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Pentium 4 Delayed
An anonymous reader noted that CNet has a story saying how the
Pentium 4 will be impossible to get for manufacturers wanting to ship them over the holidays.
Apparently the system makers aren't that happy... but considering what Intel was charging for the things, I can't imagine who would buy one.
Also add to that the current price of the
dual boards, which makes buying a faster CPU
still cheaper that 2 slower ones.
This is no longer the case. You can get dual boards for under $150 US which certainly is cheaper than buying the highest rated processer at any give time.
2-P3 700's + mobo = 400 + 150 = 550
1-P3 1000 + mobo = 600 + 50 = 650
I would also expect the dual 700 config to yeild much better performance for the casual user than the 1000. Now if you argument is that its better to just get the 700 and the regular mobo then yeah, that would be alot cheaper, about half the price, but we're talking about getting more perfomance not less.
hey, i bought 10 120mhz pentiums for $100 to crunch seti
Sanchi
"They said we couldn't do it [Athlon]... but we built it, we shipped it... and we didn't have to recall it." Rich Heye
intel is playing catch up in a market that has been around for too long anyways. the x96 isa, as I am sure most of you already know, has been on life support for a number of years now. Yet, the family doesn't want to pull the plug just yet--it may start breathing again any time soon. Look at the PPC chip. Sure, motorola is having some problems bumping it up to current standards but it is still one hell of a chip. It compares favourably to even the best of the x86 chips out there and generates less than a 10th of the heat. AMD *WAS* on the right track when they first introduced the Athlon. At the core it is a risc-esque chip with hardware translation. Too bad the risc-like core is not accessable. Imagine a chip that could do both? Now that I have read the specs on the Sledghammer I am no longer holding my breath though. A risc-like core that maintains compatability to the old 16 and 32 bit code will adding 64 bit code - all to be translated back into AMD's core code.
It's dead. Let ot go with what is left of it's dignity before you pilleage it all.
tinfoilmedia
It could be worse.. this could have been Pentium 95, that's what normally follows V3, right?
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
The power consumption of this chip is too high. I don't want to have to by a separate power bar just for my frikken case (especially when video cards are using external power now too).
And when you consider that you can get 2 chips and create a dual processor system that can run as fast or faster, you have to wonder why people would want to buy it anyways.
When they broke the 1Ghz barrier I knew a few people who were already enjoying that speed with a couple of dual 500s running GNOME (Granted you don't get the full 1000Mhz experience, but its pretty close).
I am still waiting to see a Dual Athlon motherboard, strap on a couple of T-birds, and let those pengiuns fly!
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Whatever they do, I'd image that companies paying top dollar for engineers to sit in front of slow software will be among the first in line for faster cpus!
;-)
Best of luck with getting an upgrade. I've worked for a few places where you got upgrades when money was available (budgeted), unfortunately, even though Moore's Law has been known and repeated for years, too many companies still don't get it. Execs are usually the first to get the speedy new box, so they can wave their new and improved phallus in front of other execs. It's beyond me how this improves the company bottom line, but I'm sure it makes sense from where they have their heads wedged. With Dilbert-like logic, a few minutes of the engineers time isn't justified by the expense for a new workstation, but, by golly, they need that new design ASAP
Perhaps the shortage is due to a shortage of aluminum for those massive heatsinks.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
1. 8088 for word processing and email clients.
2. 80486 for the underlying Windowing system.
3. Pentium IV for all the online shopping.
4. Pentium VI for the fully skined talking paperclip of your choice. Insert list of babes here.
Anything less and response will get chunky.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If the game's got multiple threads or has a seperate server daemon process, the SMP machine will edge out the uni-processor one if the SMP machine's CPUs are anything faster than half the uni-processor's CPU. Same goes for anything out there that has threads or has external processing applications. I don't want a 1GHz machine- I'm perfectly happy with a dual or quad 750 for now.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
an experiment:
P3 600, 256 megs RAM, NT 4.0 sp6a, Word 2000.
Click on word doc on desktop (other apps open, Outlook, Netscape-6 windows, Palm Desktop, Task Manager).
Word launches in 2 seconds, BUT word doc takes 15-seconds to open and render! Close window; Word takes a FULL 35 SECONDS to close, during which time the window is completely unresponsive to ANY commands. Will not move, resize, or minimize.
MS software is a peice of poo, to be sure, but I really need a 2 GHz P4 NOW!
Soylent Green is people!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I've been saying this for YEARS, but unfortunatley, I lack the intestinal fortitude and drive to actually do it.
We need a web site, that works like fuckedcompany.com that tracks all product announcements from major industry players, and charts how well they do or do not stay on schedule, - a betting pool could even be done around this.
To make things precise, statements like "It will ship in the 3rd quarter of 2001" will be interpreted as the LAST SECOND of the last minute of the last business-day of that quarter. Especially if that preceeds a 3-day weekend, where you KNOW the QA dept will be putting in heavy overtime.
This way, there would be a PUBLIC place where all businesses could establish their reputation, and their mistakes will not be forgotten. In this manner, vapor will be actually discouraged, and there will then be negative incentives to BS product release schedules and roadmaps - and perhaps some reality will be injected into the picture. Schedules should be set by engineers. Not Marketeers.
Soylent Green is people!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
A pentium 4. It's like another rocky movie.... Doesn't marketing do anything at Intel.
We live in interesting times. Personally I don't really bother when P4 is available but on a side note, I see a trend. The big dragons (MS and Intel) are screwing up big. My interpretation is that what is happening now is marketing Deps panicking, realizing that they are not immortal. Realizing that there are actually other guys out there who can shoot from the hip. Once doubt sets in the mistakes come as well and trying to spank the development process to produce more in less time backfires. My 15 secs being infamous.
Another point to make on this issue is that really high-end CPUs get used for one of 2 things in the real world:
(I'll ignore things like SETI@HOME / Distributed.net here 'cos noone buys a machine for that, right?....Right?)
SMP is a fine solution for rendering; I can't speak as to whether common packages out there can exploit SMP though.
However, very few if any games can exploit SMP. I'm ignoring the subclass of multiprocessing which is used in gaming: specialisation of processing to dedicated hardware (aka 3d acceleration). Partly this is because of the platform (most games are written for that non-SMP OS Windows 9x), and partly it's because SMP has such poor penetration to the consumer market (mostly because of the first reason!).
So, completely ignoring the very valid question of whether SMP is a suitable model for pushing forward the field of general purpose multiprocessing anyway, the answer to why SMP isn't really a good solution in this case (and hence why Intel/AMD et al can still make news, profits and push out megawatts of combined waste heat) is that the overwhelming majority of systems into which their high-end CPUs are placed couldn't make use of any other solution for their intended use.
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Ok, This is coming from someone on a Unix/Linux (majority) web site? I think you are mistaken. I do work with a lot of hardware and software and have yet to see an aplication that NEEDS to be run on an Intel chip. Maybe you are confused by the adds for something made for MMX enhanced CPU's? Intel, AMD, Winchip and Cyrix all used Intels MMX technology.
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
Not entirely true! Rendering usually runs on one CPU, yes, but the other can offload a lot of other stuff. Take a look at a CPU usage graph on an SMP box playing a 3D game. Under Linux, one CPU can handle the X server, and the other can take care of the game. This is automatic, since the game and the X server generally require more CPU time than any other process.
SMP does help for a lot of things. I have a dual PII 350, and while a 350MHz CPU is nothing to write home about, their combined power means that I can play any game that's currently available for Linux (I've tested most of Loki's stuff on this box). I could probably play just about any game available for Windows, but I don't own a copy thereof, so it's a moot point.
My SMP machine is much more responsive than any comparably-equipped single processor machine I've seen. It almost never becomes sluggish; indeed, one CPU frequently becomes saturated, bringing the load to an even 1.0, but the other CPU is still there to respond to input.
You're right that SMP has less market penetration, mainly due to Win98's (or whatever 2-letter code they're up to now) lack of support for multiple processors. This has kept it out of the low-end market. I think this may be a self-fulfilling prophecy as well: there's no incentive to add SMP support to the Win95 series, since there's a very small base of SMP users, and that base isn't likely to grow until there's support in the OS.
-John
A dual chip system would certainly be good for most "desktop users" who run one application at a time. These users tend to also run operating systems which use cooperative multitasking at some level or another. With two processors, you can have one running their copy of Word, and the other running the base OS.
I know a lot of people probably have an MP3 player and other applications in their system tray. Maybe they're "not on the screen," but they're still competing for resources.
--
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If that's their strategy then it's not working. Micron has just announced they will be making AMD machines, AMD has won over a large system builder in the UK and european sales are very strong. Whether it's Bang for the Buck or supply chain woes, Intel has left the door adjar and AMD has been in position to take advantage.
With the rumored failure of the Itanium-McKinley, AMD looks positioned very well with their Hammer.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I actually fire mine up at work sometimes when the room gets a bit of a chill. With headphones on, you can hardly hear the disk...
This Sucks Because 1ghz pentium 3's are way too slow. How am I supposed to get anything done?
Maybe I'll Just Suffer
How am I going to heat my house this winter?
AdFuel
The IA-64 does not execute IA-32 via software emulation. They do have IA-32 instruction decoders on the die.
The main issue is that IA-32 vs. IA-64 is modal, and so you can't mix the 64-bit and 32-bit code with a very fine granularity. From what I understand, it the mode-switch was meant to be thrown with about the same granularity as a context switch.
Sledgehammer, on the other hand, sounds like it's trying to be a straight extension on IA-32, and so would layer over IA-32 much like IA-32 layered over the 80286, which layered over the 8086... This would allow 32-bit and 64-bit code to mingle within an application. (Just look at Windows 9x for an example of a deployed system that operates in this manner, and why Sledgehammer might hit where Itanium misses.)
And one last thing: Itanium is the collective name for the IA-64 platform, whether it's Merced or McKinley, just as Pentium has become the name for the current set of IA-32 chips. Merced might get cancelled, leaving McKinley as the first Itanium chip to ship. Wouldn't surprise me in the least.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Not meaning to come across as flamebait, but it seems to me that the future for people wanting a high end system is better served if they start exploring SMP options rather than the increasingly flaky vapourware that Intel keeps pushing out. Sure, AMD are pushing ahead with some better quality chips, but why pay all that money for a high end chip when you can get two cheaper ones for the same price?
With Linux finally having some decent SMP support and Windows already possessing it (at least in the latest versions) it makes far more sense IMHO to go down this route if its performace you're looking for. Even with all the latest advances in processor technology, there's still only so much a single processor can do at once.
Hasn't this been the case with the high end Pentiums, Pentium Pro's, Pentiums II, and Pentiums III's ? :-)
Vapourware has been (ab)used by Microsoft and other software companies to stop concurrence...
Are Hardware manufacturer using the same methods ? Vapour P4 to avoid people buying AMD processors ?
Time to start pumping more money into my AMD stocks... Intel is going down. I think the Athlon was the pivotal point where intel will fall completely to AMD...
-- "Microsoft can never die! They make the best damn joysticks around!"
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
A bulletin earlier today contained unconfirmed reports of a small rebel chip manufacturer who has just finished shipping a product on time.
Industry analysts were stunned for several hours while the small manufacturer's share price rose sharply.
Details later revealed this company to be in the business of potato chip manufacture. They had just released their quick-double-dip-chip, widely accepted as the major driving force in the development of the cutting-edge rip-n-quick-n-dip-n-lick-n-chip technology.
Itanium may run IA-32 applications, but it does so slower than IA-32 processors such as Pentium or Athlon, since that's not it's native instruction set. Sure, the translation is done in Silicon, but nonetheless it's still there, and the effect on performance is apparent.
AMD's Sledgehammer will run IA-32 applications FASTER than any current IA-32 processors, and therefore seems to be a true upgrade. I'd regard Itanium as a downgrade unless the OS and applications I wanted to run had all been recompiled/rewritten to run native.
The P4 chip isn't that big a deal, but the 400mhz bus will speed things up a heck of a lot above my 133mhz bus. The processor speed is almost superfluous at this point.
:-)
As for production work, be young have fun & buy Alpha. Four out of five SQL administrators whom have tried Alpha recommend it to their pat... er, users.
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
Actually, I remember that being Dan Quayle... gonna go look that up...
Yep, it's Dan Quayle.
"Let me open these blinds so the snipers can see in." - Kevin Giffhorn
Personally, I'm waiting for Hemos to tell us the pentium 4 is Delayed.
They're obviously still working out the bugs in the Cool Ranch flavoring.
I would go with an AMD over the Intel anyway. AMD is supposedly getting the Thunderbird (Athalon in a socket instead of a slot) ready for multiple CPU Motherboards and they are just as powerful and they cost about 1/4 less (at 1 GHz right now). AMD's plant in Dresden Germany and there other main plant in the states are not haveing any problems with supply and the quality of the Thunderbird I just bought is EXCELENT! I say forget intel and just get an AMD.
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
Apparently the system makers aren't that happy...
Nobody with a rational thought in their puny heads would buy these 1.138745 GHz CPUs and Pentium-4's (5-4). Not in business, not in the home. You pay ALOT for something that'll be half the price (for the home market) next year. Not to mention how many bugs and fixes you'll get pushed on. Strangely as it seems, the most buggy shit seems to be most expensive and also the least decreasing in price over time. We live in funny times..
Oh, THEY're happy. They're happy they get media attention. WE're stupid to let us bother with such nonsense.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Did anyone really expect this to come out on time. Kinda makes me think or Merce...err Itanium.
Some people are predicting th death of chipzilla... I don't see that. Just quite a few people moving away for a while. Which is good for the whole industry.
On a completely different rant...What is with all these damn companies and their vaporware? Seriuosly. Yopy, Itanium, SMP Athlons, various linux based webpads, a cell phone that works with a palm, a decent affordable mp3 player... It's rediculous. I read about this terribly cool stuff everyday but there is no possible way to get it. Ack!
Holding up the horrific 16 to 32-bit transition debacle (as executed by Microsoft with Win9x) as a good idea seems a little odd, considering it's been 13 years since the 80386, and most users are still crunching 16-bit code on their PIIIs and K7s.
But, that's exactly what Sledgehammer is going to get you. No "64-bit" OSes (except for maybe Linux), but instead a bunch of small incremental "Accelerated for Sledgehammer" drivers and video games. And like, the 640K barrier before it, it's no real solution to the upcoming 4GB barrier ("ought to be enough for anyone", right?), which is the main reason you want a 64-bit chip to begin with.
My guess is that Intel learned their lesson from the not-yet-complete IA-32 transition, and wanted to put in small disincentives that would hurry the transition to IA-64. That and marketing Itanium OS support like hell to all major providers, including Sun, IBM, and DEC (although they all reconsidered and said no), as well as funding Linux development.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
...that Intel chips are RISC on the inside as well. No one has built a truly CISC chip in years and years. RISC won the architecture war, but not the ISA (instruction set) war. x86 was too firmly entrenched. Thus we are left with modern architectures that emulate old, crufty ones. Not conceptually lovely, but functional enough.
In practice even chips like the PowerPC aren't really RISC processors in the classical sense -- they implement too many instructions. (Altivec, anyone?) They merely hold onto the Load / Store memory model and the general feeling that instructions should be short and sweet. But they are far more complex than the RISC designs that academics came up with.
A lot of students will take an undergrad computer architecture class and come away with a RISC chip on their shoulder. Plus, it's fashionable to hate Intel, and to rag on x86. So you hear a lot of "RISC rules, dude!". However, it's all a little silly. Internally, modern x86's have benefitted from all the advances of RISC design. All we are left with is the external interface from the old days. But how much does that really matter? Virtually no one writes inline ASM these days. If your only interface to the processer is through a C compiler, then you're never dealing with the ISA anyway.
The story of x86's life: not lovely, but quite functional.
just a few thoughts...
--Lenny
It's Itanium (aka Merced) that's predictably inching closer to cancellation, not McKinley which has only just taped out. Intel's IA-64 architecture was a joint Intel/HP effort, but the Merced/Itanium implementation was an Intel only design. McKinley is a complete redesign by HP, and AFAIK is expected to meet it's design goals.
I agree that AMD's Hammer looks better positioned though (mostly due to being IA-32 compatible vs IA-64,s software emulation).
That subject aughta tell it all. Even though the anti-overclocking efforts of AMD make me a little restless, what we may see here is a blessed occurrence of a monolopy break-down. If AMD are able to play their cards right and release a Pentium 4 competitor before the Pentium 4 is even released, manufacturers will flock to them in droves. That event would have serious and very positive reprecussions throughout the entire industry. I'm sure first and foremost, the notion of IntelM$ comes to mind. Come on AMD. The ball is in your court. Run with it! Kick Intel while they're down.
> Since when has halloween been a major target for product release.
Considering the scary flaws, licensing terms, and privacy violations endemic in recent products, I think Halloween is an altogether appropriate time to buy computer stuff. I'm going to put one on my porch to scare off the trick-r-treaters.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade