I just saw one on newegg for $453. It seems to me they might have priced themselves out of the market based on performance reviews. any comments?
yeah, the new chip only offers marginal performance benefits over the current 32-bit chips. you won't see anything revolutionary until they start making 64-bit programs and who knows when that will be. Its still cool to own though if you don't mind the money. If you want top performance at any costs however, then the upcoming pentium 4 EE tops the athlon64 in almost everything.
"Even with a shrink to 90 nanometers, Intel confirms the upcoming 3.4GHz processor will dissipate 103W of heat and pull around 80A of current." Eighty amps??? For Christ sakes you'll need a cable as thick as a pencil to power it. I hope that's a misprint. 80A at 5V = 400w Good Lord. As it is I need a 5000 BTU air cond to beat back the heat from all this equipment. Next will come Windows TE - Thermal Edition.
how are they pricing themselves out of the market? usually when cpu's first come out they'll have a high retail, but as production runs increase you'll see probably a 50% drop in price within the first 3-6 months. if you look at intel's 3.2 ghz p4 processor it costs $619. the athlon64 3200 will most likely be on the same performance level as p4 2.8 ghz which are about $250 right now, so i expect the price for these processors to drop to this price soon. the really juicy prize are the athlon64 fx chips
not the +5V rail as someone earlier stated. (Pentium 4's ) As a result, the wattage figure is much higher than just a mere 400 watts. Try: 80A x 12V = 960 WATTS!!! :eek:
I can't believe the 80amps!! Current, not voltage determines conductor size. How the hell do they expect to power this thing? There isn't a foil on the motherboard than can handle that current. Good Lord.
SOI, or Silicon-On-Insulator is where everything is heading. Check out today's announcement by IBM regarding the new transistor that uses 80% less power than current technology: http://domino.research.ibm.com/Comm/bios.nsf/pages/bipolar.html