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.

Comments

Re:Is it still an x86?

[Guy Harris]

Well, if I'm correct, the Williamette is in the Iltanium/Merced family

Well, you're not correct; see the Willamette Processor Software Developer's Guide, which says "Willamette is the code name for the next generation of 32-bit Intel® Intel Architecture (IA-32) processors".

Merced is the code name for the first IA-64 (Itanium) chip, and McKinley is apparently the code name for its successor (Itanium II, or some other lame name?).

Re:Intel's magical P3

[Signail11]

Err, the figures that I referred to were in Celsius. I think that you misunderstand what T_j is. T_j is not the temperature of the surface of the chip, but rather the junction between adjacent non-similarly doped areas of silicon. T_j in a normal desktop or laptop computer is significantly higher than room temperature; I don't have any exact figures handy, but I would be willing to bet that T_j is over a hundred degrees C in any commericial x86 chip operating under normal conditions.

Bad Logic Advisory

[inquis]

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:

"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."

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

Re:More and Faster

[muecksteiner]

There _are_ people who benefit quite a lot from the current "mine is longer" processor speed wars, such as computer graphics users. For the rendering of photorealistic images with one of the more sophisticated image synthesis methods, such as raytracing and/or radiosity, CPU horsepower is essential. Without this (mostly inane) speed race on the desktop, graphics researchers like ourselves would still be paying SGI et al. $BIGNUM for halfway decent CPUs. But, as anyone with an ounce of sense knows anyway, MHz means not as much as it sounds.

Example: at our institute, we are in the process of writing a more modern GPL'ed cross-platform replacement for POVray, mainly as a rendering research tool, but it's also intended to be useable by enthusiasts. This rendering system (which btw is mostly done and will be released soon) gives us a nice opportunity to compare the performance of processors with a complex, floating-point savvy real-world benchmark, with the different levels of compiler optimization in EGCS being the only real distortion across platforms.

Not suprisingly, Intel processors could suck planet-sized marbles through bent straws in this contest. My blue-white 400MHz Apple G3 is up to 30% faster than a PIII 450, both running Linux (and floating point stuff is supposedly the weak point of the G3). Depressingly, rendering on a single Athlon 550 is for certain scenes almost as fast as on a dual PIII 450 running on both processors (the raytracer is threaded and has almost no parallelization overhead, so this is actually a fair comparison).

So, personally speaking, a flaky 1.5GHz PIII demo does little to get me excited. (fantasize-mode on) What I'd much more like to hear about would be something like third-party G4 SMP boards (ATX format) that one could install Linux on (drool... time to take my medication again).

just my usual 0.2E-32
Alexander Wilkie

Of Pentiums, Celerons and Williamettes

[tjwhaynes]

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

Who cares about CPU speed...

[duplex]

Lots of people. CAD users, 3D graphics designers, programmers (compilation speed!), etc.
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.

A Much Better Article On Willamette...

[Stickerboy]

...can be found at AnandTech. It covers much more ground than simply the rivalry between AMD and Intel, including some interesting specs about the Willamette architecture:

• 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.