You mean, Steve Jobs is not God?  My faith is shattered…

Dude, he’s a vee-pee of marketing. Of course he says his stuff is superior - it’s his job to say his stuff is superior! The vee-pee of marketing at Dell would say the same thing about his stuff. That’s why they don’t let engineers talk to the public; we can’t say stuff like that with a straight face…

did

For years Apple has been saying that PPC can walk all over Intel’s ass. So now we are to believe that Intel is the greatist shit since silicon?

AMD would have been a better choice. At least they have true 64-bit CPUs out in public circulation already!

I’ll stick with my G4, thank you.

And…  as predicted.
LOL.

;-]

Steve Jobs went under the knife for the big C last year (maybe the year before) had a near God experience and went justafiably crazy!!!  Now he is at Disney and believes in Mickey Mouse.  So he went and did it, the damnd sun-of-***** did it.  Went and ruined the only affordable unique piece of hardware left in America. Well you’ll pry my powerpc from my cold dead hand before I would ever touch an Intell Mac. Besides he is using AMD in the server line which won’t stop using the next iteration of the powerpc by the way.  Les I love ya, and most of what you say about apple is true. But it wasn’t always this way.  PS I lost my log in!!

I wouldn’t rule out buying an Intel Mac just yet. The Mac guys here in the office have played with the Dual Core Intel Macs and are practically creaming their pants over them.

Larkins, you should be able to make use of the Forgot Password function to have it sent to you, but if that’s not working for some reason (say your email address has changed) then with what you want for a new password and I’ll change it for you.

Moloch said:

AMD would have been a better choice. At least they have true 64-bit CPUs out in public circulation already!

Just for the record, so does Intel (I have 2 of them in my desktop at home).

In fact, the Pentium 4 has always had a 64-bit data bus, it was just missing the 64 bit address bus which allows it to use more than 4GB of RAM.  And up until about 2 years ago, you would have needed to refinance your house to afford to put that much memory in anyway.

Intel started producing the chips with the 64-bit address bus within 2 months of the AMD 64.  As far as I can tell, AMD is still playing catch-up.

My guess about why they didn’t go with AMD has been AMD’s historic lack of supporting architecture for their chips:  they don’t (or at least didn’t) provide any motherboard chipsets (memory contollers, PCI controllers etc).  Instead they relied on 3rd party motherboard manufacturers to produce them, at the cost of stability and reliability.

Oh yeah, and until the AMD 64, they didn’t even provide their own HEAT SINKS!

It is true that Intel did release 64-bit processors pretty quickly after AMD did, but they only did so because AMD’s sales took off. They initially claimed they didn’t see a need as there wasn’t any demand for 64 bit processors from the average consumer. There’s also a couple of other misstatements in your comment.

Intel started producing the chips with the 64-bit address bus within 2 months of the AMD 64.  As far as I can tell, AMD is still playing catch-up.

You should probably do a little more reading then. AMD’s 64-bit offerings have generally outperformed Intel’s solutions and AMD’s dual-cores often beat the crap out of Intel’s offerings and tend to be cheaper to boot.

My guess about why they didn’t go with AMD has been AMD’s historic lack of supporting architecture for their chips:  they don’t (or at least didn’t) provide any motherboard chipsets (memory contollers, PCI controllers etc).  Instead they relied on 3rd party motherboard manufacturers to produce them, at the cost of stability and reliability.

I can’t say it’s always been the case, but AMD has been producing chipsets for their processors for awhile now. Turns out most folks tend to prefer offerings from their partners over AMD’s chipsets—such as the nForce series from nVidia or VIA’s chipsets—but AMD does produce their own versions as well (e.g. the AMD 760 chipset). I’m a big fan of the nForce series myself.

The 64-bit processors have memory controllers built-in at this point which is part of the reason for their speed advantage.

Oh yeah, and until the AMD 64, they didn’t even provide their own HEAT SINKS!

That’s quite simply not true. Every AMD processor I’ve ever bought, with the exception of the very first one (a K6-333), came with an AMD supplied heatsink and fan in the box. I believe that became standard practice with the release of the Athlons.

Les said:

AMD’s 64-bit offerings have generally outperformed Intel’s solutions and AMD’s dual-cores often beat the crap out of Intel’s offerings and tend to be cheaper to boot.

Of course this is a moot point anyway, because the CPU is no longer the “bottleneck” on a computer anyway - the CPU spends most of it’s time waiting to talk to the memory and hard drive.

I have proven this fact after building my latest machine:  my last machine was a p4 3.0GHz w/HT (32-bit address bus).  It has 512MB 400Mhz DDR2, and dual WD Raptors (SATA, 10k RPM).  My new machine has 2x2.8Ghz Xeons (64 bit HT), with 1GB 400Mhz DDR2 and the same HDs.  Both machines are equally as fast, and one is dual processor!

One of the first rules of optimizing the speed of a system is to avoid “microbenchmarks”.  Your system might perform one task particularly well, yet perform poorly in others. One system might outperform another in one discrete area, but the other one could make up for it by doing something else faster.  You cannot test the speed of the overall system by pounding on one particular aspect.  Most of what you see over at Tom’s hardware are “microbenchmarks”.

I said:

Oh yeah, and until the AMD 64, they didn’t even provide their own HEAT SINKS!

Les said:

That’s quite simply not true. Every AMD processor I’ve ever bought, with the exception of the very first one (a K6-333), came with an AMD supplied heatsink and fan in the box. I believe that became standard practice with the release of the Athlons.

That’s not the one i’m referring to.  What many people are not aware of is that the CPU chip (the silicon part) is a little smaller than your pinky fingernail.  The piece of metal you see on the chip is actually a heat sink.  The advantage of supplying this type of heat sink is that it is more forgiving if the user does not install their CPU fan correctly.

If this heat sink is not perfectly installed, the chip will overheat and fail long before it would if the heat sink had been properly installed.

To save money, AMD did not provide this heat sink on their pre-64 bit offerings.  They instead required the end user to install thier own.