Do these people get paid? - - October 16

After reading this NY Times article earlier I wonder whether the representatives and senators in the US actually get paid for their work.

Why elect them in the first place, a dictatorship would be cheaper and more efficient in smacking down human rights without the pretense of discussion.

It makes me very wary to come to the US again, voicing my dissent with such undemocratic activities might just brand me a terrorist suspect and end me up in confinement for as long as it pleases the authorities and no legal remedies.

It would seem to me that it only takes a couple thousand lives lost to turn a free country into a xenophobic fortress, from which death and destruction rains down on those it deems it's enemy and those around them, innocent but to weak to run.

That certainly is more than any terrorist could reasonably have hoped for when planning those attacks. What will the next terror attack on the US bring - and I am almost certain that it will happen? Road blocks at the state borders? Curfews in all major cities? Maybe a happy little pogrom against people who "look wrong"? You'd end up happier living in Afghanistan. And speaking of which .. one can only wonder how many more than those thousand lives will have to be taken in that war-ravaged far away country to satiate the bloodthirst unleashed in New York. Will you kill a terrorist in that? Maybe by accident, given that they had ample warning and are largely anonymous. Bin Laden and the devil are indeed having a good time.

Maybe, just maybe, someone in a leadership position will have the courage to stand up and demand that the cause be cured and not the symptoms. As long as people feel that they have absolutely nothing to lose, they will merrily hurl their lives in the faces of those they deem responsible for their plight. Fix that or it just won't go away.

Sorry for blowing off. This is foremost a site that deals with computer hardware, but just as it outraged me to see New York on fire it outrages me to see the US government willingly handing victory to the morally deranged.

Hammer to fall - - October 16

I can only imagine the eerie feelings of the Intel engineers in the audience when Fred Weber presented the details on the Hammer microarchitecture last night. I would assume it had something of the famous "K7 dinner" speech.

While my ability to grok the finer points of microchip design is limited, it seems that most people in-the-know feel that the Hammer is a sound and feasible high-performance design. One source I'd like to point out is Silicon Strategies.

If you take a good look at the presentation PDF, you will find that Nvidia's nForce design makes a whole lot more sense when you imagine that a Clawhammer CPU is hooked up to it in the next generation design. It becomes the natural, HyperTransport-linked extension to the CPU. I think nVidia has made yet another smart move that will secure them a good position to carry their graphics business into the future; that HyperTransport know-how they gathered on the nForce chipsets will become essential a year from now.

Athlon XP appears in stores - - October 12

Not much time to post, but I wanted to share a quick shot with your guys of the Athlon XP that is appearing in stores here. This particular one is an Athlon XP 1600+. Remarkable is the fact that the die is not marked with the clock frequency but rather the XP-Rating.

New York - - September 15

I have been thinking for days now what to write. Ideas came and went as to how to speak about the unspeakable. My mind in futility tried to wrap itself around the motives that could prompt anyone to do what these people did. My heart hurts for those who died and more so for those who are left behind and injured.

I think in the final consequence these people had no idea just how terrible it would turn out as I refuse to believe that there is no soul in any of them who wouldn't shy away from such carnage. However, they did what they did and there is an inevitability of consequences that arises from their deed.

It is without doubt that there is a great demand for bloodshed at this time. However, lust for revenge and thirst for blood is what killed so many innocent people in the first place. Shouldn't we be above such primitive reactions and only target the guilty?

I have heard many calls to bomb Kabul. Do those who ask for that know what Kabul looks like? It has seen almost 20 years of war and civil war. The Afghan people could not survive without the aid of foreign humanitarian organisations. Women are being supressed by the Taleban, they are not able to get an education and cannot leave the house without the permission of a male relative or their husbands. Are these the people you wish to sentence to death? I would hope not, otherwise you'd be a beast worse than those you wish to punish.

Military might and security measures means little against people who do not value life, theirs or those of whom they perceive their adversary. They will, as they did in the past, do in the present, kill innocent people again. What will we be doing about it? Sacrifice our own freedoms to gain the illusion of safety? Wouldn't we be getting them just what they want that way?

Don't get me wrong. I do not mind metal detectors and the inconvenience of waiting two hours before I can board a plane. After all what I get for it is incredibly cheap, fast travel. You could ride a ship for a couple days, if you feel too inconvenienced.

I do take exception however, to be a permanent suspect, subjected to supervision by cameras in public places, scanning of my data traffic on the internet and eavesdropped upon on international phone calls. I do not know what happens to the information gathered, who it will empower to what purpose at a later time. I do not trust anyone not elected by me to have it. Period.

But I disgress into the future, when the danger looms closer to the present. Without doubt, there is a strike to be expected by the US military. It is a political necessity that is unavoidable. However the consequences are very much dependent on the target and the diligence that the US government takes in hitting the right people - and only them. Nobody should be mistaken, though, that this will not solve the problem. It rather has the potential of bringing about undesireable responses like additional attacks or a full out war that could cost many more lives than those that were already lost, in countries that will have much less of a cushion to help the victims than the US does.

What is needed above all is a way to do justice. Not only those attackers, but the people from where they came. And I am not talking about bombing them to dust. Power is nothing without justice. What goes around, comes around. Think about that before you make a move.

Chip fever - - August 26

It would seem that SiS has a real ace up their sleeve with the SiS735 Chipset for the Athlon. Not only are there rumors that VIA is trying to discourage motherboard makers from using it - curiously enough using the same tactics of fear, uncertainty and doubt that they accuse Intel of employing against them on the P4 side of the business. Not only that, but several reviewers seem to be quite impressed with the performance of the SiS offering. The question will be, how well it will work with the desktop Palomino chip, which will clearly take the performance lead once it comes out from the aging Thunderbird core.

A preview of the potential could be had with some Athlon MP reviews already, but much more so seeing how the Morgan (Duron 1 GHz and faster) performed in the first reviews. A budget chip that could outdo the Pentium 4 1500 in video encoding is something to fear. The Palomion will do at least as well and better.

However there come my gripes with AMD again which still refuses to bring the Palomino to the desktop because it is perceived in the management that the Thunderbird is good enough for the time being. That may still hold true on the consumer side - having access to actual sales numbers in the DIY market shows that the Athlon 1400 is a buyer's favourite - but why wouldn't it be at those ridiculously low prices. It does hurt AMD at the stock market, though.

The only thing that holds me back from buying one is the high price for the cooler I'd have to get with it. It is serious time that the CPU makers start thinking about cool CPUs instead of racing the clock speed. Water cooling is not a feasible thing for the mass market and air cooling is about to hit the limit. I, for one thing, would like to see speed step technology on the desktop.

Mixed Bag - - August 13

Wow. Didn't receive all that many suggestions about what to do with the site. Not sure whether that means you are happy with it or just don't care.

Either way, didn't see much daylight from work to actually do much about it, either.

On the AMD front the motto is "Waiting for Palomino", seeing that the current lineup is as exciting as watching paint dry. A new stepping of the Athlon is out which allowed some to overclock the 1 GHz part to as much at 1600 MHz on a regular basis. I couldn't confirm that first-hand, yet, but plan to.

Intel, on the other hand, is moving swiftly. The Coppermine hits 1100 MHz, which is about the last squeal to be squeezed out of that core. Tualatin, the 0.13 version, is pushing into mobile and will not hit the desktop at all, other than in OEM parts. Instead we will see the disappearance of the Pentium III, only to be reborn as highly clocked Celeron parts with 256kb of L2 cache. These will certainly give Morgan a run for the money.

The whole show points straight towards Intel's leverage: Megahertz. They push up the Pentium 4 as hard and far as they can and are aiming to do the same with the Celeron.

No longer is AMD setting the pace, Intel has taken the initiative again. AMD should be worried by this, both from a financial and strategic point of view. The silence that comes out of Austin makes the natives restless, the lack of new products speaks of helplessness more than of control over their own fate. The poor state of the share price is a reflection of this, the same stock that dominated Intel for a while is now only worth half the money of their competitor.

However, the race is not yet run. Intel must be bleeding money on the shift to the Pentium 4 and I'd be surprised to see them pull it off unscathed. However, the pain will be felt by AMD as well as ASPs get hooked on Megahertz markers and sucked down the drain as Intel ramps up speeds quicker than AMD does. I expect a loss for the third quarter and an only slightly profitable Q4. Beyond that is the uncertainty of Palomino's speed ramp.

Grand Opening Sweepstake - - July 24

Am I nuts? Nope. Those of you who hang with the site for a long time (read: the two years it exists), will remember our grand opening sweepstake, which had some pretty darn sweet prizes.

Well, ten of them were copies of Max Payne. Yep, that's how long that game has been hot and not out. Finally the guys at Remedy in Finland have gone gold with it and Scott Miller (who happens to be a much nicer guy than you'd possibly expect in the gaming industry) not only remembered he promised those 10 copies, he's also going to have them sent out to those 10 winners ASAP!

Well three huzzahs for Scott Miller and off Max Payne goes, tenfold.

Site refresher - - July 11

Guys, let's face it: the site has fallen into some disarray for lack of time to maintain it as what it once was intended to be.

I'd like to hear from you what you would like for me to do with it. Are you happy to just get occasional ramblings? Would you like a broader set of subjects than just AMD?

I want, above all, do away with the campaign thing. It never worked out quite the way I had hoped it would, mostly for lack of manpower to drive it home with developers. With the advent of the Athlon, 3DNow! has greatly lost as a necessity for games to run fast on AMD processors, it was a phenomenon of the K6-x era.

Where do we want to go from here? Speak your mind on the forum and I will see how I can meet your needs. If you are a supporter of www.3DNow.Org and would like to be listed as such on the link bar to the left, . I will toss out the current ones and put together a new one over the next couple days.

AMD resilient - - July 10

AMD today showed a remarkable resilience against selling pressures. Where Intel fell $1.11, AMD only lost 20 cents to $21. It would seem that there is a cast iron bottom at just below $21 for the stock price. I am very curious about what AMD will have to say at the earnings conference call, in particular about market share and forward looking expectations for the remainder of 2001.

AMD warns - - July 06

Both disappointingly late and disappointingly low comes a warning from AMD regarding the earnings for the second quarter.

Only a one digit cent profit per share falls far short of analyst expectations (and mine), although at least it is not a loss. It is rumoured that unit sales went up again, which could indicate a gain in market share at the expense of investor confidence. I, as an investor, am contemplating the comforting properties of getting out of the stock for good.

Update: I had the chance to talk to an AMD rep today and he expressed the opinion that the lack of profit bought market share. The question is, whether that is sustainable and how the guidance for the next quarter will be. I won't be selling for now (the downside risk is rather low at this point), with any luck the final results will be 5, maybe 6 cents a share and see the company around at least 23% marketshare.

Intel buys Alpha - - June 25

Today's major newsbit is the fact that Intel is buying the Alpha development group from Compaq, with Compaq looking to switch their server product lines to IA-64 (Itanium/Merced).

What does it mean for AMD?

At the moment, AMD is not competing yet in the performance server arena, so there is no market share at stake, unlike for someone like SUN. However, the Hammer series may be capable to address this segment and might face a stiffer, because less fragmented, competiton.

Itanium so far has not found a great deal of cheering acceptance, its future is still murky and mainly propelled by marketing dollars at this point. There is no doubt, however, that the few applications ran on servers are a whole lot easier to port to the new instruction set (IA-64) than the 10,000 consumer favourites in the desktop PC market, with much better sales margins - so it will happen and successfully so, assuming the architecture catches on in the face of the more established SUN and existing but transitioning HP CPU products.

Alpha, having named a dead-end architecture, is leaving the stage and will see no new investements after this announcement.

Does this create an opportunity for AMD?

I feel that SUN would rather bite their left leg off instead of using Itanium in their future products. It has been hinted to me in the past, that SUN could pick up AMD's Hammer series for their upcoming products in favour of their homegrown UltraSparc processors (which suffered from their own share of delays and bugs the last 2 years). Needless to say this would be a major, major step for market share in a highly profitable arena where AMD has not been present in the past.

However this is not written on paper yet and it is not clear whether AMD actually intends to get a foot in the performance server market or would rather cater to entry and mid-level needs.

What about the engineers?

Alpha for a long time made very fast, poorly marketed CPUs that would steal Intel's thunder on any day of the week. The best engineers on the team likely would rather jump off a tall building than work for that competition, several former Alpha players moved to AMD in the past years. It is not unreasonable to think that a bunch more will follow now, given the choice of working for Intel instead. It remains to be seen whether Intel just eliminated a competitor with this buy or actually gets some talent on top.

Either way, the Comapaq/Itanium deal will not hurt AMD at this point, but may raise the bar on entering the high end server market for Hammer. Positive could be a brain drain from the Alpha development team towards the AMD engineering group.

Athlon clusters - - June 17

As you may know, the Athlon has been used increasingly in high performance computing, Beowulf clusters in particular.

As has to be expected, SMP versions of the Athlon make an even better cluster solutions because of the higher I/O capabilities between the SMP nodes (usually 2 nodes per machine in the case of the Athlon MP).

Find here commercial offerings for that market.

Site stays up - - June 12

Seeing that I still have a small yet fiercely loyal readership I decided to renew the registration and keep the site going for a while longer.

Obviously the idea of the proliferation campaign is quite dead, but if you see any value in reading my irregular ramblings and little findings, be my guest :)

New Nvidia drivers - - June 12

I installed the newest Nvidia drivers the other night on my Win2k Athlon box. Unfortunately it seems like they are less compatible than the previous version as I had two blue screens of death when going into fullscreen 3D-mode when playing Everquest.

I am not quite sure yet what the issue is, but for the time being I'd suggest you do not install them if your old drivers work properly.

Domain expiring - - June 10

I am debating whether to renew the domain registration or not, as it is about to expire. If the site vanishes the next couple days you know why.

I will accept a new job tomorrow that will likely not leave me the time to post and/or will be seen as conflicting with it, so I am leaning towards having it fall back into the pond for AMD to pick up for their redirect portfolio. Post on the forum if you strongly disagree.

Wave of products - - June 06

Taiwan is upon us with a vengeance and a big pile of new products.

Nvidia was first out of the gate with the nForce chipset, which supports the Socket A platform and shows some impressive memory bandwidth that doesn't have to hide behind Intel/Rambus. I expect this combination to beat a path for special interest fellows in the audio/video encoding area as well as "high performance" integrated solutions, speak cheap machines that still can do 3D graphics without completely shaming their owner.

Tuesday brought the Athlon MP, the more than long awaited workstation/server Palomino version. It will be used in single or dual CPU configurations and shows the improvements of hardware prefetch and SSE support that I've been telling you about here since before CeBit in March. From the preliminary tests it seems that a dual Athlon MP machine will make a most excellent database server. I hope to take a look at a system like this soon.

Today, finally, AMD added the Athlon 1400 (Thunderbird core) and the Duron 950 to the product lineup. There is little excitement connected to these as they basically just write forth the clock speed to higher levels. As we know the enthusiasts out there wait for the desktop Palomino and dual Duron rigs, anyway.

Athlon 1400 - - May 31

Just saw and wanted to report that german online hardware store Alternate has the Athlon 1400 (133 MHz FSB) listed as immediately available. This part is priced at 679 german marks, which translates to $294 at current exchante rates, including 16% VAT ($253 without). The Athlon 1400 on 100 MHz FSB is expected to be stocked within a day's time.

They do not show, however, the Duron 950 yet.

Distributed Science Death - - May 27

I got some emails asking questions about the demise of Distributed Science, the company running the Gamma Flux project in which we were very well represented.

You may also know that I was a co-founder of that company (and hence am now out of a job - send your offers please).

I suggest you post your questions on the forum and I will try to answer them to the best of my abilities.

Kyro II - - May 27

Played with the Kyro 2 for a while now and there is a thing or two to say about it. Generally I can recommend it; it's a very affordable high performance 3D card, most of the issues that still popped up are driver related and bound to be fixed in the next weeks, considering that Guillemot has thrown their weight behind the chip.

The major annoyance I notices is that it won't work with my second display, a 15 inch LCD screen with VGA input. For unknown reasons the signal seems not be good enough to allow the screen to adjust itself so that the pixels will be properly alinged, unlike the old Voodoo3 I was using. This leads to very ugly text display and a wonky vertical striped 3D display that isn't acceptable. I hence hooked that display up to the GeForce powered Athlon workstation instead of the Duron game box. I have no complaints about the image on the CRT.

A second gripe is related but not the Kyro's fault. It looks like Verant simply coded a very shitty 3D engine for Everquest that manages to waste any amount of engineering smarts on the side of the hardware. I still have to reduce the clipping plane in certain zones and just like a Voodoo3 or GeForce2 GTS the Kyro cannot save the day in Trakanon's Teeth. Perhaps the engine update for the next mission pack "Luclin" will offer relief, but the current engine doesn't cut it.

How weird - - May 22

Really strange that I didn't make an update, considering that I am looking for a job and should have more time than the months before.

Anyway, I have ordered a Kyro II graphics card which I may get as soon as tomorrow. I expect for it to performa very well on the game I am playing most frequently, which is Everquest. There is a lot of overdraw in many game zones like Trakanon's Teeth that have no trouble bogging down a GeForce2. That problem should be significantly eased by the smart fillrate management of the Kyro chip. I will keep you posted on it.

The time has finally come for my K6-III/400 to move on. It's not going to be sold, but my mom is getting it to take her first steps into the wild western lands called computers and Internet. It has, upgrade by upgrade from a K6-2/333, been serving me well since the fall of 1998 and - considering that it set the starting point for my career as a hardware related journalist - will not be given into the hand of strangers. In a way it followed me through some twists in my life with fierce loyality and reliabitly that would have thrown most women I know out of the saddle.

Dual Athlon in Germany - - May 13

Waibel, a OEM from Ettlingen near Karlsruhe in Germany lists an offer for dual Thunderbird workstations, which can be seen here. The power supply of 300 Watt looks a little frail for that job, though.

Douglas Adams - - May 12

Well I originally wanted to say something witty about the issue of AMD selling the Palomino as "Athlon 4" - in the direction of "I'd rather have 4 Athlons than one Athlon 4".

Unfortunately I am much more shocked about the news that Douglas Adams died. Not only did he write the 4-book trilogy around the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but also the marvelous Dirk Gentry novels which in my mind are some of the witties books in existance.

Douglas will be missed. My condolences to those who loved him. He's one of the few "celebrities" I'd actually would have liked to meet (a short list that also includes Chuck Yeager and the guy who played him in "The Right Stuff", Sam Shepard).

End of Life - - May 07

As the Gamma Flux project at Dcypher.Net comes to a closing, it is time to review the performance of our team, the Team 3DNow!

In the time we were active since the first day of the project, December 20, 1999, we produced over 4.6 million work units. Each of those takes 10 minutes on a Pentium III at 600 MHz.

The Team hence provided 87.5 CPU years of P3/600 computing power to the project and ends up in second place after the ProcessTree team. The team's contribution equals a little over 5% of the total output generated.

The Gamma Flux project comes in at over 90 million work units or 1718 P3/600-CPU years. The total count of participants was in excess of 22,000.

Had the project been commercial, it would have generated revenue of about $2 million as per Distributed Science's business model, with a payout of over $300,000 to the participants. About $15,300 would have been distributed among the Team 3DNow! members in this case.

On the side of personal pride, 780,000 work units or 14.8 CPU years in the project were mine. That's less than one percent and about $2,600 worth in participant payout, had it been commercial.

I think we can take a lot of pride in our accomplishment. Too bad the company that could put out a project of this size and theoretical revenue is closing its doors for lack of funding.

Dual Durons - - April 23

As I've previously said (and despite being called a looney for the claim), AMD finally confirmed that it will be possible to build Dual Duron powered machines. This has come to light at the AMD Tech Tour, read a report on it here.

AMD marketing department (off site) - - April 23

Everyone keeps complaining about how AMD's marketing could do a better job at pushing the products. That, of course, is bollocks. People in the know like www.3dnow.org readers (shameless plug) are aware that the largest number of AMD marketing folks in fact are on Intel's payroll.

As proof of this I offer you Mike Magee's report on Intel's lack of supply of 1 GHz mobile Pentium III chips. Intel took all the work and expense on them to push the Gigahertz class into the mobile space and AMD gets to sell the processors in quantities for those who actually want that kind of product. You won't get any more efficient than that in marketing.

Athlon 1400 - - April 18

Obviously I was mispredicting the launch of the Athlon 1400 for April 14. Doht! I suspect that it might have been launched if the last batch of information for the earning release would not have looked positive enough.

However, there are more rumours popping up about an early May release, with several smaller OEMs readying fliers already.

I don't expect anything out of the ordinary here other than a slightly more obvious lead over the Pentium 4 1700 (compared to the Athlon 1333) that should launch slighly before this chip. After all we are still talking Thunderbird core here.

Much more exciting should be the first 760MP based workstations with the Palomino. I hope to get one in my claws for a few hours before they go official so I can do some benchmarks, in particular with Tim's ScienceMark. As they say: the only thing that I'd give my Gigahertz-Athlon up for is a Palomino 1500 ;)

AMD earnings - - April 18

AMD posted better than expected earnings. The full of it can be read here in the press release.

Key points are another round of record unit sales to 7.3 million processors, 6.5 million of them being Athlon/Duron, earnings of 37 cents a share on expectations of 33, an average sales price of over $90 per CPU and an increase of CPU sales of 17%.

Flash declined by 10% vs the last quarter but is up 26% vs Q1/2000 still. Market share was gained both in flash and CPU, more than 2 million CPUs sold were 1 GHz and faster.

Outlook for the second quarter is about flat for processor sales and a decline for flash, with a total of $1.50 per share earnings for 2001 and single digit PC market growth.

Dual Athlon 1400 workstation from BOXX - - April 17

Chris Tom over from AMDZone sent a link to this PDF describing an Athlon 1400 based dual CPU workstation with a starting price of $3,200.

The machine is meant to be available in June, which could mean it is a Palomino powered box, the PR is not specific or we could possibly lay to rest the question whether the Thunderbird is SMP-able or not ;)

Intel income vs AMD - - April 17

While AMD's actual numbers for Q1 are still out, here some numbers from the analysts' averaged expectations.

They expect for Intel to earn 67 cents a share in 2001 while the expectations for AMD are at $1.59 a share.

Intel stock price before close today was at 26.04 while AMD traded for 23. Is it just me or is there an unjustified premium on Intel considering these expectations? We are talking a factor of 2.1 in favour of Intel per cent of annual earnings. I'd think there is some upside leverage for AMD here.

Intel reports - - April 17

Intel reported earnings of 16 cents a share (7 cents after deducting acquisitions etc) for the first quarter, which beat lowered estimates by one cent. Old trick of sandbagging and then beating the sandbag still seems to work as Intel stock trends higher after hours.

Seeing this I expect that AMD beats estimates by a cent or two, possibly announcing another record quarter if they possibly can. My old heart would like to hear that.

I also dare the heretic bet that Intel will warn again in Q2 to set the pace for lower revenue and income for the rest of the year vs. Q1.

Mobile Palomino - - April 14

It looks like an announcement of OEMs with mobile Palomino products will come out as soon as tomorrow (in addtion to price cuts). Clock speeds are expected to range from 850 to 1000 MHz. This is in line with my pre-CeBIT prediction, btw.

Market Research - - April 13

InQuest has a pretty damning market research report on the Pentium 4 up that makes for a worthwhile read. Something AMD should read as well to avoid the same kind of pitfalls.

AMD, earnings, flash - - April 12

Flash maker SSTI reported earnings after hours Thursday which came in within expectations and predicted a growth of 5-10% sequentially quarter over quarter. While not all flash is created equal and this company is much smaller than AMD's flash business, one could argue that this is a reassuring signal in advance of AMD's earnings report next week.

The problematic part, however, is the fact that Intel is reporting a day before AMD. Unless a lot of creative math happens in those Intel earnings I am quite convinced that the cushion of confidence under their stock price may become deflated. This could catch AMD in a downdraft that should not be justified by their own numbers.

Stay tuned for the stock market suspense show!

Athlon 1400 - - April 11

Rumour has it that the Athlon 1400 will be out April 16, with a Thunderbird core (as expected).

Team 3DNow! - - April 07

I created a new Team 3DNow! for those of you who want to participate in the United Devices Cancer research project. The project is sponsored by Intel, so why don't we go and show them how fast real CPUs are?

Update: Use this link to access the team directly.

Duron 900 - - April 02

No real news if you did the proper educated guessing, but today the Duron 900 hits the streets (even though it would seem that OEM systems were in stores before press time already - but that's how we like it, nah?). Multiplier of 9 and a 100 MHz DDR EV6 bus, no surprises there, just another speed grade, with the likelihood of the slowest of the bunch disappearing from the shelves soon - that would be the Duron 750.

AMD to give up EV6 bus - - April 01

According to a late night call from a ranking AMD engineer, AMD will announce that they are ending their support for the EV6 bus licensed from DEC.

Instead, so my source, they will be licensing the Pentium 4 QDR bus system "which offers considerable improvements in the way of bandwidth management and latency reduction" over the EV6 system. The first CPUs with the new bus will likely be the Hammer family, with a possibility for the 0.13 versions of Duron and Athlon to introduce it to the broad market.

According to AMD "the EV6 protocol is too complicated and cost-intensive" for the markets AMD is adressing, "it was a mistake only second to the use of RAMBUS memory by Intel to adopt this technology".

Stunned industry observers claimed "ideas like this can only find traction in the difficult spring sales season", while others said "Jerry must be on crack." Details about this surprising move by AMD should emerge during the first week of the month. All this obviously is an April's fool joke. Gotcha.

Palomino Wallpaper - - March 28

I thought you'd possibly take a liking to having a Palomino CPU. Not in your computer, though, but on the desktop. To that end I'll put up a high-res digicam macro shot taken at CeBIT for your enjoyment and download. It checks in at about 444kb and is 2048x1536 pixels, which should allow about everyone to downsample it for their individual desktop size.

One night at McCool's - - March 28

Just saw this movie with Liv Tyler, Matt Dillon, John Goodman, Paul Reiser and Michael Douglas .. very funny shit. If you are looking for something to see at cinema, this one sure makes for a good popcorn event. Not recommended for fans of the Village People, though *grin*

For relase dates for your country check right here. Looks like I hit gold with this sneak preview ;)

Duron 900 debuts - - March 28

According to Pravin Kamdar on the SI AMD thread, he saw a Duron 900 system from Compaq at Sears on Washington Square in Portland, OR. I'm still obliged to keep mum on the official release date, but I assume you can do the guesswork.

Funny coincidence I shopped in that exact same store some 3 years ago when I lived in Portland. Talk about the global village.

CeBIT adding bits - - March 25

Read some stuff over at the Silicon Investor AMD thread which contradicts information I got at the visit with AMD at their CeBIT booth and would like to put them up here for clarification:

• The server, desktop and mobile version of the Palomino core are really the same, with features enabled/disabled after testing and previous to packaging. The mobile version will use a packaging that is "flatter" and hence more usable in flat notebook designs, the server and desktop version are interchangeable.
• Morgan will likely be SMP capable, allowing for an "update" of all those beloved dual Celeron machines based on the Abit BP6
  
• Nothing really contradicts the idea that the Thunderbird runs in a dual configuration on the 760MP, however the Palomino will be equipped to get the best performance in that space (even if they'd be at same clock)
  
• Whether PowerNow! is usable in the desktop version depends on the manufacturer's desire to expose it in the BIOS. The AMD representative agreed that it would be worthwhile to pursue to lower fan noise and heat production.
  
• There was no flat denial of a 512 kb L2 version of the Palomino for server/workstation use, we may only see it for Appaloosa, though, considering the negative impact it would have on the number of produced chips, simply by way of the bigger die size.
  

Blue Man Group - - March 24

You may know the Blue Man Group from the new series of Intel commercials. So far it seems the consensus opinion on those are that they are a waste of blue paint.

However, the Blue Man Group also has a tangible artistic side, they are known for their stage performances and have a CD out, called "Blue Man Group Audio".

Intel happened to hand out some of those to visitors at CeBIT and today I had time listening to it. If you enjoy beat and guitar music without lyrics you should try to Napster some samples, it's actually pretty good stuff.

Prediction check - - March 23

Now that the CeBIT stuff is on the table, let's take a look at my predictions from a couple days ago about what we'd see.

• AMD 760MP powered showcase system - was shown behind closed doors
  
• Palomino uniprocessor showcase system - was shown behind closed doors
  
• Third party display of Palomino showcase systems (motherboard makers/OEMs) - yes, but they were under NDA not to reveal it
  
• Duron 900 - no, but coming soon
  
• 90% probability for Palomino 900 and 1000 mobile and OEMs that use it in notebooks - not disclosed by AMD yet
  
• 75% probability for Palomino 1400 (133 MHz DDR FSB only) desktop (used exclusively with DDR SDRAM) - definately a no, Palomino will start above 1500 Mhz
  
• 50% probability for Palomino 850 and 800 mobile as gap stop until Morgan arrives - jury is out on that still but AMD representatives said this was quite likely
  

None of the Palomino technology guesses could be confirmed or denied yet. I guess this makes for good prediction statistics :)

History - - March 23

At 12:48 and 20 seconds EST AMD's stock price was at 27.94 with Intel's stock price at 27.9375, marking the first time that AMD is ahead in the Wall Street race. That, of course, has nothing to do with valuation of the companies since Intel has oodles more shares in the market.

CeBIT is war - - March 22

Damn me for even going there. I hate being the reliable guy that I am :P

First off a warning: do not use the german railroad system unless it is a life-or-death thing for you. They suck llama ass. On the way up to Hannover they were 10 minutes late. Tolerable. On the way back they came in 25 minutes late (freezing drizzling windy station) then lost another 10 minutes to a medical emergency (it is a good idea to call the ambulance from the train BEFORE you arrive at the station, guys). That made it impossible to get my next connection, so I sat on a freezing, windy station for another 25 minutes. Then that train was delayed, too. I ended up arriving late by an hour and ten minutes, more than a third of the scheduled actual driving time. You suck, guys. Do everyone a favour and go out of business.

Anyway, the real reason for these ordeals, perceived or real, was CeBIT, the biggest, baddest IT show on the planet. What interests us most, of course, are AMD and Intel.

AMD showed the 1300 and 1333 boxes they announced today on the floor. No show for the Duron 900 .. yet. Not next week, either. The really yummy stuff, however, once again was upstairs and for invited eyes only. I got to see a dual Palomino workstation at work, running Photoshop and 3D Studio MAX at twice 1 GHz. They displayed a low profile dual Palomino server rack, one of the cores visible. It is square and larger than the TBird core, but it takes a little comparision work to figure out just how much bigger it really is. Next to that a Palomino 1533 single-CPU machine strutted its stuff and a 1 GHz mobile Palomino board with ALi chipset was doing PowerNow! exercises next to that.

The new roadmap revealed more interesting things. Thunderbird has room for higher clock speeds, I expect 1500 MHz before a Palomino will step in and take over. This leaves, while depriving us geeks from the desktop Pallies until third quarter, AMD with the opportunity to sell the first wave of the new chips to the lucrative mobile and workstation markets (single and dual CPU). That certainly will do the bottom line good and make inroads into Intel strongholds.

While not confirming my theory directly, there was some murmuring when I suggested that Palomino might be fabbed with 512 kb L2-Cache on the die, which would sell well in the workstation market while semi-disabled versions (partly defective cache area a la Celeron) could be sold in the desktop and mobile arena. Nobody claimed to have heard of hardware prefetch and the like, but that could just mean that the PR guys are kept dumb on purpose. 0.13 process ramp seems to be on track still and no news on Fab35 or Fab30 expansions.

Intel again hid out in the network castle, shunning the display of their core business for the second year in a row. While the psychologists among you may find this fodder for thought, there was one interesting item at the booth, namely a Pentium 4 system that runs a hand-picked 2 GHz processor. Of course Intel was a little allergic to the suggestion of benchmarking it at this point in the game.

Intel confirmed that they will move to 0.13 production as planned and that they would use copper in that process. They also will move from 20 cm to 30 cm wafers, giving them about 2.5 times the number of dies per wafer. They are confident that they can pull off this triple witching.

As reported by other sources, namely Dean Kent, Tualatin seems to be poised to appear in the mobile space only, unless Intel feels they need something below the P4. Speaking of below the P4, their upcoming Brookdale chipset (i845?) may or may not actually see the light of day on PC133 memory, according to their spokesperson they are first evaluating whether that combination is worth the trouble. They do not object to the idea to use a triple split in performance using PC133, PC2100 and RDRAM (PC1000) to differentiate price points for P4 systems as time passes. They made a point of mentioning that they may exceed 2 GHz before the year is out.

On the Tualatin/P3 front they mentioned that there are 3 versions of the i815E chipset around. The first iteration (8.4/1.5) supports P3s up to 1 GHz, the second one (8.4/2.5) also offers a helping hand to the 1133 MHz version, should it reappear. Only the newest B stepping (8.5/2.5) support Tualatin, which requires lower signal voltages. If you plan to upgrade (assuming a i815 owner reads this), you may run afoul of the stepping of your chipset, so watch out there.

A quick visit with Transmeta revealed nothing substantially new, too bad I missed the opportunity to talk to their former CEO/current CTO David Ditzel. Unfortunately he was doing overtime in another interview and I was running afoul of my train departure time which then didn't happen for another 25 minutes, after all (damn them railroad monkeys).

Finally the laugh of the day: At VIA's booth they exhibited some VIA-based motherboards under glass that were actually running computers. The most prominent one was labeled with "Duron 1300". I bet not even AMD knew that chip was availble yet ;)

AMD760 Super Bypass - - March 21

As you may know or not, the AMD760 has a feature that the AMD750 introduced, the so-called "super bypass". It reduces latency between the chipset's memory hub (northbridge) and the memory by giving that data path priority over other transactions, i.e. AGP.

Our friends over at Planet 3DNow! did some benchmarks to see how much it gains in real world applications compared to default and wait-state settings.

Read their interesting findings here (german).

CeBIT - - March 19

Should you happen to attend CeBIT in any way, form or shape I'd recommend you visit the Guillemot booth. 'nuff said.

Intel woes? - - March 19

Picked up a number of links this morning while doing my usual news round on the Internet. They mostly deal with Intel today and I know some of you (yes, you!) secretly enjoy seeing them in trouble. Shameful behaviour, go to the corner.

So if you cannot help yourself despite my stern look, read here about their downtown Austin office building, here about their long-time cheerleader Ashok Kumar and finally take a look at this new Intel product.

Athlon 1.2GHz-1.33GHz - - March 18

I ran some benchmarks on my Athlon 1.2GHz (266 MHz type C) and overclocked it to 1.33GHz as well to see what to expect from the upcoming Athlon. You can check it here.

JC on Athlon 1333 - - March 18

JC has enslaved a benchmarker with the upcoming Athlon 1300C (133 MHz DDR FSB and 10x multiplier) and posted a review comparing it with the equally unreleased Pentium 4-1700 in some benchmarks and the P4-1500 in general.

You can see the outcome here. I don't have much of a beef with this article (surprise!), which means I consider it pretty good. I'd like people to try other Q3-engine games aside from Quake 3 itself, though.

From my experience the Athlon looks much better on, for example, Heavy Metal FAKK 2, which I feel is more representative for engine-license games than the original titles.

Step up and get burned - - March 17

Seeing that my prediction of a pre-CeBIT availability of the 1300 Athlon speed grade seems to materialize Monday, why not step up and take the risk of looking stupid with other predictions.

So here what I expect to see/hear at CeBIT:

• AMD 760MP powered showcase system
  
• Palomino uniprocessor showcase system
  
• Third party display of Palomino showcase systems (motherboard makers/OEMs)
  
• Duron 900
  
• 90% probability for Palomino 900 and 1000 mobile and OEMs that use it in notebooks
  
• 75% probability for Palomino 1400 (133 MHz DDR FSB only) desktop (used exclusively with DDR SDRAM)
  
• 50% probability for Palomino 850 and 800 mobile as gap stop until Morgan arrives
  

Additionally I volunteer these guesses about Palomino:

• has hardware prefetch built in
  
• emulates SSE2 at the microcode level
  
• uses 25% less power than a same clock Thunderbird
  
• available with 256 and 512kb non-shared L2 cache

Let's see how far off the mark I am :)

3D Mark 2001 - - March 13

I just took a look at 3D Mark 2001. I'm quite pleased with the benchmark parts, it looks much better and tougher than the 2000 version.

However, although the demo part is stunning, in particular the creek part, it leaves me with the feeling that it lacks something that was present in the earlier demos. Pressed to name it I'd say "choreography" or "dramaturgy".

Where the earlier versions showed some sort of coherence, this one looks like it needed to get out and chopped up in episodes. Also the animation of the opponents in the lobby scene feels choppy and the models take less polygons than I'd have liked to see, watch the ellbow of the hero.

Somewhat disturbing was the necklace of the guy in the lobby .. that's Thor's hammer, isn't it? As far as I know some skinhead groups use it as their logo. That doesn't feel right :/ MadOnion should give that one a review.

Overall not bad but you won't see everything unless you have full DirectX 8 acceleration (read: GeForce 3) at your fingertips.

3D Mark 2001 is out - - March 13

Just now 3D Mark 2001 became available at download.com. Follow this link to get it (38 MB).

Having seen the last beta I know this will rock.

Dual Athlon IBM servers? - - March 12

EBNews reports that IBM plans to launch dual Athlon powered server machines in this article. Needless to say such an embrace for the 760MP platform would be a major breakthrough for AMD.

Additionally the article quotes a chip market analyst claiming that Intel is downplaying how bad their microprocessor business is really hurt by the market downturn and AMD.

Hans Deppe about Fab30 - - March 11

AMD VP Hans Deppe (who runs Fab30 in Dresden) gave an interview that you can read here (german) at the online site of Sächsische Zeitung.

He talks about the quality of graduates in the region, the fact that Dresden is one of about half a dozen sites for the next Fab construction and that AMD could sell more copper chips than they can currently make.

Get ready for Gamma Flux 2 - - March 08

As some of the Team 3DNow! may not yet have realized, Gamma Flux 2 is getting close to roll out.

Of course we'll want to be in from the start, so clean the mothballs out of the CPU coolers, make sure you signed up for a ProcessTree ID number and keep the mouse near the download button when Harvester gets released for the project.

Intel earnings warning - - March 08

As you certainly have heard by now, Intel has warned about their expected current quarterly results and plans to cut 5,000 jobs over the course of the year.

This comes very shortly after AMD reiterated their guidance with expectations to earn $2 per share this year.

Of course we can expect for AMD's stock to tank following these news, despite the strong indications that AMD is not suffering from the same problems that plague the big guys.

Update: As expected, AMD down about 9% and Intel off 10%.

Distributed Science - - March 08

Just got word from Steve Porter that all Distributed Science/ProcessTree/DCypher.Net machines are disconnected from the Internet because of a cut fiber connection. So if you are on the Team 3DNow! don't worry if you see blocks backing up and the sits are unreachable.

Looks like a backhoe went rampage.

3D Mark 2001 - - March 06

I just had the opportunity to take a look at beta 3 of the upcoming 3D Mark 2001. While not running on a GeForce 3 (GF2 GTS instead), it was quite amazing.

If you own a DirectX 8 compliant 3D accelerator you will wet yourself when it hits the streets. Congrats to the guys in Finland and Toronto.

Tom speaks - - March 06

I received the following email from Tom, regarding the statements I made yesterday. From the tone of it I assume he is fine with it being published, correct me if I'm wrong, Tom.

Well, you finally found out!

In fact we actually OWN Intel! It's a part of our huge business park in Feldkirchen. We also own Apple (Dornacherstrasse 3) and Compaq (Dornacherstrasse 4) as well as an excellent Wine Shop (Dornacherstrasse 6). Across the road we are currently building a huge apartment block (Dornacher Feld) with about 500 Condos and apartments for our future employees. We are also planning a large grocery store and an excellent cigar shop that only sells Habańos.

What can I say ... ? Tom's Hardware is in fact a secret government operation of Fidel Castro, co-founded by Columbian drug barons, Saddam Hussein and the Russian Mafia.

I guess you should take the next flight over and take pictures of our big business complex over there. We happen to be very proud of it.

:)

Thomas Pabst

Well, what can I say ... I'm always glad when people have a stellar career in jobs other than the one they got training in. I hope the tax bracket in Cuba is better then the US ones or Fidel will be the only one smoking cigars at the end of the year.

Journalists and Independence - - March 05

A german hardware editor today sent me a german language blurb from Tom's Hardware (which can be found here). The article in itself is not so interesting, apart from the fact that it claims superiority in price of a P4-1300 with 128 MB RDRAM and a i850 motherboard versus an Athlon 1200, 128 MB DDR SDRAM and motherboard. It also predicts the downfall of AMD in the face of the Pentium 4's rulership. So far, so funny.

When I proceeded to check who wrote that article, however, I discovered something really strange. At the end of this page, stating the journalistic and economic responsibilities for the german version of Tom's Hardware, something curious struck me. It's the address of the parent company.

Dornacher Strasse 5 in Feldkirchen near Munich just happens to be on the same block as Dornacher Strasse 1 - which happens to be Intel's headquarter in Germany. Coincidence?

Overclocking the Duron - - February 26

German website PC-Extreme did a piece on whether you gain more by overclocking the Duron through multiplier or front side bus manipulation.

Considering the small L2-Cache of the Duron and the large amount of memory transaction that forces the answer to that is a no-brainer, but verify the real gains by reading their article on the subject.

Daniel, those 10 beers will get you seriously pickled.

Adding to the craze - - February 25

All your base are belong to us!

Athlon 1300 - - February 22

According to my sources, AMD will introduce the Athlon 1300 the first few days of March (which would confirm my earlier post about February remaining void of new AMD CPU announcements).

It will initially appear as a B type (100 MHz DDR FSB) only, with the C type of 1333 MHz following once that batch is officially available together with the 1000 C and 1200 C.

Duron - - February 22

I have moved up to a 137 MHz Front Side Bus on my Duron, bringing the system to a speed of 959 MHz. Evaluating how well that goes as time passes.

Every now and then .. - - February 15

Sometimes things cross your desk that make you utterly upset with some people. One case of such an occurance just happened, and I am linking to it here. I urge you to give it a good read, whether you are a US citizen or not and take some lesson from it.

Methods like these are paving the way for governments to dismember the rights of the people they are answerable to. Not ruling them in sharply means sowing the seeds for a new Gestapo. Stomp out those seeds and send those who nurture them to gainful employment in less powerful positions.

AMD hits it big - - February 13

Albeit somewhat obscure, this press release is pointing at big things to come. Having SUN on that list hints at a major customer for Sledgehammer chips ...

Duron overclockage pt. 2 - - February 12

After a couple days of testing, I can now say that I am very satisfied with the results of my overclocked Duron box. Not a single of those terribly frustrating problems I saw on the Epox board anymore, the cheap PC133 memory behaves extremely well at 135 MHz clock, the CPU at 945 MHz is rock stable.

The only test remaining is burning CDs on the machine, I shall undertake that later today when it is BACKUP TIME again :)

With that, my heartfelt recommendation for the ASUS A7V133, great board, guys!

Duron overclockage - - February 07

After weeks of hassle with instabilities on my previous Duron motherboard, an Epox 8KTA, I decided to replace it with an ASUS A7V133 (KT133A with Promise RAID0). So far things look really good, the only grief I have is the board layout, which inconveniently places the CMOS-wipe contact right behind my harddisk, so overclocking is a difficult business. It also wouldn't really harm to use a finer granularity in CPU voltage selection, 0.05 volts is twice the step of the competing ABit solution.

Using my Duron 800 and the pencil unlocking method, I had no trouble getting it to run stable at 945 Mhz (135 MHz FSB) and quite stable at 1000 MHz (133 Mhz FSB). The only application that got it to go out of whack at 1 GHz was Tim Wilkens' Science Mark 1.0, which is extremely bandwidth intensive, a slight increase in voltage might rectify that. It didn't have any issues running at that speed at 100% CPU load using Gamma Flux.

AMD stock on the rise - - February 01

I don't take things for granted, so the latest few days made me curious about AMD's stock performance. Largely disconnecting itself from the NASDAQ fidgeting, they moved higher on very decent volume scratching the underbelly of $26 as of this writing.

While the stock buyback announcement certainly has a hand in this, it doesn't justify all that movement. Add to that the increasing tightness of Thunderbird parts above 1 GHz in the DIY market, as observed by Dean Kent and JC and you may get an idea what would be a possible reason: the switch to Palomino parts in the high-performance range is going on behind the scenes and TBird inventories begin to run out.

The question remains when an official announcements will come through. As far as I've been able to research, AMD still doesn't plan on any CPU-related February announcements. Of course that may just be the smoke screen. Keep your eyes open :)

Hurray for K6-III - - January 30

I just had the sad duty of rebooting my trusted K6-III/400 (64 MB, Voodoo3-3000, Win98SE). Why that is sad, you ask? Well, it had been up for 1253 hours straight (52.2 days) and the operating system had started to flake out.

Considering that the machine ran at 100% CPU load all that time doing Gamma Flux, I think this is both a great statement for AMD processors and the stability of the Gamma Flux client software.

Go K6-III !

Athlon 1300 in March - - January 30

Intense staring at birds' entrails predict that the Athlon 1300 will be announced in March and still be a Thunderbird core CPU. Deeper digging offers the prediction that Palomino may be announced in the vicinity of CeBIT 2001 (which starts March 22).

ProcessTree signups - - January 29

Knowing that a couple guys from here have signed up themselves at ProcessTree Network using the link down at the bottom of the page I'd like to point out that due to hardware failure some records of signups after December 25 were lost.

If you are one of them, please head over and sign up again so you won't drop by the wayside when paid jobs come up :)

AMD buys back stock - - January 29

AMD announced that they are buying back up to $300 million worth of their own stock. This can be seen as a good move at current price levels, the money pouring into AMD and the tightening of the number of shares outstanding will add value to the remaining shares. That again will come in handy in purchases for stock at a later time.

Lies, damn lies and benchmarks - - January 26

A friend sent me a very interesting link regarding benchmarks that are skewed to favour certain manufacturers and the benefit of dual processor systems. You can find it here.

AMD reports 4th quarter - - January 17

Just off MSNBC, AMD reports 53 cents a share vs. analyst estimates of 55 cents. Stock is up after hours on these news, though.

Check the official press release from the guys for the tasty bits.

Athlons and Windows 2000 - - January 04

For all those naysayers, here some brief stats from the Distributed Science SQL-Server, running on an Athlon Classic 800 and Windows 2000 Server: 42 days and 15 hours uptime.

Happy new year - - December 31

A safe and happy year 2001 for everyone! Don't overclock to the point of combustion :)

Looks, though, that AMD didn't announce the Athlon 1300 after all, despite Jerry's prediction that they would in that post Q3-earnings interview.

Pentium 4 autopsy - - December 29

I found this interesting article linked over at Slashdot. Give it a read if you are inclined to watch the Pentium 4 getting kicked around.

The king is dead - - December 16

NVidia is buying the core assets of 3dfx for $70 million in cash and 1 million shares in stock. So far the dry facts.

I have to admit that I had hoped that someone else would acquire their twig and berries. While Nvidia provides great hardware (I'm running a GeForce and two TNT2s myself vs one Voodoo3), their attitude is less than appealing. This goes both as a guy who spent two years reporting on PC gaming hardware and as someone who has to chip out for their high-priced stuff to stay in the 3D gaming ratrace.

What I'd like to see is that Nvidia adopts 3dfx subpixel jittering technology for their upcoming projects, their supersampling imitation doesn't cut it. Other than that .. good riddance to 3dfx' lackluster execution.

Athlon news - - December 07

I have some indications that the next speed grade of the Thunderbird, the Athlon 1300, will be introduced the week after christmas.

This will meet the predictions that Jerry Sanders made regarding this speed grade in an interview following the Q3 earnings.

On another note, that Palomino 1700 seems to be for real but AMD feels that the Pentium 4 doesn't offer a challenge that would require for it to be brought to market at this point in time.

That makes quite a bit of financial sense, why kill yourself when you can sell decently around your ideal point of yield, which seems to be above 1 GHz. On the other hand, leaving Intel leverage in the high-price arena may only prolong their suffering, which is not entirely sportive .. just kidding.

Fire! - - November 30

Geez. My trusted K6-III seems to have put a hit out on my life. When I came into the living room this morning, an awful cable-fire-like stench polluted the air.

After some checking I discovered that the fan in the power supply had given up on the integrity of its bearings and was running VERY hot. Good thing the bastard didn't catch fire or that could have been it as far as my stay on earth is concerned.

Don't you agree that computer cases should come with smoke alarm by default?

Thunderbird 900 problems? - - November 29

After talking to the representative of a taiwanese motherboard manufacturer, several Socket A mobo makers report problems with some of the latest deliveries of Athlon 900 chips.

It would seem only the 900 MHz speed grade was affected, it is unclear whether there was a design change of any kind or just a poor batch of those chips making it into the market.

My week 37 Athlon 900 is happy, though, I can't report first hand knowledge of the reported problem. If you have trouble with a recently produced Athlon 900, you may want to give this consideration.

Micron blunder delays DDR Athlon shipments - - November 29

According to a press release, Micron's lead times on Athlon DDR systems have increased by 40 days because of bad motherboards.

The boards, supplied by Gigabyte and designed by a Gigabyte contractor, did not satisfy AMD requirements as to the noise level for the front side bus, which required for them to be tossed out and replaced.

This means a setback in availability, on the other hand this will allow for more time to ramp DDR SDRAM production and should ease pricing once the Athlon DDR models come out in numbers.

In other news, Intel announced that they hired the marketing genius responsible for the Apple "Think different" campaign. Good shot for Intel there, from the tangible results of the Pentium 4 reviews they are not stupid hiring top advertising talent. Interesting though the utter lack of advertising for the Pentium 4 before Q1/2001, instead the already defeated Pentium III line will be pushed for christmas.

Buy your loved ones some expensive old technology - unfortunately that now seems to go for both chip makers, considering the Micron screw-up.

Flip-Flop - - November 25

Mr. Flip-Flop, aka Tom Pabst, has put up his second revision (!) of his Pentium 4 tests. This time around, he received tuned binaries of the damning MPEG4-Benchmark that made the Pentium 4 looks so bad that he withdrew his recommendation for the chip in his first revision of his review.

Erm, hello? Is that the newest way to do reviews, tossing out stock code for material optimized by the company whose product is under review? How about having an AMD-compiled version too, for shits and giggles?

Looks like we are entering Florida recount times among hardware reviews, too. You may criticize Tom for many things, but he sure figured out that the same trick that works for CNN to get lots of hits is good enough for his outfit as well. Stay tuned for the third revision!

Call to arms! - - November 24

From the Anandtech distributed computing forum:

"At the current rates, according to the speed calculator at teamanandtech.com, we would need an increase of ~38.25 GHz to hold of ProcessTree and ~7.75 GHz to stay ahead of Team 3DNow!!! (speeds based on PPro, P2, P3, celeron, etc. calculations)"

The good news: Durons and Athlons are faster at same clock doing Gamma Flux than the Intel CPUs.

The bad news: Team Anandtech has a big member pool to draw from.

The solutions: Start working for Team 3DNow! Go here to get the software! Team 3DNow! is team #1

Pentium 4 addendum - - November 21

I ran one more test on the Pentium 4, which basically is a pure MMX performance test. The CSC client from DCypher.Net was a highly optimized MMX key checking software for the CS Cipher challenge last year.

Using the P4-1500 it scores 102,500 kbits/s, a TBird 900@964 MHz scores 173,000 kbits/s.

Gamma Flux team - - November 21

A friendly guy from Team Anandtech made a web page where he tracks the daily stats of the leading teams for Gamma Flux. The page can be here for those of you who participate for Team 3DNow!

P4 benchmark update - - November 15

Ran some more benchmarks today, mostly to see if the theory of weak FPU and great bandwidth advantage holds true.

Please let me reiterate that I am not trying to play roughshot on Intel, as you will be able to tell from my comments I will say where I feel they excell and where I think they fall short. It is a fact, though, that they have to beat the Athlon lineup and platforms to justify a price premium and their marketshare in the performance desktop market. I also abstained from posting actual scores as a courtesy to Intel and those people who signed an NDA. Full reviews will be out Monday when the chip is officially launched, I won't be posting one, these posts are purely for the enjoyment of the highly technically inclined.

A new compile of Primordia ran very fast (20% faster than on an Athlon 1320 SDR/KT133), but we know Primordia is a sucker for bandwidth.

Using P3-optimized binaries for a set of matrix operations (from 10x10 to 900x900 in steps of 10) vs Athlon optimized ones, the Pentium 4 took a severe beating. The Athlon 1200 DDR ended up 40% faster than the P4-1500 in peak speed. Impressive the Intel lead when the data turnaround is exclusively from main memory.

The call hence is: Pentium 4 is a weak x87 FPU performer and requires optimized code to shine but the Intel850 chipset is a most excellent companion that helps to bail it out quite often. The problem with that, for Intel, is that nothing keeps AMD or a third party like Micron from delivering a comparable chipset solution for the Athlon. Fear the Micron Scimitar.

Prediction: Pentium 4 will post insanely high scores on the SPECfp benchmark because it is a bandwidth hog.

Prediction #2: Nobody in the scientific computing community will fall for it.

Prediction #3: SPECfp will not survive in the current form.

Some graphic output of the performance data for doing matrix operations of the form AxB+C, where A, B and C are matrices of size 10x10 to 400x400 (900x900 for performance the right image - click for enlargement):

"optimized" to create bus and cache load	performance optimized

3dfx also drops card making business - - November 15

Only took 3dfx two years to confirm the sceptics regarding their STB acquisition and they are closing up their unprofitable business of making graphic cards themselves.

Returning to the shrunken fold of chip-only makers, 3dfx IMHO has a better shot at becoming lean and mean again, only now they'll really have to deliver to convince other people that their stuff is good enough to be put on 3D boards.

Good luck, folks (don't think anyone I knew still works for them, though)

Pentium 4 Benchmarks - - November 14

I just finished running some benchmarks on a Pentium 4 system. It is a reviewer box equipped with a P4/1500, 256 MB of RDRAM (dual channel, twice 128 MB) and a GeForce2 Ultra 64 MB on an Intel-made motherboard. The operating system was Windows 2000 Professional, which I also use on my workstation here, an Athlon 900 with 256 MB of PC133 memory and a GeForce 256 DDR.

I ran some game benchmarks and the usual scientific benchmarks from JC's site made by the great Tim Wilkens.

The findings confirmed my suspicions that the Pentium 4 is doing very well at bandwidth intensive work. It decidedly beats an Athlon 1200 system on DDR memory in Quake3, which is a pig for band.

Unreal Tournament, which is a glutton for CPU clock and FPU speed, doesn't fare well on the Pentium 4, it is roughly en par with a TBird 1000 on PC133 memory. The same picture for Drakan, which is a game with a desire for low memory latencies and high FPU speed.

On the scientific benchmark front it is clear that compilers make or break the P4's performance. Using Tim's Primordia benchmark, the version compiled for Intel Pentium III CPUs with the 5.0 Intel compilers gets a beating from my Athlon, while the 6.1 Fortran compiler doubles the P4's performance, beating the Athlon 900 roughly corresponding to the clock ratio.

Linpack, however, offers a different picture. Here the Athlon 900 on PC133 memory defeats the Pentium 4-1500 in peak MFLOP and keeps the crown up to the point where the matrix size exceeds an N of 325. Beyond that, the superior memory bandwidth of the dual-channel RDRAM carries the Pentium 4 to about twice the MFLOPs the Athlon can muster. That, however, is less than the bandwidth difference would suggest (3.2 GB/s vs. 1.05 GB/s).

QMC hands the Athlon a 2:1 defeat at the high setting and a narrow defeat at low setting, which again suggests the impact of memory bandwidth over FPU power as datasets get big.

As a final score comes the distributed computing client for Gamma Flux, which is very x87 FPU-heavy and requires next to no memory bandwidth. It delivers a crippling score on the Pentium 4-1500, checking in at 13300 rays/second. For comparision, an Athlon 1000 does nearly 30,000 rays/second.

What does that mean for Intel?

While nobody will trust the comments from this site until they have verified the scores for themselves, let me assure you that from my involvement with Distributed Science and the fact that the Pentium 4 will become a high volume mainstream chip over the next 18 months, I have a vested interest in Intel's success with this CPU. I made, after all, the promise to see to CPU specific optimisations in a recent press release. The compiler impact, I think, is obvious, so I am confident that when it comes down, the Pentium 4 will be a capable engine for distributed computing projects.

That said, it looks like the Pentium 4 is a sub-par gaming CPU for existing titles (at least prior to patches) based on the Unreal engine and FPU/latency limited engines. It does excell on the Quake3 engine, however, but not as much as the clock speed ratio would suggest.

The strength of the P4/Intel850 system rests with the massive memory bandwidth and depends strongly on compiler help to shine. This will be a major disadvantage for two reasons. First off, legacy code (as in about everything that is out now) will hardly be recompiled for the Pentium 4 unless Intel pays for it. Secondly, the future P4 systems will rely on less potent memory solutions than dual-channel RDRAM, which will cripple the potential of this CPU.

None the less I see the P4 as a success for Intel. AMD cannot possibly satisfy more than 30% of the market demand, simply by limitation of their production capacities. Secondly, megahertz still sells over real performance and Intel deserved to be damned if they cannot put that to work. I do see pain for Intel, though, especially in the shape of falling ASPs. Celeron is all but dead in the face of the Duron, the Pentium III gets crushed on pricing and performance between high-speed Durons and the Thunderbirds and the Pentium 4 is a product that, by mere merit of it's die size, is a pain for yields.

Until such time that Intel can gain an advantage on a 0.13 µm process, they will hurt financially.

Spam - - November 13

Looks like some misguided retard tried to use the www.3dnow.org domain for a spam mail. I doubt that anyone got hit, though, considering that I was never able to send mail out through it and had to use my local ISP instead.

Should anyone have received spam with a www.3dnow.org address as sender or return address, it did not originate here and we feel your pain.

Said so .. - - November 13

While I usually hate to say "I said so", 3dfx just confirmed my suspicion of not pursuing the Voodoo5-6000 any further in this press release.

Good decision or bad? I think it will free critical resources in the company to an attempt to get the water out of the ship that threatens to sink the whole thing. 3dfx has to execute on SAGE/RAMPAGE or they will be a thing of the past, it is as simple as that. They better get the hell out of their rut.

Tualatin dead? - - November 10

A little bird told me that Intel nixed the 0.13 µm Pentium III "Tualatin" from their desktop roadmap and will instead only feature it in the mobile market.

The assumptions what could lead them to this move are twofold. Either they feel that the Pentium III lingering in the market would spoil the Pentium 4's marketing or - much worse - that the Pentium 4 yields are so low that they need all the manufacturing capacity they can get to get it out in significant numbers.

Either way Intel's grip on the CPU market seems to be slipping once again. Analysts today downgraded them because of growing competition (guess who?) and a preceived reduced growth in PC sales.

I keep hoping that the P4 performs well to make sure that AMD will not doze off and pull more cool stuff out of the hat.

AMD760 pt. 2 - - November 09

Unfortunately the set of benchmarks I was able to do are quite inconclusive, pending results on a non-DDR system for comparision. I was positively impressed with the system stability though.

What strongly sticks out is the lack of performance Windows 98 offers for scientific applications compared to Windows 2000, which speaks volumes for the better memory management in Win2k.

AMD760 - - November 07

I will be able to take a look at an evaluation system from AMD with the known specs of AMD760, Athlon 1200 C and PC2100 memory this evening.

Among other things I hope to run Tim Wilkens matrix benchmarks on the box, which ought to benefit from the additional memory bandwidth.

www.3DNow.Org going home - - November 03

It looks like I'll be returning www.3DNow.Org to where it belongs, speak AMD. Unfortunately they don't have the resources to continue the site as a community forum like the german Athlon.de site, which would have been nice.

For those who still use the forums, which mostly means the SETI@Home team 3DNow!, I am working on setting up a forum thread at the DCypher.Net forums, which offers conversations on general distributed computing issues and is home to the second strong 3DNow! team in distributed processing, the Gamma Flux team.

Own a classic - - November 02

I decided to upgrade my Athlon 600 system, formerly used for several reviews (among others the first sanctioned Athlon review on the net) with a Duron 800 this week. This is mostly to reduce the terrible noise level in my office, where four computers are competing for the title of jet engine of the year.

The Athlon 600 classic with original cooler and the original AMD Fester B3 motherboard are up at a german auction site, in case you're interested in a collector's item.

AMD760 reviews - - October 29

First reviews of the AMD760 platform are expected to come out at midnight. A first one in german is at this location, thanks to Tom from Planet 3DNow! who figured that one out.

The article is suitable to get an overview on the chipset features and some benchmarks. Unfortunately the skill set of the reviewers did not allow for an analysis of what they've been benchmarking, so you'll have to wait for JC to state his observations.

3dfx the guys to watch at Comdex? - - October 28

A little bird (hence take this with a grain of salt) told me that 3dfx may be the company to watch at COMDEX. This may hint at the possibility that they are going to show off the RAMPAGE/SAGE chip combo.

Rumour has it that SAGE, the T&L unit, is capable of sustaining 60 million lit triangles a second, which is 2-3 times the capability of the GeForce2 GTS and Ati Radeon. The pixel drawing RAMPAGE chip has been rumoured to support up to 4 texture layers per clock and rendering pipeline (GeForce2 has 2, Radeon 3) and to be multi-chip capable like the VSA-100 on the Voodoo4/5.

3dfx certainly could use a return to technology leadership, their stock price is in the pits usually reserved for the likes of AMD ;)

Other rumours from a different source indicate that the Voodoo5-6000 (4 VSA-100 with external power supply) may not see the light of mass production. It is supposed to be too complex on the driver and technology side and too expensive for the small market niche it could conquer and hence doesn't offer a good risk/reward ratio.

c't sucks - - October 25

German c't magazine, for some folks in Germany the holy grail of computer news and reviews, has yet again managed to convince me of their mediocrity.

The reviewer Athlon 1200 AMD Germany had going around, first to c't, of course, has been shot by these great folks in an obvious overclocking attempt before mailing them on to the competition (my former employer) of PC Games Hardware.

That, while in itself a prime example of audacity, has been topped by the fact that the L1-Bridges on the chip were still smeared with pencil markings from their overclocking.

Needless to say AMD can't be thrilled about giving their best stuff in the hands of these bloody amateurs who will not hesitate to damage material that still has to go around to other publications - but then when you can't top them on quality, just stop them cold by destroying the samples, right?

None the less the boys at PC Games Hardware did get their Athlon 1200 scores done. Kudos to Chris and Lars at the lab.

Rambus fallout at Intel - - October 25

I received the following interesting link regarding the fallout of the Rambus desaster at Intel.

Interesting read and, as an entrepreneur now, a warning not how to deal with people who know what they are talking about.

Rambus sucks - officially - - October 19

Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel, said in an interview with the Financial Times "We made a big bet on Rambus and it did not work out. We hoped we were partners with a company that would concentrate on technology rather than seeking to collect a toll from other companies."

So I guess it is official now that Rambus sucks. It took Intel only a year longer than the hardware editors to figure that one out.

New chips and old tricks - - October 17

AMD officially pimps out the Athlon 1200 now, which doesn't require all that much pimpage considering it is the fastest x86 processor on the planet.

Also new the Duron 800, which should soon enough be followed by the 850 to clos the gap to the Thunderbirds, which are going to start at 900 MHz as production on the low end fades out.

In other news Intel announced quarterly earnings, beating the estimates analysts had revised down a few weeks ago because of Intel's own earning warnings. In fact they met the earnings per share that were predicted prior to the warning, but fell short on revenue. Talk about setting your targets conveniently. About one billion dollar of the reported income came from investments and interest, which is roughly 15 percent of the total.

AMD posts record results .. again - - October 11

Congratulations to all the good folks at AMD! Again they managed to best themselves and post even better results than last quarter. Good stuff :)

Jerry Sanders seems to have had a good old time telling the analysts the news, perhaps one or two of them were able to string up the facts to a plausible recommendation this time. AMD dumbed it down and put out all the facts, but you can only lead them to the water, not make them drink. Either way the stock traded up a good deal after hours, even though it is still in the doldrums. The lowest level I'd consider fair value is above the $50 mark, which is twice of where it's now.

I have to close, got to run to the bank to pump some money into my portfolio ;)

PC Games Hardware - - October 07

For those readers among you who are in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, I recommend you take a look at the hardware computer magazine I am proud to have been the senior editor for: PC Games Hardware.

Aimed mainly at folks with PCs who like to have fun with their computer, this mag tests video cards, mainboards, CPUs, game controllers, soundcards and speakers etc etc. Also a part of the mag are reviews and tuning tips for the month's hottest game and previews taking a look at those that will be.

If you are interested, check out your local newsstand or this page for subscriptions.

A time of changes - - September 18

Well, since Friday I am no longer employed with my buddies from Computec Media, so the hardware editor times are a thing of the past.

Instead I'm now working for Distributed Science. I'll be taking a trip to Toronto tomorrow to check out the development center, where the makers of DCypher.Net are coding on the next client generation that will be the great step into fee-based distributed computing. Exciting times, nothing less.

Anyway, I am currently talking to AMD about them taking over www.3dnow.org as a community site. If you are employed with AMD, please don't hesitate to ask the PR department to consider this step. I won't have the time anymore to maintain the site, but I think it would be a good thing to keep it alive as a meeting place for the friends of the best microprocessors around.

End to overclocking - - September 09

Well, AMD has gone all Intel now and put a big padlock on the Athlons and Durons after week 31 production date. Removing the multiplier selection pins from the chip there is only the front side bus left for overclocking. While you may be able to get that 10% above specs, it is much harder to do than multiplier overclocking.

Check out Insane Hardware for more information and pictures.

Athlon overclocking - - September 05

How to make your own Athlon 1100? Well, use an ASUS A7V motherboard, a Global Win FOP38 cooler (and excessive noise protection gear since that baby makes more noise than a coffee grinder) and an Athlon 1000.

Ok, NOT a cheap way, but thought I mention that it runs smoothly here in the lab. Just wish I had some Mushkin memory sticks that can go CAS2 at 143 MHz instead of doing the salto mortale like this no-name crap we're forced to buy.

Duron 750 - - September 05

Call me a prophet or something! AMD announced the Duron 750 finally, filling the gap between the existing Duron line and the Athlon 800. You may remember that Jerry Sanders gave an interview a while back, in which he mentioned that the Athlon product line runs from 800 to 1100 MHz, so the Duron 750 was the missing link.

Priced at $181 this chip is going to pack another hard punch into sub-$1k machines. Can you tell that I like that little chipling?

Athlon 1100 - - August 28

Ba-da-boom! Well finally that pesky NDA from AMD is lifted and even though the Athlon 1100 system here has been sent back already over a week ago, the smell of burnt rubber still lingers in the air ... not really.

What's there to say about it? It's about 6% or so faster in games than the Athlon 1000 we've made the staple of our Socket A motherboard tests in the lab. That by itself is nice to keep in mind for when these processors become mainstream and affordable, but also shows that 3D-accelerators and memory are taking a tall on such fast CPUs.

My current recommendation for price/performance conscious buyers is an Athlon 800 with a GeForce2 GTS for the performance hungry gamer and a Duron 650 with a GeForce2 MX for folks with a tighter budget. Always make sure to use 128 MB of PC133 memory with your KT133, ok? CAS2 latency will get you another 5 fps or so at the high end, but it doesn't save you from the bullets on the Duron .. yet.

We did it! - - August 26

Wow, what a race! We finally overtook Team Poland in Gamma Flux yesterday and assumed second place in the all time statistics behind Team Anandtech!

Great work everyone involved, now let's put some cushion between us and Poland and go hunting for Anandtech.

Mouse pad - - August 18

I just received a sample of funC Industries' new mousing surface, the sUrface1030 (Kerry, my man, that may be l33t branding but it sucks for typing out).

I put the thing on my desk for the time being, to check out if it has any merits with my optical mouse (MS Intellimouse Optical), which I came to prefer as my pointing device of choice after cleaning out a warehouse worth of mousing grime from previous mechanical models in my use.

So far I'm quite pleased with the fact that the rubber base is quite flat (no wristbreaking Everglide uphill battles) and that you have two surfaces to choose from, simply by flipping the mousing surface from coarse to fine structure or back. The cable handling doesn't beat my Mouse Bungee, though, which completely eliminates all dragging or pushing resistance the cable may exhibit.

Previously a desktop mouser without pad, I think I can warm up to this solution, but I think it may be even more interesting to mechanical mouse users who like perfect ball traktion. Give it a look.

Btw, HardOCP guys, I think calling a reviewer lame just reflects poorly on your ability to suffer criticism - which never was your forte in the first place, right?

Things in the bag - - August 10

So I can't talk about it, huh? Damnation, Jan! I'm an editor, not a catholic priest :) Anyway, I got something I cannot talk about and it runs very fast. Yeah, that's all I can say before the end of the month.

In other news that I don't have to shut up about since I got no official word on it: it is rumoured that AMD may be launching a 750 MHz version of the Duron this month. Knowing how fast the lower speed grades are already, that can only mean they are binning very well and AMD wants to get out of the 600 MHz slot onto higher ground with more profits attached to the sale. It might also mean that the Thunderbirds are binning really well and they want to shift out of the 750 MHz speed grade since it is very likely they will leave that slot to the Duron, if it materializes.

Socket A boards are popping up in our lab, too, I've seen the QDI (with the multiplier jumpers), the MSI and the Epox, the others should be close to launch as well.

What I have been working on the past two days is a Socket A cooler roundup, which led me to order Alpha PAL35-based coolers for the lab to keep our new Athlon 1000 (TBird) on the good side of the summer heat. If you're looking to buy a high performance coolers, a PAL35 may not be the worst Socket A choice.

Finally today I can start talking about what I've been working on here at Computec (Germany, not the doomed Incite US branch). Starting October there will be a new gamer and entertainment oriented hardware magazine out on the german language market called "PC Games Hardware".

Having seen today what it looks like in print I am quite impressed with what we accomplished with so few editors and resources, don't waste the chance to check it out when it hits the newsstands in Germany (plus Austria and likely parts of Switzerland).

Go Team 3DNow! - - July 31

Our Gamma Flux team is going to pass Team Poland after a long, long time of hunting them down. Good work everyone involved! Now let's go after Anandtech and keep ProcessTree at bay :)

Athlon community in Germany - - July 31

If you happen to be german (or swiss or austrian speaking german), you may want to visit www.athlon.de. This site, run by AMD Germany, is building a community for Athlon owners with discussion boards. (There Jan, finally got around to mention it).

AMD, lead duck - - July 24

Anyone been watching the AMD stock price since they reported those blowout earnings? Geezus. Tanks on good news, tanks on dropping NASDAQ, tanks on raising NASDAQ.

You could think that they just reintroduced the K6 at 300 MHz as their flagship CPU or something. All this happens in the face of Intel planning to keep the Pentium III on the respirator up to 1.4 GHz, likely discovering that one FPU is not cutting it performance wise when matching the Pentium 4 with the Athlon.

I sure hope those straying stock owners lose a lot of money on the next upswing, they deserve to.

Then there were two - - July 16

Another member of Team 3DNow! SETI has reached the miracle mark of 4000 work units. It's Frank Childers, our long time performance leader. Argos meanwhile is surging ahead with a speed unheard of towards the 5000 block count.

Cast your vote - - July 16

If you like to participate in the democratic process of shaping the future of the internet, I recommend you check this out.

Woot! - - July 14

Our very own Team 3DNow! at DCypher.Net has reached 1.5 million work units, only the third team to get that much work done.

We're only 35,000 units behind the second ranked Team Poland, so add a couple machines to catch them!

Larry Ellison sticks it to the class of '00 - - July 12

One of the funniest prank articles I read since .. well since I dropped out of university can be found here. It is a fictive speech Larry Ellison might have given at Yale.

New AMD chips multiplier locked - - July 11

The New Intel, aka AMD, today confirmed that the Duron and new Athlon CPUs are delivered in multiplier-locked versions only. I had prior knowledge of this fact but promised to keep mum about it, but I assure you that I raised my concerns with the AMD rep who informed me of this move.

While I agree with them that it will prevent remarking of whole systems (who rarely get opened by their unsupecting buyers of the mom and pop variety), it is yet another sad move towards intelian "milk the buyer" strategies.

Neither Intel nor AMD have yet implemented the far more intelligent approach of marking the CPU with a write-once register prior to shipping that would make it simple for BIOSes to read and report the rated speed of the chip. There is no good explanation for missing this opportunity in favour of patronizing skilled overclockers and DIY folks.

What does this mean? It still leaves you with the option to overclock the Front Side Bus (surprise: that also works for whole system remarkers!), which overclocks the whole system and not just the CPU. Especially the memory, when using the PC133 variety, is going to be an unstable element under that approach. Good job, AMD!

Quote of the day - - July 10

"If Intel sold rocks, then they would get a higher ASP than AMD's microprocessors."

anonymous industry sage

3DNow! optimizing compiler - - July 10

A post over at JC's News indicates that there is a new compiler out that supports 3DNow! prefetch instructions and the full SIMD instruction set.

The company offering the compiler is CodePlay. Check it out if you are developing software.

Duron performance - - July 02

Finally wrapped up all the benchmarks regarding the Duron 700. I tested P3-700E on BX, P3-733EB on VIA, Athlon 700 old and TBird 700 on KX133 and AMD750 and Celeron 700 on VIA and that new Intel chipset that I am not sure whether the NDA is up yet for.

Anyway, using Q3 on a GeForce2 the performance in Demo1 (800x600x16) is in the range between 90 and 100 fps for all CPUs but the Celeron, which checks in below 70 in both cases.

For Unreal Tournament our custom 5 minute CTF demo with heavy action (again 800x600x16) shows a spread of 55 to 64 fps, with the Celeron showing feeble sub-44 fps values.

The conclusion? Duron 700 definately is a buy for the budget minded, but don't make the mistake of coupling it with a weak 3D-board for games, it is powerful enough to utilize a GeForce 256 DDR or better. Since the new Celeron is not SMP-capable anymore, it earned himself the fate of the dodo.

Athlon/Duron - - July 01

I did some overclocking with the Duron and Athlon today.

The Duron 700 I got only to 735 using a 105 MHz FSB on the Gigabyte board AMD put in those boxes. They offer higher FSB speeds but no voltage adjustment, so this was all I could do. I assume the 600 MHz model has more frequency headroom from the spec clock.

The Slot A Thunderbird would boot to the desktop at 900 MHz but only at 850 I could take benchmarks. This, however, looked rather stable. The TBird is a week 24 model, according to Daiki those should have a 900 MHz-capable core. Well maybe not :) Either way for roughly over $200 those are steals and it did run in the QDI KX133 board. Get one.

Argos rules - - July 01

If you kept an eye on the SETI@Home Team 3DNow! (and I know you did), then you had no chance missing the stellar rise of Argos. He now has firmly planted his behind in the #1 spot close to the 4,000 work unit mark that had been held by the most incredible Frank Childers for .. like decades!

Congrats Argos on that insane amount of computing power - and remember, that's even without 3DNow! Frank, I expect that you'll give him a run for the money

Slot A Tbird - - June 30

As I mentioned I have a Slot A Thunderbird 700 here. Much to my pleasant surprise it works on the KX133 mobo from QDI, the KinetiZ 7A just as well as on the MSI K7Pro (Irongate).

If you are german and looking to buy one, Alternate and KM Elektronik have them for about 450-500 Marks. AFAIK these are Week 24 CPUs with a 900 core.

Duron etc. - - June 30

The Duron 700 system arrived. Yippee.

Curiously AMD decided to make it really low end, including a Vanta graphics card. Well out with that crap and put a GeForce2 in instead. Very decent performance, keeping in touch in games with the classic Athlon 700. The Celeron 700, as expected, gets tossed in the air and shot down like a paper kite.

I also received a Slot A TBird 700 from an online retailer, which I am benching as well. Other contestants in the field are a P3-700E on a BX board and P3-700EB on an Apollo Pro 133A. I'll let you know how it turns out for el Duron.

Duron vs. Celeron - - June 26

Still waiting here for AMD Germany to ship me the Duron sample system I've been waiting for a week now. Guess the US boys sent it out on snail's back ...

It will be interesting to see how well it fares compared with the Celeron 700 I benched two weeks ago. Bad news for Intel what that chip managed to yield in game performance, even on a based reference motherboard. Still much better than on a VIA Apollo Pro 133A, though.

Strange thing with VIA, first I thought their chipsets were crap, then they brought out the new AGP 4X drivers that made them competitive, then the KX133 was pretty good and now the Apollo Pro 133A sucks rocks compared to RDRAM/i820 or or overclocked BX on PC133.

It really makes me wonder just how much faster the Athlons and Durons could be, if Intel made a comparable chipset for it. I kinda feel that I don't really want to know.

More for Linux nuts - - June 21

It's been defunctional for a while, but now Linux 3D Net is back with daily news updates for Linux and 3D graphics. Check it out!

3DNow! patch for xmss - - June 20

Malte Gell sends word that there is a 3DNow! patch out for the Linux mp3 player xmms. Those Penguins out there may want to fetch that for yourselves hereabouts.

Looking for a game? - - June 16

For those out there with the latest Athlon hardware I have a game recommendation for you. Keep your eyes peeled for Vampire the Masquerade.

I've never seen such fat game graphics before, its quite damn awesome. I recommend Athlon 600 and up with a GeForce/GeForce2 or Voodoo5 for decent playing pleasure.

Shoddy work - - June 15

Well, Steve just showed me an article about Full Scene Antialiasing comparing the Voodoo5 5500 and the GeForce 2 GTS on a Thunderbird system. Made me cry my eyes out. What a total waste of time, if you're plain incompetent to bench the proper settings. And, of course, you'll get completely foul conclusions, too.

Anyway, that piece of art can be found at Firingsquad. I will only give you one hint: to do 2x2 supersampling on the GeForce2, you have to sacrifice 75% of your fillrate.

2x2 is just barely as good as 2x subpixel jittering on the Voodoo5 in static images and decidedly inferior in animation, for those who have not seen it in person. Check those benchmark bars and you'll notice that someone was incapable of operating the quality slider in the Nvidia drivers. Crying shame.

TBird owns - - June 14

I just got done benching our usual games on the TBird reviewer system at 1 GHz (Q3, UT, Drakan).

In comparision with the P3-1000EB it dominates on the (affordable)PC133 platform (KT133 vs Apollo Pro 133A) and is on par or slightly ahead against the i820 on a single RIMM.

I will try to do some Gamma Flux and SETI benching tonight before I have to return the system, as AMD is still tight on them for the press.

I also received a first MSI Socket A motherboard, which has very impressive capacitors around the socket, but no overclocking jumpers.

Athlon shot - - June 13

For those of you looking for a nice desktop background with a Thunderbird, here a high res shot that I took today of an 800 MHz model. Click on the thumbnail to get to the big one.

Poll - - June 13

I put up a new poll (in case you didn't see) regarding the question of whether you feel fooled by AMD and VIA about the dead end KX133 problem that won't allow Thunderbirds to run in those pretty new boards. Cast your vote!

By popular demand - - June 08

Well, I don't usually answer requests regarding pictures of mine, but since Tom Pabst published it for the world to see I guess I can let it pass.

So for all those dozens of people requesting a picture of the back of my head, check this out.

I am the guy at the center, closest to the camera.

Overclocking Socket A - - June 07

I just received a confidential roadmap from a major motherboard manufacturer that indicates that there are four pins on the Duron and Thunderbird CPUs that will allow a clock ratio override.

By activating this feature, the motherboard is capable of dictating the multiplier to the CPU, which allows easy multiplier-based overclocking in addition to front side bus manipulation.

The manufacturer of the board cautions that these pins, marked as reserved on the spec sheet, may be disconnected or removed on production CPUs, but there is hope that AMD may retain them.

Looks like this will both enable in-between sockets for overclocking and solutions directly acessing this feature on the motherboard.

Thunderbird and Co. - - June 05

Just got back from Dresden after one gruelling experience with the german railroad system after the other. Don't get me started, it would require blood to be spilled.

Anyway, Thunderbird (and yes, I will keep using that name, this is NOT The Athlon and "Athlon with performance enhancing cache memory" you should only say around me if you're either AMD staff, stoned or have a death wish) is here finally, its a little pricier than anticipated but not overly so and I guess we all are going to like it.

Well, not all of us. Forget about those people who had hoped for an upgrade of their classic Athlon and who are now screwed. I am using this term on purpose since it was AMD who raised the current followers on the upgrade path from Socket 7 and suddenly refuses to know that clientele anymore, now that they have success at their hands.

That's entirely too Intel for my taste and they better get off that trip fast. Anyway, was a long day of ado about nothing much new and I need sleep or I'll fall on my face.



Oh and finally something I saw in the corridor at Fab 30, don't know whether you've seen it before, but I loved it:

More chipsets coming - - June 03

Not only AMD and VIA will be in the boat for Thunderbird chipsets, but also SiS, according to this press release.

On the sidelines also Ali is waiting, well known still for their Aladdin V for the Super 7 platform. They will show a DDR memory supporting chipset at Computex. Tom from Planet 3DNow! forced me to post this

Losing the edge - - June 03

Well well well. Looks like c't is lining up behind the likes of Firingsquad and Chip Online by posting benchmarks on NDA products benchmarked on beta hardware (Stepping 2 TBird, beta bios, early Epox sample motherboard) and drawing nonsensical conslusions from the useless results.

Ah well. I cannot really say that I am disappointed, rather that I've seen them coming down that way.

Anyway, amateurs aside, I am going to the AMD press conference in Dresden Monday. I sure hope to god it will be good as candy because I will spend 11 hours on trains to get there and back (Jan, if you read this, you owe me big). I should receive a review system late the same week or early the following and unless there are NDAs in the way I will share my impressions with you, including such important stuff like Gamma Flux and SETI scores ;)

VIA to show 1.4 GHz Athlon at Computex - - May 29

According to here, VIA is showing a KX133 powered Athlon 1400 system. I reckon this must be a Thunderbird from the clock speed, unless there were some high speed Athlon Classic samples flying around still.

3DNow! is for more than just games - - May 26

I guess both AMD and our readers couldn't agree more with Hank Dietz, Professor and James F. Hardymon Chair in Networking at the University of Kentucky.

He sent us email to make sure you read about the 64-Athlon cluster system he and his students built with the help of AMD.

It achieves more than a GFLOP/$1000 by employing 3DNow!, which makes it the most cost effective "traditional" supercomputer. It also has the performance to secure a spot among the 150 fastest supercomputers in the world.

Last but not least, these guys spent a lot of brain grease on developing 3DNow! development tools for their baby. You can find out more about that here.

Good job, Hank and the guys!

Voodoo5-5500 Screenshot - - May 22

Played around with the Voodoo5-5500 last night while playing some Everquest and took a couple screenshots. Those of you who play that game will know that it is a prime example for how bad spatial aliasing can look (all that pixel and line popping shit going on while moving around).

One million - - May 19

The Team 3DNow! at DCypher.Net is approaching the mark of one million work units for the Gamma Flux project and will cross it during the day.

Great work everyone involved! This makes us the third best team ever behind Anandtech and Team Poland.

A look at new graphic cards - - May 19

I am currently testing the release version of the Voodoo5-5500, a bunch of GeForce 2 GTS boards and a beta version of ATi's Radeon 256 card.

So far results are looking best for the GeForce 2 cards, they have the fillrate for non-T&L games and the real punch on Quake3 engine games with T&L acceleration. On the other hand they are not a real quantum leap from the first generation GeForces, so I would grab the latter once the prices go down or wait out for faster memory on the GeForce 2 boards (200 MHz DDR or faster).

On the Voodoo5 the antialiasing is VERY compelling, but she lacks the brute high resolution power the GeForce 2 has. If you plan to play at lower resolutions (up to 1024x768) with or without AA activated, it should be a good choice, though. The real kicker should be the V5-6000, though, if they get it out real soon. It won't be cheap, though, but should work well with a TBird and Irongate board.

Beware that currently the V5-5500 is not yet cooperating with KX133, I was only able to reach the desktop but no 3D graphics.

On the Radeon side I can say that it is looking quite good in this early stage of hardware and drivers at the 500 MHz CPU level. At the high-end there is still some work to be done to wring the performance out of the silicon. This goes for fillrate in particular. Especially the drivers are still quite green, which is a recurring Ati problem. The features like keyframe interpolation are working nicely and will add greatly to game realism.

Thunderbird compatibility - - May 17

I got word from a friend who wishes to remain anonymous. He has stability testing results done with various Athlon motherboards and a Slot A Thunderbird sample:

• MSI K7Pro has no problem. It was very stable.
  
• EP-K7XKA doesn't work.
  
• BIOSTER M7MKE works.
  
• DCS's KX133 chipset board worked.
  
• MS-6167 doesn't work.
  
• AOpen KA72 can run, but it needs BIOS 1.02.

These were individual tests with individual components, your mileage may vary.

Number Nine exits left - - May 17

Number Nine, recently acquired by S3 averting a Chapter 11 shutdown, has ceased operations. It would seem that this is the first casuality to the S3/VIA graphics
operation. Wonder if Diamond is next?

Good and bad news - - May 17

As some of you may still remember, we've had a grand opening giveaway here back in late June when www.3dnow.org came to life. We then gave away 10 copies of Max Payne (or rather the right to get a copy once it is done).

Good news: Max Payne just kicks ass visually, you may have seen the AVI from E3. The bad news: It still isn't finished and rumour has it that it won't be out before late this year. Either way, just wanted to let the winners know that they are not forgotten and that I will remind 3DRealms to send the copies out once Max Payne goes gold.

TBird and KX133 Update - - May 15

I talked to an OEM today regarding availability of Socket A motherboards. He said that sample quantities are coming in this week and that I'd have my hands on one late next week. Now just for AMD to get me a CPU for it, too!

Also I got some news regarding the KX133 issue. As you may know, Abit and ASUS claim compatibility of their KX133 boards with TBirds. From what I've been told today, KX133 has few issues with the Austin made alu-TBirds, while it does not cooperate with the copper models from Dresden. Take this with a small grain of salt, as I have not heard back from AMD on this detail.

If however it holds true, there may still be some hope for those of us who invested in a KX133 board already. It did look good until that nasty snafu raised its head, after all.

KX133 is not working with TBird - - May 04

As I was just informed by AMD Germany, the current Slot A KX133 motherboards will NOT cooperate with the upcoming Thunderbird for Slot A. For that reason, no Slot A TBirds will get into the DIY channel for the forseeable future.

AMD750 boards however will work with the TBird as well as KZ133 Socket A boards are compatible with the Socket A version.

If you are currently looking to get a KX133 board, you may want to quickly reconsider since you won't have an upgrade path to Thunderbird. Buy AMD750 instead of hold off until KZ133 Socket A models are out in June.

I suggest you spread the word on this to warn friends not to step into that swamphole.

Something's up - - May 01

Daiki pointed out to me that something is up here that involves AMD and 11 other big high-tech companies.

Update It's an e-commerce thingie. How exciting . Anyway, with AMD being part of it and Intel not, how can it possibly be bad? ;)

New L2 Athlon tool - - May 01

Planet 3DNow! reports that the newest and yet to be released version of H. Oda's L2 divider utility is now capable of storing the divider info in the BIOS of certain motherboards.

This will make soldering obsolete and could allow even higher overclocking on Athlon Classic CPUs (and possibly the new ones too).

New chip, new name - - April 28

Well, looks like AMD declined my suggestion to brand the Spitfire as "Kickbutthlon" and instead will go with Duron. Sounds like a battery driven device powered by Duracell, but whatever, I guess their marketing has been in the bad weed again

ROFL - - April 24

Rolling on the floor laughing - that's what you will do when you took a look at this utter humbug from the belly of 3rd party memory vendor Kingston.

The have the flybrained audacity to "calculate" price-performance ratios of memory strips by dividing the price by the megahertz clockspeed - which of course gives the 16 bit, 800 MHz RDRAM a leg up on the 64 bit PC133 memory.

Having dealt with such joyful experiences like 20% reduced system performance once you add a second module of RDRAM into an 820 board (due to increased latencies), I'd still be laughing while security escorts that clueless marketing twit out of the building - if I had a say at Kingston.

Seriously, I won't dream of buying anything from Kingston anymore after seeing that kind of consumer hoax.

Happy Easter - - April 21

Everyone have happy and peaceful easter holidays (whether you are celebrating or not). I'll be back Tuesday after some very badly needed recovery time from work.

Socket A motherboards - - April 19

I don't want to keep from you the information that IXBT has shots of VIA reference boards for KZ133 and Socket A. Head on over and take a look-see.

SETI@Home close to conclusion? - - April 19

As The Register is reporting today, a radio telescope in South Africa, part of the SETI network, has been destroyed. From the looks of it, aliens wiped it out with a well placed phaser shot. It would seem that SETI got a stronger signal than they have been anticipating.

Read the story for yourself. For all of our SETI@Home members I recommend buying a Belkin surge protector or maybe to join DCypher.Net instead ;)

A good thing deserves mentioning - - April 14

Here's a quote I'd like to share with you, no comment needed:

"The spectacular first-quarter results of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) vindicates Needham & Co. analyst Tad LaFountain, says Larry Dignan on Zdnet.com. Last year, LaFountain came out with a strong buy rating for AMD when no one would touch the company’s shares with a ten-foot pole. AMD had a bunch of manufacturing problems and was getting clobbered by Intel (INTC) last year. But, a year later, AMD stocks have risen to $65 a share, a 400% increase since LaFountain’s strong-buy recommendation. And with Wednesday’s announcement that AMD’s first-quarter earnings nearly doubled Wall Street estimates of $1.15 a share, “AMD has made LaFountain look pretty good.”

AMD Phoenix - - April 13

Well well well. Looks like AMD may save the NASDAQ today after reporting record earnings of $1.15 per diluted share. This was well above the expectations from analysts, as you can imagine.

I'll spare you all the gushing of the pleased stockholder and direct you to JC's transcript of the conference call, which collects any and all financially relevant facts.

What I'd like to extract from there is the fact that AMD aims to achieve 1.5 GHz by January 2001 (this I assume is mass production, not Intel quantities). Also they stated that the K6 models are sold out for the quarter already, which means they'll launch into Spitfire with pretty clean inventories.

Another interesting tidbit is the fact that they seem to plan to roll out TBird slotted. This contradicts the word I had before that socketed TBirds would be out first. I assume this is a decision based on the lack of availability of Socket A mobos because of an earlier rollout than originally anticipated. Can't complain about that.

GeForce 2 info - - April 12

www.3DNow.Org UK (not related to our fine site) has some information on the GeForce 2 that it claims to have received from an anonymous source (not me).

Take the information with a grain of salt (considering I have one here, benched and it is production level).

Fun stuff - - April 07

Well boys and girls .. I'd really love to share some news I got today about a certain 3D chip that is upcoming, but alas, I signed an NDA. So I cannot talk about benchmarks I did, either. Sucks to be me.

However, I can say that before May arrives I can talk about it and that german readers can get some comprehensive information in PC Games, which will start selling May 3.

In other news I got my hands on a Pentium III 1000 (yes, the real deal, no overclocking mumbojumbo), coming with RDRAM and 820 chipset. Why mention it on www.3dnow.org of all places? Well, because that rig was able to show the KX133-based Athlon 1000 (that I tested a few days ago) the tailpipes in Quake3 and Unreal Tournament benches. I'd say it's time to let the TBird out of the Birdcage.

Hear me Drew? You know my address.

News on Spitfire, ALi chipset - - April 06

German website Computerszene sent word on some news they got regarding Spitfire and the ALi Athlon chipset.

Most interesting is a confirmation for our previous claim of 64+64 cache architecture on Spitfire and the claim that Spitfire will come in flavours for 200 and 266 MHZ (100/133 double pumped) front side bus. Article is in german.

P.S. Suck it down, Steve ;)

Win a Voodoo5 - - April 04

If you happen to be a citizen of the North American Empire (US or Canada), you can enter this 3dfx promotion to win a Voodoo5.

If you are not, we recommend you participate with DCypher.Net where you at least can win $100 each week, no matter where you are as long as it isn't prohibited by law to accept US currency.

Windows 95 kills your Athlon board? - - March 30

c't in Germany is reporting that Windows 95 is capable of overwriting BIOS chips in certain Athlon boards. In particular they showed this for the Epox 7KXA and AOpen AK72.

It's quite beyond me why anyone would use Windows 95 with an Athlon (for any other reason than having been dumped by the train of time), but you've been warned.

And there I had been wondering about some of their recent reporting ...

Keep your eyes open - - March 29

If you're the owner of an Epox EP-7KXA motherboard for the Athlon, you may want to keep your eyes on the Epox website for the BIOS of March 16. I just benched our 900 MHz Athlon with it and it showed a good improvement in Quake 3 - in fact it is just as fast as the Athlon 1000 was last week.

Too bad I had that one sent back to AMD already, so no comparision as to how much the faster brother benefits.

Spitfire cache size - - March 28

I received official word from AMD regarding the size of the caches for the Spitfire, after having been confused over and over again by reports on the net.

The Spitfire will have a total of 128 kb of on-die cache, of which 64 kb are L1 and another 64 kb are L2 cache.

This makes a lot more sense to me than the 128/64 combination that was floating around. It remains to be seen how well it can keep the core from being starved for instructions, though, but the example of Celeron vs. Coppermine is encouraging.

Also AMD made it clear that the price lists linked in the news bit below are by no means official and that Spitfire if still "scheduled to appear in mid-2000", however fuzzy that may be.

It would seem that AMD wants to be flexible as to when to strike, without giving Intel early warning. I'd bet $10 that they'll tell the date at WinHEC, though. There you go :)

Spitfire Pricing - - March 25

RB Computing has spiffy information on the pricing of the upcoming "little Athlon", AMD's Spitfire CPU.

Priced at $99 for the 600 MHz model I anticipate that it will obliterate the mid-range gaming and office machine market when combined with KX133/KZ133 and PC133 memory. I'm really looking forward to testing this CPU.

I also recommend you read the other info they got from the reseller conference they attended. Good stuff there.

Win $100 a week at DCypher.Net - - March 22

Well, I just notified myself that DCypher.Net is now handing out $100 to a random lucky participant each week to say thank you for their computing time.

For the press release mumbo-jumbo from yours truly, click here.

AMD earnings - - March 21

Not dealing out any investment advice here, there was an interesting link over at AMDZone. It deals with the earning projections for AMD's first quarter. Check it out here.

Athlon 1000 - - March 17

Just received an Athlon 1000 for review here at work and it looks like the GeForce DDR finally found her Master that can completely exhaust her fillrate. VC SDRAM does look like it adds a little more oomph to the performance over ordinary PC133 on the KX133, as well, but for the love of god I wouldn't know where to buy any. Maybe AMD will open an online store for it?

Free copies of Windows 2000, anyone? - - March 16

According to german computer mag c't, the spanish issue of IDG's PC World magazine accidentially put a full version of Windows 2000 Professional on their cover CD instead of the 120 day limited version.

The mag is said to be sold out. Damage for Microsoft is estimated at about $15 million.

DCypher.Net starting to give away cash - - March 08

DCypher.Net announced that they'll start to randomly give away a $100 check each week starting March 22nd to their active participants.

If you're not on the Team 3DNow! you may want to consider getting the client software and start doing Gamma Flux blocks!

XBox featuring Athlon? - - March 07

According to a rumour from Japan, Microsoft will be using "AMD's newest chip at a speed of about 600 MHz" for their XBox gaming console (which has not been confirmed to be a real project, either).

I would assume we are talking Spitfire here. No word on who will deliver the graphics, although NVidia is a hot contender still.

Update Looks like NVidia is entirely out of the race and so are many other brand names.

1000 MHz - - March 06

All official like, AMD announced that they began shipping 1 Ghz Athlon CPUs. For the official chestthumping check here. Still waiting for my sample to arrive here :)

CeBIT and graphics - - March 04

I promised some more CeBIT info when I made that CPU post and here goes:

• 3dfx did show a Voodoo5 board using two VSA-100 chips running at a pre-production speed of 100 MHz. They showed the Star Wars pod racing game to demonstrate the usefulness of spatial antialiasing (antialiasing of appearing/disappearing pixels while moving) and Quake 3 to show standard antialiasing (jaggie removal) and motion blur.
  
  To this end they modified the Q3-Engine to support T-Buffer motion blur. It is possible that this modified version is part of the Voodoo5 software bundles, no promise though. It certainly will NOT be shipped in Germany, as Q3 is blacklisted there "to protect the youth".
  
  The good news: antialiasing and motion blur look pretty slick, if a bit blurry due to the merging of color information of adjacent pixels. The bad news is that the boards are not on the shelves yet and the four-chip Voodoo5-6000 may be in the same league as the V3-3500 .. speak way delayed. No news on Rampage.
  
  
• NVidia was rumoured to have NV15 boards available for demonstration with OEMs (two of which I spoke to made no strong effort of denial). It also was said they didn't show them because 3dfx didn't have the Voodoo5 on the exhibit floor and it would damage their flourishing GeForce sales if they popped the NV15 cherry too soon. I guess that was proper judgement.
  
  
• ATi showed an integrated motherboard solution based on the recently acquired ArtX technology. It includes T&L and offers over 333 MPixel/s in fillrate - assuming the shared main memory SDRAM would get you the necessary bandwith. There may be a version with an AGP slot for add-in upgrade or maybe not, depending on customer needs. I'd say this is the high end of the low end. Performance is estimated to be at a level equal to their original Rage 128 chip, but without the great DVD performance (motion compensation but no IDCT)
  
  
• Matrox only did a little hush-hush showing behind closed doors.
  
  
• S3/Diamond seems to suffer from seasoned Diamond employees running for the woods and hills. Rumour had it that S3 is thinking of selling the 3D business to enjoy the growing value of their fab holdings instead.
  
  
• Gigabyte is growing to be the most versatile 3D-board maker offering G400, GeForce and Savage 2000 boards. Some of those may only work in Gigabyte motherboards for licensing reasons.
  
  
• There is going to be a big splash March 8. A company I cannot name yet will be announcing a new chip that will have advanced T&L, performance estimated to be rivalling or exceeding the NV15 and more features than you can shake a stick at. It is not Bitboys, Oy. :)
  
  
• Finally there were several companies showing 64 MB versions of GeForce boards. MSI had one on display, ASUS had a SDR version behind closed doors called the V6600 Pro. There will be DDR versions from ASUS too. ELSA said they will not have one other than their professional Quadro board. Rumour has it that these boards are faster than the 32 MB version, which I will believe when I see it.

Super7 Petition - - March 01

There is a petition going on for the continued support of the Super7 infrastructure, which you can sign here if you feel strongly about it.

From my point of view this platform has no future, mainly because of the poor memory subsystem bandwith and lack of upgrade options. I own a Super7 System myself (K6-III/400) but I think replacing it with a Socket A "Spitfire" will make a whole lot more sense than a bumbling 600 MHz K6-2+ chip (which won't show for the desktop market, according to AMD's Steve Carroll at CeBIT).

Cyrix III Interview - - February 29

I've posted my interview with VIA Cyrix about the Cyrix III processor over here at FullOn3D.

Some people ... - - February 28

Well well well. Some of you wrote me that HardOCP, who has been a supporter of ours, had been showing our exclusive Spitfire shot on their page. Those readers were miffed that there was no credit for the source or at least a link to our site here.

Considering that this image was made at the expense of my employer and used with the friendly permission of said Computec Media AG for www.3DNow.Org alone, I contacted Kyle Bennett, the webmaster of HardOCP. I requested that he replace the image with a link to www.3DNow.Org because of the aforementioned reasons, since I am not looking to get at odds with Computec over copyright issues.

Well, long story, quick result, he asked to be removed from our supporter list and completely yanked the item with Spitfire. I guess he deemed it not interesting for his readers to have this hot new info. Figure that one out for yourself, friends.

Back from CeBIT - - February 26

Got back from two days of CeBIT madness last night. Not all that much exciting stuff going on there, what I can tell you is:

• No K6-2+ for the desktop, just mobile. Same for K6-III+. Both chips will have power reduction technology. I saw it working and it looks like good stuff.
  
• AMD had a 1116 MHz Athlon (copper chip from Dresden) running. This was a standard Athlon still, no Thunderbird. Nothing more shown than a 3D demo and the clock speed readout, though, to show that copper works.
  
• I saw the first sample of a Socket A Athlon, which obviously had to be a Spitfire with on-die cache. The chip surface has a greenish tint (as opposed to Coppermine's blue tint) and there are some little chips on top of the ceramics. Cool gold print of the AMD letters and some other writing. Image © by Computec Media AG
  
• Lots of KX133 and Irongate boards with many major manufacturers.
  
• Athlon 950 samples had been distributed to several OEMs
  
• FIC had a 1 GHz air cooled Athlon running
  
• Saw Voodoo5 in action but it was still alpha silicon, looked pretty spiffy on antialiasing, though

Good times for SIMD? - - February 16

Everyone and their dog are out in the woods about the Pentium IV demo at IDF today. Looking at some of the disclosed info, it would seem that Intel is not following AMD on the x87 FPU track by adding more generalized FPU units. Instead they are massively expanding the SIMD areas (MMX and ISSE) with new commands and wider register sets.

The good part about that is that we're all equipped with SIMD-capable CPUs already (apart from some of you poor critters with the old K6) and most SIMD code is very easily portable with little extra work.

The bad part (for Intel) is a rather poor x87 performance for "legacy games" of the Pentium IV compared to Athlons running at same speed. Instead of 3 general purpose FPU units on the Athlon, PIV will only have 1 and a move/store unit. This can partially be offset with GPUs on 3D-cards and SIMD but as we all know first hand, SIMD is still not all that widespread.

Also it seems that the hyped 1500 MHz unit was only showed briefly without disclosure on the cooling used, while the demos were conducted on slower, air-cooled machines. That is not reason to rejoice for AMD fans, though, as it is certain Intel will aggressively pursue high speeds for PIV for release. AMD may speed up the Athlon speed ramping to counter that, though, knowing the K75 core can go very fast. I'm not sure where that leaves the slower speed grades of the Athlon, though.

All Athlons now 0.18 - - February 11

In an analyst conference (ever wondered how the anal part goes with that term?), Jedi-Master Sanders announced that all Athlons produced now are on the 0.18 process. As you may know these babies are nicely overclockable, so look out for the right production weeks to catch a 0.18 core.

Athlon 850 announced - - February 11

AMD is putting the smack down on Intel again and announced the Athlon 850 today. Follow the link to learn more marcom-speak.

VIA Cyrix Joshua launch date - - February 10

Check out FullOn3D for the launch date confirmation of VIA's 3DNow!-enbled Joshua processor.

Would the following gentlemen please stand up? - - February 04

Looks like AMD is coming about on the t-shirt issue finally. Nobody say bitching doesn't help occasionally.

I'd like for the following folks to contact me: "Sledge", Joel Keranen and Jeremy McCaw. They won t-shirts a while back and I am missing their email addresses.

All winners who remember themselves as such please send me their shipping addresses including phone numbers so we can fast forward this issue to a conclusion. Thanks! :)

How do I switch off the L2 cache on the Athlon? - - February 04

I have a little problem here. I run an Athlon 750 on a Biostar mobo and would like to switch off the L2 cache to check how far I can overclock the core (it goes 900 MHz with the default divider L2 on). Unfortunately the BIOS on that Biostar board is idiot-friendly, speak no L2 on/off option.

Does anyone know of a working utility that will do the trick for me?

Team Anandtech vulnerable - - February 03

Anandtech is getting hammered at RC5, so some of the Gamma Flux folks are temporarily moving their boxes to help them out. This is a good chance for us to take their position, I urge anyone with free CPU time left to join DCypher Gamma Flux Team 1: Team 3DNow!

Join Gamma Flux Team 3DNow! - - January 27

Surf on over to DCypher's stats pages and look how pitifully the proud Team 3DNow! is being topped by Anandtech and Team Poland.

That cannot do! Everyone not running a distributed computing client yet join ranks and increase our output! Go to this page, download and install the client software! Team 3DNow! has team ID 1 (of course).

AMD has a super quarter - - January 19

AMD has reported profits of 43 cents per share. Check out the announcement here.

Chris Tom fired by Dell for running AMD Zone - - January 19

You may know that AMD Zone is not one of our supporters, despite their obvious interest in AMD CPUs. Either way, there's something that I just got word of and that I want to let you know.

According to The Register, Chris Tom has been fired by Dell because they considered his work on AMD Zone a conflict of interest.

I urge you to read the article and make sure your family and friends are in the know about Dell's way to deal with web editors as well before considering to buy a new computer system from them.

Our support goes out to Chris and we hope his new job is with a real company this time. If you wish to send him supporting email, he can be reached here.

VIA 4-in-1 4.19 drivers - - January 17

You can grab VIA's newest drivers here.

New supporters - - January 17

You can find our two new supporters on the left: Silicon Dreams and JSI Hardware.

Rant Alert - - January 17

Well .. you may know that I am semi-successfully playing Unreal Tournament for a while now. But today really kicked me in the face how idiotic their ranking stuff is done. I mean, it is worth like a pound of steaming dogshit.

So I play this map on the blue side and rack up about 60 points when the red side falls behind on players in their team, we are 2:7 or something. So, being the nice guy I am and nobody changing teams to balance I volunteer and switch. Game goes well and I make another 40 points in red before the time is up. Cool.

Then I go to the stats site and what do I see? I got 10.5 points for playing in red and I lose 9.8 points for having played in blue. Hello? Anyone home? Someone forgot to stir after shitting in their brains???

Geez. I am seriously considering switching to something else that someone may have spent half an hour of brain juice on.

Do the Gamma Flux Boogie - - January 17

Guys, CSC is over so let's give Anandtech a good run for the money in DCypher Gamma Flux! They have a lead already and we have no time to waste getting on their tails!

You can download the latest GF client right here. Team 3DNow! is Team #1 and yes, Athlons do rule at GF :)

New supporter - - January 09

Well, not quite as new, I've been told they had the button up for four months now but it's the first time I heard about it so I only added it today!

The site is Screaming 3D and I urge you to visit them relentlessly until they surrender or something.

New moderator aboard - - January 08

I decided to give fredro moderator privileges on the forums since he has been doing a great job with the SETI Team 3DNow!

Since I have less and less time to deal with seveal side issues of www.3DNow.Org due to a real world work load you wouldn't envy me for, I also decided to turn the team founder access over to fredro, I am sure he'll do a good job.

If someone would like to step forward to volunteer to take over the campaign side of the site, please do so and let me know why you think you'd be qualified :)

Good going, SETI team! - - January 08

Our Team 3DNow! SETI managed to get up to 43rd place in the world club rankings, posting a healthy lead against the following teams. Good going!

Where we are not competing well is Team 3DNow! at DCypher Gamma Flux, Team Anandtech has us firmly down to second place thanks to their leading contributor, Magicman. We're still holding up well in CSC, though, where we're third behind two other AMD-oriented teams.

Socket A image - - January 05

If you're interested in the Socket A (which will carry the low cost "Spitfire" Athlon), head over to Full On 3D and take a look at their exclusive if blurry image.

PsY Mark 2000 - - January 02

Moreno Carullo of the Italian 3DNow! Zone has written a small utility that checks your FPU power, including 3DNow!. It can be downloaded from our binaries page.

Linux and FreeBSD Gamma Flux clients - - January 01

Well, I tried twice to get the oh-so-important /. to post the news about the availability of Linux and FreeBSD clients for DCypher.Net's Gamma Flux project. It seems they are allies of the competition and don't mention it so they have more space for news on Y2K compatible Linux-powered sex toys.

Screw it. So you heard it here. If you're bored and want to do me a favour, submit the news to slashdot until it comes out of their ears and they will surrender to posting news instead of bullshit. Thanks :)

New supporters - - January 01

We have a bunch of new supporters and I promise to try to get them all listed on the page this week. I just have to go through a few weeks worth of email and sort them out, which is a major drag.

Just one which I forgot to add for the longest time here for your reading pleasure: Chip Geek.

Happy New Year! - - December 31

Well, looks like Y2K was just as much hype as this book "10 easy ways to find the girl of your dreams" that the guys gave me for xmas. Hoax!

Anyway, even if you are forced to continue to live in civilized luxury instead of caves, have a good Year 2000 and we'll try to move you underground again when the millenium really starts, roughly a year from now.

Another 1000 unit champ - - December 23

And then there were three. This time Dexter crossed the magical line into the 1000 work unit club. Congratulations!

Number 4 aka as Lewin is close on his heels at 969, with any luck he'll get his 1000st done before the turn of the year, so in advance (since I won't be here), congratulations to him too!

Steve, please cater to the shirts :)

30,000 SETI@Home WUs - - December 21

Team 3DNow! SETI@Home passed the 30,000 work unit mark, something I'd never have expected back when I launched it in June. Great work everyone!

Happy Holidays - - December 21

Let's just poach AMD's season's greetings :) Happy holiday and a safe transition into Y2K. May your updates be with you.

Gamma Flux project launched - - December 21

DCypher.Net launched the Gamma Flux project which is succeeding the still ongoing CSC contest. Stats are almost working on that one as well, so you can start considering an upgrade to the new client before the turn of the year. It will run CSC until the contest ends and then switch over to GF automatically.

Right now Team Anandtech leads the Gamma Flux rankings, followed by Team 3DNow! (thanks to two Athlons here in the office, I might say).

New button design - - December 19

You may have noticed, we have updated the design of our campaign button so it is more fashionable. Thanks to Jon for that. If you spy an old button on one of the supporting sites, please drop the webmasters there a line to tell them to link to the button image instead of keeping outdated local copies. Thanks :)

And then there were 3 - - December 15

Eponymous Bosch just passed the 1000 SETI@Home unit mark, making him the 3rd on the team to cross that miracle line. Congratulations!

Steve, I think we still got some Athlon shirts reserved for this occasion, so he should get one as well.

Apology - - December 11

As you have seen during the past weeks I am not entirely up to maintaining the site due to real life obligations. If you are a supporter and think you have some original content interesting enough to be posted on here, please send it to or and ask them to put it up.

Intel's Athlon killer - - December 10

Intel have finally leaked out details over their secret Athlon killer project...something to bridge the gap between coppermine and williamette. Looks like they have some great marketing scheme now and they are starting a new trend for processor exterior casing just like what the iMac did to the PC's exterior look. Read more over here. ;)(trust me, it has something to do with 3DNow! fans)

Gateway Athlons - - December 06

As you may have seen on other sites, Gateway is close to launching Athlon machines, just not in time for xmas. Well, if you are looking to buy an Athlon from Gateway, you could just give them a call at 1-800-846-4208.

Create demand and thou shall be served :)

Hey Hey Hey - - December 05

Long time no see, but:

http://24.141.28.12/cscstats/TeamMembers.asp?team=1

Team stats for dcypher.net team 3dnow. These stats will have data from midnight est the date I posted this forward. So if you aren't in there you haven't submitted blocks since that went live.

Have fun.

Steve

CSC clients 1.04 out! - - December 02

You can tell that I'm a little buried from the fact that I didn't post about the release of the 1.04 version of the CSC clients from DCypher.Net. Gosh. And why am I the only one to post here, anyway? Adrian? Jon?

So hop on over to DCypher and update or join!

New DCypher.Net proxies - - November 28

Version 1.03 of the Win32 proxies for DCypher.Net are out. They fix some small issues and add manual flushing and enhanced logging (user ID and team ID of fetching clients) to the features. Also a configuration and optimisation guide for proxies was posted.

The proxy as well as the clients can be downloaded right here“.

We're under fire!! - - November 28

Our CSC Team 3DNow! at DCypher.Net has lost the team lead to the ATComp.Net guys from Japan.

I'm calling all AMD CPU owners to arms to redeem this defeat! Install your clients and follow me!

UT 2 - - November 24

Oh, on the other hand the game is pretty fun if you can resist doing the Quake thing (because Quake sucks and Quake 3 sucks triple, IMHO). Instagib CTF is neat and with low gravity it gets close to Tribes fun levels.

Oh, hold the flames. Q3 sucks because my boss happens to be a Quake god of epic proportions, on good days he could put blisters on Thresh's butt, on bad days he still turns anyone in this company of game reviewers into shish-kebab.

UT stuff - - November 24

Gah! Wonder what the guys did to screw up the Unreal Tournament release version so badly, the servers crash on Win98 just as well as on Linux. Couldn't get one through a whole night when they get used :P

I sure hope they patch it up or I'm back to hosting UT Demo again :)

Bride of Athlon - - November 15

Just received the first official 3dfx info on their upcoming boards (March 2000) based on their new chip formerly dubbed "Napalm". The official name now is VSA-100 (for whatever brainfarty marketing reason). Core specs are 32 bit rendering, 2k x 2k texture support, SLI-on-a-board capability from 2 to 32 (!) chips, up to 4 chips will be used in consumer products. Memory areas up to 128 MB are supported on the consumer models as well. AGP 4X is natively supported.

There will be a Voodoo4 series of boards for PCI and AGP, they mark a low-end solutions for occasional gamers with about 333-366 MPixel/s fillrate and 32 MB of memory. Price point will be around $179 here. These babies do about what Voodoo3 did, but they have the better features. Not a thing you want to upgrade to from a V3, IMHO, but should be a good thing to switch to from a last generation board like V2 or TNT.

Under the Voodoo5 label they'll have 2 and 4 VSA-100 chips on a single board (no cable humbug this time). The 2 processor board will have 2 versions, the V5-5000 PCI with PCI bus, 32 MB, 667 MPixel/s and a $229 price. The V5-5500 AGP has 64 MB memory, 667 MPixel and goes for $299. The V5-6000 AGP finally will have 128 MB (!) of memory, 4 VSA-100 chips and 1.33 GPixel/s fillrate. Price for this buster is $599.

All prices and performance levels are estimates and may change (for the better). More info can be found at 3dfx.

Processor Poll @ JC - - November 12

In case you have not cast your vote yet, you can do so here in favour of your fav hardware part. Wonder what you might prefer.

Happy Day - - November 11

I encourage everyone here to head over to JC's to check out the news that transpired from the AMD analyst meeting.

Some major butt-kicking there, including announcement of the Socket A Athlon "Spitfire" with on-die L2 cache, and server chipset info with support of up to 8 Athlons (requires a nuclear power plant as a power supply). Also some more news on K6-2+ and a K6-III+, without details though. Looks like Intel is going to live in interesting times.

DCypher.Net updates client - - November 11

DCypher.Net updated their Windows 9x clients to version 1.02. This includes a fix for a rare problem where reboots could corrupt buffers while they were just saved, compatibility with Windows 95 without need to upgrade the winsock and a speed improvement of up to 5%.

Make sure to get the patch if you already had the 1.0 client going. Otherwise download the full client and get going for Team 1 - Team 3DNow! CSC.

SETI@Home reporting - - November 10

New Scientist did an interview with me on that SETI@Home editorial I did at Full On 3D a few months ago. If they use any of it you can likely read it at their web site on Nov. 17 after 2 p.m. Easter Standard Time. Stay tuned.

PThor is a jolly good fellow - - November 09

And he should have his 1000st block done tonight. You know what that means ... PAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARTY!

Actually it means that Steve will give him an Athlon shirt too if we have any left (we should, shouldn't we?). I think we also have a bunch that we'll hand out to CSC contributors, so you better get yourself on that team ASAP to bolster your chances of looking like an AMD employee on field duty, hombres!

www.3dnow.org team for dcypher.net - - November 09

The team ID is 1

(You're welcome).

Feel free to download the client and join the team.

Steve

DCypher.net - - November 08

DCypher.net is up and running.. Go grab a client eveyrone.. advance stats and teams comming soon

Steve

ALi brings new life to Super7 - - November 08

ALi announced Alladin 7 today. It features an ArtX graphics core that is suppoed to be 2-3 times faster that MVP4. ArtX, FYI, are making the graphic chip for Nintendo's upcoming N64 successor, code-named "Dolphin". The core (in the Alladin 7) was thought to be a standalone product but then ArtX pulled out of Microprocessor Forum and I guess this is what happened ;)

A thank to Frank Childers - - November 03

If you paid some attention to the SETI Team 3DNow!, you'll have noticed that Frank Childers is approaching his 1000st work unit!

Now that is what I call a major contribution to the team :) I do assume though, that he didn't wrestle them all on his K6-2/350 at home

Steve, if he didn't get an Athlon shirt yet, write him up for one and everyone else who passed the 1000 WU mark, will ya? I think that's a worthy milestone to give one away.

Athlon 900 soon? - - November 03

Our friend D from J sent me this link that you might find mighty interesting.

If wads of money threaten to spontanously ignite in your pockets you should consider giving some away for that baby. The same goes for any and all members of our 3DNow teams ;)

Doht - - November 02

Just figured out that I had done SETI blocks but for my personal address, not the team account. Doht :) Doing some more now for the team account on the SMP box.

3dfx to announce gigapixel accelerator - - November 02

Just read a news release from 3dfx that I don't want to keep away from you, they announce to reveal their new 3D accelerator at Comdex November 15, which is expected to deliver over 1,000 MPixel/s in fillrate.

For comparision, NVidia's top of the line model GeForce 256 delivers 480 MPixel/s, ATi's Rage Fury Maxx gets up to 500 MPixel/s and S3's Savage2000 has been downgraded to deliver 500 MPixel/s, too.

Now keep in mind these are theoretical values still, the memory and memory interfacing will decide about the effective fillrate throughput, but if it can deliver at least at the ratio of the theoretical values against the competition, it will drill them a couple new orifices.

Wish I went to Comdex *sniff*

D.Net goes online - - November 01

DCypher.Net's aka D.Net's website just went online and we're looking for beta testers of the client.

In about a week we should be going gold and run at full throttle. Will keep you posted :)

DCypher.net - - October 31

Well folks, here's an interesting bit of news for you:

DCypher Core Rev 1.0a:
k6-2 333 - 6731.00 Kbps
Celeron 377.5 - ~8000.00 Kbps
PentiumMMX 233 - ~4000.00 Kbps

In short you will see that most systems offer fair bang for the buck. Much better than either SETI or RC5 for you AMD users . If you want to know more, check the site tomorrow. We will be issuing a call for small beta test group, and now that you all know this I hope to see some of you there ;)

Cool Intel system keyboard! - - October 31

For users of Microsoft Windows 98 and Intel processors, there's a new keyboard for you! Check it out over here. It has a nice convenient design... (AMD, Cyrix and IDT users should check this one out too);)

DNet launch pulling closer - - October 30

I just upgraded the DNet website to beta status (no, you can't snoop around in it yet ), which means Chris and Steve will be going through it to find any problems they may still have with it that I still have to fix.

Then we'll go through the checklist on the database end, server transfer readiness, stats storage, engine and launch readiness for the whole shebang. Once we have that all greened out I'll put up the front page and we're ready to go. Wow.

With any luck we can get slashdotted on Monday, I'll count on you to submit the news a couple hundred times so they will post it just to get rid of us :)

t-shirts - - October 29

Thanks to those folks who smacked me to remind me about this. I knew I would forget.. Our t-shirt winners are:

Clint - Seti
xeron@interlynx.net - rc5

As usual all drawing were done in an approved fashion and a respresentitive from some accounting company ensured there was no cheating. In addition the normal e-mail me within 3-day rule applies.

I have to check the reserves to see how many more shirts I have to give away.. maybe I'll double up next week just cause I'm feeling nice :P

rc5 Team - - October 29

Howdy folks, our RC5 team just broke into the top 100 teams (daily edition) for the first time.. We managed to come in at #98 for yesterday. This is quite an accomplishment since I remember just a month or two ago we were lucky to break the top 200.

If I don't hand out t-shirt by the end of today someone e-mail me and yell at me about it ;)

New distributed computing effort rolling out - - October 26

Friends, I've been hinting at it for a while now (and so has Steve). Pretty soon DCypher.Net aka DNet will be coming fully online and we'll want participants!

I cannot tell you more about the purpose of DNet other than that it will be a distributed computing effort like SETI@Home and RC5. But unlike those efforts this one was born right out of www.3DNow.Org, with Steve Porter from our workshop being the author of the software for the project.

I'd very much like to have www.3DNow.Org and you, our frequent readers, be the spearhead of DNet. Among other things this will give us a nice lead in the stats ;)

Steve will tell you more about this during the week as we prepare to launch. I am currently working on bringing the website up to speed with installation help and the likes. Stay tuned and warm up those CPUs!

Ugh! - - October 25

I just benchmarked some games for an upcoming article on an Athlon 600 (AMD's review system) vs. an Athlon 650 running on that Biostar mobo we bought last week. Damnation, but the poorly BIOS-configurable Biostar board manages to eat most of the performance gain from those 50 MHz more. We only got 0.8 and 1.3 fps more for the 650 in the two games we're focussing on. Now that's damn bad if you ask me, considering the price difference for the CPUs.

On the other hand, cheapskates that I am I'd only buy the Athlon 500 anyway ...

distributed computing teams - - October 22

Well teh rc5 team is now sitting at 687 in the overall standings, thanks for a couple of new members (one of whom had a large number of uncomitted blocks when he join).

And the SETI team has re-taken #43 in the standing, again thanks to a number of new people joining.

Now if we could only get SETI to let us keep blocks already given to us when someone leaves the team

Keep up the good work. More t-shirts on Monday.

One more cool thing: - - October 20

Team 3DNow!

Current Rank: 777 and climbing.

(subtle hint a 777 is an airplane, and climbing... well I'm sure I don't have to hand hold you through the entire pun).

Congrats to rc5 3dnow for making the top 800. We are consistently in the top 180 teams a day, despite having only a fraction of the number of active users of over team (we normally have 40/50 people active on a given day, while teams like Anandtech and Slashdot have 1000s).

Distributed computing teams - - October 20

Greetings folks,

I was just over at the seti@home site and noticed they seem to be having a lot of problems, including now having their radio telescope taken offline due to the impending huricane (Jose) (it's been a good year of nature screwing with all things computer related huh?). Anyway I would like to make a couple of suggestions for all SETI@Home users.

Suggestion 1. Ensure you are running the latest version of the seti client. The 1.3 Version of the command line client seems to be very nice in terms of actually yielding for other applications (better than 1.2 was).

Suggestion 2. Run the command line version if it all possible. It is much faster than the gui version. If you would like to install the client version as a service in Windows NT, look in the resource kit (or on the microsoft website). There is a utility which allows you to install any application to run as a service. If you are running Windows 95, you will need to head over to www.microsoft.com and get the winsock 2 update (this is why the command line version doesn't run on Windows 95).

Suggestion 3. Also download and run the distributed.net client. Should your seti client be unable to connect to SETI@home, the distributed net client will start using your spare CPU time to do more good work for a www.3dnow.org team. Please be sure to join team 3DNow (see the panel on the left) if you haven't already.

Suggestion 4. Keep your eyes open for a new distributed computing project that will be comming VERY soon to a PC near you

more t-shirts - - October 19

Okay the winners are:

Distributed.net: Postmand.per@teliamail.dk

Seti: "msantos"

Please contact me within 72 hours with your shipping information in order to get your prize.

3DNow! teams - - October 17

Good going, everyone! Team Amiga stole rank 43 from us for a day but got crushed Sunday.. burn mofos, burn, hehehe. RC5 is still advancing in leaps and bounds towards the lower 800s .. still no news on the merger with the Team AMD folks, though.

Steve will be handing out shirts again this week, so keep crunching.

Biostar M7MKA mobo - - October 17

This Athlon mobo is the one we chose to replace the Gigabyte 7IX that got molested by our dual-fan cooler. Figures that you have to be careful about choosing your Athlon cooler here, too. This time around there is a large capacitor next to the power supply plug that can mechanically interfere with large dual fan coolers, you may want to use a single, centered fan on this board. Performance looks good so far.

Geezus ... - - October 16

Boy, work is slowly killing me here, just pulled another 9.5 hours and it is a frigging Saturday! If any of you know a good looking gal with brains and a car to flee the scene in my vicinity, send her to my rescue, please (the vicinity being Nuremberg).

I've got no immediately 3DNow! related news for you other than I got that Biostar mobo to replace the Gigabyte our trusty Athlon cooler toasted, but I have yet to find the time to put it in the box. Maybe Tuesday after all our articles go into layout finally.

I just got done benchmarking the ATi Rage 128 Pro and it looks like a very decent Direct3D board, which gets my hopes high for the Fury Maxx which carries two of these critters. I also took the TNT2 Pro through some spins, which rather closely sticks to the TNT2 Ultras in 16 bit but suffers from the slower memory at 32 bit color. Guess you now know where that money went, huh?

We've got a Coppermine CPU here, I intend to pitch it against your Athlon 650 next week and maybe we'll have an article on that in our other print magazine, PC Action (so if you happen to be in Germany, stay tuned for that). I will see if I can share some bits about it here, without hurting our sales which - in final consquence - pays for the site here :)

t-shirts - - October 15

Greeting folks,

Good news, for a short while anyway some of you t-shirt winners will actually get a pair of (different) Athlon t-shirts. Cool stuff huh?

Anyway we can give AMD a big thank you (or maybe we already did by buying their processors). More t-shirt give aways on Monday.

Winners - - October 13

Well I have one winner out of the current batch who has claimed his t-shirt. However I am still waiting on 3 more with only 24 hours remaining in the allotted contact period. If no-one claims the t-shirts they got back into the draw.

Oh and we have an IBM Aptiva s865 in the office now. If anyone is considering an Athlon system and is not the do it yourself type I would highly recommend this machine. Solid components all around.

Frying Athlon mobos - - October 12

Oh my. Looks like while some people have trouble getting Athlon motherboards at all, I am already about done frying the first one.

The Gigabyte 7IX board we have in a lab machine has lost two of the fan connectors to the cooler on the Athlon 650. This resulted in nasty overheating that burnt my fingers Friday. The CPU, god bless her, is fine, though, although it was cooking for about 4 hours at above boiling temperature of water.

It seems that powerful dual fans should not be fed from a single power connection for

• safety redundancy
• power consumption considerations

Athlon motherboard petition - - October 12

There is a petition for Athlon motherboards going on here that you may want to put your names on.

GeForce to empower K6-2 users? - - October 12

Our K6-2 owners (and those of K6-IIIs, of course as well) may wish to take a look at Johan de Gelas' findings about the GeForce in connection with their favourite 3DNow! enabled CPU, especially if you've been thinking of an Athlon+TNT2 Ultra combo. Well, looks like you get to think again and get a chance to wait out the really good Athlon motherboards while your old boy is still pulling the train.

Fresh roasted supporter - - October 11

We've got ourselves a brand new supporter, Buenos Aires Tweaking, an obviously argentinian site. If your spanish is in good shape, hop on over and pay them a visit!

T-shirts - - October 11

Okay folks, apologies to all, however I technically unable to do an update for a while. To make up for my evil evil deed I am giving away 2 wonderful athlon tshirts per team.. As for last time you must claim you prize within 72 hours, or it goes back into the pot.

Seti(1): Sledge
Seti(2): Jeremy McCaw

Distributed.net(1): mike@shocked.ca
Distributed.net(2): a.smith@xtra.co.nz

As an interesting side note it was a day of bizarre luck, as the random drawing for the tshirts managed to snag 3dnow staff for seti in one pass and then myself, armin, and dcypherer for the distributed.net stats runs (what are the odds?).

Fresh New Mousepads! - - October 07

Ok, sorry guys for the big delay for the mousepads but trst me, I am working to get you guys the big deal. Right now we are working with a top secret company which aims to introduce an Everglide killer pad. So I am patiently waiting for more info. I am looking for the best deal for our readers...

Good work! - - October 07

SETI@Home Team 3DNow! took a nice leap back to Rank 44 yesterday, up from 46! Great work, dudes. Steve, time to hand out a t-shirt I think :)

Vote for www.3DNow.Org - - October 06

A german portal site is putting up user submitted sites for vote into their Top 10 categories. www.3DNow.Org is listed but needs votes!

Go to this page and click on "Spitzen-Site!" to give it a vote!

FIC SD-11 Athlon mobo - - October 06

FPS3D did a review of the FIC SD-11 for the Athlon, you may wish to give that one a read.

Planet 3DNow! gets own domain - - October 06

Planet 3DNow! has moved to their own domain, namely http://www.planet3dnow.de

New supporter - - October 06

Strengthening our operations in Asia (sounds wonderful CEO-ish), a malaysian site joined us, TechReview Malaysia. Drop by and say hi, willya?

Athlon mobos - - October 06

I had the chance to bench on an Athlon 600 with the Asus K7M motherboard the last couple days and I can say that it looks like the Athlon motherboard to have this fall.

This is mainly because it seems to simply be the most feature loaded and mind you - overclockable - board out there. In fact the system bus (memory clock) is workable from the BIOS up to 125 MHz in 1 MHz steps and then up to 150 (in case you feel really lucky). I got the 600 up to 700 and post, but the AGP slot (PCI etc) are a little out of wag at that speed and Windows wouldn't load. It ran fine at 660 though.

I also tested GeForce boards on this baby but I'm under NDA from NVidia until October 11, so I won't tell you how well they did.

3DNow! support, official like - - October 04

AMD posted a press release blurb here talking about how much support 3DNow! has received so far. Not nearly as comprehensive as what Microsoft could say about Windows, but at least something ;)

Now if they just handed over that 3dnow.com domain name so it could point to our little effort here everything would be good.

New supporter - - October 04

As you can see we gained another supporter, Overclocking Extreme. Knowing that you're hot to overclock all your Athlons until they turn to charcoal I recommend a visit.

Chewing the fat - - October 03

Hi there from the hellpits of paid review work :) What a week! Two field trips in 6 days and sustained 13 work hours on average :P

Anyway, things are very interesting here and all the hottest hardware to poke and prod, I rather wish the day had more hours for THAT.

I met with 3dfx' Brian Bruning and AMD's Michael Goddard and David Whitten from the UK office Saturday at USF, an annual powwow of the german (and some EU) game developers. All of them are really nice and approachable guys (assuming you tell David the premier league game scores, that is ;) and it was great fun picking their brains.

Brian did a first time presentation on the future of 3D graphics which promises a good deal of amazing new hardware accelerated features. I just say 1 GPixel/s fillrate, T&L on all major chips and new rendering technologies in 2000.

As you may know by now the Napalm (Voodoo 4) board is not going to have T&L acceleration since 3dfx feels that it won't be used sufficiently by the current generation of games. The good point in the presentation was that 3dfx thinks the Athlon CPUs can do quite well at pushing millions of triangles to hold out until T&L is really needed.

Michael had some very sore feet after giving 6 hours of presentations (Microsoft had failed to show up for their DirectX 7 workshops so he had to do them too), but he had an Athlon 700 with him (that he was constantly worried about pulling a disappearing act ). It isn't a secret anymore that AMD will announce the availability of that part Monday. He also said he's very excited about the prospect of faster memory next year (DDR SDRAM in particular) that will really make the Athlon machines fly.

Michael also talked some on the future of K6-X, but largely thought that there would be no major breakthroughs anymore in terms of clock speed as the core has gone a long way from 200 MHz. I also think that the infrastructure is becoming more and more of a ball and chain with the 100 MHz FSB and cache.

He considers it more likely that certain Athlon models will be moving downwards into the affordable regions but likely won't reach those extreme bargain bin K6-2 prices in 2000 that we see now.

My personal recommendation would be to hold out for DDR-capable Athlon motherboards and then buy into the fastest K7 you can afford after paying through your nose for the memory. Until then you can still upgrade the Super7s with those VERY cheap K6-2s.

Distributed.net t-shirt winner - - September 29

And the winner is:

dellis@swbell.net

Please contact me within 72 hours to claim your wonderfully cool Athlon t-shirt.

K6-2+ confirmed - - September 29

Check out Omega Hardware for the scoop:

Sources inside AMD (who will remain anonymous) have now confirmed the K6-2+. The K6-2+ is what AMD plans to market the .18(CS50)K6 (copper)line as. It will come in three flavors:
-No-cache(same as current K6-2)
-Full-cache(same as current K6-3)
-Half-cache(same as Intel Coppermine)
Currently, the K6-2+ is in the test phase, and has not yet started mass production.

Mousepads - - September 27

No...I'm not dead or something (just sick). These mousepads are taking time because there were some technical difficulties reaching Everglide when we first tried contacting them. Right now, we are moving slowly in trying to get you guys these pads. However, we are also considering an alternative to Everglide that will reach the market soon which might cost less and be just as good. I will look into that and try to get more info.

T-Shirts - - September 27

Okay folks Armin has asked that I give away some free stuff here.. so starting at this moment (1:05PM Eastern) I am notifying you that:

Joel Keranen has won the SETI team t-shirt for this week.

I unfortunately cannot give away a t-shirt to the Distributed.net team because currently the distributed.net stats database is all fsck'ed up. However, the moment I can get through I will randomly select someone.

Please remember that you must reply to me, myself and I (within 72 hours) in order to claim your t-shirt. Also remember that AMD is shipping it to you, so don't scream at us if it gets lost.

So it looks like Im in charge (cue evil cackle!!!) - - September 26

Armin got a job at a german review magazine, so it looks like Im in charge now.

First of all everyone should congratulate on his new job and thank him for the time and effort he has put in. I know he's still gonna be around so best of luck from me too.

If anyone is still wondering who I am then check out the contacts page. I have been moderating message boards from the start as well as the (very) occasional news update.

Finally (if anyone is interested), I got a hardware column over at barrysworld, a popular UK gaming site, so check it out.

If anyone has any ideas, then

In and out - - September 25

As I warned you already, I'm taking up a new job as a hardware editor for german print gamer magazines PC Games and PC Action starting Monday.

Until I found an apartment and moved in my opportunities to update the site will be sporadic, Adrian will keep the show running so please do not hesitate to contact him by email or on the forums that he is moderating. Jon should be updating the hardware and software pages and keep you posted on the mousepad issue.

Have a good time until I come back :)

Athlon t-shirts part 2 - - September 25

I was asked to explain the rules for the Athlon shirt giveaway more closely, so here goes:

• One shirt per team per week given away on a random day of the week (whenever I get to it)
• Winners must reply within 72 hours to claim their prize, shipping will be done by AMD at their discretion (so don't complain to me when you get them next summer)
• eligible are Top 100 members of the SETI@Home and RC5-64 teams who have been active during the 7 days prior to the drawing day and have not yet won a shirt

RC5 Team merger - - September 24

I have some great news regarding the RC5 team. While we're near rank 1000 and climb up around 10 places each day, Team AMD is on 101 already but slipping. Talking to their leader we agreed that it would be in both our interest to join forces.

The plan, as it stands now would be to either merge the teams, calling the resulting team Team 3DNow! or to rename the Team AMD to Team 3DNow! and all of our members join that one.

The latter one would be less appealing since it would leave all our already acquired blocks behind. Nugget from distributed.net will attempt the merger first, if you're on the team you may receive an email asking for your consent. More on this on the forums.

K6-2+ - - September 24

Don't know if you heard it yet, but AMD is bringing out a new low-end CPU in Q1/2000 for about $60, the K6-2+. It will be a middle thing between K6-2 and K6-III, carrying 128 kb of L2 cache on die and manufactured at .18 micron to permit clock speeds in excess of 500 MHz.

Sounds like a pretty sweet deal for your third and fourth 3DNow! enabled computer :)

Athlon t-shirts!! - - September 24

I got the thumbs up from AMD for some pretty Athlon t-shirts ... woohoo! Want one? Well, we only have a limited number so we'll give them away among those readers who actively support us by working in the 3DNow! teams on RC5 and SETI@Home.

The rules: one shirt each week given away on each team. Winner must be a Top 100 contributor on either team, read the news page so he knows when to claim their prize, have been active (submitted work units) during the week the prize is given out and can only win once. The giveaway will continue until we're out of shirts.

If you are interested to become an Athlon t-shirt owner, you better get on the teams now. Small hint: Team 3DNow! RC5 has less than 100 members still while the lower end of the SETI Top 100 should be well in striking distance of most members.

The times they are a-changing - - September 21

Folks, it's been in the making for a couple days and it's now time to break the news. Yours truly will assume a fulltime job as hardware editor for Germany's PC GAMES and PC ACTION print magazines.

What this means is the following: I won't have the flexibility to do updates until after work hours, I won't spend as much time online hunting for news and stuff and I cannot keep the high profile for 3DNow! products that I could so far - I have to test Intel and non-3DNow! stuff too without going for their blood :)

So I will need some more help. This mainly goes into the area of news posting that will be covered largely by Adrian and Jon from now on, as well as the real campaign work, which means the proliferation squad and the guys who'll actually get in touch with developers.

Especially the latter is not yet covered but pivotal, so step forward.

S3 under pressure - - September 20

GNN, one of the two significant german net news sites, reports about the S3 driver petition that we linked to a few days ago and claims that S3 is indeed feeling the pressure. If you can decypher german, you can read the bit here. Good work, guys!

Script problem - - September 19

Ad banner stuff should be fixed again. Also re-added the cpuid utility in the binaries section for download.

Ever had an 18 hour repartitioning, reinstalling, oh my god the backup file won't open nightmare? Just got over one of those on the K6-III system. I need a vacation, not a new job.

Banner advertising - - September 17

To recover the hosting costs I decided that I have to put up some paid banner advertising. This will happen in addition to the free supporter site banners, which will remain free and will displayed until we crash and burn for whatever reason will bring about our demise (my personal favourite being: everything is 3DNow! accelerated).

Making a little bit of money off the site will also allow me to write off any non-covered expenses from taxes, which seems to be the only way to recover the $153 for the forum script that AMD still didn't say whether they want to sponsor it or not.

Oh well. It's not like Jerry Sanders can spare a penny and I don't want to be the reason the guys file Chapter 11.

New poll - - September 17

Our old poll finally ran out by getting so many responses that the script crashed (best way to find out if it is enough I guess) and we found out the following about the www.3dnow.org visiting habits:

28.4%
this is the first time

27.9%
a few times each week

14.8%
once a day

11.1%
less than once a week

8.9%
once a week

8.6%
several times each day

RC5 Team 3DNow! to get major boost - - September 17

The RC5 team will receive 172,000 blocks tonight as the contributors to the eBay crunching account decided to donate them to the team. The bidder was a crook and didn't intend to pay up to his bid, so instead of auctioning it off again we'll put it where it will do some good.

Thanks go to idiot from Ace's Hardware, Steve Porter from our workshop, Linux 3D.Net, Chris from Upgrade Center, Jon from Full On 3D, Daiki from Daiki's PC Info and JC from JC's News who all contributed to these blocks!

This, btw, also marks my last engagement with eBay who let a guy with multiple poor ratings for not paying up or even stealing money continue to bid. Piss poor job there, if you ask me. And no, I don't intend to pay their fee, either.

Free mail accounts - - September 17

Our supporter Siliconews is offering free mail accounts, surf on over if you'd like one.

S3 3DNow! petition - - September 16

Our S3 supporters told me to make it known that there is a petition running for Savage 3/4 owners to put more pressure on S3 to improve their 3DNow! support. If you're one of them and have not yet signed up (or want to do the S3 folks a favour), hope over here and sign up.

Battlezone II boycott - - September 15

Jason from Silconews, one of our supporting sites, is holding a poll on boycotting Battlezone II. This game, as you may have heard on our forums already, has Intel SSE support but no support for 3DNow!

I agree with Jason that this speaks of a poor attitude towards the end-user and 3DNow! owners should not reward that by giving them money for the game. Let's see how many paying SSE customers they can round up for their product and if Intel's development cash will get them out of the red.

Help wanted - - September 15

I'm offering the position of head game company testicle squeezer ... er, developer relations manager, yes, that's it, here at www.3dnow.org.

I'll be taking up a new job soon and I want to make sure to have an officer who will knock on the doors of game developers and inquire about their 3DNow! proficiency etc, basically someone to execute the site's intention of creating positive pressure on game developers to pick up 3DNow!. I do know I won't have the time for that in the future to handle that, so if someone would step forward please?

Compensation for the job is zero, job satisfaction is high. Email address in the www.3dnow.org domain becomes a work tool as well as the ability to recruit other volunteers to support the task. Interested parties please apply with a sample letter they'd write to a game developer to inquire about his activities regarding 3DNow! and coerce him into using it if he doesn't embrace it already. Best submissions wins the job.

More on prizes - - September 13

I hear from Maurits that the Grand Prize from AMD, a K6-III with mobo, has disappeared in transit. Intead AMD is sending him an Athlon CPU. Good deal :)

Sweepstake prizes - - September 11

I hate having to talk about this again, but I keep receiving email from outraged winners who still didn't get their prizes they won in the opening and 3dfx sweepstake.

Sorry. There is really not more I can do, the shipping is entirely the responsibility of the prize sponsors. This means that 3dfx is severely staying behind their promises and will not be considered for any promotions whatsoever anymore. Also Max Payne has not shipped yet as the game is not out, our winners will receive their copies once the game goes gold.

From what I know all the Cyrix prize winners have been served with their t-shirt and mousepad and we're working on tracking the grand prize from AMD that seems to have gotten lost somewhere in transit.

I can't emphasize enough how much this embarasses the staff and myself personally and you can bet that I am not in a good mood about it, especially as far as 3dfx is concerned. They made me jump through a dozen of hoops to get the phone numbers of all non-US winners (even for the t-shirts!) and still make me look like I was cheating people out of their stuff. *******.

300 on Team 3DNow! - - September 11

Wow! We mark another milestone with www.3DNow.Org's SETI@Home team by welcoming our 300st member! We lost one place today bumping us down to #44 but we're increasing our output by reducing the average unit time, more than 300 units a day should be possible that way.

Crank up your output if you are not in the Top 100 as we plan to soon give away Athlon t-shirts to those most heavily contributing (random drawing from the Top 100). The same goes for the RC5 team that has a lot more spots open still to get in a Top 100 position! Join up today.

Drakan 3DNow! interview - - September 10

Master Ren of 3DNow.Net, one of our partner sites, did an interview with Stuart Denman of Surreal Entertainment about Drakan: Order of the Flame and their 3DNow! support. Give it a read.

How to build an Athlon system - - September 09

AMD is nice enough to put up an illustrated guide on how to build your own Athlon system from scratch. You can access it here. Thanks to Marc for the link.

Athlon architecture analysis - - September 08

If you enjoy the deep stuff I recommend you take a look at Paul Hsieh's architectural comparisions between Athlon, Alpha and Pentium III which you can find here. Warning: this is not for folks with a shoddy CPU design background :)

Athlon t-shirts, anyone? - - September 07

I am in talks with AMD to get some Athlon t-shirts for our glorious 3DNow! Teams. If they are game we'll give one of them away for each team each week randomly among the Top 100 participants. You can only win once, though so many people will be able to benefit if - and only if - they get serious on pushing our teams forward!

This is an early warning so you'll be able to get your stuff in place for the race for a chance to win an official AMD Athlon t-shirt! Start your engines, gentlemen!

Athlon memory performance - - September 07

Johan de Gelas took a look at the Athlon's memory performance, which is a worthy read if you care for more than just raw megahertz numbers.

Er ... - - September 06

Ok this is actually a little embarassing. A couple guys and I crunched a whole load of RC5 blocks (146,246 actually) and put them up for auctioning at eBay.

This was mainly planned to test whether someone would actually buy them and to generate some publicity for www.3dnow.org. Problem: we didn't really expect anyone to offer $100 for it - now someone did and we'll be forced to sell them if he pays. If nobody had bid we'd have donated the blocks to the Team 3DNow!.

So if you have money burning you a hole in the pocket and want to outbid this guy and get those blocks for yourself and the Team 3DNow! RC5, go and bid now, it runs for another 18 hours as of this posting!

Preaching to the choir - - September 06

Godallmighty. Leave for 48 hours and all hell breaks lose in my mailbox. Anyway, wanted to mention one of the oodles of reviews I was sent the past two days, even though I guess it won't sway your set minds on buying an Athlon. Give Riva 3D's review a look, the gave it the big smackaroo award.

Yet another supporter - - September 03

The Upgradecenter finally decided to join us as a full supporter. If you don't know them yet you should change that lack by visiting them right now.

New supporter - - September 02

We rounded up a new supporter (tried to hide but we drove him out with a couple air strikes and he signed up .. j/k), 3DNow.nu. They publish in swedish, so if you're a scandinavian you might understand what they're saying, unlike me :) Pay them a visit!

Tirtanium sources opened - - September 02

Michael Tirtisana, author of the OpenGL/DirectX benchmark Tirtanium opened his sources, including the 3DNow! matrix operations part. You can find his work here, it should provide some insight into 3D engine programming.

Gainward SG4 review - - September 01

I reviewed the Gainward SG4 Savage 4 LT graphic card and found that it is very suitable for low-end 3DNow! systems, beating a Celeron at same clockspeed in OpenGL. Check out the findings here.

NVidia cheating you out of your privacy? - - August 31

I just was over at NVidia's site and they have this $10,000 contest running where they ask about some of your preferences, the usual "give me marketing info for a chance to win" deal.

Nothing wrong with it if that's the deal you believe to get, you can opt out of taking part, after all or accept the deal. But the form also has a field "Country", indicating to the casual observer that the prizes are available to international users as well. Wrong! If you read the rules you'll notice only US citizens (with the usual Florida exception) are eligible to win.

What does that tell us? They still like the international marketing data but are not going to part with the prize if you should happen to be drawn (so you make it into the drawing after not putting USA in the country box to start with).

That is a very poor policy towards your international visitors' privacy, friends, be ashamed of yourself!

Identifying flawed MSI 6167 boards - - August 31

I received word from AMD how to identify the buggy 6167 boards that tripped the start of Athlon in Japan:

Here is how folks can identify if their motherboard is potentially affected: Users can distinguish between flawed motherboards and modified ones by the shape of a sticker that reads "for Japanese market" on each motherboard package. The affected units have a star shape seal and the corrected units feature a round one.
MSI is currently replacing all affected boards, so anyone who finds themselves with one should get a replacement.

Unless you have a gray import from Japan you should be safe outside of that country, if you're in Japan check the retail box or ask your dealer where you bought your whole system (so any have been sold yet).

SETI Spy - - August 30

If you're interested in projected finishing times etc. for your SETI@Home command line client under Windows, this little utility may help: SETI Spy.

It will offer you a progress bar, progress estimation and some other info without using the poor ass GUI client.

New supporter - - August 30

We kick off the week with a new supporter, this time for our portuguese and brazilian readers, Superclocking. Pay them a visit.

S3 Savage 2000 - - August 29

Since it's from S3 it will get 3DNow! support, even though that might be a secondary consideration as it has transform and lighting acceleration (S3TL): S3 announces the Savage 2000.

Read the details at Savage Daily News - of course one of our supporters had it first.

SETI Team 3DNow! hits 10,000 units - - August 29

Congratulations to the 290 members of our SETI Team 3DNow!, today we completed the 10,000st unit - a long way to go since June 28 when we launched it. Great work everyone involved!

I wish we'd have the 3DNow! enabled client yet, but work on it is continuing, even though slowly.

Battlezone 2 - - August 28

For those not regularily reading the forums (which would be a loss for you, guys), here something I want your attention on: Battlezone 2 to support ISSE but not 3DNow!.

Check it out!

Overclocking? - - August 27

If overclocking is your thing or your current Super 7 cooler is junk, you may want to give my review of the TennMax MEGA7 a read, it works on Super 7 and Socket 370 CPUs and showed a very convincing cooling performance - the only thing it lacks is 3DNow! support :)

RE: Pads - - August 27

If you haven't sent me a confirmation notice of your intent to purchase the www.3DNow.Org Everglide Pads, do it now. Remember, number of pads you want in the subject box and send the mail to so that it is easier for me to count how many pads we need to order. I promise that we will get finalized pricing and shipping info next week so that they can start shipping these things.

Another new supporter - - August 27

Tweakers Guides joined the ranks of our supporting websites today, take a look-see!

New supporter - - August 27

We have a new supporter in Mic's 3D Zone, a dutch size, pay him a visit and vote on his CPU poll!

Dynamix on Tribes Extreme/Tribes 2 - - August 26

I received a reply to an inquiry regarding 3DNow! support for Tribes Extreme from Nels Bruckner of Dynamix:

Tribes Extreme, while it boasts many new features, is based on the
Tribes 1 technology. So, the basic support of hardware will be exactly the same as that found in the latest version of Tribes 1 (i.e. sorry, no 3DNow!). However, Tribes 2 is a nearly complete rewrite of the basic engine and we are planning on supporting 3DNow! (and other extensions) from the ground up. It's gonna rock!

--Nels

MSI produced bad Athlon mobos - - August 26

From a source in Japan I was informed that the pullback of AMD and MSI for the Athlon launch there has been caused by MSI trying to go cheap. They seem to have redesigned the AMD approved motherboard layout for the 6167 to save costs and ended up with a crashing nightmare so those board were for the trashcan.

Without doubt AMD is not too happy about that as it jeopardizes their sales numbers for 1999 and specifically for this quarter.

ASM plugin for VC++ - - August 25

LOOP provides an ASM plugin for VISUAL C++ that adds compiler and debug support for 3D Now! (and PentiumIII) instructions. You can download a trial version.

I hope it works better than their jacked-up news database :) Kudos go to JC for this link.

New supporter - - August 25

We've rounded up a new supporter, BizNizzy.Com, take a look at their site and pay attention to that animated guy, looks just like my upstairs neighbour! Just kidding.

New supporting site - - August 24

Savage News decided to join the ranks of our supporters, pay them a visit and don't confuse them with Savage Daily News, which already supported us for some time :)

Do you want Linux? - - August 24

I just got a mail from Xoom.com, they are offering members (i.e. people who run their webcounter) a discounted version of Red Hat Linux at $49.95 instead of $79.95. This, of course, is because of the manual and compilation, the OS itself is free.

So if you're interested, the thing still runs till August 31 according to their excited blurbs - better than paying the full monty, I guess.

This link should tell you more. Make sure to check if this is legit, though, I'm not sure about that.

AMD nut - - August 24

To see what a real AMD nut's computer case looks like, surf on over to our italian supporter.

Everglide Pads (again) - - August 24

I sent out some "confirmation" email to those who emailed me about their interest in the pads. If you did not get this email, then you should with the number of pads you would like to purchase in the subject box. If you want to buy one and still haven't emailed me, then just do the same as above.

3DNow! email blitz! - - August 23

Folks, if you have some time to spare, please join the proliferation squad in their effort to get more websites to join us as supporters! All you have to do is to send an email (or some if you want) to sites that you'd like to see on our supporter list.

Go to the link above and talk to the squad how to be involved!

Outcast review - - August 23

On of our supporting sites, Planet 3DNow! reviewed Outcast with special attention to the 3DNow! support of the game. Give it a read if you understand german.

New supporters - - August 22

Two more sites joined out supporters, TanWare and Gameulation, bringing the total count of supporting websites up to 37!

Wow, that's almost more than we have signed petitions! Talking of which, did you sign it already? If not, do it here, do it NOW! (in 3D if you want).

New poll - - August 20

As you can see I added a new poll to find out about our visitor's visiting habits, that way we can better tailor our news for you guys, so tell us what you're up to.

The old poll, asking when you will buy your Athlon system, has been retired, you can catch the results here.

If you haven't seen this already... - - August 19

Here it is, the preliminary design of the Get 3DNow! mousepad.
If you think it looks cool (and plus it's cheaper than what everglide charges), email me!

Athlon spied - - August 18

The Hive, which has close ties to high performance gaming computer maker Alienware, shows some images of boxed Athlons, which likely means that Alienware Athlons are about to roll out. Check this image.

Also please let me mention that I added another forum, this one is for private sales ads among members and to tell everyone about good hardware deals on the net that you want to share.

Get 3DNow! Pads - - August 17

We have gotten ok response for the mousepads so far. I hope we can get some more orders for these www.3DNow.Org Everglide Large Attack Pads which will most likely cost lower than what Everglide charges. So tell your friends and relatives about this deal so that they can support 3DNow! and our cause.

Athlon motherboard comparision - - August 17

Just saw that HappyCat, a japanese site, compares benchmark values of the 4 main Athlon motherboards, you can take a look at the table here

SETI@home project now largest computation ever! - - August 17

Any members of our team3dnow! SETI@home effort might find it interesting that according to the BBC news site, SETI@home is now the largest single computation ever carried out (At least on THIS planet) with over 50,000 years of computing time, of which a measly 200,000 hours (23 years) belong to us.

Distributed computing - - August 17

I got an email from the webmaster of Idle PC looking for visitors of his site. Since we participate with teams in RC5 and SETI@Home I decided we'll pimp him some:

This site is dedicated to distributed computing projects running on the Internet. Distributed computing projects on the Internet involve using your computer when it's idle, which for a lot of people, is 20 hours per day or more. Instead of leaving it off, or just sitting here waiting for you to do something, put that idling CPU to good use and maybe you can make a great scientific discover or maybe win some dough.

Currently, there are three that I know of, SETI@Home, RC5 and GIMPS. If there is another project similar to these three, please let me know and I'll check it out for possible inclusion here.

This site was established as a general meeting place for people taking part in these efforts. In doing searches on Deja.com, I've noticed that people were posting in all kinds of funky places. SETI@Home people were posting in astronomy groups, others were posting in security or CPU-related groups. This is a place for all of you, where people participating in one effort might learn about another. A lot of people doing SETI don't know about RC5 and GIMPS, and a lot of RC5 folks don't know GIMPS is running. So I'm hoping for some cross-pollination of the efforts.

Pay him a visit.

Athlon systems to buy - - August 17

I just surfed by at CyberMax, a long time AMD system vendor and they have a number of Athlon machines up for sale (13 models in fact). The $1499 looks rather good to me, but if you plan to buy read that video card review I did a few days back first so you won't buy into a crap video card to save a few bucks.

Matrox Millenium G400 review - - August 16

Finally completed the review of this vanilla G400 board, done on the K6-III, Athlon and Celery 450. Give it a read if you're interested.

Yeah, I know, I am still waiting for pbrain to set me up a second news script so we can post reviews for the supporting sites on a separate page. pbrain, listening?

Petition status - - August 16

I just updated our petition records and we have 842 unique subscribers who asked us to represent them. That's a good turnout for the 6 weeks we're running, but by far not good enough. If you did not subscribe yourself yet, please do so, you won't benefit by staying off that list if we don't get a significant number of people on it!

To see the names of the people who subscribed themselves already, take a look-see here.

www.3DNow.Org top 3DNow! resource - - August 16

Hey guys, we were mentioned in german print gamer magazine PC Action in the September issue. Together with FullOn3DNow! and 3DNow.Net we're the top resource for all things 3DNow! in their book. Good going!

Alle deutschsprachigen Besucher, die über uns in PC Action gelesen haben: Herzlich willkommen bei "Get 3DNow!". Tragt euch auf unserer Petition ein und schaut euch um, vielleicht wollt ihr ja Stammgäste werden.

New supporters - - August 15

Calling myself a liar I added two german 3DNow! sites, German 3DNow! Site and Planet 3DNow! to our supporters.

I guess they have to fight it out who gets to be on the national team.

Help wanted! - - August 15

Folks, as you can see our supporting websites are not growing in numbers lately, but we need many more to carry our button and adhere to the "No 3DNow!, no cigar" policy for reviews to gain the necessary leverage to make a difference.

So here's the deal: I need a coordinator of a team and team members that will agressively go out, find contact information of any and all websites that could and should bear our button and stick to our supporter requirements and then systematically work these sites (in our patented friendly but persistant manner) to join up with us.

I'd like for people interested in this work to , with some sort of idea what your qualification is if you want to be the coordinator. I'll set up a forum for this group to share the contact info you found and to discuss our work.

New Workshop project coming up - - August 14

Folks, for those bored with FFTs we'll launch a new workshop project that deals with 3D graphics in general and matrix operations in particular, where, you guess it, 3DNow! is most beneficial!

The project we picked for this is Gizmo3D, the 3D engine by Anders Modén. I'll post more information on the workshop page once we have it spelled out.

3DNow! Workshop - - August 11

Hi there folks. It's me again (aren't you lucky). Anyway I just wanted to drop a note to say that the workshop is far from dead. However, with the site move, and certain real life constraints on myself things have been a little delayed. Add to that the launch of the K7 and well, I'm sure you can see why things have been moving slowly.

We do have a baseline for a 'mini-seti' client in terms of benchmark numbers. I will try and put together a nice test harness/source code for folks to download. Then we will get around to benchmarking all the submissions, and documenting those that work and those that don't. Look for an update shortly.

Also it seems we may have another chunk of code for your review. This one is really perfect for 3DNow! as it is 3D related. Keep an eye open for that too!

That is all for now.

Get 3DNow! Everglide Mousepad Page - - August 11

I've setup a page here with the details and a preliminary pic of how our www.3DNow.Org Everglide Large Attack Pad will look like. if you want to buy one. Show your support for the 3DNow! campaign and at the same time, get the ultimate gaming mousepad for a lower price than what Everglide sells it for.

Pain in the neck - - August 11

I have to apologize to all non-US winners of 3dfx prizes from our two sweepstakes. You didn't get your stuff yet because 3dfx forgot to tell me that they need phone numbers for all foreign winners to do the shipping.

I mailed all non-US winners of 3dfx prizes that I could find in my mailbox but there is a slim chance that I may have missed someone, so if you were notified you won a 3dfx prize and sent me your address before and are not in the United States, please send me your shipping address again complete with your phone number.

Thanks and again sorry, next time we'll see to sending the prizes out ourselves so it gets done right.

SETI@Home chat transcripts - - August 10

There were a number of people who asked for the transcript of the SETI@Home chat at Yahoo! from July 30, if you're still interested, check here.

Get 3DNow! Everglide mousepads - - August 10

We are planning to get some Everglide Large Attack Pads with the Get 3DNow! logo on it (a modified version). My initial estimate for the maximum price (25-75 orders) of this customized mouse pad is around 13-14$ (plus shipping and handling). This will be a good way to show you support our campaign and spread user awareness of our site and at the same time, you get an Everglide Large Attack Pad at a lower price than Everlgide sells it at (which is 16.95$). If you're intereted I need to know. telling me you're interested. The more response we get, the lower the price of the mouse pad (may reach even below 10$!). Also, if you're interested in a T-shirt tell me in your email as well. My estimate is around 10$ for the T-shirt. We may get a special bundling deal going if there is enough response for both.

Athlon 500 - - August 10

Our friend and supporter tophe from Rapide PC has one of the more interesting Athlon reviews by testing the most affordable model, the Athlon 500, as well. His review is in french and can be found here.

You may wish to try to have it translated to english using Babelfish, just paste the URL into the box and select French->English. The result may be a little crude but greatly enhances understanding if you never took any french in school.

Athlon review - - August 09

A godawful number of reviews of the Athlon is on the net, so to make things short and simple for you I am handing you over to JC who keeps a directory and rating page for them.

Follow the white rabbit.

AMD - Road to recovery - - August 08

I got a rather interesting article sent to me earlier today, it is called AMD - Road to recovery and is an interesting recollection of AMD's history and thoughts about their future. Give it a read.

Athlon video card shootout - - August 08

Seeing that there is great interest in the Athlon (that must be the lowballing of the year), I tested most current 3D accelerators on the Athlon 600 in a grand shootout to determine which of the boards can be recommended and which are just a waste of CPU speed.

You can find it right here.

If you don't plan to buy an Athlon yet but want to invest in a new video board, this review will also help you to see where the current boards max out their performance and which are suitable as upgrades to an Athlon at a later time.

And as if that wasn't enough we also have a 7 page interview with AMD about the K6 and Athlon model lines, which you can enjoy here.

Sorry - - August 08

I installed Frontpage on the server last night and accidentially locked the site for browsing with a password, which also affected all supporting sites that load the button from here (as they should). My apologies to all those who were affected.

Cyrix massacre - - August 07

Well it is hard to describe it any differently, looks like VIA's interest is mainly in the licenses anymore (especially those that irk Intel) and some choice employees while they throw away the rest like rotten fruit (which, unfortunately, it might just be).

Too bad that this also hits some good people in the noggins, but I feel that they will not have a hard time finding different jobs in the current IT personnel starved environment, it would just be a major loss if the 3DNow! optimizers wouldn't continue that work, whether for AMD or for Centaur/VIA I don't really care (apart from Stevie's worries, that is).

Read more about the Cyrix stuff at Steve Porter's site, coming from inside Cyrix.

Team 3DNow! - - August 07

Our SETI team moved to rank 44 with a solid 200 unit lead to the next team in line and a good shot at overtaking the 2 ahead of us, good work everbody!

The RC5 group - still in need for more members, learn here how to become one - is approaching the 2100s in the team stats and has a fixed place among the Top 500 daily groups.

Intel buys AMD - - August 06

The Laughingstock is making an argument that Intel now can buy AMD since VIA picked up the other 2.5% percent marketshare in the x86 market.

Uh? Hello? Earth to Mike Magee, drop that ganja right now! Ever heard of the requirement of antitrust approval for that kind of deal? Ever heard of the requirement of shareholder approval? They sure as hell wouldn't get my votes, nor those of the FTC or EU commission.

And Chapter 11? Muahahahaa. AMD should have sent you an Athlon to show you the errors of your ways ;)

Cyrix to perish? - - August 06

Rumour at Cyrix has it that VIA may nix the agreement with NSM to buy 50% of Cyrix in favour of their deal they just struck with IDT to acquire the Centaur IP and design team. This would mean the end of Cyrix and the loss of all jobs there unless someone like Acer jumped in and picked them up.

I have some doubts about that considering the licensing problems VIA faces and the Cyrix deal could solve and it would quite frankly suck if Cyrix had to drop out of business.

Update Looks like dinner wasn't eaten as hot as it had been cooked after all. According to this article 170 people will be laid off, mostly involved with the MII, while the rest of the company is continuing.

Matrox G200 OpenGL ICD - - August 06

I received a more precise answer from Matrox regarding the OpenGL ICD for the G200 and 3DNow! improvements.

Since Matrox is using a unified driver concept, all improvements automatically are passed downwards to older models using the same driver set, hence the G400 drivers will speed up the G200 as well. Hope this helps all those power hungry G200 users out there :)

Teams 3DNow! - - August 06

Wanted to update you on our standings in the RC5-64 and SETI@Home teams. SETI Team is approaching the 7000st unit (!) today and is still holding up in the Top 50 despite a massive assault of other teams, we should be able to defend and slightly improve that position until the cavalry comes out.

Team RC5 is getting better every day, yesterday we were among the Top 500 teams in daily submissions and total we entered the Top 2200 and improve by about 20-30 ranks every day. If you haven't joined either team yet, please consider to do so!

Matrox OpenGL ICD - - August 05

I received the Matrox G400 today and with it some beta drivers (5.11), which was not entirely convincing in OpenGL - BUT - tonight I got a new alpha version ICD and it does 20% better on the machine I cannot report about yet. I expect such benefits to carry over on the K6-2 and III as well.

I do expect for this to move into the G200 ICD as well, so we may have seen the worst there.

Breaking News - VIA buys IDT Centaur - - August 05

Just received the press release that VIA agreed to buy the intellectual property and chip design team of IDT Centaur (Winchip). This means VIA solidifies their position in the x86 and 3DNow! market but also that we only have 2 of the three original 3DNow! CPU makers left - allthough both with a fair chance to stay.

For the full press release check here.

Site update - - August 04

It looks like almost everything is working again, though there are still some problems related to the slow propagation of the new address to name servers around the world. No way to speed that up, sorry, I tried to catch it all with redirects.

If you encounter problems, please post on the forums about it.

SETI Optimization - - August 02

Okay folks,

As I promised I have been working on a test harness and some other stuff. Well I got an unexpected present the other day. Some OLD (note that please) SETI code. So in otherwords, none of the networking works, but the majority of the computational engine is the same, so this will become our 'platform' for implementing a faster FFT.

However, before I release the code I have put up a page to gather some benchmark information. This will allow us to time our improvements.

http://130.113.184.129/sp/ contains the information you need. You'll have to forgive the layout, as it is clearly a work in progress. Just head for the SETI pages, READ the instructions, and have fun. (PS. The block that is included with that has since been finsihed and submitted to SETI, so don't get any ideas ;) )

RC5 - - August 02

I've noticed some people talking about RC5 statistics in the forums, and I just thought I would mention to everyone, that unlike Seti@home, RC5 is NOT sensitive to FSB differences, etc. The code and data segments easily fit into the CPU's L1 Cache. So you don't need to worry about the FSB with RC5. Also, if any of you happen to have old K5 systems (or Rise MP6 systems) you should fire them up for RC5. Those processors are great for RC5.

RC5 Team 3DNow! - - August 02

Team 3DNow! is ranked #364 for yesterday!

Good job folks! We're also closing in on the 2,200 ranks overall with a steady push forward of 34 ranks yesterday. A couple hundred more members would help, though :)

First real Athlon review - - August 01

Hartware, german hardware review and news website, posted the first real review of the Athlon, which you can find here. Article is in german, you can use Babelfish to get a crude translation to english if you enjoy being puzzled.

Site move - - August 01

We're on the move to the new site, once everything is set up I'll put an automatic forward on here to pop those people over that get the new IP late in the game. It may happen that some stuff doesn't work, we're debugging as soon we have the thing available ourselves.

Tweekers Guides Sweepstake - - August 01

Tweekers Guides, a new site is holding a sweepstake this week which involves AMD stuff, so you may want to pay them a visit and win something.

New supporters - - July 31

Welcome to www.3DNow.Org, the only website that has lots of news on the weekend, hehe.

I added two supporters today, first the Yahoo! SETI club which ran our button for a while now. Visit them but join our team since we have the tougher goons and the prettier girls :)

Secondly Ultimate 3D expressed the wish to support us, they do hardware reviews so they'll be able to put the squeeze on the hardware companies by retaining the top award for 3DNow! products.

Sadly I had to remove Naked Gamer from the supporter list, it is an alias now for VoodooExtreme and Billy Wilson told me he doesn't want to support the campaign to keep on the neutral side of the Intel fanatics.

Campaign Petition - - July 31

Time to give you another update on the Campaign Petition status. I stated before that I need at least 2000 signatures on it before we can consider to really claim any kind of representation, so far we have 714 unique names on the list, which leaves some more to be desired.

There are 581 owners of K6-2s, 108 K6-III owners, 3 K7s /reviewers) and a number of converts using Cyrix MII, Pentium II, Pentium, Celeries and one Winchip2 owner in Malaysia :)

So please, go around your friends and family if they have 3DNow! CPUs and have them sign up to get our numbers in the green. I know of at least 3 winners of Winchip2s here from the Grand Opening Sweepstake who could sign up too .. come on!

New poll - - July 31

I retired the old poll that gave us a good impression on whether you want t-shirts for the campaign or not, we'll evaluate the possibility and leads to a company that offers good quality shirts, the printing and all the red tape involved with shipping and handling for individual orders are still very welcome.

Our new poll deals with Athlon and whether and when you plan to buy one, clue me in. Also I'd like to know on the forums whether you think that 3DNow! will be of diminished importance for the Athlon or not - and why.

Updated software list - - July 31

I updated the software list with titles that do not support 3DNow! (but we'd like them to :P). In the future, if you guys can find some apps that don't support 3DNow! for sure or some apps that support 3DNow! but aren't on our list (or hardware), I am in charge of the software and hardware 3DNow! lists. The software page was updated with software from Jane's/EA and Wolfram.

SETI Team 3DNow! Top 50 - - July 31

Well, today we arrived legitimately in the Top 50 teams of the world, which is an indicator of just how great you guys are :) Now if you sign me up a new supporter for each block you submit I'm gonna get all un-machoed and cry.

We were in the Top 50 yesterday already with the help of a bug we found and verified (it's not cheating, it's science) and then immediately reported to the SETI@Home staff. I think, however, that they only recalculated out score and not that of some other teams that move up suspiciously fast with very few members.

How to join the RC5-64 Team 3DNow! - - July 31

I wrote up a page detailing how you get into RC5-64 and join the Team 3DNow! RC5-64. Check it out here.

SETI@Home Editorial - - July 30

Looks like my editorial on SETI@Home's waste of computer time stirred up quite a response which ranges from 200+ comments on Slashdot to faxes being sent to AMD's acting president. I hope it will accelerate improvements with the project and specifically with the code and not only muddy the waters.

SETI@Home Team 3DNow! - - July 30

We, the staffers of the site, decided to toss all our units into one account to free up some more slots on the Top 100 list so you, the contributing members, have a better chance at showing your name there. Hope you like it :)

New supporter - - July 30

We added ATi World to our supporters today, pay them a visit.

Forums - - July 29

I re-opened the forums for the time being, looks like Jason wasn't able to struggle free from work to set up the new site yet, we'll close them again and move the added data once he gives me the ok.

workshop - - July 29

Hi there folks. I know things have been moving slowly lately, but that is partially because I have been waiting on SETI to comment/provide information so we don't waste our time on something not applicable.

Well I have just about given up on hearing from SETI in a timely fashion, so here's what we are going to do. I am changing the goal of the workshop. Our new goal is to make a fast 3dnow FFT. But there's a catch ;) (isn't there always). The goal is to make an FFT that performs well on data sets that don't fit in the L1/L2 caches. So in other words the kind of FFT that SETI needs. If we do a good job, I am sure we can get AMD to include it in their 3DNow! SDK. Then it would be up to SETI to use.

Sometime in the next 48 hours I will write up the following:

A set of ground rules.
A testing harness.
A set of sample data and sample results.

Until then please be patient, I myself am very busy trying to get SETI to work with us. However, I feel we can at least get started on something useful.

New supporter - - July 29

HardOCP, one of the leading sites in the overclocking madness business, finally sent me their banner, so they're official supporters now. Check them out.

Team 3DNow! - - July 29

Well it's been exactly a month and a day since I started doing SETI@Home and founded the team and what a long way we went since! 222 members now and just shy of 5000 work units put us in place 54 of the Top 100 clubs in the world, that is quite impressive and I'm proud of you all.

I got some questions whether we should continue to do units for them considering how poorly they responded to our optimisation efforts and make us waste a lot of our time. Well, that pretty much is up to you guys. I myself would like to show them just how determined the 3DNow! community is by pushing the team into the Top 10 even without their support to show everyone that we won't settle down and die, but I'd understand if you would rather drop it. Speak your mind on the forum.

Why SETI@Home is wasting your money and time - - July 28

I just wrote an editorial about the issue of SETI@Home's stalling tactics to prevent faster client software. Read about it here!.

SETI Team 3DNow! - - July 28

We're still doing well, showing at Rank 58 in the Top 100 after falling back to 60 in the afternoon yesterday (the first post referred to an unscheduled morning run), so our trend up to the top is still intact.

However some other teams are getting along much faster coming from the bottom, and that is something I think our pride cannot suffer, so I am asking that you join up if you're not a member yet and recruit more people if you are.

Especially post on message boards on big websites advertising out team, I don't think any self-respecting 3DNow! user can be a member of any team but ours!

Site will be moving - - July 27

In between now and August 1st www.3DNow.Org will be moving to a new webspace provider to meet the need for more bandwith. We're doing so well that we cannot afford staying with the original hosting service after only one month.

Service here may be breaking off as the new site goes up and the domain name is transferring to the new IP address, which will be 216.147.74.214. You may want to write that down. I will set up a redirect on this site to forward everyone, but that only works for as long as this site is physically accessible.

Forums may be locked down here during the move to make sure we're not losing posts (I hope we can transfer them in the first place).

Athlon roadmap - - July 27

I stumbled upon a roadmap for the Athlon CPU line, which you can check out here. Since AMD has not been going public specifically this may contain speculation.

Workshop - - July 27

Okay folks, I'm busy working on an update for the workshop pages. I should let everyone know that I have been very busy lately with some real-life stuff. I've been talking to several MPU makers (some who support 3dnow and some who don't) and I may have to take a plane ride or 2 in the next little while to see about getting a job with some of these people, therefore if I am scarce for the next little while I apologize.

Also I should go on record (once again) as saying that with respect to the 3DNow! enabled Seti client: "Seti has agreed to look at our results, but nothing beyond that". It appears that Seti fears that faster block turn around times would do bad things to the server setup. So we are taking this fft optimization as a 'text book' example with POSSIBLE practical implications (I'm sure if it's fast for large data sets we might be able to convince AMD to include it in the 3DNOW! SDK).

Keep up the good work.

Teams 3DNow! - - July 27

Brimstone and hellfires, we're on a roll! The SETI team hit Rank 57 in the club stats this morning, up from 67 yesterday and it looks like we'll be in the Top 50 a week after we entered the Top 100. Team Anandtech is toast this afternoon latest!

The RC5 team is making good progress as well, even though it still lacks members, Rank 2333 in a very hard competition that we entered late in the game, but in the top 900 every day when it comes to the daily unit turnaround. If you have only little CPU time to donate you should direct it at this team, it produces visible output much faster.

New SETI@Home command line client - - July 26

Version 1.3 of the client for NT command line (and Win9x) is out and can be directly downloaded here. Other text based clients can be found on this page. According to Steve this version is 5-10% faster but doesn't include any 3DNow! yet.

SETI Team 3DNow! - a success story - - July 26

Hey guys, we made another three ranks up on our 5th day in the Top 100, hailing from Rank 67. The next couple teams ahead of us look like rather weak resistance up to 55th place so I envision that we'll enter the middle third of the Top Chop tossing the competition left and right, as it is becoming of our dynamic team!

If you did not join yet you should consider it, a look at the member statistics (left side above the poll) will show you that we are team that succeeds by virtue of a broad membership and not just a handful of big guns. Mind you, though, that it takes 8 units now to show on the list which only displays the Top 100 members - all the more a reason to crunch harder, I guess :)

Workshop - - July 26

You may notice a new button on our navigation bar on the upper left part of the page, we added one for the workshop pages so you can easily access it from anywhere on the site. Enjoy.

SETI Team 3DNow! - - July 25

Our ascension to fame and fortune continues, we went from #93 to #77 to #73 to #70 in the Top 100 club list over the last four days and there is no stopping! If you are not yet a team member consider getting aboard now so you can say "I've been there, I won the cup!"

New supporter - - July 24

Again we signed up a new supporting website, this time another spanish language site, guķa del overclocking. If you speak spanish and want to learn about overclocking that way, pay them a visit.

3DNow! workshop - - July 23

If you are looking for our workshop, try try this page and check out the forum under Software where the newest developments are discussed before they get html-ized on the project page.

Team 3DNow! SETI - - July 23

After making our debut in the Top 100 on rank 93 yesterday, today we shot up to #77! Great work everyone, keep it up and we soon will be in the Top 50!

Mousepads? - - July 22

I've just been pointed to another good idea for the campaign, what do you guys think about Everglide mouse pads (I've been told those rule) with the campaign logo on them for your desk? Speak your mind on the forum. I think we'd need a minimum order of 500 units to have that done, maybe 1000, though, I'll have Jon inquire.

Team 3DNow! - - July 22

Ho ho ho. We made our debut on the SETI Club stats page at rank 93 and at our current speed will plow up towards Rank 82 like a freight train, good work everyone!

On the RC5 team there are still a bunch of slots free (typed sluts there first, oh damnation), so if you have only little CPU time to spare but want to be on one of our teams I recommend you join that one, it can still use reinforcment even though we went up more than 2000 ranks yesterday!

Steve is AWOL - - July 21

Steve, our codemaster, let me know that he has to pull a disappearing act for a couple of days to deal with some real life matters that popped up like a rake someone forgot in the high grass and smacked him upside the noggins.

Make good use of the time by posting on the workshop forums and digging up FFT algorithms for him.

New poll - - July 21

I already threatened to do that and after our last poll gave us such a strong mandate to optimize SETI@Home, now for the question whether you'd like to be able to buy "Get 3DNow!" t-shirts to show where you're coming from. Go and vote :)

Time to thank - - July 21

Well, I think it is time to thank someone on our staff who worked largely behind the scenes, it's Jonathan Hou who takes care of the hardware and software lists to keep them current and he also designed the site header graphic and our campaign button. Thanks guy!

Send if you want!

Sweepstake finals! - - July 21

Our last day of the sweepstake is over and we have 2 t-shirt winners and the weekly prize of a Voodoo3-3000 is going away too!

The winners are:

• 3dfx t-shirt - Gunter Lahm, Nürnberg, Germany
• 3dfx t-shirt - Charles Castioni, NY
• Voodoo3-3000 - Jeffrey Clulow, OR

Workshop Problem - - July 21

Okay folks, I know what I said previously about not wanting to use another FFT algorithm because Seti might balk at it. However, Intel has taken this liberty in their optimizations, so I think we should to. Your new mission should you chose to accept it is (and you must) find the fastest c/c++ FFT you can and post it in the forums. I will review them all and select the one that offers the closest match in terms of numerical performance to the current FFT, while offering the greatest performance increase.

Sorry about this, but I had to hear this from Intel and not Seti.. hey Seti guys, e-mail me!.

Top 100! - - July 21

Ha! A few minute ago we passed the incumbent #100 team by 6 units to take their rank in the SETI club stats. It will take a little while for this result to be updated on the ranking page, though. We are also within 2 units of the #99 team and in striking distance of several others.

Good work, all of you team members, we needed every single unit for this and will continue to need you, keep it up!

Seti, Seti Workshop and More Seti - - July 21

Good Morning (barely) folks,

First of all I figured I would let all of you know, Team 3DNow! looks good to move into the top 100 today. You guys are great, keep up the good work.

Now onto the Seti Workshop. I am hoping to have some more of that up either late today or early tomorrow depending on how my work schedule goes. I could have tossed something up by now, but the entire point of the workshop is to be informative.

Also, with respect to the FFT that we are using for this workshop. I have had a number of people (quite correctly) point out that this is far from the most efficient FFT out there. However, this is the FFT that Seti is using. Therefore, since we are in the business of speeding up existing code, we will do all we can with this FFT and pass along recommendations for algorithm changes to Seti.

Keep on running those seti blocks.

SETI Team 3DNow! - - July 20

Wow, folks, we rock, I am not kidding you. We caught up on Rank 100 from 500 units last night to 130 right now thanks to a disciplined output from the regulars and a couple heavy new members. Welcome :)

I have one request to make, though, namely (literally) that you give yourself at least a nickname so we can refer to you in some way on the forums and here on the news. Also I'd like to encourage all members to use the forum, that's what it is there for and we want to be a community, nobody asked for an oath of silent labor :)

Sweepstake - - July 20

Yes, you guessed it, I managed to forget the drawing for tonight, this means tomorrow will be the final drawing and I'll give away the last 2 3dfx t-shirts and the weekly prize, the Voodoo3-3000 board!

New supporter - - July 20

Boy, we're on a roll here today with news, don't you love it?

We've got another supporter, Quantum Studios, a web site design company, they also run two machines for our great SETI team.

Seti Team.... - - July 20

Just a brief little note to all of you out there, we have just finished our 2000th block. Congrats go to Björn Lieske who turned in the block approximately 4:25pm EST.

Thanks and keep up the good work, we are quickly closing on the top 100.

Slave Zero 3DNow! enabled - - July 20

I just received word that Slave Zero has 3DNow! support and hence we upgraded it to green on our software list. Also we have a little DOS utility to download from the binaries page, it allows you to identify your CPU and some key features like MMX, 3DNow! support and whether the FPU is pipelined or not.

Campaign t-shirt? - - July 20

I was just idly readying up on good ways to meet chicks when it occured to me that it may be a nice idea to have a t-shirt with a print for the campaign on it (which, coincidentially, reminded me that I have to pester AMD about an Athlon t-shirt so I can show my face in public again).

I think I'll go ask that question in the next poll, which is approaching soon anyway. If you have any connections in the t-shirt printing business and would be able to help, contact .

Workshop launched - - July 20

Our first workshop is underway on the SETI@Home Fast Fourier Transformation routine that is the performance critical part of the software. You can read up on the problem here and offer your ideas and ask questions on the workshop forum.

SETI Team 3DNow! - - July 20

Here's a frequent reminder that you should use the text based client to speed up operations over the graphical thingiemadoo. Either use the Linux client or the Windows NT 386 command line one, it will run fine on Windows 98 and much faster!

We are slowly catching up with the Top 100 teams and, if we continue our good work, will soon be one of them! Go 3DNow!

If you are a member and are not listed on the team, please note that only the Top 100 contributors are listed, we can't help that as much as we'd like to :/

Day 12 Winner - - July 19

We have another winner for Monday, his name is Michael Restine, Sr. from New Mexico, he'll be able to keep warm in a 3dfx t-shirt in that state so renowned for the wind chill! Congratulations! Two more days of games and fun and then we're out of sweepstakes, a first in our long history .. waaahh.

Well, never fret, we shall try to prey some of those excess inventory CPUs from AMD sometime later this summer :)

Seti, www.3Dnow.org and hello. - - July 19

Since this is my first 'news' post I guess I should say hello, so 'Hello'. Now onto business...

Thanks to everyone that voted for us to add 3DNow! enhancements to the Seti@home core. While nothing is for certain yet, things are looking up. However I notice that at this time, 242 people have voted to add 3d-now support and yet only 114 are on the www.3dnow.org team.. if you aren't already on a team join ours at the following url. Team 3DNow!@Seti page ;). Remember the more people that join the team the more easily we can say to people who we want to get 3DNow! support from "Look at our user base, they want it!".

K6-III performance - - July 19

I just posted an article dealing with the performance of the K6-III under various applications. If you are considering an upgrade or try to decide whether to buy a K6-2 or a K6-III, you may find this useful.

We Won! - - July 18

After countless efforts to get SETI to allow us to develop a 3DNow! version of SETI@Home, SETI has finally agreed to examine the benchmark results of our 3DNow! version of the main portion of the code. At that time, the decision will be made up to them. Send your comments to our resident code optimizer,

Day 11 winner! - - July 18

Hah .. thought I'd forget it, huh, did ya? Well, you're all wrong about that, we have a 3dfx t-shirt winner for Sunday and his name is Geraldo van Ijzendoorn, a dutch fellow. Remember our sweepstake is still running till Wednesday - after which we'll have to fly on our own *gulp* - and all valid daily entries count towards the closing prize, a Voodoo3-3000 board!

Updates - - July 17

I've updated the 3DNow! software and hardware lists as well as the binaries section.

New poll - - July 17

Our last poll was approaching the critical mark of submissions where the script crashes, so I retired it. Our new poll asks whether we should be doing the 3DNow! optimizing for SETI@Home to get the thing out of the door real quick and ticking. Vote!

More winners! - - July 17

Today we've drawn more winners, for Thursday, Friday and Saturday, respectively. They are:

• Memon Nadeem, MA
• Mike Levy, Canada
• Andre Waldmann, Münster, Germany

SETI@Home progress! - - July 17

Dr. Anderson from SETI@Home replied to my letter and identified the routine that is performance critical. According to , our resident code optimizer, the routine can be transformed into 3DNow! code without problems and could be up to 3 times faster after that.

It is now SETI@Home's call to accept our offer (requires a CPU detection routine or a software version specifically for 3DNow! CPUs), stay tuned for that.

3DNow! workshop - - July 17

Guys, here's our first really exciting project: The 3DNow! Workshop

What we'll do is show you how to convert x87 code into the proper 3DNow! code. So come forward with x87 code samples and on the workshop forum we'll work out the translation to 3DNow!.

We want code from a working program so we can measure the speed difference and play with some tweaks to see how they influence the performance. Native x87 code is preferred over C/C++ code for faster convertability and the code must be easily testable, i.e. part of a standalone module. Code going into commercial products caries no charge, other than acknowledgement of the programming team.

You can mail directly with it.

SETI and 3DNow! - - July 17

Ok, I just mailed Dr. David Anderson, the project director of SETI@Home regarding the 3DNow! optimising issue:

David,

My name is Armin Lenz, I am the managing editor of "Get 3DNow!" http://www.3dnow.org, the campaign for the proliferation of 3DNow! support in applications, drivers and games.

We are an initiative founded last month that is carried by two dozen independent websites that aims at getting 3DNow! SIMD support into all software that can expect a honest boost from this technology and SETI@Home seems to be a prime example considering the vast amount of floating point operations required.

Dan Werthimer told me that I should be contacting you about making 3DNow! improvements to the client software. Now I just read that Intel is working on implementing SSE speed-ups to the client, which makes it even more important for us to get a 3DNow! enabled version for our AMD users as soon as possible.

I'd like to suggest that you either put the client code into free source under the GPL license to allow for the community to tackle the problem Linux-style and improve the code to generate a 3DNow! performance version, or to provide it to us under a project NDA so we can do it with a small project group including developer staff from Cyrix and AMD who offered to lend us a hand.

I don't see why Intel should get access to the code and the 3DNow! community doesn't unless there has been a financial agreement that would explicitly prohibit it.

Best regards,

Armin Lenz

P.S. Our SETI Team 3DNow! counts 108 members and 1421 completed units at this time, with an average output of about 100 units/day as of yesterday. And that is without 3DNow! optimizations.

Back - - July 17

I'm back in town after a short trip, this means that tonight I'll hold a drawing for the sweepstake that covers the days I missed! Did you all enter yourself into the Campaign Petition yet?

Are you a member of the RC5-64 Team 3DNow!? Or of SETI Team 3DNow!? Hmmm? Are you? Are you? :)

SETI crippled on AMD, Cyrix and IDT CPUs? - - July 17

According to Ace's Hardware, SETI is being optimized by Intel for all x86 CPUs including 3DNow! CPUs. We can expect SSE support (duh!) but what about 3DNow! support. They also got a repsonse from an AMD engineer:

She was very disappointed to learn that Intel would be given access to optimizing the SETI client for K6-x and her new baby K7. Since it is unlikely that Intel engineers could or would optimize for AMD processors, however on the converse, it is quite likely that they can make coding choices that are neutral to Intel processors, and detrimental to AMD processors. The same goes for Cyrix and other Intel competitors

So if you want SETI 3DNow!, vote in our poll, sign up in the Get 3DNow! campaign and we'll show them how important 3DNow! is.

New supporter - - July 15

Today again we welcome a new supporter, Savage Daily News, which covers news related to the two latest S3 graphic chips, Savage3D and Savage4. Knowing as to how badly S3 needs to implement 3DNow! they were more than eager to support us so we can support them. Pay them a visit.

SETI Team 3DNow! - - July 14

Hey, good going folks, 1200 units are passed tonight and over 100 members.

Looking at the Top 100, though, I see that we are not catching up, the minimum bid is over 1800 already, so we need more and faster output to compete.

If you have not signed up with the team yet, I encourage you to join. If you are running with us already, use the text based clients to double or triple your output! Let's hunt them suckers down and pass them on our way to the top. This is 3DNow!

Bad news - - July 14

I have some news, which you can read verbatim here:

AMD's president, COO and CTO Atiq Raza resigned from all these positions for personal reasons. He also vacates his seat on the board of directors. This is considered bad news by analysts.

AMD posted a loss of $162 million, which is better than the warning issued a couple weeks ago that spoke of a quarter billion.

IDT is selling Centaur, speak Winchip, withdrawing from the x86 business. This means the same fate as Cyrix, only IDT claims to have potential buyers lined up so survival may be likely.

AMD is confident to ship a million (!) Athlons in the fourth quarter. This is better than expected.

Looks like a mixed bag of good and bad. I'm already looking forward to the 1 million new site supporters in the next 3 months!

Winner! - - July 14

We have two winners tonight, first Viktor Solis from the Philipines who won today's 3dfx t-shirt and the winner of our weekly prize, a Voodoo3-3000 board: It goes to Jon Asplund in Sweden. Congratulations!

The next few days I will not have the time to draw winners so we let them accumulate from Thursday to Saturday, you may enter three times during that period and three t-shirts will be drawn Saturday night!

Sign the petition! - - July 14

Frequent reminder, folks, if you didn't put yourself on our campaign petition we'll stay weak and without impact! If you want 3DNow! to be proliferated, head over here and sign up. If you want to be on our newsletter list too, add your email address to it on the form just underneath.

New supporting sites - - July 14

We have two new supporting sites:

• Game Downloads
• Naked Gamer

Day 6 Winner - - July 13

Our 3dfx sweepstake has a new winner of a 3dfx t-shirt, Jimmy Hatlemark from Norway! Congratulations, Jimmy.

Don't forget to enter again today and the following week to get a shot at winning a 3dfx t-shirt or one of the two Voodoo3-3000 boards we give away!

ATi 3DNow! drivers - - July 13

Guys, I whipped up a comparision of the new ATi beta 3DNow! drivers Jon announced below, you can find it over at Full On 3D at this location. I guess after reading that you'll want them.

Rage 128 3DNow! drivers - - July 13

New BETA Win9X Rage 128 3DNow! drivers:
This driver includes:
- optimizations for Quake3 Test.
- optimizations for 3DNow! with AMD K6-* and Athlon.
- optimizations for Streaming SIMD Extensions with the Intel Pentium III.
- support for high resolutions, up to and including 1920x1440.
Get them as well as newer NT 4.0 drivers over here.

IBM Aptiva K7s - - July 12

Don't know if you caught my news item at Full On 3D yesterday, so here goes: IBM projects 50,000 units for 1999 in sales of their K7 powered Aptiva line which they'll equip with ELSA Erazor III Ultra TNT-2 boards.

The unclear point is whether this is the full number of K7 Aptivas they plan to sell or just the model with the ELSA board as the information comes from a source with the video OEM, not IBM.

Driver poll - - July 12

The driver poll crashed under the number of votes again (cheap cr*p), so here the results.

Winner - - July 12

Finally wrapped up the last 72 hours of the 3dfx sweepstake and the three winners for the last 3 days of a 3dfx t-shirt each are:

• Kevin Trasente, OK
• Martin Brown, NC
• Denis Plovier, Belgium

SETI Team 3DNow! - - July 11

While still in need of members, our SETI Team 3DNow!is approaching the 1000st unit and will likely post it early Monday! Wow, good going guys, at around 1500 we should show in the Top 100 list!

New supporter - - July 11

Hardly a day without a new supporter: VTR online, a second french site has joined us.

NVidia driver comparision - - July 10

I compared the 1.88 vs the 2.08 reference driver versions for the TNT-2 over in a brief article at Full On 3D. You can check it out here, half of it is done on the K6-III/450.

RC5-64 Team 3DNow! needs more members - - July 10

We're just 8 so far and even though we do rather well, we need more help. I'd like a team the size of Team 3DNow! SETI to push us into the big league in both places!

To download the client, go here, it will only use up your idle CPU time and help to strengthen encryption that will at some point protect your credit card numbers, too! A day after the first results were sent in by you, you'll be able to join our team from your statistics page.

If you have problems, ask on our forums.

New supporter signed up - - July 10

I already talked about it a little while back but today it becomes all official-like by adding the banner and link, amd.strefa.com has joined the ranks of our supporters. Do you know of any other big AMD sites that are still missing? Post on the forum.

3dfx sweepstake @ www.3DNow.Org - - July 09

Simon Waddington of London, UK, is the lucky t-shirt winner of Day 2's 3dfx sweepstake @ www.3DNow.Org. Only those who enter can win, only those who enter every day have a perfect shot at the Voodoo3-3000 we'll give away next Wednesday!

New supporter - - July 09

Officially linked to Generation K7, our first supporting site from Australia today, pay them a visit!

We still have poor registration for the campaign petition, if you have a 3DNow! CPU and want better support for it I urge you to sign up to it here.

Team 3DNow! SETI - - July 09

Hey, we should be posting the 800st work unit today, that's great work everyone!

3dfx Sweepstake Day 1 winner - - July 08

The winner of a 3dfx t-shirt for the day is Simon Varisto from Finland. Congratulations!

All prizes should be shipping - - July 08

All winner adresses are in and forwarded to the sponsors of our Grand Opening Sweepstake, so I expect that shipping is underway. If you don't receive your stuff within 2 weeks please notify me so I can fret. Thanks!

Netscape compatible - - July 08

You may have noticed if you use Netscape that the pages now work fine with it as had the time to fix them for compatibility. Send him email :)

Campaign petition list - - July 08

I just counted the number of entries on the campaign petition list and felt like crying .. less than 150 entries. What's wrong?

New supporter - - July 08

You may already have noticed that we signed up another supporting site, Siliconews. Pay them a visit.

Prize not claimed - new winner! - - July 07

We had one winner who didn't claim his Cyrix t-shirt and mousepad prize on Day 3 of the Grand Opening Sweepstake, hence I am handing it to someone else who entered that day: Sam Bao of Pratt, KS.

3dfx Sweepstake @ www.3DNow.Org - - July 07

Ta-taaaaaaaa! Since 3dfx loves us so much we'll launch right into another sweepstake, with t-shirts for daily prizes and a Voodoo3-3000 each week for Slam Prizes!

The sweepstake runs 2 weeks starting right now and you can enter it through this link.

Please read the rules and obey them to be eligible to win. If you didn't fill out the survey or the campaign petition yet, let this be your waking call.

SETI Team 3DNow! needs you! - - July 07

SETI Team 3DNow! is looking for more members dedicating computer time to the discovery of sentinent life in space - after we established there is none on this planet.

Get your client here and sign up with us here. We want to be in the Top 100 next week and the Top 10 by the end of August!

3dfx sweepstake soon - - July 07

I didn't forget about it, our 3dfx sweepstake will open soon, I have to make some last adjustments and tests then I will put the link up. We'll have 7 t-shirts and one Voodoo3-3000 boards each week, for two weeks.

Get 3DNow! gets more manufacturer support - - July 06

Thought I'd mention it, have a little look at this link :)

Review of Gigabyte GA-660 TNT-2 - - July 06

I just finished up my review of the Gigabyte GA-660 TNT-2 board, which was done on both a K6-III/450 and Celeron 450. I also compared it to the ELSA Winner II (Savage 4 Pro), ELSA Erazor III (TNT-2) which we just gave three of away in the sweepstake, the ATi Rage Fury 32 and the Leadtek S320 TNT. Go and read it if you care.

Forums are going up! - - July 06

pbrain set up our forum software after I robbed a little old lady of her lifetime savings to buy the license - I hope AMD will decide to sponsor it and reimburse me or I won't eat next month.

Remember that in order to be allowed to post or reply you have to register yourself, that will enhance the quality of the posts as people have to stand to what they write :)

The Grand Prize Winner - - July 06

Our Grand Prize Winner, taking home an AMD K6-III/450 and an Epox MVP3G-M motherboard both donated by AMD, comes from the Netherlands, entered the sweepstake every day but today and yesterday and goes by the name of Maurits Westein from Utrecht. Congratulations!

Day 10 winners - - July 06

Our winners on the last day of the Grand Opening Sweepstake are:

• 3dfx t-shirt - Sonya Dougan, Brisbane, Australia
• Cyrix t-shirt and mousepad - Michael Yamada, Santa Maria, CA
• Max Payne -Ayris Alcala, North Bergen, NJ

Grand Opening Sweepstake is over! - - July 06

Yep, just closed the lid on it. The daily winners and of course our lucky Grand Prize winner will be announced shortly.

Come back tomorrow to enter in our next sweepstake, sponsored by 3dfx with daily t-shirts and a V3-3000 board every week - the 3dfx sweepstake!

New day, new supporters! - - July 06

Good morning once more! Today, too, we open the day with new supporting sites joining our ranks:

• french site Rapide PC, the guys who brought you the shots of the K7 and K7 motherboard the other day
• amd.strefa.com, THE polish site for AMD news agreed to join the next couple days

Commercial interest in 3DNow! - - July 05

I received email from the lead programmer at Beyond 3D Security in Australia. They are working on several simulation projects which use 3DNow! enhancements and consider having us fill some of their beta testing slots once the projects reach the appropriate levels of maturity. This, or course, we'll gladly do.

Cyrix news - - July 05

I just got off a chat with a source at Cyrix, I posted the information I received on multiprocessor support, 3DNow! with Socket 370 boards etc in the news at Full On 3D. Interesting stuff in there, I must say!

rc5 Team 3DNow! - - July 05

Looks like we only have 2 rc5 fighters so far. Come on, all this thing does is eat the idle cycles on your CPU when you don't need it anyway and it will help to create more secure encryption that will some day protect your own online transactions :)

To get the proper client, just go here and you'll be led through the installation. A day after submitting your first block, you'll be able to find yourself in the stats and enter your user info (idiotic setup, I know) and with the password you can join the team. Read up on what to do here. Hope to see you on the team soon!

We're also still looking for massive numbers of new members for our SETI@Home Team 3DNow! which works after the same principle of distributed processing but runs as a screensaver (or fulltime) instead off while-at-work idle cycles.

Day 9 Winners - - July 05

As our sweepstake approaches the last day, here are the winners for Day 9:

• 3dfx t-shirt - Robert Kalnins, Princeton, NJ
• Cyrix t-shirt and mousepad - Ivan Wilcken, Phoenix, AZ
• Max Payne - James Gold, San Jose, CA
• ELSA Erazor III with 3D Revelator - Joseph Drake, Austin, TX

New supporter added - - July 05

VoodooStation, a german 3dfx centered site, joined our supporters. Pay them a visit if you speak german.

Server problems - - July 05

It looks like the webspace provider had some trouble with their nameserver today so if our IP was not cached by your browser anymore you have been unable to reach the site, sorry about that, we'll execute someone to make sure it doesn't occur again.

To make up for the problem, I am extending today's sweepstake by 3 hours so you can get in still if you were blocked out by this accident.

CPU Poll at Rivazone - - July 05

I received word that Rivazone is doing a poll on what CPU people own. Since there is only one kind of CPU worth owning .. you get my drift?

Supporters - - July 05

Good morning :) We start the day with a new supporting website, Dimension 128, the place where we got those NVidia reference drivers from lately! Welcome aboard, Snake.

Speaking of supporters, did you sign up to the Campaign Petition yet? No? Well I guess if you run a 3DNow! enabled system you just might want to consider it!

More votes, more votes! - - July 04

Peeps, we need more votes on the sponsorship thing to make a convincing plea to AMD, so cast yours, please!

New supporter added - - July 04

No day without new supporting websites, today it is Rivastation. Also added to our ad rotator was PC Benchmarks after Eric sent me his banner.

Day 8 Winners - - July 04

This is the home stretch, baby! Day 8 is over and again we have deliriously happy winners:

• 3dfx t-shirt - Justin Paluch, Amherst, OH
• Cyrix t-shirt and mousepad - Benjamin Sun, Monterey Park, CA
• Max Payne - Hartawan Laksmono, Columbus, OH
• IDT Winchip 2-266 CPU - Tony Franzese, Eaton, OH

Statistics are in! - - July 04

I just got the analysis of the week ending Sunday 1am from the provider and I have to say I am quite impressed with the turnout. The logs recorded 22,291 visits this week, peaking on Monday with 232,000 hits and the low on Saturday at 65,500 (those Independence Day weekends suck for websites).

Total we ferried off an impressive 4 GB of data this week (which might get our butt in trouble with the provider if we kept this up all month long). All together the main page received 22,007 visitors.

I think that's quite good for starters but not enough to make a real dent in the armour of the more aloof developers. So spread the word, hook your friends and family up and get your dog internet access! Once we get 100,000 visits a week we'll have enough steam to throw a couple of stern looks at the likes of Activision.

rc5 Team 3DNow! - - July 04

While not capable of using 3DNow! support for exactly this job, we also have a team for rc5 cracking started by . rc5 is a distributed computing task just like SETI@Home with the goal to crack encryptions to test the strength of various encryption schemes. If you are more into that than finding ET, this might be for you!

You can download the software here and join the team here. Good cracking. We'll offer a forum for this team on the forums too, once they are online (mid-week I estimate).

John Carmack on K7 - - July 03

John Carmack has some scores and choice words on the K7. Click on the link to read them.

Team 3DNow! ranking - - July 03

Here's the link to the club ranking page for SETI@Home. See where we are with Team 3DNow!? No? Well, I guess that's because we need more members to put out more results! Join today!

New member site - - July 03

Yet another site joined our little campaign bandwagon today, #3dfx_news, a spanish site publishing in - you guess it - spanish. Welcome :)

Forums - - July 03

It looks like the vast majority favours sponsorship by AMD so far. To approach them I would like to ask for a favour from you - drive that vote up higher so I can show them some serious numbers. If I come to them saying "300 people think you should sponsor that" it doesn't make the impact of "1000 people think you should sponsor it". Please?

Day 7 winners - - July 03

Day 7 is over and Day 8 has begun in our Grand Opening Sweepstake - gee, is it a week already? Feels like a month :)

The winners for Day 7 are:

• 3dfx t-shirt - Kevin Metcalfe, Tas, Australia
• Cyrix t-shirt and mousepad - Jason Freeland, Oklahoma City, OK
• Max Payne - Brian Tan, Perth, Australia
• 3dfx Voodoo3-3000 - John Sayeau, Canada

Team 3DNow! - - July 03

Team 3DNow! is shaping up nicely with 69 members so far. I am sure if we can sign up 500 we'll be able to work our way into the Top 50 of the Club statistics, so keep signing up and produce units, folks, we can't be bested by Intel folks!

Intel feeling the pressure - - July 02

Just read that Intel plans to launch their Pentium III-600 at a significantly lower price than previously planned ($823 originally) to combat Athlon-600 by price (which is scheduled to ship at $699 two weeks after P3-600 rolls out).

That, of course, won't hurt Intel as much as it could AMD since Intel can throw wads of cash it previously looted from its customers by lowering their inflated prices, but overall it obviously is a kiss-the-floor for the arrival of the Master. Oh - and the price performance ratio is still well in favour of Athlon even if Intel only takes $599 a unit.

Day 6 Winners - - July 02

Our sweepstake is in the end run towards the Grand Prize, so keep those submissions coming daily to raise your chances! Our winners for Day 6 are:

• 3dfx t-shirt - Leslie Chung, Singapore
• Cyrix t-shirt and mousepad - Steve Ciesla, Las Vegas, NV
• Max Payne - Nicola Cassolato, Riese Pio X, Italy
• IDT Winchip 2-266 - Michael Kaesper, Cologne, Germany

CPU Poll - go vote - - July 01

iXBT has a poll as to which CPU you may want for your next computer, left side on the main page. Go and tell them who's the king of the hill!

Forum Poll 2 - - July 01

After 391 votes I closed the poll, a majority of 57.1% wants for us to set up local forums for the campaign community and we'll listen to that!

The software most suitable for the purpose is UltimateBBS which is also used at 3DNow.Net and Full On 3D, hence you won't have to learn new tricks.

Problem with that is the price, $67 for a one year lease, $157 for ownership of the license which someone, by default I, will have to pick up. I have some ideas as to how to neutralize those costs, please let me know in the poll which you think is right.

New Supporters - - July 01

We added two new supporting websites to our network of friends:

• Strategic Gaming Network (opening soon)
• 3DNow! UK

Day 5 Winners - - July 01

Day 5 is over and Day 6 began. Our winners for Day 5 are:

• 3dfx t-shirt - James Erthal, Ft. Rucker, AL
• Cyrix t-shirt and mousepad - Ray Griffith, Wallis, TX
• Max Payne - Cynthia Singh, Keller, TX
• Erazor III and 3D Revelator - Aaron Cloutman, Manhattan Beach, CA

New supporters added - - June 30

Boy, aren't you glad we don't report daily news, you'd never get done reading :)

Some of you may have noticed that we have another bunch of supporters:

• 3D Rage
• Coyote's Den
• Eric Mintz' PC Benchmarks
• Armin Gerritsen's CPUSite

SETI@Home 1.05 - - June 30

SETI has the first updated version of SETI@Home out which fixes some bugs in the 1.0 version but didn't add 3DNow! support yet. Grab it from the link above and join Team 3DNow!.

Day 4 Winners - - June 30

Day 4 of our drawing is over and here are the winners:

• 3dfx t-shirt - Alex Lorenzen, Ranchos Palos Verdes, CA
• Cyrix t-shirt and mousepad - Naik Jagesar, Utrecht, Netherlands
• Max Payne - Sean Flynn, Canberra, Australia
• IDT Winchip 2-266 CPU - Erwin de Buijzer, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Boycott Yahoo! - - June 30

You may have read about it already, Yahoo! has put a change into their Terms of Services for all Yahoo! owned sites (which includes GeoCities) which grants them copyrights to all content you may have on these services (i.e. that invention you made and discuss on a Yahoo! forum, your GeoCities website, the ideas you send through their email service etc). They may, under this Term of Services, use your stuff to their monetary gain, give it to other people as they see fit etc.

This of course if nothing any sane mind can tolerate. Hence some people called into life a Boycott Yahoo! Campaign.

As a creator of original content on the web I encourage you to participate in this and force Yahoo! to surrender that clause unconditionally and apologize for this brazen attempt of theft. Don't use their search engine anymore, stop using their Yahoo! email service and take your site from GeoCities to a different free provider - and make sure to wipe the account clean.

Campaign petition list created - - June 29

I added a new option to the Campaign List page. Now you can sign up without your email address to have www.3DNow.Org represent you towards developers and manufacturers, this will be the head count that makes the most impact, so enter yourself please!

Secondly there still is the form for the mailing list, if you give us your email address you'll receive a copy of the newsletter that notifies you of important events relating to the site, campaign and upcoming sweepstakes.

Day 3 winners - - June 29

Day 3 of our Grand Opening Sweepstake is over and here are our winners:

• 3dfx t-shirt - Matthew Bennett, New Albany, MS
• Cyrix t-shirt and mousepad - Christian Lipphardt, Lohfelden, Hessen, Germany
• Max Payne - Eulogio Apelin, Honolulu, HI
• 3dfx Voodoo3-3000 - Randall Ted, Champlin, MN

Athlon NDA - - June 29

Rapide PC, a french site, sent me the information that AMD's Athlon non-disclosure agreement with the press runs until August 9 and that for manufacturers until August 16. I am taking a bet that this means you won't be able to buy a system until then, either, since otherwise you could easily get and post the benchmarks the press can't - hell, I probably would, be it my financial downfall or not.

SETI Team 3DNow! - - June 28

Call me stupid, but, hey, why not just vote with your feet? I set up a group Team 3DNow! at SETI, follow this link to join up with it if you're already running SETI@Home, otherwise you can get the software from here, depending on your platform pick the right one and then join up when you have your account set up.

IDT joins sweepstake sponsors - - June 28

Ayup. Now we have stuff from all three 3DNow! CPU makers! IDT gave 3 boxed Winchip 2-266 CPUs (with thermal grease and heatsink/fan) as additional Daily Slam prizes!

The first of those we'll throw in tomorrow, followed by another Erazor III with shutter glasses Wednesday!

Day 2 Winners - - June 28

Winners on Day 2 were these people:

• 3dfx t-shirt - Lee Sze Min, Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia
• Max Payne - Benjamin Chan, Duluth, MN

More prizes upcoming - - June 28

We just received word from Cyrix that they will give t-shirts and mousepads for the rest of the sweepstake, so starting with Day 3 we'll add a bundle of Cyrix t-shirt and mousepad to the daily prizes!

SIMD poll - - June 27

Systemlogic runs a poll on their main page (left side, one screen down) about which SIMD technology is best, 3DNow!, Altivec or SSE. 3DNow! is lagging behind, need I say more?

Let's show them where the home of the hammer is :)

Day One winners - - June 27

Winners of the first day of our Grand Opening Sweepstake are:

• 3dfx t-shirt - Kurt Adkins, Manchester, England
• Max Payne - Sake Hoekstra, Netherlands
• Erazor III + 3D Revelator - Dieter Schwarzkopf, Konstanz, Germany

Day 2 of the Sweepstake - - June 27

Day One of our sweepstake is over and I am putting on my blindfold to make the three lucky winners, they will be named here in a few minutes and notified by email!

Today we have a 3dfx t-shirt and one copy of May Payne up for grabs. Also your participation will count towards the Grand Prize. Tomorrow I think I'll throw in a V3-3000 from 3dfx as Daily Slam addition.

Participation - - June 27

Thank you for your great participation so far! I am a little sad that we were not mentioned on some of the bigger news sits like VoodooExtreme, BluesNews, Anandtech or 3DNews.Net, maybe some of you could send them email asking to plug the site? That would be great.

We are getting great feedback on the survey, keep that up! I added a few more options to the CPU and Rendition to the 3D accelerator question since I forgot that in the first version, if you were affected please take it now. Mailing list subscriptions are a little on the low side still, are you concerned about privacy?

GRAND OPENING! - - June 26

Ladies and Gentlemen!

It is with pleasure that I hereby officially open the doors of www.3DNow.Org, the "Get 3DNow!" initiative for the proliferation of 3DNow! support!

Please help yourself on our buffet, take part in our Grand Opening Sweepstake to win fantastic 3DNow! enabled prizes, subscribe to the campaign mailing list and take our survey to give us an impression what your interests are!

Welcome, welcome, welcome every day! Enjoy :)

Survey - - June 26

Ok, we are almost there. I just put up the survey form to gather anonymous data to figure out what gear and preferences people visiting here have so we can target our work accordingly. Give it a look and a fill-out if you want here.

Opening is drawing closer - - June 25

Our official opening is getting closer, friends! I am securing the last items for our grand opening sweepstake and I can tell you, they are sweet!

AMD is donating the Grand Prize, a K6-III/450 with Epox MVP3G motherboard, the same combination I am running and I can promise whoever the big winner will be, he/she is a fortunate soul!

We also have 2 Voodoo3-3000, 3 bundles consisting of Erazor III and 3D Revelator shutter classes, a daily t-shirt from 3dfx and one copy of the upcoming hit game Max Payne from Remedy Entertainment.

Athlon jokes - - June 23

Speculation is running amok that the dual CPU Athlon systems will be called .. you guess it ... BiAthlon. Which part is skiing and which is shooting is not clarified yet.

Tune in tomorrow to the 4 CPU system where one is broken, called TriAthlon. This is the one with the Ironman chipset, hehe

AMD announces Athlon, pricing - - June 23

AMD just released the news on Athlon (formerly known as K7), including the FAQ. Pricing is as follows:

• $699 for the 600 MHz model
• $479 for the 550 MHz part
• $324 for the 500 MHz piece, each based on 1,000 unit purchases

Relevant links - - June 22

I put up a preliminary list of links regarding 3DNow! and the CPUs that love it. Please check it out and for further inclusions. Don't mind the rotten look under Netscape, that will be fixed.

Opening Sweepstakes - - June 22

Some more news for you, friends. We are aiming at a launch on Friday now to fill in more goodies before we kick off and to give two of the companies we asked for prizes the time to get through their red tape for approval.

So far we lined up 2 Voodoo3-3000s and t-shirts from 3dfx, 10 copies of the upcoming Max Payne from 3DRealms/Remedy and 3 bundles consisting of ELSA's Erazor III and the cable version of their 3D Revelator shutter glasses.

All great stuff indeed and we're proud as hell that they recognize our efforts like this!

K7 information - - June 21

We are still adding in material and are compiling a list of essential background stuff. As a first important document there is JC's K7 curtain call, which is a careful collection of all leaked information and educated guesstimates on the chip - you'll be hard pressed to find something comparable. We'll move it into the proper place before opening day.

New Site Design - - June 20

There's a "new" site design for preview here. We've designed a brand new logo and animated link button so check it out! Remember this is preliminary and the end product might and will probably be totally different. Tell us what you think about the new design

How to link to us - - June 18

As you can see we have some pretty button for the campaign. If you run a webpage or site and want to support us, please check the small conditions we ask for you to meet. Then use this HTML code to put the button somewhere on your page where it is seen (like on the side as we do):

Grand Opening Sweepstake - - June 17

For those of you who are visiting here already (and hopefully daily, even if we're still slow), some more teaser news on the grand opening sweepstake we'll be holding.

It is set to start next week, likely Wednesday and will last for ten days with daily prizes. On the last day we'll draw a grand prize which I hope will come from AMD and pack some punch - who else would be suitable?

So far we have 10 copies of an upcoming, 3DNow! accelerated (of course) game from 3DRealms that looks like a smash hit already - our winners will receive a copy right when it goes into sale - and t-shirts and 2 Voodoo3-3000 boards from 3dfx. Sounds juicy, huh?

greetings to our italian friends - - June 16

I would like to direct your attention to the Italian 3DNow! Zone. That's right, all of you Italian folk who have been holding out on making that 3DNow! enabled CPU purchase can finally go for broke knowing that their are fellow Italians like Moreno to help you get your 3DNow! news.

Excellent looking website btw.

News script etc - - June 16

As you can see pbrain set up the news script, so we'll be able to easily post updates. I just finished uploading the supporters and mission pages. Let me know if you think my wording is goofy or not getting to the point.

progress, man's distinctive mark. - - June 16

I would like to be the first to welcome www.3dnow.org's newest member, Adrian Hirst. He will get his bio info to me and I will update the contacts page accordingly. He has some really good ideas for the site and brings along with him some very useful skills. Keep on the lookout for his stuff, I expect it to be high caliber work. Welcome aboard!

On a side note, I figured out the code bug for Netscape users. It is in the Tables I created for the games and hardware compatibility pages. I will fix it soon I promise. Call me lazy.

I seriously need to start manageing my time better :o). FO3D Calls, I will be back later.

mission [reprint] - - June 16

I got a nice bunch of reactions to the site going online, all of them positive (although it looks like this will turn into real work, hehe). Some are still uncertain about what we want to accomplish, whether we're just a money making scheme, excluding other websites etc.

To separate nonsense and sense I'll post up our mission statement later tonight and how you can support us, as well. I'll put the word up here when it is done. /armin/

MMX and 3DNow! libraries for linux [reprint] - - June 16

Well you won't catch me without some goodies to post, so here's links to Linux libraries for 3DNow! and MMX. Not entirely newbie stuff, so be warned of installation hurdles. /armin/

new color scheme [reprint] - - June 16

Jon busted out some updated color schematics because my lame ass couldn't get online all night.  You can view his proposed color change for www.3dnow.org here.

personally, I like it.  The text needs to get a pbrain rubdown, but as for the logo and blue framework, well, I am kinda keen on it.  .

Also, as far as netscape goes, assuming I have a minute tomorrow, I will skip lunch and fix any compatibility issues that may remain.  I am busy with some review work for FullOn3D right now, or I would attend to it tonight.  I apologize for the inconvenience.

Also, either tomorrow or the next day, I will be installing our scripts so you can tell who is posting this crap.  Right now, from top to bottom it is pbrain - armin - pbrain - pbrain - pbrain - pbrain - pbrain for those of you keeping track. :o)

under construction [reprint] - - June 16

You doubtlessly can see for yourself that we're in beta still, this especially shows in Netscape where most pages look trashed. This will be fixed shortly, for the time being we're only IE compatible until we find the time for the other browser, sorry.

On more interesting news, I am trying to get together some big-bang prizes for an opening sweepstake, I asked AMD, 3dfx, ELSA, Remedy and a couple others to donate 3DNow! enabled bounty to give away to the participants of our grand opening. Stay tuned and spread the word to your friends and on web boards! (I don't want to get your expectations too high but I asked AMD for a K7 system as Grand Prize)

updated hardware listing [reprint] - - June 16

Mucho thanks to Psycho_Clown (again!) for sending me a current hardware list for 3dnow support action.  Only I forgot to upload the yellow.gif last night so it is showing a broken image.  Sorry about that, it'll get squared away tonight.

He also sent me some updates for the games listing.  I will post that tonight as well.  Also, the different color scheme goes up tonight.  I will post the link right here for ya to browse and love.

3DNow! libs for linux [reprint] - - June 16

Reader Richard Kolb sent in some ultra cool word on 3DNow! libs for linux.  Apparantly he heard that they are in development.  I am going to try and find out more, but this is very slick news.  Armin loves his K6-III under linux, and even goes so far to claim that it is THE x86 Linux porcessor to have, bar none.

contacts page fleshed out a little [reprint] - - June 16

Armin, Jon, and I have schlapped together the contacts page with our info on it, in case you were wondering what kind of freaks we really are.  At this point, I am sure most of you have come here from one of our other projects [ FullOn3D, or Linux3D], or know us somehow already.  Either way, you can find out more now.

We are working on a couple different color schemes tonight, and maybe posting it for reader comments.  I am not sure how many readers we have right now, but you are more than welcome to speak your mind.  I guess I just wanted to say that we aren't settled on anything yet (this being day 1 of www.3dnow.org's online presence).

I will also be cleaning up our news postings and most likely, the mission statement will be the front page.  Why?  Because 3DNow.net and FullOn3DNow! do much better news coverage then we could hope to (especially with our other commitments) so news will most likely be regulated to stuff directly related to the campagn.  Therefore, the front page will need to be highly informational.  Again, this is 24hours old (almost), things are a changin'.

games page updated [reprint] - - June 16

I posted that list that Psycho_Clown over at 3DNow.net gave me.  It looks like a pretty thorough run-down of hip games that support 3DNow!.  Like I said before, I don't have a 3DNow! enabled CPU to test these on, but if Psycho_Clown doesn't know his 3DNow! stuff, then who really does? To peep out that list, just click on the word "games" at the top or bottom of your screen.

the welcome message [reprint] - - June 16

Welcome to www.3dnow.org, the campaign for the proliferation of 3DNow! support.  This site is still under construction and should be fully operational by the end of the week.  Until then, please visit the following sites for more on 3DNow! (the extra instructions built into AMD and IDT's  latest CPU offerings).

www.amd.com

www.3dnow.net

www.fullon3d.com/3dnow/

And for a completely different bit of information on easier instructions...

click here.

Script is Up - - June 16

While I am still tweaking some of it's output, It should be smooth sailing by the end of the week. Now, to really screw with everybody, I am going to re-enter all of our previous news items into this script so we have it in our searchable database. That way we don't forget what we have already said, and you can find it all later.

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