Re: I'll bet Pong really screams on the Athlon.
Whatever pong may do on either chip, the point is that Windows 98, Windows ME, Linux, Windows NT, and Windows 2000, desktop and server operating systems and Office 97, Office 2000, Oracle, Sql Server, and compiled Visual C++, Visual Basic, Borland Delphi, gcc, etc. applications run faster on the 1.2GHZ Athlon than they do on the 1.5GHZ P4.
Often much faster.
Given that P4 sales will be far fewer than Macintosh sales for at least a year (and maybe longer) I don't see everyone scrambling to rewrite enough applications to matter.
And the jury is definitely still out on whether or not P4 is faster on more than a handful of applications even after they've been re-compiled. Benchmarks can be tuned to look good on any platform (See Apple if you want a "supercomputer"). Given months to create such benchmarks, Intel was able to come up with almost none.
The P4 will keep Intel alive, but so far it just hasn't lived up to the expectation that it would be faster than the Athlon. And P4 is much more expensive to produce, cutting Intel's effective production capacity by about 2/3s. To maintain a 70% market share against AMD, Intel will need 3 to 4 dedicated .13 FABs against AMD's one Dresden FAB. That's a fresh capital investment from Intel of 9 to 12 Billion dollars to compete with a FAB that AMD is completing this year and has largely already paid for.
Dan |
