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Intel Tests Show PC133 SDRAM Bests RDRAM
SteveM wrote citing an Semiconductor Business News article which begins: "SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Here's a surprise. Benchmark test results from Intel Corp. show its new 815E chip set with PC133 SDRAMs beating the performance of its 820 chip set with Direct Rambus memories. Moreover, Intel has posted those unexpected test results on its Web site, not intending to show PC133 SDRAMs beating the Direct Rambus memory format, which is favored by the Santa Clara chip giant." The results actually show some fairly unspectacular differences, but those differences lean overwhelmingly in favor of the SDRAM. Surely someone will come up with a benchmark that always makes RDRAM look better.
> I agree with your entire position on Intel, but logically you cannot exempt
2 57&cid=170 ], I argued that x86 is the "open-source ISA" since anyone can use it, while Intel and HP will demand steep royalties for anyone wanting to do IA64 processors. As long as you don't have to code in assembler for it--and few code in assembler these days, anyway--there's nothing wrong with x86 since modern x86 CPUs are really a RISC core with an x86 decoder tacked on, which according to Ars Technica only adds about 1% penalty to the processor's speed. My point was that I find it contradictory that so many people hate x86, but love Intel. People just hate x86 because it's old and ugly as an ISA, but these days it's not such a real-world problem since few people code in hand assembler. ISA is really less important than how efficient the actual RISCy core of a modern CPU is; a 1% speed penalty is really insignificant in exchange for compatibility with the last 20 years worth of x86 apps, and despite people claiming for the last 5 years that x86 is going to hit a performance ceiling "soon", it still hasn't and probably won't for some time.
> AMD from your ire. While they are surely less evil than Intel, they are
> still evil for contributing to the continued existence of x86.
Actually, I never said that I personally think x86 is bad, evil, or otherwise undesirable. I used the phrase "since everyone here hates the x86 architecture so much"--and generally they do, but I'm an exception. In a recent post [ http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/06/29/2227
So, I never said Intel was evil for pushing x86 for so long, I said that it's dumb for people to hate x86 but not fault Intel for creating a better ISA long ago. That leaves AMD in the clear as far as I'm concerned, since I'm glad they're going to extend x86 to 64bits and maintain backwards compatibility and maintain an open, freely usable ISA--putting the next big ISA into Intel's licensing control is a very, very, very dangerous idea--I'll keep incurring that 1% penalty in exchange for keeping an open chip platform, thank you. The reasons Intel is evil include its sloth, especially in keeping the P6 core so long, and its predatory M$ like nature. I congratulate AMD for starting out as having really crappy inferior processors, but making honest and huge leaps with almost every generation, almost every year, while Intel sat on its hands with the P6 core *for 5+ years*. AMD processors are now at least equal to their Intel brethren, and most benchmarks put them at a slight edge now that cache is all on-die, and in price/performance they whomp Intel completely and mercilessly.
> Quality, high-performance workstations from Sun, SGI, and Decompaq can
> be had for less than USD 5000
Yes, I agree that the PC architecture is lacking woefully, but the oppenness of that platform is what allowed the Internet boom and Information Age to happen. Cheap commodity hardware that even people who live in trailer parks can afford, but which scales up to performance powerhouses which equal the horsepower (for most applications, but obviously not all) of a RISC unix workstation for a fraction of the price. The sheer brute force and clockspeed of a commodity x86 processor, even on the hobbled buses of the PC platform, make Alphas and Ultrasparcs unnecessory for all but the highest-ed uses. It may take an 800MHz Athlon to get the FP performance of a 400MHz Alpha, but when the Athlon and its mobo are so inexpensive, there's no contest as to which is most useful. Why in God's name would I pay $5000 for a DEC or Sun box which won't run most things any faster than a $2500 x86 box I could build myself? For the elegance? Fuck elegance, give me just as fast for half the price and I'll take x86 ugliness any day. Depending on which processor the DEC or Sparc has, either an Athlon Tbird or SMP P!!!s could get equal performance for between $1600 and $2500 total, not near the $5000 for a non-x86 workstation or server. If you need those big caches, the 500MHz Xeon with 2MB cache goes for between $700 and $900, though for most applications regular P!!!s at higher clockspeed/smaller cache would be better, or a regular 1 GHz Athlon Tbird. Jeezus, one could build a Quad Xeon for less than the price of a typical DEC workstation: mobo $2500, processors P!!! Xeon 733MHz $500 each, add a hard disk and video card to taste. Unfortunately, AMD is still behind with its multiprocessor solutions...
Most PC platform problems could be cured by moving to faster and wider buses, and a Unified Memory Architecture like SGI used on its short-lived line of Wintel workstaions. And, most existing operating systems and the software which run on them would work fine with just a minor OS patch, like the one SGI used to get NT 4.0 to run on its UMA Visual Workstations.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
There are plenty of options out there; many are surprisingly inexpensive. Quality, high-performance workstations from Sun, SGI, and Decompaq can be had for less than USD 5000, often less than half of that, which do not use x86 nor the peecee architecture. You'd better hurry, though, before everyone drops their quality architectures for IA64 and gives Intel the market chokehold it has been lusting after for years.
Fight the power; insist on quality; boycott the peecee!
Intel's philosophy is no different from Microsoft's: Embrace, extend, extinguish. I'm just amazed that your typical Microsoft-bashing /.ers aren't Intel bashers, too, because Intel deserves a big ol' can of whoopass opened right by their corporate asses. Let's examine a little...
/.ers such big Intel fans? They're the companywhich kept pushing x86 for decades instead of developing something new and improved and more RISCy, so why so many Intel apologists and AMD naysayers? After all, as good and serviceable as the P6 core was, it didn't deserve to stay in service for 5+ years. AMD may have been a dog back then, but at least it made radical improvements with almost every product cycle; Intel just wasn't trying at all. And look at the disaster which is the new Celeron/Culeron: it may be overclockable to 900MHz easily, but because of the set associativity lost by savagely destroying half the cache like Huns sacking Rome, it barely rivals a P!!! 700MHz and gets blown away by a lower-clocked Duron too--and the Duron is also very OCable. Intel is being just as evil as M4.
First off, Intel has been in the process of developing standards for the PC architecture for some time, as well it should. However, they've doing it the same way Microsoft has been "contributing" to Internet standards. For example, they developed AGP up to 4x, which has proven to be very useful; however, rumours are churning out from reputable sources discussing an Intel project to create a successor to AGP 4x, and this successor is to be limited to Intel chipsets and chipsets made by select Intel partners--i.e., anyone who annoys Intel will get left behind. Intel developed PC-100 memory standards--a great service, but...then it refused to develop PC-133 standard or DDR-SDRAM specifications, because of its own interest in RDRAM as a wholesale replacement for all SDRAM.
Many have questioned that Intel has much to gain from Rambus becoming the new standard instead of DDR-SDRAM; after all, contrary to popular belief Intel doesn't completely own Rambus, and their deal with Rambus would only give them compensation in the tens of millions, which isn't much for a company whose revenues are in the billions each year. But what Intel has to gain isn't direct monetary compensation by Rambus, it's *control* over the standards for memory and memory controllers--and the rights to manufacture and license those memory controller technologies. This is exactly what MS did with IE--it didn't directly make a profit by developing a new web browser and bundling it with Windows; it gained market control and the ability to manipulate the Internet protocols so that all its products, from IIS to Frontpage to NT Server and the rest, had an advantage of guaranteed interoperability and increased functionality over competing products.
Intel wants to do the same with RDRAM and its new IA64 architecture, and its new forays into the emerging appliance market. Intel will make royalties on all chipsets which support RDRAM. Intel will make direct profits on its IA64 processors and has probably been hoping to licence the ISA to competitors once x86 plateaus. Intel has purchased the StronARM and other embedded/appliance hardware companies, hoping to leverage its market dominance to push it into every area. And, let's not forget that they tried and tried and tried to force their way into the graphics market, but failed there due to too-short product cycles and competitors with much more graphics experience.
It's clear that Intel wants to be the Microsoft of the hardware world. If they leverage enough tech patents on all fronts, they can force use of their products in the same unfair ways Microsoft leveraged itself into every crevice: big OEMs unable to get the best prices on Intel desktop processors unless they agree to use StrongARM in their embedded/appliance products instead of Transmeta or MIPS, or unable to get hold of ahort-supplied IA64 for workstations/servers unless they use P4 in their desktops, VIA unable to make the most advanced RDRAM chipsets unless they cut back on DDR or agree not to pursue QDR, etc. Don't think it won't happen, even with M$ as an example: there are many sneaky, below-the-board ways to hint at such matters without bluntly making demands.
And, since everyone here hates the x86 architecture so much, why the Hell are so many
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Intel's high-end RDRAM motherboard beat the hell out of SDRAM systems. It had two interleaved RIMM slots, doubling effective bandwidth.
Wrong.
The PIII has a 64 bit memory bus operating at 133Mhz. That's 1.06GB/s. Adding a second channel of PC-800 RDRAM -- theoretical max bandwith of 1.6GB/s -- does not give you 3.2GB/s of effective bandwith, you're still limited by the CPU. A PIII can't handle any more bandwith than PC-133 delivers. The reason the i840 outpowers the i820 is that it reduces latency. RDRAM latency gets worse the more sticks you add. So a system with 2 Rimms on two channels will have lower latency than a system with 2 Rimms on 1 channel.
--Shoeboy