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September 29 2003: Welcome Back !! The relative calm that descended over the tech community over the past few months has been broken with a resounding BANG, with shots being fired by all the majors. The G5's have finally started to appear in the flesh , and much to Apples embarrassment, but not to the surprise of anyone else, the real world performance figures presented to the world at the products launch have proved to be nothing more than a work of fiction on behalf of Mr Jobs' Blind Monkey Marketing Department. AMD have Finally Paper launched the long over due Athlon 64 Range, while Intel managed to pull another rabbit out by rebadging a Xeon MP chip with a 2MB L3 cache, as a PIV Extreme Edition ??? Let the the Hyperbole Fly :-) The Athlon 64 has finally seen the light of day, Hoooray
!! Lets all hope its been worth the wait. The Athlon 64 comes in 2 versions, a 754 Pin Single Channel DDR version, and a 940 Pin Dual Channel DDR version, dubbed Athlon 64 FX-51.( A rebadged Opteron ?) They have also announced a 939 Pin version for next year !!? Now granted that the Opteron is also a 940 Pin layout, the question that goes begging is what is the difference between the Opteron and the Athlon 64, and What Prey tell is the purpose of the 939 Pin Unit. AMD insist that there is a lot of differences between the Opteron and the Athlon 64 , sure, who's to argue ! Mind you, Intel insists there's a big difference between a Xeon and a Pentium 4 but I'll be damned if I can find much to distinguish them apart except the Pin layout, and the extra cash layout ... Bingo !!!! Ahhh My head hurts :-( Bah enough of this.. On with the Show. The Athlon 64 / FX-51 has hit the ground running with chips being released at clockspeeds ranging from 1.8 to 2.2 Ghz. Of cause Cheapzilla insisted on maintaining their ever so popular PR Rating, with the 2 Ghz Athlon 64 chip having the Moniker of 3200+. However , the 2.2 Ghz Opteron ? chip scores the FX-51 Tag ? Other features include, an integrated memory controller supporting dual-channel and single-channel DDR SDRAM,1MB L2 cache, SSE2 instruction support, and a longer 12-stage integer pipeline and 17-stage floating-point pipeline (Athlon XP features 10 and 15 stages respectively). This not only increases the scalability of this architecture it also speeds up decoding of certain commands. Compatible chipsets have been released by Via in the form of the KT800 and also nVidea with the nForce 3. Both feature an AGP hub (North Bridge, without the memory controller as this is now on-die), an I/O hub (South Bridge) and an optional PCI-X bridge. These chips are linked by AMD's HyperTransport technology,which interestingly is also used by Apple on the G5. One odd anomaly seems to be the fact that the FX-51, following on from its Opteron heritage, is requiring ECC registered Ram, which in the specified DDR400 variant is as rare as hens teeth at the moment . Can't really get my head around what Chipzilla were thinking . There are some memory manufacturers listed as interested in producing the modules, but I would expect them to be thin on the ground for a quite while yet. Of course every tech site and his dog has got on board to review and analyze the the new chip. The AMD fraternity had hyped themselves into a frenzy, convinced they had the speed crown all sewn up, at least for a few months before the Prescott reared its head. Chipzilla had other plans , and rained on their parade by releasing a rebadged Xeon MP as a PIV Extreme Edition . Oouch. !! In short, the Athlon 64 FX-51 has managed
to keep the current PIV line in sight, but it raises the question on
whether its going to be enough to compete with the Prescott when it
arrives in a few months. Time will tell. Next...
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Intel pulled the proverbial Rabbit out by releasing the PIV 3.2 Extreme Edition ( Emergency Edition ) 1 week prior to the Athlon 64 launch. This was no doubt to counter any advantage that AMD may have gained in the performance race. So what the Hell is a PIV EE. Scratching the surface reveals little more than a Prestonia Cored Xeon MP clocked at 3.2 Ghz, and running an 800 FSB. Hmmm, what's amusing is that the fastest Xeon MP is 2.8 Ghz, and can only manage a 533 FSB. What's even more amusing ? is that the price difference is in the vicinity of > $5K, I kid you not. Its amazing what lengths all of the Majors go to win a few benchmarks, unlike Apple who have the uncanny ability of just manufacturing figures and expecting the faithful to swallow the tripe, both Chipzilla and Cheapzilla have to actually answer to the swarm of X86 evangelists who review the units hands on, so simply making flippant announcements about being the fastest isn't going to cut it, instead they both rebadge High End Server product as Desk Top solutions, price them accordingly, and hope no one in the Enterprise Market notice they are being bent over .. :-) In the end , we the end user are the winners in this latest round of shenanigans :-) The release of the PIV EE line has also
raised some questions on whether Prescott is still on track for a
Q4 release. Intel has indicated that the roadmap has not changed,
but there are reports that all may not be going as smoothly as Intel
would have liked. Rumors that the new .09 Micron chips were dissipating
103 watts were first dismissed , but then much to the tech communities
horror later confirmed. Man this thing will double as a microwave
if Intel doesn't tame the beast. Looks like that Water Cooling Solution
is not so Extreme :-) here,
here
, here
and here..
Phew... that should keep ya busy for a while
:-) Well, lets just say that no one can manage to get even close to Apples reported figures with the reality being that the only System that is even giving the X86 variants any thing to be concerned about is the Dual 2.0 Ghz units. Mind you , they are still getting creamed in some benchmarks. Here .The Single Processor systems are not exactly causing excitement by any stretch of the imagination. Embarrassingly for Apple, the single Systems are barely beating earlier G4DP machines in a lot of Apples own beloved Photoshop Tests.. Hmmmm.. Oh My :-) Here. Now before anyone starts accusing me of only posting biased PC favored benchmarks, all of the above are from a Mac Technology Site !! O.K, Heres one from a " PC "
Magazine in the U.K. Here Its great to see that the once very vocal and zealously one eyed fools who went on a feeding frenzy a few months back, have now gone mysteriously quiet. ?? Surprise, Surprise !! Mr Jobs must be suffering from his extended forays in the RDF ( Reality Distortion Field ) that Apple seems to use whenever they benchmark their products. How else can you explain his insistence on maintaining the original line of Monkey Marketing that we are being inflicted with. Keep it Up Steve, I'm sure that preaching to the 1.5% of already converted will do you some good in the long run !! Sad thing is, the G5 really is an awesome piece of work, if only they had marketed the product on its merit instead of the bullshite overblown , over hyped fertilizer that we have been fed, then I wouldn't be needing to give these fools such a kick.., but then again , What Fun would that be...
Till Next Time :-)
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