New-Gen tech a load of ****?

Slutmonkey57b

Have been looking out for an upgrade for the past 6 months or so, and it seems to me that the current run of tech has been an almighty ****-up from practically all concerned, with the exception of Intel. While the C2D meets all expectations, then stomps all over them with massive overclocking, NV, Ati and AMD have done nothing but make a hash of things for over a year. AMD screwed its users by introducing four new sockets, three of which they've yet to launch because their brand-new super duper Barcelona is a) Late and b) a steaming pile. NV released the 8800 to great acclaim, priced it at a massive premuim, then proceeded to sit on their arse for over 6 months before finally releasing the mid-range. Ati have finally got round to releasing the r600 and it's an absolute turkey. And quite why either NV or Ati think I want a new-generation midrange graphics card that is outperformed by value-priced cards from the LAST generation is totally beyond me. And as for Vista... note to MS: if you're going to end up with a product that breaks 80% of your apps and drivers, then you might as well go the whole hog and fix or remove some of the broken legacy crap that causes so many problems in the first place - clean slate and all that.

RuggieBear

feeling better now?:)

Anti

Jasus you talk some sh1t. Nvidia have done great with the 8600/8800. Amd has been ****. but then again they do not have the revenue to research like intel can. Dont forget intel hold 70% of the market. The rest os broken up among AMD and the others. As for MS, Its 90% users stupidness.

petes

Anti wrote:

As for MS, Its 90% users stupidness.

Qft.

Slutmonkey57b

Anti wrote:

Jasus you talk some sh1t. Nvidia have done great with the 8600/8800. Amd has been ****. but then again they do not have the revenue to research like intel can. Dont forget intel hold 70% of the market.

1: The 8600 parts are outclassed by the previous-gen tech from Ati and NV on all the benchmarks. How is a step backward in performance a great achievement?
2: The 8800 is a great card at a price that's way outside most budgets. There is NO midrange NV next-gen part. There's the sub-par performing 8600 parts, then a ~€200 gap between them and the over-performing 8800 parts.
3: AMD was a smaller company with less revenue, and practically no market share when it came out with the Athlon, Opteron, and Athlon 64, all of which beat the equivalent Intel parts hands down for about 3 years.
4: AMD had a 3 year leadership gap they effectively threw away, and Barcelona is shaping up to be on-par performance wise with Core2 - pity Intel has Penryn waiting, ramped up, and ready to go, eh?
5: AMD screwed its retail buyers again and again with socket replacements - 754/939/940/941/AM2/AM2+/AM3... Clearly that's the fault of Intel's R&D spend, eh?

As for MS, Its 90% users stupidness.

I'd LOVE to hear how "stupid users" are responsible for, lets say, Nvidia not having Vista drivers for their DX10 cards for months on end. Or why the audio driver model was broken in vista, but the security model wasn't. I'd also love to hear how "stupid users" are responsible for the decision to drop WinFS, or the failure to introduce a new security model into vista. Clearly, that's the fault of the people at the shop till.

joe_chicken

AMD/ATI are doing shìt at the moment, the take over seems to have put both companies back about 6 months and their rivals have taken advantage of it.

Nvidia priced their cards so high for one reason: there was no competition.
Why was there no competition? See above.

People bought 8800's in the bucketload, so as far as Nvidia are concerned, I think it was a good move (not for the consumer mind, but this is what happens when there's no competition).

And quite why either NV or Ati think I want a new-generation midrange graphics card that is outperformed by value-priced cards from the LAST generation is totally beyond me

Most first generation DX10 cards are going to be shìt. But people will still buy them as they have big shiny DX10 stickers on them. Nvidia/ATI know this.

Anti

Slutmonkey57b wrote:

1: The 8600 parts are outclassed by the previous-gen tech from Ati and NV on all the benchmarks. How is a step backward in performance a great achievement?
2: The 8800 is a great card at a price that's way outside most budgets. There is NO midrange NV next-gen part. There's the sub-par performing 8600 parts, then a ~€200 gap between them and the over-performing 8800 parts.
3: AMD was a smaller company with less revenue, and practically no market share when it came out with the Athlon, Opteron, and Athlon 64, all of which beat the equivalent Intel parts hands down for about 3 years.
4: AMD had a 3 year leadership gap they effectively threw away, and Barcelona is shaping up to be on-par performance wise with Core2 - pity Intel has Penryn waiting, ramped up, and ready to go, eh?
5: AMD screwed its retail buyers again and again with socket replacements - 754/939/940/941/AM2/AM2+/AM3... Clearly that's the fault of Intel's R&D spend, eh?



I'd LOVE to hear how "stupid users" are responsible for, lets say, Nvidia not having Vista drivers for their DX10 cards for months on end. Or why the audio driver model was broken in vista, but the security model wasn't. I'd also love to hear how "stupid users" are responsible for the decision to drop WinFS, or the failure to introduce a new security model into vista. Clearly, that's the fault of the people at the shop till.

To reply to your post in order. And lets not turn this into a slagging match.

1. The 8600 is low end man. Not mid range

2. Nvidias mid range is the 8800gts 320mb. This is not a high end card at all.

3. Yep i complettly agree with you here. But dont forget AMD did not come up with the technology for the athlon range or the opteron rannge. They bough smaller companys who had this technology in the pipeline.

4. Yep. Tis true that.

5. Amd's fault for not sticking with a socket type like intel tbh. And yes intels R&D budget will be alot bigger, allow the research of new technologies. You really should read some white amd/intel papers and see what both have lined up.

As for the vista thing, The dx10 nvidia drivers is Nvidias fault for not pulling the finger out, not MS's fault. The audio driver is fixed, and has been for a while. And what i was trying to say with the point of 90% being user problems, i didnt mean drivers. i meant the way the user is to stupid to find a solution to a problem them selfs, without bitching and ranting on a forum because they havent got the experience or skills to fix problems them selfs !

requiem1

i was going to get involved with this debate but i really don't want to justify anybody's moaning. These companies are trying to offer us the best they can with the resources they have and if they didn't change the hardware we'd moan about being stuck with the same things for years. Companies like ATI and NVIDIA have a lot on their plate with the PS3 and XBOX and currently PC users are on a low priority for them. AMD aren't doing great for the simple reason they now have the massive overheads of ATI on their books and they have spent a large amount of their R&D budget in developing an fully integregrated graphics, sound and general CPU so that people would stop moaning about having to spend extorionate amounts on sound and graphic cards. But considering intel had to but technology off AMD to develop the first coreduos we can't really say they are doing that bad.

As for vista, its early days and i don't remember XP having as few problems at the start as vista so give it time and let them iron out the issues. As for lack of driver availability, microsoft are overseeing the development of alot of the big companies drivers to ensure they are secure and don't corrupt the registry files so again give it time.

Offalycool

AMD’s Barcelona may surprise us yet http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,133403-pg,1/article.html

Sun chose the AMD Opteron quad-core chip, code-named Barcelona, over rival Intel Corp.'s quad-core Xeon 5300 chip, because it believes AMD's will be "the fastest chip on the market this year," said Andreas Bechtolsheim, chief architect and senior vice president of the systems group at Sun. "We are still hopeful that they will deliver the chips on time."

papu

Most first generation DX10 cards are going to be shìt. But people will still buy them as they have big shiny DX10 stickers on them. Nvidia/ATI know this.

not true at all , why the hell would you buy a 1900xt or a 7950 if you ahve the money to spend on somthing better , these cards rape all the existing cards at dx9 so ....no....its not just for a sticker :P

L31mr0d

in fairness most new gen tech in nearly every area of engineering launchs with at least a handfull of bugs. I don't think i've had a pc, game or app yet that doesn't require a flash, update, tweak, patch...etc. It comes with the territory.

That being said I won't be going AMD/ATI anytime soon, and i'll be using Vista as a backup OS. The OP is correct in that it is a particularly shaky time at the moment in the tech world. A lot of new hardware and software has been released all at the same time in beta it would seem.

TerrorFirmer

papu wrote:

not true at all , why the hell would you buy a 1900xt or a 7950 if you ahve the money to spend on somthing better , these cards rape all the existing cards at dx9 so ....no....its not just for a sticker :P

I think he means the budget range, like the 8600 and 8600gts - both of which did not live up to expectation and do not offer any incentive to upgrade from the previous generation and aside from a few odd good deals cost more or the same as then dx9 cards that outperform them currently.

Slutmonkey57b

Anti wrote:

To reply to your post in order. And lets not turn this into a slagging match.

1. The 8600 is low end man. Not mid range.
2. Nvidias mid range is the 8800gts 320mb. This is not a high end card at all.

But it's priced mid-range. The 320mb GTS is priced ~€300 - that's not "mid-range" by any stretch. It's only mid-range because the GTX and Ultra are priced at insane levels altogether. Ati is going to pick up a lot of business not because radeon HD is any good, but because it is going to be sold dirt cheap and with low power requirements for OEMs. NV on the other hand, has great top-end cards that most retail buyers can't afford, and won't pick up as much OEM business due to 2400/2600's lower cost, power and heat specs.

5. Amd's fault for not sticking with a socket type like intel tbh. And yes intels R&D budget will be alot bigger, allow the research of new technologies. You really should read some white amd/intel papers and see what both have lined up.

White papers != real-world performance, as R600 and Barcelona have proved.

As for the vista thing, The dx10 nvidia drivers is Nvidias fault for not pulling the finger out, not MS's fault. The audio driver is fixed, and has been for a while. And what i was trying to say with the point of 90% being user problems, i didnt mean drivers. i meant the way the user is to stupid to find a solution to a problem them selfs, without bitching and ranting on a forum because they havent got the experience or skills to fix problems them selfs !

Perhaps so, but my point initially was that MS had a choice: they were already breaking graphics and audio support (DX10 and AL), so why not break something that *needed* fixing, and putting in WinFS or a sandboxed security model? Instead, they decided to concentrate on flashy graphics effects, and massive DRM infections that the customer didn't want. It's a lose-lose situation - Vista doesn't solve what needed fixing, breaks what needed leaving alone, and doesn't even have the platform stability argument to pull in corporate buys. Most large organisations won't switch until after SP1, if at all, because Vista is going to do nothing worthwhile for them.

Slutmonkey57b

Offalycool wrote:

AMD’s Barcelona may surprise us yet http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,133403-pg,1/article.html

Sun chose the AMD Opteron quad-core chip, code-named Barcelona, over rival Intel Corp.'s quad-core Xeon 5300 chip, because it believes AMD's will be "the fastest chip on the market this year," said Andreas Bechtolsheim, chief architect and senior vice president of the systems group at Sun. "We are still hopeful that they will deliver the chips on time."

Sun chose that chip a long time ago based on promises that AMD was making at the time - promises including (most obviously) availability that it has failed to deliver on. Sun is waiting on a delayed chip that isn't hitting the speed marks AMD wants it to.

Slutmonkey57b

requiem1 wrote:

i was going to get involved with this debate but i really don't want to justify anybody's moaning. These companies are trying to offer us the best they can with the resources they have and if they didn't change the hardware we'd moan about being stuck with the same things for years. Companies like ATI and NVIDIA have a lot on their plate with the PS3 and XBOX and currently PC users are on a low priority for them.

These are companies trying to sell us stuff, not down-on-their luck members of our family. They don't need our sympathy, and we shouldn't be offering it - you want me to spend my money on your stuff, you had better make it worth my while is an attitude we could all do with a lot more of.

AMD aren't doing great for the simple reason they now have the massive overheads of ATI on their books

Buying ATI was an unnecessary move at the time, and damaged both companies. Ati's 600 series Intel chipset which was getting massive pre-release buzz ended up getting mysteriously delayed and released crippled according to its original specs. Ati spent a lot of money and effort on that which went down the drain, and damaged the brand into the bargain. Trying to merge two very different companies while both were at crucial middle-stage gestation of new complicated products was hardly a help either.

and they have spent a large amount of their R&D budget in developing an fully integregrated graphics, sound and general CPU so that people would stop moaning about having to spend extorionate amounts on sound and graphic cards. But considering intel had to but technology off AMD to develop the first coreduos we can't really say they are doing that bad.

Practically every motherboard sold has integrated surround sound already - Audigy cards which offer great performance can be bought for €30. Nobody's complaining about overpriced audio solutions nowadays, unless they're choosing to spend stupid money. Core 2 Duo is based off the heritage of Pentium Pro/PIII/Centrino, not Athlon. And as for having integrated HD sound on RadeonHD - I'd quite happily swap that extra transistor space, PCB space, and R&D cost for, say, a 256bit-memory bus on the 2600 or more unified shaders.

papu

nice triple post , you need to calm down man , your asking for an assault on all sides

These are companies trying to sell us stuff, not down-on-their luck members of our family. They don't need our sympathy, and we shouldn't be offering it - you want me to spend my money on your stuff, you had better make it worth my while is an attitude we could all do with a lot more of.

this is your own view , i suppose you applaud lidl and aldi and piss all over small family run local shops cause they cant get their stuff as cheap?

there are too many instances to get into a fight it would last for years , turn off your pc take a walk , count to ten and calm down

Offalycool

Slutmonkey57b wrote:

Sun chose that chip a long time ago based on promises that AMD was making at the time - promises including (most obviously) availability that it has failed to deliver on. Sun is waiting on a delayed chip that isn't hitting the speed marks AMD wants it to.

This article was put up on the PCworld website only a few days ago. By your logic if AMD could not deliver to Sun on their promises; Sun would abandon support for Barcelona. I think AMD are right to delay the launce if it means doing it right. On the other hand the 2900XT may have all the power that’s needed when DX10 titles hit the market (if M$ actually deliver on the performance enhancements for Graphics processing) .. making the GTX and the Ultra a waste of money.

Anti

Sun says the Constellation features a total 131,072 processor cores, can operate at up to 1.08 petaflops

Jasus, imagine running superpi on that beast !

Slutmonkey57b

Offalycool wrote:

This article was put up on the PCworld website only a few days ago. By your logic if AMD could not deliver to Sun on their promises; Sun would abandon support for Barcelona. I think AMD are right to delay the launce if it means doing it right. On the other hand the 2900XT may have all the power that’s needed when DX10 titles hit the market (if M$ actually deliver on the performance enhancements for Graphics processing) .. making the GTX and the Ultra a waste of money.

Sun haven't abandoned support for barcelona because it is (finally) just round the corner. Having spent a lot of PR blurb on what they're going to make with the cores, they're not going to back out of it without using a get-out clause when nobody's looking, but you can bet they DO have a get out clause.

I suppose it seems like I'm losing the head here. I just find it a bit annoying that 3 out of the 4 major component makers us upgraders deal with have dropped the ball so spectacularly all at the same time, and if like me you've been holding off upgrading then it's all the worse. We've all been subject to massive hype about Ati, NV and AMD's upcoming products for well over a year now, and watched the delays, only to find not even sub-par products coming out but absolute turkeys. The after-hype buzzkill effect I suppose. MS obviously are constant ball-droppers so that's not really a suprise.

As to the constellation... I'm sure somebody at Sony can make us a graph telling us how the PS3 is just as powerful.

leeroybrown

Slutmonkey57b wrote:

Sun chose that chip a long time ago based on promises that AMD was making at the time - promises including (most obviously) availability that it has failed to deliver on. Sun is waiting on a delayed chip that isn't hitting the speed marks AMD wants it to.

Sun are eventually going to sell the Constellation with three processor options: Opteron, Xeon or UltraSparc T1. Sun aren't really waiting on the Barcelona chips as the quad-socket blade model that the Constellation being built with for TACC isn't at available yet and the delivery date for the TACC machine was always the end of this year anyway.

The choice of Opteron was probably a TACC decision too. The lower memory latencies on the Opterons with DDR2 compared to the Xeons with FB-DIMMS can make a _huge_ difference to some HPC applications.

As for the comparison press blurbs from Sun - I'd take them with a large pinch of salt. If you look at the other information coming out about the system you'll find some ridiculous comparisons being made elsewhere.

If you want an example of AMD's problems causing major problems for a company then look at another HPC vendor, Cray, whose entire 2007 profits will probably be wiped out by the delays with Budapest (the single socket version of Barcelona).

Slutmonkey57b wrote:

As to the constellation... I'm sure somebody at Sony can make us a graph telling us how the PS3 is just as powerful.

Well actually! IBM are making a modified double-precision version of the Cell BE processor for HPC applications. The big target machine for that is an hybrid Opteron/Cell system called 'Road Runner' to be installed at Los Alamos National Labs in the US with a target of approx 1.7 Petaflops.

Anti wrote:

Jasus, imagine running superpi on that beast !

In HPC we have a similarly pointless parallel synthetic benchmark called Linkpack instead.

leeroybrown

Slutmonkey57b wrote:

3: AMD was a smaller company with less revenue, and practically no market share when it came out with the Athlon, Opteron, and Athlon 64, all of which beat the equivalent Intel parts hands down for about 3 years.
4: AMD had a 3 year leadership gap they effectively threw away, and Barcelona is shaping up to be on-par performance wise with Core2 - pity Intel has Penryn waiting, ramped up, and ready to go, eh?

Anti wrote:

5. Amd's fault for not sticking with a socket type like intel tbh. And yes intels R&D budget will be alot bigger, allow the research of new technologies. You really should read some white amd/intel papers and see what both have lined up.

In my view the argument about research and development is actually being made in the wrong area. AMD have some very talented microprocessor designers who have designed an extremely good architecture. Intel let them steal a march and have since been panic'ed into action and have chucked vast amounts of money at achieving what will have clock-for-clock parity in most areas with Barcelona when it comes out (no complaints from me).

The real difference between the two that no one mentions is manufacturing. What Intel do best - probably better than anyone else in the world - is ramp up semiconductor processes to a high-yield production capacity. AMD have less production capacity and a far worse track record when it comes to getting processes up to high yield for product launches. Intel will normally have enough high-clock parts where as early in a process AMD have tended to struggle to do this.

The classic example of this is the average difference in overclockability of Intel and AMD processors.

Slutmonkey57b wrote:

Buying ATI was an unnecessary move at the time, and damaged both companies. Ati's 600 series Intel chipset which was getting massive pre-release buzz ended up getting mysteriously delayed and released crippled according to its original specs. Ati spent a lot of money and effort on that which went down the drain, and damaged the brand into the bargain. Trying to merge two very different companies while both were at crucial middle-stage gestation of new complicated products was hardly a help either.

AMD's purchase of ATI was a medium to long term merger looking forward a few years to the use of GPU technology for non-graphics processing with GPU cores in multi-core/massively-multi-core CPU technologies. It probably does make sense but it's hard to deny that the short term effects on the merger on ATI were anything other than bad.

Anti

leeroybrown wrote:

In my view the argument about research and development is actually being made in the wrong area. AMD have some very talented microprocessor designers who have designed an extremely good architecture. Intel let them steal a march and have since been panic'ed into action and have chucked vast amounts of money at achieving what will have clock-for-clock parity in most areas with Barcelona when it comes out (no complaints from me).

The real difference between the two that no one mentions is manufacturing. What Intel do best - probably better than anyone else in the world - is ramp up semiconductor processes to a high-yield production capacity. AMD have less production capacity and a far worse track record when it comes to getting processes up to high yield for product launches. Intel will normally have enough high-clock parts where as early in a process AMD have tended to struggle to do this.

The classic example of this is the average difference in overclockability of Intel and AMD processors.


AMD's purchase of ATI was a medium to long term merger looking forward a few years to the use of GPU technology for non-graphics processing with GPU cores in multi-core/massively-multi-core CPU technologies. It probably does make sense but it's hard to deny that the short term effects on the merger on ATI were anything other than bad.

Leyroy.

I really enjoyed your post man. You know mostly what your talking about. But you forgot one thing, Intel bought out a shi1te load of amd eng's last year.

I dont thitnk this battle is over yet, not by long way.

I have a feeling amd will come back with something that will blow the c2d and c2q out of the water, the only problem is amd will price them so high, it will be out of the reach of most pople.

But really lads, read the white papers. Some of the proposed technology is amazing !

shanethemofo

Anti wrote:

As for the vista thing, The dx10 nvidia drivers is Nvidias fault for not pulling the finger out, not MS's fault. The audio driver is fixed, and has been for a while. And what i was trying to say with the point of 90% being user problems, i didnt mean drivers. i meant the way the user is to stupid to find a solution to a problem them selfs, without bitching and ranting on a forum because they havent got the experience or skills to fix problems them selfs !

In fairness one shouldnt have to fix these problems. Its meant to be a user friendly OS, not just one for the tech heads.

DirkVoodoo

I think its also important to remember that alot of benchmarks are still being conducted using DX9 and DX10-patched games.

youcancallmeal

Can someone summarise this thread for me? It seemed interesting at the start then trailed off in overly analytical technical discussion?

DirkVoodoo

I'll give it a shot....*clears throat*

Intel and Nvidia in the ascendancy, AMD and ATI in a bit of a curfuffle (I guess that should just be AMD, but for simplicity's sake).

Also, midrange 2400/2600 and 8500/8600 cards have been underwhelming so far.

And barcelona will intially ship with a top-out 2.0GHz, but it should be an interesting end to 2007.

youcancallmeal

DirkVoodoo wrote:

I'll give it a shot....*clears throat*

Intel and Nvidia in the ascendancy, AMD and ATI in a bit of a curfuffle (I guess that should just be AMD, but for simplicity's sake).

Also, midrange 2400/2600 and 8500/8600 cards have been underwhelming so far.

And barcelona will intially ship with a top-out 2.0GHz, but it should be an interesting end to 2007.

Perfect
That'll do nicely

Anyway I'm still sticking to my single core AMD 4000+ 2.4GHz, it has served me well so far. For my next upgrade I originally waited to see what would happen when c2d was released, then my plan was to wait for AMD's response. As has been mentioned the Barcelona core is coming up but I can see myself waiting again for Intel's Wolfdale and Yorkfield cores which are due the end of this year and are supposedly going to be the final upgrade of the core 2 duo range before Intel introduce a whole new design.

As far as AMD vs Intel goes I'd say it'll take at least 2-3 years for AMD/ATI to start being competitive again and even then they'll need to come out with something amazing or else for Intel to really f**k up in some way?

nibble

I don't think AMD are going to compete in the high end with barcelona / Phenom in the forseeable future, even if they pull a rabbit out of the hat with IPC improvements, the clocks are just too low at the moment. Now maybe a few months down the line we'll see them perfect the process and I'll eat my words but it's hard to see TBH. But performance/watt maybe they can win that battle.

awhir

nibble wrote:

I don't think AMD are going to compete in the high end with barcelona / Phenom in the forseeable future, even if they pull a rabbit out of the hat with IPC improvements, the clocks are just too low at the moment. Now maybe a few months down the line we'll see them perfect the process and I'll eat my words but it's hard to see TBH. But performance/watt maybe they can win that battle.

its a new clock structur its not mesuared how the old amds were.

nibble

awhir wrote:

its a new clock structur its not mesuared how the old amds were.

Err, did I say it was? Say for example barc was 20% better clock for clock over Core 2, and we take the launch 2Ghz part, in that case it would take a 2.4Ghz Core2 to match it, but Core2 clocks very well so high speed isn't a problem which it would seem it is for AMD next gen. So overall despite the IPC improvements Core 2 would be a higher performing arch because of clockspeed. Now thats all very simplified and there are way more variables but you can see what I am getting at.

Cuddlesworth

nibble wrote:

Err, did I say it was? Say for example barc was 20% better clock for clock over Core 2, and we take the launch 2Ghz part, in that case it would take a 2.4Ghz Core2 to match it, but Core2 clocks very well so high speed isn't a problem which it would seem it is for AMD next gen. So overall despite the IPC improvements Core 2 would be a higher performing arch because of clockspeed. Now thats all very simplified and there are way more variables but you can see what I am getting at.

I suppose 1 of the variables is that Amd are hoping that the Barc core scales better with multiple cores, which would put Intel in a bad position in the high end server market. Its one of the reasons that Intel has been pushing Fbdimms and Ddr3 so much, more bandwidth means better scaling for Intel Procs.