AMD Cuts X2 Processor Prices 206
BDPrime writes "AMD is cutting prices for its X2 processors, according to an update on its microprocessor pricing list. The cuts refer to AMD's Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 X2 chips. Some of the price cuts are almost in half."
socket 939 seems to be screwed all-round (Score:2, Informative)
I just bought a 4200+ x2 for $159 from newegg. They sold out hours later. I don't think they even make 'em any more. Anything higher than a 4200 was plain sold out everywhere.
So if you've got a socket 939, I'd say you better upgrade with a quickness cuz those CPUs are going, going, gone.
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Not sure if it's any help, but 939 Opterons work great for that as well... better than most of the X2s since all Opterons have 1MB cache per core and only some X2s do. Back a year and a half ago, the Opterons were even cheaper than the X2s as well. If you can find it for a good price, it's a great chip.
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But as far as I can find, none of the Socket 939 X2's support hardware virtualization, which is a biggie for me as I do a lot of cross-platform development.
Are there *any* socket 939 X2's that support hardware virt?
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No, unfortunately not.
Re:socket 939 seems to be screwed all-round (Score:4, Funny)
To tell you the truth... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:To tell you the truth... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:To tell you the truth... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:To tell you the truth... (Score:5, Informative)
Huh? The Core 2 is based on technology used in the Pentium M which itself was based on technology from the original Pentium families (not P4). The Core 2 family in some ways has a more developed history then the Pentium 4 (NetBurst) family did. Also unlike the Itanium the Core 2 uses x86-32/64 ISA... just like current AMDs processors.
Anyway the Core 2 Duo (and Core Duo before it) have been out for a while now (around a year) and are used in a huge number of consumer, prosumer and workstation systems from many vendors. You think that would prove something...
Spell that right... (Score:2)
You mean to say the Core 2 uses the AMD64 ISA... just like current AMD processors.
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all the benchmarks are 32-bit (Score:3, Insightful)
Intel chips go 5% slower when 64-bit.
I suppose this is an indication that Intel marketing pays attention to the very lame old 32-bit benchmarks that are getting used.
64-bit is here now, even if you run Windows. Linux people have had pure 64-bit systems for many years.
Re:all the benchmarks are 32-bit (Score:4, Insightful)
That, and going to 64-bit just isn't that useful right now. With AMD, you may get some speed increases (I really can't say, as I haven't seen the benchmarks or performed any tests myself for Linux--for FreeBSD, I know that the performance just isn't there) but that's architectural. Intel generally beats AMD64(in 32-bit mode), and if I don't have any reason to run in 64-bit mode (and plenty of reasons not to) then what's the point? My next machine will be from the Core2Duo line.
AMD had their day, and they may have it again, but for right now, I'm not interested.
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As for running a 64bit environment, the biggest factor is memory usage. Its true that 64bit programs yield slightly faster performance boosts, they take a lot more ram (think cumulative of all programs running and you can imagine what i mean) than their
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Ditto with Debian and Ubuntu and probably every other 64-bit distro :-) Just install the 32-bit libs and you're good to go. It's a little messy to set this up for flash, but frankly... we can blame that on Adobe/Macromedia and their proprietary not-64-bit-s
Re:all the benchmarks are 32-bit (Score:4, Informative)
The Debian team is working on a new multiarch [debian.org] system that will address this, making it simple to install mixed architecture software on machines that support it. Basically, the packaging system will understand all of the various ISAs and their relationships, and which ones will run on which processors, and the package dependencies.
This means that rather than having aptitude (or your apt front end of choice) show you six different versions of the linux-image package (-486, -586, -686, -k7, -k8, -amd64, etc.) or the mencoder package, there will only be one linux-image and one mencoder in the list. The various binary versions will still exist, and by default apt will pick the best of those available for your platform. If you want, however, you'll be able to override its choice and pick a different one. If the one you pick requires different versions of support packages, then dpkg will also know that and apt will handle all of the dependency management, making sure that the right versions of everything are installed.
So for example, if you have an Athlon 64, by default apt will install 64-bit versions of everything. If, however, you decide to install the flashplugin-nonfree package, which is 32-bit only, apt will recognize that it cannot be used with your 64-bit browsers and offer to replace them with 32-bit versions. Since the 32-bit versions require 32-bit libraries, it will also offer to install the required libs. Part of the multiarch specification is a scheme for making it easy to install multiple versions of a given library side by side, and for automatically configuring apps to find the correct library versions.
This might seem like an overly-general solution for addressing the temporary x86 32- to 64-bit transition, but the Debian developers doing it have recognized that as just one example of a much larger problem [lackof.org], including:
So, the plan is to develop a solution that addresses all of these issues in a general way, rather than continuing to use various architecture-specific hacks to get around the fact that dpkg currently believes a machine has only one architecture. It's a pretty big project, but people are pushing to get it included in Lenny (which, judging by past releases should be out mid-2009), and users of unstable and testing should see it much sooner.
Re:all the benchmarks are 32-bit (Score:5, Informative)
You've already had someone respond with a link to benchmarks showing exactly the opposite of what you claim:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=
Where are the benchmarks that show what you claim?
Cheers,
Roger
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ScienceMark 2.0 has the Athlons run four times faster in 64-bit mode than 32; the Core2 Duo speeds up by a factor of three. Primordia has the AMD64 speed up by a factor near 8/7; Core2 by the smaller factor of 9/8. I'd say that it's swings a
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Exactly... which again disproves what the following bogus statement...
No data that I have seen anywhere supports a statement like that... Core 2 chips are faster when in 64-bit mode (assuming compiled to utilize additional registers, etc.). The only likely edge case would be a pointer heavy data stream that causes
Re:To tell you the truth... (Score:5, Informative)
Just to take a stupid guess... I think with the need for cash, AMD was hoping Microsoft releasing Vista (Biggest upgrade in 7 years) would create high demand for new PC's and they could sell product as demand exceeded supply. The demand for Vista didn't drive demand as expected.
Vista failing to launch put AMD in tight competition in a smaller market due the lack of demand for Vista. AMD didn't sell to Apple. Intel did. Mac's are selling where Vista is getting so-so response so Intel is selling the new chips into markets AMD is not in. If Intel didn't sell to Apple, and had to cut prices, AMD would be in an even worse position due to the low demand for new Vista machines.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AAPL&annual [yahoo.com]
Note that Apple has gone in revenue from 2004-2006 $8,279,000,000 to $19,315,000,000
Operating income has gone from $326,000,000 to $2,453,000,000. This is almost an order of magnitude growth in only 2 years. This isn't just from a few iPod sales. Vista's dead start and XP's malware flood is driving people away from Microsoft. The recent growth in Apple and Linux is not primarily new PC consumers. It's mostly ex-Microsoft consumers.
I'm wondering if AMD is selling chips at a loss instead of having to throw them out. I can't see them making money at that price, only cutting their loss.
Selling chips at half price is not profitable. I'm assuming most chips have only a 10-30% margin. Chopping the price in half is selling under the cost to manufacture.
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Hmmm. Are you sure. I thought there was quite a bit of expense to produce high speed processors due to the costs associated in production. Not only is R&D costs high, but so is the technology for Lithography, Clean Rooms, Metrology (can't make and sell a product with 100% failure rates), packaging (Silicon in carrier, effective heat spreader, etc. Not the cardboard box), and of course Yeild. The more steps it ta
Damn I just bought one! (Score:2)
I have a Core2Duo system myself but currently the AMDs are a great value.
Re:Damn I just bought one! (Score:4, Insightful)
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I just bought one, too: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+. I can't say I'm too upset about missing a price drop. These things happen.
What's really cool about these chips, IMO, is that you can get the power-efficient ones that only draw 65 W max for the CPU. My new system only draws 133 W (monitor included) with both CPUs running full blast, and when they're idle and the monitor is powered down, it goes down to only 51 W! These chips have AMD's cool'n'quiet, which is fully supported in recent linux kernels.
This wa
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Waiting for the corresponding cut on Core2 Duo (Score:2)
I must presume, though, that this cut is just to clean up on the bottm end and make way for a new high-end line.
Re:Waiting for the corresponding cut on Core2 Duo (Score:5, Informative)
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800 2.93GHz x 2 4MB x 2 $1199
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 2.66GHz x 2 4MB x 2 $999
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 2.93GHz 4MB $999
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40GHz x 2 4MB x 2 $530
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz 4MB $316
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.40GHz 4MB $224
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz 2MB $183
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz 2MB $163
Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 1.80GHz 2MB $113
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Also shamelessly ripped from AnanadTech: Currently the E6300 and E6400 both have 2MB L2s, but both chips will be replaced by 4MB versions - the E6320 and E6420 respectively.
The best part is that they won't cost any different than the 2MB versions.
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There are motherboards that allow you to use DDR RAM with a Core 2 Duo CPU (example: http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=775Du a l-VSTA&s=n [asrock.com] ), I believe Anandtech or Toms Hardware had some benchmarks that showed the performance difference from using DDR RAM in one of these boards was negligable.
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Is it enough? (Score:2)
At least before the price cuts, there was simply no way I would even consider an AMD CPU, after Intel got Core 2 Duo up and running.
So unless Barcelona changes AMD:s position, what CPU:s do you recommend that actually give us some serious $/performance sightings against Intel?
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None of them. The overclock potential on the C4D is so high, but the C4D's overlock isn't factored into the price.
I have a C4D rated at 2.4 GHz running at 2.9 GHz (an easy, downright effortless overlock if there ever was one) and there is almost no difference in temp - but that much overclock results in a very noticable speed gain. Many people are overclocking the 6600's into the mid-3GHz with d
More than enough. (Score:2)
So what's your usage profile ? High-end gaming or running some extremely CPU-intensive tasks where time is money ? Yup, then the C2D is for you.
But what about the mass market ? People whose CPU will mainly twiddle its thumbs (and other digits) while running web/email/office ? People who don't care if they get 100 fps or 145 ? For them, getting an Athlon makes more sense. It's
Re:Is it enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that we're stuck with x86 isn't Intel's fault. At the time, CISC was considered a good idea, and as for endianness.... I won't even go there.
Intel has tried to move away from x86: look at the Itanium and Itanium II. Intel gambled that they could find enough ILP with their compiler, and lost, but at least they moved off of x86, right?
The fact is, because x86 was so wildly successful, and because so much software was written for it, Intel had to ensure that future processors were compatible with the x86 instruction set. Doing otherwise would have been deliberately alienating a large part of their market share. It could be argued that x86 compatibility (or lack thereof, more specifically) is one of the major reasons why IA-64 was unsuccessful. Completely moving off of x86 would be devastating to the company, and irresponsible in the eyes of their shareholders/employees.
I can't believe that any engineer in his right mind would actually want to stick with IA-32 in the face of its glaring defects, they're very bright people, and if you need proof of that, just look at the Core. But if you want to sell consumer chips, you don't have any other choice.
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The fastest Itanium 2 there isn't faster than the fastest x86 in floating point performance or integer performance when you compare quad cores with quad cores, etc.
And look at price, power consumption for the performance you get. Expensive (the same number of transistors in an Itanium 2 system (18MB or e
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Re:consider AMD... (Score:4, Informative)
And even at Science Mark 2.0 at which Intel C2Duo is slower than FX-62, switching into 64 bit reduces time needed to run the test from 66.241sec to 21.36.
At least provide some sort of sources when claiming performance drop in 64 bit mode. According to the above benchmark I do want to buy C2Duo and run it in 64-bit mode to do all the gzipping.
By the time consumers will start to care about PCI DMA eating more than 4GB of memory, the new revision of Intel CPU will be out with on-die controller
AMD is the best choice for budget customers right now
I know why (Score:4, Funny)
Please, (Score:3, Funny)
The Price/Performance Argument Hipocracy (Score:4, Interesting)
Now those same people are trying to argue that the less expensive, cooler and more efficient Core2Duo are still not as good as their beloved AMD. They will point to 64 bit performance or performance over 4GB of ram - or a myraid of little things that are not relevant to the vast majority for at least the next couple years to support their bias.
The processor wars, just like the video wars, will go back and forth. Nobody stays on top forever. Intel, after many years trailing, had their leap ahead for a generation or two. The people who are the most rational go with the best architecture or company at the time. I bought an ATI 9600 instead of a Nvidia 5600, even though I had always owned Nvidia and loved the drivers, because it was the better value for the money at that time.
The bigger person, the more rational person, is the one who can be objective about these things. Which CPU company you "love" is a very strange thing to have an irrational passion about...
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And that was before I found out about the 32bit vs 64 bit performance difference. It all worked out in my favor since I run my system in almost entirely 64 bit mode.
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That is why I went AMD on my new system, even though I was paying, right now, a little more for less. (Which, I learned later, as I am on 64 bit is not even less)
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That used to be the case a couple of years ago, when OpenOffice.org was still 32-bit only. Indeed, you needed 32-bit and 64-bit copies of every library and it was a bit of a mess. But nowadays pretty much everything is 64-bit native. See the LWN story The end of the multiarch era? [lwn.net].
Even bac
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On the Athlon 64, 64-bit code is about 10% faster than 32-bit, so I switched to an x86_64 native Linux distribution, and I don't want to switch back to i386.
xbitlabs to the rescue (Score:3, Informative)
Athlon 64 3600+ (Score:5, Interesting)
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and that is for the cheap stuff.
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Re:OT RAM prices (Score:4, Funny)
If you're complaining about ONLY $80 for 1GB of RAM, you have no concept of what non-shitty memory for real workstations can cost."
Hey, I paid more than that for 64k of ram (not 640k .. 64k). $100.00 on sale. A gig of ram for $80 - stop complaining, its cheaper than staples, thumbtacks, plant seeds, etc.
And you should have seen the cost of the abacus before that!!!
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What is it that computers do? Compute! Mathematics. I just have to deal with computers that aren't exactly meant for Joe Windows User, Bob Apple User, or AC Linux User, so if that makes me an "elitist troll" so be it. Computational fluid dynamics, finite element modeling with millions upon millions of nodes in a mesh, mechanical system modeling, and more are all computational tasks suite
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I read that as he's buying non-shitty ECC memory, as in name brand and not generic crap. I think you read it as non-ECC memory is shitty.
Having ECC is good for servers where since you don't want the server to crash due to bad memory, but you want to know asap about memory that's gone bad. You also want to minimize down time since there could be 100s or 1000s of people using that
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RAM prices come down in steps. RAM gets cheaper because new fab technologies come out, but upgrading to these new factories costs a lot of money. This loss is recouped by selling the current technology at a higher price, while discounting the old technology to have half a chance in hell of selling enough to maintain a profit. This is the way CPU prices work (see current article). While prices come down slowly (I purchased a gig of RAM for 100 dollars last year, which is almost 50% more than current
Re:OT RAM prices (Score:4, Informative)
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But on a side note, I don't understand why he is complaining about the cost of a special needs system when he is the one dictating the special needs. And $80 per gig isn't likely going to be the type of memory to excel in this area. I have dabbled with video editing in the past and found the rock bottom priced memory to have issues i
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After ordering hardware for a Vista Editor, and using it for 2 days we erased it and downgraded to XP. the machine is at LEAST 3X faster without Vista taking up all the resources. (64bit is useless in video editing right now, most editing apps are NOT optimized for it yet)
Only a complete fool would use Vista on a video editor, stay with XP until the last possible moment, you get more done faster.
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If more people kept to XP, maybe we can make Vista to Microsoft what the Itanium was to Intel.
Now if the Wine etc people would come up with an XP+DirectX compatible ASAP, then when Microsoft tries to pull the plug on Windows XP, lots would switch to "XP" on Linux. Just like when Intel tried to kick people off x86 and on to the Itanium, AMD started raking it in
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There are several factors at work here but 5 years ago, 512 megs was going in the $100+ range. Now a full gig is under that in some cases. A key difference between the two might be the amount of competition that is limited by the CPU designs and motherboards that support them when dealing with me
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If you can't run memtest86 overnight on new RAM, you should return it. End of story.
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I'm not sure if there wasn't something with the ability of the memory to keep up in the timing when a heavy demand was placed on it or if there was just a bad spot that only got accessed when using the video editing stuff. I mean working with a 2 gig raw video file compared to a couple hundred megs for a game or word processing is a little different in usage. But to tell you the trut
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Re:Damn, another weekend at Frys. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why would you buy RAM at Newegg, but processors at a box store? They're almost certainly going to be more expensive at Frys than they are at Newegg.
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Re:Price isn't everything; boycott AMD (Score:5, Insightful)
So, where's that Free Software Intel wireless chipset driver, then? (Just sayin'...)
Also, although I agree with you about old ATI's shitty attitude, it seems a little premature to condemn AMD for it. They haven't been the same company for that long yet, you know, and it remains to be seen whether AMD's leadership might change things.
(Note: I'm not an AMD fanboy; in fact I'm posting this from a Core Duo laptop.)
Re:Price isn't everything; boycott AMD (Score:5, Informative)
That would be right here [sourceforge.net]. Everything non-binary is licensed under either GPLv2 or dual-license BSD/GPLv2, according to the documentation. The binaries are released in that form because they are prohibited by FCC regulations from releasing anything that could be modified by the end user to violate regulatory limits. Exactly the same thing applies to the MADWifi drivers for Atheros, who makes available a binary HAL to the developers.
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See the Ralink cards for examples of drivers that only consist of free software.
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Operation of an intentional, unintentional, or incidental radiator is subject to the conditions that no harmful interference is caused and that interference must be accepted that may be caused by the operation of an authorized radio station, by another intentional or unintentional radiator, by industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) equ
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An Openbsd guy wrote one but then a Linux guy accused him of stealing the code...
Re:Price isn't everything; boycott AMD (Score:4, Insightful)
AMD and ATI have only just merged, so it's a little early to judge the "open-source friendliness" of the new company. However, the history is varied. AMD provides very strong support for gcc and other projects that are important to it, funding a number of full-time developers. ATI hasn't provided as much support for its graphics chipsets - partial documentation rather than active development - but the open-source drivers for ATI still do more than those for Intel, just because Intel graphics chips are a whole lot simpler. (Which means that Intel aren't losing any trade secrets by exposing their internals - their graphics chips are using less "clever stuff" than ATI or nVidia). Every ATI chip that has capabilities in the same class as any Intel graphics chip you care to name has a complete open-source driver, and for every closed ATI GPU there's an equally closed Intel wireless chipset.
Both companies play nice where it suits them and take their ball and go home where that is percieved as the more profitable option. My advice to you is to do the same and pick whichever option gives you more performance per dollar.
One example doesn't make a rule (Score:5, Insightful)
And what of chip companies that do publish specs? There are MANY chips from FreeScale (formerly Motorola's semiconductor division) that include fantastic levels of documentation. All the calls, all the functions, all the features. There are bugger all drivers in any Open Source *nix (xBSD, Linux, Plan9, you name it) for the S1 encryption chip. You want to talk about supporting those vendors who support Open Source? Then support them by adding that support.
Let us get down to basics, here. Part of the reason why companies like ATI can avoid supporting Open Source is because the Open Source community has, itself, failed to support the Open Source community. We have not been perfect, shining examples of our own standards and have no right to expect others to adhere to ideals we ourselves fall desperately short of.
Sure, the Open Source community lacks the kind of funding needed for this sort of stuff. So does AMD, whose profits were almost a billion short of expectation, whose net worth is now not much more than ATI prior to being bought, and whose future (due to Intel's near-monopolistic control over the industry and near-inexhaustible supply of funds) is severely in doubt. AMD has less than a tenth of the money of Intel and can't afford the current price-war for much longer. In the meantime, Intel can not only afford it but can afford to make next-gen components that have exactly the same flaws in concept as all their products have always have. Intel can afford it, Intel will essentially kill AMD, and Intel will only correct the flaws in the logic the next time it is threatened by a chip company.
(I may sound a little harsh on Intel there, but it's basically true of all corporations. Quality for the sake of quality is not a concept most managers comprehend, and "engineering excellence" is an oxymoron in any group outside of a few fringe development projects and maybe a couple of Formula 1 teams.)
If support for Open Source were a criteria, I'd say support nobody and move to another planet. As the old NASA joke goes, there is intelligent life on Earth but it's only visiting. There isn't any meaningful support for Open Source, outside of a handful of individuals.
What about IBM? All those 500+ patents they freed up! Yeah, and how many projects do you see based on them? None? Is that a surprise, when most were hardware patents? Outside of OpenCores, I really don't see many people being able to do much with pipeline optimization or CPU scheduling, and frankly most coders there working on CPUs have been doing just fine using their own methods of solving these problems, and anyone likely to want a high-end 64-bit Open Source chip would probably be looking at the Open Sourced UltraSparc. IBM have released lots of bits of project in the past, but never really maintained them and never really did anything with them. You been using IBM's GUI-based Apache management tool? Ever realized IBM had one?
The community should, by rights, support anything and anyone it can, AMD included, because a monoculture would be far far worse than the putrid stench we have at the moment. The existing mess can be fixed, with a lot of time and a lot of patience. Monocultures are stagnant cultures are cultures waiting to die. What we have right now is no great shakes, but I'll take it over a living death any day. The dead can't be cured - well, unless they're a kipper.
Unknown circumstances (Score:2)
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What a crock of shit. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Price isn't everything; boycott AMD (Score:4, Insightful)
I think blaming AMD for ATI's old mistakes is a bit premature at this stage.
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Quite amazing when you realize how long we sold socket A boards. They went from a duron 700 to well over Athlon 2400+ over about 3 years IIRC.
AM2 is supposed to be here for a while now. Just ordered a 4400 today. It's gonna cost me about $138 canadian. Got an Asus board, the chip, Nvidia 256 video card gig of ram
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Ummm, right.... Before the 64s came out, AMD had the Socket A, which was around for a very long time (Duron through Athlon XP). Before that was (Super) Socket 7. How many sockets did Intel go through in the same amount of time? Check out Wikipedia.
Sticking with "mainstream" CPU sockets/slots (ie: no mobile or server parts, since they're not really relevant) since the K6 and Pentium 2 (1997), we have:
AMD (6)
Super socket 7
Slot A
Socket A
Socket 754
Socket 939
Socket AM2
Intel (5)
Slot 1
Socket 370
Socke
So what you're saying is (Score:2, Insightful)