Slashdot Mirror
Intel to Release Pentium 1.13Ghz
NoWhere Man writes "According to TechWeb, Intel officials have said that they plan to ship a 1.13-GHz Pentium III in limited production quantities on July 31 >(which also happens to be the anniversary of AMDZone). Interestingly enough, at the same time, the schedule for the Itanium, the companys first 64bit processor, seems to have slipped from the 3rd quarter of next year to the 4th quarter."
It seems clear that Intel is adopting the 'limited quantity' strategy as a tactic of exerting influence over the OEMs that recently complained about the Xeon incremental releases.
Created a limited supply is a good way to create artificial demand and a means of initiating punitive action against the companies that were 'uppity' so recently.
I suspect that if the whole Xeon controversy hadn't happened, this would just be another quiet incremental upgrade like before, but now.... it's an opportunity to put the OEMs in their place.
Is this going to be the same quantity as the P3 1 GHz. So far, it still isn't possible to get those. This seems more like "marketware" than anything useful.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
One point twenty one gigawatts! er, hertz!
I guess you'll be able to toast bread on that wafer. Can't wait to get my hands on one...
-- Estoy feliz, feliz de que no sea cierto.
I don't believe that I could get my hands on a 1.0Ghz PIII, even if I wanted to.
so, Intel is doing yet another paper launch.
I guess that it is all about marketing, not about availability.
Wouldn't it be cool if AMD beats them to the punch by a week, just like last time?
---
Interested in the Colorado Lottery?
Interested in the Colorado Lottery or Powerball games?
check out http://colotto.com
Frankly I'm not suprised Intel is doing this. After all, what sense would it make for them actually use any manufacturing capabilities that they might have to make the 1GHz CPU's available in some respectable quantities. I believe that Intel is running scared. AMD has them shaking, because the Athlon outperforms the PIII hands down. Intel continues to promise new technology, but when they actually produce something tangable (RAMBUS) it falls flat on its face. They are scrambling to introduce technology they don't have the bugs worked out of yet. And all because of the little company they've tried to bury under all the mud, FUD, and rigged benchmarks for all these years, AMD. Granted this is the first time AMD has out performed Intel, but it has made the giant nervous. And nervous giants tend to be clumsy. See any resemblence there?
NEWS FLASH! CPU Maker Announces Incremental Speed Increase; Chip Expected To Be Slightly Faster Than Previous Model
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I hope they actually sell both of the chips they manage to fab, and not keep one in house for testing.
When is the computer industry going to abandon this idea of a faster and faster single CPU in favor of slower but massively parallel CPUs. IMO, the latter would be able to accomplish far more. Yes, they're expensive, but that's only because there's little focus on them. Of course, programmers will have to get used to thinking differently for parallel programming. As it is, the few 2/4/8 way systems seemed to be being deliberatly kept expensive and off of the desks of us mere non-corporate peons. Linux already has SMP support, yes? Or are we all waiting for MS to "invent" SMP for (user grade) windows before we see the HW to support SMP get cheep?
This is just marketing hype from Intel. Their 1GHz Pentium III is being outshipped by the 1GHz Athlon by a factor of 12 to 1. You can't even find a 1GHz Pentium listing on the Pricewatch CPU page, let alone compare prices.
Given how much Intel has been suffering from their decision to go with Rambus (see this article from Tom's Hardware), you can see why they feel the need to brag about something.
Are they going to be collectables?
At least there are ways to obtain those things when they are announced...unlike Apple's 500 Mhz G4 announcement a year ago which took almost 6 months to fulfill...
It would be fairer to scold Motorola for this - they botched the PowerPC production runs. Apple should have been more careful in not announcing systems until they were receiving a good supply from Mot, but at the end of the day Apple don't fab. PowerPC's themselves, Motorola and IBM do.
Sailing over the event horizon
Actually the article says that Intel won't start selling the chip until the fourth quarter of *this* year, with general availability for consumers coming sometime in 2001.
As mentioned in another reply, most recent intel CPU's are at least multiplier locked. You can usually still overclock by adjusting the FSB, but at 8.5x this gets very dangerous quickly.
Example: for a 1.13 Ghz (133x8.5) processor, if you overclocked the bus up from 133 to 140 (a modest 5% move), the processor steps up to 1.19 Ghz. Since these cores are in limited quantity and nothing faster is made, it is probably a decent bet that either the processor or the integrated L2 would fail before you got to 1.2 Ghz.
11*43+456^2
Intel's moving back of the projected in-volume ship dates for the Itanium is far more important than the release, in limited OEM quantities no less, of an incremental increase in speed grade for the current generation x86 chips. Itanium, as the first line of IA-64 systems, represents the unveiling of a multi-billion dollar gamble by Intel (and its strategic, quasi-partner HP) in making inroads into the high end, 64-bit processor market. IA-64 is an elephantine archetecture; it includes everything including the kitchen sink, the waste disposal, the plumbing, and the hot water heater. It's such an unwieldy ISA for an idea that was supposed to simplify the processor by effectively exposing processor functional units to programmer visible namespace. And yet, Itanium has 10 pipeline stages (3 more than the Alpha 21264, I must add), is barely pushing 500 Mhz, and will probably be slower on a clock for clock basis than the current Alphas and PA-RISCs. I don't buy the ISA, the implementation of the ISA embodied in the Itanium, the projected performance of the Itanium (although I do have greater hopes for HP's Ft. Collins team in the McKinley...it would be hard to see how they could screw up as badly), and the market placement of the initial IA-64 processor line. All in all, I'm not exactly surprised at this delay.
Maybe this means that Intel will have some sense and wait for HP's processor team to finish design so that they can fab the McKinley and avoid embarassment.
Too many people forget that all CPUs wait at the same speed. A 1Ghz anything is a waste considering the state of I/O and memory technology.
This CPU is going to spend a lot of time waiting for memory, even with a generous cache. How many programmers design their data structures to be cache friendly?
With all of the processing of multi-media data types (music, video, and pictures), there isn't a cache big enough to contain the data. Also, the temporal and spatial locality of these data types stink - you process a few pixels, and move on. You don't get to revisit a certain pixel very often. Yet it is wasting space in the cache.
Intel and other manufactures would do much better to add some architectural improvements designed to help multi-media, which is much of what people do with these chips now. How about a section of "streaming cache" for data that will pass through, but only once? That way you don't have to fill the entire cache with useless bulk data.
Or how about I/O model improvements - split the bulk data from the signal and control data so that the bulk data doesn't have to go through the memory hierarchy and the processor at all? If I'm playing a video file, why should the cache and processor be deluged with data being routed to the sound card and the video card? Put the signal and control data out of band from the bulk data so that the processor doesn't have to sift through the bulk data.
Does absolutely everything have to do with Microsoft? Microsoft does not want to be solely dependent on Intel chips anymore than Intel wants to be tied to Microsoft operating systems.
There are *many* problems with the IA-64 ISA and the specific Itanium implementation of it. I know someone working for HP (the organization that I work for purchases high performance supercomputers on pretty much a regular basis), who reliably states that the SpecFP performance of the Itanium is will be not at all competitive even with today's high end chips *even if it were at the same clock speed*, which it will not. They're barely pushing 700 Mhz even on small scale lots with a hell of a lot more QC than on any production fab.
I was listening to most of the AMD conference call today, and they said that they would be releasing a 1.1 GHz chip this quarter (I'm guessing Tbird) with the Mustang (Server chip), Corvette, and Camaro (both notebook) coming in fourth quarter. Also, there will be faster speeds in the fourth quarter. I also think they mentioned something about the Sledgehammer (K8 - 64 bit) coming next year, but I'm not sure when. They also said that they will be moving toward DDR SDRAM, but that they had a Rambus license in case customers wanted a rambus support. There's probably some more things I missed (apart from all the financials).
... the REPENTium?
J
They are talking about putting a PLL (Phase Locked Loop) circuit in during marking, so the processor will only work at the proper FSB setting. Hasn't happened yet, but I expect it happen soon.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
Actually, Compaq has been in the Athlon camp for their 1 Ghz machines lately. Dell is strictly Intel (and probably always will be, because of Intel advertising co-ops). Compaq, Gateway, and IBM are primarily AMD.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
Can you imagine if Intel had continued with their scheme of releaseing procs with half a bin more speed? How funny would a Pentium 1.066 GHz be?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I've been thinking the same thing. There is supposed to be a big AMD price break on September 20th. The 1000 should drop below $500, possibly the low $400 range. I think by January it should be in the $200 range. That's what you call cheap power.
Don' cha love progress? (For pricing reasons at least.)
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
Can we stop the nimrod who say 1GHz is wasted because of limits in memory and I/O technology? The speed is only wasted IF you're doing certian types of tasks. In every other case, it is not.
Places where proc speed is wasted:
- Serving.
- Databases.
- Programming/Compiling.
Places where it definately is NOT wasted.
- Gaming.
- 3D rendering.
- Running high load apps like 3D Studio, Maya, and MS Outlook.
- Running Win2K.
- Scientific probs. where the data-sets are fairly small.
- Image processing.
In these types of tasks, I/O bandwidth is a non-issue, because if you're 3D renderer is swaping, you're wasted anyway. Machines for these tasks tend to have a load of RAM, thus disk I/O really isn't a factor. For stuff like games (and the little preview window in you're 3D app) the data sets are small, and the computations are large. Even a complex game like Quake3 rarely pushes over 200MB/sec of bandwidth to RAM. That's one reason why RDRAM is often useless, because apps rarely push even the 800MB/sec of SDRAM.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Great joke, except not. If I made the same comment of Netscape on Linux, I'm afraid I would have gotten quite a few remarks telling me where to put my CPU.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
If I'm playing a video file, why should the cache and processor be deluged with data being routed to the sound card and the video card?
Subject says it all. Sure most video cards will do MPEG-2 in hardware nowadays; maybe you'd save something by getting the CPU out of the way there (although it's not actually in the way very much when you're just doing a memcpy of compressed data). But then here comes MPEG-4, and suddenly you need to do all that decoding work in software again. Which sucks if you're concerned about your SETI@Home performance, but it sure beats buying a new video card.
Has a nice ring to it.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Just speculating...
Intel, being a big, mature company, probably operates under a five year business plan and a more detailed two year business plan. It is in their best interest (as is true for all CPU makers) to feed the market with upgrades slowly, both to exploit the incremental upgrade frenzy and to keep from topping out where they don't have something new within easy reach that they can announce for next month to maintain the interest of the media and investors. The posited business plans would have been based on such a slow ramping system.
Thus I speculate that their business plan called for shipping (say) 600 MHz last summer, 700 MHz over the fall/winter, 800 MHz in the late spring, etc., with 1G falling late this year or even early in '01.
If they had honestly expected to see a 1G Athlon in quantity and problem free this spring, I'm sure they would have been working under a more agressive plan; per my first paragraph, such a plan would almost certainly have been feasible if it had been desirable.
At any rate, they are now hustling to retool their plan (and factories) to an unwelcome reality.
Notice also that the 1G Gold Rush has pretty much queered Moore's Law over the short run - I think we doubled peak speed in approximately one year. (Anyone remember when 500M first came out?) OTOH, I suspect that both Intel and AMD have "sprinted" to reach 1G ahead of schedule, so we will probably see sub-Moore advances from them for the next year or so.
Presumably Intel's original business plan called for following the "every 18 months" variant of Moore's Law that has become familiar of late.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That is not true for all CPU makers. It is true for the speed and market leader. But if you are trailing the leader it is in your best intrest to skip ahead. If you are the speed leader it might make sense to move ahead faster if you are still not the market leader.
It is obviously not a good idea to slowly ramp up if you are slower then the other guy, and have less market share.
It also may not be true in a market with diffrent priorities. Would a 300Mhz StrongARM sell more units then a 200Mhz one? Probbably. But if they skip from 200Mhz to 600Mhz they might manage to make sales into markets that would have bought the TI integrated DSP and ARM7 (because the 600Mhz SA can jpeg compress as fast as the TI DSP and gobble digicam market share -- or at least that is my thery). Note for this example I'm assuming the faster SA doesn't suck much more power and lots of other stuff, but you get the point.
In the days that more and more are migrating to an OS that will run happily on a 486
that's right...all those happy new linux users running KDE, GNOME, Netscape, GIMP, XMMS, BladeEnc, StarOffice...all on a 486!!! and they say it beats a 1GHz Athlon running Win2000!!! wow...those Linux programmers are smart guys. either that, or most linux zealots are full of shit about this whole "linux runs great on a 486" lie.
Finally, Intel is breaking away from 33 mhz increments for its chips. It was ok when the 133 was followed by 166, with about a 20% mhz difference. But later we were seeing 833, 866, 900, etc., with differences of less than 4%. Factor in Amdahl's law, and that was a fairly useless distinction.
Still useless, unfortunately, like saying that a Corvette with 400 horsepower is a big improvement over 350. The extra 50 HP is for bragging rights and faster times on the test track, for the handful of people who really care.
Everyone is losing in these CPU speed pissing contests except Intel and AMD.
The reason why Quake doesn't look like Toy Story? You're CPU can't push nearly enough triangles. The GeForce can still razterize more triangles than you can throw at it. Resolution is a different issue entierly, since the load on the CPU doesn't change. The test you mention is invalid in this arguement because the fact that a GeForce isn't being maxed out at lower resolutions (ie. it gets faster from Celeron to PIII) means that the proc isn't giving the GeForce enough triangles to render. If you increased the proc speed to say 2 GHz, then the test would be faster still at lower resolutions. I know it's confusing. In the end, its a chain issue. The total speed is as weak as the weakest link. At 1024x768, above which the gains become smaller at this polygon size, the Geforce can still handle more polygons that the PIII 1GHz can feed it. Right now, the proc is the weakest link.) A more valid benchmark would be this. Use a high polycount scene and compare differnt procs. NVIDIA as already shown this. Scenes that bog down even on a 1GHz Pentium III, run fine on a GeForce2 because of the geometry acceleration. The key to making games look better is more triangles, and current CPUs can't nearly push the cards hard enough in that respect.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The 1GHz PIII was announced as a knee-jerk reaction to the Athlon announced only day(s?) before, and to no one's surpirse, there was a huge supply problem. To many people's surprise, AMD didn't have a huge problem with supply and has been the only contender in the x86 world selling actual GHz machines.
Will we ever see this new PIII? I don't know. Chances are, it was just a smoke screen to keep their market value up while whispering about the slipping release date of their next processor.
As we've seen from experience, Intel loves to throw out a few extra mHz (or a 100+ of them) and the market will buy them as they see their PC is now obsolete. Frankly? I have a 350 mHz K6/2 in my desktop and have no problem running most tasks.
--
Never trust anyone over 90000.