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Intel Demos Williamette at 1.5GHz
|0|4 writes, "There's a CNET article about Intel's demo of a Williamette processor running at 1.5GHz. " Mentions the 1ghz P3s and other odds and ends. As always with Intel, 'Demands exceed expectations' with their new chips, so it'll be awhile before they cost less than a compact car.
A fan-heater would be cheaper though.
Wingnut
Also, it is not mentioned how much this thing was cooled to be able to hit 1500MHZ. The Willamette was not cooled at all to hit 1500 MHz. I would lay money down that AMD's newest Athlon, when properly cooled, would be able to hit at least this number easily. Clearly you don't know a bad bet when you see one. I'll see your money and double it. Methinks Intel needs to be beaten with a cluestick. Based on your post, I think you are the one who needs to refrain from posting until you are able to locate a clue.
AMD demoed a 1.1 GHz Athlon, put it was a lot closer to being a real product than this 1.5 GHz dog and pony show.
That is very interesting. 1.5GHz frequency = .667ns theoretical minimum latency between retired instructions, * 20 clocks from issue to retirement = 13.33ns single-instruction issue-to-retirement latency. 500MHz G4 (if I remember correctly) uses a 5-stage pipeline, = 10ns latency between a given instruction's issue and retirement. So if you manage to avoid the Memory Wall and are running entirely in-core, the 1.5GHz Williamette will need to find at least 1.3x as much instruction-level parallelism as the 500MHz G4 to get the same overall processing throughput. I do believe existing P3's find somewhat higher ILP than existing G4's (OOO issue, more executable units, etc), but this might help explain some of the performance discrepancies we're seeing.
-- Guges --
> The damndest thing is it's name.
Hey, the name is awesome. I grew up in Salem, OR, on the banks of the lovely Willamette. It is, frankly, the navel of the universe.
If you are passing through (on your way up to Bill's house or whatever), take the time to relax in Salem. It's a great place, although nothing ever happened there except for the filming of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" at the state mental hospital.
wow
"All of this is predicated on us collectively to do the same thing that we did in the IT industry," Grove said, adding that there will be a "relentless drive to higher performance at lower prices." Doesn't this sound familiar? Maybe Groves should go to work for NASA.
Really? Who cares that much about processor speeds? Once you get beyond a certain point, faster is pretty much useless for most things. Linux really doesn't need a 1Ghz - what could that much processor be used for?
What do I need more speed for? Check out:
Quantum Chemistry Software
Since moderate calculations on DMOL3 can take hours to days every little bit helps! Also, if Athlon's get fast enough maybe we can stop buying all these expensive SGI's. Of course improvements in cache size and bus speed are also needed to fully realize the power of these new processors.
Long live the Intel/AMD chip wars!
what i could not do with a beowulf cluster of these... :)
Would that be 20C or 20K (Liquid Helium)? It seems like Intel tries to dodge the topic of exactly how the chip was cooled. That makes me a little hesitant to trust their benchmark.
I love it when people try to paint Intel as being "in trouble". Let's look at some recent figures...
:-)
Intel had $29B in sales with an operating margin of 34%.
AMD had $2.9B in sales with an operating margin of -13%.
Intel has a market cap of $375B.
AMD has a market cap of $6.5B.
So which is the company in trouble again?
I ordered my Willamette like 4 weeks ago on eBay...where is it?
And there's always video editing for another example of a power-hog.
imagine you were asked what the temperature was in your car's engine..... if you answered "20 C" and the car was running, you would have to be in antarctica, yah? idiot software types......
Hemos tells me Rob screwed up the moderation for a few days but it should be fixed now. No one was getting any points.
Thank you very much to the second AC who answered my question.
As for the first AC and the "Now go back under your bridge, you troll" comment, you can go fuck yourself. I just asked a simply question and get told to go away. Great attitude to take, unless it's a sig or joke.
How about "Bad boys, bad boys" (whatch gonna do when they come for you?) ?
The kernel is fairly small. Try compiling Mozilla, kde/koffice, or some other large programm.
So what kind of Mobo can take one of these new chips? Still the bh6 or what? And what kind of RAM? The article mentioned the new celeron being compatible with some kind of new, faster RAM?
This is sounding like it won't be a simple task of changing your CPU. You'd have to change major portions of the computer, no?
Got it? No? You're too goddamn stupid to understand what I'm saying to you?
Well, then I'll say it real, real slowly: One 'i'. I'll say it again: One 'i'. ONE FUCKING 'i'. Can you count that high? No?
Fuck yourself, you pathetic brainless animal.
It's "Willamette", as in the C|Net article, as in teh Willamette River in Oregon, as in Willamette University in Oregon.
Here's a safe assumption to stick with: They way they spell it on Slashdot is ALWAYS WRONG. Slashdot is the most amazing collection of illiterate, mentally retarded morons the world has ever seen. Anything they do, say, or believe is pretty well guaranteed to be idiotic, misinformed, and useless.
On a second side note, if you want more speed you can go to 14K RPM SCSI U2 drives.
As in the Willamette River in Oregon, you illiterate piece of shit. As in Willamette University in Oregon, you drooling, babbling imbecile. AS IN THE MICROSCOPIC DOT OF FUCKING FLY-SHIT YOU USE FOR A FUCKING BRAIN, YOU MISERABLE GODDAMN INVERTEBRATE.
I'm sorry, but users with more brains than a fucking lizard are now permitted to post on Slashdot. I can see by the fact that you spelled "Willamette" correctly that you do, in fact, have significantly more brains than a fucking lizard. This cannot be permitted, because it makes the stupid people feel inadequate, and that makes them hostile. Slashdot was put here as a place for stupid and illiterate people to congratulate themselves and each other on their inadequacies (hence all the cretinous "Hellmouth" chest-thumping). The Slashdot Mantra: "I'm *ever* so glad I'm a Beta -- those Alphas are so *frightfully* clever!". Repeat four hundred times per week, age 16-25.
If you can spell, you're not a Beta at all. You'll have to leave now, sir.
Hehe...jerk around...hehe
Isn't it amazing that html hacks and perl monkeys think they're programmers now?
3x the clock speed will certainly NOT mean 3x the speed.
The rest of your post is just obvious misinterpretations of other people's opinions, and not worth comment.
Does cdrom.com, fastest/biggest ftp server, count as a high bandwidth server? Yeup, x86. u were saying?
Hmm, one who hasn't heard of falcon 4.0 ic.
Now if there would be a SMP chip set that would support AMD chips. That is still one thing Intel has over AMD is chipsets that support more than one processor.
That makes you one of about three people in this discussion who can lay claim to being more evolved than a fucking chimpanzee.
Congrats. On Slashdot, being more evolved than a fucking chimpanzee is a rare and remarkable distinction.
Ok, being a native webfoot my entire life, I have to jump in here. ok, here's a stab ore-gun but say ore with a quick transition to a mild "oy" before you hit the "r". This forces you to smile slightly when you say it. That's right: "Oregon, smile when you say it." : [Now begin the making fun of Oregonians thread]
This contrasts with Carmac's experience of g3 vs x86 optimized code.
I'll take the better latency of ddr thankyou.
& if u move to the hills, the country bumpkins will want to correct your 'incorrect' speak, will u start to talk like a hick?
Kinda makes you wonder what Intel's fastest chips are really running at...
Why should they show off their fastest chips when they make more money by slowly increasing chip speeds.
"All of this is predicated on us collectively to do the same thing that we did in the IT industry," Grove said, adding that there will be a "relentless drive to higher performance at lower prices."
Sure that's it... lower prices.
What do these three things have in common; crap chipset, mb, & overpriced? The state of Athlon motherboards. This stuck out like a sore thumb when Athlons were released & it still holds.
retorical question? everyone knows the answer.
Feh, I agree with though. Me like pascal + asm. fast & fast.
Where have u been hiding to miss the gazillion hw site articles of the p3's being 'the next celeron'?
only if u buy overpriced cpus.
Wuh lamb it (silent b)
Or a gun (u just a little shorter than in gun)
Processor speed is all well and good, but a faster processor will only increase the spped of the system up to a point. If your disk and memory subsystems are slow, then the computer is slow. And Rambus, although propriatary, is _fast_. Why would you buy a 1Ghz processor and attach 100MHz memory to it? This only lets you hit the memory every 10 clock cycles, and with superscalar chips this could be as many as 30 instructions. Think about drag racing. You can't win the race by adding a larger engine because there just isn't enough traction.
Off topic, but, what I've often wondered what context that Bill Gates quote was taken from. (The version of it I've seen before is "640K ought to be enough for anyone" or something like that, which could easily make sense in a coktext such as, "When you're running DOS 2.0, 640K of memory ought to be enough for anyone."
Actually a few months back someone demonstrated this by using quantum physics and non-locality. It was a *very* simple demonstration but interesting for the future possibilities nonetheless (I love 3-word words). Anyone remember the link?
Hey if you're not man enough to use C++ and have to use some sissy language like Delphi, that's your problem. ;)
I would suggest that you go back and read what this guy said in "Oh Brother" again and again. Ignore the rest of the junk in here. IMHO
Now go back under your bridge, you troll.
I bet CmdrTaco simply cut and pasted |0|4s submission. Anyway, I don't see the difference between Will-A-mette and Willa-mette (I mean, there is no way to pronounce Willa in one syllable). Are you implying a slight pause between will and a? Just curious... that region produces some good pinot noir!
Even worse, software 'engineers'. I'm waiting for everything to be suffixed with engineer. Only a matter of time.
AMD screwed up with the chipset situation period. & don't anyone retort with AMD's justification. It's what was/is needed or to have had something lined up. They messed up.
/. users will benefit as well. They will be able to use the Linux MPEG players to view pr0n VCDs or DVDs full screen w/o it being slow and having corrupted color. It is an annoyance to try to watch those movies full screen and have them jerk around.
AMD already made a stupid mistake. chipest. & they've been paying for it since the release of the Athlons. Lucky for them, Intel made their own stupid mistake: rambus & the 820 chipset.
EAT HOT GRITS AND DIE!
Thank you.
Excuse me while my laughter paroxysms recede. Intel and availability, hahahaha, what a fucking bad joke.
How long is it going to be until all the newbies realize that a DEC Alpha 500Mhz can out-perform an Intel 900Mhz chip!?
Megahertz does not determine how fast a chip is(to a certain extent)!
Anyone interested in real power should be looking at the MIPS or FLOPS a chip can do.
Ever notice how supercomputers are measured in terms of FLOPS?
You never hear about a new supercomputer that runs at 233Thz(T as in Tera).
FLOPS is where its at.
Besides, how much more electricity can CPU companys force through a chip? Jeez, soon your gonna need a gasoline generator just for your computer! And I'm scared to think of the electromagnetic radiation that's going to be produced! You thought those high-voltage wires over your house caused cancer...? Nope! It's you 10 Billion Mhz CPU.
bradley.bender@edu.sait.ab.ca
You misread the article. The article to which you refer said the Pentium III that they demoed was 'specially cooled'. The Willamette that was demoed was not specially cooled.
NO, the article said the Pentium III was specially cooled. The Willamette was NOT specially cooled.
The second half will also see the introduction of Timna, a Celeron with an integrated
graphics chip and memory controller. Although originally rumored to be compatible with
next-generation Rambus memory, the chip will at first work with ordinary, less-expensive
memory. The Rambus move will occur in 2001, said Pat Gelsinger, an Intel vice president.
Oh deary dear...
They still haven't learned, have they?
Then invest in a decent SGI with a 64bit MIPS cpu or an Alpha with 8 meg of cache on the cpu. Stop wasting your time with x86. My 40mhz Sparc compiles things just as fast as my p75.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Didn't AMD do this 10 days ago? Is Intel running behind again :) There's a big surprise.
kwsNI
Williamette. Why not just name it Floralprintdress or PussyProc? Come on, it sounds like a type of doily. It does not strike me as 'speedy' or 'powerful'. Maybe that's why an AMD Sledgehammer is on my list of things to buy...
Dyslexic.
This comment is brought to you by the drug caffiene, and the number 5.
I was about to post and say:
"What the hell takes 5 hours to compile!?!. My PII-450 (64Mb ram) does not take anywhere near that much time to compile the whole kernel."
THEN you mentioned NT and C++. All's explained now. sorry.
--
Simon
They did. It's called SSE2. You don't have to use it for SIMD, there are instructions that just treat it like a flat floating point register file with 8 registers. Very much compiler-targetable as far as I can see.
Check out the PDF file from Intel about Willamette.
NO The flaw was with Inel engineering on the chipset now with the Ram.
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
Must crack keys...must join Slashdot team...
Rob is my hero...
(And now I return you back to reality)
LOL..."We"? I didn't have anything to do with it. Did you?
I just read through the optimization document Intel now has available on the Willamette. I'm very impressed with the direction they've taken the instruction set. They have filled out the SIMD instructions, extending MMX to their XMM 128-bit registers. They also support true 64-bit integer operations (no more multi-instruction ADD or MUL sequences). They've added prefixes to the branch instructions to provide hints to the branch predictor -- very useful for profiled code.
:) available when the chip debuts.
The hard thing now is going to be figuring out a good scheme for allocating variables between the standard, the MMX, and the XMM register sets when generating code. I'm thinking that the integer set will be best used for address calculations, while true scalar and FP values would do better living in MMX and XMM registers when possible.
I'd also like to thank Intel for releasing this information earlier rahter than later. Last year, I was peeved when the Pentium III instruction details weren't made public until the chips were released. Intel may have given themself enough lead time to actually have Willamette optimized software (especially compilers
Help, I upgraded my processor and it erased the UVPROM my BIOS was on.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Compile time is I/O bound. Buy a fast SCSI disk, lots of RAM, and a fast bus if you really want to speed it up. =)
A 1Ghz CPU running on a 100Mhz bus with an IDE drive. As for intel HAHAHAHA... sorry it's just that it's so outlandish to expect cpu power alone to improve performane. These intel/AMD press releases are funny. Also things like cache speed being like 3/5 or even 1/2 to 1/3 cpu speed make this even more lauaghable. I think a 4x - 8x ppro ( cache and cpus @ 200Mhz ) are the best x86 machines out for what most of the linux crowd.
I wanna 4x SMP K7 to still up here with my ppro ( socket 8 ) dual workstation.
OpenProjects #debian - in irc you can't run away from the taunting
Excuse me? Who would run a mission critical server on an x86? I see AMD and intel both on the low end server/end consumer market.
I still wonder about PSX2 and other appliances vs PCs - will programmers like us be the only ones with PCs soon?
I agree. I have three machines at home. Celeron 333, P-133, and a 486-33, all running Linux (windows on the fast one for games only). The smallest machine is a print server and it works quickly and reliably. My P-133 is very snappy and responsive, even when loaded down with 70 processes! For programming I couldn't ask for any more speed. I'm not writing the Linux kernel, and even then it would be perfectly fine. Of course, under Windows the Celeron 333 sometimes disappoints, but that's mostly because I'm running games in Windows. For Linux, the Celeron is also snappy. In fact, I can perceive very little difference in responsiveness between those two machines. One is damn fast, the other one is damn faster!
Everyone should recite this mantra: "A Pentium 133 does 200 MIPS. A Pentium 133 does 200 MIPS. A Pentiu..." 200 MIPS is a meaningless benchmark number, but it does give a rough insight into just how fast even that old machine is, especially when running a lean operating system.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
It's definitely 1.5GHz. But still this is a only 50% increase over what will presumably be shipping from Intel's competition before this summer. It's no different from jumping 50% from 500MHz to 750MHz - which is pretty much what happened from summer last year to Christmas. A 50% jump in clock frequency in six months is starting to become status quo in this one-upsmanship game between Intel and AMD.
It's not going to be released any time soon, so who cares what the stability is? The engineers have more than half a year to iron out the bugs, why does it matter if it can run Word at 1.5GHz right now?
Just a side note, you could of course "double"* your speed to hard drive access by going to Ultra66. This assumes two things, 1) you haven't done so, 2) you have Ultra66 capable hard drives.
* This does not double your drive access speed, but does increase performance, and it's pretty common in new hard drives, but can't say that it's standard yet on the boards. I've only recently been seeing daughtercards for connecting these. And all the stuff I've read is of course for Windows, so i don't know linux's capabilities.
Just a side note, resume with discussion about AMD's awesome processor and Intel's inability to keep up.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
20-stage pipeline, ouch, Intel is really playing the MHz game, but as long as a regular user thinks that more MHz == more powerfull, they will keep doing this.
> 2. The FPU is running at half the speed of the ALU.
> So FP performance will not be up to par for scientific applications (or games)
> as compared to an AMD processor running both at the same speed.
> Athlon's FPU is already known to blow PIII's out
> of the water.
Do not forget that FPU are very diffent from integer unit, and that speed alone means nothing but speed and pipeline length, paralelism do counts. I think that you are jumping to the conclusion here.
What I don't understand is WHY Intel keeps their FP instructions, it is notoriously known for complicating compiler works (if it is trying to reach big performance) and slowing down things.
Why not add new instructions (as will AMD do with their future SlegeHammer CPU), it should have been done a loooong time ago.
Well, Intel sells CPUs and not memory chips, so what they are really saying is:
the new OS requires 250 more megahertz of chip power to get the equivalent user experience (if you only have 32MB of RAM)
On a "reasonable" NT machine with 128MB, the "user experience" is about the same between NT4+ActiveDesktop and NT5.
(And, yes, I know that Linux users will flame the 128MB number. Yawn. A memory upgrade is still cheaper than a CPU upgrade. And since corporations don't usually upgrade CPUs, that means a whole new computer if you were to follow Intel's instructions.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Just want to point out that "no... you're wrong on that count".
1200 dpi is the minimum for line art (one color, solids). For halftones, you just double the linescreen of your imagesetter. Text books are around 133 to 150 lines per inch, meaning that you want 266-300 dots per inch. High quality books, like coffee table or artsy books, are around 180 - 200 lpi, so the maximum resolution you'd want out of a halftoned piece of art is 400 dpi... and that's an extreme measure.
I'm just curious as to what in the world you're doing with 900dpi images? I thought that in most cases 300 dpi is overkill.... Or are they 8 1/2 by 11's destinedd to be posters?
AMD would cannibalize so many of their own sales by releasing the absolute fastest processor they could, rather than incrementally upgrading speeds as they and intel are doing.
It's also in their best interests to slowly grow the market, rather than have everyone crawling all over one another in order to acquire one of their chips. Why? Because they can't make them fast enough, that's why. Kind of like what's happening now with Intel and their 800 Mhz systems. They announce them. Everyone lines up to order. People stall their purchases. Very few people get them...
It's pretty funny watching the completely different tone of /. reactions between when AMD demos 1 GHz and when Intel demos 1.5 GHz...
echo Prpv a\'rfg cnf har cvcr | tr Pacfghnrvp Cnpstuaeic
Linux users, you brag so often about the cleanliness and speed of your OS against the bulky Windows... then why do you keep using one the worst language in the world
Nothing wrong with C - something's wrong with those who believe they have to recompile everything now and then. Any sane makefile setup will compile only what needs compiling, making C compilations nice and quick.
<I>A language that is so unreadable that there's a contest of code offuscation ?</I>
Exists because C is popular, clear C code is definitely possible, and of course I can write pascal so bad that nobody can read it - but there are so few pascal programmers to impress out there...
<I>When I read a comment "if it crash try to compile without the speed optimization" </I>
Broken for sure. But compilers get fixed. And pascal has the same problems from time to time, 16-bit delphi had a lot of "don't do that" type problems.
don't forget...
the athlon bus is a *switched* processor bus that is engineered to run from 200Mhz-800Mhz. I don't know the details of Wiliamette bus, but knowing intel.... 400Mhz shared bus is quite likely.
Consider what the difference will mean in 2 years when 2 and 4 cpu systems become quite common. Folks are already buying dual cpu boxen(boards at least) by the tens of thousands. If MS ever makes NT/2000 the consumer windows OS, system builders will start selling dual 600Mhz systems instead of pushing expensive 1Ghz monsters. Margins will suck either way, and they can get better volume on the chaper boxes.
-earl
Nobody is stopping you from buying Alpha, Sparc, PPC or some else non-x86 chip..
IMHO Intel had to release some big news, because lately the press has been portraying Intel as in severe trouble because their key 64 bit chip (code named 'Itanium') isn't measuring up to expectations, and AMDs chips are out there in quantity and making customers extremely happy. Transmeta releases specs for a viable x86 threat to the low end processor line (Crusoe vs. Celeron), so Intel has to push the edge up for the Pentium lines to remain marketable. Tom's hardware does a review of the Athlon, and low and behold, the chip measures up to expectations.
Trouble is, the Intel press release/party, etc. and the C/Net article are long on hype and extremely low on independently verifiable specs. Perhaps they can clock a Willamette at 1.5 GHz now, but the key question is when will the yield rates (number of processors per silicon batch) be high enough to compete economically with the Athlon?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Business ethics are something important to me. Since Intel can allow itself to bully companies around, it's 100% AMD for me. Besides, Athlon is a superior product.
I currently have a 550 MHz Athlon, as well as a K6-2 and a K6.
I do lots of graphics editing, and every MHz counts. Try applying image filters on a 128MB IMAGE. My current machine is an Athlon 600 w/ 256MB RAM. Just doing a Print Preview on a 900dpi image is a feat. And No, your 466 MHz Celeron won't cut it.
Most other graphics designers I know use NT workstation and dual CPU's... Or SGI's IRIX (if you have the money for it).
Let's also not forget Database servers, who usually execute processor-intensive code. Also think about sites like Slashdot, that get mega-hits/hour and every hit is a dynamic page. In these cases, the high CPU frequencies really do a lot.
I guess people at Slashdot only use their PC's for gaming. No, you won't see a light of difference between a 400MHz and a 600MHz for a game. But on a Database server, or for a graphics editor, a 1GHz chip is most appreciated.
When I apply a "smooth" effect on a 96MB 900dpi image, it takes my 600MHz Athlon roughtly 25 seconds to complete. Could I use a 1GHz? Obviously. But not for Quake.
I certainly can't agree with this. While the card can render triangles with textures, it hardly falls into the range of the cards out there that do T&L in hardware, accept a common API call that all operating systems can share, and do so with little interaction from the main processor.
Your Sound card *IS* a band in a box
While my sound card does wavetable synthesis, my computer must tell it which notes to play when, when to swap instruments and so on. While you have to tell a midi sequencer what to do, you can simply upload the relevant data and use it at will. My card, the SBAWE64, actually has 32 channels, and emulates 32 in software on top of that. I'd wager the 128 only has 64 hardware channels. It is still a Software solution.
but that's because of refinement, and has little to do with the capabilities of the chips themselves.
The Amiga demos used hardware tricks such as copper bars and sprite moves. It took some digging to get that out of a pc. I've seen it in text mode, and I was impressed. I've also seen some PC demos that had un-explainably good graphics that worked completely with standard vga graphics doing 3d. That was tight code.
My point is this: If you can do it in hardware, don't do it in software. Doing things in hardware raises costs in the short term, but adding one of these cards decreases system load while increasing the productivity of the core's time.
Lowmag.net
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the Athlon motherboards do this now?
I thought their archetecture allowed you two instructions per clock tick so the 100mhz bus effectively operated at 200mhz (for comparison purposes only).
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I think its sort of the chicken and egg syndrome. Sometimes you need the increased resources before the aplications that can take advantage of them come along. Personally I see Voice Recognition as the 'next big thing' to hit PCs en masse and that will definately eat up those lovely clock cycles :)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
I;m not going to comment on the performance comparison, but I'll say this:
The Athlon is a 'true' 7th generation x86 processor. The PIII is still 6th generation (it's still the antiquated PPRo core). So, that means that WILLAMETTE is Intel's -7TH- generation chip.
AKA: Intel's answer to AMD.
I'll note that other posters have mentioned that Willamette's FPU blows chunks, so I wouldn't be worried about AMD getting pushed out of the gaming market *shrug*
The K8, IIRC, is Sledgehammer, the hybrid 32/64, and is going to run 32Bit MUCH faster than Itanium. I'm going to make a (not so) bold predicion and say the Itanium, and POSSIBLY McKinley aren't going to go very far once they are actually released. We -STILL- don't have this chip on the market and they've been talking about the fucking thing for 3 years.
Hmmm.... my 300/450 difference is pretty apparent running netscape, Eudora, booting (much quicker into NT, 98 or Linux), and way faster in games, compiles, and a lot of othre things (the Gimp).
Menus feel a lot faster too - everything does...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
That would be the smart way to go (it's the way I build my computers, which is how I get away with a K6-200 in a machine that plays DVDs (should try an even older 5x86-120 sometime and see if it'll still work)). It's not the cheap way, though, which is why pretty much the only way to get a computer built that way is to build it yourself.
Winmodems suck. Software DVD sucks. Give me hardware or give me death! :-)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
(code offuscation ) Exists because C is popular, clear C code is definitely possible, and of course I can write pascal so bad that nobody can read it - but there are so few pascal programmers to impress out there...
I'm affraid this is not a valid argument. A begin...end sequence is still more readable than { }, especially when you get lots of them together (and don't get me talking about those fucking C pointers, they really suck a lot and make code even more a mess !).
Broken for sure. But compilers get fixed. And pascal has the same problems from time to time, 16-bit delphi had a lot of "don't do that" type problems.
I've been using "code optimisation" on Delphi for years without a single problem with it. On the other hand most large C programs behave differently depending of the compiler optimisation... which is, by all name, a bug and nothing else. The difficulty of writing a C code parser compared to any other *really* structured language (ADA, Pascal, whatever) shows clearly that there's something wrong with it.
I know, there are many ways to make C easier to use with macros and other defines, but why bother trying to make a bad language look good when there ARE good languages around. All studies done shows that code in C is more bugged, longer to develop and maintain that code in Pascal or ADA (no I don't have a link to provide here unfortunately). This is a reason why aerospace software is NOT written in C...
Being a programmer I know that five hours compilation is the norm on a 500MHz PIII
;-). I think that before improving (expensive) CPU we should try to use elegant, cleanly designed software tools. Linux users, you brag so often about the cleanliness and speed of your OS against the bulky Windows... then why do you keep using one the worst language in the world ? A language that is so broken that it takes hours for the compiler to try to figure out how to compile the code ? A language that is so unreadable that there's a contest of code offuscation ? A language that sometimes looks like assembler with macros ? A language that is so wrong that compiler optimizations can output buggy code because they are not failproof !!! When I read a comment "if it crash try to compile without the speed optimization" I think this is just unacceptable, just as the Windows crash are unacceptable... I mean, if the optimization can generate buggy code then call it "beta feature" and don't release it until it produce always 100% correct code.
What ? 5 hours ? I compile all my programs, including my multithreaded web server code in less than 1 second on my PII 333... Oh wait, that is because I use Delphi, not some junk like C++
Well my policy is to go for best balance of performance and price... right now I would buy an Athlon over a P3. But Willamette sounds way more powerfull than an Athlon ! Just look at bus speed : 400 Mhz against the "meager" 200 Mhz of the Athlon... from every point of view Willamette looks much better than the Athlon. To fight Willamette AMD will have to design a new core, so unless the K8 is out before Willamette, Intel will take the speed crown again... and from the news and rumours around it won't happen.
As the song say "sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug". Intel is the bug now, next time it will be AMD, and so on...
Instant computing. When you click something it is done. You don't think about it, you don't wait, it IS. As in it works as fast as when you drop something. You open your hand and its gone, no waiting. The death of progress bars. The % symbol goes homeless.
As noble a goal as this sounds, the only way this could possibly be achieved, is to become 100% complacent with software's present capabilities (whenever you choose to define as present )
To state it another way (and to terribly misquote thousands of other developers who have said the same):
Hardware developers' sole purpose is to increase the capabilities of hardware, ie number of CPU cycles, storage, et. al. available to perform tasks (and, optionally, to reduce the number of cycles necessary to perform some hardware-specific functions)
Software developers' sole purpose is to utilize those CPU cycles to perform constructive (or at least entertaining) tasks. As Hardware speed increases, consumers demand that software progresses to provide additional capabilities, ie justify the need for additional hardware.
As software grows to need additional hardware speed, hardware developers are forced to provide additional speed & other resources.
Hardware and software developers are in a perpetual race of hardware speed vs. software capabilities. The race is called progress. The victor is the consumer.
...it sounds like the name of a river...
...oh wait, it is the name of a river, since that's how Intel names its projects in development...
...now only if you could spell it correctly (Willamette), maybe I'd feel some pity for someone who buys their processors on the basis of their names.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Welcome to Moore's Law. Ain't exponential growth great?
Ken
I think Rambus DRAM will run at this speed. Not sure if this is correct though.
Why is it that whenever Intel or AMD or whoever, tries to make progress by making faster chips, Microsoft does the reverse by releasing a shitty OS that requires more CPU speed and more RAM?
Room temperature my left, ehrm... That baby was so hot you could fry chicken between the slats in the oversize, high-speed dual fan cpu cooler!! And they mention no test of stability! I can overclock a 450 K6-2 by a third and have it boot.. It won't make it into the OS, but its running at 650Mhz!
.sig: Now legally binding!
You know, quite frankly, I doubt if I'll be buying an Intel chip for quite some time. AMD seems to be taking the better, faster, cheaper road, and I'm happy to support their business. Besides, Intel's fingers are beginning to get as dirty as M$'s, if you consider recent events.
No thanks, I'll take the Athlon. (Until Transmeta comes up with some comparable (read: really fast) Crusoes for the desktop market.)
I mean, I can't tell the difference between my Celeron running at 450mhz or 300mhz! I can, I guess, If I turn on the FPS count on games I'm playing (revolt improves noticably). But honestly, I can't detect frame rate changes once it gets above 20 fps. Others can, but I can't.
So why bother? I turn my overclocking down unless I'm gonna 3d render or something.......
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Heh I just left the Portland area to go back to school. They're FREAKISH about their pronunciation. I think will-AM-it makes more sense. maybe not *shrug*
You're right except what do they use to measure frequencies 0.6% really sucks for GHz level frequency measurements, 1ppm isn't very hard.
However the fluctuations in the clock frequency could be on the order of 0.6% but that still seems high to me.
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There's a fairly good article over at Tom's hardware guide describing some of the recent mis-steps by intel in their processor line (one that sticks out is the RAMBUS decision) and why they have a hard time changing direction (long plan for releases, if it they make a mistake and it changes it messes up the whole thing).
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Although I agree with you. I'd like to know what you compile that takes 5 hours?
You're not using GCC are you? Use precompiled headers and incremental compilation.
In my experience GCC is slower than VC++ or BCB on large projects.
No, I didn't mean a P2 or even an AMD chip at 450 against the Celeron. I meant if you have 2 processors side by side running at 450 and one is naturally running at 450 with a base clock of 125 with a multiplier of 2 (these numbers are made up, multipliers are rarely this small) and the other is running at a core clock of 100 with a multiplier of 4.5 that someone overclocked to that, the real 450 would be faster than the overclocked version.
Esperandi
You're correct, this is the way reality works and "instant computing" will never exist, but it is a good example to throw out when people say "I don't need 1GHz to play Solitaire"... theres another law by some other famous guy (I am horrid with names) that says software is a gas. It expands to fill the space it is given. I completely believe that. I know personally, my computer use is a gas. I moved from a 166 to a 350 with 4x the RAM and such, it took me a month before I was needing more speed because I simply increased the things I did and ran beefier stuff that I never did before... hell, I used to trace fractals for literally days at a time on my 386 with Fractint... now I just trace the more complicated ones that would have taken a month or more ;) I'm looking forward to the Athlon I ordered boosting my speed with video processing a significant amount, but the minute that happens I'll start doing bigger videos, use better codecs that take longer to process, etc, etc....
Esperandi
When the Itanium and AMDs 64 bit chips are out (and BTW, the AMD one already looks like it will make Intel's chip its bitch with 50% better performance running old 32 bit apps and extremely easier programming) you're going to complain that you can't use .
Esperandi
It expands to fill the space it is given, its a law of software engineering.
Esperandi
It's RDRAM only, I guess that means its dead already, huh? I mean being as they can't get it to work, it costs more than a shiny new car, and all that jazz...
At least they're finally not doing that pussy-ass shit like moving from 100Mhz bus to 133... come on, how lame is that? AMD gave us a jump to 200, and we're getting 400 next. When Intel tries to go from 400 to 433, I will rain hellfire on their engineers.
Esperandi
I want my 500GHz processor NOW, bitch. Screw your profits, you'll sell enough of them to make up for it.
Well, x86 is what people know. Just like MS & AOL. The chip manufacturers are still calling them x86 chips because x86 is what's known and sells. "Futuristic" at this point means (x+n)86.
Maybe someday we'll get beyond that....
Eruantalon
The Annals of Middle-earth
Really? Who cares that much about processor speeds? Once you get beyond a certain point, faster is pretty much useless for most things. Linux really doesn't need a 1Ghz - what could that much processor be used for? Windows, on the other hand, may run better (read: faster) with a 1Ghz, but even with Windows, there's a point where a faster chip doesn't make the system faster.
So Intel & Athlon want to put each other out of business. Why doesn't one of them make a revolutionary processor instead of adding zeros & ones to the x86's? I'm perfectly happy with my PII 350. Sure, I could use more ram, but my processor speed is just fine for what I need. I really don't care if there's a 10Ghz processor - I don't need or want it. I want something that will be useful to me, not a status symbol.
Come up with some new processor that can do something completely new and different. Make it faster and more reliable. Then I'll buy it.
Eruantalon
The Annals of Middle-earth
Heh mm heheh. He said, "organ." Heh heh mm heh heh heheh mm heh!
Huhuh. Shut up, Beavis. You want me to smack you?
Heheh mm heh. Yeah! YEAH!
*smack*
Ahhh, brings back the memories, doesn't it, Vel?
Constitutionally Correct
Come on now, guys.
Do you really think that if Intel could run Willamette at 1.5 GHz now with no special cooling that they would intro it in October at "only" 1.3?
This snippet at Aces Hardware kinda puts it into perspective:
In your opinion, could Willamette ALU run at 3GHz air-cooled on Intel's 0.18 transistors?
I am here at IDF. I saw the Albert's demo and Glen's presentation and demos. I was very impressed with the 1.5GHz. 3GHz ALU is even more impressive, although, it is only a tiny percent of the whole die.
Albert's presentation was designed for maximum effect. When a quick 1.5GHz frequency utility demo was run, Albert did not say anything about how the chip was cooled. Then he quickly switched to a different system and ran some 3D rendering. During this second demo Albert and his partner engaged in a lively conversation showing everybody that it was running air-cooled. Of course now it was not displaying the frequency.
The impression was created that the 1.5GHz system is running 3D rendering air-cooled. But for all we know, 1.5GHz system could have been floating in liquid helium, while the one running 3d rendering was running at 800MHz.
That said, Willamette could still be a very nice CPU, but Im not going to get it unless Intel has a change of heart. The point being that Intel says Willamette will only support RAMBUS memory, and Im not going to shell out 5 times as much $ fom my RAM with no advantage whatsoever (with RAMBUS yields only getting worse there is little hope in its price turning sane any time soon).
That is why Im going for AMD and DDR. In fact, my K7-500@700 should suffice for some time.
/Dervak
Do we really need an extremely fast chip like that yet. I have a p2 333 and its still running everything I need, no problems.
Why dosent intel find ways to increase hard drive access or [insert buzzwords here].
Personally, I would like a faster hard drive, loading windows (yes, I run windows, as primary os only) takes a long time, maybe a hard drive with 1/4 the access time would speed things up a little.
icq:=22921393;
Sorry, maybe I've got processor envy, my 400A Celeron doesn't measure up anymore...
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
Open Directory - Science: Technology: Optics: Optical Computing has a bunch of links to universities and and others pursuing these lines of investigation.
Feb 15, 2002 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, NASDAQ) made headlines in the processor world today by demoing a processor capable of transmitting data across the bus faster than the speed of light (FTL). Recent advances in nanotechnology and wormhole miniaturization made this breakthrough possible. Intel Corp. is expected to announce its new line of Faster than Faster than Light (FTL+) processors later this week. Although no official statement to this effect has come out of Intel, this sort of one-ups-man-ship has now being going on for, what, 4 straight years now? So nobody's going to be surprised by the next big announcement, are they?
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
And it *certainly* won't mean 1/5th the time, (would that be considered 5 times the speed?)
Yes, true, and this also shows what good benchmarks can be if you try to apply them to different application areas. The stuff Carmack does is real-time embellished polygon spitting on cutting edge 3D hardware, which is dependant on quite a number of other factors besides CPU speed, and where specifically the interaction of the CPU with the rest of the system matters quite a bit (gross oversimplification in semi-techspeak, please no flames). We more or less only do number crunching, which is pretty processor-centric, so a good chip can show off more of it's potential in our case. Not the same thing altogether.
AlexanderSome of the more bothersome things about this demo are pointed out on anandtech: mainly the fact that they only ran a simple benchmarking demo, nothing else and that the chip didn't appear to be very stable.
There's a lot of talk about the fact that the CPU runs the ALU at 2x speed, thus a 1.5ghz cpu would be running the ALUs at 3ghz. That's fast!
BUT, isn't the following feasible?
What if the non-ALU CPU was running at 750mhz, and the ALU's were running at 1.5ghz? Given that, we can assume:
1) The reason Intel didn't show any real-world benchmarks is because this CPU wouldn't perform very well. Sure it would do 1.5ghz worth of speed on integer instructions, but it would only be 750mhz on floating point. This thing (in general) would get it's butt kicked by the 1.1ghz Athlon.
2) The reason the CPU can run at room temperature is because most of it is running at 750mhz. Sure the overclocked ALUs would add some heat, but probably not enough to unstabilize a demo chip when we know Intel can do 1ghz chips at room temp.
3) I remember in the "good ol' days" running Norton-ish benchmarks on my 386 and 486. The things would give you a pretty good indication of how fast your CPU was running, but they would tend to waver a bit -- my 386/dx33 would tend to jump between 33.1 and 33.3. Could that account for the instability we saw? If the benchmark was benching 1.5ghz worth of integer instructions, it seems to me that it might waver a bit, as it did (barely reaching a measured 1.5ghz).4) The general lack of information on the speed of discrete components in the chip (eg. cache timings, etc...)
Of course, this is a lot of supposition. But assuming this, a lot of things suddenly make sense (and I'm sure you can think of more).
Seems like Intel is trying to become the next Cyrix. First Tinma (think Media/GL) and now an overclocked ALU with horrible floating point (think 5x86). And we all know what happened to Cyrix.
I'd love to hear your comments. I'm not putting forth any of the above as being true -- I'm just putting it out on the table to be thought about.
Tarindel
It's a nice demo but take a look around at the places that sell CPU's. Go on look... Notice something? There doesn't seem to be anyone selling the 800Mhz chip Intel was "shipping in quantity" over a month ago.
Check Pricewatch, and thechipmerchant. No 800Mhz. Best they have is 733Mhz.
Plenty of AMD though.
- 2002 we should exceed 1.6 GHz, achieving microwave frequencies
- 2005 we exceed 3.1 GHz, or infrared frequencies
- 2026 400 GHz (we'll start using microns from here on out), or
.7 microns. In other words, visible red light. - 2032 0.19 microns, or ultraviolet radiation
- 2044 0.01 microns, or hard ultraviolet
- 2050 0.003 microns, or X-rays
- 2080 2E-6 microns, or gamma radiation
In other words:- In 2032, The stereotypical programmer will no longer be pale and pasty looking. Geeks will be associated with the fine bronzed appearance they get from their UV-emitting processor Undoubtedly it will become fashionable to look pale and pasty.
- In 2050, it will no longer be necessary to go to the hospital for X-rays. Your machine can do updates every 30 seconds, so we can keep an eye out for the various cancers caused by sitting near an X-ray emitting chip all day. We'll have sites that have live feeds from people's "X-ray cams". Many people's cats will become mysteriously bald and patchy.
- In 2080, food poisoning will become a thing of the past, as everyone can irradiate their food simply by putting on top of the computer. Or, since, embedded computers will be everywhere, just lean it against the dishwasher, or maybe next to your alarm clock.
Yes, the future has a lot of interesting things in store...Everyone will have a healthy glow too!
Nothing is really x86 anymore as is... New chips are designed to emulate the old form x86, while taking advantage of new technologies, hence out of order execution and multiple fpu's are possible in new cpu's, but weren't previously, yet the pcpu's execute code from eons ago...
Intel seems to miss the entiire point, by the date of release of the willamette, their chip will almost indefinately be inferior to the AMD chip which is superior to their current technology. The earlier articale at Tom's Hardware really summed how meaning less the willamete is... What's more, intel actually charges more for their inferior chips, but people are catching on... slowly. I've begun talking to "non-geeks" who can tell you that the p3 is inferior... And they Won't be able to catch AMD (unless AMD makes a stupid mistake, like the itanium)
It should be noticed that Intel also increased the instruction pipeline's length from 15 to 20. This also makes higher clocking frequencies possible, however trading performance for it. An optimal length is between 7 and 11.
IMHO Intel has just thrown out whatever they had, which is by the way an old tactic of them, which they also put to "good" use against Motorola in the 68000-8088/86-war.
The willamette shown had been an early prototype. They hooked it up a little and there the show started, I'd say.
End Of Message "Shouldn't have taken the blue pill
"No one should ever need more than 640k of RAM." - Bill Gates.
What you said is just about as short-sighted as what BillG said way back when. YOU may not need 1.5GHz today, but some other people do today and many more will need it in the future.
AFAIK, Willamettes will be available in Q3 2000.
PS: There ARE lots of high-bandwidth x86 boxes out there.
They know something we apparently dont! Like maybe they are wanting to busy Intel's balls all along the way.. :-) which is fine by me... Dont you feel the suspense this type of marketing creates? Ehh just to totally blow them out of the water what fun is that?? Just lead Intel along thats a better insult to, we are always one step ahead (but really we are like 5 and you know it were just doing this to piss you off) I love it.. :-) GO AMD
Now, this combined with a GeforceDDR would actually make Quake 3 look real at 1600x1200.
Can't wait for 2ghz athlons to come out.
--
Talon Karrde
The damndest thing is it's name.
I like saying, I have a K6-2. That sounds technological and even though it isn't the best chip it sounds like it is good.
Athlon sounds like Athlete, and seems fast.... and it is, too. It "outruns" P3.
Itanium sounds like Titanium, which is silverey burnished metal (in my mind, at least), and that sounds cool. Titanium is strong and expensive. I want an itanium, in a titanium case.
Merced sounds like Mercedes, so it's the pimp-daddy. I want one with a zebra patterened heatsink and a gold plated fan.
But Willamette? I can hear the William Tell Overture. It just sounds yucky.
I want a chip with a sexy metallic name. Name a chip Hydroxide or Matrix or Neuromagic. Not Willamette... it sounds like a chip for grandmas. (Booyah!)
--
Talon Karrde
Dunno when, but that was WAYYY long time ago.. so if they repeat what they already did, this 1.5GHz won't be out for 2 years.
That's an interesting point, one I've been thinking for a while
:)
I may be talking bull*** out of my mouth here but I was wondering why, or if there is any, any of the chip companies working on ways to create processors using laser technology versus electric?
Catch my drift? This IS pretty much way over my head. But you guys are smarter so that's why I'm asking
Thanks
Nope, not exactly. Willamette is in fact not in the Itanium/Merced family, rather it is yet another x86-based processor. The first couple of IA-64 processors that should come to fruition are the Itanium and McKinley. As far as Sledgehammer goes, I'm questioning the intelligence of AMD's decision to expand upon the x86 architecture. This instruction set has been expanded upon for 20 years now, and has become incredibly bloated. How many thousands of instructions are there? One, maybe two? But that's still a hell of a lot of instructions. Any person coding in assembly couldn't possibly use the entire instruction set effectively. On the other hand, though, what is AMD supposed to do? Designing a completely new architecture all by AMD's little self is probably asking a bit much (let's face it, they aren't as resource-rich as the likes of Intel or Sun), and unfortunately would likely spell doom due to the probable lack of support. I guess AMD's stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place. www.umr.edu/~tcaton
You are right. My bad.
You are correct. I apologize. Does anyone know the operating temp on the Willamette?
I agree that stability seemed to be quite a problem--they didn't mention any testing they did, it seems that they only ran it for bragging rights , even if the processor was probably really unstable. I read at JC that they were air-cooled.
The Tom's Hardware Guide article is a must read. I don't agree with all the points he tries to make, but there is a wealth of insight into all the things AMD and Intel have done right and wrong to get us to this point.
And this CPU demo seems to fit right in with what he was saying.
Has nothing to do with trumping. Even now, AMD is shipping their top sorts, and from what I've heard, Intel isn't. It appears that AMD has the top stuff you can actually buy in X86.
I suspect it has more to do with selling the slower stuff. There is a group of people that will buy the fastest, whatever speed it is, whatever price it is. There is also a perceived permissible price curve between fastest and slowest.
Besides, this gives them headroom in the race with Intel, as well as keeping the slower chips more salable. It may well signal to the overclockers out there, "Start your engines!"
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
That may be the case if the chip was not turned on!
__
Sigs are like arse-holes, everybody has one
- - - -
I'd like to say that everyone who's replied to my message has given me some insight into the AMD/Intel war.
I really though AMD and intel were just playing games and they both had higher end things they weren't showing. But I do remember AMD's trouble meeting demand, and I'm sure they don't want to have that with a 1 GHz athlon, and Intel is already having trouble with the upper end CuMines.
Thanks for the insight!
-------- "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away" --Spiritualized
Amazing the game playing that goes on here. AMD demos 1.1 ghz, but "insiders" say they could do MUCH MORE, and release 1.1 ghz in quantities. Then intel pops out with the 1.5 ghz williamette.
It's like, if you CAN do it, AMD, just do it, and take the whole market from Intel, if you can do it an intel can't, then why wait? But I hear "things" about AMD engineers saying "We could mass produce 1.1 GHZ athlons tommorrow if Marketing gives the word". Well, why isn't marketing giving the word?
Because AMD is afraid intel can trump them, and they don't want to show their hand too early. The CPU games are amazing.
-------- "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away" --Spiritualized
the following quote in that article caught my eye: **With all of the construction that needs to take place, Intel and others will need to concentrate on keeping costs down. Interestingly, two of three e-commerce CEOs brought on stage to tout the benefits of e-commerce and Intel servers said they were using the low-cost Linux OS.** although i will say the use of linux is "interesting" i don't find it particulary unexpected. "e-commerce", for the majority, is synonomous with internet business, thus making perfect sense for 2/3 of these CEOs to deploy apache vs IIS or some other web server platform. in a field that is as upstart as internet commerce it makes perfect sense to deploy linux where it excels: the internet server market. the free part doesn't hurt either...
-rich henning -linux 2.2.x
BTW. I'm still waiting for a single on-topic reply to my original post ;-)
FYI. I'm an NT developer. And yes, I do use C++. As for the rest of your comment I'll ignore it because it's just flamebait and offtopic.
Who cares though. Either way it's pretty silly.
Take a look at the Intel Press Release
"... demonstrating the company's fastest microprocessor: a chip running at 1.5 gigahertz (GHz), or 1.5 billion clock cycles per second, at room temperature."
Well, if I'm correct, the Williamette is in the Iltanium/Merced family, in which case it would be quite different from an x86. Rumors have it that it will actually run x86 32 bit code slower than an equivalently clocked PIII, since it's designed for 64 bit code. On the other hand, I'm still waiting to see the miracle EPIC compiler that can actually produce code that will utilize this 64 bit processor to the max.
...
The Sledgehammer, on the other hand, should be optimized to run 32 bit code much faster than it currently runs on Athlons
The Wintel affair may have just been a one night stand -- I think they caught something from their partner in Redmond...
--
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fat lenny's gonna lick your brain today.
The Willamette will be introduced at 800 mhz initially and climb in 33 mhz increments for a total of 22 separate processors. To prevent VAI from gaining market share Intel will be creating 22 new slot types believed to be labeled SLOT E through SLOT BB, skipping the letters Q and Z.
Interestingly, you will be able to overclock the new Celerons to 1.5 ghz three months prior to Willamette's 1.5 ghz release. Sadly, the price of rambus is expected to climb as long as Intel's processors remain faster than their AMD counterparts. That's ok to potential low end Celeron customers because they only expect to get 16 megs of ram with their sub-$1000 systems.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel however: In 2001 Intel will debut a whole new way to compute! Intel is building a vast server running at 10.94 TeraFLOPs/sec capable of running everybody's desktops from San Jose. You will have instantaneous access at anytime to the worlds fastest computer. The home client will be called Q Box! followed of course by Z Box! completely skipping X Box... This is of course the natural next step in the evolution of home computing. Intel will no longer be putting serial numbers on their processors to keep track of you. They will already have all your data. Rumors of Intel's collaboration with the folks at SETI@home are patently false. Intel did mention not to expect more than one frame every 18 hrs 13 min 45.4 sec on your first person shooter.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Delphi is decent. Pascal is pretty clean. But Ada is where it's at. I used to code in delphi, but I no longer have any windows boxen, so I have switched to C and am learning ADA. Really, if you are conserned with straight up speed &power stick with c. If you want a clean, well implamented object oriented language, go with ADA. C++ sucks, though, I agree. BTW, anyone know when borland/interprise plans to release Delphi for Linux? the guibuilder is rather cool. Oh, and are you refering to the obsfucated perl contest? Well written perl is easier to read than english, but it is so loosly typed that you can write really crapy perl code that is almost as bad as visual basic. My suggestion is "use strict" on anything longer than one screen. oh and as for macros- macros are fast. Macros are cool. Don't mess with macros. If you are mearly chaseing after the "most object oriented" language, Ada kicks Delphi's ass. If you are going for speed, go with C. if you are going for speed of development, use perl. Delphi does have a kick-ass guibuilder, though.
http://g3d.arashbest.com/geforcetweak2. html
I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, so I dont know how good it is. And unfortunately, the pics look like he was working in his basement with a flashlight :\
-c0bra
There are strange things done, under the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold - Robert Service
Wake up and realize this fact: Intel is not at all worried about AMD.
Then who (or what) is Intel worried about?
The Internet.
Have any of you noticed how Intel has been deliberately and steadily shifting it's core business away from CPU's? Intel is investing it's Billions in networking and servers, markets that AMD cannot even touch. You may whine and complain about the high price of Intel CPU's, but if you are a sysadmin buying a $50K database server, the price of the CPU becomes irrelevant compared to reputation and availablity.
My prediction: in two or three years, after the server boom has started, AMD will inherit a commoditized PC market and will be utterly shut out of the server market because not only will Itanium have left them behind, but Intel will have a much better marketing position since they will be able to offer fully integrated Internet products.
If it runs x86 code, and doesn't run IA-64 code, it's an x86. If you can't get at what's inside, then, from a programmer's standpoint, the only way in which the inside is relevant is its effect on performance (e.g. "do this, don't do that, if you want your code to run fast"). You can't write raw rops to feed to the guts of a P6, so a P6 is an x86; unless Intel lets you write raw rops to feed to the guts of a Willamette - and I really really really really really doubt they'll let you do that - it's an x86.
Yeah, as discussed elsewhere 20C is a bit of a stretch. Provided no active refrigeration (peletier, or freon) it must be a few (10C or more) warmer then ambient/room temp.
The junction temp can also be the temp between the heatsink and the chip. (As opposed to the junction between differently doped Si.) If you talked to to a thermodynamics guy the temp between heatsink and chip would be the one he was talking about.
Just a couple items:
1. It is reported that the execution units have a 20-stage pipeline. So stalls will hurt big-time unless Intel has something new up its sleeves (which I really doubt). They'll probably let loose plenty of PR using benchmarks with some very carefully hand-tuned code that shows this chip just blows AMD out of the water, but will mean little for most things.
2. The FPU is running at half the speed of the ALU. So FP performance will not be up to par for scientific applications (or games) as compared to an AMD processor running both at the same speed. Athlon's FPU is already known to blow PIII's out of the water.
3. This processor won't be released until the end of the year, which the way things have been working means they won't be available until next year. By then, Athlon will have large on-die cache, increased bus speed and possibly SMP systems (fingers crossed).
C|net has no data in that URL. A better URL is ... n 021500a.htm
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/c
-ak
It took quite a while for us to hit the 1000 megahertz mark. Now, all of a sudden, we've made leaps and bounds, and have jumped up a whole 500 megahertz? Am I reading this correctly? Or should it really be 1.05 GHz (1050 MHz)?
I'm sorry. What I meant to say was 'please excuse me.'
what came out of my mouth was 'Move or I'll kill you!'
so you all know, at Intel's processor forum going on they were running the Powerpoint presentation on a Willamette. I think it was running at 1.1ghz rather than 1.5 though, while theres a 400mhz speed difference it showed the validity of the chip's ability.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Of course, the Timna sounds like a dead end technology (who would want graphics that you have to replace the chip to upgrade?),
Lots of people. The buisness desktop market doesn't really care about 3d-graphics, neither does the email & web only segment of the market. What these people want is a dirt cheap system with decent 2d performance. SOC technology can help deliver that. I wouldn't buy one for myself, but for low-end systems...
--Shoeboy
Many people in science and technology use Celsius rather than Farenheit. 20 degrees C = 68 degrees F... a bit on the cool side for my liking, but perfectly reasonable value for room temperature.
Eric
Your graphics card *IS* a rendering sub-system. Your Sound card *IS* a band in a box.
Your drive controller *DOES* do everything it can. Sure.. SCSI does this much better than IDE, as IDE is basically a raw i/o port, nothing more than a 16 bit buffer/latch...but the controller is on each drive.
The real magic in these co-processor chips, on the Amiga, was the standard platform. Because they were all the same, it was possible for each successive generation of software to be more and more refined, they could bang away on the hardware directly......
yes. Old Amiga Demos still look and sound BETTER and more pleasing to the eye tha many super-high res things these days... but that's because of refinement, and has little to do with the capabilities of the chips themselves.
However, more and faster can't take the place of smart. What I'd like to see is more media processor chips. You know like Sid and Nancy, and Paula, and so on. Even the 68xxx chip series started out as a process controller.
I'd like to see the next GeForce256 based card as a rendering sub-system. I want my drive controller to do everything it can, and I want a sound card that acts like a band in a box.
Most of all, I'd like to see modern software not require the newest chip. If you come down to it, every new chip, every new hard drive and every new graphics technology gets abused eventually. That's unfortunate, especially when you go to computer shows and see 1024x768 3d card demos that look like the 640x480 vga based 3d demos from the earlier 90s.
I always wait until my processor is out-classed by 100-120% in speed increase before I consider an upgrade. I then buy the next one back. I currently have a PII450, and I will upgrade when we get to 1GHz shipped. At that point, I may buy a 900mhz. But running Linux, I can't see where that will take me except shorter compile times, and the ability to serve to 100+ thin clients in my house or something like that. Of course I could boot into windows and play games :)
It's a another case of "More and faster." God bless Moore's law.
Lowmag.net
from this article about Dell switching website to Win2K
If Win2K really needs that sort of a Mhz boost then Microsoft HAS to push intel to release as fast as they can, so people feel obliged to upgrade, and they can turn out the 'old' machines that would run NT4 just fine, but would run NT5^H^H^HWin2K like a dog.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
1. Willamette isn't out. Willamette won't BE out for a while yet (try October, based on Intel's current roadmap).
2. This is still part of the pissing match they have going on with AMD. Woopedy do. AMD is at least putting out products in volume when they announce. (don't start going off about being able to get 750Mhz and 800Mhz machines from Dell, Dell is just about the -only- vendor getting those parts right now).
3. Intel is scared shitless right now because AMD isn't screwing up for once.
4. This was at the Intel Developer's Conference. This means they're talking about products and projects at least 6 months down the road.
It boils down to this: So fucking what. They DON'T have 1 Ghz ready for the market, they WON'T have it ready for a while yet, and if/when they DO put it out, it's going to be atrociously expensive. Basically, just like AMD's 1.1 Ghz demo a few days back, this is meaningless.
Of course, AMD is more likely to RELEASE that one sometime soon *shrug*
The likely reason(s0 that AMD has not upped the MGZ war to the extreme is: 1) They are struggling to meet increased demand. They currently have only a fraction of the market and if their demand increased they would have a hard time meeting it. This would cause several problems. if supply decreases and demand increases then prices must rise. By previously stating they will remain under Intel's prices by 15% they would be exposing ther necks to Intel (can we say pricewar?). 2) Initial silicon die molds generally have low yields. If you end up throwing out half your ouput because yield is too low the cost of manufactuing rises and the rate of defects also increases. The reason Intel is showing the 1.5GHZ is for bragging rights. Their yield rate is likely very low. At best what we are seeing is AMD's short term advantage at being able to output better performing chips (at comparable clock rates) with a relatively high yield. The real war begins if Intel abandons x86. intel will have a hard sell and AMD will be selling to the legacy market. This is the same folly that gave AMD room to grow in the past. Personally I don't see Intel making the same mistake again. But indications are that they may be too far down the wrong path to turn back. If so Intel may be forced to backpetal and rethink its core strategy.
I also suspect it was a lack of precision in their monitoring equipment. After all, how much inertia is there in a chip's speed? ;)
Anyway, I think this is quite a positive development. It does at least prove that Willamette is capable of doing 1.5 GHz. Of course it is a rare chip off the line that can do it now. Too bad the cooling wasn't mentioned, but the fact that is is clockable to 1.5 GHz under *any* conditions is quite a claim.
Yields will improve and they will improve the quality of the chips steadily -- I have confidence in that much. Unfortunately, I am afraid that their failure to mention either power consumption or heat dissipation methods is not a coincidence.
Of course, it may be that that was also just an oversight of a clueless reporter who thought 1.5GHz was the only important datum. Maybe we'll see 1.2 and 1.4GHz chips in a few months, after all.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
No, you miss understood what he said. He said the temperature at the junction(whatever that is) was 20 degrees(C?). So for the tempture to be 20 degrees C at the junction the temperature in the room the CPU was in, it had to be near Antarctic levels.
That's great tht they have developed such fast processor, but isn't it still just an x86? When are we going to see some real nextgen chips, Itanium or whatever you call it. Computer companies, for such a "futuristic" industry seem to love to live in the past.
This is looking somewhat sooner than October. We'll just have to see how long it takes them to start producing in significant quantities. Let's hope for Intel's sake that it isn't October. I wonder if that article prompted the demo.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
(Like "Science", "Ask Slashdot", etc, some of its articles would also show up on the main page.)
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The shareholder is always right.
One thing curiously missing from the AMD report was what it was doing. The Intel chip was only running a frequency ID utility which is great if that's what you plan on running all day. Who knows, maybe both of these processors melt the second you try to run real code on them. This report, to me at least, just seems like fluff. I would really like it if companies just talked about what they had ready for production rather than just trying to create a media stir. Because megahertz ISN'T a measure of performance when comparing two different types of chips, who really cares other than the media? I like seeing the tech specs but I wish these companies would stop tooting the MHz horn. Give me true loaded performance, not this frequency stuff.
A side note of genuine curiosity: I've heard RDRAM is slow when transfering many small files but blazing when transfering large files. That in mind, is anyone out there ready to shell out the big bucks for RDRAM?
Microsoft seems to like old rock songs. For the release of win95 they purchased the rights to the Stones song "Start Me Up." Perhaps a more fitting song for the upcoming release of win2K would be "I Fought the Law and the Law Won."
What do you mean a "real" 450? A PII450 benches about 3 to 5 percent faster than a Celeron bumped to 450. It has a larger cache (512k) than the Celeron's 128K, but the celeron's runs at the chip speed. Multipliers are the same. Actually a 300a celeron bumped to 450 runs about the same benchmarks as a 466 Celeron. Why? The 466 is running at a 66mhz Motherboard Bus speed. The 300 is bumped to 100 mhz, so it's almost a wash. Visiti www.overclocking.com or Tom's hardware to see the above benchmarks.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
There's some law in software and hardware design, its named after someone but I forget. Anyhow, the law says that humans can't "see" benefits in performance unless they're at least a 20% speed advancement.
I think that's pretty much about right, and based on that you wouldn't notice the difference (not to mention the fact that the difference between a 300 and an overclocked 450 is NOT even close to the difference between a 300 and a real 450 (unless the multiplers are the same, chance are they're not)).
If you think we don't need faster processors except for high end stuff, consider this:
Instant computing. When you click something it is done. You don't think about it, you don't wait, it IS. As in it works as fast as when you drop something. You open your hand and its gone, no waiting. The death of progress bars. The % symbol goes homeless.
Esperandi
Actually, I chalked that up to the cluelessness of the reporter. I mean, what does "barely" mean? They don't slowly increase the "throttle" until it hits top speed; it either runs or it doesn't. That the device they were using to measure the clock speed had some minor fluctuations is not a huge deal. 1.492 is within 0.6% of 1.5G, well within typical measurement error.
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1. It will require a totally new chipset and these chipsets will be RDRAM-only! (at least the ones made by intel)
2. It will have a 400mhz bus. This could mean either a 100 Mhz ddr bus that fetches twice as much data as normal buses or 200mhz ddr bus. Anyways, data transfer rate will be 3.2GB/s. They have announced a Quad Pumped bus recently so 100mhz clocking would make sense.
3. The integer unit will work at twice the clock speed of the processor. So for 1.5Ghz chip expect 3Ghz integer unit. Can you say fast kernel compiling!
It will still use aluminium interconnects. There will be additions to SIMD-instruction set(a total of 144 new instructions).
They did speculate at Anandtech that the only program that could be run stable enough was the frequency ID-utility... =)
Hey... the correct spelling is "Willamette". Named after the main river running through Portland.
And in case you're wondering, the correct pronunciation is "Will-A-mette", not "Willa-METTE".
Sorry. I live in the Portland area. When I first got here, I pronounced it the second way, and was set straight real quick.
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
On a related note that makes me suspect the conditions under which this result was obtained, at a recent Intel Developer Forum demonstration, Intel unveiled a P3 (ie. Coppermine) operating at 1Ghz. An audience member asked what temperature the result was done at. Intel replied room temperature. Another audience member asked what room temperature was. Intel replied the 20 degrees. Yet another audience members asked which part of the chip was measured at 20 degrees. Intel replies T_j (the temperature at the junction)!!!
For those not conversant in chip design, this means that the "room temperature" must have been near Antarctic for T_j to be 20 degrees. Gotta love Intel.
What would these be useful for? I agree that their speed is pretty impressive since they are air cooled, but I can't seem to find a good reasons for buying one--for games, the video card is pretty much what keeps the framerate down, and most high-bandwith servers don't use x86.
Anyone have any idea what the price of one of these chips will be? Me, I expect that they will initially sell around $2500--but that's just my estimate. Anyone from *HINT* Intel *HINT* to give us more information on their availability/price?
I would just like to reiterate that frequency is relatively unimportant compared to how fast this thing crunches numbers. Since no numbers to that effect were released, it can be assumed that this is just another bit of Intel PR posturing.
Also, it is not mentioned how much this thing was cooled to be able to hit 1500MHZ. I would lay money down that AMD's newest Athlon, when properly cooled, would be able to hit at least this number easily.
On a side note, this paragraph held interest for me:
RAMBUS tech, while viable and more than just a little cool, will be dead as a doornail without support from motherboard manufacturers, and it looks like that by postponing its official Intel adoption by several years will effectively kill it good. Of course, the Timna sounds like a dead end technology (who would want graphics that you have to replace the chip to upgrade?), so I don't think that that would be something I would waste expensive RAMBUS on anyway.
Methinks Intel needs to be beaten with a cluestick.
the inquisitor
Intriguingly, this article totally fails to mention just how much cooling the Williamette required for operation, or how stable it was in operation. The mention that it 'barely made 1.5GHz' doesn't suggest to me that stability was an important part of this demonstration. It's also interesting to note that the time line for Williamette is still scheduled for late this year, so I suspect this sample is one of the best off the line so far. The recent fan-cooled 1.1GHz Athlon demonstration may prove to be a more realistic view of the Q4 performance we are likely to be able to get our hands on, although Kryotech may prove me wrong.
Also intriguing is Intel's reluctance to push up the speeds of the Celerons closer to their limits. This is rapidly turning into an overclocking dream - I've seen 500MHz Celerons go easily to 640MHz, whereas the Pentium IIIs seem to be selected to be much more difficult to successfully overclock. So the announcement of 600MHz Celerons seems long overdue - my only thought is that Intel does not want the Celeron line encroaching on their Pentium sales, since there appear to be no technical reasons for the delay.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
If you are thinking about posting another "who cares" comment think twice: just because it doesn't affect you doesn't mean it won't affect others. Being a programmer I know that five hours compilation is the norm on a 500MHz PIII. 1.5GHZ Willamette should do the job in just over an hour. That's a lot of time saved on compilation.
As for "Intel can't supply Coppermines at decent clock speed so Willamette is vapourware" comments is simply rubbish Coppermine is an old design and Intel could only push it so far (I heard they had to reroute the chip to get it to 1GHz). However, Willamette is a new design altogether so if it's done properly they shouldn't have so many yield problems. Having said that I don't think that their design can match that of Athlon which was designed by one of the main Alpha guys (and it shows).
What truly sucks about this announcement however, is that Intel is trying to make us buy Rambus crap. And I don't want it. And nobody else apart from Intel wants Rambus. It's expensive, has latency problems and carries implicit Rambus tax in it. I hate intel pushing those political decisions down our throats. That's why I stick with AMD.
- 2x ALU unit (i.e. the integer processor runs at 3.0 GHz)
- FSB runs at "400 MHz" (similar to the "200 MHz" EV6 bus)
- the introduction of SSE2
It also talks more about Intel recognizing the need for DDR SDRAM systems as well.Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.