Is the Athlon 64 "the moment of truth" for AMD?

[MrEgo]

What I mean is, is this release going to make or break AMD? I don't know a lot about the company, but it does seem as though Intel has been gaining a lot of ground back that AMD might have gained over the last few years. I'd like to hear what you guys have to say. I really like AMD, and I appreciate them giving me the ability to purchase a budget processor that performs like a champ. Now it seems like an upgrade every 6 months is hardly a lot of money. Anyway, let me know what you guys think.

 

[Jeff7181]

I think it would take something massive, like the Dresden factory being destroyed to get rid of AMD... even if the current AMD ownership can't hack it anymore, somebody else will buy them because lets face it, AMD is Intel's only competition, and they do damn well for what they have to compete against... SOMEBODY would take over... hell, maybe Bill Gates would step in, or more likely IBM would buy them out since they're already working closely to make processors.

 

[beatle]

Hard to say if IBM would pick them up since they're tied closely with the new G5, but who knows? VIA picked up Cyrix, but look where that has gone...

 

[Jeff7181]

Well, IBM is also working directly with AMD on SOI... they haven't formally announced a partnership, but I think it's safe to say IBM has a vested interest in AMD.

 

[Icewind]

If athlon 64 can't beat Prescott or Tejas, AMD is in serious trouble. For now, im enjoying my new P4 setup so I can enjoy Half Life 2 in all its beauty.

 

[Corporate Thug]

icewind, athlon XP's arent beating P4C's now but amd seems to be doing ok. i too will enjoy HL2 in all its beauty with my AMD rig

 

[Jeff7181]

I have to disagree, Icewind. I don't want to start a big argument and a flame war, but the Opteron has already proven it's worthyness. So we know the Athlon-64 won't be a flop... however, if they chop down the L2 cache, and fail to impliment dual channel memory, it won't be as strong as it could be. If sales decline, you can bet they'll do both of those things right if they don't do it right away. I don't see AMD being in any serious trouble. Intel doesn't want AMD to go out of business any more than the people at AMD. And consumers definately shouldn't want AMD to go out of business, because then you're only alternative to an Intel processor is a crappy IBM (Cyrix) processor, or a Mac. Then Intel could charge whatever they wanted, and people would have to pay it. The worst possible situation I can see is AMD dropping home user type of processors and switching to only producing enterprise level equipment. Cause like it or not, the Opteron is THE processor for servers right now... it may not be as fast at certain things as the Xeon, but it's capable of running 64 bit software and addressing over 4 GB of memory, which the Xeon can do neither. And the Itanium MUST use 64 bit software, so for a company to change to the Itanium means they have to change every piece of software they use as well, which not many companies will find cost effective.

 

[stevejst]

Market share.
AMD has been living through a lot of bad things but they are still around.
On the server market Opteron is a new arrival, the two top companies are Dell and HP and they hold more than 50% of the market, IBM is a distant third. Dell and HP do not use Opteron though things can always change, HP uses AMD processors in their retail PCs. Xeon dominates the market. It is expected that this year AMD could gain 2% of the market share from Intel, up from 2% they held in 2002. That is 4% total, and only expectation.

AMD is banking on the market reality (nothing to loose) and the verbal support of IBM. It is certain that if IBM goes aggressive against HP (#1 on the server market) offering Opteron servers, HP will respond in kind, meaning offering Opteron servers. Whether this is all a pipe dream of AMD or unavoidable reality, we'll see. Opteron is reviewed favorably by many.
I am actually in the process of building Linux Opteron server, still looking for decent prices on a CPU.

So the PC retail market is vital to AMD and the release of Athlon64 is extremely important, everybody knows that, including AMD.

 

[batmang]

the opteron is great, but who has money for those? as a gamer, your always looking at the best bang for the buck when your shopping for the cpu. all the money they really want to spend is going at the video card. the athlon 64 is what the gamers are eyeing, not the opteron. if the athlon 64 doesnt perform like we all hope, i dont think its going to make AMD flop, not at all. But i do think its going to make all the gamers look at the intel chips in a different light. the first thing i look at overall, is: " Will this cpu play the new games coming out? " "Is it worth the money compared to Intel?" If those two come out as NO's. I sure as hell wouldnt buy an athlon 64 if its not going to benefit me towards gaming. Right now the c series intel chips are doing a great job with value and performance. Before i bought my intel rig, about 2 months ago, i was eyeing the bartons months before they got released but then i heard about the hyper threading and 800 bus. I compared and contrasted the two and when it came down to opening my wallet. For what i got with my money, i beleive my intel system is a sh1tload better then a overheater AMD. Lets just hope we get the bang for the buck AMD value back again.

 

[pspada]

Originally posted by: beatle
Hard to say if IBM would pick them up since they're tied closely with the new G5, but who knows? VIA picked up Cyrix, but look where that has gone...

Yea, but Cyrix sucked, unlike AMD.

And I concur with Jeff, the ability to run both 32-bit and 64-bit on the same processor is a siginificant advantage. Even better, simply not having to recompile everything for a completely different 64-bit architecture is an even more compelling reason that AMD will remain viable for the forseeable future.

 

[batmang]

yeah, cyrix sucked horribly... no clue why via would spend money on that cpu.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

the opteron is great, but who has money for those?

The crowd it's targeted at, the high-end workstation/server crowd. It's a more lucrative market than the desktop one so market penetration there is a very intelligent goal. AMD representitives have been quoted as saying that their strategy is being altered to become more market-focused instead of single-competitor focused. They understand that going head-to-head with Intel is a losing proposition, and that creating new markets and creating solutions that are attractive from a cost and performance perspective in existing markets is the direction that will yield the best chance for continued growth.

Also, IBM is doing more than giving verbal support to AMD link and I'd bet dollars to donuts that they deliver on the workstation next year too. I don't think Intel has to worry as much about AMD's goals as Sun does but I'm certainly no tech industry analyst or IEEE type with the educational back-round to bolster my suppositions so I'll STFU now

 

[INemtsev]

I think Athlon 64 is gonna be great I am running my website on the Optereon and it beats Xeon in all benchmarks...Unless Intel improves their technology well AMD might take the crown from here on...

 

[INemtsev]

I hate VIA cpus and I start to notlike their chipsets too...nvidia chipsets are the ones Im buying from now on...

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: INemtsev
I think Athlon 64 is gonna be great I am running my website on the Optereon and it beats Xeon in all benchmarks...Unless Intel improves their technology well AMD might take the crown from here on...

Have you run any benchmarks? Like the popular PCMark and Sandra? I'm curious what a REAL rig does... rather than what you see in reviews with pre-release motherboards and possible tweaks to either increase or decrease performance.

 

[OddTSi]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
Cause like it or not, the Opteron is THE processor for servers right now... it may not be as fast at certain things as the Xeon, but it's capable of running 64 bit software and addressing over 4 GB of memory, which the Xeon can do neither.

I guess all those Xeon servers with 32GB of RAM are just make-believe then, right?

 

[stevejst]

I think Athlon 64 is gonna be great I am running my website on the Optereon and it beats Xeon in all benchmarks...Unless Intel improves their technology well AMD might take the crown from here on...

What is truly amazing is this AMD inability to gain the market share with a better product. I think we all know that T'bird was a better processor than Pentium III and yet AMD could not reach 20% of the market. XP was a better processor than Pentium IV A and again AMD could not make substantial gain. Duron was better than Celeron but Duron never made it either. Most would agree that Opteron is better than Xeon and yet again who would bet on Opteron?
Barton is apparently worse than Northwood C so if Athlon64 cannot regain some ground I don't see that AMD is going to produce nothing but more financial loss. They are doing that for 7 quarters already, good hopes are one thing but investors are not going to fund good hopes.

 

[Soulkeeper]

the only recent via chipsets i liked were the kt133a and kt266a at release time
kt133, kt266, kt333, kt400, kt400a, and kt600 were all kinda weak in one way or another compared to themselves or competition. for this reason i just bought an nforce2 board last week

i agree with many above this won't make or break AMD cause with this release AMD is entering new market segments so if they failed the worst case senario would be them dropping outta the server market

also i highly doubt that the hammer series will fail
my prediction is that it will give amd the leadership position in performance for 6 or so months
then it will be back and forth competition for like 8 months to a year atleast on the desktop/laptop segments
it could also really take off in the server market
especially if it is priced significantly lower than intel

i can't wait to see what .09u does for the hammer
not to mention ddr2

 

[bunnyfubbles]

AMD won't go anywhere as long as nVidia is still around. I don't know what all this talk about VIA is for, I'd think it more likely for nVidia to do something before VIA might. nVidia has really smashed its way into AMD's life with the nForce chipsets, nForce 1 wasn't as badass as we'd thought it would be but hey, considering that was their first attempt, nForce 2 is hands down the best platform for AMD Athlon XP CPUs, nForce 3 for the K8 Athlons should shine as well. Intel made a mistake by not letting nVidia get close with the pentium but suit themselves, Intel can keep investing time and research into badass chipsets for their Pentiumss while AMD will go ahead and let nVidia do that for their Athlons. VIA and SIS now seem to be mere middle men to me free to pick and choose sides and produce seemingly insignificant products in light to other options.

No, AMD won't go anywhere anytime soon. They have some good high end solutions and some awesome budget solutions, it's in between that's a major thorn in their side, AMD would very much so love to be able to sell their CPUs at Intel prices and still be able to make more than enough sales.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: OddTSi

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
Cause like it or not, the Opteron is THE processor for servers right now... it may not be as fast at certain things as the Xeon, but it's capable of running 64 bit software and addressing over 4 GB of memory, which the Xeon can do neither.

I guess all those Xeon servers with 32GB of RAM are just make-believe then, right?

I guess you haven't heard of clusters then, have you?

*EDIT* Correction... OddTSi... you're right... Xeon processor are capable of addressing more than 4 GB. So the Opteron doesn't have an advantage over the Xeon is that respect.

 

[pspada]

Originally posted by: stevejst

I think Athlon 64 is gonna be great I am running my website on the Optereon and it beats Xeon in all benchmarks...Unless Intel improves their technology well AMD might take the crown from here on...

What is truly amazing is this AMD inability to gain the market share with a better product. I think we all know that T'bird was a better processor than Pentium III and yet AMD could not reach 20% of the market. XP was a better processor than Pentium IV A and again AMD could not make substantial gain. Duron was better than Celeron but Duron never made it either. Most would agree that Opteron is better than Xeon and yet again who would bet on Opteron?
Barton is apparently worse than Northwood C so if Athlon64 cannot regain some ground I don't see that AMD is going to produce nothing but more financial loss. They are doing that for 7 quarters already, good hopes are one thing but investors are not going to fund good hopes.

AMD spends it's money on chip development, whereas Intel blows more than AMDs entire budget on advertising. Not to mention strong arming PC makers to keep them from selling systems with AMD chips in them. So it's not surprising that clueless end users spend more money on systems with crappy performance then I do when I build an AMD system.

 

[Wingznut]

Originally posted by: pspada
AMD spends it's money on chip development, whereas Intel blows more than AMDs entire budget on advertising. Not to mention strong arming PC makers to keep them from selling systems with AMD chips in them. So it's not surprising that clueless end users spend more money on systems with crappy performance then I do when I build an AMD system.

Just out of curiosity... What is AMD's R&D and "entire" budget, and Intel's advertising budget? And how much of Intel's gross (or net) income do you suppose they ought to be spending on advertising and R&D?

Also, besides such rock solid reputable journalists such as theinquirer, amdzone, xbitlabs, etc... What makes you think that Intel "strongarms" PC makers? And which PC makers would this be?

One last thing... How do you define "crappy performance"?

 

[stevejst]

So it's not surprising that clueless end users spend more money on systems with crappy performance then I do when I build an AMD system.

Really. I switched to Intel because it is a better platform at the moment. As a matter of fact current XP chips are crappy when compared to HT Northwoods C. You gotta be AMD fanatic not to see that.
I suggest you visit Tom's Hardware site and check the benchmarks. XP 3200 is losing to almost all Northwoods C but the 2.4 GHz one which is very easy to overclock far beyond the reach of any AMD chip.
I know what the realtions are since I have two PCs with Bartons XP2500 NF7-S and A7N8X and one Northwood C 2.4 with IS7-E. I can tell you that overclocked XP processors can suck overclocked Intel 2.4GHz big time.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: stevejst

So it's not surprising that clueless end users spend more money on systems with crappy performance then I do when I build an AMD system.

Really. I switched to Intel because it is a better platform at the moment. As a matter of fact current XP chips are crappy when compared to HT Northwoods C. You gotta be AMD fanatic not to see that.
I suggest you visit Tom's Hardware site and check the benchmarks. XP 3200 is losing to almost all Northwoods C but the 2.4 GHz one which is very easy to overclock far beyond the reach of any AMD chip.
I know what the realtions are since I have two PCs with Bartons XP2500 NF7-S and A7N8X and one Northwood C 2.4 with IS7-E. I can tell you that overclocked XP processors can suck overclocked Intel 2.4GHz big time.

Since you seem to be so enthusiastic about Intel... what are the significant changes being made to the Prescott? It's going to have a 1 MB L2 cache right? And the possibility for a 1000 Mhz FSB I think I read somewhere... what else?

 

[stevejst]

Summary.
The set of instructions is changing as well. I personally expect it to be Athlon64 killer though of course prices in the initial offering (Q4 of 2003) will be spicy.
I am using common sense. I will probably make Athlon64 PC this year and a second HT Pentium IV. As far as Prescott is concerned that will wait the next year. AMD XP line and N-Force 2 motherboards are finished as far as I am concerned.
More on architecture.