here it is. not just a qwestion really.
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AMD users - all ignorant and uneducated - or is it just a small few?
I expected some backlash from AMD users this week when I announced that the AMD Athlon is no longer the fastest x86 processor.
I DID expect to receive some emails from people insulting me, and those of course I got.
I DID expect to receive other people's benchmark data to perhaps dispute my findings. That data I have NOT received. No one has sent me any quantitative data to try to disprove my findings. Certainly I expected an intelligent bunch like AMD users to speak up and defend their favorite processor with their own data. But they did not.
And what I DID NOT expect to find out was that some AMD users are as close minded and ignorant as some other rather rabid and fanatical computer users - Macintosh users.
No one less than Chris Tom himself of AMDZONE.COM chose to spew a long stream of obscenities at me, somehow as an effort to defend AMD. And his emails have been closely followed by a long stream of semi-accurate (or just plain inaccurate) emails from other rabid followers of Mr. Tom who just plain either have forgotten their facts, or just plain don't make an effort to verify their data.
Mr. Tom wrote me an email in which he blamed 99.9% of hardware problems on user error. I responded back to him, in a letter which he posted on his site, stating that he is a fraud to make such statements. Is he seriously stating that a consumer who walks into a computer store, asks for an AMD Athlon motherboard, is sold such a motherboard by a commissioned salesman, goes home and tries to install an Athlon XP processor on such a motherboard only to find that there are problems, is it really the user's fault 99.9% of the time that this happened. Especially when the motherboard in question, the ASUS A7A266 is clearly labeled on the package as being compatible with the processor.
Obviously the consumer can't be at fault for buying a shrink wrapped motherboard from a computer salesman who claims the board is Athlon XP compatible. 99.9% of the time, the consumer is at fault? What a load of bull!
I also pointed out to Mr. Tom, as I pointed our in a public posting last summer entitled Do not trust review sites, that he in a conflict of interest to be accepting payment and free product from the very companies whose products he then reviews. This is the classic "grease the palm" scam that goes on not only in the computer industry but in many other industries. You pick up a magazine, you read a glowing review of a product, turn the page, and presto, there just very conveniently placed is a full page ad for that very product! Now visit the www.amdzone.com web site and you will find an extra-ordinary amount of screen space cluttered with banner ads promoting not only AMD related motherboard but outright bashing web sites such as boycottrambus.com.
Can you trust a hardware reviewer who is PAID by special interest groups to honestly review products? OF COURSE NOT! The validity of the data contained on Mr. Tom's web site is as suspect as the validity of any print magazine that places product reviews next to product ads for the same product being reviewed.
Mr. Tom apparently feels, as a few of his readers feel, that I am incapable of assembling a computer. Despite the fact that I've assembled any number of other Athlon Thunderbird, Pentium III, Celeron, and Pentium 4 systems using similar ASUS and MSI motherboards which all worked out of the box the first time.
Now, for the 0.01% case where the customer is not at fault, Mr. Tom does admit that the cause can be a bad motherboard. Well, I looked on his web site, in fact I even asked him point blank by email, to point me at a review of the A7A266 motherboard to tell me, as a consumer, that this board shouldn't be used with the Athlon XP. I can't find any such review, and why not. It would not serve Mr. Tom's interests to tell readers NOT to buy some motherboard when he is in the business of profiting from motherboard ads.
Certainly I maybe just had some bad luck with the particular components that I purchased, but certainly someone like Mr. Tom, who runs a web site claiming to be, and I quote from the web site, "The real #1 Source for Hammer, Athlon, Duron, K6, news, reviews and information. Est. July 1998.", should not take the actions that he has taken.
First of all, right off the bat I have to question exactly WHO appointed his web site the #1 "real source" for the AMD related information? Did AMD? Does AMD endorse his web site or allow him to freely use the AMD name in his web site's domain name, and to use AMD graphics stolen directly from AMD's web site? Do they approve of the way Mr. Tom behaves?
Rather than asking me for specifics about my configuration, Mr. Tom responded by posting my insulting me with not ONE, not TWO, not THREE, but FOUR hastily put together emails which he emailed to me this morning around the same time that he chose to post my private emails to him to the net.
Here is what I was greeted to this morning (April 7 2002) checking my emails:
[email screen shot]
This coming from the man who is the webmaster of the self proclaimed #1 source of Athlon news, reviews, and information. Apparently the way to fix your hardware problems is to go f*ck yourself. Hmmm. I'm not aware of that technique working.
What's interesting is how easily Mr. Tom is caught in a lie. For the front page of his own web site he claims, and here is a screen shot:
[amdzone.com screenshot]
Yet at the same time, in between vulgarities sent to me by email, he professes to "make hardly any ... money". Which is it Mr. Chris Tom? Are you making loads of money from your web site that profits from AMD's name and banner ad revenue, or are you making "hardly any". Even "hardly any" is still a profit, despite your apparent attempt to deny it to me.
I am shocked that AMD seems to allow a web site to use its name like this, to proclaim itself to the #1 source of information about AMD's products, and yet have a webmaster who admittedly is in the profitable business of accepting banner ads for products which he then supposedly "reviews".
It's outright fraud, compounded by the fact that Mr. Tom chooses not dispute my statements with any kind of factual data of his own, but instead chooses to blame the innocent consumer for hardware problems and chooses to respond to me in a most a vulgar fashion?
Mr. Tom, since you so eagerly chose to post my private email to on the web, why did you not post your 4 very eloquent responses to me? I'm sure everyone would love to hear your revolutionary technique of making an Athlon work better by f*cking oneself.
Despite the fact that the self-appointed spokesman of the AMD community and others chose to respond in such a vulgar manner, I did receive other emails from people who have been very helpful in aiding me get the dual Athlon MP system working with Windows XP.
For unlike Mr. Tom, others did freely admit to being in similar situations with their Athlon MP systems, and did share some useful advice. I thank people such as Matthew Kim here in Seattle and Malcolm Taylor in New Zealand among others who made suggestions as to ways to get this system running better.
One suggestion was to raise the core voltage of the chips from the default settings. Another was to use a different video card other than the GeForce 3 as apparently there are known problems with the combination of dual Athlon, GeForce 3, and Windows XP. Using those suggestions and some others, I tweaked the BIOS settings to raise the voltage, turn off some performance options, not cache the video memory, etc. and finally, this afternoon, was able to successfully upgrade Windows 2000 to Windows XP Pro. I then applied the usual Windows Update patches (26 megabytes now and counting, installed the latest nVidia Detonator driver, upgraded the A7M266-D BIOS from revision 1004 to 1005, and changed some of the BIOS settings back to more optimal settings.
The end result is that the dual Athlon MP is now running Windows XP and I am able to conduct the dual processor tests on that machine in Windows XP rather than being stuck using Windows 2000. Hurray!
There were other cases of pure disinformation being sent to me. According to a Jon Carta, and I quote: "When the Athlon was released in the fall of 99, it went from 600MHz to 900Mhz before the end of the year." Now this is just a laughable example of someone who is so either clued out or so intent on lying, that they don't bother to realize that their bogus statement can be verified in about 15 seconds of trying. By simply visiting AMD's own web site, (c'mon folks, this is just TOO EASY), one sees that in the fall of 1999 the Athlon was shipping at 600 MHz (which is when I first got my hands on it and endorsed it), followed by the release of the 700 MHz part in October 1999. Now according to this fool, within the next 2 months then AMD shipped a 900 MHz part. In fact, one has to go a full 4 months forward, to February 2000 just to find the release of the 850 MHz part. The 900 MHz and 1 GHz parts followed soon thereafter. While this reader was certainly in the right ballpark, he chose to rely on his defective memory than to simply spend 15 seconds verifying his data. Literally, go to amd.com, click on the Press Releases link, look up 1999, and then try to find a press release for the 900 MHz part. I knew where to look (2000) and found the release of the 900 MHz part in March 2000. Nice try Mr. Carta, but I am not so naive that I can't verify the release of some product.
By the way, it is interesting to note that while the Athlon ramped up from 600 MHz to 1000 MHz in the course of about 6 months, it took an entire year (March 2000 to March 2001) to bump the speed up by 33% (to 1.33 GHz) and another year after that to bump it up an additional 30% to 1.73 GHz.
Another reader, commenting on my comparison of PC133 and DDR2100 memory prices, someone who chooses to remain anonymous and only identifies himself by the the drug related email address of BongWaterz@hotmail.com states that, and I quote (deleting explicatives): "DDR is not but 5% or so more expensive". Now, while this was certainly true last summer when RAM prices were at an all-time low, RAM prices have gone up since then and I have watched the price premium of DDR go up.
I asked Mr. Bong (or is that Mr. Waters?) and also asked the readers here if someone knows of a computer store that sells DDR memory for only 5% over the same sized PC133 memory to please let me know so that I can inform people about this wonderful buying opportunity.
Mr. Bong and a few other readers did respond and pointed me at some mail order sites. It turns out that this wonderful buying opportunity only applies to lower density memory, 64 megabyte modules, where the premium of DDR is about 10% over PC133. With 128 meg and 256 meg modules the price premium of DDR rises to about 15%, and with 512 meg modules (what I've been purchasing since last year) the premium rises to 20% and higher.
I didn't realize that Mr. Bong was discussing liquidation prices on year-old memory modules. Most Athlon motherboards only have 2 or 3 DDR slots, and certainly to fill those up by placing only 128 to 192 megabytes of RAM in the PC to run today's Windows XP operating system and applications (or running Mac OS on top of that using our emulators) is only going to cause you to throw away the low density RAM and replace it with higher density RAM.
Certainly today, I only purchase 512 meg modules, and would for most people recommend purchasing either 256 meg or 512 meg memory modules. Even if you don't fill up your memory slots today, you'll have the empty slots for future expansion.
But the 5% figure is really fantasy and Mr. Bong knows it, which is why he refuses to give his real name and hides behind a Hotmail account. The list of such idiotic emails received in the past few days goes on and on in an effort to distort the price/performance/facts of AMD products.
Certainly computer magazines, individuals such as Chris Tom, and even myself, have a right to review hardware products. As a policy, our web site has NEVER accepted banner ads, and we have no shortage of offers. It is simply a bad idea to take advertising revenue from companies whose products you review. That's why I am so strongly against so many of these for-hire hardware review sites and why in general I don't pay attention to computer magazines that derive most of their revenue from such payments.
Does Emulators profit from doing these mini hardware reviews? Absolutely! As software developers we do what every responsible software developer does and that is to do product testing. In particular there is a type of testing known as configuration testing, where you set up a large number of computers with various processors, memory configurations, video cards, sound cards, and operating systems which users of that software may encounter. Doing so ensures not only that users of the software will run into less hardware related problems, but also increase the potential market for the product by letting people know what the product has been tested on.
In our case, we set the compatibility bar very low (by today's standards) at a 33 MHz 486. Why? For historical reasons, when we launched our first 68000 emulator for the PC, that software required a 486/33. Even today, we make sure that every one of our emulators can still run on a customer machine from 10 years ago. 486, Pentium, K6, Athlon, Pentium III, etc. we still support it.
Testing is a natural part of software development. It is built into the price of software development. It should not be funded by banner ads, or similar attempts to extort payment. We buy the hardware, we do the testing, we report the results. No freebies from Intel or AMD, save for a single Athlon XP 1900 chip that was sent to us last year. No free motherboards. No motive to promote either Intel or AMD.
It is this concept that some AMD fans cannot seem to grasp. How is it that our web site can recommend the Athlon processor for 2.5 years (from October 1999 to April 2002) and then seemingly switch sides. It's very simple - we do new tests every month and the results change. Duh! If they didn't change there we be no point to running new tests every month. This rather obvious concept is just beyond the intellectual grasp of some AMD users.
I've had many very intelligent conversations with AMD users over the past 2.5 years. I only hope that the level of ignorance, vulgarity, and disrespect demonstrated by people such as Chris Tom is not indicative of a general level of ignorance among the AMD community. For if it is, AMD will have a hard time gaining market share (as is the case with Apple) if its products are viewed as appealing to a small rabid community promoting their anti-Intel agenda at all costs.
Searching for the true, the beautiful, and the eternal
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