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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.
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
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.
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.
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I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
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.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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.
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.
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."
> Vapour P4 to avoid people buying AMD processors ?
But is it working? I noticed a 1G Athlon system on the shelf at Best Buy yesterday. And the price wasn't unreasonable, considering what people normally pay for PCs.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
...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