So it's June...

[slaveofconvention]

IDN if they're really dead in the water just yet - sure the current state of play isn't good - there's no denying that, but the Classic AMD comment? From my memory, Classic AMD moves were things like the K6 processors outclassing the P3's for a fraction of the price, then the 462 XP processors ourperforming the current P4s and finally the first Athlon 64's making what was left of the P4's go running crying for mummy.....

I'm a partial AMD Fanboy - or I used to be - actually I'm a performance fan lol - I had a K6-200, then a K-6 2 450, then a 1700XP and one of the 754 64 3000's - my current machine is an intel Q6700, and an intel 2600k system is very much in the works....

The only time they've really done the too-little-too-late thing I can recall was the failure of the Phenom to really compete with the i7.... or am I wrong here with my recollections?

[x88x]

shuold have known you'd turn up here with something smart-ass to say

edit: you totally overuse the devil smiley. I don't like it. I much prefer this guy

lol I use the other a lot because it generally signifies a tongue-in-cheek response...or at least that's the way I read it...also, it's a lot easier to do ": P" than ": santa :" (minus the spaces and "s, obviously).

OT though, I agree; it's annoying that they delayed launch...not that I'm exactly in a position to buy atm, but I was hoping to catch them on post-release price-drop.

As far as AMD 'too little too late', as far as I remember, the only time they've really done that was with the Turion and Phenom chips. Though, I think the Phenom/Athlon II's hit pretty much on the mark for what 90%+ of the market actually needs. Hell, I consider myself a power-user but I have yet to see my 1090T (or my C2Q 9450 before it) tapped out except when I'm folding. I'm perfectly happy with the "80% of the performance for 40% of the cost" strategy, especially when I don't even max out that '80%'.

...oh, there was also the Slot A stuff...the only Thunderbird CPUs I've ever had to deal with were nightmares...

I know I've said this before, but I really do think that as time goes on the CPU is going to become less and less important...at least the way things are going now anyway.. Most of the heavy lifting is being off-loaded to GPUs (and to a lesser extent FPGAs), and between the demand for CPU power leveling off and the available CPU power skyrocketing, I think in another few years we're at the very least going to settle firmly into a plateau where just about any CPU on the market will be indistinguishable from any other to 99%+ of users. ...of course, there could be some major change that comes up and creates a massive spike in CPU power demand and proves me wrong...but we'll deal with that if it happens.

[dr.walrus]

I think it's a really true point that out biggest processing demands have always been and will continue to be graphics. I don't think it's true that we can generalise that across all computing, but with stuff like tablets? It's at least 50% of the overhead!

[Snowman]

i made exactly 2 forays into the intel world and ran back to the luscious pastures of amd both times. For the price of the pentium M and the celeron M chips I had I could have got a much better amd processor at the time but was at the mercy of my parents wanting a prebuilt system. No matter of ram upgrades or gpu upgrades ever made up for that huge bottleneck at the processor.

[dr.walrus]

for me it's just a question of cost and backwards compatibility

[AmEv]

Cyrix?

[x88x]

I think it's a really true point that out biggest processing demands have always been and will continue to be graphics. I don't think it's true that we can generalise that across all computing, but with stuff like tablets? It's at least 50% of the overhead!

I didn't say the heaviest processing loads are all graphics, I said they're mostly being shifted onto GPUs. Ever since GPGPU stuff really took off, most of the things that have historically been the biggest non-gaming CPU consumers (rendering, video processing, etc) have been being moving to GPGPU because they benefit tremendously from the processing style of GPGPUs.

Cyrix?

What about them?

[RogueOpportunist]

Apparently, the currently available B0 and B1 stepping Zambezi/Bulldozer processors can function at around 2.50GHz/3.50GHz (nominal/turbo) clock-speeds and at such frequencies they cannot deliver performance AMD considers competitive, a person with knowledge of the situation said on Monday.

Reading something like that doesn't bode well with me, if the BD chips can't even be "competitive" at 3.5ghz then obviously this new architecture isn't as advanced performance wise as we're being lead to believe, I mean if they can't even "compete" with a 3.5ghz Zambezi at this point in time how do they expect anything to be better in the fall when Intel is going to be punching them in the face with Ivy Bridge?

I dunno, call me skeptical but I think the only bulldozer we're gonna need at the end of this is the bulldozer we'll have to use to clean up this mountain of bulls***.

[AmEv]

I mean, how are they in the competition?

[x88x]

You mean..this Cyrix?

AFAIK, the only thing left of Cyrix is the AMD Geode, that AMD bought from National Semiconductor in 2003 (after NS bought Cyrix back in 1997).