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Smurgen
Guest
Does anyone have that AMD 64 Bit thinger? is it really all that and a bag of chips? I'm looking to build a new PC from the ground up and want to know if i should spend the extra moneys on that chip
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Aaron
Guest
I don't think its worth the money yet. Sure its fast, but you can get pretty good performance from an Athlon XP that'll only cost you $100 compared to Athlon 64's $350+. Plus, there's no 64-bit software out yet, and when there is, you're gonna have to find 64-bit drivers for all of your stuff.
32-bit for me for another year or so...
32-bit for me for another year or so...
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Rubicant?
Guest
same here, I already have an XP 2800+ going up another what like another 200 isnt worth it too me.... -_-
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xeriouxi
Guest
Hi!
I agree! 64-bit applications are going to take well over a year to start to even slightly sell. As processors now are topping the 3GHz mark, people will be satisfied with their speed for quite a few years. I haven't heard of the Microsoft Windows XP 64-bit edition selling much, either. Nothing will work on it!
xeriouxi.
I agree! 64-bit applications are going to take well over a year to start to even slightly sell. As processors now are topping the 3GHz mark, people will be satisfied with their speed for quite a few years. I haven't heard of the Microsoft Windows XP 64-bit edition selling much, either. Nothing will work on it!
xeriouxi.
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Aaron
Guest
That's because it's not out yet. They only recently released the official beta. But as far as application compatibility, I've heard that its wonderful. It was less wonderful with the version that is out for Intel's Itanium processors, because they do not have built in support for running 32-bit code, and it has to be emulated which also slows down the performance. Opteron/Athlon 64 can run 32-bit code though, so this makes it faster. Plus, you can choose to run a 32-bit OS if you want.
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Caddberry
Guest
Hi!
I agree! 64-bit applications are going to take well over a year to start to even slightly sell. As processors now are topping the 3GHz mark, people will be satisfied with their speed for quite a few years. I haven't heard of the Microsoft Windows XP 64-bit edition selling much, either. Nothing will work on it!
xeriouxi.
A friend of mine mentioned that processors are going to be stuck at 3ghz for awhile now.. something like they have fit all the crap they could on sillicon cihps or something.. I mean when you think about it 3 ghz has been the top mark for quite some time now.. but do you honestly think in a few years people are going to be satisfied with that? .. i dont..
I imagine that when the 64 bit processors do start rolling and everything shifts over to 64 bit its going to = some bad ass systems.. and probably some really cool looking software.. i.e. games.. i bet the games by then will look really awesome.. Hell, just look at Doom III.. it looks sweet and its almost here today.. same goes for HL2..
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Aaron
Guest
Intel is about to put out the 3.4 GHz P4, and supposedly they will be pushing mid-4 GHz chips by the end of next year...
Who knows though.
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Mofokubik
Guest
What about the new SOI processors in developement by Sony, Toshiba and IBM. I hear at about 2006 it will be very fast and featured in Sony's ps3. Heres something I found at fileplanet about it:
Cell, scheduled to hit the market in late 2004 or early 2005, differs notably from current processors. This finely crafted chunk of silicon will contain multiple chips within a single unit, and will be able to perform in excess of one trillion mathematical calculations a second. Put into perspective, that makes it approximately 100 times more powerful than a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4 CPU!
Here is the article.
Cell, scheduled to hit the market in late 2004 or early 2005, differs notably from current processors. This finely crafted chunk of silicon will contain multiple chips within a single unit, and will be able to perform in excess of one trillion mathematical calculations a second. Put into perspective, that makes it approximately 100 times more powerful than a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4 CPU!
Here is the article.
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Aaron
Guest
Intel is already talking about "multiple CPUs in one CPU" so to speak... Though I'd be very surprised to see a trillion operations per second unit out that soon.
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Smurgen
Guest
Hmm..ok! I'm a pretty novice PC Builder so I'll take your guys words for it and skip the 64 Bit thingy for now ^_^
Thanks for your input!
Thanks for your input!
J
Jedimark
Guest
Slightly on-topic... soon the P4's will have 1MB Cache to tempt people away from all the Athlon 64 hype.
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Nom_Anor
Guest
About 64 Bit...the one thing I hate the most is when those hozers from Macintosh claim 'OOOH OHH WE had the 64 bit first!!!'
Come on. It was AMD by a long shot.
I hope someone nailz their asses for false advertisement.
On a sidenote...4 GHRz is plenty...when it comes out (for like a year ^_^); the 64 B is just tits.
Come on. It was AMD by a long shot.
I hope someone nailz their asses for false advertisement.
On a sidenote...4 GHRz is plenty...when it comes out (for like a year ^_^); the 64 B is just tits.
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Cyberman
Guest
Well just like the Nintendo 64 was.. 64bits is RELATIVE. There have been 64bit processors around for a fair number of years. However this is the first mainstream application.
Intel's road map beyond 2006 is a little blured at the moment. I believe they are wanting the Itanium to become more mainstream as the P4 series begins to loose steam.
The biggest anoyance with Intels bench marks and AMD's bench marks is equitable comparisons aren't there. The Hammer will run 32bit software however just fine, it will be a bit faster with certain things.
You can have a mix of 64bit specific code in a 32bit OS as well.
As for the 'top' speed of semiconductors.. this is a really silly issue. The primary thing is does the processor get done what you need to when you need to.
Hyper threaded versions of the P4 are coming out, this is similiar too dual CPU's on chip but instead makes use of silicon that goes underutilized on the chip. Why? Because on new CPUs the more transistors they've been slaping on for more 'power' has yielded a less effective utilization. At the current rate of declination of utilized silicon area we'll have more than half the CPU doing nothing most of the time. This is rather inefficient so that's wht Intel did with hyper threading to increase the utilization of the silicon.
Dual CPUs/threaded CPUs are already being utilized in PPC incarnations. These have independant L1 cache's may share an L2 cache and a very large high speed L3 cache is likely to be used.. by large I'm refering to 32megabytes or greater. They are looking into specialized DRAM for such things (L3 is external cache).
Other things, Itanium is looking to have 6Megs of cache on it. There is a serious problem with such a large cache. Each bit uses 6 transistors.. that's 288 million transistors just in the memory alone. It's a nightmare waiting to happen. High density SRAM has a tendancy to be suseptable to cosmic rays and other forms of emf and radiation.. the meaning is that a significant increase in the number of errors in the cache memory will be unavoidable especially as the size shrinks and densities increase.
So what does this mean?
Everyone has the same set of problems, and they are dealing with it differently. Intel has decided that GHZ sells. AMD is working on getting more per GHZ (but has slower speeds although Intel's figures are highly deceptive in practice). Hyper threading will increase performance for P4's. How much? It depends on the software entirely (go figure). As cache sizes are increased so will the failure rates of cache memories. The future is never as rosey as people think, it's just like today with a different set of problems
Cyb
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Nom_Anor
Guest
Thanks for the chunck of info Cyber.
I know on the older computers, you could always overclock them a bit. I was curious...is there a way to do that with a newer laptop, say, a P4 1.6? Or can you swap the processor out?
I know if you touch anywhere near the motherboard you basically void your warentee and dell/hp/ect will tell you that they will never touch your computer again...let me know
I know on the older computers, you could always overclock them a bit. I was curious...is there a way to do that with a newer laptop, say, a P4 1.6? Or can you swap the processor out?
I know if you touch anywhere near the motherboard you basically void your warentee and dell/hp/ect will tell you that they will never touch your computer again...let me know
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ficedula
Guest
The easiest way to overclock most processors nowadays is just to overclock the FSB (Front side bus) - mainly because you can do *that* from software. You do need to know what timer chip your motherboard uses, though; given that - and the popular motherboards are usually listed in any program that can control the FSB - you can often over (or under) clock as you want.
Only problem is that by changing the FSB, you're often changing the speed of the whole system; PCI bus speed, AGP bus speed, DIMM (ie. RAM) bus speed. Some chips let you control each speed totally separately, but many don't - so even if your CPU can overclock by 10%, that's no use unless your graphics card, RAM and other cards are also happy with a 10% speed boost.
Works fine for me, though; I'm running an Athlon XP (133MHz FSB), and my motherboard lets me take the FSB down to 100 in steps (126, 120, 116, etc), or up to 146 in steps (133, 136...). Works from within Windows, too; I used to use it to clock the chip down to cool it off during the really hot days of summer Something doesn't like me going all the way up to 146; I suspect the memory.
Finally, with laptops they may well use less common timer chips - and it's not so easy to find out, either; you can just read the model number off the chip on the motherboard on a desktop
Oh, and yeah; I'm not sure whether it'd void your warrantee, overclocking from software. Technically, it might, but since you might not have even had to open the case, they'd have a hard time proving you'd done anything wrong. Unless they found a shortcut to "CPUFSB" on your desktop, of course
Things can go wrong, though: it's *mostly* safe, but when I was testing out the timer chip on my mobo, I selected the wrong model, and not only did my PC lock up, I had to hard power cycle it 4 times to get it to boot again ... I've never damaged anything permanently, but it's not foolproof...
Only problem is that by changing the FSB, you're often changing the speed of the whole system; PCI bus speed, AGP bus speed, DIMM (ie. RAM) bus speed. Some chips let you control each speed totally separately, but many don't - so even if your CPU can overclock by 10%, that's no use unless your graphics card, RAM and other cards are also happy with a 10% speed boost.
Works fine for me, though; I'm running an Athlon XP (133MHz FSB), and my motherboard lets me take the FSB down to 100 in steps (126, 120, 116, etc), or up to 146 in steps (133, 136...). Works from within Windows, too; I used to use it to clock the chip down to cool it off during the really hot days of summer
Something doesn't like me going all the way up to 146; I suspect the memory.Finally, with laptops they may well use less common timer chips - and it's not so easy to find out, either; you can just read the model number off the chip on the motherboard on a desktop
Oh, and yeah; I'm not sure whether it'd void your warrantee, overclocking from software. Technically, it might, but since you might not have even had to open the case, they'd have a hard time proving you'd done anything wrong. Unless they found a shortcut to "CPUFSB" on your desktop, of course
Things can go wrong, though: it's *mostly* safe, but when I was testing out the timer chip on my mobo, I selected the wrong model, and not only did my PC lock up, I had to hard power cycle it 4 times to get it to boot again ... I've never damaged anything permanently, but it's not foolproof...
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