AMD DIES, INTEL SURVIVES!!!

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Agreed, it's time AMD started competing with Intel in terms of resilience to user stupidity (that wasn't sarcasm, btw--I generally have my code compensate for user stupidity whenever possible/practical).

As for me, I'm not particularly worried--I did research, I got a suitable HSF, and I enabled health monitoring software as well. One should look elsewhere for a stupid user. :wink:

Kelledin

"/join #hackerz. See the Web. DoS interesting people."
 
>Also the palaminos don't have the heat problems that thunderbirds do

wow, you are beyond clueless, did you look at the video did you read the article?

<A HREF="http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q3/010917/heatvideo-04.html" target="_new">Palomino has thermal protection, NOT!</A>

"<b>AMD/VIA!</b>...you are <i>still</i> the weakest link, good bye!"
 
When I said that they don't have the heat problems that Thunderbirds do I meant that they use <A HREF="http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q2/010605/760mp-03.html" target="_new">less power</A> and therefore don't get as hot.

Nice <b><font color=green>Lizards</b></font color=green> <b>crunch</b> Trolls cookies....... :smile: Yummy!! :smile:
 
What, SGI likes to take the HSF off a mission-critical CPU in the middle of operation, just for kicks? WTG! Be proud of the people you work for. :lol:

Professionals know how to handle any CPU, Intel, AMD, or otherwise. Apparently you don't.

Kelledin

"/join #hackerz. See the Web. DoS interesting people."
 
>Your a moron, i'll edit this post later after I find what i'm looking for.

what? me a moron? why don't you find what you're looking for and then post, you're so pissed off you can't even see straight LOL!

the hard truth hit you hard, didn't it?

"<b>AMD/VIA!</b>...you are <i>still</i> the weakest link, good bye!"
 
Yet most people who buy OEM don't even dare to examine the inside of their PC case. There are a few water blocks out there that allow surface to air radiation but many are only designed to allow surface to water heat dissipation. With the case of the Palamino/Thunderbird, it may/will fry with either water block on water failure. The Palamino should have done what the Pentium 4 did in the test but it didn't.

{A water leak is going to fry your system so I don't see how that is the same as removing the heatsink.}
A water leak at the water block can indeed be fatal to ther PC. I keep my storage tank and pump outside the case where it gets moved around a lot. Once in a while I get a leak at the bottom hose connector of the tank but I patch it up before it could do any real damage to my floor 😉

<font color=red>It is the weakest link. They are not ready yet many have tried and failed with it.</font color=red>
 
Well he does have a point in the assumption that say if your CPU fan fails from you tinkering or from just plain old crapping out. I don’t know the exact math of it but the heat created by both the Athlon, Athlonmp and soon to be Athlonxp (kind of corny but oh well). How long before the heat sink absorbs too much heat to dissipate effectively? I think that in about 5 sec of 40w or 80w energy absorption that puppies going to blow. I personally take that as a bad conclusion for the CPU. I have had my stock fan die once and I was all worried about the thermal protection on my chip, lucky me I wasn’t disappointed. This is a very serious issue because as we see, there is more and more fans onboard systems; louder, faster fans and when one goes and your in the middle of a game or out WTF are you going to do? Im almost certain you won’t hear the fan die. Plus power down while in operation is still 5 seconds. Unless your a fast little MOFO and can pull that plug. All Im saying is that’s a big issue and no wonder the OEM's are moving away from AMD. RMA isn't cost effective.

-Spuddy


<font color=red>Being Evil Is Good. Cause I Can Be A Prick And Get Away With It.</font color=red> :lol:
 
How often do those people move their cases around enought to knock the Heatsink off? All I'm saying is that if the fan fails on a tbird it's dead, if it fails on the mp it'll be able to shutdown. If the heatsink (for some ungodly reason) falls off they are both gone. How often does that happen? Not very often, they wouldn't be able to stay in business if it did. All I'm trying to say is that is unrealistic. AMD does need to improve, but this is no reason not to buy an AMD, most servers don't use hsf, they have large passive heatsinks and use case fans to push air over them. If one of those fans go down the system shuts down. If you need absolute 100% uptime then you would have a backup system anyways.

Nice <b><font color=green>Lizards</b></font color=green> <b>crunch</b> Trolls cookies....... :smile: Yummy!! :smile:
 
When you build supercritical systems comprised of thousands of processors its good to know that if one HSF fails its not going to destoy itself and the socket it sits in let alone the whole system and sale.

With repeat customers like NASA, DOE, DOI, Raytheon, and so on. You do not want parts that fail let alone destoy themselves and the parts around them. granted some stuff does fail but why take stupid chances for 5 bucks savings (hence we are not DELL).

Obviously Keliden is clueless to "mission-critical" and the importance of the highest quality/bulletproof parts available.
 
dude, don't try and sidestep the issues, the article is about whether or not a cpu can withstand when an emergency arises, clearly the AMD cpu is quite gay.

Van Smith is the guy who exaggerated the P4 throttling and as you can see, it responds beautifully.


How many people have a heatsink fall off? Yes, it happens, but it's rare. Don't forget that someone on here pulled the power to the fan and their Tbird still ran without problems for quite a while. It was never damaged.

And P4 throttling IS an issue. I for one don't want to pay twice as much for a similarly performaing CPU that only performs at 60% of it's potential, because it thinks it's overheating.

<font color=green>They may take our lives, but they will never take our freedom!</font color=green>
 
OF all the systems I've built, I had TWO heatsinks break off the tabs after final assembly. One was sitting on the showroom floor! I was wondering why nobody was buying it, then moved the mouse and noticed it didn't move. Sure enough, a tab had broke. But that was a Pentium, they didn't need thermall protection, they would lock up at a much lower temp then necessary to damage them.

Back to you Tom...
 
Yes, we do. It is nice to know that your hardware will not be scrapped when you do get one. Large companies that buy thousands of workstations for their employees do not want to have to worry about their computers. These systems will get banged around by careless users, hit by vacuum cleaners from the cleaning crew, etc. Not only do heatsinks get jarred, but quite often CPUs come loose from their very sockets. This is a fact of life when dealing with such hostile environments. Workers sitting in an office, or cleaning them, do not care as much about their computer as you do about your home system.

When something gets loose you should be able to tighten it up and get the user back to work as quickly as possible. Time lost from an idle worker is much more expensive than the cost of that computer system, no matter what CPU you place in it. If a CPU and/or motherboard get burned up, the heat can also destroy the data on your hard drive, or even start a fire. You can lose a great deal of work this way. You also spend more money on equipment this way. Ensuring that your systems take action to prevent major damage on catastrophic failure is an absolute requirement in such environments.

-Raystonn


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =
 
Good point, but out of all the systems that I've installed I've never had a heatsink fall off. I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, just saying it's not very common.

Nice <b><font color=green>Lizards</b></font color=green> <b>crunch</b> Trolls cookies....... :smile: Yummy!! :smile:
 
Why are you saying 'nobody takes the heatsink off anyway'? That is clearly not the issue as nobody does that. The two points are
a) if you are messing round with your computer and / or overclocking it, you don't want to be forking out another $100 every time it goes wrong. Also as people have said there are water pump / pipe failure possibilties with watercooling, and if you are trying to experiment a bit then again, you don't want to be paying for every mistake. I'm not saying that every AMD chip will die instantly, but this article does show that the Intel is more likely to survive.
b) The article shows why Intel is still more popular with PC shops where joe-public buys his computer. It isn't common at all, but every time a heatsink falls off when the computer is being delivered to the customers house, if it is an AMD then it is likly that the supplier is going to have to fork out for a new one, and for a large company even a small fraction of CPUs failing can result in alot of money over time. This along with the fact that most people don't know about the superior performance of the AMD chip in most things they will be doing and think the best PC is the one with all the biggest numbers, I think make AMD less attractive to such PC shops.
Nowhere in the article does it say 'AMD are lame', and it wouldn't say that because the performance is clear. I think the point is that AMD would sell more chips if they had features like those on the P3 and P4 that save any users unfortunate enough to have a CPU overheat the cost of a new chip.

Oh yeah, does anybody know if celerons using the P3 core also have this feature of turning off before they melt? if so that would mean I could try and take mine a bit further with less fear of frying it :)
 
I have always liked the price/performance offerings from AMD, and at work all our machines are running with AMD processors), and am usually promoting the performance points to my friend(A die hard seemingly unconvertable Intel fan). After much reading on thermal solutions, and the reading of this article, I can see why IBM uses Intel processors in their servers, AMD CPU's run much hotter then Intel processors(or at least P3's, I'm not familiar with P4 power dissipation), and can be counted on to respond positively to unlikely circumstances(heatsink falls off, fan stops functioning).

Learning about different AMD cooling solutions, I can see another reason why AMD processors need to address the issues with processor heat dissipation, and integrated thermal overload protection, heatsinks are much larger then Intel equivalents, and many are more complex to mount(the original version of the Swifttech MC462 had difficulty being mounted because of the size of the base), this could possibly cause someone who is building up their first system to mount a HSF slightly incorrectly, lose a processor, and/or mainboard. Sure we are all smart enough to see when the heatsink isn't sitting right, but not everyone has mounted their own one before.

Redundancy & Reliability is what differentiates a server from a home machine, I don't believe IBM would be making any money in the server market, if everytime their Processor cooling solution failed, there was a chance of the processor being destroyed, which in turn could take out the mainboard, and possibly damage the RAID card(and so RAID configuration) attached to the dying board/processor.

So far I can see the MultiProcessing solution offered by AMD working on workstations, but I have yet to see a brand name Server(IBM, Compaq, etc) use an AMD processor. I like AMD, and will most likely buy myself an AMD machine within the near future, but if AMD wants to make brandname server machines, they have a lot of processor tweaking to do.
 
The problem is that 'not very common' multiplied by 10,000 workstations could become 'common', depending on the environment. Additionally, all it takes is one of these systems causing a fire to destroy a whole building. This might be uncommon, but it should not even be a possibility. This is one reason Intel will continue to dominate in the business and OEM market.

-Raystonn


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =
 
When you build supercritical systems comprised of thousands of processors its good to know that if one HSF fails its not going to destoy itself and the socket it sits in let alone the whole system and sale.
That's why you install health monitoring daemons to shut down the system. It's also why you get approved HSFs that aren't so heavy that they fall off on their own. It's what I've always done and what I've always advised everyone else to do, and guess what--it works. It's reliable. It's stable. If you can't do simple stuff like that, you shouldn't even be messing with your system's internals.

Performance is part of quality, and that's one area where Intel's offerings are currently lacking. Sorry if that bakes your noodle.

P.S. if a HSF falls off in a system, you've got other things to worry about besides your CPU toasting itself--like the HSF falling on cards, shorting out traces, etc. If you go in and rip the thing off yourself, you're just dumb. :lol:

Kelledin

"/join #hackerz. See the Web. DoS interesting people."
 
I' not going to argue that, you are right there. I like AMD but I will admit they have their flaws, but they are getting better. The palamino improved the thermal issues slightly, but I hope their .13 micron versions will do a much better job.

Nice <b><font color=green>Lizards</b></font color=green> <b>crunch</b> Trolls cookies....... :smile: Yummy!! :smile:
 
It would be an extreme case if one actually did fall off and then burn a building down. In general the attachments for HSF's should be reviewed and improved, and AMD needs to address this issue of thermal protection. I think its good that THG wrote that article because AMD might just take notice and do something. There are other ways to help eliminate the so called risks by using MBM5 with shutdown now set 5-10 C above max cpu temp, bios offers a shutdown option with a min' of 60C as well and I'm sure there are many other soft' options which are just as effective.
The above will not protect the CPU from a loose or fallen off HSF, as I cannot get MBM to shutdown quick enough yet, at least it will prevent the chance of my house being burnt down and hopefully save the rest of my hardware.
But as I had posted in another thread I had a P266 burn badly due to a build up of dust in a dusty environment, so when we are talking about workplace neglect that certainly fits into that category, the dust was reasonably flammable and could have burnt my workshop/business down too. Being working hours we managed to unplug it and move it before causing serious damage, imagine if it happened after hours as this system was always left on.




<font color=purple>Three ways to do things, your way, my way and the right way!</font color=purple>
 
"It would be an extreme case if one actually did fall off and then burn a building down."

Yes, but if you have 10,000 systems, the chances of this happening just multiplied by 10,000. That is not really a risk I would be willing to take when there are other alternatives that do not have this risk.


"In general the attachments for HSF's should be reviewed and improved, and AMD needs to address this issue of thermal protection."

It would be in their best interest.


"There are other ways to help eliminate the so called risks by using MBM5 with shutdown now set 5-10 C above max cpu temp, bios offers a shutdown option with a min' of 60C as well and I'm sure there are many other soft' options which are just as effective.
The above will not protect the CPU from a loose or fallen off HSF, as I cannot get MBM to shutdown quick enough yet"

If it cannot engage before the system locks up, then it will never engage. The CPU will stop processing instructions at some point, and just continue burning. This is evident in how the screen freezes in THG's video while the CPU continues burning.


"at least it will prevent the chance of my house being burnt down and hopefully save the rest of my hardware."

I do not see how. The CPU is still burning.


"I had a P266 burn badly due to a build up of dust in a dusty environment, so when we are talking about workplace neglect that certainly fits into that category, the dust was reasonably flammable and could have burnt my workshop/business down too."

I do not recall if the P266 had thermal protection, but it sounds like the fire was caused by normal operating temperatures and a buildup of flammable material that ignited at these temperatures. HSFs have increased in quality over the last few years and usually keep any large temperature buildup from occurring. Back when the P266 was common, case fans were not popular. Cooling solutions have come a long way. This is one of many things that must be addressed to ensure a safe system. At any rate, I'm glad you managed to fix the situation in time.

-Raystonn


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =
 
Consider people transporting their machines in an airplane. A friend of mine found the heatsink of his 486 lying inside the case after traveling by plane. Of course 486 sinks were light and they did not have a tight grip at the CPU. Then, consider people moving their machines inside the trunk of their cars, to go to LAN parties. I am such a person myself 🙂

All I am saying is that it's unlikely, but *not* impossible for the sink to come out of its place, no matter how well it is attached. AMD is not a small-town family firm anymore. They need to pay attention to thermal protection if they want to hit on the big boys (IBM, HP and the like). Intel does and many people drink to its name. AMD can win the same trust among its users / adopters.
 
How do Athlon 4s work then? They are not using huge HSFs but they work without overheating! What's their secret?

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor