Rants & Raves

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April 24, 2001 Intel Vs. AMD

Oops, they did it again.
Last night's show was another one-time only deal thanks to someone forgetting to tape the show for rebroadcast. Now I have another collector's item episode to go with the blackout episode of March 19.

Way to go, AMD!
Tonight's segment on the new Intel 1.7 GHz processor just goes to show that clock speed isn't all it's cracked up to be. The 1.3 GHz Athlon beat the Intel in nearly all benchmarks. I like to root for the underdog, and lately AMD has been giving Intel a beating. Part of the reason why the 1.3 GHz Athlon was faster is that the Intel has a longer stage pipeline. This may make the Intel chip faster in the future, but right now, applications are not written to take advantage of this. And software makers aren't likely to recompile their applications anytime soon because so few people have the new processors. Intel has also stumbled with their adoption of Rambus RAM. Rambus was supposed to help with looming RAM speed bottlenecks, but Rambus is expensive, and as it turns out, does not deliver the performance boost they were hoping for. AMD chose to go with DDR Ram, which itself was expensive to begin with, but because there is competition amoung DDR manufacturers, the price for it now is only slightly higher than conventional 133 MHz SDRAM.

Quote of the night (actually from last night's show): "There are lies, there are damn lies, and then there are benchmarks." (Patrick)

Dave Touretzky's website address didn't appear in the shownotes for this episode. He is a proponent of free speech on the internet and is hosting various versions of the DeCSS code. You can find his site at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/.

Posted by Christy on April 24, 2001 10:55 PM

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