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Tom's Hardware Retracts P4 Endorsement
Dice writes: "More benchmarks have come in and Tom (of Tom's Hardware) is expressing doubt in regards to the P4 in this article, "I have to admit that I started off being a believer in Pentium 4 and I still respect Pentium 4's future potential. However, right now I am genuinely disappointed. For the time being, I wouldn't let any of my friends or family members buy a Pentium 4 system. It's simply not justifiable."" Intel is definitely not impressing the hardware reviewers with their new chip.
Fighting over the newest and most bestest Pentium based system is getting a bit old. The P4 is DIFFERENT from the P3 it isn't merely a core modification like the P3 was to the P2 and the P2 was to the PPro. The P4 is something Intel wants to promote as a real solution until they are able to roll out IA64 in the mainstream. If it costs too much or doesn't do what you want, don't buy the fucking thing. I'm not going to buy one. Let the OEMs buy a shitload of them and package them in consumer PCs. In terms of actual core quality, I'd vie for a Xeon over a regular P3 or P4. I get the option of lots of memory, better pipelining, and better branch prediction. Along with that I get the option of an enormous L2 cache which is very important when you're using the same instructions over and over, say when I'm doing 3D rendering or have a web server running; it's also going to increase performance on large numbers of non-repeating instructions (i.e. a large number of individual apps running all doing their own thing, say on a large multi-user system). The P4 is in the same situation the K6-3 was, AMD haters hoped it would kill AMD while supports defended it as more of a testbed than anything else. The P4 is a production test of some new approaches to things. It won't sell well in retail sales but I bet OEMs will eat it up because their customers will want it. The Duron many of you bought is a combination of technologies used in the K6-3 and Athlon, if the K6-3 had never been released the Duron might cost you a lot more due to the fact that some techniques were untried which means unrefined. In production cases, anything you try to do without first perfecting will cost you alot of money.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
but, I have to take exception to the following statement:
The mere fact that Corps. act as though they own the laws and can do whatever they wish does not mean I have to accept that as a 'fact of life'. Replace 'corporation' with 'mafioso', and that line suddenly looks less appealing, even though the Mafia has been (and probably still is) supporting some causes which might, by some, be seen as beneficial for society. Like ridding neighbourhoods of crime (by criminal means, but still). That does not negate the poisoning role of the Mafia (or other crime syndicates) in several public institutions.
So, cheers to Intel for their insight that free software and business can go together. But boo to them (and all other nasty corporations) for their continued disregard of 'the intent of the law', for their heavy-handedness, their lies and their greed.
--frank[at]unternet.org
Since the P4 costs as much as two of the 1.2GHz Athlons wouldn't it make more sense to compare the P4 to a system with the AMD 760MP chipset and two of the DDR Athlon 1.2GHz CPUs?
Has anyone seen such a comparison?
I have this feeling everyone's against Intel and is making sure this viewpoint gets through.
/.'s point of view.
People openly say "I want Intel to crash and burn" ALL THE TIME!, even though this isn't Tom Pabst's or
Most of you who curse Intel are hypocrites. You'll be buying Intel processors if they come back and saying "Intel rules".
You seem to disconsider Intel has developed good products and technologies despite its failures. Please don't send me Intel's top 10 (or 50, or 100) top mistakes list. I'm well aware of those.
If you think Intel charges way too much for their processors (and they do), fine, just don't buy them. You shouldn't run around screaming antipropaganda simply because they're on top.
A similar phenomena has happened to 3dfx and Netscape. They also have made bad, wrong decisions. But haven't they also broken huge amounts of ground?
So lay off Intel a bit. Cut them a little slack. Do you think RAMBUS's debacle and design difficulties all over are done on purpose?
Here's an analogy for you guys (you say if it's bad or good). Most of you (the ones from the US, at least) sometimes agree with Jon Katz about the geek kids who are made fun of by the jocks.
Intel started playing really bad american football for some reason and is like a geek kid. Don't kick them when they're down, at least not that hard. You have your reasons, I know, but enough is enough.
Flavio
P.S.: I don't work for Intel, never have and don't expect to. I wouldn't mind to, though.
The P4 isn't a chip for you and me. Wanna know why?
* In almost all kinds of applications, it is slower than an Athlon T-Bird 1.2 Ghz, and that's from a P4 1.4Ghz. Even overclocked to 1.7ghz, it's still slower.
* Almost all applications - meaning pretty much everything involving a floating point unit, including CAD, raw calculations, Office apps, and Unreal Tournament - are slower than on the lower-clocked and cheaper Athlong. Oh, and I forgot: It is atrociously slow compiling anything with gcc.
* The much slower P3s actually beat it in speed at many real-life applications.
* Tom's review compares it encoding a long DivX movie in high quality with a 1.2Ghz Athlon. The P4 needs twice as long at some tests.
* You can get a 1Ghz Athlon for less than $300 in some places, with Athlon prices dropping weekly. A 1.4Ghz P4 will cost around $1000. Prices won't be dropping anytime soon.
* The P4 needs a new socket, doesn't always play nice with all types of memory, its socket is of course incompatible with everything, it needs gigantic coolers which NECESSITATE new cases, where old cases are simply too narrow. That's right, many old cases (ATX format) simply won't take a P4+cooler.
* The P4 will not come with a multi-CPU chipset anytime soon. In fact, the P4 right now and in the next few months will definitely be a no-MP tool. MP Athlons are just around the corner, and so is the 266mhz FSB Athlon chipset for use with superfast DDR memory. Rambus, anyone?
And if you read the reviews, the only thing it's actually faster than the Athlons is at Quake3. Seeing how many buying decisions are made by completely irrelevant Q3 scores, this may be a very bad thing.
And yes, the incessant pro-AMD propagande isn't good, but have a look at face intel to see why intel really isn't a good company. Maybe that will explain some of the hostility.
Alex T-B
St Andrews
If you think Intel is going down, why don't you short some Intel stock? There are billions to be made and for shorting stock, you don't even need money! Coming to think of it, you'd think a lot of Slashdot readers should be shorting Microsoft stock. Talk about an opportunity to make money there!!
That is.. if you truly believe they are going down. Kinda makes you wonder...
Since the P4 is slower than one Athlon in most benchmarks, pitting it against a pair of Athla is just mean.
--
This reminds me of...
The 386 (faster than a 286, but oh so expensive, and no one uses 32 bit apps yet anyway)
The 486 (who needs a math co-processor? Geez it's expensive)
The Pentium (Gosh 486's are available with the same or higher clock speed)
The Pentium Pro (16 bit apps actually run _slower_)
The Pentium II (oh, bummer, L2 cache is at half-speed, PPro is so much better...)
Lets face it; many of Intels 'new' chips don't make immediate sense, but who was buying the predecesor to any of the above chips once the new style had been in the market for a while.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the new AMD chips. As always, more bang for the buck than Intel.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
...to count the dimpled chads the first time, and durring the recount he found some extra cpu cycles for designated for the Athlon.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
As others have pointed out, these new chips are *usually* slower on 'legacy' code (cf original 5volt pentiums etc).
All this is a bit preliminary, ie P4 is certainly expensive and not that great Right Now, but almost certainly will rock when there is the code to support it (as there certainly will be).
I am a big AMD supporter, I think that they have done extremely well. But now, they are under the pump, just as they had Intel under the pump for the last 18 months.
All is well, just don't buy a P4 right now. Maybe the vapourware dual Athlon chipsets and motherboard will come out in time to toast the P4, but otherwise Athlon has some serious competition.
When I threw this same story in the hopper this morning, I did it with something along the lines of "Happy Thanksgiving and the P4 is a turkey". With Grove gone, these guys don't have a clue anymore...
The P4 is a new core actually, its the first new core since the PPro. Thats the reason why its slower right now really, Intel always has this problem with its new cores at first. The Pentium was slower at first, and so was the PPro.
Much like those, give the P4 some time. As the clockrates go up and SSE2 enabled software comes out, it will start to look better.
Actually, The Register did some SSE2 enabled benchmarks, and the P4 was rather impressive in them.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/c ont ent/3/14922.html
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I think Dr. Tom is biased against BAD HARDWARE, not necessarily Intel. You should have read him some time ago, he was always endorsing the P3/Celeron, until AMD just simply came out with a better product.
And any objective reviewer would have to conclude, that unless you need SMP, AMD's top processor is better than Intel's top processor. And Intel's top processor IS NOT the P4, it's the 1 GHz P3...
I hadn't owned an AMD based machine (since my original `286, circa 1990) until I recently replaced my P3 with a Duron 700. And I'm very happy with it and plan to replace my Duron with a 1-1.2 GHz Thunderbird Athlon. Not a P4.
Keep in mind, these benchmarks are RAMBUS based P4's going up against PC133 SDRAM Athlons... And the Athlons win. When the DDR based Athlon system is available, the gap will WIDEN.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
First, a disclaimer: I never intend on buying this revision of the P4 - too expensive, not enough performance, etc., etc.. My next computer is probably going to be a dual-processor T-Bird/Duron.
:)
Now, on to the meat.
-It's slower clock for clock than a P3 or an Athlon... In fact, a 1.2 GHz Athlon is probably a bit faster than the 1.4 GHz P4.
Read the article. A 1.2 GHz Athlon IS faster than a 1.4GHz P4.
-You are stuck with RAMBUS and the buggy Intel RAMBUS chipsets.
So far, Intel's RAMBUS chipset are only buggy when you use SDRAM with them.
after all, hasn't every Intel chip since the 8088 out performed the prevtious generation at the same clock?
Quite the opposite - in most cases, Intel's newest CPU architecture doesn't perform as well as what it replaces - at least for a while, until the compilers have been modified.
and probably can end up at higher clock rates than the Thunderbird Athlon
Intel engineers, and most people who understand these things, feel that the P4 should be able to ramp up to somewhere in between 7-10GHz, given appropriate die shrinks.
But the P4 is like a school bus racing against a Porsche, it's got to have a much bigger engine running at a much higher RPM to equal the speed.
You've got it backwards - in this analogy, the P4 is the small engine that can rev to extremely high RPMs(incidentally, Formula-1 racers can only go so fast because the engines can take extremely high RPMs - for a given size of engine, the only way to get more horsepower[at a certain point] is to increase RPMs). The T-Bird/Durons are the ones that have engine size(high IPC), but can't rev high. P4's have small engines(low IPC), but can rev to extremely high RPMs.
the P4 can't do SMP yet, and likely won't be able to before the Thunderbird Athlon (and the upcoming new core) can.
The P4 won't be able to do SMP(as far as Intel is concerned) until it has been switched to the next socket format.
The P4, like the Celeron, would have to run considerably FASTER than 900 Mhz to equal a 900 Mhz Athlon.
That's exactly the point. Intel will be able to get massive MHz out of this core, and it'll leave Athlons in the dust(unfortunatly). Athlons will only be able to clock so high, and then that's it. They won't get any faster, without staying an Athlon. The P4 will increase its clock rate very quickly - and with that, you'll get a lot of performance. Sure, on a clock-for-clock basis, the Athlon can do more, but if the P4 has twice, even three times the clock rate, it'll be faster. That's what Intel plans on doing.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
The FPU in the P4 is there for x86 compatability. Intel is betting that software developers will use some of the P4's 144 new instructions to accomplish floating point operations. The new instructions, if used properly, could realize significant speed increases.
Further, as was mentioned earlier, Intel has always released new generations of CPUs that didn't exactly take the benchmark world by storm. Wait 'till software emerges that takes advantage of what the P4 has to offer. Then you can try to complain.
Didn't anyone read what Paul DeMone had to say? Or Ace's review of the P4?
Now, the chips might have seemed faster than their predecessors, but I'm betting you only bought them after a lot of code had been re-compiled. The Pentium Pro was slower, clock-for-clock, then the Pentium. It ran 16-bit code REALLY slowly, compared to Pentiums(which is why PPros never really entered the home-PC market).
Actually, for the older Intel chips (8086 to 80486), he's definitely correct. I had an old x86 assmebly manual at one point that listed instruction latencies in clock cycles for each of these processors - the latencies on the old chips weren't funny.
As far as I can tell, what happened was the newer chips had more transistors to play with, and so could implement more efficient (but bigger) functional units for operations. This would be especially noticeable for things like multiplication (software vs. shift-and-add vs. other methods).
As for the late end of that spectrum... The 486, if I recall correctly, was the first x86 chip to support pipelining. This made a *huge* difference, as was probably one of the driving factors behind the huge increase in clock speed that occurred with that chip (though linewidth shrinks would have helped). Effective latency for a lot of instructions went down to 1 clock, and clock period went down to the delay of one pipeline stage.
The Pentium introduced superscaling - a badly implemented dual-issue pipe, but a dual-issue pipe nonetheless. Code with instructions in the right order would execute up to twice as fast as in an equivalently-clocked 486 (though ordering it was difficult and annoying, due to many restrictions).
The Pentium Pro had a much better superscaling architecture - four pipelines, for handling different types of micro-op, and far fewer restrictions on what could be issued at the same time. It also broke CISC instructions into RISC-ian primitives for execution, which made superscaling much easier. While there wouldn't be a quantum leap in performance over the Pentium, it should have gotten much closer to the theoretical factor-of-two-over-486 than the Pentium did on most code (even optimized code).
The Pentium MMX and the Pentium Pro were two divergent forks off of the Pentium - not successors to each other. The Pentium MMX used the old Pentium core with a larger cache and SIMD integer instructions. Not terribly noteworthy (though the cache definitely helped).
The Pentium II was basically a P-Pro with the SIMD instructions and a larger cache. More of an incremental polishing over the P-Pro than anything else.
Ditto the Pentium III, though the SIMD instructions it added were actually extremely useful (sped up graphics drivers that used software transformation by about 25% on average, if I remember Tom's benchmarks).
So, I can't find fault with any of the changes Intel made. The 32 vs. 16-bit thing was IMO a _good_ tradeoff, as it didn't sacrifice new performance for legacy support.
No idea how good the P4 architecture is; I only have detailed specs on the ones listed above. The trace cache is a good idea, though.