amd 64bits interesting?

is it interesting to wait for an amd 64 or is it better to buy a classic amd
athlon xp (barton or not) now?
cause i want to buy a new pc but i can wait a little if there are many
advantages...

In article ,
says...
is it interesting to wait for an amd 64 or is it better to buy a classic amd
athlon xp (barton or not) now?

Perhaps you might want to read the group for a while before you
come crashing in, uncapitalized and all.

cause i want to buy a new pc but i can wait a little if there are many
advantages...

Sure! Wait until next year! There will be far more choices then
and they'll be cheaper. This has always been a fact in this
industry and it's not about to change.

....hope I helped!

--
Keith

On Fri, 19 Sep 2003 23:32:54 +0200, "Kriss"
wrote:
is it interesting to wait for an amd 64 or is it better to buy a classic amd
athlon xp (barton or not) now?
cause i want to buy a new pc but i can wait a little if there are many
advantages...

Well, of course there are advantages, what would have been the point
in developing the new chip if there weren't any advantages!? :

It's really more a question of whether or not those advantages are
going to be of any use to you. First off, going to 64-bits will allow
the use of TONS of memory, this is the main reason for the switch.
32-bit chips can only handle 4GB of main memory without resorting to
really ugly hacks, and even than they run into fairly major problems
at about 2GB of memory. If you have applications that need lots of
memory, then the Athlon64 or an Opteron are definitely a good choice.
Otherwise, simply being a 64-bit chip doesn't buy you much.

However, the new Athlon64 does also offer some additional advantages
over existing AthlonXP chips. First off, it will offer more memory
bandwidth and lower latencies to memory due to it's integrated memory
controller. This alone should improve performance by quite a bit.
Second, it offers more cache memory (1MB of L2 cache vs. 512KB for the
Barton or 256KB all other AthlonXP chips). Again, this should boost
it's performance. Then there is the I/O bandwidth, which is now
significantly higher because it's no longer shared with the traffic
to/from main memory. Finally there are a number of internal
enhancements to the chip that should allow it to perform better.

The big downside though is that the chip and the motherboards to
support this chip are going to be significantly more expensive than
current AthlonXP chips.

So, my advice? You're probably better off sticking to either one of
the low-end or mid-range AthlonXP chips, or if you want more
performance, go for a Pentium4 (the high-end AthlonXP chips don't
offer very good value for their money at this point in time). The
Athlon64 is going to be fairly expensive for at least a few months
time (probably at least until the new year), and at least initially
Windows will not support it's 64-bit capabilities (though Linux will).
A 64-bit version of WinXP is expected sometime in the new year.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

On Fri, 19 Sep 2003 23:32:54 +0200, "Kriss" wrote:

is it interesting to wait for an amd 64 or is it better to buy a classic amd
athlon xp (barton or not) now?
cause i want to buy a new pc but i can wait a little if there are many
advantages...

It depends a lot on what you intend to do with the new system, now and down
the road - always good to supply that info - and what your expected system
life cycle is. For general business/home type use and maybe some
photo/video work for a 2/3year life cycle the Athlon XP or P4 would
probably be the best route right now.

I don't know about France but in the U.S. the price sweet spot just now
seems to be the Athlon XP 3000+/400 or the P4 2.8GHz.

Rgds, George Macdonald

"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??

"Kriss" wrote in message
...
is it interesting to wait for an amd 64 or is it better to buy a classic
amd
athlon xp (barton or not) now?
cause i want to buy a new pc but i can wait a little if there are many
advantages...

It's actually far more interesting buying an Athlon XP later, when Athlon
64's are more common, because you'll get the XP a lot cheaper.

Yousuf Khan