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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.
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?
---
The deal is speed == big_shiny_object so it sells.
However, I agree with you. Now that we've hit the 1000 MHz level, maybe the industry can concentrate less on clock speed and move onto cool architectural enhancements. The next big step is not 2 GHz, but 10 GHz, IMO, since "factor of" jumps are more impressive than "multiple of" jumps.
Maybe they could come up with a line of chips with interesting features besides clock speed, keeping clock-speed oriented stuff the consumer line. However, that could fragment things, but it would still be kinda fun. I'd love to play around with something like that.
Woz
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!
And the frequency at which a processor operates has about as much to do with its speed as a handsets signal frequency does with its cpu frequency. Which, I believe, was the point.
Many standard PCI cards will run in several different Alpha motherboards - both under Linux and NT (maybe Digital Unix, too, who knows). A Matrox G200 in a 533MHz Alpha 21164 was pretty decent at quake (before my board died and Compaq refused to even *sell* me a new one, much less replace it under warantee)...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
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."
Technically, all Coppermine procs faster than the 600 are overclocked because there is no real difference in the cores between a 600 MHz coppermine and a 1GHz coppermine. There are some tweeks, but mainly the only difference is that the 1GHz procs are lower yield/higher quality parts. All procs are made at the same. If a particular core can't hit 1GHz, its sold as something lower. If there is a really high yield, and no cores are failing the tests, then even cores that pass at 1GHz will be sold as something lower. Overclocking is only when a chip is run faster than the manufacturer sold it to run. (not necessarily what speed it passed at. Many 600MHz procs actually have cores that passed at a higher speed, since Intel is getting really good yields on the coppermine chips.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
I think the problem with your argument is that you're trying to figure out why one ghz processors would be needed in handhelds. I say that they'll happen regardless of whether or not they're needed. One ghz chips are sexy.
Plus, who knows what cockamaimy scheme somebody'll dream up next year that'll start chewing up mad mobile cpu time? Just because you can't envision it (and neither can I, because if either of us could we could potentially grow rather wealthy -- please let me know if you think of anything) doesn't mean it won't happen.
Besides, the ambitiosity of software is usually directly related to what kind of hardware is out there. People just keep making bigger and bigger software.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
...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.
and someone will still overclock it
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
There was a /. article a few months ago about this. IBM has the capability now to produce circuits that can handle 90 Ghz. Here's the link...
slashdot.org/articles/99/12/06/ 0823227.shtml
--
"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.
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.