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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."
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
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.
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.