[NTLUG:Discuss] Athlon incompatibilities?

[cbbrowne@ntlug.org]

> I'm thinking of building a system with the AMD Athlon
> Thunderbird 1GHz CPU. This will be the first time I'll
> move out of Intel Inside land.

My only "Intel Inside" machine is a Pentium Pro, which
dates me somewhat :-).

> My main concern is software compatibility: Apparently,
> most software should work fine but there are stories of
> incompatibilities, e.g. StarOffice 5.2 was available only
> for x86 machines, some PC games are limited to Intel
> architecture, etc.

There were some problems with _early_ releases of the AMD
K6 whereby they had trouble supporting more than 32MB of
memory.  Since resolution of that, there have been few if
any such issues noted.

> Any real life encounters with Athlon incompatible software
> (Windows and Linux) that people have run into? Also, tips
> from anyone who has recently built a similar system will
> also be appreciated.

I recently put together a 600MHz Duron system; the issue
I was _expecting_ to have to grapple with was that of RAM
compatibility.  Rumor has been that the Athons are a bit
sensitive to what kind of RAM gets used.

That turned out to be a non-issue; I've got an assortment of
PC100 and PC133 DIMMs in it, all seeming to play quite well.

The issues to be "paranoid" about are primarily those of
what hardware you get:
-> These Real Fast CPUs need _serious_ cooling; they can
   burn up in an instant if the fan fails.
-> The latest and greatest seems to require a fair bit of
   power; you may find that you need to bump up to a 
   better power supply [300W rather than 250W].
-> I had few problems with RAM, but if you are on the
   bleeding edge, you may need to be more careful than I.

I wouldn't expect there to be _any_ issues with things like
StarOffice not running; the point there is that SO may not
run on Alpha, which is a completely incompatible architecture,
or on PowerPC, again a completely incompatible architecture.
The critical test is that if the same version of MS Windows
can run on both Celerons and Athlons, then they've got to be
pretty strongly compatible down to such a low level that 
you're unlikely to have many problems with Linux.

I think your primary concern is a _minor_ one; concentrate
on the hardware being compatible with your system and all
should be well.