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."
One point twenty one gigawatts! er, hertz!
I hope they actually sell both of the chips they manage to fab, and not keep one in house for testing.
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.
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.
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.
Unlike other 'pretenders', this is the real thing, and to prove it, you can purchase other pieces of art in the Intel Art Range, including the wondrous 256Mb RIMM, and the beautiful Itanium - purchases guaranteed to make your new PentiumIII glow in a different, rosy glow!