-=> Richard Menedetter wrote to Tony Langdon <=-   
      
    RM> It blew out anything that Intel had at that time of the water.   
    RM> What was your exact problem?   
    RM> I had a 800 MHz Thunderbird, and it was exceptionally great.   
    RM> Only issue I can think of is with the first cartridge based ones, which   
    RM> had heat and production issues.   
      
   Mine was a 1.2 GHz CPU, IIRC.  I had some stability problems, which   
   underclocking did resolve.  I ran it at around 1 or 1.05 GHz.   
      
    RM> The P4 was a complete disaster that Intel only did to have something   
    RM> that can counter the Athlon marketing wise.   
    RM> All the DEC engineers went to AMD, and the Athlon microarchitecture was   
    RM> 1-2 years ahead of what Intel had at that time.   
      
   yeah, agree with the P4.  Only thing it did have was the stability, but it did   
   suck.   
      
    RM> See also the talk/book of Bob Colwell for that.   
      
    TL> One thing AMD did do right was developing the 64 bit instruction set   
    TL> we know and love today. :)   
      
    RM> That was only made possible by the exceptional K7 (Athlon)   
    RM> microarchitecture. We compared P6 (PPro, P2, P3) to K7 (Athlon) at   
    RM> university ... The age of P6 showed VERY clearly.   
      
   Cool.  I was long out of university by then! :)  But yes, the AMD 64 bit   
   instrution set was a good development.   
      
    TL> Intel's "clean slate" 65 bit efforts didn't penetrate the mainstream   
    TL> like AMDs did.   
      
    RM> Well ... the Itanium was never really meant as a P4 replacement.   
    RM> It was a monster that had to be able to replace PARISC for HP.   
      
   Yeah, I didn't follow the Itanium much, but was aware it was intended for "big   
   data".   
   ... I used to be an agnostic, but now I'm not so sure.   
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