Americans are not always pragmatic

[razvan]

Yes. That's true at least for one quarter of them in my approx. Latest days the hottest topic was if P4 is/isn't worth buying. IMHO right now obviously is not:

- it's more expensive than T-Bird and with few exceptions slower;
- it's strongly unbalanced exactly like the old K6 line from AMD (I mean it "prefers" some applications);
- if you buy one right you'll get stucked: Intel wants to abandon Socket423 and P4 in less than a year. That's a short life, don't you think?
- about the SSE2 story: if you are interested only in high performance then you should look for other platforms like Alpha. The users of the 80x86 platform always put a big price on compatibility. Otherwise how do you explain that we are still working on 8086 compatible machines? SSE2 right now is NOTHING. My guess is that it will be important in 1 year but in 1 year you will have much better alternatives from Intel.

You may argue that P4 has a lot of potential. IMHO the architecture of P4 has a lot of potential but the P4 doesn't. You should wait at least for another stepping (right now it has 40 bugs, many of them without "workaround" - I wonder if companies will ever accept that! A home user could always blame Microsoft but a company...) and if you wait for another stepping why not wait another 2-3 months for a MUCH better alternative from Intel - that is if you are a real Intel fanatic.





Razvan

 

[Atman]

sarcasm on
You will accept whatever the high priestess intel commands. you will purchase this new cpu they have so graciously provided and you will like it. you will not complain. intel is so high and mighty that they can put out subpar product and we will (not) buy it. huge corps will buy it because some of them have their noses so far up intel's butt they think it's a blessing upon them when intel farts. (dell..) you will buy this new cpu and then you will buy the next one they dain to toss to us commoners in a few months....
sarcasm off.....
I can partially understand the efforts involved in switching from intel to amd so can't really knock the corps... I wonder, if AMD hadn't been doing so well with the Thunderbird/Duron, if Intel would have released the P4 at all. They may have chose to wait a few more months and skipped it altogether. But with so many faillures lately and AMD's successes, maybe they just fealt pressured to release it anyway. I don't know.
I wouldn't purchase a P4 for anything now. I hate getting stuck, such as with the Athlon Slot-A...it was round for a few months but that was about it.

The only problem with waiting, IMHO, is I can wait a month or two for the next best thing but will then only have to wait another couple of months for the one after that which will be followed by the improved version shortly thereafter and so on. Ok...sorry...gripe mode off.

I thought bugs were bonus features!

Atman

no offense intended toward anyone...well, maybe intel, but nobody else.