Techies: How 'bout AMD?

[alexwcovington]

In the past five years, AMD has gone from a second-rate chipmaker to making what many consider to be the finest CPUs in the world. But AMD has lagged in the speed wars over the past year... and some say its move into 64-bit processors is a bit premature.

Will the Athlon 64 save or destroy AMD?

[Fixated]

1. ....

Save. It's looking sweet.

[alexwcovington]

2. gettin' close to 1000!

congrats...

[Nlighten1]

3. No telling really

But I don't think it was a mistake. AMD rolled out a fine 64bit chip and it is getting a lot of good press. It isn't really needed by the masses of IT shops yet but it will. I still don't think they are going to catch Intel though.

The first quarter of next year Intel is going to release the Pentium V chip and it will begin at 5GHz. By the end of that year it will be 10GHz and the same goes for 2005 where we will see a 20GHz chip if all goes well.

[bowens43]

4. GHz isn't everything.....

For the past few years AMD processors have easily out performed higher clocked Intel processors.

[TreasonousBastard]

7. And, ummm....

Wot's a lotta gigaherz when you're bogged down by bus speed, disk and peripheral accessing, and another humongous load of Windoze?

There was an article in one of the local fishwraps a few days ago about a guy who tied together 1,000 Mac G4's and built a supercomputer. 7 teraflops, iirc.

Neat grad school project.

[JanMichael]

5. My first laptop was powered by AMD and it was great.

I'm all for competition and hope that they keep up the fight and don't capitulate.

[alexwcovington]

6. I hope so too

but I'm worried.

[Spider Jerusalem]

8. AMD's 64-bit chip will probably give them a competitive edge...

especially since the AMD chip (unlike the 64-bit Intel chip) retains backward compatibility, in that it's ALSO capable of executing the x86 instruction set.

Intel seems to be focussing on raw clock speed as their main selling point...trying to keep Moore's Law stumbling along as long as possible, one supposes...but AMD chips have been beating Intel in instructions per clock cycle for years now, and the latter is a more important indicator of a chip's actual performance.