Cringley on Intel, AMD, and PIII 23
Isochrome writes "Robert Cringley has written an interesting article on Intel and PIIIs at I, Cringley.
It is high level, but covers some interesting ground, like Intel's historical licensing, attempts to push the proprietary Socket 1, and what to do with all its cash. He describes the company's slow decline due to age and size.
"
On a related tanget (Score:1)
Actually... (Score:1)
The PIII has higher clock speed that PII. If you have a (shudder) Winmodem (lots of people do) you'll theoretically get better performance because the extra cycles make up for the overhead of the winmodem.
Interesting (Score:1)
Interesting article --- kind of seems to be abruptly ended... but otherwise, I found it to be an interesting look at Intel.
Kind of hope that the P-III 450's and 500's go *WAY* down in price so that I can upgrade my current slot-uno mobo without having to upgrade to the 440JX Camino chipset and its expensive RDRAM modules... hmmm, I wonder.... nah...
Also, hope K7 comes out soon and hope it does what ppl purport it to do. That way, I can run 2 PC's side by side. One for Linux, the other for BeOS, Solaris, MT (err NT), and Win98.
Oh well... enough rambling...
Out.
Wonderful article (Score:1)
Anyways, it was a great way to start my workday.
FYI... (Score:1)
--
INTEL HAS BECOME MICROSOFT (Score:1)
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
spelling. (Score:1)
On a related tanget (Score:1)
Thanks in advance,
Rand
Factual errors in the Cringley article. (Score:1)
just had to comment that Cringley made some factual errors in his article...
"... when AMD introduces its K6-3 chip."
Umm what does he mean, "when"? It's out, and has been since Monday last week! Of course, Pricewatch has had prices for the P-III for over a month - a chip that isn't out yet. Yet, it took them two days to get pricing for the K6-III up...
"Besides, there isn't any software that yet
supports those 70 extra P-III instructions,"
Yeah - Direct X 6.1, Dragon's Naturally Speaking, PhotoShop 5, that's no support at all. While I realize that it's thin support on a platform most of us revile, it is support.
"and there probably won't be for months or years,
a la Intel's thinly supported MMX instructions or AMD's even more thinly supported 3D-Now. So wait a few months, let the AMD chip appear, then see what happens to prices."
Umm - MMX is actually pretty well supported. And, some people curse it because it impacts FPU performance which has become somewhat more important with the advent of games like Quake. A large number of video encoders/decoders under the Windows platform actually make extensive use of MMX instructions.
Oh - and 3D-Now! even more thinly supported than SSE! Come on! It's been out since June 1998, and has a number of (mostly multimedia and game) applications that support it. In addition MetroWerks CodeWarrior supports it directly.
Wait a few months for the AMD chip...? The K6-III which I assume he's still talking about, because there is no mention of the K7, is already out!!!
Why is it so hard to get accurate, factual reporting on technical topics in mainstream media?
- Porter
Pentium III Marketing (Score:1)
Bend over, Point to your anus, and tell Intel: "This way in."
Accipiter
Or ... (Score:1)
$1000 CPU + $5 keyboard + crappy power supply + flickertron monitor = crappy computer (but that's what folks are selling to the poor ignorant masses.)
The computer industry will regret burning people by saving pennies on the components just so they can afford Intel's high margin CPUs.
I heard similar things (Score:1)
I rarely use my cpu computing power as it is..
here is when it gets used...
1) printing 720x720 dpi color pictures on my epson printer using ghostscript.. my cpus (dual P233) get maxed out at 99% for a minute or so.. but I do not do this all the time.. maybe just once a week
2) scanning.. and using the gimp.. neither max my cpus thou there is stress on my system..
3) can't think of what else I do to use those cycles.. but last night I did so somehting that had then at the 90% range
my system has bog downs in the I/O NOT the cpu.. I have a 66mhz system bus, 33 mhz pci bus... althoug I do need to get an agp graphic port.. I think that 450Mhz is a bit more power than most people need or can use
I want a FASTER (both system and pci) bus
pci is still 33mhz on most systems and agp is 33mhz too
so what if you have a 100mhz system bus. you still have bottleneck in getting the data from the HD or the network or the video card....
and yes computer have more than one bus in case you did not know. the system bus is the one that the memory and cpu sit on and this is then connected to the isa, pci or agp bus...
come on guys give me speed in other parts of the system..
Fashionable technology (Score:1)
Whatever you think about Microsoft, their use of year version numbers was a great (marketing) idea. Software that automatically obsoletes itself. In 1997, Windows 95 was already old news even though there was no Windows 98 yet!