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Intel Introduces 1 GHz Chips
sheck was one of the first people to write about the release of Intel's 1 Ghz chip. Beating Intel to the punch, we already covered AMD's 1 Ghz Athlon. If you want more coverage check out C|Net. This corporate peeing match about who can release these machines first is pretty funny to watch.
Yeah the cache difference means the vaporware Intel 1 ghz chip will be faster than the AMD 1 ghz. Of course, WHEN the chip actually appears in the market, it'll be more expensive. Add to that the fact that AMD might just decide to drop a 1.1 ghz into the fray when the market can finally buy individual 1 ghz intel's, and you can guarantee Intel is going to be doing some scrambling. What's sad is they weren't prepared, yet AMD has been hinting all along that they were ready to fire some deadly shots.
Introducing 1 Ghz chips was sooo two days days ago..
Tried Applixware on an Alpha? I run Q3A on my 21264-667 better than my friend who has an Athlon 600 x86 software runs sweetly. Alpha software runs extraordinarily sweetly. And with all the open source software I need native to Alpha, it simply blows everything away!
And that's just about it.
There are only so many synths and F/X you can chain on a slow processor.....
Oh, that brings back memories!
My C-64 died a hard death. I was a little overconfident after soldering an extra 256 KBs of RAM into my memory expansion module (a total of 512 KBs of RAM disk for GEOS...It was only *supposed* to hold 256! WOW!!).
I bought a 65c02 rated for 4 MHz and a 4 MHz crystal. I found that the pin-outs on the 6510 and the 65c02 didn't match...so I wired up a tristate buffer on a bread board and cross-connects to match up the pins. I got it all wired up, soldered in the 4 MHz crystal and nothing worked. I was only out about $35 in parts, but I wasted A LOT of time on it. Poor thing never played Bop-n-Wrestle or Bruce Lee again. {snif}
1GHZ is old news, when can we expect 2GHZ?
hmm, I have to correct myself actually, the Coppermine L2 bus is 256bits wide. One interesting note, this chip runs at 7.5 x 133.3 so if you do the maths, that equates to 999.75mhz, is this truely a 1ghz chip ?
And on 2 D cells (3V), fully portable, and weights under 1 pound, with no fan and no heatsink baby! Beat that! PH33R MY 31337 P0\/\/3RZ d00dz!!!11!!!#@#@#@#@$@!
Polyester Dot Net .. the Headshop style e-Cards & laughs!
I DID. RECENTLY, I DECIDED TO FIND OUT WHAT MAINSTREAM USERS WANT IN A CPU. I WAITED UNTIL I HAD A FSCKED UP DAY AT WORK, BOUGHT A BOTTLE OF MID-GRADE VODKA AND 6 CANS OF FROZEN GRAPEFRUIT JUICE (GUESS WHAT HAPPENED NEXT). I JUMPED ON MY MOUNTAIN BIKE AND HEADED FOR THE NEIGHBORHOOD HO-HOUSE. AFTER SNEAKING IN VIA THE FIRE ESCAPE, I MET A CUSTOMER EAGER AWAITING HIS TURN WITH A LADY. I ASKED "SIR, WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE INTEL/AMD BATTLE? WHO REALLY WINS? HIS CRYPTIC REPLY: "GET OUT OF MY ROOM, ASSHOLE, I'M TRYING TO GET LAID HERE". THERE IS MORE TO THIS COMMENT THAN MET THE EAR. ASK ANY HONEST WOMAN. LET THE ROOM BE THE WORLD MARKET FOR CPUS. LET THE "JOHN" BE THE ORDINARY CONSUMER. LET "LOVELY LISA" BE AMD, AND "ROCKIN' RAQUEL" BE INTEL. CLEARLY, THE SCUMBUCKET (WITH FLOATING CONDOMS) IS THE CPU SPEED. BY VISITING RR AND LL'S ROOMS, AND NOTING BOTH THE QUALITY AND QUANITY OF CONDOMS FLOATING IN THE AFORMENTIONED SCUMBUCKET, YOUR CHOICE IS CLEAR. I AM HUGH JANUS. YOU CAN MODERATE ME, AND YOU CAN POSSIBLY MAKE ME SHUT UP. YOU CAN PROBABLY HATE ME ON SIGHT. I CAN'T DENY YOU THAT. FOLLOW THE PURPLE DINOSAUR. THIS TRULY IS KIDDIE HOUR. IN THE PAST, I HAVE WAITED PATIENTLY FOR YOU, BOTH OUTSIDE YOUR PLACE OF WORK AND NEAR YOUR HOME. YOU DID NOT CALL. IF YOU WISH TO DISCUSS THIS TOPIC FURTHER, I WILL STANDING ON THE ROOF OF MY 1977 LIME SUBARU BRAT NEAR THE CORNER OF 4TH AND ELM AT HIGH NOON TOMORROW. I WILL BE WEARING A SOMBRERO, JOCK STRAP AND HAI KARATE COLOGNE. IF FOR SOME REASON, THERE ARE MULTIPLE SUBARUS WITH MEN SIMILARLY DRESSED, PLEASE HONK YOUR HORN TO THE RYTHYM OF PETER GABRIEL'S "DON'T SHOCK THE MONKEY". IFF THE SITUATION REMAINS AMBIGUOUS, ON THE STROKE OF THE QUARTER HOUR I SHALL SCREAM "HUGH JANUS IS HERE FOR YOU! SHIRKETH NOT THY DESIRE TO COMMUNE!".
The thing that excites me the most is with a 1GHZ chip there should be enough horsepower to have Outlook 2000 and Access 2000 open at the same time. Bahahahhahahaha.
That's still 4 times faster than Athlon or Katmai (old P3) with 64 bits L2 bus at 1/2.
My current line:
If you want to ORDER a fast computer, get an Intel.
If you want to GET a fast computer go with AMD.
Intel is forgetting that we geeks rule the world, and BTW we aren't stupid.
depending on the accident.....you would be safer in the tercel....of course the tercel would be destroyed and the galaxy wouldnt be scratched. newer cars are designed to absorb impacts which is why they are destroyed....in an older car you absorb the impact.
Right, one wonders how Intel is going to get the PC market excited when they finally get around to shipping a 600 Mhz Itanium CPU. By then, x86 should be well over the 1200 Mhz range, and the buyers are Mhz-centric.
The choice is easy.
I think you mean $0.62 per MB (80/128) not (128/80 thats MBs per dollar).
AthAlon? Ath-a-lon?! Athlon.
man I feel sorry for anyone this humor-impaired that they have to respond to a joke post by calling people idiots! Um, my microwave oven is running at 16.4 Ghz, care to comment on that?
You like being called an asshole? Where do you get off calling them idiots? It was a great joke, I laughed my butt off when I saw it. You must make everyone around you miserable... get a sense of humor.
So what the fuck are all of you doing here?
I'm afraid that the clown will buy a computer with a 1 gigahertz processor so he can find me faster and eat me in my sleep.
Well, i guess that means the 900mhz isnt must faster than the 800mhz... which isnt much faster than the 700mhz... etc etc etc.... messed up eh? We have to progress somehow. Personally, i then 1ghz is a big step for the x86 archetecture.
Actually, at 33 Watts, it's half the power of the 1G Athlon, which comes in at 60W (typical), 65 W (max). I've got lightbulbs which use less power than that.
$200 more for 128 kilobytes of RAM?!
Man, RAM prices have increased more than I thought...
On purpose. AMD wanted to replace it with something more versatile, which included the 3DNow-2 instructions on the Athlon.
The new baby: K6-2+
They tweaked it a lot apparently, and I'm looking forward to one.
I think you may have stumbled onto something there. Why not do like the CD-ROM drives and advertise "up to 10Ghz speed"* (*Maximum clock speed, runs slower for many,many programs.) Then the IC designers would only have to setup a way to increase the clock speed for a few cycles when the machine is first turned on and is still cool. And why not? My 140 watt speakers are running from a transformer rated at 15 volts and 0.8 amps, and for you non-technical (what are you doing here?) that is 1.2 watts. LCM (alright, so I forgot my password!)
No around here everyone say pee and poop not piss and shit.
Actually, the only thing rumored to be hanging up faster G4 chips is production problems at Motorola. IBM supposedly already has 600 Mhz+ G4 processors ready to roll. Check out MacOsRumors for their March 6 speculation .
I've got a question which is somehow related to this. Assume we have a 20 GHz chip. Can you build a PC around this chip whitout having to use a video card, sound card and a modem? Just the 20 GHz chip and memory. This would be a dirt cheap PC, wouldn't it?
You forget that the 1 Ghz Athlon has a 128KB L1 cache that's running at full throttle in addition to the 512KB cache that is running at 1/3. Compare that with intels miniscule 32KB L1 cache and full speed 256KB L2, and frankly arguments about intel having a better cache architecture are completely mute. Can you really say that a 32KB L1/256 L2 is faster than a 128KB L1/512 L2? If the working set is within 128KB athlons smoke any PIII at similar speeds. If its greater than 256KB athlons and withing 512KB + 128KB athlons will smoke a PIII. Only when its between 128KB and 256KB then maybe PIIIs have an advantage, although its still a tossup! http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/athlon/comparison. html
...1 GHz chips have been available for days. Let me know when something fast comes out
You got to be joking me, this is the one of the best post I have read so far and it gets a 2? Come on Moderators you need to do your job, the post below got a 5 and it isn't half as well written or informative as this post is. On a side note, so I won't get mod down: If AMD is able to keep up with Intel, remember now this is all relatively new for AMD being able to give Intel true competition, can we say price wars price wars price wars. Ever seen a new chip release drop 25%, well we are just about too if this game continues to be played by both sides. Also anyone every wonder why IBM or Motorola does get involoved in the PC market? they both have the capability.
CH00 Back a4
It's all useless with the current crop of chipsets though. The 810/820's are useless and the 840 isn't looking all that. Via's Apollo 133 Pro chipset looks to be the most promising right now, though. Doesn't make sense to build that "killer system" just yet...
Can't say I'm sad to see RDRAM go. Later!
...both of you. It's a "pissing contest." Four year olds "pee."
Putting cost and evangelism aside, I'd take the 1gig Intel rather than the Athlon. AMD's 2/5 L2 multiplier is really detrimental on performance, at least the P3 has a 1/1 and 128bit wide L2 bus.
However, you've probably got a better chance of getting hold of a 1gig Athlon, the number of 1gig P3's could probably be counted on your hand. Without question, both have been rushed to market, which isn't a bad thing at all, it's certainly better than performance increases being introduced whenever Intel decided to enlighten us mere mortals.
Personally, I'd look out for the Athlons based round the Thunderbird core in SocketA packaging, rather than the current Athlons with the L2 hack.
While I realize some people just like to say "peeing match", let's reserve that term for petty conflicts along the lines of the RealAudio vs. Microsoft Media Player exchange, where each program tried to take over everything the other program did, a pathetic effort to grab market share that only annoyed the end user. AMD vs. Intel in a battle to provide the fastest chip is what it's all about: a legitimate drive to have the top product, in an arena where the consumer ultimately benefits from the competition.
P3 1GHz L2 cache runs at 500 MHz on a 256 bit bus.
And RDRAM sucks big time by the way, did you read Tom's latest article ?
To quote an auto company executive's response to this claim: "Yeah, and they'd burst into flames at random intervals."
I can't help but suspect that the relative lack of concern for reliability on the desktop has made it easier for hardware to race forward. Less concern for reliability means less time spent testing and refining, and therefore shorter product development cycles.
I wonder if the rate of improvement of truly high-reliability systems is empirically slower than that of PCs. Any mainframe people care to comment? How does the mainframe of today compare to that of yesteryear, performance-wise?
lots of benchmarks are available here
Just slap a micro-grill on the heatsink and watch that meat fry, baby!
These x86 houses are all playing catchup to
the Alphas anyhow. The 667Mhz EV6.7
is what.. 3 times faster on fp than the
800Mhz Pentium III?
Hah.
I will be very interested to see what happend when AMD gets enough marketshare that they can leave the x86 instruction set behind. The k8 does this to some extent (new fpu and such) but there is still a great deal of bagage being towed along. The powerpc processors are a great example. They have a much smaller die, fewer transistors and very good performance.
What I think that AMD needs to be able to do is create a new processor without regard to legacy hardware. They could build a smaller/faster/cheaper chip.
Binder
I have a fealing that we aren't going to see 10GHz processors. At least not for a -long- time.
I think that IBM's concept of putting two cores on the same die is a great idea. effectively doubling the performance at the same clockspeed.
We will see multicore cpu's and parallel optimizing compilers before 10GHz.
Eventually it is going to become too expensive to continue the MHz race. Instead it will be cheaper to make a more efficient processor. All those engineers figuring out how to push the current die faster will be designing a processor that does more per clock and does it with fewer transistors.
( the better algorithm vs faster computer debate )
just my 2c
Binder
My wireless lan card says 2.4Ghz! HA! 2.4 is faster then 2.0...ph33r!
I have to return some videotapes...
the main point is that people keep missing is no matter how fast you build the processors (and related hardware), the computer is never going to go any faster than a human will allow it. a person who has the top of the line everything (mobo, maxed ram, processor, vid card, harddisks, etc) is still limited by his own ineptude at typing. :)
ls
Yes, I suppose we *are* totally off-topic. ;-) I have been thinking about this a good bit lately and frankly, I have no sympathy for those car owners caught by surprise by the price increase. Although the federally mandated fleet average for *cars* is 27.5 MPG, many (most?) people have side-stepped this requirement by buying trucks and other vehicles that must only average 21.5 or so, as I recall. Hopefully, this will make an impression on someone, but I rather doubt it. I'll continue to sick with my trusty '88 Chevy Sprint Metro, rated at 55 MPG City, 60 MPG Highway, the highest rating ever for any production car sold in the US (although manufactured by Suzuki) and also the most reliable car I have ever owned, and currently at ~274,000 miles.
Now that we are in the New Dawn of Gigahertz processors, the following questions must be answered:
Which is faster? An Intel gigahertz processor or an AMD gigahertz processor?
Which is heavier? A pound of Intel chips or a pound of AMD chips?
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Gah! "...find and dandy..." Strike that! Make it "...fine and dandy..."
------ "Darn floor. Big bite." (Koko the gorilla's best attempt at explaining the experience of an earthquake.)
"Features like extended cab, 3rd/4th door, etc. weren't available in trucks 10 or 20 years ago. "
Sure they were -- Your average DOT has a fleet of ancient orange four door trucks. Besides, putting a truck bed on the back of a 4-door SUV body is hardly a significant change.
Trucks have seen improvements, just not as radical as cars have. Compare the brand new 2000 Chevy Suburban with the 1970 model, then compare the brand new 2000 Chevy Impala with the 1970 model -- you'll see the difference.
(However, note that trucks and SUVs are not covered by the same fuel economy and emission rules as cars - a big reason cars had to change is government regulation, and the popularity of SUVs is to some extent a reaction against this.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Cars are enormously better than they were 15 years ago -- much higher quality, much safer, much higher efficency (although the efficency is usually applied to get horsepower rather than fuel economy). They are also relatively more expensive than they used to be.
Of course, the American public doesn't like buying cars as much as they used to. Instead, half the market is trucks, which are usually much more primative in design and efficency.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
A gigahertz is a nice, round number.
At some point the wires on the chip become just
a few atoms thick and too choppy to shrink.
I was hearing numbers around 3-4 GHz for a new
insulator.
Not really. I'd be willing to bet it was more than 1000 times faster than your 1MHz C64. You see, you can't really compare MHz ratings to fairly compare two processers of different architecture in terms of speed. Hz is just the number of clock cycles per second. What really counts is what gets done in each clock cycle. A 500 MHz Alpha will not be the same "speed" as an 500 MHz Pentium III as an 500 MHz G4.
In fact, it is not even really fair to compare the Athlon to the Pentium III in the MHz game to be able to say one is faster, even though they are both x86, because the Athlon can do much more (on average) per clock cycle than the Pentium III, making it an overall faster processer clock per clock.
-B...who gives a fuck? This whole thing about MHz is just propaganda from intel and AMD. Sure, more MHz == more speed - but instead of spending paltry amounts on bigger fans, these companies should fscking stop ripping off consumers with their huge margins, and make some decent technologies.
MHz != innovation/evolution/better
pffft...
Again as the previous poster mentioned, go to www.gw2k.com, click there little "Introducing the Worlds First 1GHz PC" blurb at the bottom. Damn, only $3k, I wonder how much that HP system is going to be. I am guessing $4k at least with that insanely expensive RDRAM they are using.
Q.
Intel pretty much HAS to undercut AMD now, the only officially supported platform is the i820/i840 which is Rambus only. That is $800+ for 128 MB of RAM. That lower price Intel is charging for the processor vanishes very quickly when you put the system together.
An interesting note, if you look at this article at Tom'sHardware you will see that the best platform for the copermine is actually an old BX chipset overclocked to 133 MHz bus.
Q.
does AMD's 1-ghz chip, while having the same high clockspeed, have the same level of Innovation?
for example does it Make the Internet More Fun?
**walks away snickering**
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
What better way to give feedback to OPEC then to tell them "no thanks, we don't need much oil anymore"
Not very likely. Sure - we'll get hydrogen-powered cars. No carbon dioxide or other pollution. But the hydrogen will mostly come from hydrocarbons, with the carbon removed chemically.
Athlon is a superscaler processor that is capable of issuing 9 instructions per cycle, the Pentium 3 according to the intel document is not superscaler, it can only issue 1 instruction per clock.
Something's wrong here. Even the original pentium had an advantage over the 486: It could issue 2 instructions per clock as long as they didn't conflict. The athlon has a clearly superior floating point unit though.
Yeah, I remember reading that my 1 Mhz C=64 ran it's code as fast as a 4.77 Mhz IBM PC... something about a more efficient design in the instruction decoding section of the chip. Where the the Intel chip used a ROM look up table, the 6502/6510 chip used combinatorial logic? Is that right?
It isn't just MHz. It is also "how many of these fast clock cycles are necessary for doing the job?"
I had an assembly programming manual for the 6510. Most of the common instructions took 2 or three clock cycles to complete. There were some rare instructions that could take as much as 9 clock cycles, (if they used the seldom used "indirect indexed adressing mode" and also stumbled onto a 256-byte boundary while doing so. That was the very worst case.
The 8088 were a lot worse off - any instruction requiring memory access had an extra cost of address calculation and could easily use 30 or so clock cycles. So the 6510 won on speed, but the 8088 had nifty stuff like 16-bit registers and could access more than 64kB.
The c64 was interesting in another way too - main memory was <I>faster</I> than the processor those days. No cache needed! The c64 video logic accessed memory between the processor's memory cycles - without slowing processing at all. If I could get that kind of memory for today's processors...
They're canning the K6-2+ in favor of the Athlon Select, a socket-based Athlon core with 128KB on-die L2, for the low-end market. It will compete very well with the Celeron, as you can imagine.
-- Liquor up front, poker in the rear.
Check out the volume of AMD stocks being traded and that'll tell you the big deal -- It's not important to most of us, but to marketing folks, it's a big deal. AMD *had* to beat Intel to 1 Ghz to get all this attention from the mainstream media.
Well, that's leaving out the one number-crunching-intensive application that would be really useful on PDA's, etc: voice recognition. Now, the quality of voice recognition isn't too useful at this point, but while it's mostly a novelty on desktops, voice recognition on a PDA would be EXTREMELY useful.
I don't know anything about the algorithms for voice recognition, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of that could be moved into specialized hardware which could run at a much, much lower clock rate, so you probably won't need 1GHZ anytime soon anyway.
Yeah - remember when the 80486 CPU was a server component, and desktops wouldn't be able to take advantage of the CPUs?
Hmm, same here... Has the wait for SMP mobo's been so long with all new CPU's?
If it's as stable as the new i820 chipset then good luck to intel....
... in real world benchmarks. If you're talking pure CPU measurements, the AMD *can* be *up to* 40% faster, but it's not usually... they're about even with Intel, a little faster. But because of their 1/3 speed level 2 cache, they get bogged down in most real-world tests, falling slightly behind an Intel chip of the same speed.
Overall, the two chips are just about equivalent... there is no real major advantage that either has over the other, other than price and availability. That is where AMD really hits its stride, because they are far easier to find than Intel chips.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Currentley AMD is undercutting Intel by a couple of hundred
and with the onboard cache things are comparable.
Actually as the Athalons got faster the cache divisor got bigger, leaving Athalons with less of a performance gain each time. My guess is the performance between intels and AMD's at the high end is finaly starting to get close. I personaly cant wait for AMD to release the Thunderbird with full speed on die cache.
Problems with supply will dog them as they are only doing a limited run in the first instance.
cant agree with you more, by my calculation I'll be able to purchas a 1GHz P3 by the time I'm 40 ;->
What are you, four?
-jpowers
-jpowers
I love seeing newer faster processors being released because it gives me the ability to by the old ones cheaper. In about 2 months the windows/zdnet/cnet users are gonna say 'oh my god my processor is _only_ 600 mhz' and I'll be there to say 'here is 300 dollars for your system'. -- the joys of running an efficient operating system.
See here. From the people who brought us the review posted w/ the Athlon article earlier this week.
Hands in my pocket
It has been said before (in different context) clock rate isn't everything. There are other factors. Like the fact that the AMD has 128k of L1. Clock rate on L2's
doesn't mean shit if it has extra latency associated with it.
10 minutes running W2k and your 10 favorite games on equivalent Athlon -vs- PIII will tell you the Athlon blows the doors off the PIII for nearly everything except a few rare cases.
These people who pound the one or two cases where the PIII is faster have obviously forgotten the noise surrounding the 286->386 and the P5(pentium)->P6(PPro) upgrades because there were a number of cases where the newer processor didn't keep up with the old.
The bottom line is the K7 will be the death of the existing P6 core. Intel knows this and is just attempting to keep their head above water while they work out the kinks in their next core. This time next year the Athlon core will still be around and fighting the fight while the PIII will be a memory just like the P5 is today.
Yes, your phone does have a very fast processor. The processor is designed with a very specialized instruction set that is an extreme form of risc called a Parallel Logic Ladder (PLL). These processors are typified by the PLLatinum line from National Semiconductor.
PLLs have an instruction set that is sparse even compared to conventional risc chips. Most PLLs only have one instruction, integer divide. This makes programming a bit cumbersome at times but modern compilers make the job easier.
Over the last decade PLLs have worked their way into almost every wireless communications device. Their rapid growth has been attributed to the massive computational demands of the NSA's voice recognition software.
Ryan
> The processor speed is not a frequency.
Exactly right. When applied to processors (or other computational components) MHz refers to inverse time. This phenomenon is an obvious consequence of Gates' Law and Moore's Law.
Moore: Speed of hardware *2 every 18 months.
Gates: Speed of software 1/2s every 18 months.
As you can see, there is an inverse relationship between hardware and software speed, that is, software = INV(hardware). This is where the term 'inverse time' comes from.
Ryan KE6FFQ
... and the idiot is you.
OK, but it's 1 000 times faster than my 1 Mhz C=64 ! [Snip] wow my god ! 1 000 times faster (not talking in MIPS, of course) than my first computer.
Yeah, I remember reading that my 1 Mhz C=64 ran it's code as fast as a 4.77 Mhz IBM PC... something about a more efficient design in the instruction decoding section of the chip. Where the the Intel chip used a ROM look up table, the 6502/6510 chip used combinatorial logic? Is that right?
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
Well, a nice side effect of finally releasing 1GHz processors is the next step will be in .1 GHz increments, instead of 33 & 50 MHz increments.
I can't wait for 1.5GHz chips. By that time all these 600MHz chips will be dirt cheap.
-Adam
"Consider the two levers for moving men - interest and fear" - Napoleon
AMD stock is also climbing due to them making the cpu for Microsoft's X-box.
AnandTech Review of CuMine 1Ghz
This article has "interesting" benchmarks, using the i820 chipset. It shows that the Athlon can beat the crap out of the Intel chip in alot of the cases.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
C'mon, what red-blooded American male technophile with a keen sense of penis envy wouldn't buy a 1-Ghz CPU? Then they can go to their office, harrumph, hitch up their pants and proclaim to their co-workers in a loud, booming voice that they have the latest, greatest hardware on their desk at home.
Of course, if you really want to be the big stud on the block, get a dual processor 1-Ghz machine. Then the chicks will just *flock* to your doorstep.
Moore's Law is getting blown out of proportion. Personally, I think it sucks if my system bus runs at 10-13% of my CPU speed. When someone comes out with a 1-Ghz motherboard, then I'll get excited. I'd rather see these companies working more towards widening bandwidth to memory or some other more beneficial pursuit. Intel's made enough of a mockery of Rambus already.
** Programmers that do not comprehend the Tao are always running out of time and space for their programs. Programmers that comprehend the Tao always have enough time and space to accomplish their goals. How could it be otherwise? **
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Beleive it or not, many OEMs "sell" bleeding edge Intel machines, but they rarely ship them in volume right away. Many of these sales take forever to actually ship. They take long enough, in fact, that customers cancel their orders in droves (ask dell how many millions they lost due to lack of chip supply from intel).
"Perspective is lost in the spirit of the chase."
Sharkey Extreeme implied in the AMD 1000 MHz article that he would now have less work to do since the speed increments would be more significant. 150MHz was a big deal when compared with a 100MHz chip. 750-800MHz? *Yawn* I don't expect people will even notice the difference between a 1.2Ghz chip and a 1.25GHz. People can now focus upon more subtle things like quality. Just give me a chip that doesn't run HOT...thankyouverymuch
In 18-22 months we should have 2GHz chips!
Okay, I just caught a couple of mistakes in my own message.
One, everything you said *wasn't* truthful, according the to guy above. (However, my post didn't pertain to technical speficics.)
Two, I understand now that there are motherboards for the CuMine that use SDRAM that aren't really too shabby.
Three, I said SIMM when I meant RIMM. And PC100 comes in a DIMM package, usually.
While everything you say is truthful, you're missing a few key ideas here.
If you have a *really* fast processor, it does you no good at all to have a shitty motherboard, IDE hard drive, slow memory, etc. I personally have an Athlon 750 system, with SCSI hard discs, PC100 memory (Irongate 750, blegh), and a GeForce video card. This is one butt-fast system, but I had to pay out the ass for it. But the components do exist.
Now, look over at Intel. As I understand it, to get top performance out of a CuMine CPU, you need an i820 chipset (buggy), and a stick or two of RAMBUS. RAMBUS, for crying out loud, is like $600 on pricewatch right now for a 128MB SIMM. Compare that to SDRAM, which is around $90 once you add in shipping.
RDRAM is supposed to be technically superior to SDRAM, which I don't doubt. But it just reeks of conspiracy. I mean look at the prices. Yet Athlon benchmarks continue to edge out P3 ones in all the reviews.
But it's true that cars have not advanced as far as computers--if they improved at the rate that computers have over the past 15 years, today's car would deliver 1000 hp, get 100 mpg, and cost less than $1000.
I'm no conspiracy theorist, but don't yout think that just maybe OPEC/the oil companies had more than a little part in holding back progress & discouraging innovation?
...or maybe I'm just bitter that gas prices are 72.9 cents a litre ($CAN) despite the fact that it's produced here in Alberta.
Price-fixing pure and simple... maybe I should have posted this as an AC I'd hate for anythkdflidysff ad,a;dsolkdladflshd.3
Compaq has st ated that they will begin selling a 1 Gig system before the end of this week as well -- HP will be starting next week. And in v.limited quantities too, I might add.
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
I have talked to numerous people who used slide rules for math, and used three pages front and back to do one math problem. Now I just plug it into a faithful TI-86. Think how in a few years, we could all be doing analysis of major equations. Even now it takes about a minute for a 20 degree probelm (don't ask me how I know). Each generation of chip gets cooler. Think what one of those K6s would feel like if it were majorly OCed. HOT! As these developements come, we get better technology in everything. It is only a matter of time before I have a TI-1000 (not an advertisement) that has a lens on the end and soem way to transmit info out the bottom. It will be able to take pictures, do math, and have say infrared gaming. Now that is what I call study hall.
If you want my respect, give it first...
If you don't want my respect, expect mine before you give it.
A 300 watt power supply should be more than enough.
--Have a Johsonville brat.
What are these going to cost on the street, huh? $1000? What's the point? If you want realpower and you don't care about price, why don't you go out and buy a Cray or something? This is rediculous. I think that Intel just decided to announce when they got five or so coppermine 800mhz's that rolled off and could do 1ghz - not because the chip is actually there.
"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
Visit
The whole 1 Ghz thing is "only" pure marketing, of course. It's not a lot faster than 900 Mhz, OK, but it's 1 000 times faster than my 1 Mhz C=64 !
In my mind (call it perverted with the metric & decimal system if you want), this looks like a milestone : wow my god ! 1 000 times faster (not talking in MIPS, of course) than my first computer.
Psychologically, it's a bigger step than the adoption of a 64 bits CPU. There's nothing rational here.
Stéphane
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
perhaps someone can fill me in on this, since the link wasn't too technial.
when the athlon was released, everyone complained about the 1/3 core speed of the L2 cache. how does the new intel chip compare in terms of the L2 speed?
would that by any chance be mr. mac of P.C.C.C.?
q
"PROFANITY is the inevitable literary crutch of the inarticulate MOTHER FUCKER." -- some PC user
If you can run Q3A on the Alpha platform, then I'm wrong right in the category where I was making my case, lol.
Way to go
I was also educated via email that Alphas can use some PC addon cards. Very interesting!
As for the implied Alpha vs Athlon thing...isn't the Athlon the brainchild of some Alpha engineers?
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
How can you read these comments and have to be all nit-picky and such? Its just a little fun!
Thats why it was rated as funny and not something else, because non-nitpickers find things like this humorous.
Sounds like you haven't seen any new trucks lately. Features like extended cab, 3rd/4th door, etc. weren't available in trucks 10 or 20 years ago. And who's to say they're less efficient? My truck gets 25 mpg on average, which is about the average of cars today.
But it's true that cars have not advanced as far as computers--if they improved at the rate that computers have over the past 15 years, today's car would deliver 1000 hp, get 100 mpg, and cost less than $1000. Oh well, we can dream...
"It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
I am mainly replying due to the car statement, but I will finish with a computer analogy to save my off-topicness.
Yes, for reliability I agree that current automobiles are far better than those of the 60's.
However, if you were going to be in an accident would you rather be in a 1965 Ford Galaxy or a 1993 Toyota Tercel?
They don't make cars like they used to... nice and heavy, able to withstand punishment.
This brings me to the computer analogy.
Isn't it interesting that it is almost the opposite with computers? Today's systems are faster and look a lot better. Yet I would venture to say that they are LESS reliable. After all, I can't even remember my old DOS programs ever locking up the way Windows machines do these days.
And of course I know Windows is not the only platform, blah blah blah, I'm just speaking for the majority of users. Linux and such get the reliability factor but frankly also don't look so hot. I hate Microsoft as much as most intelligent people, but ripped-off or not, I am very comfortable with most of the user interfaces they come up with.
Carl
Hey this is my first post.
Vote Libertarian
Quite true, but not for the reasons you claim, there was ALSO supposed to be a K6-3+. Guess why it was canned? I'll let a much smarter guy put you in the know:
0 02
http://www.jc -news.com/pc/index.cgi?search=K6-3+cache&peek=200
Check the second article on the page; it explains the problems AMD has been having quite succinctly...
To try to give you a full story, the K6-3+ has been on and off the AMD roadmap for a couple of months, it is currently on BUT there is no sign that these cache problems have been solved...
-----------------------------------
Jeff Coulter
Geek in the clouds
Virtuoso - Smart Personal Agent
Jeffcoulter@users.sourceforge.net
ICQ: 33011156
-----------------------------------
"He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot
is a fool; he who dares not is a slave."
- Sir William Drummond
Cars are enormously better than they were 15 years ago
:)
Oh, I don't know about that. I drive a 21 year old 200SX. It gets about 30mpg, has just over 100Hp, and aside from a few problems from just being plain old (starting to leak some oil, funny noises starting to crop up, dings and scratches) runs just as well as my freinds 2yr old Neon Sport, except his Neon only gets about 25mpg. In fact, the 21yr-old 200SX got better ratings on last years CA emmissions check than many 1999 models.
Maybe old Scramble's a fluke, maybe Nissan/Datsun just managed to build really kickass cars. Maybe the former owner was an exceptional mechanic. All I know is it's really freaking reliable.
When it comes time to replace the old buggy, I think one of Honda's hybrid cars will be in the top running on my list, though
--
Xiphos
Is this really all that great? I have to wonder how much these companies are throwing at this MHz battle in the way of R&D resources. I'd much rather see larger steps taken toward introducing Itanium, Sledgehammer, and Willamette, instead of focused on the short-term clock speed contest. Let them compete by actual innovation instead of incremental improvements.
CNBC claims that Dell will come out with systems containing these chips soon... whatever soon is.
You probably aren't missing much. I got a 600MHz (Coppermine) Dell with Win98 just before Christmas, and when I worked on my father-in-law's "old" 350MHz PII Dell (also with Win98 and same hard drive as mine) over the holidays I noticed almost no difference in speed. Made me glad I didn't wait for the 800MHz.
I don't think that you are correct about memory prices remaining constant. They have been falling. In 1988 I bought 1MB SIMMs for approx. $100 per SIMM. A very good price at the time. Today I can get 128MB Sims for $80. That's $1.60 per MB. That's pretty close to Moore's law.
The Economics of Website Security
If it were a completely competitive market, Intel would never be able to supply enough 1Ghz chips to satisfy demand at $990 each.
But its not. Intel can, does, and will discriminate buyers on other basii than price. In fact, I think you can only get any of these 1Ghz chips if your name is Dell.
The Financial Times (p22) also relates how Intel is going to follow Ford Motors by supplying their 70,000 employees with free PCs and internet access. To this end the are inviting bids from PC manufacturers, but they cannot have an AMD processor in them. They are also including a digital camera, printer and home networking as well as a toy from the Play Line. Employees can do what they want with these including selling them on the open market. I wonder if Apple is also excluded ;-)
Answer is that they can't. This is obviously a fud manuver to keep more folks like Gateway from jumping ship and going with AMD. You gotta wonder what is going through Michael Dell's mind at a time like this though. If I were him, I might just want to keep my options open...
Actually, the only thing that is hanging up faster G4 chips is production problems at Motorola. IBM already has 600 Mhz+ G4 processors ready to roll. Check out MacOsRumors for their March 6 story.
It is highly telling that a trip past the Dell site today shows that you cannot order a desktop system from them with this chip in it...
Since the 2Ghz on your phone means that your handset sends the radio/digital signal at a frequency of 2Ghz to the base unit. The processor speed is not a frequency. Two completely different things here.
"The day they take Linux away from us is the day they pry it from our cold, dead fingers!"
what alternative fuels would you reccommend?
hydrogen? from where and how would you distribute it?
electric charging stations for battery powered cars? how do we generate the electricity?
wind power? a windmill on top of a car? yeah, right!
ethanol? can you distill the stuff from biomass and use a fraction of the output ethanol to power the boiler stills?
and what about the plastics industry, the input is crude oil, ya gonna use your cloth bag to carry those groceries and junk food packaged in plastics?
what about electric bicycles ala ed begley in malibu? you can't put enough photovoltaic cells on the roof of a car to get it work...
"...can you imagine a BEOWULF CLUSTER of these? That'd be some serious power!"
IBM HAD THEM ALL BEAT, THEY HAD THE CHIP @ YEARS AGO
Loz
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
today's car would deliver 1000 hp, get 100 mpg, and cost less than $1000.
While it doesn't fit those specs, the new honda hybrid car (i forget the name) gets about 80 mpg, and costs around 16-18k
It's also easier to make a computer faster by throwing more transistors on a chip, but to fit more engine in a car you have to start removing passenger space, and then the car wouldn't sell as well.
I agree with Rob (I think it was him) that I don't understand what the big deal about 1Ghz is. Its not like its all that faster than a 900Mgz. Let me know when Willamett or Spitfire is out.
They misunderestimated me. -- George W. Bush
I'm having to agree with saige. Seeing as how competition drives markets to cheaper prices and better products, I can't complain. The whole contest seems somewhat absurd but it's good for the consumer.
It would seem that all that crap (sorry mr. mac) from my free enterprise class might be true.
and when i press my face against the frosted shower stall
Agreed, the CPU war is good, however, I'd rather be running a 64bit CPU, such as an Alpha. OT: Car companies have and we have benefitted. Oh, ye of short memory. Compare todays cars to the clunkers of the 1960's. They may have had style, but that was it. Reliability was up to how handy you were with a wrench.
AMD still is at such a disadvantage, let's hope this helps AMD!
Really, I saw that and thought the same thing!
<p>
Plus, it's always been <i>pissing contest</i> when I've heard the expression.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Heavy processing power generally gets used in one of three ways: heavy number crunching (i.e. scientific analysis), entertainment (the latest games that I feel are the actual driving force behind desktop CPU advancement), or multi-user servers.
Both "internet appliances" and handheld computers have by their nature somewhat limited interfaces, making them somewhat inappropriate for cutting edge entertainment. That leaves heavy number crunching, servers, or an as-yet undiscovered technology.
Internet appliances being by definition of limited function, they are also inappropriate for most scientific work, which requires a flexible environment. That leaves heavy servers, or an advance in technology. They *might* be useful as servers, but here again, think about what would require that kind of power: horridly complex cgi being hit at a tremendous rate. Bandwidth will get you first, and even at that, since it's something that distributes well, a multiple processor setup at a lower speed will probably be better bang for the buck. This also holds true for any significant VR advances on web pages -- either you'll need massive bandwidth to handle all the data, or massive storage to handle some kind of superlist of standard textures.
Handhelds tend to be used as personal organizers, and furthermore won't have the room to handle the heat dissipation of the current generation of 1ghz chips, but disregarding that, let's think about where they're going. The tendency right now is in the direction of communication, so let's assume we suddenly get cameras on them that imply a need for compression. Well, that still doesn't require 1ghz, but beyond that, to transmit moving images like that requires again a decent amount of cellular bandwidth, which is going to be harder to come by than even the new Intel chips. So how about number crunching? Generally that requires large sets of data, and that requires miniaturized storage, which isn't there yet either.
We've got at least one generation of technology yet before 1ghz chips get used in anything but the conventional personal computer that we know so well already. Even granting that the PC isn't going anywhere, though, the 1 ghz milestone is more symbolic than functional. There's been no change is basic computing efficiency per mhz, and for a 100% increase in price you get a 25% increase in processing power over the previous 800mhz chips. The only reason it seems suddenly impressive is that it's a BIG and ROUND number in our wonderful base-10 system.
This isn't to say that the new processors aren't going to be functionally useful; they are. Just simply no more than the previous generation of processors was above the set it replaced.
Intel might have accomplished this 1Ghz by slightly overclocking existing processor cores and introducing new L2 cache in order to issue 1 Ghz CPUs before AMD. Maybe that's why it's a limited temporary supply...
The only thing of importance that I saw is that the Intel Cache runs at 1GHz while the AMD cache runs at 333MHz. So they both have released the 1GHz chips...with a 56K modem they're useless. With a slow HDD, you're probably wasting clock cycles waiting for the data to catch up...though from what I've seen the systems being built at this point have only RDRAM...that might help a lil bit. I would think the Intel part would be somewhat faster at this point. Didn't Colonel Sanders say they would adopt RDRAM soon????? Buy your Rambus stock NOW!!!
Groove - Misanthrope to the stars
I thought that Intel and AMD were somewhat close, and the clock speed was the major difference, but but then i went to http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/athlon/techdocs/pd f/22054.pdf and also to http://developer.intel.com/design/pentiumiii/datas hts/244452.htm Athlon is a superscaler processor that is capable of issuing 9 instructions per cycle, the Pentium 3 according to the intel document is not superscaler, it can only issue 1 instruction per clock. so, what does that mean? Thoeretically the Athlon can do nine times more instructions per clock cycle than the pentium 3!! It probably will not actually issue 9 instructions per cycle because of data dependencies between instructions, but it will definatly be able to issue more than one on average! i have lost all faith in Intel tonight... :(
Seeing as how Intel has been having MAJOR problems ramping up their Coppermine chips recently, even on their .18 micron process, I would really have to wonder if Intel will actually release their 1GHz chip within the next 3 months. ;)
Note that it took 2 months from the time that Intel announced their 800MHz coppermine and when it actually appeared on the market. And even still, its in very limited quantities.
This is just a "Me Too" action by them, I am willing to bet a lot on it.
That would be wierd if I got a first post
Throw your money away!
Well, you will unless you buy the chips in the 600-800 MHz range...
Those are sooooo January, though..
http://www.gw2k.com/prod/hm_sel_Matrix
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
The funky thing about having stock holders is that you owe them a load of explanations for your actions. AMD's 1 GHz costs US$1299 (1000 units) vs Intel's 1 GHz at US$990. I'm sorry, but the demand for such beasts is high and Intel has supply problems, their price must go up.
I really hope Intel won't be able to keep up with this.
"I do have to say that the corporate peeing match between these two is pretty amusing..."
Dateline, March 8, 2000, Hemos:
"This corporate peeing match is pretty funny to watch about who can release these machines first."
Some kind of fetish, there, Hemos?
---
At the moment, Intel's price is $990 each and AMD's is $1299; it's pretty much unprecedented to see AMD charging a premium over Intel, especially for what is not as good a chip except for FP work.
Neither of those prices bear any relation to the cost of manufacturing the chips; I have a feeling that the yield at these speeds (at least for Intel) is not high, and that these might even be loss-leaders ("I've got a GHz chip. OK, we get three working chips out of each $5000 wafer, but think of the press release").
I expect dual 1GHz Athlons to be in the same position this Christmas that dual Celerons are now, and by this time next year I hope to be using a dual 1500MHz Willamette box.
This is all find and dandy, but it's just incremental improvements in existing stuff. What I get the hots for are the quantum leaps: fundamental changes in technology that give you huge leaps in performance, reliability, portability, usability, scalability... You get the picture.
We need both. We need the Intels and AMDs shaving off a few nanoseconds here and there by upping the clock speeds and improving the caching, etc. But we also need someone in the skunk works somewhere trying for the "Now for something completely different" stuff.
------ "Darn floor. Big bite." (Koko the gorilla's best attempt at explaining the experience of an earthquake.)
> HP is already planning to sell systems within a week.
For my money, a chip is on the market when I can go to pricewatch.com, find some prices, call the seller, and find someone who actually has it in stock.
Special arrangements with OEMs are exactly that: special arrangements.
p.s. - By the above definition, the fastest x86 chip "on the market" today is the Athlon 850, and it is about three times as available as the PIII 800, if you measure availability in terms of number of sellers. It's also cheaper.
It will be interesting to watch and see when the G's show up, but right now I don't think there's any possible spin that is going to let Intel come out on top on this one.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
My cordless telephone says it's "2 gigahertz". Since 2 is greater than 1, that means my phone is faster than those new chips! Top that Intel and AMD!
One of the two Ghz chips will probably suffer from "Better 75% right and in the market than 100% right and too late." We'll see who blows up first. (can of Splode anyone?)
.5Ghz hurdle... (POINT five!!!)
Now if we could just get those G4s over the
You're all obliged to scrub the zeros off your processor speeds and add a decimal in front.
joe maller
Anandtech has a really good review of the Intel (and AMD) chips. The difference in performance between the two is pretty interesting. While the 1/3 speed cache on the AMD hurts it in some benchmarks, it still whoops up on Intel in others. Very good piece on the technical and business aspects of the speed race.
IANAL, but I play one on
I'm no conspiracy theorist, but don't yout think that just maybe OPEC/the oil companies had more than a little part in holding back progress & discouraging innovation?
...or maybe I'm just bitter that gas prices are 72.9 cents a litre ($CAN) despite the fact that it's produced here in Alberta.
To be honest, I'm of split mind about the recent huge increase in gas prices. It's horrible having to spend to much to fill up the car, but perhaps if OPEC continues to use it's monopoly power to driver up prices, people will start to consider alternative fuel sources more seriously, instead of just as a novelty.
What better way to give feedback to OPEC then to tell them "no thanks, we don't need much oil anymore" and watch their fortunes (and maybe the political instability of the area) dry up due to greed.
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Okay, I noticed there's a lot of misinformation/total crap being thrown out on /. right now...so I'll clear a few things up.
Correction: Clock for clock, according to SharkyExtreme's and AnandTech's benchmarks, the Pentium III takes a majority decision against the Athlon while using the i820/RDRAM and KX133/SDRAM chipsets (with the notable exception of professional CAD/CAM), which is useful for the money-is-no-object department. Interestingly, Anand also benched the P3 with a Apollo 133A/SDRAM chipset revealing a give-and-take tie relative to the Athlon, for those of us that are a bit more price conscious.
Correction: The P3 L2 cache is 8-way associative, 256 bit wide, 256KB in size, and runs at full clockspeed. The Athlon L2 cache is 512KB in size, running at 1/3 the clockspeed. The Athlon also has a 128KB L1 cache compared to the P3's 32KB L1 cache, both running at full clockspeed.
Correction: There is NO yield problem at Intel. There is, however, a supply problem, due to management mispredicting what quantity in chips they need to have supplied, as well as reallocation of resources as Intel prepares its fabs for Willamette and Itanium. Gotta love management. For proof, check out the amazing ability of Intel's 500E-600E chips to overclock to 700+ MHz. That's not a characteristic of a chipmaker with yield problems.
Correction: Why on Earth are people deciding what processor is superior by the supply of said chips? Like most sane people, I happen to judge performance on the basis of performance alone. Or maybe it's because I'm not a brand-name zealot. Either way...unless you're talking price/performance (in which case why even talk about GHz processors?) please can the supply arguments.
So who wins? The consumer does. Hopefully with the introduction of Cyrix's Joshua processors, the chipmakers will be squeezed even harder to cut both profits and prices. If you really desire a God Box, go take out a student loan and treat yourself to an SMP Alpha platform.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
...saying that its 1 GHz processor is 15% faster than its rivals (AMD?) when the Athlons are approximately 40% faster than the P3s of the same clockrate? Are they referring to the speed of the internet on the P3 1G vs the Athlon 1G? :)
But seriously. Maybe they consider the Athlon 700 to be their competitor? (1.4 * 700 = 980)
Ah well. I personally can't wait for the SMP DDR Mobos to start falling out from AMD so I can run dual 700s. Awwwiyeah.
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
What does the #1 chipmaker title entail? I noticed the article referred to Intel as such... is it because Intel sells more chips, is more popular in the minds of empty-brained managerial types? Its obviously no longer because they lead the industry in producing the highest performing chips and hasn't been for several months. I'm just wondering what AMD needs to do in order to wrest this title from Intel...
Or is it a totally unofficial definition-less title the author bestows on Intel in an attempt to give some deep loving tongue to their ass?
Esperandi
Sorry to break this to ya, bub, but if you actually read the article about Intel, you'd see that HP is already planning to sell systems within a week. Have you seen any packaged systems with an Athlon yet?
Brad Johnson
--We are the Music Makers, and we
are the Dreamers of Dreams
Brad Johnson
This is somewhat ironic. The first week in December, I ended 15 years of employment at Intel Corp. One of the major frustrations over the years was that their entire I.T. organization was set up to support someone who runs MS Office and that's it. It was very difficult for engineers (particually software engineers.) to get decent machines. So it seems funny that they will be giving employees new machines for home but can't seem to give their engineers decent systems for their desk at work.
"1 GHz" this and "700 MHz" that...I'm still paying for my PII-350, you insensitive fucks!@#$
Reminds me of when I paid $480 for a 540M hard drive years ago. Excuse me, I have to go sit in the corner and cry now. Make the bad people stop. :P
-Legion
vaporware alert:
:)
Your best bet between Intel and AMD for a 64bit cpu is AMD's implementation, aka the Sledgehammer architecture, which is an extension of the current IA32 instruction set to 64 bits. Without sacrificing 64bit quality, the 32 bit apps will run far quicker on a Sledgehammer architecture than on Intel's 'hard core' Itanium.
Then again if you're using an Alpha, I guess you're not even using x86 based software. Alphas make great server machines, but I wouldn't count on any leisure applications coming out for it
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The MHz race is boiling down to nothing more than a marketing warefare. The overall impact from speed this or speed that printed on the box makes a huge difference in sales, especially with the big manufactures who they have had partnerships for years. Technically, for Intel this is really not all that big a deal, just another step in the longer term strategy of Intel. They have to announce "Break through this or break through that about once a quater to keep shareholders happy. Used to be about once every six months or so, but with AMD biting at their heels with the Athalons selling like hotcakes, they need to keep up. The down side is that addind x MHz every quarter or so takes time and resources away from development of the next architecture. Newer architecture on processors will make a significant impact on my buying decisions, not 50 MHz a quarter, It just doesn't give me enough to make it worthwhile.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
I think two drunk guys with a ruler and their pants around their ankles is a better description.
"Peeing Match" is just easier to say.
-
It's going to need a wombat heatsink and a 3&1/2 inch fan. I wonder if the power supplies out on the market can adequately power a system with one of these, a DVD, a ZIP, a bleeding edge video card, etc.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
So finally Intel has gotten the Pentium IIIE CPU to run at 1,000 MHz.
There are a few problems, though. First, FINDING a 1,000 MHz PIIIE CPU is going to be just about impossible. Secondly, when it comes to pure FPU performance, the Athlon 1,000 MHz is still better because the PIIIE is still heavily based on the original P6 core from the Pentium Pro some five years ago!
Now that motherboards that use the VIA Apollo KX133 chipset is now becoming available, there's no incentive to use the PIIIE instead. In fact, if you have a graphics card that uses the nVidia GeForce 256 chipset and also run the latest Detonator 3.76 driver, the Athlon in many tests will run rings around the PIIIE 1,000 MHz.
I think the Athlon's advantage will increase even more when the second-generation Athlon (code named Thunderbird) with its CPU-speed L2 cache becomes available in a few months. I think a 1,000 MHz 2nd gen Athlon may perform as much as 20 to 25 percent faster than a PIIIE 1,000 MHz, mostly because the 2/5 L2 cache speed restriction will be gone.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
For a long time processors have been the most important part of a computer. At school I was taught that some day in the future RAM would become the most expensive part, not processors. When this occured a major change in computing would happen, using more processors instead of more RAM. I think this will happen very soon.
Prices of processors are dropping so fast because of this speed race. RAM OTOH stays expensive. We are allready seeing a steady increase in dual processor boxes.
Does anyone have any ideas about how this change from lots of memory to lots of processors will look like.
Dell 1GHz PIII: $5999
Gateway 1GHz Athlon: $3199
Those prices are for otherwise identical systems: 30G HD, GeForce, 19" monitor, 256K RAM (gateway base price is $2999 with 128K, so I added the $200 that their configurator adds for a 256K config.).
The Dell/Intel system is almost **DOUBLE** !!!! the price of the Gateway/AMD system!!!
The Rambus memory used by the PIII is of course the reason, and is why Intel is forced to price the CPU itself under AMD. If you check my history I predicted this yesterday, and stand by my predition that AMD will not drop their price in response - they have no need to!
Intel will release Pentium IIIs running at 1 GHz or faster by the second half of the year as well as the next-generation Willamette chips running at the same speed, Yu said. Quote here
Now isn't the second half of the year starting around July, August? Intel hasn't been doing well meeting its deadlines much less breaking them by months. I seem to remeber something simmiliar happening when both AMD and Intel were comming out with 600Mhz processors, AMD demoed theirs and then Intel came out a close second with their chip that, while it did run at 600Mhz did it using a little more voltage the usual and didn't seem to be as stable and their regular batch of PIIIs.
Remembering my comments about failures of PIII 600 CPUs, actually also reported by several other publications in Germany and the UK, should give you an idea how hard it was to run all the benchmarks with an even overclocked PIII 650. Quote here
It will be interesting to see tests on these 2 new processors to see how good they actually are, but this just seems to be a release by Intel to show that they arn't lagging AMD even though they really could be if AMD can produce good 1Ghz chips in mass when Intel is suck with declaring that there ARE 1Ghz PIIIs but if you actually wanted to find one it would be as easy as finding a Athlon and motherboard when they were`released'.
I hope Intel and AMD continue their little battle - I'd love to see more companies get involved. After all, we're the ones that benefit from it from faster chips and cheaper prices.
Too bad car companies don't put as much effort into improving over each other instead of just advertising better - we'd be driving much safer and fuel efficient things...
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Ha!
Reasons for laughing:
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
Sheesh - go look at this and see that Mhz nowdays (has it ever?) is irrelevant. A 733 Intel CPU gets a rating of 336 while an Alpha 667 get 413!!! And I forgot where I saw it, but Intel says the 1Ghz rates a 410 on this. STILL lower than the 667 Alpha. (on par, but lower)Total marketing BS. I'll admit the speed wars are great, but let's remember what Intel ISN't telling you - that they HAVE to run their chips faster because they're inherently slower designs (sorry for the rant)
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
Although what it should mean is the drastic lowering of Athlon 700 chips, which I'm thinking would make a good system for me. All hail competition. Price wars are good, price wars are our friend.
Working for the (other) man
Check out this Mac Plus (circa 1980s) running at 1 GHz.
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schrier/plus.html
AMD's idea of "introducing a 1GHz chip" is that you can go to gw2k.com , order a PC with that chip and expect it to be delivered in a few days or weeks.
iNTEL's idea is that there are a few sample chips for manufactures to practice tweaking motherboards.
AMD has sent chips to the larger retail stores and they should be on the shelf at Comp USSR soon ( if not already ).
iNTEL will be selling Gigahertz chips retail in a matter of months at best.
These people define release in vastly different ways and it will take your typical PC user a few more years to work out the difference. As for me personally, I am just happy that this will hammer the prices of the Celeron or K6-2 I can actually afford farther into the cheap range.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
What makes this siutation interesting in two reguards is this:
First AMD now has corperate attentions. It produced the 1GHZ chip first. That demonstrates that it is a very serious player. My boss didn't know what AMD was a few weeks ago. He does now.
Second Intel is now having to dance to the beat of someone elses drum. How long has it been since they've had to do that?
I'm hoping AMD can keep this up. If they can I could be able to convince upper checksigners to start letting me put in AMD powered servers and such very soon. Trick is they have to keep delivering.