AMD in the future...Thouroughbred or wait for the Hammer?

[HawkMt210]

What is your opinion on the new processors due out soon? I think all of us with processors over 850 Mhz can wait for the Thouroughbred to come out in the 1st quarter of 2002, but how about the Hammer due out in the end of 2002/beginnig of 2003? Now I am personally happy with my 1.4 Ghz Athlon but how bout you guys out there with the will and the money to upgrade sooner? What is your opinion?
Also, I have not seen anybody talk about the Bartons on the AMD Processor Roadmap (http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_608,00.html). So, for you more informed people out there what are they all about?
One more thing: Intel has already realeased a 32/64 bit chip, the Itanium, but its sucess has been hindered partly due to it being slower with 32 bit applications compared to 64 bit applications. Do you think that after AMD releases the ClawHammer at a more affordable pricepoint than the Itanium that the 64 bit system will become more recognised in daily applications or will Intel go ahead in the processor market by not changing over to 64 bit systems in home-use processors? Or will they?
Post your comments below.

[lennytiger]

AMD is like Microsoft releasing new things every five minutes and asking evryone to upgrade!!

Processor speeds are always on the up, but there is the question of if speed will soon become unimportant!! What will us overclockers do?? We can't speed something up that is already too fast!!

We just keep buying the cpu's and new os's and keep upgrading keeping the speed, its great!! The new cpus by AMD have not had any immediate response from intel as of yet, I'll wait but i'm not holding my breath.

[Qualtran]

As of right now, processor speeds are pretty fast, but they still have to come a LONG way to become too fast. The day when anything I try to do on my system is instantaneous, or I can run a program like Seti@home and complete 10000000 WU's in a second is the day when processor speeds will be fast. But even then, there will be new applications that will probably utilize all that processor power. So, processors will always be improving to meet greater and greater demands.

[BigPappaP]

the Itanium processor is NOT a 32/64 bit processor. It is strictly 64 bit. To run 32 bit applications it uses emulation, which is software not hardware. It will never be fast using emulation, thats why an apple is slow running Windows because it has to use Virtual PC, an emulator. Anyway, wait for the hammer, your ocmputer is very fast already. I am running a P3 450 with crappy peripherals and i get along jsut fine. Even Max Payne runs decently well, it doesnt lag 95% of the time. The Hammer will be excellent for running SETI, lol - you guys will love it. I dont run it because i couldnt help much wiht my little 450. My girlfriend is talking to me, i'll respond later, c-ya

[lennytiger]

I would recomend you upgrade that little PIII to something more exciting, try an athlon xp 1800 oc it to 2.2GHz and it will be nice :)

[Slurgi]

I will probably wait until the hammer.

I probably will be fine running every program I need to until about when the hammer comes out. When it does come out, I will get the hammer and hopefully a 64-bit operating system as well.