No spam wrote:
Hello everyone. I am looking to buy a new desktop PC. I currently have
a Compaq Pentium 3 733 MHz desktop and a Dell 2.0 GHz Celeron laptop.

I have always been a fan of Intel... mainly because when I got into
computers there was no AMD. My first IBM based PC was an 8088 with
640k RAM and a 21 megabyte hard drive.

Well hi, and welcome to the 21st Century, Rip Van Winkle. :-) A lot of the
rest of us in these newsgroups started on those 8088 PC clones ourselves,
and we didn't seem to have much trouble accepting AMD as a credible
alternative.

Actually, AMD has been making Intel compatible chips for as long as Intel
has been making them. Initially it was making them with the complete
permission and support of Intel -- AMD was Intel's official second source
right from the days of the original IBM PC. And then later it was making
them without so much permission and support. :-)

I think the first time I'd heard of AMD was when I was shopping for a cheap
287 coprocessor to fit to my 386DX CPU. (Yes, 386's could also be fitted to
287's rather than 387's.) Then later I found out that AMD not only made
coprocessors but also direct clones of the processors. This was around 1988
or thereabouts.

The first time I had any knowledge of an AMD product was around 1996.
Because (and I might be remembering this incorrect ...) but as I
remember a good friend of mine had a K5 processor and I remember he
had all kinds of problems with Windows 95. MANY MANY more Windows 95
problems than I had on my 80486 SX 25... Or did I have the Packard
Hell Pentium (Classic) 100 MHz by then... Lol... I don't remember.

The K5 was not AMD's most successful design, not by a long shot. It was
AMD's first attempt its own original design. It's previous processors were
much more successful (the 386, 486, and 5x86), and it's later processors
were much more successful (K6, Athlon, and Athlon 64). So yes, you could
call the K5 to be AMD's lowest valley. Prior to the K5, AMD's designs were
all direct copies transistor-for-transistor copies of Intel's processors --
since AMD had been Intel's second source for years prior to that. At around
the time of the 386 were when AMD and Intel started having their first
feuds; Intel no longer wanted to have AMD as its second source, while AMD
insisted that they had a binding contract for just that. The court battle
eventually came down to an agreement that AMD would stop cloning Intel's
chips as of the end of the 486. So K5 was AMD's attempt to engineer a
Pentium-workalike, but with their own original design inside. The K5 didn't
succeed, but AMD's second attempt was the K6, which was also a
Pentium-workalike, and it also fit into the Pentium socket. This was much
more successful, and it in fact extended the Pentium infrastructure beyond
the Pentium, beyond what Intel had imagined for that infrastructure. The K6
was competing against the Pentium II's and III's, which were on their
next-generation infrastructure. AMD's next design, the Athlon, was (and is
to this day) their most successful original design ever; and not only was it
original on the inside, it was also original on the outside, as the Athlon
uses no infrastructure at all that's similar to anything from Intel's; oh it
runs all of the same software as Intel's, and all of the same peripherals,
such as USB and PCI cards work with either Intel or AMD, but below that
level Intel and AMD had diverged completely. Now the Athlon is giving way
slowly to the Athlon 64, which is another completely original design, and
actually quite a quantum leap over even the original Athlon, and anything
that Intel has (including their Itanium).

Now I am looking to buy a new desktop and I am looking for the best
new technology. I am very interested in 64 bit technology. I know
Intel has had Itanium and Itanium II but as I understand it those are
not for consumers.

No, the Itanium is definitely not for consumers (though originally Intel may
have had such hopes and plans). These days, it's living out life as a
server-only processor.

So I want the "straight poop" about the AMD 64 FX models. And is there
any new AMD 64 FX chip coming in the fourth quarter 2004?

Well, the AMD Athlon 64 FX processors are AMD's ultimate gaming processors.
And as such they are more expensive than their regular Athlon 64's. They
typically have slightly better memory interfaces than the regular A64's,
either dual-channel memory, or bigger cache, or both. I think most people
suggest that you stay away from the FX's, as they are extremely expensive
compared to the regular A64's. Quite a bit more money for only slightly
better performance.

Similarly, people suggest you stay away from Pentium 4 Extreme Edition vs.
regular Pentium 4. Exact same reasons.

Also can anyone explain the Intel roadmap for a consumer 64 bit CPU?

Intel has copied AMD's 64-bit language extensions now. But it hasn't
implemented these extension throughout the board on all of its processors.
It is first going to implement them in its server Xeon processors, before it
brings them to its desktop Pentium 4 processors. It's expect that these will
take until the middle of 2005 before Intel has it fully incorporated on all
of its non-Itanium processors. Intel calls its version EM64T, while AMD
calls it's AMD64, but they are exactly the same thing.

However, it's not just the extensions that matters here. AMD spent a great
deal of time not only improving the language, but it also came up with an
incredibly sophisticated infrastructure, which it calls Direct Connect
Architecture. That's just a marketing term for a processor that connects to
its RAM and its peripherals and to other processors directly with very few
other chips required in between, allowing for much higher throughput. This
is the real secret behind AMD64, not so much its 64-bittedness.

Any thoughts on the best place to order custom built High performance
PCs? I can't stand the newer all integrated systems. I do not want
integrated Graphics, sound, NIC, ect.

Not having integrated graphics is a good choice. Integrated sound is
actually not so bad, especially if you get a motherboard with an Nvidia
chipset in it, because they have a version of the sound chipset that is
present inside the Microsoft Xbox. And integrated NICs are just great, no
reason why you would want a separate card for a NIC anymore.

I was looking at Alienware. Are there other sites as well? I have to
say those Alienware systems always look damn cool.

Sure, they're supposed to look cool. They are geared towards the gaming
enthusiast.

Yousuf Khan