Red Hat announced the availability of our AMD64 technology preview. This preview is for those who are interested in early access to a Red Hat distribution for the AMD64 platform.
GinGin64: A Technology Preview for the AMD64 Platform
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I can’t afford a 64 bit platform – otherwise I’d be all over it
I speced out an Opteron system on http://www.xicomputer.com and it’s about the same price for a similarly configured P4 system. So it’s closer to home than you think, and once the chips and motherboards become available to consumers for do-it-yourself systems you could get away with it cheaper.
Don’t worry – the Athlon 64 will give you most of the benefits , sans some of the performance gains from the 1mb cache. Ought to be much cheaper, too.
-Erwos
If Athlon64 ever makes it to market. TheRegister has been speculating that it might get canned and AMD’s 64 bit solution would be server/workstation only.
If I remember correctly, the Register speculated that the Athlon64 might get canned and that the Opteron would be offered with smaller cache sizes. That way, there is only one socket to keep up with. But seeing as you can get a 240 for 300$ from NewEgg.com, price for the MB would be the only bottleneck in the build process that I can see right now. Believe it or not, but the Opteron isn’t as costly as some might believe it to be. I’m sure that the 1xx series can be had for even less than the 300$ that the 240 is selling for.
There is no way that a crippled processor can compete with the Pentium 4, much less the upcoming Pentium 5. And the Athlon 64 is nothing more than a crippled Opteron.
AMD should definitely cancel the current single DDR channel 256KB cache Athlon 64 and offer the Opteron instead. This way, costs will be driven down for both platforms and AMD’s platform has a chance to compete on performance.
If anything, AMD should be doing everything they can to boost Opteron performance — higher clock, more cache, faster memory controller, etc. Cutting the chip down now is not the answer.
Has anyone ever thought that AMD could be delay Athlon64 so that they can use a higher FSB in it? Would this be possible? DDR2 maybe?
Technology Preview? Shouldn’t it be ready by now, or are they just giving themselves some extra time to release it closer to when MS does for their own solution.
Early adopters will buy AMD64 for consumer use – no question. A very high end Opteron system is still going much cheaper in todays dollars than the original PC ever was. There is a (small) market for high end consumer $3000-5000 desktops.
A consumer level motherboard+Athlon64 will probably be available for as little as $500 by the years end. Asus and nVidia have already announced workstation chipsets and ATX motherboards.
Every techie will want an 64 bit present in their Christmas stocking.
Well, First of all the article is found at The Inquirer, not The Register, Inq is run by the cofounder of Reg, he has been there since he had a personal reason the leave Reg.
And if you read the article it clearly states that it is a conspiracy theory nothing more, yes it may well have some merits, the writer has some background in the field, but it does not rest o any solid information AFAIK.
I hope that Athlon64 will release by the end of the summer, and i for one will know what to save up for, the ultimate geek processor, Intel can go soak!