Intel Announces Pentium 4

A friend of mine pointed me at this press release telling us about Intel's brand-new, shockingly original name (and logo) for the series of processors formerly code-named 'Willamette.' Meanwhile, I'll sit back and wait to see the logo parodies. Thanks to David Hageman.

Comments

Re:numbering system

[alleria]

Heh. I'm personally waiting for the Super Pro Turbo Pentium Hyper Alpha Tournament Winner's Platinum Edition. :-)

Whats next?

[iridium18]

Even though the P4(Willamette) uses the same 0.18 micron technology as the P3's, it will feature separate internal arithmetic logic units that run at 3GHz, and a 400 MHz data bus and a 20 stage pipeline. IBM, also using the 0.18 micron technology for their experimental chip-the Interlocked Pipelined CMOS-have pushed it up to 4.5 GHz. In their design, they have several locally placed clocks that allow certain sections to run faster instead of waiting for the slower sections. This goes to show that the design is just as important as what and how much we put on it. Want to know more? Check out http://www.research.ibm. com/news/detail/fast_circuits.html

Re:AMD's more creative

[Guy Harris]

C'mon, Athlon sounds very cool indeed.

...even if it is the name of a sports magazine in the US (which much of the rest of the world would call a "sport magazine", I suspect :-)).

It's also the name of an "integrated marketing communications firm", who say, on their What is an Athlon? page:

The major city-states of ancient Greece periodically held large celebrations which included contests among their best playwrights, musicians, orators and sportsmen. The prize awarded to the victors was called an athlon.

The athlon usually took the form of a large terracotta vase, known as a prize amphora, filled with olive oil. The outside of the vase was specially decorated with images of the contest, presided over by a deity such as Athena. The skilled competitors who strove after these prizes -- regardless of the field of endeavor -- were known as athletes. It is telling that the term athlon was used not only for the prize but for the contest as well, thus linking the struggle for excellence with the fruits of victory.

At Athlon Communications, we have adopted this ancient symbol of excellence as a fitting touchstone for today's business environment, in which competition is constant, the margin for error is slim, and the rewards of victory are great.

(Yeah, I know, the third paragraph falls under the heading of "blah blah blah blah blah".)

OK, so Duron may be an invitation for parodies

It sounds like a brand of paint or something - "New all-weather Duron - stands up to sun, rain, hail...."

I always liked the Compaq Contura, which sounded as if it belonged on the racks in the drugstore right next to the Durexes and Trojans ("ribbed for her pleasure").

Re:Wouldn't it be cool if cars were named by Intel

[Valdrax]

"Pentium 5" is kind of redundant in some weird way. I'm just wondering how much longer it's going to take us to get back to P6.

New category!

[Sebbo]

Is it time to have a Stupid Tech Product Name Slashdot logo, to go with teh Stupid Patents logo? What would the image be, though?

Re:New category!

[Sebbo]

Oh, and I suppose Athlon and Duron are brilliant names, eh?

Actually, my favorite stupid name of the hour is the artist formerly known as BBN, which finally IPOed this week under the name Genuity. Presumably, it's the opposite if ingenuity. Woo-hoo.

x86 Evolution

[Alakaboo]

80486SX - No FPU
80486DX - Internal FPU

At this point, Intel became involved with several lawsuits because they didn't want AMD and Cyrix to relabel and resell their chips under the x86 names anymore, so they switched to:

Pentium (P5-4) - On-board cache
Pentium MMX (P5-5C) - MMX
Pentium Pro (P6) - On-die cache
Pentium II (P6; Deschutes, Mendocino) - On-card cache
Celeron (P6; Mendocino) - No L2 cache
Celeron-A (P6; Mendocino) - On-die cache
Pentium !!! (P6; Katmai) - On-card cache, KNI/SSE
Pentium !!! (P6; Coppermine) - On-die cache
Celeron II (P6; Coppermine) - On-die cache
Pentium 4 (P7; Williamette)

The primary differences between the original, deschutes, mendocino, and coppermine cores are:
1) Size of L1 cache
2) Size, speed, and location of L2 cache
3) Die layout
4) Packaging
5) x86 enhancements (MMX, SSE)

These changes ultimately resulted in:
1) Higher attainable clock speeds
2) Higher per-clock performance

Traditionally, a chip attains a new architecture identifier (ie, 486, 586) when the actual processing path changes. The Athlon was considered 786 material simply because they made massive improvements to the floating point unit, and because it utilized a completely new bus protocol (EV6 vs. GTL+). All of Intel's processors starting with the Pentium Pro up through the Pentium III Coppermine are considered 'P6' or '686' by many simply because it hasn't changed.

Take a Pentium Pro 200 and a Coppermine and do the following:
1) Downclock to 200, 66MHz FSB
2) Disable the L1 and L2 caches
3) Disable the x86 enchancements (MMX and SSE)

And although I am no engineer and I do not work for Intel, I can almost guarantee that both processors will give you the same performance.

If you try the same for any scenario, 386 vs. 486, Pentium II vs. Williamette (P-4), whatever, you will probably achieve entirely different performance marks. The Williamette, from what I've seen, is a completely revamped x86 architecture.

On the other hand, many people prefer to separate generations by per-clock performance, including cache changes and x86 extensions. The then you would have Pentium = P5, Pentium MMX/Pentium Pro/Pentium II/Pentium III (Katmai) = P6, Pentium III (Coppermine) = P7, and Pentium 4 = P8. The problem with this method is that it is open for interpretation. It's obvious to me that the Coppermine cannot be grouped with the original Pentium II, but Joe Q. Techhead may not agree with me.

Or we could take Intel's word for it (which is what they obviously want us to do) and believe that the Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III, and Pentium 4 processors each have their own bevy of industry-dominating performance. :)

Enjoy the flamebait.

Alakaboo

Re:x86 Evolution

[linuxonceleron]

Pentium Pro (P6) - On-die cache
Actually the PPro had the cache on a separate die on the same chip package, unlike the CeleronA and Coppermine, which have the cache in the CPU die itself.

Re:x86 Evolution

[stripes]

Take a Pentium Pro 200 and a Coppermine and do the following

...

Traditionally, a chip attains a new architecture identifier (ie, 486, 586) when the actual processing path changes. The Athlon was considered 786 material simply because they made massive improvements to the floating point unit, and because it utilized a completely new bus protocol (EV6 vs. GTL+). All of Intel's processors starting with the Pentium Pro up through the Pentium III Coppermine are considered 'P6' or '686' by many simply because it hasn't changed.

The PPro would stall if you mixed 8bit/16bit/32bit register uses inside it's rename engine. The P-II and on didn't (well, not just because they are mixed size uses at least). That may seem minor, but it makes a huge diffrence to Win95 and Win98 (and maybe WinME).

The P-III has 3 decoders, rather then the two the P-I, P-II, and PPro had.

The cache archatecture, and interfaces to the cache have changed a lot. Don't under estimate this, cache control logic is a very big part of modern CPUs (not to be confused with cache memory, which is almost all of the CPU by transistor count!).

Somewhere between the PPro and the P-III some really close to non-deterministic functional unit allocation went away (so code doesn't get faster by putting NOPs in hard to guess places...only in easy to guess places like aligning loops to cache lines).

Oh, and of corse pipestages have been added, work has been juggled between them, and things have been re-layed out to allow process shrinks and clock speed bumps.

The changes between the PPro, P-II, and P-III are at least as big as between the 68000 and 68010. That is to say, not huge, but not trivial things an intern could have done.

Find a compiler writer (a good one) and ask them the diffrences. They are pretty sizable.

Of corse they arn't as big as the diffrence between the AMD K6 and the K7, but, well, that's another story.

Re:x86 Evolution

[throx]

The PPro would stall if you mixed 8bit/16bit/32bit register uses inside it's rename engine. The P-II and on didn't (well, not just because they are mixed size uses at least). That may seem minor, but it makes a huge diffrence to Win95 and Win98 (and maybe WinME).

I thought the thing that really sped up Win9x on the P2 vs the PPro was the fact that they added segment register caches. Win9x switches segments a lot when compared to code which was designed for a flat memory model and so the CPU spends a lot of time reloading the segment information from the LDT/GDT if there is no cache there (30 or 40 cycles possibly). I was under the impression the rename engine was fairly consistent across the whole P6 architecture.

John Wiltshire

Re:x86 Evolution

[maraist]

80486SX - No FPU 80486DX - Internal FPU

Don't forget the DLC and SLC, the 16bit versions.

And although I am no engineer and I do not work for Intel, I can almost guarantee that both processors will give you the same performance.

Well, the PPro apparently had some odd configuration issues with 16 bit code, so it's possible that the PPro would run slower than a PII+.

Additionally, don't forget that MMX and SSE in the PII and PIII are utilized by lots of low-level drivers nowadays; so you might get noticable performance boosts.

Also, to my knowledge, there were tiny memory access tweaks added to PII+ lines. Of course, this might be moot since the majority of delay would be from the lack of cache.

I agree that there is a problem with differentiating CPU generations. I would stand behind a naming convention based on radically differing designs, such as pipelining, integrated caching, out of order execution, parallel execution ( e.g. multi-threading or even multi-processing on die ), or even the crusoe approach. From this stand-point, the Pentium would be one generation, the Pro another, the 64bit proc ( from both AMD and Intel ) would be the next while all the little evolutionary upgrades would really just be different model numbers.

There is nothing wrong with Intel naming this the Pentium I, II, III, IV, etc, because they're really just model numbers. The complete model number involves the frequency. The only real argument, as any textbook would support, is when Intel attempts to call this a 7'th or 8'th generation CPU ( which they've tried to do with their PIII line ).

Re:Same ol', same ol'

[Guy Harris]

To me, it's just the same old product witha flashy new box.

"Same old product" only in the sense that it executes the x86 instruction set. It has a new processor core, i.e. not the core used in the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, and Celeron; it's not just a tweaked PIII.

Re:Penta-who?

[drinkypoo]

Obviously "we" do, or else this story wouldn't have made the front page and gotten over a hundred comments that weren't "me too", "natalie portman w/ hot grits et. al.", or "first..nth post".

why its pentium4 and not hexium,octium, etc...

[plone]

IIRC, Intel named the 586 architecture the pentium because they wanted to differentiate their product from the 486 clones from cyrix and AMD. Unfortunately it isnt possible to trademark numbers, so Intel paid alot of money to a marketing firm to come up with "Pentium", which was easily trademarked as it was a completely new word. However, when intel was ready to launch the PII, they found that the names hexium,septium, octium, nonium(sp?),etc had all being copyrighted by a bunch of sly folk, in the hopes that intel would by the name from them. Unfortunately Intel took the easy way and decided to cop out with the pentium II,III and now 4 processors.

Re:why its pentium4 and not hexium,octium, etc...

[evand]

they found that the names hexium,septium, octium, nonium(sp?),etc had all being copyrighted by a bunch of sly folk, in the hopes that intel would by the name from them.

I knew there was a reason I did all the research for this post!

Basically some guy named Eric Rosenfield (I think it was Rosenfield, could have been Rosenfeld or some variant) owns Hexium. He used to own Sextium, but abandoned it on June 16, 2000 (hmm...). Intel Corporation owns Septium, however.

And just in! (or, just searched for...) This Eric Rosenfeld (whoops, sorry about that) character also owned Octium, but abandoned that on June 16, 2000 as well! Apparently, someone (I wonder who) filed for opposition on January 31, 1995, which is about five months before Intel registered Septium.

Nonium and Decium are not registered. I guess nobody thought Intel would release a 986 or 1086.

Wouldn't it be cool if cars were named by Intel?

[Chiasmus_]

Dodge One
Dodge Two
Dodge Three
Dodge Delta
Dodge Delta 2
Dodge Delta 3
Dodge Delta Delta

Which gets me thinking.. "Pentium 5" is kind of redundant in some weird way. Maybe they'll call it Pentium Squared?

Logo

[51M02]

Humm Blue,White and Red reminds me the BeOS logo... Does Intel still have some share inside Be, Inc ?

Disclaimer: "These opinions are my own, though for a small fee they be yours too"

Re:Logo

[spectecjr]

Well, they couldn't go for the old one, because Pentium IV sounds too much like they're selling silicon crack :)

Si

Re:Pentium 4 = Funeral Knell for PowerPC?

[evangellydonut]

G4e will add 2 Alti-vec and 1 more FPU unit, and an extended pipeline. The single Alti-vec already whoop the vector processing capability of the Athlon, not to mention Pentiums...at 700Mhz, those things should easily beat out the 1Ghz K7/PIII in overall performance. I haven't read up all that much 'bout the P4s, but it is still IA-32! 'course the next question is when will the G4e hit the market...all the mac loyalists are hoping that it won't be too little too late...

Re:Top 10 Other Names Considered for Pentium 4

[mcc]

livegoatpornium? hm.

seeing those words set off a random train of thought that involved goatse.cx, was heavily enhanced by large amounts of sleep deprevation, and ended with me idly asking myself the question: is pentium.cx taken?

I immediately realized it was a dumb question; why would anyone want pentium.cx and what would they _do_ with it?

I would have immediately forgotten it, except i suddenly realized something that made me wonder if maybe it isn't such a dumb question after all. Alright, think about this for a minute:

It's pretty clear that intel's naming scheme no longer directly relates to reality. Moreover, the scism is getting more extreme over time. From the pentium to the pentium 2 to the pentium 3 to the pentium 4, the differences in the chip have become less apparent in usefulness and much more arbitrary. From my totally ignorant perspective, it would appear that the pentium 3 was more a marketing construct than it was anything else; just a desperate attempt to stuff a _lot_ more not-very-useful-or-realistic complexity into the pentium instruction set so they could claim "look, we did something!" and have an excuse to run a lot of commercials, just to keep intel in everyone's mind as being cutting-edge, or something. I mean, look, it has something to do with the internet, doesn't it?? and they have cool 3d graphics and a looney toons character in the ad! It must be really advanced!!! d00d L337 1 \V1LL HAVE MY DAD R3PL4C3 MY 0V3RCL0CK3D AMD R16GHT 4W4Y with a PENTIUM 3 and it will MAKE THE INTERNET M0R3 FUN 4ND 1 \V1LL H4XOR BETTER!!!
The pentium 4 seems pure desperation, some extremely vague advancement just to pump the number up one more, just to release a lot of press releases and get people to buy stuff. Just to say, ok, the pentium 3 failed to change the world, but we're still here, and we're still alive and vital and moving!!
If i were going to be paranoid, i'd say the point of the pentium 4 is so intel can make a lot of noise about it to distract us from the IA-64. What about the IA-64, you ask? Say, that's what i want to know exactly.

But whether i'm being too harsh, and whether i know jack shit about microchips, i think i can say with some certainty that with each new "version" of the x86, the real _meaningful_ difference between each processor is getting a good deal smaller with each iteration, and the marketing aspects of a new product launch are overshadowing the technological aspects in intel's mind with each iteration. And i can DEFINATELY say the amount of time between "releases" is getting faster and faster.

My prediction:

From this point, with each "new" chip intel releases, the fluff value of the release will increase exponentially, the time between releases will decrease exponentially, and the justification for changing numbers will decrease exponentially. Eventually, intel will get to the point where they assign a different Pentium Number for each different clockrate assignment.

Thus about two years from now, Intel will have reached the point of the Pentium 110-- which they will name the Pentium CX [roman numerals!] -- and register the domain pentium.cx for it, to commemorate the Pentium CX's simultaneous release with "Windows ME harder"!

But who knows how much the tech industry will have changed by then? Hell, by that point, there may even be multiple-core G4s on the market.

(Score:0, Gibberish)

Re:Wouldn't it be cool if cars were named by Intel

[DawnHorse]

At least they know how to count. Important for a cpu manufacturer i think.

Re:Penta-who?

[TGR]

I can understand a passing interest in Intel announcing their next generation (of sorts), but what makes me go "ugh, how pathetic" is how people kept whining about the name... of all things.

Intel confidential email about P4 chip layout!

[DeeKayWon]

I was doing some "field research" on firewall security when I stumbled across this from an Intel engineer. It got chopped off at the end in the process, but there's still some juicy stuff here.
---------------------------
To: Head Cheese of Intel
From: P4 project manager
Re: P4 chip layout

Message:

The die layout of the latest revision of the prototype P4 is in the attached JPEG. Here's the rundown of the labelled sections:

1. 11,290,491 transistors: CISC-to-RISC conversion. Handles a bunch of 1978 legacy bullshit.

2. I know this looks like just a dot on the chip, but it turned out the MMX stuff could be done with only eight transistors.

3. 12 Superpipelined floating point units: We designed them so that hopefully the next version of Excel will run tolerably, but we're not getting our hopes up.

4. Instruction scheduler: Arranges instructions in the fastest manner possible for those too wussy to use assembler.

5. We etched in a proposal from you to your secretary like you asked.

6. 453 transistors, 35 varicaps, four inductors and an op amp: I think this was put in while someone was drunk, but everything stops working if we take it out.

Re:Intel confidential email about P4 chip layout!

[seebs]

Just a side note: Run-time reordering beats the pants off assembly, because the chip knows more about its resources than you do. There's a reason for it to exist, and no amount of coding will ever eliminate the fact that, at the time when the chip really sees the instructions, it knows to the cycle how long it will be before a given bit is available, and you don't.

This is how I play old school games.

[angelo]

Without their cache, these modern chips amount to nothing. They are no good unless you have something filling the pipeline with the next instruction.
Take your k-spiff pentium III 950 and turn off cache. Boot windows. Have fun in your misery. THis is how I slow games enough to play them on my 450. Gabriel knight works just fine without cache. :)

But they're on the pentium *four*

[Tom7]

So shouldn't it be octium? That almost sounds good.

You forgot

[Inoshiro]

NolongerthePProcorium! (wow, now that's inovation!)
---

Re:Oooh what's next pentium 5? Isn't that redundan

[divec]

> I guess they can't call it "Sextium"

Sorry, you're mixing Latin and Greek. The successor to the "Pentium" would logically be the "Hexium"

Isn't "-ium" a Latin ending? In which case, wouldn't the unmixed version be "Quintium" rather than "Pentium"?

Re:Wouldn't it be cool if cars were named by Intel

[Kwelstr]

Well, the problem is that Intel cannot go up from Pentium because they'll get Sextium... on the other hand, maybe it will make for sexier computers, as in: I named my computer Helga and she has a very fast sextium.

reminds me of that old pentium joke...

[fluxrad]

how many pentium processors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

exactly 1.8342210020334565635623561
but 2 is close enough.

all hail the thunderbird!


FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network

Re:reminds me of that old pentium joke...

[fluxrad]

jesus man! your post is dangerous! you almost made me suffocate on mountain dew!!


FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network

Re:reminds me of that old pentium joke...

[infodragon]

I am Pentium of Borg. Division is futile. You will be approximated.

Re:Top 10 Other Names Considered for Pentium 4

[wowbagger]

7) Pengium (Thus really cementing the break with Microsoft)

"Cementing the break"? That metaphor was well mixed. Shaken, or stirred?

Re:Pentium 4 = Funeral Knell for PowerPC?

[hazydave]

AIM is the typical "we're not Intel or Microsoft" story in this industry. Rather than let Intel actually need to punch out a few teeth, Apple basically had them all surgically removed while Mot and IBM were, apparently, stoned on nitrous. Or at least their lawyers...

The only way PPC systems would match x86 in price would be to have a large enough open systems market rivalling the PClone market. I was doing that in '97 when Apple pulled the plug. And while moving into the set-top box business from there has our stock some 20x higher than in the Maclone days, I'm still bitter. Not just because Apple proved to be the dicks everyone kept telling me they'd be (no, they've really changed, I met with the CHRP group myself), but simply that the PPC's good enough. It deserves success.

After that fell blow, neither Morotola nor IBM has felt particularly compelled to race with Intel just for Apple's sake. When phone or internet switches or other high-end embedded gear need an upgrade, they'll crank out a faster chip (like IBM's forthcoming PPC750 update, starting out at 700MHz). With all that copper and SOI and all, it's not like IBM couldn't deliver if they wanted to.

Re:When I switched from Suns it was to Athlon.

[stripes]

Intel's non-support history with the Pentium math bug.

"non-support"? You mean the one-week (one month?) stonewall, followed by the biggest CPU recall program in history?

So, ok, it was a crappy thing for them to do, but you make it sound like they didn't come through at all. Which is pretty far from what happened.

I have a K7 too, but more because it was a better bang for my buck then because of a PR disasater half a decade ago!

Wow, my brand new P3 is now even more outdated

[Tairan]

Time to spend another 13 thousand dollars..

Any idea if Intel is EVER going to change the name? I doubt it. "Pentium" is such a household name, and whenever it is mentioned, the average person recognizes it, and associates it with a fast computer. Intel has succeeded in making sure EVERYONE knows its product name..

Re:Wow, my brand new P3 is now even more outdated

[randombit]

the average person recognizes it, and associates it with a fast computer. Intel has succeeded in making sure EVERYONE knows its product name.

Sure, to the average person Pentium == fast. But geeks hear "Alpha" and start drooling all over themselves. :)

Re:Wow, my brand new P3 is now even more outdated

[FFFish]

What Intel doesn't realize yet is that "Pentium" has become a generic.

The average consumer -- and, frankly, even a fairly schmart geek like me -- tends to not feel that there's a whole lot of difference between a Pentium II and Pentium III or 4.

Probably because in all other markets, a same-named product is just a slightly updated product. A '99 Miata looks and performs a whole lot like a '01 Miata. Tide with Bleach seems to perform a lot like Tide with Enzymes.

The Pentium name just doesn't differentiate. Intel could release a Pentium-I 900 and it would outsell a Pentium-4 700...

Of course, anyone with a clue is buying Duron. Best bang for the buck... :)

--

Re:Wow, my brand new P3 is now even more outdated

[DeeKayWon]

Brand new P4 1.4 GHz: $1000
New motherboard: $200
Rambus RDRAM to replace SDRAM: $11800
The smiles on the faces of Intel and Rambus stockholders: Priceless.

Okay, I tried.

Re:It's just hard to believe.

[arivanov]

1. There is a "lack of there of"
2. The few that are supposedly new are well known
3. So everyone is taking a piss at the PRdrones and the "YetAnotherMeaninglessPieceofPRBulshit" with no info in it. And at the logo of course. When you start being a laughing stock you usually go a very long way... It is almost as bad the new SGI logo. And I bet it is inroduced for the same purpose - to be rendered easier as MS Word clipart. If you do not understand what I mean try to make the old SGI logo in the form of a windows metafile suitable for clipshit, err... sorry clipart.

Re:Oooh what's next pentium 5? Isn't that redundan

[jinschoi]

"Sextium" would be mixing Latin and Latin! Sex- is a latin prefix for six, as in sextuplets, and "ium" is a Latinate prefix.

"Pentium" and "Hextium" are the bastard offspring of Greek prefix and Latin suffix here....

Great news!

[SecretAsianMan]

Now I will finally be able to afford a Pentium II!

When I switched from Suns it was to Athlon.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

For the millenium I finally retired my Suns-at-home and went to a PC architecture. (Also retired SunOS/Solaris for Linux.)

For the hardware I chose the top-end Athlon.

Reasons:

- No serial number inside.
- Great price/performance.
- Intel's non-support history with the Pentium math bug.

Oooh what's next pentium 5? Isn't that redundant?

[smoon]

I guess the can't call it "Sextium", although it might boost sales...

BTW the correct link is her e.

Re:Wouldn't it be cool if cars were named by Intel

[ChadN]

You can't patent a name, either. "Pentium" is trademarked.

Pentium 4 = Funeral Knell for PowerPC?

[vought]

Gosh, I use a mac and I love it (for Linux and OS X) but Intel's new processors, if they perform as advertised, will simply keep knocking AIM's teeth out, performance wise.

With no other advantage besides ColorSync, cute cases, and a (finally) solid operating system, what the hell is going to happen to the platform that was to bring us 'affordable, scalable RISC Processing'?

I hate to think it's necessary, but I may end up with a space heater (P4/Athlon) in my computer.

Re:Pentium 4 = Funeral Knell for PowerPC?

[Shoeboy]

It also stands a good chance of kicking the Alpha 21264's A**!
Kicking it at what? Alphas are moving .18 later this year and should top 1 ghz. That will ensure a comfortable fp edge over everyone. On the integer front it should be close, but I suspect it'll be the alpha's win here too. The williamette core is too deeply pipelined and has too much of a branch mispredict penalty.
--Shoeboy

Oops

[Surak]

what about hotgritsinthepantsium?
natalieportmanium?
TrollMaster i4x86?

never mind...

Real meaning of pentium reveiled

[Zaaf]

Uninteresting fact:
Pentium stands for Produces erroneous numbers through incorrect understanding of mathematics.
This would explain a lot, if I only new what. ;-)


---

Is it time yet?

[dolanh]

Wow, looks like Intel finally released the P4 BBQ model in time for fourth of July. Put them ribs on the heatsink, baby, slather them in head-conductive grease, and we're cookin', baby!

If they sell enough of these we'll start hearing stories about "Intel brownouts"...

Thats a press release?

[JordoCrouse]

I have C comment blocks longer (and more informative) then that press release.

Re:Thats a press release?

[MAXOMENOS]

I have C comment blocks longer (and more informative) then that press release.

Dude, I just about died laughing when I read that. Well said!!

The Second Amendment Sisters

Re:Thats a press release?

[iCEBaLM]

Well, press releases arn't supposed to be informative, they're for the press! When was the last time you saw anything mildly informative from CNN?

-- iCEBaLM

I hate these names...

[ChristianBaekkelund]

I so long for the days when I could tell chips apart from one another...the 386, the 486, etc. But, now, how do I compare a Pentium, an Athlon, a Celeron, a Crusoe, a whatever?...
While I am half-joking here, I seriously though want them to stop adding on numbers to the Pentium and go to the next logical name. Let's see, doesn't it go Pent, Sex, Sept, Oct, Non, Dec?...so would that make this the Sexium? Or perhaps that was the Pentium II, and this is actually the Octium?

And the slogan will be ...

[arthurs_sidekick]

"Don't just get into the internet, get to know it carnally"

This parallels ...

[Kwikymart]

Intel is on the decline just like Microsoft started to a few years back. Though Intel is nowhere near the state MS is in, it seems these huge product releases are made out of desperation. AMD has taken a huge chunk of Intel's market, but who knows, maybe they might be able to make a comeback?

Re:This parallels ...

[randombit]

Though Intel is nowhere near the state MS is in, it seems these huge product releases are made out of desperation.

Well, Intel does seem to have a tendency lately to announce products that you can't actually buy. And while the P-IV core is actually supposed to be pretty good (ie they finally have moved past the PPro/PII/PIII core), whether or not anyone will actually be able to buy one is rather debatable (based on their current supply problems with the P-IIIs). Not the mention all the problems Intel has had with their chipsets, fscking hell, it's nuts. And the RDRAM fiasco hasn't helped either.

AMD has taken a huge chunk of Intel's market, but who knows, maybe they might be able to make a comeback?

To be realistic, Intel still has a big chunk of the market (80% maybe?). AMD is doing very well for itself, I agree, but they're nowhere near putting Intel out of business yet. And honestly I would prefer it if they just kept competing with each other, with about 50/50 market share, each producing better and cheaper CPUs until the end of time. Though all I want in the short term is for AMD to come out with SMP chipsets (770... yummy) and then I'll get a dual Thunderbird or Mustang box.

Re:Top 10 Other Names Considered for Pentium 4

[Upsilon]

Actually, the Pentium 4 is a very drastic change from the P3. It has an entirely new core, with some interesting new ideas (trace cache, "double pumped" ALUs). However, whether or not it is any good remains to be seen. Your comment that it is just a marketing exercise may very well prove to be true anyway.

You see, the P4 has a 20 stage pipeline. Now that's a lot compared to most chips, meaning that it will take a huge penalty for a branch misprediction. What's the advantage of a 20 stage pipeline? Clockspeed. The P4 was designed first and foremost for clockspeed, because that's all the clueless average computer user looks at. There's a very good possibility that the P4 will perform worse at the same clockspeed than the P3, but it will reach some insane clockspeeds. This is especially true in floating-point operations. The P4 only has one FPU while even the P3 has two (the Athlon has three). That just doesn't cut the mustard these days.

Of course, intel is banking on SSE2 to make up for their pathetic FPU, but that has to be specifically supported in the application. Anything FPU intensive and without SSE2 support will perform much better on a P3 than a P4 of the same clockspeed. Of course, intel will base all their bencharks on the miniscule number of applications that will support SSE2 (and pressure third-party benchmark makers to include SSE2 support as well), so they'll have a bunch or pretty graphs showing that the P4 is super-duper fast.

Re:Top 10 Other Names Considered for Pentium 4

[barleyguy]

Actually, 886 would be short for 80886, so in 72 generations, we'll be at 88086.

But anyhow....

Re:Flamage from a classic Cadillac owner

[Abreu]

...and is it your implication that older cars, especially of the "Yank tank" variety, are smoke-belching monsters? I have a '77 Cutlass Supreme Brougham (with the Rocket 350 V-8) that's as clean-burning as any other car I've had.

But its still a V8, and that simple fact makes it guzzle more gas (and pollute more by extention) than any (well tuned) 4 or 6 cilinder car.

Which makes me wonder: why do we buy cars that can do 200Km per hour when in most countries the speed limit rarely reaches above 140km per hour? Particularly in the cities, where you seldom get the machine beyond the 90km per hour mark...

But then again... people buy Pentium III's at 800Mhz only to surf the internet and write letters in M$Word...

Re:Wouldn't it be cool if cars were named by Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

don't forget, the only reason we got pentium was that intel added 486+100 and got 585.99999999993646872

Top 10 Other Names Considered for Pentium 4

[Greyfox]

10) Borgium

9) Whupamdassium

8) Fnordium

7) Pengium (Thus really cementing the break with Microsoft)

6) Really obscenely fast processor

5) Notcreativeenoughium

4) 886

3) Just another damn IA32 chip

2) Killappleium

And the number one other considered name for the Pentium 4:

1) Livegoatpornium

Re:Top 10 Other Names Considered for Pentium 4

[x0]

I have a BusLogic BT-948 UltraSCSI controller with an Intel 80186 processor.

Re:Top 10 Other Names Considered for Pentium 4

[jafuser]

4) 886

Oh great... we're only 72 generations away from returning to the 8086...

My god...

[DigitalEntropy]

Did they learn nothing from the Rocky series?


-={(.Y.)}=-

Re:My god...

[DeeKayWon]

They remembered Rocky, but forgot Police Academy.

Intel AC

[HerrNewton]

Hmmm. Just in time for summer. Now, Dell, Gateway, etc. can advertise their boxes are dual use.

1. Remove P4 case from board
2. Open window, lay case horiztonally across sill in the direction of desired airflow, and close window.
3. Plug-in computer and turn power on.

Window air conditioner ;-)

----

Just makes you wonder...

[meldroc]

How much did Intel pay the brand consultants to come up with "Pentium 4"? Those guys literally get paid millions to come up with things like the Lucent coffee stain logo, the AT&T Death Star, the name Agilent (sounds like a washing machine company,) etc.

Re:Just makes you wonder...

[Kwikymart]

Look on the bright side, at least it's not "Pentium 2000"

Unlucky 4?

[cxreg]

I thought I had heard that Intel was going to avoid the name Pentium 4 because the number 4 is unlucky in Japan. I don't remember why exactly, but it had something to do with the Japanese word for 4 sounding like something else which was "evil" or something like that.

Re:Oooh what's next pentium 5? Isn't that redundan

[stevelinton]

I believe that Intel does have trademarks on
hexium, sextium, heptium, septium and all plausible variations.

The Intel 986

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Remember years ago when we said 'oh, someday we'll have some really fast Intel 986 chip with tons of memory and stuff...' ... well, that day is about to happen. If Intel had continued its old naming (numbering) convention, this would have been the 986.
--

Re:The Intel 986

[Shoeboy]

Actually my friend, you are the one who is mistaken. The williamette is pretty massively different from the p6. A good overview is here and here.
--Shoeboy

Re:The Intel 986

[Shoeboy]

Uh, you mean 786 right?
Pentium was the 586, p-pro was the 686, this'll be the 786.
--Shoeboy

I'm sure I'm the first....

[carlos_benj]

Has anyone else pointed out the broken link? Only 2 dozen or so?

So, don't the big guys that post the stories have that neat 'preview' thingy so that they can check their links? Perhaps that's how all the typos and grammer oopses get into the stories. Either that or they just scramble to see who can post a particular story first.

Same ol', same ol'

[UpeoWaMacho]

To me, it's just the same old product witha flashy new box. big deal. When i want a new processer, i'll go to AMD.

Interesting quote...

[DiningPhilosopher]

"Around the world, PC users associate the Pentium brand with the highest PC performance, compatibility and quality available."

Oh yeah, my Pentium 120 just screams.

Branding

[Animats]

Oh, great. A press release for a brand name. Not a product, just its brand name.

Still, I'm glad they called it that. It beats Celeron, Athelon, and Duron.

NEWS FLASH: THE INTEL ODIUM

[jetson123]

After the Itanium and Xeon, continuing with their tradition of naming processors after elements with a letter missing, Intel is announcing today the the Intel Odium. "We believe that the names we give to our processors should be representative of the relationship between the company and its customers", the Intel CEO said in a public statement announcing the release.

Rumors that Intel might be working on the Intel Oxgen, the Urnium, or the Lutonium processors were vigorously denied by the company.

Additional press releases

[dolanh]

"Intel will also be offering it's new, jointly developed, industrial strength power supply for ISPs using large scale P4 systems"

"Earlier today, seven intel engineers were incinertated in a systems-test accident. The incident occurred on power-up of the test-bed of Intel's new quad-P4 board, codenamed Phoenix. Witnesses describe the cause as 'spontaneous combustion'. 'The damn thing just blew', said one engineer, 'and then everything was just a ball of fire! I'm sure glad I got out of there alive... Sources report that Intel management has reportedly been talking to executives at Frigidaire regarding the incident."

It's very iMac

[Craig Davison]

Beveled, bubbly plastic edges and a brightly coloured 4.

It's about as inspiring as SGI's new logo.

Re:Wouldn't it be cool if cars were named by Intel

[shippo]

Intel had already released an ethernet card called the PC586 prior to the release of the Pentium. I always thought that they chose the name Pentium to avoid confusion over names.

BTW the PC586 was a pain to configure, compared to the then current 3Com cards.

New names...

[Haven]

Itanium/2

Copout(TM)

Crap(TM)

----------------------

At least they aren't doing the 3DFX design model.

Voodoo 1 = Revolutionary technology
Voodoo 2 = 2 Voodoo 1's
Voodoo 3 = Newer design, more memory, AGP
Voodoo 5 = 2 Voodoo 3's, MORE VRAM THAN YOUR SDRAM

----------------------

All I want in a processor is 512k of integrated L2 cache that runs at full clockspeed, and a 200mhz bus. Is that too much?

Re:no page

[deefer]

In response to your .sig :
"In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is ostracised as a troublemaker" - Deefer

Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.

Re:Oooh what's next pentium 5? Isn't that redundan

[Chris Mattern]

> I guess the can't call it "Sextium", although
> it might boost sales...

Sorry, you're mixing Latin and Greek. The
successor to the "Pentium" would logically be
the "Hexium"--which admittedly isn't as funny but
does have its own possiblities. The "Sextium"
would have to be the successor to the "Quintium".

Chris Mattern

Pentium is a household name

[wowbagger]

"It's worse than that he's dead Jim dead Jim dead Jim"

Most people not only associate "Pentium" with "fast processor", they associate "Pentium" with "any processor".

True story: I was in my local Drat Shack (which also has a section devoted to amateur radio gear and other "stuff" on consignment) and this kid (who, for the record, seemed to believe "soap" was a four letter word) comes in. He starts looking at this old Pentium 75 that is stuck into a block of plain old styrofoam (can you say ESD? I thought you could). "Ouuuuh, would this work in my computer? I have a pentium-486." As you can tell, it went downhill from there. Fast.

Intel has poured gigadollars into making this the case: people ask what kind of Pentium is in their Macs, or in my Indy, or whatnot. Intel's execs would sooner chew off their own testicles than change that name.

That logo, must have cost a fortune!

[anticypher]

Can you imagine how much money some team of graphics artists got paid to come up with that logo?

Sometimes it seems I'm in the wrong line of work, but then I end up having too much fun one day and it becomes worth it.

the AC

Re:That logo, must have cost a fortune!

[PurpleBob]

Yeah, amazing how much money you could get from putting your company's brand name on... an upside-down stick of multi-colored deodorant?
--
No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.

Haiku

[575]

Labeling is false:
The eighth generation chip
Should be "Octium"

numbering system

[waterhouse]

Well, its entirely obvious to me that Intel has adopted the Street Fighter numbering system. In three or four years, we can look forward to Pentium Ex Alpha Plus.

--

AMD's more creative

[decaf_dude]

C'mon, Athlon sounds very cool indeed. OK, so Duron may be an invitation for parodies, but Athlon...
As someone said earlier, the word Pentium has become so vague, you no longer know whether you're talking about a puny 75MHz granpa or an 850MHz beast.
Can't wait for those SMP Athlon boards :)

BBC news has (slightly) more informative info.

[jpkeane]

There is slightly more info in this story on BBC news. (that was quick) 1.5GHz would be nice though...

Re:numbering system

[Munelight]

Super Pro Turbo Pentium Hyper Alpha Tournament Winner's Platinum Edition The Movie.

=)

Umm, no....

[kronos]

Does no one pay attention to uname(1) anymore? :)

The Pentium was the 586; The Pentium Pro was the 686; The Pentium II and III, being merely modifications of the PPro, are also 686. Originally, the Merced was to be the 786, but it looks like they'll be going a whole new route with that, and Willamette (the Pentium 4), being a new chip, will take the 786 label.

Re:Damn, I was hoping they would name it

[TGR]

If they'd named it Peon, they had better name a chip chanop or ircop :)

Re:intel may take the pentium line even further

[titus-g]

they own all the way up to 10, except for 7 and 8.

11+ (I guess only checked a couple) seem to be free, anyone want to invest? (given of course that Pentium is a made up name, and a trademark)

Naming jokes aside, some comments about performanc

[be-fan]

Wow. Switch the mode to threaded highest score first. That top guy most hold some kind of record for most responses to a single comment. Wonderfully, all 478 comments on this page seem to be about naming. As for the processesor itself, it is the biggest leap since the Pentium Pro. The Pentium 4 is an entierly new architecture (dumb as hell naming scheme. If a PII with extra cache deserves the Xeon moniker, this should atleast beo Pentium Rangers in Space! But I digress.) The PIV uses a new technique that Intel calls "double pumping." It is essentially the same technology used in AGP and DDR-SDRAM to achive high clockspeeds, the data units work on both the rising and falling edges of the clock. Thus, the bus is quad pumped (I think 100MHz clock transferrng 4X per clock) and the ALU's are double pumped, so a 1.5GHz PIV will have math units crunching at 3GHz! Also, there are a bevy of other changes such as deeper pipelines and better caching. What's certain is that Athlon is not going to hold AMD on top anymore. Sure, clock for clock the Athlon might be more efficient, but nothing is argueing with an effective 3GHz clockspeed. This is especially important for stuff like 3D graphics since the geometry doesn't use up that much bus bandwidth, so the processor can crunch at the full 3GHz without having to wait for the bus.

Re:It's all about the Pentiums, baby

[finkployd]

I like:

"They call me the king of the spreadsheets, gottem all printed out on my bedsheets

Just provides some wierd mental imagery.

Finkployd

It's all about the Pentiums, baby

[Reality Master 101]

I think it's time for some Weird Al

Favorite line: "I should do the world a favor and cap you like Old Yeller"

--