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Willamette and Other IDF Highlights
Hoodoo Extreme writes, "There's a new issue out of the Private Eye which takes an interesting look at Willamette from IDF as well as some new info on RAMBUS. Later on in the piece there are some new findings on various 3D chips such as the S3 GX4-C which will follow the Savage 2000. Has anyone heard about this one? " IDF == Intel Developers Forum.
might pass the athlon. But then again maybe not. I think that AMD has been listening to people and giving them what they want while Intel has been riding their laurels for the past couple years. Intel had better be afraid.
I thought the big push from Intel was to switch to copper interconnects. Isn't copper supposed to increase speed at lower power? Or am I just talking out of my ass? Oh well, it is pretty late. Also, I'm glad to see that the Willamette is using a 400 MHz bus (Or a quad pumped data bus running at 100 MHz for the nit pickers)... wow.. that's pretty damn fast. Seem's like quite a jump from the PIII 133MHz. All in all, seems like another new crop of goodies that I won't be able to afford for a year or two... boohoo.
Polluting the Internet since 2003...
http://percep
I'm reading it and I got to say that it sounds like a bunch of marketing hype for Intel (well it is their show). I hear nine MPEG-1 movies and think 'wow', but there's no explanation of how much to attribute to Willamette and how much to attribute to the video card (and the T&L problems). Try some MPEG-4 movies to impress and let us know what the chip's doing (real numbers).
//end rant [tired,sleep]
So looks like Will'll be out in Q3 of 2000 and probably called Pentium IV. And then there's Rambus:
Not only was RAMBUS a 'Gold Sponsor' (that means they're in bed with Intel) at this year's IDF but did anyone notice their stock soar earlier this week (up over 50%!)? We met with RAMBUS' Steven Woo, who explained the sharp rise in stock being due to Intel's announcements that the Willamette, Tehama and Timna platforms will only run with RDRAM.
Do we really want to pay 3x the price for RAM?
Fortunately, there's AMD, who was "showing off a very impressive 1.1Ghz Athlon with the new "Thunderbird" core (on-die L2 cache)."
Talk about power of 10! I think I'll be going with AMD from now on.
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
I'm not a big Intel fan (I laughed my ass off when I first saw Athlon benchmarks) but at least Intel seems to be doing something very new. That fast a bus will be a big deal.
All Athlon contributed was a supposed 200MHz bus, but using ordinary (100MHz) SDRAM. Even Sledgehammer sounds like more of the same.
-sig-
With AMD hitting at its low end range of processors, and Crusoe bound to fight for its higher end range, Intel has to do much more than it is doing now to stay in contention in the chip market.
I don't see how anything you've described will lead to a lawsuit. Can you cite your examples? I'm not on the inside track of IP and trade restriction issues with respect to microprocessors, but the size of the chip seems doubtful as being restricted by EU import restrictions. Why would it be? Second, why would the EPA care about extra pipelines in a chip design? Is this an energy issue? How? Last, the issue of barratry, which as some of us probably don't know means "The offense of persistently instigating lawsuits, typically groundless ones." It sounds as though your argument is that Willamette will cause lawsuits because it causes lawsuits. Seems a bit circular, no? So, again, give us some hard evidence of Intel's non-compliance issues (the two you give do not seem very convincing). Then let us go about in peace (ie, stop with the profanity already). And if I'm wrong, I'm sorry. Your post just seems like a psychology experiment.
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
Anybody else think this Anonymous Lawyer has been doing a few too many drugs so he can work for the past 40 hours on one case?
I do...
I've seen plenty of reporst from intel about how the willamtette is going to be 1.5 ghz, however, that's all, nothing along the lines of having fixed stability problems in that were in the p3 core. Much less this processor isn't for another 8-10 months... I don't remember hearing about the athlon like this 8 months before release. Maybe i'm wrong, I don't remember the exact release date that is set for the willamette, but i'm pretty sure it's no time soon. Where's any real benchmarking, where's the things that actually mean anything about the chip. Also, in general intel tries to kill you with chip prices. on a second note, this is a question. How many fpu's did were on the chip?
I know this is off-topic, but I dunno where to post it, and I wanted to put it somewhere where most ./ers would see because it's kinda funny.
In this picture, if you take off the moustache, I swear that mahir "I kiss you!" guy looks a lot like CmdrTaco. It's scary. Go ahead and moderate it down if you want, but I can't think of anywhere else to post it.
I have never seen the clue impaired bite as hard as they do when streetlawyer does his stuff.
Everytime I read his posts, I think to myself: "This time he's gone too far, no one is stupid enough to believe that tripe" but I am always proven wrong.
Bravo for a classic troller.
Well, I quite liked the fact that Heresy was thrown in there.
This is essentially the same thing as me explaining the average non-techy person how computers have pressure sensors in the keyboard that increase the processor speed when you hit the keys impatiently. It's amazing how many people believe me.
64-bit data bus
Playstation 2 bus speed3.2 Gbyte/Sec data transfer rate -source synchronous 64-bit data bus -400MHz quad pumped
data bus (running at 100Mhz)
split transaction, deeply pipelined bus 128-byte lines with 64 byte accesses
Total Memory Bandwidth: 48 gigabytes per second
By the way the friggin bus speed on the PS2 is the most impressive thing I have seenCombined Internal Data Bus Bandwidth: 2,560 bit
Read: 1,024 bit
Write: 1,024 bit
Texture: 512 bit
The other 25% are fiddles to make the numbers look bigger.
2560 just seems a suspicious number unless there's a 256 bit pipeline with 10 stages and they're adding the stages together. They would after all be moving 2560 bits at the same time. This is of course speculation.
I know, I probably shouldn't be writing this, but this is some of the best trolling I've ever seen. I mean, where does he come up with this stuff? The EPA restricting the number of pipelines on a processor?? That's classic! :)
The only thing that could possibly have made it better is if it was a little more readable
Anyways, congratulations on elevating trolling to an art form.
(Who needs Karma anyway?)
Search first, ask questions later.
I propose calling the Willamette by an alternative name, maybe the Death AMD Killer 10000. At least that has style.
And don't get me started on Itanium....
There have been a number of articles on Slashdot recently about the plight of RAMBUS, specifically how it isn't really delivering, poor yields, problems with chipsets etc. This article seemed to reference RAMBUS almost in passing; does anyone out there in the trenches have the real deal on what's going on? It seems Intel have really thrown their weight behind this, but is it a case of "If we don't follow through on this then our credibility in the marketplace is screwed?"
It just seems that every time I here about RAMBUS the ante has been upped, and sooner or later something's going to hit the fan....
If you are referring to me, I was refuting the AC's arguments so that others would not have to waste their time on it. He did have a good start, but there was so much more potential if he had laid off the profanity and used available facts, like Intel confirms problem with chip sets and Taiwan VIA hits back against Intel's patent claims. I didn't even have to leave /. to demonstrate the weaknesses in what AC wrote. Not exactly a bravo performance.
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
Wriggle.
Wriggle.
Wriggle.
Saxo Grammaticus
Wriggle.
Wriggle.
Wriggle.
Saxo Grammaticus
Al Gore, you are a french commie fag, and you know it. Just put a gun in your mouth and shoot your head of your neck you homo bastard. Before doing that, swallow a 1/4 stick of dynamite. We'd all like to see all your guts and stuff shoot out your neck hole.
Fag.
I do not have modarator points right now, but if I did, I may have considered moderating this one up a little.
Its language may offend some of us, and I don't want to encorage too many simillar posts, but OTOH, this one is just too hillariously funny to be ignored, so we might forgive the streetlawyer.
Anyway, someone must have looked up and realized that AMD was coming from one side and Transmeta from another and the two of them were getting ready to divvy up Intel's entire market between them. And while they're out there showing blue sky, here in the real world AMD is still leading them in terms of processor and memory speed.
Isn't competition wonderful?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There isn't a Slashdot Giveaway
Things like this would be posted on the VA website, not on Slashdot.
My apologies to anyone who has been misled by this poster.
--Kit
Former Inmate, VA Linux Sanitarium
I'm always surprised at the amount of heat Intel takes on Slashdot. While in many ways Intel is just Another Big Scary Corporate Entity, most of the things that make the internet and computing so accessable can be attributed to Intel's ability to crank out successive families of CPUs, each new one providing enough of a speed increase to drive the prices of the previous generation down to silly levels. Without this cycle could anyone really have a half-dozen Unix-capable CPUs sitting around the house?
The other thing I don't understand is what makes Intel so bad but AMD or Digital/Compaq the good guys. AMD I can almost understand -- they make a CPU swap-in compatible with Intel CPUs, but its not like they're giving them away for free, either. And Alpha systems are outrageously priced, I don't care how good the performance is, for $4-6k, entry-level (prices from Pricewatch) doesn't do much for the average hobbyist.
And while I'm on the subject, when are we going to see SMP chipsets for Athlon?
Also, when i read that Timna will have native RAMBUS only forced through a MTH so it can only take SDRAM, I was confused, as that cripples performance, until I realized, "Intel's doing that so Rambus will get a cut of the price due to royalties," which is probably due to exclusivity contracts with Rambus.
Finally, it's interesting that Intel is pushing DDRRAM for servers, which are notorious for needing high performance, which seems to say Rambus can't cut it at that level, yet at a far higher price. So, in all likelyhood they know Rambus is inferior, yet are still pushing it for consumer-level. Gotta love that company!
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Simply because their FP performance stinks!
They have always been significantly behind their RISC competition (especially Alpha). This is mostly due to the original design of the x87 instruction set and its stack-based register structure.
In the x86 arena, they have always been in the lead. Not so much because their design was so good, but FP is something companies are willing to skimp on to make a chip, especially in the low-end of the market. Now here comes Athlon which showed everyone that you can still remain compatible to the x87 instruction set, but have signifiantly higher performance. Unfortunately, Intel has decided with the Willy to not try to compete with AMD, but instead shift focus to SSE. Time will tell if this works or not...
Just remember that with the T&L engine going to the card on the GEforce (and, based on its performance, probably on others as well) the flops of the machine, while still important, are less so; Now a lot of it is going to be about being able to push textures to the card. The CPU is going to primarily be doing physics and tossing data around. (Yes, I know there's plenty of other stuff.) Outside of games, FP math tends to be less important. How much FP does M$ Word do?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How about because FLOPS are a worthless measurement? It is a purely theoretical performance measure used to fool newbies like yourself. If Intel stapled 4 more FP pipelines onto their chips, they might get 10% improvement in real FP benchmarks, while your FLOPS number would be 5X bigger.
FLOPS and MIPS are the #1 most misleading processor statistics, according to a pretty good article in one of the IEEE computing mags.
Example, the PIII-800 would have a FLOPS rating of 4 (simd) * 800M (clock) = 3.2GFLOPS (the SSE instruction latency is 2, but you get a result out every clock). Does the processor every reach this? Hell, no! It problably sustains 400MFLOPS. If you want to know FP performance, why not use LINPACK, LAPACK, DGEMM or some other standard benchmark instead of some theoretical measurement?
Anyone else notice that SE likes to misuse buzzwords prolifically through its articles? Referring to things like "Dell taping out", et al.
-- Guges --
I'm betting on "Anyone But Rambus".
If Intel continues to tie their fortunes to Rambus, they're in for lots of serious pain.
I believe that intel owns a significant share of rambus, which is a -propriatary- memory technology... Unlike other forms of ram, like SDRAM, no rambus owns "key patents" on the RDRAM architecture, so no company will be able to manufacture and sell ram to work with a system that needs RDRAM except those who -pay money to rambus-... One reason SDRAM has gotten so cheap is because it is a commodity, and massive competition between different manufacturors has driven the price pleasantly low... I think that this is a contemptible move on intel's part... They are clearly trying to create a monopsony on memory that is compatible with their systems... It is an ugly attempt at a hidden memory tax, on every Mb bought, and I hope it backfires horribly, as open chip ram chip [and bus] designs surplant it, and RDRAM dies a horrible death. ...Although I do value performance, I would not be willing to support an attempt to introduce a proprieatary technology into all systems... Luckily I feel better because I am writing this on a wonderfull K7 system [which I waited for for what seemed like forever, even though I needed more horsepower, because I didn't want to support the P3]... It was worth the wait... [And by the way, I do not think that any arguements here are based upon any implicit assertion that "all big cooperation's are evil"... most of us are technologists and love a free market... However, -some- companies, and the techniques they use to try to victimize their consumers, are evil, and I as a member of of the demand side of that market am proud to make ethical choices about what products to support [which really come down to self interest anyway, just with a longer view...]]
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
Also just announced at IDF was the world's smallest PIII motherboard. Yes, it's the same size as the world's smallest PII motherboard (3 X 5 X .7") and it's from the same company, Cell Computing.
400 MHz in your pocket.
Probably more than you think... General key to seeing if something uses floating point is to look for a decimal point. Not a sure-fire way, but works well enough in practice.
While M$ Word won't care if your CPU does only 1 FLOP/s or 10 billion FLOP/s (well, at 1 FLOP/s...) or even use that much, oftentimes programs use floating point.
As for other than games, if you use a spreadsheet, that's a nice use of floating point there. Or perhaps sound editing (usually integer, but sines and cosines have an awful habit of being in [0,1], and FLOP/s are important when you want to do accurate fourier transforms). Or perhaps GIMP/Photoshop. Or perhaps apps like CAD/FEM(finite element modeling)/etc.
Just my pointless bool bit[2]; .