Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Who needs more that 640Kb of RAM for applications? There's no way that personal computers would ever require more than 1MB of memory!
;)
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.
That must be the "Hyper Pipelined Technology" to which the Willamette Processor Software Developer's Guide refers.
I guess "Hyper Pipelined Technology" is what you use when superpipelining just isn't enough; I'm waiting for UltraSuperHyperMegaDeathPipelining, myself....
Well, ceteris paribus, higher clock frequencies do boost performance, but I guess the deeper the pipeline, the more pain you suffer if, say, you mispredict a branch and have to throw out a bunch of stuff you've sucked up into said pipeline. (The Willamette document in question speaks of better branch prediction by "effectively combining all current branch prediction schemes".)
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).
Consider that I can't get more than one or two 750 or 800Mhz P3s to sell and they are not cheap. I *can* get 800 & 850Mhz Athlons. Intel may have produced a very fast one-off chip to demonstrate, but that is not the same thing as making hundreds of thousands of chips for retail sale.
I am more interested in the SMP capable Athlons that are supposed to be here the second half of 2000.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
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.)
--
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."
I agree. I used to be a graphic artist. I know there is no such thing as too much speed or RAM for those users. I'm just talking about what I do now.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
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.
---
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.
--
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... =)
Increasing motherboard speed woult be nice, too. A 133 MHz system bus is nice, but wouldn't it be great if your 800 MHz processor could access RDRAM at 200MHz or higher.
Cache... we don't need no stinking cache!
--"The it'd-be-cool-if department".
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the aforementioned flaw with Intel's i820 chipset, rather than with RDRAM? I don't recall the i840 chipset having the same limitation (ie one of the memory slots disabled). True? Keep in mind, also, that RDRAM won't *necessarily* cost your first born son next year like it does now. SDRAM prices fluctuated by like %300 in the month of October last year, things change quickly. Perhaps if Rambus can get their shiznit together, Intel's investment might actually pay off.
--Terrence
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?
1200dpi is the MIN standard for photo-quality marcom style artwork. fyi,
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.