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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."
now toasters and ovens can have Web access, and don't even need the old inefficient heating elements...
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
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.
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.