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1-GHz Pentium III Due This Month
ReviewSeek writes "According to this News.Com article, consumers will be able to buy Pentium III computers running at 1 GHz from Hewlett-Packard and IBM later this month. Volume production and sales aren't expected until third quarter though. " It's strange to me that for some reason that "One Ghz" thing seems important. But ya gotta love fast.
I'm sorry but I can't think WTF I would need 1 GHz for. I'm currently managing with a P133 which, although a little too slow for comfort, still just about manages to cope with my demands. And even if I did want a 1 GHz processor to show off to my mates I'd wait for the 1 GHz Athlon to come out rather than buy a chip based on an outmoded and inefficient design.
And with Intel's recent track record in supplying their processors I think you'll be lucky to get one of the dozen systems that'll be available in the next year :)
The 1Ghz figure is important to the computing community for the same reason that the year 2000 was important to society as a whole.
We humans have an irrational interest in what we consider to be 'round numbers' whereby we feel that a year with a 'round number' or, in this case, a processor clocked at one will in some way be extra-better as it were over previous incarnations than if it did not have that round number in it's name.
There is also the psychological effect that canging the name of the unit has. Once we are able to rate processors in GHz rather than MHz, people will subconciously expect them to run significantly faster (the difference between 900 & 1000 MHz is not that big, but the difference between 900MHz and 1GHz sounds like a lot more), so the manufacturer who can hit that 'magic number' first will have a bit of a head-start in shifting increased numbers of units.
And of course, the people who buy those processors expecting increased performance gains, will then brag about them, even if they're not noticable, because otherwise they may look foolish.
What very few people will ask is "do I need this". Personally, I have a P166MMX at home, and it does everything I need. I can run Linux, Star Office and Nyetscrape without difficulty. 1GHz would be nice, but frankly, I don't need it.
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Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
So, what, are they going to have a lottery to decide who gets the few precious chips they can turn out?
Oh! I got it. I bet they'll have competitions as to who gets the chips.
First round elimination: Stupid Bunny Suit dancing competition. Points for garish colors and imaginative dance moves.
Second round elimination: Chili cookoffs, using old P60's as the burner. Is that smoke from the food or the chip? Who cares! It burns, baby!
The PIII Superbowl: The person who actually gets the chip is the person who can come up with the least-stupid-sounding reason why the general public needs to drop 1k on a 1Gz CPU so they can check out porn sites and forward the same retarded joke (headers and all!) to a bazillion people.
They're going to be really expensive and what's the point? So you get an extra 10 FPS in Q3Arena, honestly, I can't tell a difference between my 450 and 550 computers in Q3. One gets about 10 FPS more but it's not visible, they both look about the same. Apps will load a little faster but is that worth the price? I don't see programs coming out that have system requirements for 1 GHz for quite a while so I think I'll stick with my 550 for a while.
kwsNI
You all might want to have a look at The Register and Tom's Hardware to get better information about this story. Both sites have been publishing some interesting stories (specifically The Register) concerning this chip race that we all love watching. They seem to do a good job of getting the dirt on both AMD and Intel, and although they do seem to play favorites with AMD (as I'm sure most of you do as well), they have posted relatively unbiased articles about both companies. When I say unbiased, you have to look at all of their storys, as both sites have taken to Intel bashing as of late, and for good reason.
Intel is still having production problems with their 800Mhz PIII, whether they will confirm that is another matter. The Register contacted a German distributor and he said that he isn't getting the 800Mhz chips, let alone something running at 1Ghz. Also, a story on The Register a couple of days ago said that Intel had told manufacturers to expect 866Mhz's by the end of February. That obviously hasn't happened.
I find it hard to believe that Chipzilla is going to be able to jump 200Mhz in one month. Maybe they'll take a prototype, tape an ice-cube to it and ship it to Dell so they can say they did. You may see these chips in volume by June, but I sure wouldn't believe this information coming out of Chipzilla now...
How about some 1GHz Athlons instead. They'll be available in full volume production too... unlike the P3. Cheaper too.
Really though its quite sad how anti-Intel everyone is, I mean the reason why Intel became Intel was because of its reliability and performance, this is not to say that today Intel doesn't sing a different tune, but still everytime I read about something that Intel is doing to push the enevelope in CPU technology people just bash it away as if its already been done or there is something better coming around the corner, which is always true, but regardless if the industry didn't have Intel who knows what could of happened, some would argue that another manufacturer would of just taken control of the market and, rightly so, but the history of Intel is very impressive and their ability to stay as one of the top manufacturers of chips is rather astounding, and yes I would like to recognize the fact that they have used some Microsoftesque tatics to stay in that lead, but the credit that has been given to them is rather pathetic people will critique Intel for anything that they do, the point I am trying to make is that I am sick of the same post of people just flaming Intel, if your going to flame them I suppose make it original ok ;), not ohh well AMD is blah blah, or ohh big deal I did that yesterday crap that I keep on reading repetively by people. Think Original, Think Spam, as in the actual Spam.
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance" -Confucius
Here are a couple of reasons why I could use all the processing power I could get:
If I am working on a project, my code-compile-debug (whatever it's called) cycle is approx 5-10 min plus the time it takes to compile. If in that time I change a .h file, I must recompile most of the project, which takes a few minutes. If my cycle time goes from 10 min to 5 because of a processor that compiles faster, I just doubled my productivity!
As another example, A year ago I was doing some research involving Mandelbrot/Julia sets. Rendering those in large quantities at high quality can take forever even on a fast machine.
I won't even talk about tons of applications in the scientific world--they should be obvious. So if you post that you don't need no faster processor, all that means is you're not a coder.
-- The Sheep --
Talk about science fiction! I'm in my mid-30's and remember having conversations with friends where we marvelled at having 64K RAM and a 4MHz processor.
Now Joe or Jane Consumer can easily go out and buy a supercomputer for their family. Yet, in the long run are they doing anything more with their home computer than they were doing 10 years ago (other than surfing the web)? It just seems that all that computing power hasn't really changed what most people do with their PC's -- which is pretty much use it as a glorified electric typewriter, surfing the web and e-mail.
Despite what Intel and Microsoft might say, a 1GHz Pentium III is not necessary, nor does it even enhance the experience of web browsing. It certainly isn't needed for the dreaded paperclip living inside Word.
Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I just don't see where all this computing power is of any practical benefit to the average user.
Simply, because it's a benchmark! I don't understand why people don't understand that. It's the same thing with 2000, or with turning 30. It's a round number, and our human nature is to like round numbers.
Personally, I do think, in all irrationality, that 950 MHz doesn't have the same ring as 1 GHz.
As a side-note, to all the people who say, 'Now, what the hell am I gonna do with 1 GHz??' Gimme a break. I heard people say that when the 100 MHz Pentium came out, and when the 1 GB drives came out. but I bet they didn't count on bloatware and games becoming more and more demanding on a system.
Now, you're gonna tell me most games today only require a killer video card. Sure. And what do you think powers the AI's?
And there's a stable 1.1GHz Athlon that was shown at CeBIT.
And not just any old Athlon. a 'Thunderbird' (AMD code name) with 256kB full-speed on-die cache.
Where I live (sweden), it is hard enough to get ANY coppermine (P3 'E')... but athlons abound. I'll belive in a 1Ghz P3 when it is marked as 'In stock' at my fave webstore.
dufke
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The reason is that Intel is scared shitless of AMD. Intel knows that AMD can best them in the MHz (GHz?) race at any time, and they know that AMD has 1GHz chips. They also know that the Athlon beats the pants off the old 686 core of the Pentium III (which is really only a Pentium Pro that went uptown).
The fact of the matter is that Intel is scrambling to keep its mindshare, so it makes big news about things that will happen six months from now. People that trade stocks and make PCs now have it in their heads that Intel actually has a 1GHz system, and that they were the first ones to break the GHz barrier. Those people forget about AMD and the K7. That's the really Intel's strategy: keep announcing things that aren't here yet so the spotlight never strays too far, even though the PIII is inferior. Make people forget about that "other" chip company.
But don't take my word for it, no. Go try and buy an 800 or even 750 MHz PIII system. Then go shop around for an 850 MHz Athlon system. AMD announces things when they happen, like a company should. Intel is the hardware equivalent of Microsoft and I hope their subterfuge and bully tactics (look through Tom's Hardware for articles about Intel and K7 motherboard manufacturers for a little info about friendly old Intel) come back to bite them in the ass.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
I've been building my own PCs since 1988, and I've found that it almost never pays to buy the hot new processor. Software (except, perhaps, for Windows OSes) is usually designed with last year's machines in mind, so you get perfectly acceptable performance at the mid to low range for a fraction of the cost. I remember a friend buying a 486 machine for $10 grand when they came out. 18 months later, I bought a slightly faster one for $1500. Is it really worth it to have "the fastest"? Not for me, at least.
The other thing I find interesting is that while Microsoft seems driven to drive Intel's stock up, making slower and slower software to require faster and faster chips, most other modern OSes make the CPU less important. X isn't getting any slower (thank god) so one can assume that the 2005 version will be as responsive on a given machine as the 1995 version. With that being the case, I think that CPU speed will just become less and less important to the average user. I think they are starting to figure this out, as more and more people refuse to ugrade just because the hot new OS/chip is out. I think they've realized that it's something of a suckers game in the Wintel world. You need to "upgrade" every year or two to continue to do what you've done all along. Really, if you are not a gamer, but just doing word processing, finances, e-mail, browsing, etc., a 1995 era machine would be perfectly adequate.
Yes, there is still a relation. The Front Side Bus speed is multiplied by a fixed number to get the core speed. Thus, for a 1Ghz P3 EB it would be 133Mhz * 7.5 = 997Mhz (heh... false marketing... its 3 Mhz too slow! ;-)
Intel's Celerons run 66Mhz FSB. Their cores are not slower than a P2, but the slower memory bus will hamper them in memory-intensive tasks. (Trust me, I have one...)
dufke
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You went through all the trouble of finding/purchasing a V20 and you didn't even O/C it?? I had one of the earlier 10mhz 8086's, and I was able to dead drop a 10 Mhz V30 in and tweak the RC clock mechanism to almost 16!! I had to add a heatsink and remove the coprocessor, but it ran like a demon! The 16Mhz CDIP 80C86's would clock almost eighteen, and the V20 16's would hit 21 nicely.. Damn, those were the days..
.sig: Now legally binding!
(RISC processors get MANY more MIPS than CISC ones, but as they only do a fraction as much, that isn't a measure of anything -real-.)
Unfortunately, there is no genuinely useful measure of performance for a processor, and all the benchtests that exist are catastrophically flawed.
(Typically, a benchtest program will fit entirely in the memory cache, and will probably mostly reside in the processor cache. I don't care if you're using X11R6.3 or Windows 2000, there is no way that a REAL application, or even a REAL window manager would be crammable into that kind of space. If your processor, on a benchtest, has no wait states, but is burning 90% of its time in idle cycles for real applications, then the benchtest is useless.)
Personally, I think the P3 is an over-bloated lump of silicon. I feel that it's time that it got divided into a network of high-speed RISC chips that -pretended- to be a single CISC chip. That way, you'd get the speed of RISC, with the power of CISC.
You also don't need QUITE so many duplicate instructions. Last time I counted, I found over 100 ways to program a jump instruction. That is STUPID! Most RISC chips don't even have 100 instructions in total! It makes no sense to scan through that many instructions, when you could start by determining it's a jump, and figuring things out from there.
(This would involve an instruction tree, whereby related instructions are in related parts of the tree. By following such an approach, by the time you're far enough in to need to do a linear search, you already know what you're doing and what is involved.)
However, this is getting off-track. To get back to the main point, if you are going to use/need a single, simple benchmark, the MIPS rating is far, far superior to the clock speed, because at least it measures how much the chip is doing in that time. A 1 GHz chip could only be doing 1 instruction per second - what use is that to anyone?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Now, all the processors run at very close to the same bus speed
Well... depends on how you mean. Intel is currently selling proc's at 66, 100 and 133 Mhz bus speeds. AMD is selling K6-x at 100Mhz FSB, and the Athlon at 100Mhz, but it transfers on both edges of the clock (aka. 'DDR') effectively making it a 200Mhz bus.
(These buses are comparable directly in Mhz, since to my knowledge, they are all 64 bits wide.)
dufke
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my first computer ran at 3mhz.
fwiw ;-)
--
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I personally have never used an AMD chip. I also thought, that as long as we are going to be using operating systems on 808x architecture.. I would rather use the original (INTEL), rather then a emulation chip (AMD).. Thats just how I thought. And thru the years, seeing that there was this or that incompadibility problem with AMD chips for certain applications (ie. There were a handful of games in the past years that needed a patch in order for them to work on AMD chips).. It just reinforced my feelings against having an AMD chip.
:)
Now much time has gone by.. I've honestly not heard a bad thing about an AMD chip in a long time. Perhaps they have achived a perfect duplication of the instruction sets that are in PIII's?
My concern is.. I really want a 1 GHz chip. I actually have some stuff that really could use the speed as my P2-400 is starting to feel sluggish. I'm much more willing to entertain the idea of having an AMD Athlon chip verses a PIII. Especially if AMD releases their 1 GHz in high volume production before this month is over (which looks likely).
SO MY QUESTION IS... What do I gain or loose by choosing one over the other? I've seen chip-enhancements talked about.. Like MMX, 3DMax, etc etc... Does AMD support MMX? Or is that strictly an Intel thing?
Basicly.. what I'm getting at is.. You can't have a sound card without Creative Labs Sound Blaster compadibility.. unless you want alot of games that don't support your sound card (at least thats how it was before DirectX). Are we still in that type of time period with using the most popular chip verses a chip (AMD) that only has 16% of the market?
If someone could list the Pro's & Cons of choosing AMD verses Intel.. or point me to a webpage that has such information.. I would be eternally grateful. Especially if it frees me from my bondage that Intel has me in.
Thanks,
-Matthew
The Athlon can outperform any PIII at similar clock speeds, in a few weeks we should start seeing DDR enabled Athlon motherbaords, basically doubleing the memory bandwidth to twice what's available to the PIII. The Athlon is faster than a PIII and it's not even getting all the momory it can handle. With full speed cache (now enabled) and the DDR sytems, the Athlon will make its lead even bigger over the PIII. It will still be cheaper. And with the release of the DDR chipsets will come support for SMP too. (for all those servers) There's no good reason to go with a Cu P3.
Intel's days as the number one x86 CPU maker are numbered.
This is how long things would take (approx) if you or I operated at 1 GHz...
Eating Breakfast (cereal, 40 bites, 10 chews per) : 0.0000004 sec
Dialing the phone: Local: 0.000000007 sec
long distance: 0.00000001 sec
Germany: 0.000000013 sec
Flipping through a magazine: 0.000000136 sec
Flipping through Machinery's Handbook: 0.000002555 sec
Dealing a game of poker (4 players): 0.00000002 sec
Writing 100 pages of text: 0.000090016 sec
Writing this post 0.000000484 sec
-ShelbyCobra
Living life in the right side of the s-plane
- Weight, in itself, isn't an indicator -
That was true of the old calorie ratings, too.
(olives have MANY more calories than apples, but as that doesn't take into account digestibility, that isn't a measure of anything -real-.)
Unfortunately, there is no genuinely useful measure of value of a fruit, and all the benchtests that exist are catastrophically flawed.
Personally, I think the giant apple is an over-bloated lump of fruit. I feel that it's time that it got divided into a pile of high-calorie olives that -pretended- to be a single apple. That way, you'd get the calories of olives, with the convenience of one apple.
However, this is getting off-track. To get back to the main point, if you are going to use/need a single, simple benchmark, the calories rating is far, far superior to the weight, because at least it measures how much energy the fruit contains. A 1000 pound fruit could only have 1 calorie per pound - what use is that to anyone?
Sometimes "it's just more" is all the argument you need, when you're comparing apples to apples.
OK, I am not saying Intel doesn't actually have a 1 GHz PIII. They probably have, but vary, very few pieces. The yield to get such silicone is low at House Intel, which means they will have one or none ! GHz chips per wafer. Probably less, judging from the "ease" you can buy a 800 MHz PIII.
And maybe Intel can even afford to sell such rare silicon for about US$ 1000, efecctively losing on the deal. They can afford it because, well, they still have money to throw away. Being the first to cross the 1 GHz barrier is probably worth it.
BUT do they really think people are going to drink the story this time? Ask Gateway, that got seriously burnt with Intel. I think NOT! It's to damn obvious Intel doesn't have enough 1 giga, or even enough 800 MHz silicone. Itäs so obvious that the marketeering with the "first to giga" won't work. It just won't, no matter what Intel does, they can't cause a collective brain damage to their potential customers. Oh, wait, Microsoft has been doing this for years, and people are still buying the crappier than crapy releases of Win9x...
Sigged!
Yes, but if the machine does 30 fps, it will drop below that on occasion, causing frame drops and visual discomfort 8^) If you can get 60/90/130 fps, you know that even worst case scenarios will keep you visually happy. Anything higher than your monitor refresh rate is just bragging gravy anyway...
as for now, my celery (300a@450) and TNT(1) are just fine for my games, and another 300a@450 with a Matrox G200 is perfect for all of my NT stuff...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Athlon is kicking Intel's ass, and there's really not much they can do about it for now. Investors and the technical press all seem pretty well clued in about Intel's current problems, and judging by this forum the tech-savvy (i.e. likely to buy a premium 1GHz system) end users also realize what's going on.... so who are Intel hoping to fool by announcing a 1GHz PIII that everyone knows they can't deliver in anything other than perhaps sample quantity? Apparently AMD *already* can produce the 1GHz Athlon, and are just waiting for the strategically best time to announce (and deliver!) it.
I'm looking forward to Intel's next processor announcement: "The 600MHz toaster over heating element"... they've got problems ahead.
Really, why the excitement, a much 'slower' CPU could (theoretically) execute programs much faster by beeing better designed. We nead to get away from this oversimplified CPU centric mesures of performance. We all know that the CPU isn't the bottleneck on modern systems, so why is it the every improvment in CPU clock frequence is met with drooling addoration, when improvments in motherboard design, IO thoughput, memory chip speed, and so on are practially ignored.
Thad
- Game
- Program
- Run an MS OS
Or have some other obvious reason to use 1 billion cycles per second. I believe the need that will come along will be called the "3D OS", and it's coming soon ladies and germs. The combination of consumer 2D and 3D cards into one piece of hardware in the last couple of years was the handwriting on the wall, and these processors are the wall itself.
But I don't need 3D, I'm happy with my command line! the curmudgeons cry. Well fine, and you'll probably still be using your P133's and your command lines 10 years from now and you'll probably still be smug. But there are real benefits that could be realized from a 3D OS, or to go a bit further, an immersive OS. The human mind is built to navigate a 3D, full-sensory world, so it's only natural that making the computer more like that in every way would enhance usability, shrink the learning curve and increase productivity.
You probably didn't read it here first, but you read it here last.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
The race to 1GHz is at the expense of things that really matter to people who use computers. I stopped being able to tell the difference in processor speed after about 200MHz or so. After that point, resources would have been better spent on getting a processor that uses very little power and costs $10. In some ways we're not advancing at all. I could boot up a circa 1984 PC into WordStar--from diskette--faster than I can boot a Linux machine and get into Emacs.
Please, can people get a clue and realise that MHz isn't the /only/ thing the worry about?!
/. community also has this idea.
/real/ CPU's instead of these overheating pieces of crap using 10 y/o technology?
.. then maybe we might get some decent technology out of them.
"MHz" is used by both AMD and intel as propaganda and FUD as they try and capture consumers $$$'s. Most consumers nowadays know what "MHz" is, and most are now (unfortunately) under the misconception that "more MHz == better". Sadly, it seems that the
Sure, MHz vs. MHz on a particular processor, the higher the better. But it's not worth singing and dancing about. It's no great giant leap in CPU design - in fact, intel take their L2 cache latency UP to accommodate for higher clock rates. And when you go out and buy your brand spanking new PIII Xeon - have you thought of the fact that its really just a glorified Pentium Pro with a few odds and ends tacked on?
Get real. Intel and AMD aren't giving us anything great by giving us more MHz. (Look at how much intel advertised 66MHz to 100MHz bus speeds - they only made ~= 15% performance increase). It's more cost effective for them to keep upping the clock rates and adding bigger fans - there's not much R&D involved in that - and intel and AMD know that MHz sells.
Why don't these companies invest in some proper R&D and make some
Look at MIPS. An R12000 at 300MHz beats a PIII 700MHz in FP (specbench), and G4's are noticibly faster "MHz" for "MHz". Then again, say the word "altivec" and consumer won't have a clue what your talking about, even though this technology allows a G4 to totally thrash your intel counterpart at half the MHz.
If we all stop worshipping intel and AMD for pushing the MHz barrier
Yeah, reaction times can be cut down by anticipation, and the more fluid the motion of the visual cues on the screen (other players, direction of rocket fire 8^) the better you can anticipate and therefore avoid getting fragged... In terms of video, I can't even stand watching most Real Player or other streaming video... I don't mind grain, and color problems as much I can't stand seeing someone's half rendered face in the wrong spot for the words said, or a baseball bat hitting a ball well after the crack (or missing it totally), due to frame drops... Even the nickelodians at the old shoe store I went to as a kid (back in the real early 80s) had better motion than most of these. Granted, bandwith is a big consideration for these videos, not CPU power, but All Video Should Be Smooth Video(sm), and I can't wait until TV goes full to progressive scan - interlacing is a pain...
/.)... funny how that works...
I'm very picky about a lot of things, but I'm easily amused (probably why I read
Mmmmm.... Pong - look at http://www.ttinet.com/pjf/pong/ shows that pong needs even a decent CPU (it is Java, after all)...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
What I find interesting about all these arguments about faster and faster CPU's is that you CAN right now make your system go quite a bit faster without having to resort to getting a new CPU.
There are three things you can do:
1. Increase the main memory size to the maximum the budget allows. Just going from 64 to 128 MB produces HUGE benefits, because you use your hard drive a lot less as "virtual memory," which speeds up things as much as 50% or more.
2. Get yourself a 7200 rpm hard drive. Higher spindle speeds usually mean faster data reads and writes on the hard drive regardless of whether you're using IDE or SCSI interface.
3. Get yourself a graphics card (if your system has an AGP graphics port) that uses the Matrox G400 or nVidia Riva TNT2/GeForce 256 chipsets. These faster chipsets makes a big difference in many games.
People are usually surprised how much "snappier" their computers get when they following the suggestions listed above.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
> *sigh...* I suppose it really is just too difficult to actually read the article, isn't it? This announcement is that 1GHz PIII systems will be available, actually available, by the end of the month.
For what it's worth, here's what I see at pricewatch.com right now:
PIII 800 - four vendors listed, one offering at $799, the rest over a grand.
Athlon 850 - fifteen vendors listed, thirteen under $800, the rest between $800 and $850.
Athlon 800 - five pages of vendors listed, prices starting at $522.
Yet somehow Intel is going to jerk the rug out from under AMD's feet in the next four weeks. If you doubt it, you can just ask them.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I bought an Athlon system as soon as I saw that it was designed by some of the Alpha 21264 team. So here's the differences as far as I remember - Tom's hardware has far more detail in it's articles on the K7 (Athlon).
Take your pick - I've been extremely pleased with my Athlon 650MHz. In fact the only thing I'm less pleased about is that this MHz race is making my processor look slower much too quickly - I'd usually upgrade once the top of the line processor gets to 2-3 times the clock speed of my current one, but at this rate that will mean an upgrade in Q4 this year :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
The applications which will use the power of these types of processor speeds are things like speech recognition and real-time video compression/decompression (video conferecing). Games of course always make use of whatever power is available - more speed enables more realistic games in terms of things like 3-D, textures, lighting, object modelling, etc.
Thinking "do I want/need to run my current apps faster" is the wrong question. Sure a few extra FPS never hurt a game, but it's "what will I be able to do that I could never do before" that is the much more interesting question.
BTW, a 1GHz CPU is probably capable of real-time MPEG-2 compression, which is quite a feat!
Apple used to make a desktop that ran off of the Motorola 68000. Motorola added analog to digital, pulse width modulation (for music or motor control), serial and IR interface, and LCD control on dye. They called it the dragonball and sold it for $12 a pop. It now runs 3Com's PalmPilot.
Anouncements the such-and-such has a prossesor at X Mhz for $1000 at 50 Watts with no mobo ready does nothing for me. When someone releases a Pentium class MPU for $20 with on chip peripherals that runs off of AAA batteries, then I will sit up and take notice. Transmeta may be a step in the right direction but we are not there yet.
AMD is already ahead in the speed wars (850 vs 800), and with the 1GHz Athlon will also announce the 900 and 950MHz parts vs Intel's as yet unannounced (850), 866 and 933MHz PIIIs... Never mind the fact that the Athlon is a superior design.
AMD have no need to push lower speed prices down by announcing the faster parts, since they're already ahead and well positioned. Intel on the other hand is playing catch-up and hence is forced to announce faster parts even before it is capable of shipping them in volume (thereby hurting it's sales).
Your argument is semantically logical, but still a bastardization of the intent of the Hertz rating. 2 photons with identical frequencies do not result in a photon with twice the frequency. They add to give a photon of twice the amplitude (assuming coherent phase).
The simple fact that the units are consistent does not mean a property is additive. Take temperature for example. Intel Marketers would be adding temperatures right and left if it helped them sell PIIIs.
"This processor runs at 150F, this one runs at 160F, together, a staggering 310F!"
No.
I do see your point, but electronics rely on rising and falling waves, not a crank turning out widgets. When you deal with EM waves, adding hertz just isn't done.
-Rothfuss
The 1GHz PIII is going to use Rambus too, I think. The IGHz Athlon will use SDRAM.
:-)
That's a huge price penalty to put on Intel systems, even with the just announced cheaper RIMM packaging.
Of course, as an AMD shareholder, I'm enjoying every moment of this!
Possibly. In an effort to maintain their lead through other means than performance, Intel keeps inventing new SSE SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instructions. You will have noticed that the K7 covers all the standard PII instructions now, and has it's own set of SIMD instructions which go under the moniker of 3DNow. So if you get hold of an application which is *very* heavily optimised to use only the latest SSE instructions, you might see a *slight* performance hit. I think Adobe Photoshop is the only major suite I can think of which has gone this route, and even then there is not much to pick between the Athlon and the PIII. Most other application makers have kept out of the SSE/3DNow battle and just support the more basic SSE instructions which are covered in both CPUs and don't hurt older processors much.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.