To: Echo Talon
101 posted on
01/30/2007 6:49:17 AM PST by
corlorde
(New Hampshire)
To: corlorde
well... ya can't get AMD with apple now can ya? ;)
Well... AMD acquired ATI... so... you could get an ATI video card in a mac but... you still cant get an AMD processor... although the C2D/Quad is the better choice at the moment...
To: corlorde; Echo Talon
lol, I'm a huge AMD fan.
Me too. But Intel will have their season with Core Duo/Xeon. They earned it this time. And AMD/ATI and IBM just announced they have matched Intel's breakthrough in replacing silicon with hafnium alloys, perhaps the most radical improvement in semiconductor fabrication since their invention in the Sixties.
On AMD, watch for their new multicore designs. My Intel Xeons are good but are hobbled by a mediocre memory design from the full potential of all four cores on a single memory bus. In brief, they can read/write simultaneously across a serial bus but they pass their requests to each of the four banks in turn. So memory can rarely be perfectly optimal. It was not a great compromise but even this solution is too expensive. AMD's new chips have an extremely tight interface between their cores on a high-speed inter-CPU bus and each CPU (and its cores) address its own banks of memory at full speed, locking and caching and borrowing memory from one another in a very transparent way. This solves the bus latency problems of the S5000 bus devices on the Core 2 Xeons.
Look for good things from AMD this summer, first in the server market but quickly trickling down to consumer level to restore AMD's position. And this time frame will likely see remarkably powerful fully integrated ATI graphics chips on the die with the CPU's, also tightly coupled and largely removing even the restrictions of the x16 bus interface we use now on slotted video cards.
Don't rush to buy AMD stock. But if you're waiting for the next great Intel-slayer from AMD, maybe by this fall they can get this architecture to market. Interestingly, by avoiding the Xeon serial memory (the worst power hog/heat generator in my machine), they get increased performance with lower power consumption and heat generation.
Gotta love a company as scrappy as AMD.
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