Originally posted by: stevejst
AMD is sinking into deeper and deeper trouble, announcing $100 million lower sales in Q2 which is 7th consecutive quarter of losses for AMD, and this one is really a hard one. Buy chips before they are gone, the way the things are AMD might never see the end of the tunnel.
Pentium IVC is all over Athlon XP, and Prescott will eat Hammer alive. All these delays and nothing at the end.
Yeah things don't look good for AMD on the desktop side...I guess they're hoping Opteron will save them or something...
But who knows...I thought AMD had a chance starting from when the K5 came out...(of course, at that point I was largely a computer illiterate 12 year old so I don't know if my opinion really counted =P) but the K6-2 bore out the feeling that got stronger with the K6.
Of course, nowadays I don't feel that feeling anymore about AMD =(
In the total tally of my CPU purchases it goes:
Pentium 166(from a prefab Compaq! aaahh!!! and not even the good Compaqs, this was a 1996 "let's build crapmachines" Compaq Presario 4712 that benchmarked worse than a P90 on almost all benchmarks-YES THAT INCLUDES CPU BENCHES!)
Pentium III 450Mhz Slot 1 SECC2 Poor overclocker even though I had the same heatsink as the CPU below
Pentium III 550"E" Coppermine Slot1 SECC2(thought my 450Mhz was dead actually...but it wasn't, just really bad alignment after I took off the back cover for the CPU-it had the Alpha P3125 on it heh and I did the ball pen tube mod) Overclocking god! This thing ran 842Mhz ROCK solid. I don't know why there wasn't more press on this CPU, but I bought it the day it was out on Googlegear.com because originally I was going to have to go with a slocket to use the flip grid chips. All I found later on was a blurb passage on some tech site about how some people are reporting decent results. Everybody was too caught up in FC-PGA socket chips and totally ignored this awesome CPU! Ran 733Mhz out of the box on stock cooler but I didn't push it to 842 until I put the Alpha on-was on a BX440 board with Corsair PC133 Cas3(they had the newer Cas2 out but I bought the RAM when PC133 was new and it was really for my P3 450) that was a 153Mhz FSB in case nobody figured it out!
AMD Athlon 1.2Ghz Thunderbird(bought this for my new PC for college =) not much to say really, ran it with 2 boards, both with DDR-first was an ASUS with one of those hybrid AMD north and southbridge setups[too long ago for me to remember, damn my memory is getting bad], then a Shuttle AK31A with KT266A[BIG improvement actually, noticable FPS improvement in almost all games])
Intel Pentium IV 1.6A-disappointed by this chip since it had such a reputation but didn't OC well at all for me-used in new college PC(upgrade itch ok?) Couldn't hold past 1.9 stably regardless of voltage-stock cooler
AMD AthlonXP 1600+ AGOIA(bought it cheap off of a deal here and OC'ed it...holds 2100+ just fine-is an upgrade for the 1.2Ghz T-bird)
Intel Pentium IV 2.4-not so great overclocking either actually, but nonetheless a hell of a lot faster than a 1.6A anyway(@2.7 now stock cooler)
Anyways, so you can see I've been rather even about my CPU purchases lately. I'm definitely looking at building another PC now and it's definitely a hard choice. I'm thinking about simply waiting for Prescott, but Intel isn't feeling pressured to bring up the release any because of AMD's less than spectacular showing lately. I will say this much though, Barton seems to be a much better overclocking deal than the Pentium 4's in my opinion(the low end chips I mean). Even though everybody keeps talking about how their P4C's overclock great, the fact that I've had 2 Pentium 4's with lousy overclocking ability(to be fair the Thunderbird sucked too-and it had an Alpha cooler) has put me off of trying to overclock Intel's lower end...I guess their binning computer's make it a luck of the draw thing.