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AMD Announces 1GHz Athlon Imminent
Foxpaw writes, "Not to be outdone by Intel, according to ZDNet UK, AMD is planning on simultaneously releasing the 900MHz, 950MHz and 1GHz Athlons, maybe as early as later this month. " I do have to say that the corporate peeing match between these two is pretty amusing - but if Intel is still having production problems, then AMD can continue to leverage their high-end chips.
AMD is going to build ``normal'' x86 chips with special 64 bit instructions, while Intel is trying to push IA64... which hasn't been released in a commercial version, and which many people think won't be popular until 2003 or so. AMD has a brand new Athlon core to work with, but Intel is doing all they can to s t r e c h the PPro/PII/PIII core to faster speeds by increasing the length of the pipeline everywhere they can. Will Intel make a re-designed new core (I'm a big fan of calling the chip the Sexium if they do...)? Do they have to to compete with AMD?
And then there's the issue of other people... will we finally see a board capable of running new PowerPC chips that doesn't come from Apple? Will the portability of Linux allow other chip makers to enter the playing field? Maybe the Digi... er, Compaq Alpha people will get someone to fab their ``old, slow'' 21164s for really cheap.
Anyway, where is technology heading? Certainly low-power-consumption chips are a booming industry, microcontrollers are everywhere, but for the desktop, what will the landscape look like in 4 years?
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
How many applications these days are really processor bound? Sure this'll speed up your SETI rate, but is that a good reason to buy a $500 processor? I just went from a 300 Mhz to a 466 Mhz chip. You'd think that would be a noticeable difference in the everyday user experience. Nope. Feels just about the same -- even on Win 2K. Now what would a 1 Ghz do for me?
I know there are some people who can appreciate this. But it's getting to the point where most people have no reason to upgrade.
Their take is basically that Intel can't handle how to deal with competition, and is kinda panicing.
The Register is also suggesting that AMD might start fabbing Alpha's.
It's been pretty much established at this point that $800 is roughly the maximum price that the market will bear for the top-of-the-line processor from a given manufacturer in the general computing market. This has the effect of driving down prices on the rest of the processor speeds in the family.
A 1GHz CPU, by itself, is nearly useless for most purposes given the massive I/O bottlenecks we have to deal with. The fastest system buses out there are the CuMine 133 MHz FSB, and the Athlon/Alpha 200 MHz bus (that's really a 100 MHz bus). Memory is a huge constraining factor at these speeds, too, and the ATA-66 drives can just barely keep pace with those needs. When the FSB runs at 400 MHz, with RAM speeds to match, and everyone uses 66 MHz, 64-bit PCI and 4x AGP, then the rest of the system can keep pace. What a 1 GHz processor does in today's platforms is basically run benchmarks faster. There's not going to be a huge impact. To really get into equipment that supports that kind of I/O, you're talking about mainframes and super high-end workstations, not PC's anymore. And the costs rise accordingly.
The impact will be in the downward price pressure across the board - 600 MHz processors will be under $200 soon. Being able to get a lot of bang for a lot less buck is more compelling, I think.
And for the Beowulf trolls out there - for the money it'll cost for a single 1 GHz processor-based PC you'll be able to run a pair of 600's in a cluster, or buy a SMP board with a couple of 650 MHz CuMine's. Now that's cool!
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
IBM is pretty sure 4Ghz is doable in the next two years by doing multiple independent clocks with async buffering between them. Slashdot ran something about that within the last month or so.
I don't know how fast CPUs can really get, but clock speed isn't the only factor. Work done per cycle is also important. If you look at today's (desktop/workstation) CPUs they all can execute more then one instruction per cycle. Two is a minimum. Three is the sustained max for Intel/AMD. Some RISC CPUs can do 5 instructions (UltraSPARC) if they are just the right set. This rarely happens, so most of hte time your two/three/five banger is executing zero (waiting for main memory), or one (too many read-after-write hazards) instruction. Transmeta is trying to fix this by making the (emulated) CPU really smart. The Alpha is trying to fix this by executing instrctions from more then one process at the same time (i.e. an ADD and MUL from your MP3 player, a LOAD and FMUL for your Quake server, and a STORE and a CMP for the re-compile of your Linux kernel). Compaq's simulations say this is really the shit. In two years I guess we will be able to see if it is. (the idea isn't new, the Terra supercomputer does something similar, and barrel processors have been doing something similar for decades).
As for 1Ghz being unthinkable four years ago, I assure you the design cycle for CPUs is long enough that the team that built the Athalon was almost certonally thinking of it. About eight years ago the Alpha archature manual was talking about it. Seven years I would have taken a bet that the Alpha would be the first "desktop" CPU to hit it. Apparently later this month I can be thankful nobody took me up on it. :-)
I have a 200Mhz machine at work, and a 266Mhz at work. Both do nicely for a lot of tasks. I bought a new machine to ray trace on (you could give me a million 1Ghz machines and I could still use more CPU to raytrace on...well maybe not me, but a real artest I guess). Neither do well for modern games, which seem to be a big driver for fast desktop CPUs. My C++ compiler could use a faster CPU too, which is why I don't do compiles on my 200Mhz box at work.
A fast desktop machine doesn't have the I/O of an oldish supercomputer. It does have a faster CPU. It's CPU is even competitave with modern supercomputers (sometimes it shares the CPU!). It's memory system and I/O is staggeringly far behind. Then again so is it's microscopic price tag.
So a fast desktop is good for anything that can get away with less memory, slower memory, and slower I/O, and just pain can't afford a supercomputer.
Since supercomputers are staggeringly expensave, I would guess lots of stuff "makes do" with desktop CPUs. Off the top of my head I would say: