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Pentium III 1.13Ghz: The Real Story
NoWhere Man writes: "Tom's Hardware has posted up their dealings with the new PIII 1.13GHz processor. Apparently without a special board with a new bios from Intel it will not even run correctly. Any motherboard that has not got the special micro code update for this very processor will ultimately fail. The review has some interesting facts about the processor as well."
maybe the bugs in the OS will be where the bugs in the processor are...and we might beable to have a version of windoze that doesn't crash when i have InterNut Exploder and Nutscrape open at the same time
JediLuke
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
>(10 RPM * 5-way radial symetry * 60 seconds per minute = 3000 FPS)
:)
you made a mistake there, you have to DIVIDE by 60.
10 * 5 / 60 = less than 1 FPS
I think the whole article is just a troll. It simply doesn't add up, from a technical standpoint or a business standpoint. Seems like WHBT, WHL, HAND.
Actually, sockets have a huge advantage in cooling over slots. It is mostly because of the direct connection of the pins to the board. The pins help dissipate heat, as well as the heat sink being directly seated to the top of the core.
As far as size, you can get a larger heat sink on a slot, but that still doesn't make up for the natural cooling properties of a socket, unless the difference in size is massive.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
As Ferdinand Porsche found out during the development of the original Beetle, it only requires 20 horsepower to get a car moving 60 mph (a car with the rolling resistance and aerodynamic profile of the Beetle, which originally shipped with a 36hp engine).
Why bother, when you can build an electric car that gets 4 miles per gallon?
Think about it. Then click the damned link.
<grin>
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Part of the reason the performance enhancement isn't there for small-time stuff is that progammers have had little motivation to add it; SMP workstations (as opposed to servers running server processes that either fork or work in conjuction with other, seperate processes and hence have 'native', systemic parallelism) have traditionally been really, really expensive and the parallelization work has only been done on applications that need as much speed improvement as possible and where people were willing to pay for it, like 3D visualization stuff. Everything else hasn't seen the work because the hardware has been too scarce or too expensive or some other cost/benefit analysis made paralellization unpopular.
What I'm saying is that if computer manufacturers would instead start coming out with dirt-cheap consumer-priced SMP systems this would have the added benefit of motivating programmers to consider parallelization in their applications more closesly, upping the benefit to SMP, enabling greater demand, etc. A classic feedback loop.
With the right thread support in the OS and the application, there's no reason a 4-way 300Mhz Celeron system couldn't clean the clock of 1Ghz CPUs at a fraction of the cost of the higher clock CPU. Imagine sitting down to your 8-way 300Mhz Celeron system.
It's also possible that the boffins at Intel might also get their heads on straight and start coming up with the goodies to give us segmentation. If they can't give us virtualization, segmentation+SMP might be even better.
(Before you get all wet and hard to light, yes, I *know* that there are no 4-way Celery boards and yes, I know that beyond 2-way SMP normally uses Xeon CPUs. But its not like Intel couldn't come out with a 128K on-die cache "xeon celeron" if they wanted to, and yes, I know that you don't just add SMP Mhz up like I did.)
The OS?
I think the reason they went with a slot one design is that you can but a larger heatsink on that cartridge. Simple as that.
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Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
at work i use P166 with 16 Mb of ram running MSOffice And guess what, ifs fine, and works great. At home I use Duel PII 466, and it's a little on the slow side (but the bottle necks in every day work is H/D & Mem, I need more than 128Mb) this hole I don't need it, but I do is utter bollocks. Some people will need it. Some peeople will need more than just a faster proc some people will WANT faster but some will not. I've worked inplaces using 386's, why the hell should they upgrade? mlk http://free.be.com
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
That's not the point. Instead of going for an unstable 1133-MHz processor just because of the clock speed, try perhaps an 800-850 MHz. Most applications you'd care to throw at the slower processor would probably gain *NO* benefit from the extra MHz. (See Tom's list of applications, which covers most computer users, I think, except maybe researchers or audio/video editors.)
Plus, as you decrease clock speed from the absolute high-end of CPUs, price/performance dramatically increases.
-$0.02 from Andy
Oh, please. Sure there are scientific and entertainment applications that still require more power. And servers, you can't put enough grunt into a shared server. But of 50-odd people that work where I work only 3 (including myself) would regularly max-out a PC regardless of its power, with maybe another 6 requiring PCs faster than the ones on their desk. We've probably got 20 people that could do everything they want on a 32MB 486, with the rest (50 -20 -6 -3 = 21) probably never needing anything more powerful than a Pentium II.
I'm not familiar with the applications you mentioned. These must involve doing the same thing over and over to a fairly small data set? Maybe a larger cache might be more to the point, if it would let you run code and data in the cache? I wonder if something like the Altivec unit in a G4 would adapt well to this sort of thing? I think that the Motorola CPU's come with larger caches than the Intel CPU's. And I know that the Sparcs do, but I think their cost-benefit ratio is worse than Apple's.
All my stuff is large data, with a reasonable number of operations on each element (linear regression, non-linear regression, etc.), so I've never really thought about this before. I seem to need a faster harddrive and faster RAM _way_ more than I need a faster CPU.
I wonder if you have considered SMP? Would this be more cost effective than a single, fast processor for your kind of use? I should think that running multiple cellular automata might parallelize well, at least.
Nels
See what I've been reading.
Why do I get the feeling that the market for this CPU is going to be largely based on buyers who will pay the $990 for the CPU and nosebleed prices for the RDRAM in the name of raw speed yet will never think about getting a U2W or Ultra160 setup because "it's expensive"?
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Microcode is a sub-Assembly language that's very dependent on the processor. It defines the processor's instruction set. The instructions are like ENABLE ALU A, SET ALU A INPUT TO DATA BUS, GATE ALU OUTPUT TO ADDRESS BUS, stuff like that. The instructions vary wildly from processor to processor and sometimes from processor model to processor model. But if you can manipulate tbe microcode you can completely refefine the instruction set. An example would be someone at MIT (I think it was MIT) hacked the DEC KL-10 Model B microcode to make the machine compatible with the IBM 370. Another example would be the ITS microcode for the DEC KS-10, which completely restructured the pager to make it use ITS style paging instead of the DECSYSTEM20 paging. They also added several new instructions via microcode update, and redefined the bus I/o instructions to make I/O work in a manner more compatible with their operating system (ITS). Certain models of the PDP-11 were microcoded, the LISPMs were microcoded, all of the large VAXen were microcoded, but I did not know PCs were microcoded. Or has Intel redefined microcode? Microcode defines the instruction set, it is not just a bunch of FEATURE X ON/OFF type stuff. It's much more important (and more a pain in the ass to debug!) than they make it sound.
Oh come on. The damned acid-trip paperclip in Office takes, like, 30% of your CPU cycles.
The bigger the CPU speed (and, more importantly, factor into that the number of CPU cycles it takes to execute the average instruction), the faster the parts of Office that you actually need will work.
Along the same lines, if I wanted to, I could take a 5 horsepower Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine and make it power my car. It would work just fine, but it would be about as useful as Windows 95 on a 386.
Even if M$ software were efficient, incremental upgrades in speed make it possible to do things that we couldn't do a few years ago. A few years ago, arguably, you didn't need anything more than a 486. 486 machines don't generally play MP3s very well.
More power means more new uses.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
youre right, hes on crack. the real thing thats going to hurt them is when superscalar fails and vliw wins out. as for rambus, technically it is slightly superior (according to toms hardware)
Tom Pabst. The Jon Katz of Hardware!
Remember the back cover of The Dilbert Principle: "Employees are the ninth most valuable asset of the company...carbon paper came in eighth."
I don't buy Intel now. My new box is powered by an AMD K6-2. And when I save up enough $$, I'll upgrade to an Athlon. But no P-III for me, thanks.
I will agree with the fact that more non-big-company consumers (namely Joe Schmo with his PC et al) are getting frustrated and shying away from Intel. However I do not agree that it will be enough to oust them and give AMD enough room to start sitting on their laurels just yet, simply because Intel will not not have to convince us to buy it, they do have companies willing to buy the 1.13 GHz along with the special board and the special drivers if needs be.
We have seen time and time again, and although we'd like to secretly deny it, that these products are not made for us (the trickle down consumer). So Intel will be able to afford their "paper realeases" for at least another three years. Yes, I know I sound like a pessimist but don't you think that if little "trickle down consumers" Mary Jane and Billy Bob could have companies that huge shifting gears because we were unsatisfied, that for instance Microsoft, Intel, Apple etc, would stop leading us around by our pockets and start giving us quality first instead of "hand me your wallet now and I'll patch it up later?"
Nuff Respec'
DeICQLady
7D3 CPE
Intel needs to catch up to Apple. Did you see how the dualie G4 smoked that 1GHz PIII?
I am currently spending serious amounts of cpu time running Frau. mp3 encoding. its very slow and to encode a whole album takes well over an hour (well over).
its mostly cpu-bound and when I moved from a lowly p2/450 to a k7-800 (an o/c 700 tbird), I shaved 10's of minutes off each song's encode time
so tell me again that pure compute power isn't needed by the masses?
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
With a well written suite of applications over half of the staff where I work could probably get by on an XT. Certainly a 68000-based system like the Amiga 500 would be able to cope. It's only the bloated apps with the cute crap that means people would consider anything less than a Pentium "slow". No-one should ever need more than 640k...
"Let's face it all they have been doing any more is shrinking die sizes by going to smaller processes and adding instructions"
Strange, that sounds like exactly what they've always been doing - in fact, that is what they've always been doing, since the 8086 - adding instructions, shrinking die sizes, and optimizing CPU speed internally (they haven't stopped doing that either, considering Williamette's (sp?) internal risc-like architecture).
Perhaps I've missed something basic, but you seem to imply that there was a time when Intel was somehow doing more than just shrinking die and adding instructions .. if so, what was it? 286/386 protected mode was probably the only major addition ever in the entire line.
Tommy claims that the Pentium-3 1.13GHz is unstable, and he can't get benchmarks to run. Why?
Because the Pentium-3 demolishes Athlon, and costs less. So he made up this little story. Ach!
As you can see, some other Hardware sites had NO problem running the 1.13GHz Pentium-3.
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html? i=1290
http://www.shar kyextreme.com/hardware/reviews/cpu/pentium3_1x13gh z/
http://firingsquad.gamer s.com/hardware/p3-1133/default.asp
They even ran it on 440BX and VIA boards! Firing Squad OVERCLOCKED it. But Tommy's was broken, really, and it must be a SCANDAL for Intel.
Here's a scandal for you--AMD's stock price is going to cross Intel's this week, heading the wrong direction! No wonder Dr. Tommy is having problems!
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This chip is more or less an overclocked P III 800 or 900. I have a 700E running at 1085 @ 1.7 volts...
This Fall Intel puts out a cC0 stepping which should allow CuMines to clear into the 1.2-1.3 GHz range.
<o)
(\
X
8====D
It is also a misconception that motion blur is an ideal solution for smooth displays.
;)
In real life if you see a fast moving object then your eyes can track it, and the object does not ppear blurred at all. However if your eyes follow a fast moving object on a cinema display then it will appear blurred.
Thus, as the previous poster showed, if you want accurate representation of fast moving objects then high frame rates are a must. There are cinema systems around that use much higher frame rates than the usual 24FPS.
I'm just waiting for a video card and monitor that can do 1600*1200 at 150FPS.
But you must admit AMD is getting the best of intel simply because intel has streched itself too far and isn't innovating any more. Let's face it all they have been doing any more is shrinking die sizes by going to smaller processes and adding instructions. We need to simplify again and go back to a RISC processor and away from making the chip better by adding instructions to it. SSE is a crock, MMX was good, but mainly a marketing ploy. AMD's 3DNOW technology isn't much better, but at least they don't use that as the reason for raising the price of their CPU's
And how about naming a CPU "Coppermine" when it is still using Aluminum interconnects. The thunderbird and Duron are using copper. As it stands AMD has a greater potention in the future at the least cost. Their Dresden plant, .18 micron process, copper interconnects, and a much better yield on their chips than Intel could ever dream of. Oh yah and they don't have to deal with Rambus.
Yhcrana
The voices in my head don't like you
Well, consider this. What about stuff like voice recognition? Given the correct software, people could be immensly more productive if they could have a computerized assistant to do stuff for them. If there was software that would provide the equivilant of an assistant (archive this file, send this document to this person, take these notes, get info about this topic, etc) then businesses would immediatly buy the fastest computers availabe if that was what was needed to run this software (because speech recognition and AI are pretty big CPU hogs.) That's what this increase in power amounts to. As for the "cute crap," that offends me. Sure you can buy a perfectly functional Toyota, but given the option any sane man would buy a Boxter with tons of chrome trim, no? Asthetics counts for a lot to most people. Some people manage without them (anyone who still uses TWM for example) but to most people working in a nice computing GUI is just like having nice office furniture. Sure you can do without it, but its so much nicer on the eyes.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You bring up an interesting point, one that is very important for SMP computers and OSs. You see, there is only a few reasons why BeOS is better than Linux at SMP. One is that it was designed for it, but in the end, that isn't the biggest reason. The major reason is because of the way the BeOS API is designed. It is designed in such a way that it is not only easy for an application designer to use multiple threads, but is often EASIER. For example, the protocol used to allow direct access to the screen. Conventional wisdom dictates that an application locks the buffer, draws to it, and then unlocks it. However, in BeOS, the system sends messages whenever the state of a buffer changes. The application must respond to this change inside a function that may not run for more than 3 seconds. Thus, the application designer is forced to use a seperate rendering thread to update the window. Not only does this improve performance (since the surface isn't being constantly locked and unlocked) but it allows the load of the application to be distributed between multiple processors. Of course, this API dictates a lot of policy, which is quite unUNIXish. However, it really is the most effective way to end up with a good SMP system. I see the GTK and Qt people missing a tremendous opportunity in what they are doing. GTK and Qt are entire OS-level APIs in their own right, and thus they have the opportinity to force developers to use threads (and do other desirable things like support application scripting.) However, not only do GTK and Qt NOT force developers to use threads, in general they are (especially GTK) pretty thread unfriendly. Developers are almost by definition lazy. Even if SMP machines were very common, it still wouldn't be as much of an incentive as an API that made it easier for them to use threads than not.
(BTW> The Be API is not at all hard. It is just designed in a way to make threads a more desirable choice than no threads. Even with the extensive threading it is still easier to program for than most other APIs. I say this because there is no reason to scare any programmers away from the OS;)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Heh... I remember when I came to college with a 3 year old 486, even when I bought it, it was obsolete. I had been running DOS on it (didn't really know about linux then). I even managed to get the internet working with it. It tooks a few tricks, but it worked... slowly... so grudgingly, installed Windows95 on it. The internet was faster, but ofcourse, the rest of my computer wasn't... so it averaged out... and eventually I got a faster CPU, a PII266. I dunno, I always just use what I need. Right now, I have a PIII 500 Mhz, and I really don't forsee a time when I'll need much faster unless I start doing some serious number crunching on this baby. I guess some people just got to have the latest and greatest. =)
Humorless sig goes here.
I'm not really complaining all that much. I'm actually an AMD fan anyway. There is a performance boost when you go from one processor to the next (obviously) but I think we could benefit just as much (if not more) if we worked on the less "sexy" technologies such as bus speed. Start improving some of the backend stuff that is important to the speed of every component in the computer instead of just one component. And I never said that I'm not the one freak that has a 950 in his machine right now - I happen to enjoy collecting processors and having the latest greatest. I'm kinda sado-masochistic like that :P.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Cites, please? Do you have anything to back up this claim?
If you are having stability problems with an Athalon system, it's probably because you failed to follow AMD's guidelines. The Athalon, particuarly early ones (like mine), are finicky about the hardware they work with. They are particuarly sensitive to the power supply, which is why AMD has a list of recommended power supplies on their web site. A UPS with a power conditioner is a smart investment for any high-end system. (I use an APC Smart-UPS 650)According to the guys I buy my hardware from, somthing like 90% of the stability problems with Athalon systems that they see come from people using an out-of-spec power supply. Most of the rest of the problems come from using marginal memory.
My primary system is a FIC SD11 with an Athalon 550. I got it within the first two weeks of it hitting the market. It's almost a year old now, and I have had ZERO stability problems with it. It runs 24x7; the only time I ever have to reboot it is when I switch into 95 to do some gaming. This box primarily ran NT4 Workstation up until May, when I switched it over to RedHat 6.1 It was rock-solid even under NT, and has been just as stable under Linux.
It makes NO sense whatsoever to buy a top-of-the-line CPU and MoBo and stick it in a bargain-basement case with a cheesy power supply and no-name RAM. Spend the extra money and get server-grade memory and power. Likewise, if you ignore the manufacturer's guidelines and use out-of-spec parts, you have no right to be pissed at them when your substandard components crash the system.
Before you build an Athalon system, do yourself a favor and RTFM first. You'll save yourself a lot of aggrivation.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
And a 600 MHz G4 still works better...
Dog is my co-pilot.
Two words: voice recognition.
I have a blog.
I hate waiting 20 mins for the latest build to compile.
Well maybe you could give your wrist a little rest. While waiting may be annoying, there is definitly an upside to it. Slow computers and computer crashes allow us to break free from our screens every now and then. Having to wait 10 minutes to boot Win95, 30 minutes to render 1 image allows me to socialise with my collegues (and at home with my wife). I still suspect Micro Soft to give us the BSOD every now and then on purpose, just based on our activities with the machine. Hey! That's where the CPU-cycles go!
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"Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a sick mind." (Terry Pratchett)
DOJ sued Intel in 1999 and Intel settled. Had to do with anti-chip actions against DEC (R.I.P.) and Intergraph, among other things. Not all companies are obstinate like MicroSoft and fight the government forever.
my point is more that intel says they have something..which means they are ready to begin fullon production...however amd says they have it and you see it avail almost immediately by comparison.
JediLuke
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
The processors used at my school (staff/faculty work machines) are roughly: 50% P133-166, 25% PII 300, 15% PPC 601/603/G3 66-266, 5% PIII 400, 5% G4 400-500. The majority of staff use the P133-166 machines, as well as most of the PC labs. The Mac labs have been upgraded to G3 but faculty still have slower Macs and PCs on their desks. A few professors in natural sciences (geologists, mathematicians, physicists) are using high end machines and that's about it. Students in the dorms have the fastest machines on campus. The staff and faculty mostly use their machines for word processing, email and the web. These machines (P133-166) just seem to keep chugging along. The majority of these people, who do have a lot of computers at home as well, are not into ripping mp3's, gaming, or cellular recombination. They just do the big three-word processing, surf the web, and email. How much power does one need for these tasks?
I drank what? -- Socrates
You are right, there will always be a need for more CPU power.
There is a temporary reprieve from that law, however, since your computer is no longer the bottleneck to performance. The internet is.
If there is some breakthrough that actually brings gigabit-all-the-way connections into the mass market like 56K modems are today, then we'll see CPUs becoming important again.
Given enough bandwidth, we could see lots of uses for more CPU power. Virtual Reality, AI, Super-Duper-Uber-Hi-Res-Hi-Fi-256-bit-audio movies over the internet, etc. will all need lots of CPU.
P.S. Switch to "Plain Old Text" when posting or remember to use BRs or Ps.
(I'm using Win98 first edition)
Try opening slashdot and anandtech in both IE 5.0x and Netscape 4.73, both with JavaConscript enabled.
In IE, scroll up and down vigorously.
This always crashes it for me. The strange thing is, once IE crashes, Netscape can no longer finish loading a page.
How about the fact that our eyes cannot do more than 30 fps? If you're game constantly stays about 40 fps, isn't that as smooth as we can discern?
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
Saying intel isn't innovating anymore is more of a bad choice of words than it is incorrect. Obviously you've seen intel is working on some intersting things, however, the original poster is referring to what they actually bring to market. In the end, thats all that matters.
It's easy to say this now, but you could see intel starting to falter a few years ago. What wasn't so easy to see was the emergance of AMD.
Intel has been around a long time. They made good stuff for a long time. They made huge dough. The shareholders were happy. But shareholders always want more. Profit margins have to keep increasing. They can only increase to a point until the rubber band snaps. Their high prices, the RAMBUS fiasco, and others point to this. Eventually you really piss off the customer.
There are other reasons too. The older a company gets, the more bureaucratic it becomes. A Very Bad Thing in this industry. Intel is also very engineering "top heavy". Too many engineers who have been around for too long, all thinking they know exactly how it should be done. This can stifle innovation very badly.
Intel will have to go through some sort of rebirth eventually, something like what IBM went through. They haven't hit bottom yet, though. I love to see intel suffer, but I don't ant them to go away: AMD needs competition. There is no reason AMD can't turn into intel in a few short years. They're just another corporation, who have to answer to a group of shareholders who are no different than any other.
Actually, the GeForce problem wasn't a driver issue at all, it was a power issue - the board eats power like no tomorrow. I suppose if you really wanted to blame someone you could blame AMD because their processor consumed more power, leaving less for peripherals like the vid card - but it was really a problem with the board and power supply.
All new drivers did is lower the bus speed the card operated at, so that it required less power.
Read the Sharky's article. Skip the garbage and go straight to the hardware specs. Sharky got Intel's VC820 board -- which Tom didn't get. He tested (or tried to test) the 1133MHz chip with other boards (BX, i820, i840, Apollo133) and it didn't work. *That* is what Tom is saying. The mysterious 1133MHz CPU requires a brand new board to work properly. Also note that Sharky didn't test any game in 32 bit color. Oh I can play Quake 3 at 640x480 at 150 FPS. Great! But useless. I want to play Quake 3 at 1024x768 (or above!) and 32 bit color. The 1GHz+ CPU doesn't help here. At this resolution even 800MHz is enough to max out GeForce 2. And in general, at high resolutions the performance is limited by the video card.
> ... silicon > 2.1GHz == bad ...
gasfet should go to 50 GHz. Not easy, but possible (I think).
Ryan
Looks like we'll be seeing another anti-trust case in the near future. Intel is almost as bad as Microsoft. I wonder when they'll catch on to Cisco's monopoly...
Remember he was the first one to point out that Rambus performed worse than SDRAM, when everyone else was claiming it was great but just too expensive.
Intel are now part of an industry law cuit fighting Rambus patents, and have announced a complete U turn and will support SDRAM and DDR for P4.
I'll give Tom the benefit of the doubt on this one - lets wait a while, and I'm sure the truth will come out about the microcode update.
Right.....which is why the original poster criticized Intel for releasing this new 1.13 GHz chip in -Slot 1- only. There's no technical reasone why this couldn't have been FC-PGA, except for the fact that Intel wants you to rush out and by this new super duper fast Slot 1 processer that you can't upgrade later, as everything else has moved back to sockets
I know over the past long while I have been using my little P2-233, back when 300 was the upper end, and I have yet to have any problems with it. Everyone is saying that it will run apps slower then the new 1gig processors but I really don't care about a couple tenths of a second here or there. Besides my average usage is only about 40%.
I have recently installed a SCSI Barracuda drive from Seagate and I have noticed a definite improvement in system performance. Given that the big bottle necks in my system right now are my hard drives and lack of memory, 160meg SDRAM, I figure it I improve those first then maybe I won't need to get a new processor.
Can anyone else see the logic in all of this?
while I tend to agree, sure, Quake doesn't look much better if you run it at 100 fps on a 600 MHz chip or at 150 fps on a GHz chip, but start throwing in the FSAA and other shiney new effects, and watch those framerates go to hell on the slower processer. Game developerss are always going to find new ways to push processor limits in an effort towards "cinematic" looking 3D graphics
Does anyone have the feeling that another fiasco is abound?
Really, I think they got away with that slogan because some programs were enhanced to run faster on a PIII, and these programs supposedly would work faster with a PIII, thus your internet would be faster.. It was paper-thin at that. Hehe, I realize all that AMD does is not gold either, I am impartial, its just I think Intel has had their chance and would liek to see AMD have their chance as well.
If you think education is expensive, try ignornace
Actually, I'm not sure about this. I think Intel's biggest problem with these high-speed PIII's has been getting decent cache-memory yields. I could be wrong, but I think with the PIII design they can make the cache seperate from the CPU. Net result: higher yields (which Intel needs desperately).
sigs are a waste of space
Intel could release the "Jesus Processor" that would save our souls and send us to heaven eternally if we just asked. Tom would say it was a cult so they could get our money, and would lead to mass suicide.
Intel could release the "Olympic Processor" that ran faster, harder, higher and broke every single record. Tom would say it was just the doping.
Intel could release the "World Peace Processor" that automatically altered documents from world leaders, causing world peace. Tom would say Intel was spying on everyone and abusing the information to generate massive profits.
Intel could release the "3rd World Processor" that cost five cents, ran off sand, had built in voice input in every spoken language and had a holographic display built in so you wouldn't have to buy expensive peripherals. Tom would say they were trying to create a monopoly for their lousy video cards in the lucrative market of people who can't afford monitors.
I'm not saying Intel has any of this stuff; obviously they don't, but Tom's comments about Intel are neither surprising nor credible.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
Thomas Pabst wrote:
It requires the whooping core voltage of 1.75 V by default. Normal Coppermines' only require 1.65 V. This increases the power hunger of that CPU over the Giga-Pentium III (1.7 V) significantly by already at least 3%, plus the 13% required by the higher clock speed, summing up to over 16 % more power hunger.
He added voltage and current together to get power?
> Is there even a market for 1GHz+ right now?
Yes, but it may not be the mass market.
I, for example, need all the Hz I can get because I play around with CPU-intensive tasks like running genetic algorithms, training simulated neural networks, and running cellular automata on game-sized maps.
For a slightly broader market, analysts were saying a few months back that NT users upgrading to W2K should upgrade by 300 MHz at the same time if they want to keep their current performance level, so that will put a number of people up in the ballpark of 1GHz.
But for most people, I share your doubts about the need, at least until the next generation of bloatware makes 1GHz absolutely essential.
For now, even kooks like me sometimes buy less than the top of the line, since the performance/price ratio improves so much. If I bought today I would probably only buy 800 MHz, CPU hog though I be.
I'm certainly not going to buy extra gidgets to stick on my computer so I can run 1.13 GHz instead of 1 GHz.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's all about marketing.
- A.P.
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"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?"
Sharky Extreme chose to use the VC820 board, however they mentioned nothing about these "problems" that so far only Tom has found.
The NDA was just lifted today, folks. Don't think Tom is the first and last word, and don't think he has an exclusive here.
I don't trust him. Cough, cough, GeForce benchmarking...
I heard Tom is a bad doctor.
<o)
(\
X
8====D
How about this, Intel limiting their celery chips to the 66 mHz bus. I can't believe that, what a crock. I'm sorry, but I get kinda tired of being told how I should run my CPU by the company I buy it from.
Yes if I remember right the AMD CPU's do have a smaller cache and a lower multiplier, but look at it like this. AMD also has a faster bus speed (admittedly it is DDR based if I remember right), more L1 cache and the L2 cache doesn't mirror the L1 cache like Intel chips do, higher yields on their CPU's, and can actually make market...
Yhcrana
The voices in my head don't like you
> Paper releases seem to be all that Intel can do anymore.
Yeah, it's starting to look like AMD has such little competition on the high end that I'm afraid they might start resting on their laurels.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Stay Away From:
Debian - the distro for the sensible Linux user. Now available in 3 delicious varieties!
I was wondering what was up with Tom and his hardware. Both PlanetHardware and SharkyExtreme (who was subtly dissed by Tom) got it running and put up bunches of benchmarks. Neither one reported problems, special motherboards, or other such things. I see now that AnandTech has a review as well.
As another poster suggested, did Tom get a bum chip, or did all the other sites gloss over very real limitations?
ShoutingMan.com
And by "cute crap" I meant the 10,000 Word and Excel "features" that the average office worker never uses. I didn't mean eye candy - I run the Litestep shell on my Win9x box with associated visual effects and other cool stuff I enjoy. (lighter, faster and better looking than the Explorer shell...)
You are very much distorting the issue...the debate of RISC v. CISC is almost irrelevant as of today, as RISC technology has become more CISC-like, and CISC technology more CISC-like. Even what you consider "RISC" technology such as MIPS is MUCH more complicated than the traditional RISC technology of the past, when the term RISC was first invented. As for Intel's and AMD's, they are both converging towards RISCness, reducing the number of pre-built in instructions.
To put it another way: "RISC" technology is now 40% CISC, and "CISC" technology 40% RISC. And as for RISC being the future, if so, they need to get their act together, as a whole...I consider SGI to be the representative of RISC, as they sell some of the best systems, MIPS based, with IRIX. However, on their web-site is full of annoying PDF files, which necessarily make finding out information about platforms difficult...not to mention that fact that the damn site doesn't have *any* information on the pricing of various systems, nor is there any way in which the site allows for their MIPS platforms for to be compared to Intel/AMD based systems. Then again, IBM and Compaq don't offer any way for their systems to be comapred to MIPS based systems.
Anyways, this bullshit with different processors 'speed' being affected by both the number of Mhz value and the number of instructiosn per cycle. There should be a STANDARD way to compare processors, in an ABSOLUTE sense...i.e., the equation for time/application is this: time/application = (lines/application) * (cycles/line) * (time/cycles). Note that time/cycle is the inverse of Mhz value, or 1/Mhz's. What should happen, is that the CPU speed-representing value shoudl be represented by the inverse of the multiple of 1/[(cycles/line) * (time/cycles)], or lines/time.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
It's just not economical to purchase more power than you need at the current prices, because by the time you get around to needing that extra power, you could've bought it at a lower price-per-unit rate.
Do you understand that there are people out there that don't want to upgrade every 6 months, and that these people outnumber those of us that do?
-thomas
"And like that
Sharky Extreme seems to like the new chip. Check it out here. I'm all for more than one opinion. I think Tom bashed it hard and it probablly deserved the bashing, however now I've got to decide whom to believe.
Thats what I was getting at - they'd historically get access to a beast.
But, what would happenif they had the ability to easily cluster lots of el-cheapo, low priced, consumer chips?
It would yank the carpet out from beneath the workstation market. I'd rather have a rack of PIII systems, then a monolithic station sitting in the corner.
50 GHz ? Check this out:
http://pbunyk.physics.sunysb.edu/~paul/uprocess
They also made a 770GHz flip flop.
Oh well - maybe the liquid helium cooling might prevent this from entering the mainstream market.
Nope, that's a common misconseption though. Here's the logic behind it:
Given: (#1) TVs display at 30 frames per second.
Given: (#2) Motion on TVs look perfectly smooth.
Conclusion: Therefore, the human eye can only distinguish up to 30 frames per second.
Both of the givens are true, but the conclusion drawn is false. Here's why:
Given: (#1) TV displays images captured by a camera.
Given: (#2) Cameras use a shutter to allow light to reach the film/light sensor.
Given: (#3) The shutter takes a period of time to open and close.
Conclusion: Each frame displayed on a TV consists of an image taken over a short period of time, inducing an effect known as 'motion blur', which helps trick the human eye into seeing the intended motion.
Without motion blur, it takes a higher frame rate to convince the average human eye that the motion on screen is smooth. (It may not take 150 FPS, but it generally takes about 60 or so to seem smooth.)
The only way to determine what the actual frame rate of the human eye is, would be to put an image on a wheel & slowly increase the RPMs of the wheel until the observer couldn't tell the wheel was turning. At that point, you know that the observers visual frame rate tops out at about as many frames per second as the wheel was doing revolutions per second.
If the image on the wheel is symetrical in any orientation (say a wheel with 4 evenly spaced spokes), then the number of revs per second must be multiplied by that number.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about (using numbers pulled out of my ass):
We use a car's hubcap (5 spoke design). The hubcap seems to stay facing the same way once it is spinning at 25 RPM. That means a single spoke design would seem stationary at 125 RPM (7500 RPS), for a visual rate of 7500 frames per second for that observer. If the wheel had seemed stationary at 10 RPM, that would translate to about 3000 FPS. (10 RPM * 5-way radial symetry * 60 seconds per minute = 3000 FPS)
Note #1: the image seeming stationary at 0 RPMs doesn't mean the observer has a 0 FPS visual rate, the image actually ISN'T moving then.
Note #2: If anybody has the equipment to run this experiment post the results, it should be interesting.
This has been said by many people, and I thought they needed to be corrected on that particular subject : multiprocessor boards from AMD. Even tough there are no multi-processor boards right now, the EV6 bus (which as been created by Sun I think) used by the Athlon can use up to 14 processors at a time! And how can Intel do so far? They have problems to have more than 4 processors right now, or at least, last time I read about it. AMD has shown 14 Athlons used together, but this would cost too much to produce. Why don't they release MP motherboards? Because AMD needs to have a good single processor user base before going to multi-processor systems.
Personnally, I think Tom is right. Intel has been struggling in the past few months to compete with AMD and the only thing that kept them going so strong is because they have very good marketting and because the Intel brand is what most poeple hear and talk about. Ever talked about AMD to a regular computer user? Ah, and the bullshit about the new AMD processors not working with every software. That used to be true, but let me tell you, my new Thunderbird 700 has no problem with any software, in fact, it outperforms the 733EB my friend has!
Beside, I don't think Tom wants to destroy Intel as someone posted earlier. Intel just deserve some good spaking because they're so arrogant (just like Microsoft are) and don't have the best processors anymore. If they weren't that arrogant, they wouldn't need a good spanking, but they are, so...
Which brings us to an interresting point : why is Intel bashing bad, but Microsoft bashing good. Ok, so Intel is not as bad and monopolistic an Microsoft, but still, Intel these days is a lot of hype and AMD is still the king of the x86 market when you look at the performance charts.
but start throwing in the FSAA and other shiney new effects
Umm.. Nope. The bottleneck is mainly memory bandwith and the processing speed of the 3D card.
Processor speed is increasing faster than mem speed, so relative latency is going up. The more work you can offload on other parts of your computer, the better.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
I agree with you completely. I would be much willing to pay for a new mobo that had a 300-400 mhz bus than a new 1 ghz chip.
You are either dealing with a buggy OS, some buggy apps, or some seriously stupid user behavior if you actually need 512 on a desktop pc. That is frankly obscene.
I read Tom Pabst's article and frankly, I have this feeling he may have gotten some bad parts.
The reason I say this is because Anandtech got the 1,130 MHz Pentium IIIEB working using a Slot 1 motherboard that uses the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset with good stability--and the performance was quite good, only limited by the somewhat slow memory management chipset.
It'll be interesting to see when will Intel ship the 1,130 MHz PIIIEB on FC-PGA format, though.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
The argument that "nobody needs a faster computer, anyway" was rubbish 20 years ago and it's rubbish now. As a programmer, every time I compile something I feel the need for more CPU speed, and if compilation starts to become I/O bound there's always more optimizations that can be done to soak up that time.
Want something considerably more mainstream? Digital video editing, which is going to take off like crazy over the next few years, as people realise that you can use it to produce watchable movies instead of the unbearable tripe that is an unedited amateur video. It's going to be a hardware manufacturer's dream, because it places huge loads on CPU (compression), memory, and I/O.
Of course, edit capabilities just bring us back to what you could do with Super 8 movies decades ago, but anyway . . .)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Just curious -- does your optimization include arranging the order of execution to maximize cache usage? Is your cpu usage maxed out? I've played w/ neural nets, but I'm not the best coder so I don't know how to do it. Also, I seem to recall that some Athlons had cache running at 1/3 or 1/2 cpu speed -- not good for heavy iterations.
Also, since you can run linux on ppcs now, has anyone done a home-built ppc system? I'd like something that doesn't require an asbestos case, but I can't find ppc cpu/motherboards that aren't mac-attached.
Kill, Tux, kill!
There are many CAD and IC design simulations/compilations that requires from 10 minuts to 24 hours to proceed. :-(
I had a class in University to design some simple logic cirquit and I was waiting 15 minuts each time I change 1 line in the Verilog code
Andrew
Cisco at least has a certification program that is worth a lot more than the paper it is printed on.
MCSE is sort of a joke compared to CCIE.
Their routers are very decent. Unfortunately, some of them are rather light on the CPU side, so performance suffers when you want to do compression and encryption. Their larger routers have add-on cards with ASICs for this, though.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
For a slightly broader market, analysts were saying a few months back that NT users upgrading to W2K should upgrade by 300 MHz at the same time if they want to keep their current performance level, so that will put a number of people up in the ballpark of 1GHz.
Luckily the analysts don't know shit. Using the same speed processor, my upgrade from NT to Win2K offered no noticeable speed differences. Of course, I turned off the stupid fading menus and shadow mouse cursor BS.
But for most people, I share your doubts about the need, at least until the next generation of bloatware makes 1GHz absolutely essential.
Huh? Let's see... the following people or groups of people need all the speed they can get:
- Programmers (compiling speed)
- Scientists
- Gamers
- Sysadmins running servers (web, file, email, etc)
Then there are the other obvious things that go into the "need" for speed. First of all, it drops the price of lower-clock hardware. Second of all, many people are buying a computer for the first time -- and will buy the fastest chip they can afford, so it lasts longer. Not everyone is upgrading!
-thomas
"And like that
> I'm curious: what can you do that would warrent a 1GHz processor? It must take _lots_ of operations on just a little data?
Yes, all involve many iterations. The data can be either small or large, depending on the problem you are running.
And you're right about cache. Right now I'm running with 1 Mb L3 cache (on the motherboard). I hope the next system I build will have a big cache plus PC 133 DDR to fill it up as fast as possible whenever I do have a miss.
> I wonder if you have considered SMP?
Yes SMP or even multiple machines is ideal for some of this work. Still, I'd rather have a twin 1 GHz system than twin 500 MHz system!
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
To quote amzone who put it bluntly, but accurately (of this tweaktown article):
~full tide~
"Linux is only free if your time has no value."
An hour?!? I assume that there's some reason that you continue using that encoder? There are faster ones with comparable compression quality. I'm using SoundJamMP (Mac) on a g4/500 that rips and encodes @ the same time, and handles most average length CD's in less than 10 minutes.
That's 10 minutes. Seti@home units complete in a bit under 5 hours.
I'm not trying to gloat, instead I think that the question is still a valid one. Do we really need 1GhZ+ processors? Shitty software is another story.
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
You're wrong.
The Thunderbirds have been out more than long enough to get them into stores and their L2 cache is at full clock
AMD I would hope will continue their stellar product line and I can't wait for the Sledgehammer to do as it's name implies to Intel
Yhcrana
The voices in my head don't like you
One of my favorites can be read here: /980725/
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/98q3
Summed up, it says:
That's about when I lost faith in Tom and stopped reading his drivel. Lets all stop playing the fool for Tom's "news" site.
I'm in the 300-450 bracket myself. My desktop is a 333 celery. My work laptop is a PIII-450, and I don't notice much meaningful distance for any of the work I do (development). Heck, even Win2K runs nicely under VMWare on the laptop.
My telehoused box is only a 486-100 and is just fine for everything I need to do except run Postgres - which runs on another P166.
Games might want more grunt than I have. Perhaps some really poorly written OS/App combos (but, like I say, big Java apps on W2K are OK for me). I suspect the speed market is currently sustained, on the desktop, by games and the "mine's bigger than yours" crowd.
(And SETI fans 8)
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
Tyranny =Gov. choosing how much power to give the People.
I have had much more luck pumping my machine full of fast RAM, rather than jumping up the CPU every 8 months. At 512MB, there is a VERY noticable increase (for me, YMMV of course) in stability with apps like Netscape, that are known to crash. I got better performance out of Quake, I think, but I haven't clocked it. Overall, my machine works better. I keep thinking if I had spent the money on a new CPU, and kept it at 128MB RAM, I would have seen Netscape just load faster between constant crashes.
Bottom line, which has been said here already, is that its all about marketing and "prick waving", look at us, we have the fastest CPU.
Everyone who asks me about what to upgrade, I tell them "Aim for 500Mhz, and spend the extra dough on RAM and a fast HD and good video card". I agree that I just don't see the need for that much speed when good RAM and good video makes all the difference, IMHO.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Is fraunhofer only for Windows? I can't find anything better than nolame for Linux.
Andrew
In "testing" the P3-1.133 GHz, did you try over clocking an 850 MHz P3 to 1.133 GHz ?
Did it "perform" any worse ?
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Are you saying BIll Gates is clever? :)
(Slight OT note: I believe it was Lotus 1-2-3 that spurred business/consumer demand for the 386. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong).
All my stuff is large data, with a reasonable number of operations on each element (linear regression, non-linear regression, etc.), so I've never really thought about this before. I seem to need a faster harddrive and faster RAM _way_ more than I need a faster CPU.
That's interesting. I've noticed the same thing. I train neural networks on a training set of 400,000 input/output vectors and even after heavy optimization (the next step would be assembly), I still only get ~100 mflops from my Athlon 500. Looks a lot like a memory bandwidth problem. Right now it takes ~10 hours to complete training... I'd sure like to get a 5 GHz CPU/1 GHz FSB!
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Ah, yes, Good old Tom Pabst. Intel lover at large. Let's go back to the old archives and pull out a gem: "By this time next year, AMD will have captured the lead in all relevant desktop microprocessor markets and will be seen as the acknowledged technology leader. Within two years, Intel, citing eroding margins, will effectively withdraw from this market except in the production of proprietary multi-processor Web servers based on the McKinley (the Itanium's successor) and consumer-oriented devices based around StrongARM derivatives." - www.tomshardware.com, 6-Feb-2000
OK, not a year has passed, but it's time for a bit of a mid-year update on Tom's predictions. Since Tom uttered these foolish words, the following has happened:
o Intel's marketshare has increased from 81% (at the beginning of the year) to 82% (as of Q2)
o Intel announced record quarterly revenue in Q200, its traditionally weakest quarter
So where is all of this switch to AMD that we were supposed to see? Are you going to post a midyear update to admit to everyone you were completely, and utterly, wrong?
So, run Windows 95B on a PIII-700. Not just will it be a hell of a lot faster than 98SE, it also won't have the stupid "Active Desktop".
("Active Desktop", of course, is just a very nice way of saying that not only can you crash Explorer, but you can also crash Internet Explorer, all without ever having to dial up your ISP.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
At 50 GHZ, you wont be running a microprocessor as we know it. For technical reasons (IIRC, it has something to do with electron speed) you cant clock a silicon lump higher than about 2,1 GHZ. Youre gonna need optical CPUs for more "clock frequency". Btw, quantum processors would probably not be a good CPU replacement, because they arent always faster than normal CPUs. Just at special things, like number crunching...
nc
I will not buy this software, it is scratched
Of course. Your ten year old 386 is exactly the same computer as it was when you bought it. It's still every bit as fast as it ever was.
Your perceptions of what a computer should be have changed since then. Not only do you want a bigger and (arguably not) better operating system than Windows 3.1, but you're now trying to play MP3s, video clips, video games, not to mention opening fat and inefficient programs.
At the time your 386 was new, a little video window the size of a postage stamp and playing 5 frames per second was high-tech video.
Nowadays, thanks to ever-faster processors, many new computers now ship with DVD players. (And don't get into a semantical argument that most of the processing occurs in the DVD decoder, I know that too, but I use it as an illustration anyway.)
How long ago was it that Bill Gates said we'd never need anything more than 640k of RAM?
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Maybe it's... heat related.. you can cram a bigger heat sink on a slot 1 processor.. just look at it. My theory only. No proof to back it up.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
Too many paper MCSE's. Makes mine harder to market. I wish Troytech, transcender, etc... would just go away. ANYBODY can take one of those cheater tests, memorize the answers, pass the real test, and be certified not knowing a damn thing about what they're certified in. Maybe, just maybe, people ought to study and, yes I'm going to say the dirty word, LEARN!!!!!!! I'm glad MS is revamping the tests, end-of-lifing the old one's and only letting you take the accelerated exam once and once only. Makes it harder to study. I hope they make all the new exams interactive. Sorry, just had to vent. Pisses me off when I run into MCSE's who doesn't even know how to change an IP address. TRUE story.
Faster CPUs are of little use to me. After a few tests I've determined that memory bandwidth alown is what is holding my image processing back. Yeh raw processor speed helps, but when you can't get the data to it fast enough then adding more is useless. I've gone to using prefetching and wavefront optimizations to get my processing speed up to a reasonable level. Even then a 2x speedup in main memory throughput will double my video frame rate.
...they still have a larger maket share, but they have inferior technology and have done for a generation and a half or so...
gee, does this sound like anyone else we know?
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
Yhcrana
The voices in my head don't like you
But Cisco does not go around acting like MSFT, does it? If I am not correct please let me know.
First and foremost we must all take every site at their word and not beleive them always. I read multiple sites and get as much information as I can then make my own decisions based on intelligence rather than what a site told me.
Yhcrana
The voices in my head don't like you
AMD's 3DNOW technology isn't much better, but at least they don't use that as the reason for raising the price of their CPU's How else is AMD supposed to compete in the x86 market with Intel releasing SSE instructions etc?
They needed a gimmick and I am impressed they come up with the engineering resources to create more than hype/vaporware.
AMD has put their money into their processors(Where their mouth is) Not into the hype and busting Intel's balls.
Take me your average programmer, I keep up with the technical issues for the most part and.. I cant think of to many times were I have been sold any hype about AMD processors, but nearly every campaign from intel is hype/shit.
That said how fair is it to judge AMD on the same scale as Intel when they have been palying catch-up the entire time and still managing to stay afloat?
Look at the Athlon, its not even native x86 it just emulates it.
It may be like a raging bull with power consumption, but lets at least give AMD the chance to become king of the hill and then see where they take us.
I just dont thinkt here has been a lot of room to innovate and stay ontop of the Wintel world. How can you just get back to RISC processing and stay in the market?
Simply said if you want to be king of the moneypile you will be running a windows platform for a while no two ways bout it.
Thats where the money is so I think in order for AMD to become a real innovator they need their time on top before they will be able to 'push' something like RISC and strong arm the rest of the PC world into it..they would just be laughed at right now and we all know Intel isnt going to.
Jeremy
If you think education is expensive, try ignornace
ON THE HIGH END?? You must be kidding. Out of the narrow selection of AMD motherboards, they all have stability problems, and their performance over Pentiums is negligible.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
note the irony on Stockpile
Yhcrana
The voices in my head don't like you
Tom's Hardware has absolutely and positively no credibility IMHO. Every one of his articles are another diatribe exposing the truth about some big bad company or another. If he isn't trashing the GeForce, RAMBUS, Intel, or anyone else he knows is an easy target he's putting out fluff articles. Complete and utter waste of time.
My take is that this is all because of the whole nvidia deal from a couple of years ago where Tom, in an absolute BLAZING display of gross arrogance (to the point of being mentally incompetent) actually argued publicly with id about whether or not benchmarking in Quake worked properly (id said that benchmarking was not working and should not be used. Tom then used it and published his results claiming that he discovered some great secret. What a quack).
To see Tom (or one of his croonies who he's trained to write in the same vitriol piss-and-vinegar speak) shitting on Intel is absolutely no surprise, and seeing that several other sites manage to run the processor without any problems casts a significant amount of doubt over the voracity of this article.
Cheers.
> Is there even a market for 1GHz+ right now?
Game developers: Programmers, and artists. ( I fall in the former category. I hate waiting 20 mins for the latest build to compile.)
Scientific visualization.
CAD
etc.
Some of us need real-time processing and have to go out and always have the fastest chip. Some things don't cluster. I for one am glad to see a faster chip come out regularly. It would stifle my research if they didn't. I'm sure my market segment is small. :)
B1ood
Note to self: pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours. -- John Carmack
Reading Tom yapping about how no one needs more than 1Ghz drives me nuts. I remember hearing that bullshit argument several years ago: "What could you possibly need more than a 383/33 for? There's nothing that needs more power than that!" I went from 450 to 667 and the change was very, very obvious to me in all sorts of applications, and just generally in the environment in general. Flight Simulator 2000, however, still begs for more power (yes yes yes...it's because it's an evil empire product, but it's also because it has an enormously complex environment simulating a gigantic swath of the world. Several simulators, such as GP3, having physics models that push the limits of the processors. New innovative interfaces using 3D techniques and modelling, overlays, etc., beg for more processing power. Don't EVER say that no one has any need for it unless you accept a myopic vision as the truth just because you're saying it.
Having said that you know Tom's purely pissing on Intel (presumably because he didn't get the microcode : WHO DO INTEL THINK THEY ARE? Don't they realize the importance of Tom Pabst?!) when you read : "A 3D modeler? Well, moving wire frame models around is again limited by the 3D chip and the scene rendering is done faster with an Athlon processor at less clock speed anyway." in reference to why no one needs more than 1Ghz. Okay firstly the wire frame model is only accelerated by the video hardware if you have a GeForce (2) or a professional video card : Does everyone have one of those? Secondly the rendering is begging for every microta of processing power you can give it. An array of 64 Xeon's : It's still begging for more. To simply jump over this and say that an Athlon does it better completely defeats this whole "no one needs more than 1Ghz" bogus article. In 6 months I'd love if everyone remembered Tom's wisdom in this.
I was sort of wondering this myself. It probably is possible to disable the on-die cache if it isn't yielding as well as expected (or at all for that matter @1.13) and go with a PII solution of a larger slower external cache.
Personally I find this a more valid reason for that slot than cooling issues. Apparently no one here has seen some of the high end server heat sinks designed to work without fans. In fact since the die size should be the same (unless there is an external cache) It would seem
to me that it is possible to get more surface area on a FCPGA heat sink since you can grow vertically quite a bit and still expand out to maybe 2 or 3 times chip size horizontally on the board. Of course for that matter I have seen some pretty big slot heatsinks that rise 2x-3x higher than than the processor.
Wow, I rember people asking the same thing about 200mhz processors.
It takes all types, after a few years in the industry some poeple go through this stage where they wish the pace would just slow down. Asking "do we need this much speed" is a sure sign your in that stage. Acceptance is the next step.
Of course you need that 1.1ghz processor!! Duh!!! In two years when they are releasing the 2ghz processor and you have a nice 1.8ghz processor you will wonder how you ever got along with a lowly 800mhz one. Anyone who runs on a 500mhz machine and thinks its fast enough hasn't tasted the joys of running on a 850+ machine.
Its based on the LAME codec but its very fast and supports SMP :)
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Be ot or bot ne ot, taht is the nestquoi.
The way it is now, I cannot change the order of execution. However, I have made sure to balance the multiply and add operations. As for my cache, it is 1/2. There's no (Non-thunderbird) Athlon with a fullspeed cache. I'd like to have this info confirmed, but I think double values bypass L1 cache (what about L2?).
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
SMP did hit the mainstream, or did you miss a little thing that happened on the 15th called Macworld?
cheers,
Matthew
Thanks for letting me know after the fact. I bought a Asus K7M for Christmas and it has been rock solid so I .......never mind, you just rant on. I only buy quality parts for my systems, none of that generic stuff for me. I have always done that with my Intel systems too. If you do this, don't overclock and load reliable device drivers then your system will be stable too no matter which chip is under the hood.
I've seen way too many people buying bargin hardware, not properly grounding their system, install every piece of beta software they can get there hands on and then they blame the OS/Hardware for being a piece of junk. Just because you can slap the parts together and get it to post doesn't make you any good at computers. Lockups don't make a successful overclock. I can run my Athlon in UT for hours and I quit when I'm ready not because of a lockup.
their performance over Pentiums is negligible
You need to check you tests again because Thunderbirds have a pretty good margin on the PIII and even if they were tied I would rather have a cheaper chip that I can actually get my hands on.
That's exactly the point. Slot-1 is Intel's old technology that's supposed to be on it's way out. So why do they only release their fastest CPUs only in Slot-1 and not FC-PGA?
It's all speculation, but Tom has a few theories in his review. The most likely explanation is that Intel wants to lock the high end customers into a Rambus solution instead of PC133 SDRAM. The i815 Solano chipset has no Slot-1 motherboards available. There's no way you'll see it paired with a VIA Apollo Pro because the OEMS have to kiss Intel's ass like crazy to get their supply of the precious 1Gig PIII's. That only leaves the i820 chipset. When you're already paying a $600 price premium for the CPU, who's gonna notice another $600 price premium for the RDRAM?
BTW, does anyone else notice the rabid anti-Intel bias of Tom's Hardware.
Actually, the Coppermines have the cache right on the die, and they produce far less heat than the Slot-1 solutions. If Intel was only worried about the amount of heat, they would have automatically gone to PGA. They must be having a problem with yields or else they must not have the technical acumen to produce any super-high-clock-speed chips anymore.
I'm betting it's the latter. Go AMD!
Sarge
You are correct. Somebody mod this up.
Too few overclockers and hardware junkies post here it seems. I mean *practical* hardware junkies not theoretical ones.
Why on earth do you have IE and Netscape open at the same time?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
I'm not sure who to go with on this one anymore! I first agreed with Tom, but then found this article at Sharky Extreme
WURD!!
While I agree, the *average* consumer has little need for this power right now (with the state of 3d accelerators and all), I do agree that some high end research applications need more horsepower.
I'm wondering why people in this catagory don't explore cluster technology or multiprocessing instead. Seriously - the 3d accelerator market is undercutting the demand for more "power" - the CPU becomes a bit more irrelevent (although, not totally)
As for as I can tell, its cheaper to go that 550Mhz or 600Mhz instead of buying a single CPU that runs at 1.13 Ghz.
3DNow has been around longer than SSE and is more widely recognized. Here is something interesting, I remember the Intel commercials where they said the internet would be faster because of the pIII, I about laughed my balls off upon hearing that.
If anybody can explain to me why I will be eternally happy, because as I see it with my computer experience I don't understand how the processor can make my internet connection faster short of comparing it to a 386 running the internet over a 56K modem with a pIII.
Yhcrana
The voices in my head don't like you
Not true. When I had a, I thought. 8088-a 286 sure would be cool 386-40, damn I wish I had a 486-66 486-100, windows 95 is a little clunky with 8 megs, doh. P233-MMX, OH FUCKING YEAH, I'll never need a faster processor C-300,I'm happy as a clam. (C-300 is where I am right now, btw. Don't need more for a looooong while. The incentive just doesn't exist.)
Go Kathryn Thurber!
....
....
--Hey Doctor Jones! No time for love!
My linux webserver/firewall/NAT router is on a k6-2 500... runs great, and plenty of horsepower to compile large projects, too (mozilla, GCC for x-compile).
My other two systems are 1.5 yr old C-300a @ 450s... they run like a dream and barely get warm.
I'm waiting for the dual-athlon/duron/sledgehammer boards before I go all out on the next system (TNT-1 on a Celery@450 will have to hold me over on my gaming fix for now).
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Well, I'm in the market for a new computer, so maybe I'll do the intelligent thing and buy the fastest damn thing I can now, and make sure it's upgrade-capable, so in two years, I'm not feeling too inferior to the 2.5 ghz procs.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
. Any motherboard that has not got the special micro code update for this very processor will ultimately fail.
Oh, cry me a river, I can't run my P3 on my old LX motherboard either...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Looks very promising to me, time to brake out the old disassembler ;)
From what I have been seeing from Intel I don't see much of a future for them, releasing a chip in slot 1 format when they are obviously trying to go to Flip-Chip socket format. This simply seems like a reason for you to have to go out and buy a new CPU sooner.
With the Rambus fiasco, 64 bit CPU fiasco, this, and the i820/i810 problems I find that Intel needs to sit back and take the marketing department out of the driver seat. AMD has the idea release products that are reliable and available to the general public.
Oh and btw if you want to claim that AMD sucks because of the Ge-Force problems that were occuring that was a driver issue and not a CPU issue. I do however agree that AMD needs to add better sealant to their duron and new Thunderbird chips as Anandtech talks about in their web news sections. Where if you apply a heatsink just a little wrong it will crack the die of the chip. Other than that AMD has intel by the short-hairs and intel isn't capable of doing anything about it right now
Yhcrana
The voices in my head don't like you
I've noticed a trend in processors. Many people are doing fine with the 300-450mhz processors purchased 2 years ago. Do we need all this speed? I know no one who owns more than 800mhz, and most people I know have around 500mhz. Is there even a market for 1GHz+ right now?
Sometimes you by Force overwhelmed are.
HEHEHE, oh this one is good :). :).
I don't have any points left, sorry, or I'd give you one up
Yeah, but you have a Pitt address ... what do you do in the lab, sweep up?
(some good-natured ribbing from a CMU CS alumnus)
Yes, BillG is pretty clever. He certainly has marketing sense. And I don't know what spurred demand for the 386, but I do remember multimedia being the reason we bought a 486. Either way, it's a moot point. People were saying nobody would use this power, and somebody did.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
awright, so YOU map it to 10.0.0.0 or something...
Sometimes I think /. is the home of people who don't get it. Sure, given current software, there's not a need for the power. But, as I remember it, Word processing, and email have worked fine since the 286 days. However, something always comes around to use additional power. The GUI word processors demanded more power. Who knows, maybe when chips get fast enough to do really good voice recognition without slowing to a crawl people will upgrade to P5 4GHz's so they can use the new voice powered user interfaces. Telling the what to do certainly makes things easier for these people, right?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
...I immediately read "Pentium III 1133" as the Pentium III 'leet
M$: "We're #2!"
/. really should do a little more research before posting articles. Your link had much more info. Thanks!
-John
If porsches were $50, there'd be no car theft. SFW.
----------------------------
With all these review samples going out there aren't going to be any Pentium 3 chips for us to buy!
V2 = V1 * (1 + DeltaV)
I2 = I1 * (1 + DeltaI)
P2 = V2 * I2
= V1 * I1 * (1 + DeltaV + DeltaI + DeltaV * DeltaI)
neglecting the higher order term, for
DeltaV, DeltaI 1
P1 = P1 * (1 + DeltaV + DeltaI)
And since that higher order term is positive, Tom's statement that 3% and 13% sum to "over 16%" makes sense; the exact answer would be 16.39%.
When you've got no calculator handy, knowing that 1.03 * 1.13 is about 1.16 isn't a bad thing, especially if you dump more digits in there.
They're up, but not at cryptome.org.
You can access it through this IP until Domain name changes take effect. http://216.167.120.50
Here's some info on it from shmoo.com http://www.shmoo.com/index.shtml#200007311013
Use it for playing Quake faster. Use it for rendering faster. Use it for ripping and encoding bootlegged DVDs faster. But to buy a $950 CPU simply to *crack RC5 keys* faster is the height of retardedness, IMO.
- 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?"
>Look at the Athlon, its not even native x86 it just emulates it.
;-)
If you want to get real technical, the PPro core (P-II, III, etc) emulates most of the x86 instruction set, too... the AMD happens to do it a little bit smarter, since it was redesigned from scratch (after fab processes had come a long way since 1994). When you know you will have the area and ability to make something, your design can be a lot less constrained.
As for the power consumption, if you have any extra 700 MHz 21264s to get rid of because they consume too much power, just toss 'em my way
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Guess what? All the tech companies are like that. Have you ever had to work with a Sun E10000? You have to underclock them or else you'll get E-Cache failures. That and, dynamic reconfiguration involves shutting the thing down and moving boards, which is a scoosh different from what the marketing hype says.
so...
[] IA-64 is still on the way... there's still a bandwagon, but the wheels are a little rusty.
[] oops... the PPC is probably the best chip out there in a lot of respects...
[] Sure does... when you find the 21364, and have some review samples, I'll take some... oh, wait...
[] Looks better than Merced - "My half-functional really hot chip is way better than your half-functional really hot chip... and it doesn't need quite as smart a compiler"
[] Muhahahahaha (oops)
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Isn't the irony beautiful? I can just imagine the 386 days some guy saying
"But of the 50-odd people that work where I work, only 3 (including myself) woulrd regularly max-out a PC regardless of power, with maybe another 6 requiring PCs faster than the ones on their desk/ We've probably got 20 people that could do everything they want on a 1 MB 8086, with the rest (50-20-6-3=21) probably never needing anything more powerful than a 286"
People have said that forever. GUIs necessitated the 486 and Pentium for regular business desktops. Multimedia, 3D, etc required home users to own PIIs (btw the home market is quite huge and very influental) Something will come along. My first guess is probably a voice user interface. Coupled with a mouse, a voice interface really could make web browsing really accessible to a larger group of people. Instead of icons,etc, you could say "PC dictate an email for my daughter." You can do that to some extent, but you still need to train it etc. For a really fluid voice UI you need a lot of horsepower for AI algorithms that can understand nuances of speech, figure out how to adapt to the same command said in a different manner, etc. Or maybe something else entirely will come out, you never know. However, the most dangerous thing you can do is be satisfied with what exists, and be closed to new concepts because that way you really miss out on what COULD be.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
uh i don't know if this occured to anyone else...but tom's hardware doesn't exactly like intel. they show way too much favortism to AMD.
now i'm not saying AMD is bad...and for that matter intel still hasn't shipped their 1GHz chip while AMD has got them in stores.
like you tell all those sluts: Intel needs to put up or shut up.
JediLuke
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
Anandtech has a review of the Pentium 3 1.13 GHz where he had used motherboards using the VIA Apollo Pro 133 Chipset which Tom Pabst said did not work with the boards on that chipset. Anand did not say anything about the microcode nor did he use the motherboard that Tom said did not arrive.
Lotus 1-2-3 might have had a lot to do with it, but I also remember one of the big things were the promise of memory managers letting you break through that nasty 640K conventional RAM barrier.
I bet QEMM (with the nifty Desqview 386 DOS multitasker) sold a *lot* of people on the 386 architecture. I remember having a fast 286 as my first PC clone, and I thought it was great until my buddy got an early 386 class PC. He quickly started doing cool things with the RAM above the first megabyte that my 286 couldn't pull off....
The real purpose of Intel introducing a factory overclocked chip is the publicity factor. Now that we've all read about Intel Pentium, fast! crashes! we can go order one from Dell or IBM.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Well, SMP works only to a point. If the stuff you're doing is easily parallizable then it works pretty great, but otherwise it really doesn't. For actualy desktop use SMP is great if the OS you use is really good with it (ahem, BeOS) but if you're running an OS that really isn't (ahem, MacOS) then you don't see much of a performance enhancement. In the end, clockspeed really is the best way to go. Doubling clockspeed will always give you a bigger payoff than doubling the number of CPUs.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'm tired of hearing all these people saying we don't need more power. It all depends on what you use. There will always be those who need more power, and not just in a "Tim Allen-esque testosterone induced" way, but genuinely. People have been saying that nobody needs more power ever since the 386 days. Even Intel used to say that the 386 wasn't really meant for consumer space, it was a server/workstation chip. Yet always, some clever dude found a use for that power. Back in the 386/486 days it was multimedia and video. Just when the Pentiums seemed fast enough, those crazy gaming guys came up with 3D, which needed a lot more proc power. I think 3D will carry processors until the 50+GHz region, at which point somebody will find something else to use the proc for. Even then there will be morons saying "oh, is there really a USE for this 100GHz proc?"
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I agree with you entirely (exept the part of programmers. Even on 50GHz procs I want to see those programmers slaving away for every last clock cycle ;) However, I think that if I said EVERYONE can use more power I'd get 500 responses from people still using 386s saying I was an idiot.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
This chip was so shitty tom's hardware wouldn't even post test results!
"this processor proved to be an example of instability, which is why I won't publish results at this time"
Wow... I knew intel was bad... but releasing processors as buggy as microsoft's OS's... this is just a joke.
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
Why is everybody so caught up on Pentiums? The future is multiprocessing RISC chips like the PowerPC. Microsoft Windows seems to be the only reason everyone is still using Pentiums, AMD, or any other outdated CISC architecture. When used together, RISC chips sync together instead of wrestling with each other like CISC chips. PPC's already outperform Pentiums--at less than half the clock speed,and they don't even need fans! Monopolies always crumble on their own. Some people just get too impatient.
I've got a PC with 128Mb of RAM a 600MHz CPU and a 7200rpm disc drive but it's really no faster than my older P200 system with 64Mb and 7200rpm disk.
What? 'How can this be' I hear you cry!
Well. The CPU isn't the bottleneck. Hasn't been for quite a long time now.
Bus speeds, memory speed and by far overall, disk speeds are what are limiting the overall speed of systems these days.
I don't see a huge point in having a 1GHz CPU which can access data in 1ns if the data to and from disk takes 8ms (125,000 x slower). Sure adding memory gives buffering but there's a diminishing return on doing that.
You go on and get all excited over 1GHz CPUs. I'll get all excited when a new long term low cost storage device is created which can handle the I/O from said CPUs.
Deleted
With Intel at least trying to yap at the heels of AMD, there is a reason for AMD to release quality. Back when AMD was trailing Intel, Intel had to make sure they released quality chips to stay in the lead. I don't think Intel will die, and if they do, then we're all screwed. The way these two fight it out makes the one with the better chips release great chips. Whichever you are a fan of, you should recognize that they feed off each other to improve the quality of their products. I just got an 950 Thunderbird because it's higher quality now. I'm sure the trend will swing back and Intel will be a better chip soon enough.
______
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everyone was born right-handed, only the greatest overcome it.
http://leftorium.net
Reading the reviews of this part, it's obviously just a really overclocked part (yes i know all processors are created equal, some just run reliably faster than others) They are really pushing the die to get this processor to run at 1133 Mhz.. using 2 of the mainstays of overclocking.. a LARGE heatsink (did you see the pics?) with 2 fans, and increasing the voltage the processor runs at.
Anyone could have done that stuff, but the microcode issue Tom talks about is just wierd/suspicous... unless its a multiplier problem, the same processor that runs (underclocked) at 850 Mhz fine with a given microcode, should run fine at its full rated speed with said microcode version.. do you think they are deactivating processor features to save heat as Tom seems to insinuate? I'm eager to hear from the rest of the slashdotters on this...
Either way the first 2 issues show that Intel is really struggling to get product out the door at or above 1Ghz... they should have just sanely clocked these puppies and sold them as Gig models instead of going to crazy lengths to get an maginary victory in the CPU wars
I missed the part where you could actually buy and use a real operating system on those things.
But you must admit AMD is getting the best of intel simply because intel has streched itself too far and isn't innovating any more.
You're wrong. They're still innovating. I know this for a fact, because the lab I work in at CMU has entered into a partnership with Intel to work on some pretty cutting-edge stuff. You'll notice that processors are starting to slip behind Moore's Law predictions. If this idea works, it'll get us back onto the doubling curve and maybe even beyond. Now, this is a university project which is just getting started up as some grad student's thesis, so it'll be at least a decade till it hits your motherboard, but Intel is not just doing the same old thing.
I know I'm being vague, but I can't exactly talk about the details. I don't know how much of the project (if any) is public knowledge; it's certainly not posted on our group's webpage. A few measly karma points aren't enough reward for me to risk getting in trouble for talking too much.
Intel may be sucking compared to AMD these days, but at least one can use TWO fast Intel cpus in slot one systems.
I have yet to see any multi cpu AMD machines, therefore I have not bought an AMD cpu since the days of my 486 DX2-80 (made Descent 1 go faster:)
Now with the hudge wave of big bloated crappy software hitting us, we need big monster multi cpu systems to keep things running in a timly fashion.
This guy's just wrong, or not plugged into the right parts of intel. I work for a server company and we're running 1GHz & up in the lab in both Slot 1 *and* flip chip packaging. They're not easy to get, but the roadmaps are clearly supporting FC-PGA moving forward. As for micro-code updates... Well, yeah. Pretty much anytime you change processor steppings, a microcode update is required. Read the Intel errata sheets: "stepping is not not considered complete unless accompanied by matching microcode update". This is business as usual, and not necessarily anything bad. There are tools to update microcode in existing BIOSs. This guy's Intel rep wasn't able to show him the proper roadmaps, or get him the samples he wanted, and he's jumped the gun on guessing the truth. He's full of shit.
I agree with the sentiment, but you seem to imply that some tasks can't benefit from more speed.
There is no general task that can't be done better with more power. You don't need to go around dreaming up new things for computers to do, almost everybody who writes a program throws out features because the computers wouldn't be fast enough to run them.
Sure, you can have "adequate" tools that work with current hardware, but if you don't see how all of them could be better, it's a failure of imagination.
3D will carry processors far beyond the 50 GHz region. Virtual reality is an obvious bottomless computation pit, you can always do better with more.
A few other computational bottomless pits (there are many more):
-compression
-physical simulation
-genetic algorithms
-natural language processing
Even in a thing like word processing, consider how much more computational power is needed to give consistently good advice on things like grammar and spelling. Yeah, the current software is pretty bad, but I don't believe good software can be written for this enhancement without more speed.
Perhaps most important of all is freeing up programmer time. The less you have to worry about conserving resources, the more you can get done. It's a shame when programmers waste resources inappropriately, but having computers fast enough to be able to just hack up a quick Perl script, rather having to write optimized C and assembly, can make incredible increases in productivity. Another example is being able to emulate old programs, rather than having to rewrite them.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Tom blames the problem on the motherboard/BIOS, saying it has the wrong microcode. This page has a utility that allows Linux to update the CPU's microcode (it works using /dev/microcode in the newest 2.4 kernels, see CONFIG_MICROCODE). He should get some new microcode and use this utility to update it (he'd have to compile a 2.4 kernel on another machine of course). At least then you'd know if that's the problem.
Regardless of the facts or reality or the economics or even the technical plausibility. What Intel typically does is make older models too expensive or unavailable so man'f'turs are forced to use new chips and motherboards.
I for one am completely sick of newer faster hotter! Take some of the effort that goes into this and build me a reliable half-speed PC for $99 bucks. This is all starting to sound like the dopes who go out and buy a Ferrari and brag about how great it is - - at least in 2nd gear - - because there aren't any roads that they can go over ~80mph.
I'm not sure if its the engineering or what, but EVERYBODY seems to be having challenges with their silicon these days. Moto can't get the G4 over the 500Mhz mark and Intel can't supply new CPUs period.
So why not dump more of the marketing/manufacturing/research into consumer level SMP? It's a winner for Intel as they can sell more CPUs ("What? You only have 8-way SMP?"), and presumably a push into consumer level SMP will be a push to software vendors to make their programs take advantage of SMP, which many don't do (well) now.
Yes, I realize that 2-way systems are cheap (I'm running a dual 650e system now) and have limits to their performance advantage relative to faster clock, but I keep waiting for SMP to hit mainstream..
What good is 1.13 GHz with a 100Mhz bus?
- My password is slashdot
From the conclusion of his "review":
Let's hope that Pentium IV will not follow suit in the same manner, or I see the days of Intel as a player in the processor area as counted indeed.
Man, this guy is great. Every article he ever posts predicts the fall of Intel. I mean, one of these days Intel probably will either go out of business or someone will overtake them in the desktop processor market and the good Dr. will be there going "You know sonny, I predicted this way baaaaaack in 1997. and 1998. and 1999."
He should go back to giving ID advice on how to run their own benchmarking utilities like he did when Quake 3 was in beta....
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
This is really not surprising, the processor wars have had their casualties in the marketplace. With the competition drivi9ng hardware prices down, you would think that this would be the best time to buy/build a new PC. But with the problems encountered with the high end PIII, and the Slot A, no wait, Socket A, no wait, Fonzie says "Aaaayy..", this is undoubtedly the worst time.
Both companies are far more interested in getting a product out the door, and not interested in getting a working product out the door. The result of this could be interesting to watch.
My guess is that the end result will just add to a growing contempt for the multipurpose PC adding to the appeal of small embedded devices. (Unless the small embedded devices try to go the same route...) As we know, all of these races to be first usually signal the death knoll for at least one of the companies involved, if not both.
End analysis? My next PC purchase will be after the market calms down, which may be never. If all else fails, we might have to go with "OSH", Open Source Hardware...
HamNRye
"My only hope is that they don't breed..."
-Said about "pet" penguins that have escaped or been abandoned by their owners.
I don't know about all that higher-order bullsh*t, but in the books I read while getting my EE degrees switching power consumption is directly proportional to : C * V^2 * f C is capacitance, V is voltage, and f is frequency. Scaling V from 1.65 to 1.75 increases power by 12%. Scaling f by 13%, increases it by, well, 13%. The net effect, while keeping C constant, would be approximately (1.12 * 1.13 - 1) * 100% = 27%. Of course, that's if Intel kept C constant. Duh, like C is constant. If this 1.13GHz monster is a shrink or has some redesign, chances are that the average (average, since portions of a chip can be turned on/off with software) capacitance could have been decreased. Anyhow, nice calculations coming from your ass, Tom, and you too, Mr. Linear Approximation. Also, there is more to power consumption than just switching power. Current drain is a biggie, too, especially at such small technologies. The net result is you gotta make power measurements if you want to know the power consumption. You need to know what software you are running, and what subsystems in the chip are enabled.
I don't get how Intel thinks they can still act like a monopoly. Granted, they still have a larger maket share, but they have inferior technology and have done for a generation and a half or so. Given that, do they really think that they can pull tricks like requiring an Intel mobo? They're gonna have problems if people a)can't overclock and b)have to buy Intel for everything, because it's going to cost more and not be as good. plus, the gubmint might have something to say about it at some point. In addition, if it doesn't work, that's a major problem (duh), since AMD is faster, better and cheaper (a la NASA).
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
It's another extremely extended anus pic.
Sorry, trolls, cranky today.
Debian - the distro for the sensible Linux user. Now available in 3 delicious varieties!
Hrmm, I use a pretty recent lame version. There is _no_ difference in quality between my Mp3s (192kbit VBR:6 44100) and the CD. My stereo equipment is a quality amplifier from Sansui and a pair of 3-way 400W Birklin speakers. BTW on my K6-266 songs are compressed slightly faster than real-time (about 10% faster).