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New GHz Competitor In Processor Market Soon
pug23 writes: "CNET has an article about the Samuel 2, [a 1 Ghz-plus] processor which Via plans to begin production on in the first half of next year. More competition in this area can only be a good thing. Apparently they introduced the Samuel 1 (at speeds between 500 and 600 MHz) in June, but have been marketing it primarily in Russia, India, China and Eastern Europe."
You're talking about benchmarks for the current Cyrix III chip, which performs miserably. The reason it performs worse at over 500MHz on FPU intensive apps than a lowly K6 300 is that the Cyrix IIIs FPU is clocked at only half the core speed, so in that light the chip wouldn't do badly at all if the FPU were clocked at the same speed as the rest of the core--its performance is good considering this and the fact that is has no L2 cache whatsoever. If the whole core operated at 1GHz, and it had at least 128k of on-die L2, it would be a great budget chip. But that's not going to happen because of problems with the current FPU reaching high speeds, which is why they need a new design.
But the article makes a significant mistake--its author thinks that this will be a move by VIA/Cyrix into the high-end, making the classic mistake of equating clockspeed with performance. But VIA itself is quoted as saying "Samuel 2 will expand our market, moving into notebooks and information appliances"--not high-end markets. But as a mobile or appliance processor, even a 1GHz Samuel of the current design would do well, even with the FPU clocked only at half speed, considereing that 400-600MHz notebooks are still the lion's share of the notebook market, and the appliance market still uses 180MHz WinChip 2's through low end old Celerons. Not bad for those uses, at all, even a high performance choice for those markets--especially when you consider that laptops don't run at full clock speed unless plugged in or under heavy load, whereas the Cyrix chip can run relatively cool at rated speed. Weird calling a Cyrix chip 'cool', isn't it, considering that you used to be able to fry eggs on the old Cyrix MII.
As for that point made at the start of this thread about "who needs a GHz processor anyway"--considering that the wholesale price of 1 GHz Athlon Thunderbirds was just dropped, and will probably drop again within a month or 2, it'll only be a few months before a 1GHz Athlon can be bought for about $500 or less. Then, when we can afford them and get them, we'll realize how useful it is to have that kind of power to encode MPEG-2 video in real time with a cheap capture card at the same quality it usually costs to have special high-end hardware cards for, how nice it is to make MP3s quickly, and how great it is to playback MP3 files while doing heavy work without having the processor overtaxed enough to distort the playback. That much power may seem like too much to need for everyday stuff, but once you get that much power I bet your everyday habits might just change to accomodate your new abilities. I know mine changed when I moved from 100MHz 486 to a 400MHz K6-2, and I bet they'll change again when I get the cash to fly the Thunderbird. Even if all you'll ever use it for is turning on all the eye candy in Enlightenment or whatever you like to use, without a big performance hit, you can't complain that prices are dropping so steadily that a consumer will soon be able to afford a 1GHz machine--price cuts are good, period.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
AMD was just like VIA in pentium days except they didnt have a market share in io chips. Who knows, the Samuel 5 might be the next Athlon..
Tyan plans on releasing a dual athlon motherboard, based on the AMD 770 chipset in the 4th quarter this year, codenamed "dolphin"
Arun
Well to be fair the Mac hardware does have a superior architecture to the dated-x86 and the PPC chips are faster per mhz, but it's hardly fair comparing them.
:)
I'm guessing that the filters chosen were very floating point intensive, and obviously smp enabled.
As for your point about macs ageing, they do and they dont. Apple computers do maintain a remarkably large degree of compatibility across their entire product line, in that you will find that new software (provided they still compile it for the old 68k chip) will run quite happily on a 10 year old mac (slowly of course). I have a powerbook 100 (16mhz 68020 i think) and it's perfectly adequate for word processing and from a useability point, it's 1989 hardware running OS7 is still very very similar to OS9. Now if you compare windows 3.0 with windows 2000 you will notice all the similarities - they both have windows for a start
I think it's brilliant that via are producing processors. Sure this generation wont be the fastest on the planet but I can see where via is headed.
Think system integration. Look at the VIA-GRA mobos with built in modem, networkd, sound and vga (not to mention regular IO). With a reasonable processor design via will be able to integrate more and more of the system into smaller components.
This will help the low end PC market (since your average high street buyer will be tempted by a 1ghz pc for $600 when intels is about $2000).
It should certainly give the celeron a run for it's money in the low-end high street field (since chipset integration might well make the cost of the cpu negligible). Then we have AMD stealing ahead at the middle -> high end market - in the UK i'd reckon at least 60% of pcs sold on the high street are AMD.
It's starting to not look so good for intel since they appear to be loosing the home market. Certainly they still have the business market, but once they've lost home users they'll loose the rest too.
Anyway, there is an argument for reasonable optimisation of code - using good data structures and algorithms for example. On the other hand, as you point out, too much optimisation spoils the broth, you end up with hard to read code because of these optimisations, which is bad, and bug hunting becomes more difficult. When you can assume that processors will be 2x as fast when the game you have just started writing is finally released, if you get it running decently on current hardware, then it will scream on the new hardware.
And the most popular paint program was DPaint, and that was written in C. It was slow as a dog in some operations though, so some optimisation was in order! Of course, optimisation was a necessity in the 8 and 16 bit days, either for space (erk, only has 64k/512k) or speed. But there is nothing wrong with well-written assembly, as long as it works - it just takes longer to develop, so it is usually only used in graphics/audio drivers themselves, as opposed to the games/apps themselves.
PPC chips are faster per mhz than P3 chips. However, those blazingly fast speeds that Apple touts are result of Photoshop being optimized for the Altivec instructions.
This proves two points:
1) Never judge a processor by the number of mhz. Apples are faster per mhz than Intel. And I doubt this new Samuel 2 will be anywhere near as fast as an Intel chip.
2) Don't trust benchmarks from the manufacturers, they're always tweaked versions of the programs. The filters that Apple uses to compare to Intel have been tweaked to take advantage of Altivec. To do the test correctly, you would need a dual processor board with two 1000mhz P3 chips with a version of Photoshop that has been tweaked for the Intel chip.
Always do a little research before buying your next chip. Decide what you will be using it for, and buy the best chip per dollar value that you can reasonably afford. I just do gaming. So a $120 Celeron 566 overclocked to 933 is plenty fine for me.
The big architectural break was between the Pentium and the Pentium Pro, remember. That's when mass-market CPUs started looking like supercomputers inside, with serious superscalar architecture. The PII, PIII, and their low-end friends are all basically Pentium Pro derivatives. (The AMD chips are quite different.)
Designing one of those superscalar beasts is a big job. It took Intel upwards of 1000 people to get the Pentium Pro design to first silicon. But recycling some old design in a modern fab is easy. Maybe that's what Cyrix did. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this; those superscalar engines are power hogs and take a big die, because there's a lot of stuff in there all going at once. It may turn out this is a reasonable way to make midrange CPUs. And it gets them that all-important "1GHz" label.
Businesses are also a cautious lot. They really want to make sure that AMD chips are stable and can be counted on in "the long run." Since AMD just recently (in the grand scheme of things) emerged into the market as a true competitor, businesses are waiting to see how they fare in the desktop market and also whether AMD runs out of steam. AMD has had stability problems in the past and businesses are not going to forget so easily. When the multiprocessor chipsets do come out, businesses will eye them with suspicion and wait to mare the stability is there before relying on them to handle their critical applications. Hopefully, AMD can pick up the ball and have the dual chipset rock.
-- Wolfpup
"A man whose circumstances went beyond his control." -- Styx
Regarding more high-speed CPU production, the poster wrote, "More competition in this area can only be a good thing." Is it really? Yes, competition drives down prices, which I like. But sometimes I wonder... What would happen if CPU speed progressive much slower than it does today, and the speed increases had to be accomplished via more sophisticated programming? What if hardware change was slow enough, that developers had to finesse every last bit of performance from the machine? Consider the lowly video-game console. The first gen. of games on those things are interesting, and look decent. By the third or fourth gen. of games, you might think someone secretly upgraded your console. Instead, locked into an unchanging hardware profile, developers learned sweet-nothings to whisper into the console's ears, in order to coax out greater performance. And, without losing system stability (maybe even increasing it?) If nothing else, might we have more stable OS's and apps that crash less? The time I would save from a rock-solid system would probably be greater than that from tripling the system speed.
ShoutingMan.com
even if they manage to release an 1 GHz chip, it's probably gonna be PR-1000 aka "equivalent to a 1 Ghz Pentium III"
First off, the PR ratings were based on the integer speeds of the original Pentiums (P5), not P6 chips.
And second, actually no; Via specifically changed their Cyrix III over from the Joshua core they had developed in-house over to the current "Samuel" core purchased from Centaur, not because the Samuel core had better performance, but because it offered similar performance at higher clock speeds. Thus, the Cyrix III is being marketed at its actual clock speed, not its P5 equivalent. So interestingly enough they corrected their marketing-driven bunk with some ill-concieved marchitecture changes.
Thus, this chip really will be clocked at 1000 MHz--but will only offer the integer performance of a PIII 800 (and the floating-point performance of a 486SX, but that's another story).
The US government maintains export controls on any processor with a performance of greater than 2 gigaflops, making it slightly difficult for some high tech companies and government agencies in India, China, and Russia to purchase high end Intel chips. By being a Taiwanese company, Via can potentially grab a huge, rapidly growing market from Intel and AMD, which may have legal difficulties selling chips from even their non-US chip fabs to these countries.
Incorrect, and absolutely irrelevent anyways. First off, those export restrictions were lifted a few months ago. And second, current Cyrix III's have their FPU's clocked at only half the chip speed, making the FPU performance of a CIII 550 roughly equivalent to that of a 6-year old Pentium 200, or of a theoretical Athlon 90 or so. Rumor has it the FPU will be running at full clock speed by the time they hit 1000 MHz sometime early next year, but even then you're talking maybe "Athlon 400" performance, possibly worse. And even then, it appears it will only be any good at single-percision FP, not the double-percision which the export controls are concerned with.
In other words, nowhere near worth an export control. And nowhere near worth sticking in anything this side of a web pad, either. Frankly, this chip is just not very good.
Remember your historical perspective. When the WinChip came along, Intel was still selling the 486 on the low end. WinChips kicked 486 ass, and when the 486 got retired the WinChip you could get for the price of a low end Pentium was significantly faster because you could afford a higher speed WinChip than Pentium, for the same price point. I can remember wishing I'd gotten a computer with a WinChip instead of my Intel 100MHz 486 DX4--the first and only Intel processor I ever owned, and I'd feel guilty about having it now that I know how predatory Intel is, if it weren't for the fact that I bought it second-hand and so didn't give the $$$ directly to Intel.
Getting back to the VIA/Cyrix chips, even though they're not useful for my own purposes, I'm glad they're around. A Cyrix III 533 would be good for the appliance market, if only they could price it low enough. And if they can get the FPU to run at the same frequency as the rest of the core, and slap an L2 on it, it could be even more useful in laptops. But the key here is competition--we went from having a market with 4 or 5 x86 competitors, to a market with only 2. Now, at least if VIA can pull it together, we'll have 3. This is important to keep pressure on Intel, else prices would never come down as they've been doing lately--we'd still be paying about a dollar per MHz on even lower end P!!! chips, yuck. Now, AMD is whomping Intel on both the high end and the midrange, and if VIA plays its cards right, it could take over the low end since AMD is abandoning the K6 lines (except in notebook K6-2+ chips).
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
It's disappointing that the Tom's Hardware article doesn't contain an architectural block diagram of the CPU, or much information about how much gets done per clock.
Check out the review at Ace's. It doesn't quite contain a full block diagram, but does a much better job than Tom's at discussing the architecture of the chip.
The summary: whether to try to keep die size/power consumption low or because they didn't have the expertise, Centaur (later bought by Cyrix later bought by VIA, the ones who actually designed this chip) decided to keep it very simple. Thus, the chip is in-order, with a relatively deep pipeline (11 stages), relatively large 128 KB L1 cache (it needs it to try to make up for the fact that as an in-order chip it needs to sit and idle while waiting for any memory accesses), and just 4 execution units--2 SIMD, 1 ALU and 1 FPU.
The good news: it's just 76 mm^2 (on a not-very-good ".18 micron" process), consumes very little power, and runs cool enough to forego a fan. The bad news: no L2 and a half-clocked FPU mean laughable performance as a desktop or even a laptop chip. It might do ok compiling kernels and web browsing, but anything requiring a decent cache or any FPU at all (i.e. playing games, encoding MP3s, anything involving 3D, and even plain old office apps) and you're better off with last year's Celeron or K6-2.
Ok so the chip will perform slower regardless of speed . But the decision seems to have been based on Fab yield. Ummm.. cheaper chips that may run somewhat slower than latest/greatest coming out of the oven at rock bottom prices. And the design and the track record leads one to believe that at least the possibility of computer-on-a-chip designs are in the pipeline. What does this add up to? Sounds like practically disposable mid tier performance PC's in a very small form factor.
Hey I want cartons of those !!!
In and effort to instill proper family values amonth the computer-using community, the Christian Family Coalition, in an unprecedented foray into high-technology and inter-faith healing has announced a complete line of CPUs for the home user. Here's some features of the upcoming processors in the series:
* Moses: Has only 10 opcodes, burned directly into the silicon using patented "Finger of God" lasing technique.
* David: All web content appears as though run through www.askjesus.com.
* Maccabee: No irrational number mathematics permitted. No division by zero and no infinite loops. You must take all results on Faith.
* Joshua: Linux runs fine on this chip, but BSD will definitely NOT. Something about an inappropriate logo...
* Aaron: Any LONG pointers are immediately truncated. Pointers of unauthorized programs are set to null.
* Solomon: You can just FORGET running SATAN to scan your networks.
* Ruth: Children's games featuring the Telle-Tubbies crash inexplicably.
A new, 64-bit series of CPUs has also been announced. Features are unclear, but twelve distinct processors have been listed.
* Peter: Rock-solid performance. Water cooled.
* Thomas: The availability of this chip is somewhat doubtful.
* Judas: Special purpose hardware for network 'honeypot' machines. New, silver-based transistors.
* James I, James II, Matthew, Mark, Andrew and the rest are noted are general purpose and peripheral control processors at this time.
It's a consipiracy I tell you.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Tom's hardware really doesn't like this chip as a power desktop chip, which is what most people look for in any GHz chip these days. It has an absolutley atrocious FPU and no L2 cache. On the other hand, it's designed to run without a fan which could make it an awesome laptop chip, assuming they put in Crusoe/AMD style power saving features. As bad as that FPU is, at a GHz it would be more than made up for by sheer speed in most business applications, as laptops tend to be used for.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Well considering the benchmarks of the VIA/Cyrix/IDT Samuel 1 at 533Mhz, it'll need a 1Gig just to keep up with the 500 Celeron. So it's really a case of just enough rather than too much power.
This looks like the Cyrix Jalapeno (Which I thought was cancelled...)
Still, by the time this hits mass production it will be incredibly out of date. Standard for the recent Cyrix processors (Ironic really, because back in the 486 days they were bigger than AMD).
It seems obvious that VIA is going after the "low cost market", but it seems that they are doing it in an unusual market... Perhaps to appease Intel so they can keep compatiblites with their Motherboard chipsets?
In any case, if it works out, it could create a brand loalty in those areas, after all, with the amount that Intel chips are overpriced, a "discount" chip like this could really bring computers in a ubiquidous fashion to all these areas. VIA sure seems to think so. They look to be going for volume in a new market. I hope that they can pull it off.
I would say that the odds are good though, with a weak FPU I cannot see the chip gaining any popularity in Western Europe, Taiwan or North America.
Still, never mind anything else, competition is a good thing!
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
http://www.pcworld.com/p cwtoday/article/0,1510,15637,00.html
However the reality now is that the Intel 1 Ghz CPI is still sold only on paper why you can already buy 1 Ghz AMD over here in Canada, meaning this has been long on sale in the States as well.
I fear this CPU won't stand much chance against the giants. Intel and AMD have been undercutting each other's prices for several months now, meaning they are ready to sacrifice profits for market share, at least for now. Article on this is here:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/0 8/22/1728232.shtml
--
Kiro
Every time Intel or AMD introduce even faster chips that run at even faster clock speeds, other competitors (IBM,VIA, etc) seem to be compelled to anounce:"We will have a 1Ghz chip too... in the first quater of the next year", and, of couse, then delay it to the end of the last quarter of that year when it absolutely will not matter.
Cyrix' CEO (I am not sure if he still has that position now at VIA) affirmatively promissed a "1Ghz CPU by the end of 1999" in early 1999 in an interview with the Maximum PC magazine. Where the hell is that 1Ghz CPU for god's sake?
But seriously... I think if this actually does have any chance to stand up it will have to belly up to the bar with the big boys (AMD and Intel) and start selling. Unfortunately by the time the VIA Samuel chip comes out it will probably already be yesterdays news. By that time if we look at Intel's predictions (Yah right those will ever come to be correct) they should have 1.6 or 1.7 Ghz chips by them. But if we look at their track record of releases, well let's just not touch that... Too easy. Am I wrong or was the Samuel one of Cyrix's chips (not sure, but I know the Joshua was) and those had atrocious (sp) FPU's. That equates to a bad gaming chip, but ok office app performance.
But we can hope that this will have something revolutionary in it somewhere (doubt it) and maybe it will even make Intel start sweating even more (like they'll ever show that to the public). AMD still is #1 in my book especially after the drop in prices that happened this week and the one that is supposed to happen last week. I mean let's face it 1 Ghz chips to the public (not in 1000 bunches) for under $600 WOW. While intel's chip was $1,200 for the same speed. :cough: wallet molestation :cough:
Yhcrana
The voices in my head don't like you
While these new CPU's may not have the horsepower to compete head to head against AMD or Intel's best in a pure CPU comparison, they could certainly take advantage of the fact that Via is probably the premier mobo chipset manufacturer right now.
You could get some amazingly small form factor, power machines if they smash their mobo chipset, the CPU, and say a graphics chip into one big "Slot-1"-sized unit.
Maybe they could out make the guts of a machine to out-"cube" Apple, if it's really as low power as the article makes it sound.
The US government maintains export controls on any processor with a performance of greater than 2 gigaflops, making it slightly difficult for some high tech companies and government agencies in India, China, and Russia to purchase high end Intel chips. By being a Taiwanese company, Via can potentially grab a huge, rapidly growing market from Intel and AMD, which may have legal difficulties selling chips from even their non-US chip fabs to these countries.
Arun
We can't be blinded by the fact that these are GHz chips. Who knows how good of a processor they are? When the WinChips came along, they tried to say that they would be able to create a cheap, competitive chip by just reving upthe speed and not adding any of the 'fancy' aspects of the other, high-end, processors from AMD and Intel (they offered a barebones processor, we're not talking about just no MMX or 3D-Now! or whatever).
How good are these processors, and are they just trying to win us over with large numbers?
And just as a side note: I couldn't help but read about where they've released their chips already and be reminded about the '16 processor hardware solution' for seti@home that appeared on /. earlier. . .
Signal 11 is an error.
IOpener type appliances. If these chips really are on the crappy side, they'll be cheap and consequently put into just such machines, i'd imagine...
I could handle that.
This is a WinChip made by the Centaur design team. All Cyrix employees have left VIA. Cyrix III is __NOT__ a Cyrix design, but a Winchip. The original Cyrix III was to be Joshua but the yields were too low, so instead VIA substitued the WindChip design, which sucks worse than Joshua did. The head of the Centaur team said that he'd have a 1.2 GHz chip by using an 18 stage pipe. Unless he has extremely good branch prediction, an 18 stage pipe is mainly idle on an x86 since in x86 there's a jump every 3-4 instructions, which causes a pipe flush if mispredicted. I expect this CPU will suck big-time, perhaps even to the extent people will realize that MHz is not performance (although the PR rating Cyrix used wasn't either at the end of its life).
Jobs' presentation provided a Photoshop (TM) shootout between a dual-processor 500 MHz Power Mac G4 and a single processor 1 GHz Pentium. As expected, the PowerPC finished the test in about half the time it took the PC.
That's because the test was, as expected, rigged. That is, it only used a certain set of filters which happen to run faster on PPC than on x86. It would be quite easy to pick a different set of filters and "show" that the PIII is faster than the G4 clock-for-clock on Photoshop. (Not to mention the fact that Photoshop is perhaps the only mainstream program better optimized for the Mac than the PC.)
A fairer Photoshop benchmark (and using Photoshop as your sole benchmark is pretty shortsighted, to say the least) is PSBench, which runs not 3 specially selected filters like Steve did, but a full 21. The results? A 500 MHz G4 is a bit slower than an 800 MHz P3. A dual 500 MHz G4 is probably not much faster than a 1 GHz P3, and certainly no faster than a (cheaper) dual 800 MHz P3.
For a rather exhaustive look at G4 vs. x86 benchmarks, try here. The upshot? A G4 500 is maybe as fast in raw integer and FPU speed as...a PIII 400. That is to say, the G3 was about equal with the PII clock-for-clock; however, the Coppermine PIII's have since added some stuff which the G3/G4 can't match--namely, a much faster L2 cache and 133 MHz FSB.
Where the G4 really shines, of course, is in those programs which can take advantage of AltiVec--and indeed, those are about the only benchmarks you'll find on that page. (You won't, however, find any gaming benchmarks, because the Mac would of course be "unfairly" limited by its lack of good graphics cards.) In raw SIMD-plus-FPU, a 500 MHz G4 performs about as well as...well, it depends, but a fair guesstimate would be a PIII 750 or an Athlon 650. If you look at the page, you'll find that the Mac wins quite a few benchmarks, and that one or both of the x86 chips wins most of them, and that the margins of victory vary widely.
Suffice it to say, though, that even if you do run Photoshop all day, the performance of Apple's hardware is not a good reason to buy a Mac. With the exception of Seti@Home and RC5 (but not OGR!), there is a significantly cheaper PC which will run any program faster. This isn't to say there aren't other good reasons to buy Macs. But when one platform's top chips double in speed in a year, and the other's only go up by 50 MHz, you can bet that the first platform is going to be faster.
My argument was really based around the point that in 1986 apple got the desktop metaphor pretty much spot on.
Sure it's got nice pretty 3d bits now but at the end of the day they got it right and whilst they have pulled off some amazing trickery to switch machine architetures in the middle it's all worked well.
The Alpha is more powerful than Pentium III, but not by as much as you'd might think; most of its advantage for supercomputing comes from its superior bus.
Actually, the main advantage of the Alpha comes from the fact that it is not held back by requiring compatability with the x86's god-awful stack-based floating point registers. That's why a GHz PIII can equal a 733 Alpha 21624 in SpecINT, but gets blown away on SpecFP by a factor of 2.5 or so. The superior chipsets of the high end RISC-based set help quite a bit too, of course, though that advantage is partially matched as far as SPEC goes by Intel's incredible (and non-functioning for most other code) compilers.
As for Sledgehammer and Willamette, they hope to narrow this gap by trying to replace the x87 FPU stack for most code with the double-percision capable SSE2, and by moving to wider buses with faster DRAM. On the other hand, the 21634 and Power4 look remarkably good, and ought to extend the high-end chips' lead for quite some time.
...and yet the Amiga community faces jokes such as, "what's the difference between a Boeing 747 and an Amiga... an Boeing only crashes once."
Between 1985 and 1993, the Amiga hardware platform was essentially frozen. Yes, there was the Amiga 3000 and whatnot, but most people bought 7.14Mhz 16-bit MC68000 machines.
And you had people bend over backwards to get amazing things done in that platform. One of the most popular paint programs, DigiPaint, was written in assembly language. Some games were written to partially run on the 10(?) instruction graphics processor (the Amiga was a non-symetric multiprocessor machine). People some how managed to fit all this onto an Amiga 500 and still have things run semi-smoothly. Yup, all things considered it was fast.
But, alas, it still crashed. Sorry.
Hmm... isn't it interesting that he didn't use SSE-enhanced filters, which would be a fair comparison?
Hmm... won't work with PC Video cards? Like the ATI Radeon, GeForce 2MX, or the Voodoo 5 5500? Take a look around. The mac has a good selection of video cards.
The 533 Samual may have been overclockable to 733MHz, but even then it couldn't beat a Celeron 500! This is what Van Smith had to say:
Geez, the Samual has to run at 1.6GHz to be equivalent to a Celeron 500. 1GHz doesn't sound so great to me, even if it is overclockable. It'll probably do okay for simple integer-based applications like business suites, but gamers will stay away from the Samuel for a while. Thankfully, we still have AMD to turn to as an alternative to Intel... so competition so far is good (AMD's going to drop the price of their 1GHz Thunderbird to below $500... can you say SWEET!)
I wonder if one was using Linux and the floating point emulation if they could best the onboard FPU of the chip.
Maybe this chip is a reason for people to still be making math co-processors...
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Jobs' presentation provided a Photoshop (TM) shootout between a dual-processor 500 MHz Power Mac G4 and a single processor 1 GHz Pentium. As expected, the PowerPC finished the test in about half the time it took the PC. I haven't had an Apple since //e. With Power Mac's current performance and the 'coolness' of OS X, I really might get a new toy soon. However, I recently browsed a Goodwill ComputerWorks store for the heck of it and found it to mainly be a graveyard of Apples (original Macs $3).
The site of the eventual fate of most Macs was scary, but I just don't see a dual-processor 500 MHz Power Mac G4 being out-dated any time soon (?).
"... and growing market share," said Wong, who's firm has a "strong buy"...
This should of course say "whose".
This news is sort of exciting, but recall that VIA owns Cyrix, and Cyrix chips have historically been very poor products. I do recognize the quality on my VIA KX133 chipset though, so maybe times are changing.
The Alpha is more powerful than Pentium III, but not by as much as you'd might think; most of its advantage for supercomputing comes from its superior bus. Similarly, the Alpha and the Athlon are suprisingly well matched, as the Athlon uses the Alpha bus; but, of course, the Alpha is designed as supercomputing equipment. The POWER3 and POWER4 chips are less powerful than you might suspect, probably around or below an Alpha -- IBM's machines run so quickly because they so bloody many of them hooked together which such absurdly wide/fast busses. Of course, when the 21364 rolls into town, it should blow the doors off the T-bird; but but the SledgeHammer/Williamette may be ready by then.
The reason (Beowulf) clusters have become common in recent years is that only recently have the 'desktop' chips started run fast enough to compete against the generally more powerful chips from the big iron companies. It's like the G4/Pentium situation (a gHz G4 would spank a gHz PIII, but no such beast exists), except even more so.
-_Quinn
Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.