Athlon's FSB...

[phrozen_dreamz]

Why doesnt Athlon come out with a competing Proc. with a competing FSB? Really with the FSB at 166 this cant even compete with a P4 533 FSB. I will always purchase athlon cause I love those guys but why dont they even bother making a better CPU? You help and Incite is very appreciated...

edit for spelling...

[squeech]

One thing you have to remember off the bat is that the Pentium 4 chips actually run at a PHYSICAL FSB of 100MHz and 133MHz (for the 400 and 533 chips). The FSB is then put through a process known as "Quad pumping" which sends 4 data packets through the bus channel every clock cycle.

AMD uses the DDR technology to send two packets through every clock cycle; giving the effective 200, 266, and 333 MHz from 100, 133, and now 166 MHz. The two companies actually run chips at the same PHYSICAL FSB settings.

After talking to AMD many times over the past months, I have concluded that AMD is not concerned mainly because their chips continue to be competitive and still give Intel a "run for their money". Also, they are calmly awaiting the Athlon 64/Hammer release date. AMD believes that, even though the chip is going to be released at only 333 or 400 MHz FSB ( 166 or 200 MHz physical double pumped) the infrastructure of the chip will not only compete with Intel, but give them one in the back of the knees

AMD's infrastructure, IMO, has always been superior to Intel, but that's just editorializing

Hope you find this info useful, let us know of any other questions you want answered in more detail

[Ace McGirk]

what squeech said!!

[DPA]

squeech cleaned house with that one...

I agree, AMD would rather slowly gain a lot of money than to blow the market and throw out a huge CPU that would result in a massive loss of money in the long run. Its all about the $$$, and don't worry, we don't even need to care about CPU speed right now, we are so far ahead of the system requirements for anything, that a new CPU will not even have noticable speed differences in any direction (except for those of you who have 50000 icons on the desktop and run 30 windows all the time, one of them always being solitare; you know who you are) The average user has absolutely no use for a 3Ghz, crap, we dont even need 2GHz, the market demands around 800-1000MHz right now, so what is all the fuss?

Just sit down and watch the market pummel itself into the ground

Its gonna be a bumpy ride

[Blac]

Outside of a corporate environment, anything above 1.8Ghz or so is, at this moment, just for bragging rights.

[krohnjw]

1.8Ghz?????????

I've got a 700 in the living room that has zero problems and runs wonderfully......

[Brainchild]

HEHE I'm running a 400 at the moment and really have no problems over using my 750 t-bird. Who knows, I'm not a gamer though, could be the reason huh?

[squeech]

Can't say that I NEED all the power my 2200+ has, but it sure helps out when crunchin' the ECC challenges!

[OuTpaTienT]

Yeah. It also helps when Raytracing, encoding compressed video/audio, decoding video/audio, processing video/audio, performing numerous photo editing jobs in apps like Photoshop, 3D modelling, realtime audio effects in wave editors, distributed computing, general number cruching, encryption cracking, etc. etc. etc.

So if any of you aren't using your CPU to the fullest then let me know 'cause I got plenty of stuff you can do.

[phrozen_dreamz]

Yeah but with the double pumped 166 FSB compared to intels 166 quad pumped FSB the Athlon Bandwith with the ram is considerably slower. In fact the DDR only competes with that RDRAM if it is effectivly overclocked(not an easy thing)....Whens the realeae of the new AMD chip anyways? Thanx!