Jim, Re: "And Intel will announce 2.8 ghz P4 and availability will be nil too."
I disagree. Dell will have it. Gateway will have it. I bet HPQ will have it, too. And if Pricewatch is any indication, the channel will have quite a bit of it.
pricewatch.com
Yes, "surprisingly" enough, they all have an ETA of the 26th. But guess which day the launch will be?
Re: "P4 wins the bandwidth benches and Athlon wins the cpu intensive benchmarks."
P4 wins on the majority of benchmarks, and that's what counts, doesn't it? Who cares if the benchmarks are memory intensive or not? Part of the design decision of the Pentium 4 was to give it a very robust memory hierarchy, and now that decision seems to have paid off. In some cases, it even gives the Pentium 4 an IPC advantage over the Athlon, and even when the Athlon is overclocked to have the faster 333Mhz bus interface.
Sorry, Jim, but the memory bandwidth argument is moot. All of these CPU reviews now use memory bandwidth intensive benchmarks and applications, and so do many end users, as well. In fact, it's getting pretty difficult to find an application where you can actually be certain that it's cache resident any more. So why whine about it? New applications favor more memory bandwidth. That's all there is to it.
Re: "Forget Barton. they need Hammer. Barton is nothing more than a K6-III. On the other hand, the new headroom afforded athlon is impressive."
I agree with you in both cases. By the time Barton ramps up, it will be too little, too late. But fortunately for AMD, they have a more powerful core in the works. Barton will just be their low end part. But, if Hammer fails to deliver as promised (and AMD has a lot to live up to, IMO), then AMD will be left with 2 low end parts.
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