's equivalent to a Quantispeed rating of 50000000+. Can that $400 chip lay the smackdown on a $175 P4 running at 3.6 GHz?...especially in the apps the 'enthusiast' cares about?
I think we're looking at two different time periods here. AMD definately lost some of their edge over the past 6-12 months, partially because the "Hammer" was supposed to be here a full year ago (originally).
Something else to keep in mind - not all "enthusiasts" overclock the heck out of their CPUs, so traditionally you have been able to buy an AMD chip for hundreds of dollars less than the equivalent speed Intel offering. And yes, AMD has recently lost a lot of ground in this respect.
Arguments aside, it's always great when Intel migrates their chipsets to a higher FSB speed, because there are usually some CPUs in their product line that have the ability to do insane overclocks. Nice thing about this approach is that you don't end up overclocking your FSB speeds (something I've always avoided if possible for stability reasons).