AMD introduces budget Athlon 64

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Actually, almost all of Intel's cheaper-because-we-care-about-the-budget-conscious-consumer lines started due to a bug, clear back to the 80386, which had a problem with 32-bit math. Post-bugfix 80386's were marked with a double-sigma, but Intel was faced with the dilemma of what to do with all of those buggy chips. So, they started selling the buggy chips as 80386SX -- 80386 chips limited to 16 bits for math functions -- and the double-sigma chips as 80386DX.

The move was wildly successful, both from a consumer standpoint and clearing out all that inventory that would have otherwise been melted down for scrap. Thus, Intel discovered that there was a big market for cheap, lobotomized chips. Same thing happened with the 80486: the 80486 had a high failure rate for the integrated math coprocessors during testing, so Intel remarketed the chips whose math coprocessors had failed testing as the 80486SX.

Note, however, that I used the phease "almost all" in reference to this phenomenon. The Celeron line was not born from a bug with the Pentium II. While rumor is that the Celeron came from problems with cache failures on the Pentium II line, from all accounts, this is simply not true. The fact is, the 512KB L2 cache was the most expensive part of the Pentium II, and Intel needed to cut chip costs to compete with the growing tide of AMD K6 chips that had performance comparable to the Pentium II at a fraction of the cost. So, they removed it, saved a bundle on chip production, put these cheaper chips on the market . . . and promptly became a laughing stock as the Celeron 266 could be outrun by a Pentium MMX 233MHz on a decent motherboard. The very-embarassed Intel eventually would come out with the Celeron 300A, which had a significantly smaller 128KB cache, thus still saving money, while not sacrificing so much in performance. Ironically, if Intel had shot itself in the foot with the original Celeron, it reloaded and shot itself again with this one, as overclockers realized that the 66MHz bus Celeron 300A could be made to perform as well as, and sometimes even better than, a 100MHz bus Pentium II 450 by simply bumping the bus speed to match the Pentium II. The reason the Celeron actually performed better at the same speed in some operations was because the Pentium II's 512KB cache ran at one-half clock speed -- 225MHz, in the case of the 450 -- while the Celeron's 128KB cache ran at the same speed at the CPU, or 300MHz on a stock Celeron 300A, or 450MHz when overclocked. P2 performance at a fraction of the cost! It took a while before Intel recovered from that blunder.

Anyhew . . . So, now AMD is taking a page from Intel's old book. Can't say where as I am terribly surprised. After all, if it worked for Intel . . .

Posted by: Whyaylooh   Posted on: 12/19/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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