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2Ghz P4 Shown Off
mduell writes "Intel showed off their newest, fastest chip ever. The Pentium 4, running at 2 Ghz uses 400MHz Rambus Direct RAM(ugh). They also demo'd an Itanium server cluster running Linux with failover protection (what does this have to do with the chip?). Additionally, a 1Ghz P3-Xeon and a new 500Mhz mobile P3 that uses just 850 milliwatts when running most applications (5.5W max) were shown."
If you read the article, you will notice that while they are shipping Xeon chips at 1 GHz now, they are still unsure as to a time frame on 1 GHz P-IIIs. And this despite the recent "announcement" of 1.13 GHz p-III's. How can you "announce" and "release" a product when you can't even buy the previous generation yet?
Despite quantity shipments of 1 GHz Athlons and Thunderbirds, there is no real way to get a 1 GHz P-III. That makes all of this just another set of smoke and mirrors - Intel takes a few high quality pre-production chips and cranks them up for a demo. Then they ship a very limited quantity of 1 GHz server chips - of course, server chips are better cooled and maintained, are much more expensive, and are ordered in much lower quantities.
So Intel has still failed to answer the real question at hand - can they actually ship a 1 GHz chip for the desktop? Can they capitalize on their market entrenchment, product quality, and technical expertise (all of which are vast, no matter your position) Or have they put too much junk in the trunk, spent too much time optimizing an overloaded, antiquated core, and lost too much technical drive to overcome the AMD challenge? Because right now, these "announcements" and "demos" sound like the last gasp of a dying dinosaur and not sound development from the once-undisputed king of the PC chip world.
now toasters and ovens can have Web access, and don't even need the old inefficient heating elements...
Disk has become the biggest remaining bottleneck in most computers. The only way I've found to get around this is to use RAID controllers and stripe data across several disks to do parallel reads and writes. Believe it or not, Promise has an ATA-RAID controller than can bind up to four IDE disks together for about $100. Use something like this, and you could cut your load time down by half or better.
World Beach List, my latest project.
If a 20 Stage Pipeline was a good move is to be seen. But the design takes the long latencies coming with a pipeline stall into account and tries to battle it at every front. This are better Branch-Prediction, ALUs working at double CPU core frequency and the Trace-Cache. since this is the first chip implementing a Trace-Cache i'm very interrested how this new cache model will influence performance.
To see how the new chip perform we will have to wait for neutral benchmarks. Perhaps it will not beat the Athlon clock by clock, but it will start with 1.5 GHz und will scale well beyond 2 Ghz this will make it the performance leader for some time.
About the floating point performance. IMHO Intel stopped beating the old x86 stack based FPU model to death and is walking along the way of SSE2. With a good optimizing compiler this will be pretty competitive. We can only hope Intel helps to get gcc to a point where it can optimize for the SSE Instructions as well as the Intel compilers.
thomas
I wondered how long it would take the Intel engineers to work their way through the DEC purchases they made and start using that technology in other areas. Given that a 200MHz StrongARM processor maxes out power consumption way below 1W (I have a feeling the figure is around 700mW) the power consumption of the Pentium processors looks pretty silly. Still there is no easy way to go from a streamlined low power consumption RISC design like the StrongARM and plunk all that technology into the Pentium line which requires a whole lot more transistors.
What I do take issue with is this 850mW figure for a 500MHz PIII. Intel's low power consumption tricks up till now have involved idling the processor when there isn't much happening, and I strongly suspect that this 850mW figure has a lot of idling in its measurement time frame. That figure of 5.5W max looks far more likely to really reflect the power consumption of the low power PIII. That is not to say that having a processor having various power consumption modes is a bad thing - the Amulet project has a more interesting take on this one (variable asynchronous clock speeds) - but I do wish that Intel would be more 'honest' with its figures. As for the rest of the announcements, I just request that you don't hold your breath waiting for these to appear on the shelves.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
So now I'll be able to cook and eat my dinner without moving from the desk. Just hope it doesn't cook my nuts too.
I find it quite ironic to show a 2Ghz CPU when you can't even supply our 1Ghz. Has anyone seen a 1Ghz CPU from Intel somewhere lately? They seem to have all vanished from the price lists.
2Ghz is just hype, one more attempt to show people they are ahead in the clock speed race which nobody still follows except them.
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
As with most of the recent Intel announcements, surely the most important question is "when are speeds like this going to be available in quantity?"
Without a decent answer to that, all of these announcements look more like an attempt to create FUD to work against AMD than like genuine advancements in the field.
Why do things like this even get posted to /. This article is just filled with inflated marketing hype.
... peer-to-peer networking
The 1GHz Xeon chip offers 256KB of Level 2 cache and a 133MHz bus, he said.
Wow so it's got twice the cache, a little over twice the clockspeed and a slighly higher bus speed than my OC'd celeron300 that I bought for pennies over a year ago.
The future is
Obligatory napster reference (dont flame me I do know what they really mean)
A 1.5GHz Pentium 4 system was then tested against an 800MHz Pentium III system in video capture. The 1.5GHz Pentium 4 was able to capture more frames of video than the 800MHz Pentium III
Wow good test. Curious how they dont mention any figures or how the difference in bus speed might affect the video capture performance. I HIGHLY doubt that the 1.5ghz machine was over twice as fast.
"Pentium 4 will be the fastest desktop processor in the world"
When it ships maybe, but when it actually hits the streets AMD should already be there. Intel seems to ship things an awful long time before you can actually buy them. They need faster ships
Not to imply Intel had rigged this one, but a single demo of a single P4@2GHz doesn't mean we'll that chip at that speed for sale any time soon.
The 2GHz part was a handpicked chip, cooled like hell, and is far from being available.
The 850 mW number is measured "the Intel way", and therefore some considerable spindoctoring is involved.
Of course one can buy into the Intel marketing, but I prefer to spare my enthusiasm until I see that stuff for real, in volume, and tested by independent and reliable publications.
While this chip will run a 2Ghz, just how many instructions is it executing during each of those clock cycles?
With a 20 stage pipeline... not as many as a P3 or Athlon.
Intel designed this chip for very high clock rates with the assumption that Mhz ratings sell chips and systems because joe public is too stupid to know what IPC means. Sadly they may be right. Long gone are the days when the average computer shopper even knew how to use his or her system, let alone what went on under the hood.
Also, have you heard about how abysmal the floating point performance on it is supposed to be?
Hello Cyrix!
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.