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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.
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.
--
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
How about some 1GHz Athlons instead. They'll be available in full volume production too... unlike the P3. Cheaper too.
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?
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.
(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)
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
So get back to me when compiling software takes a blink of an eye.
Actually, you won't be seeing them available for sale on pricewatch.
Intel has said that it will be giving "limited quanties" to a small number of vendors (HP, Dell, and some other company I think).
They won't be available on the BYO market until their problem with "limited quantities" goes away.
...and somehow, I think that "limited quantities" equates to something along the lines of "hey! it worked at 1ghz! ship it!" when they do their bin testing...