Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kash johal who wrote (94102)	2/18/2000 1:51:00 PM
From: Jim McMannis	Respond to of 1576164

RE:"What do you think of Intels desperate strategy of producing lots of cumines and making a 2 fer 1 offer. Do they really think a dual 500-600 Cumine system can compete even with an AThlon 850. Perhaps Dumbass is running their marketing for them!!!" --- Intel had to come up with some way to dump all those low speed Floppermines.... They may not make much profit but they will make it up on volume(TM-AMD). E-machines must be in hog heaven...can't wait for the dual Flopper e-mo'chine. (TM Steve Harris) Can Intel scramble or what? AMD needs to move the bottom rung Athlon up to 650-700... In light of all this, AMD needs to move the K6-2s up to 600 Mhz or phase them out if they can't compete Mhz wise with the P6 core. Jim

To: kash johal who wrote (94102)	2/18/2000 1:58:00 PM
From: Kenith Lee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576164

One of the reasons Intel still making tons of money is that people do not need a very fast PC. Many people including myself are looking for one at 500-600 MHz. Too bad that the K6 can't keep up and Spitfire is yet to be seen. I don't know why people need dual but some people may think 2x is better than 1 when it is relatively cheap.

To: kash johal who wrote (94102)	2/19/2000 9:25:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576164

Is Dell really making a 2nd cpu for free offer? On the general issue of what a 2nd processor gives you, here's a couple year old articles from Anand: anandtech.com anandtech.com As near as I can tell, the 2nd CPU doesn't add much except in specialized applications, and even there you never get anything like a 2x improvement. The 2nd article has a strange conclusion that doesn't seem to match the graphs at all. In general, a 50% faster CPU will win all the time, and be close to 50% faster most of the time, when things are CPU bound. I got a vintage dual PPro system, and my personal experience is similar. I looked at the task manager CPU chart, running 100% processor stuff, and it's amusing, the usage charts for the 2 cpu's will go into this random inverted image pattern, where cpu1%usage + cpu2%usage = 100. Linux is a little different, there are some things that can be parallelized fairly trivially, the favorite of software jocks is kernel recompilation. This will often show a near linear improvement, i.e. it will go close to twice as fast with dual processors. And the way X works, you could expect some improvement in anything graphic intensive, since sending bits to the display is always done in a separate process from the application. Servers are different too, you'd normally expect extra processors to be useful there, though scaling usually works better in Unix than NT, just because Unix programmers aren't shy about starting lots of processes, where NT tends to run single tasks with multiple threads. NT task switching is really piggy, and NT thread switching is not cheap either. Cheers, Dan.