The Dual 1GHz Pentium III Myth

Sander Sassen writes: "HardwareCentral has the latest on the dual 1GHz Pentium III controversy. Here's a blurb: 'The 1 GHz Intel Pentium III seems to be the subject of much controversy, as many claims have been made about its inability to run in a dual CPU configuration. HardwareCentral has been following the discussion closely and decided to put an end to all the rumors and get a couple of GigaHertz Pentium IIIs and a dual CPU motherboard and find out what exactly is the truth of the matter.'"

Comments

Geez,when did slashdot become news of sysadmins?

[be-fan]

I'm tired of all you people saying that faster procs are useless because of other bottlenecks. I got news for you, in most non-server environments the proc is still the biggest bottle neck. To tell the truth, I enjoyed much more the 50% boost from 200 to 300 MHz than I did the 50% boost from a 66 to a 100MHz bus. For the most part apps are still computer bound, EXCEPT in server space. Thats why the Xeon is still chugging along at 550MHz. Examples of apps that are compute bound.
1) 3D, games, rendering,modling, you name it.
2) Any kind of realtime graphics.
3) Photoshop type apps depending on wether you use filters more often or just edits to large files.
4) Compiling.
5) Audio editing
6) Real-time video editing. (What, I have to wait 2 minutes to render the changes!)
Things not compute bound
1) Serving webpages, files, etc.
2) Working with large photoshop files.
3) Some types of scientific computing where data crunching is high volume, low workload.
Yes I've forgotten a few tihngs, but the market for more CPU power is clearly more important than the market for higher bandwidth.

Re:Wow

[John Carmack]

A GeForce should be able to run Q3 at 200 fps at 400x300 (r_mode 1) or possibly even 512x384 resolution if the cpu was fast enough. A dual willamette at the end of this year will probably do it.

We currently see 100+ fps timedemos at 640x480 with either a 1ghz processor or dual 800's, and that isn't completely fill rate limited. DDR GeForce cards are really, really fast.

Yes, it is almost completely pointless.

The only reasonable argument for super high framerates is to do multi frame composited motion blur, but it turns out that it isn't all that impressive.

I did a set of offline renderings of running Q3 at 1000 fps and blending down to 60 fps for display. Looked at individually, the screenshots were AWESOME, with characters blurring through their animations and gibs streaking off the screen, but when they were played at 60hz, nobody could tell the difference even side by side.

Motion blur is more important at 24hz movie speeds, but at higher monitor retrace rates it really doesn't matter much.

There are some poster-child cases for it, like a spinning wagon wheel, but for most aspects of a FPS, realistic motion blur isn't noticable.

Exagerated motion blur (light sabers, etc) is a separate issue, and doesn't require ultra-high framerates.

There are still plenty of things we can usefully burn faster cpu's on...

John Carmack