| iroc409 |
06-23-2003 04:23 PM |
the amd 64bit chips are already out... the opteron series (server version). i've checked out a lot of them, and the motherboards right now are VERY server-oriented, and would not make good workstations. however, the opteron can handle simultaneous 32bit and 64bit processes very well (and is much faster than intel's itanium, which is so expensive it doesn't even make sense). and for you *nix desktop users, what difference does windows make?
however, the dual athlon mp boards are very worstation-friendly, and overclockable as well (check out the ones by msi and gigabyte). the athlon mp is just an xp with smp enabled. you can actually mod an xp chip into the mp.
i'd really like to see a mac go head-to-head with amd. amd has always been faster than intel in most situations, and now with the barton 3200 running, it's really kicking some ass. i think a dual 3200 barton with some pc3500 corsair and ata133 8mb drives would actually give the mac a run for the money.
it's nice to see mac finally caught up with the world though, in technology. most of the things it's included now has been around in pc's for a while. the new mac board with the memory capability is more server-board/workstation than anything that's been around that i know of, which is definitely cool (although i hope OSX.whatever has the ability like freebsd to load the entire os into memory, this would give it a clear speed jump over windows.. and with 8gb of ram i don't see how you couldn't).
the 1ghz fsb is pretty cool... the only problem with that (and one thing the p4 accelerates at) is that the memory and fsb are not balanced. it would really help out the mac if they could balance this out a bit. all in time, i guess.
although even with that bus, comparing amd's 300mhz fsb vs intel's 400 and 533 obviously doesn't make a great case for a faster fsb.
all in all i think it's a great setup. it really is nice to see mac catching up. it was rather disconcerting that a mac duallie was getting beat out in real-world apps by a single pc processor.
and why not consider the alpha? back in the day it really wasn't that much more expensive than a pc.
and you can build a duallie amd for about the same price as a single proc amd. just add about $20 for the duallie mainboard, and the extra processor (about $100 for the 2400 xp, which would need SMP enabled).
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