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The Pentium IV Dissected
An AC pointed sent us this: "In this extremely well written and technical article, the author points out the various mistakes that Intel made with the production of the Pentium IV, the fact that Intel and other manufacturers have been misleading customers about the performance of the Pentium IV, and the amount of work that will be pushed onto software developers backs to get a piece of software to run at a reasonable speed." Beginning section readable by anybody; by the end you need to know a little more assembly language than is healthy for anyone, but excellent overall. For a Cliff's Notes version of the above, try this NYTimes article discussing the chip in non-technical terms. My guess is that most computer buyers will continue to compare only clock speeds, however.
The author is Darek Mihocka, "President and Founder, Emulators Inc." according to the article. Their main product is a Mac emulator for the PC. The corp shares his ego: "Our Macintosh and Atari emulators are simply the fastest on the planet. Period." Slashdot featured another of his rants earlier this year. That said, the reason SoftMac is fastest is because it's written in assembly (and even some machine code!). When it comes to code execution speed, he knows what he's talking about.
As for the P4, read the article closely. He realizes Intel is going for a brute-force, high-clock chip (compares to RISC). He admits it performs faster for some tasks, just far less efficiently. He just thinks Intel should have concentrated on better design (like AMD) instead of getting the big marketing win: a new chip with a huge clock speed. What's the point? Don't spend the big money on the P4 now since AMD has better design and will scale better beyond 1.5GHz
AMD is supposed to have a SMP chipset for the Socket A proocessors out pretty soon. Then it is up to the motherboard vendors to ship it. Once AMD has broken Intel's monopoly on dual processor systems, it should force Intel to be more price competitive with the PIII Xeon, for example. So why be so down on AMD, if it wasn't from them, your PIII SMP box would have been a lot more expensive.
first, you're comparing a 1.5 ghz Pentium 4 with rambus ram against a 1.2 ghz athlon thunderbird with sdr sdram when most 1.2 ghz athlons would probably be paired with ddr sdram.
Incorrect. There is no Athlon DDR moterboard released yet, but RDR (and SDR, obviously) motherboards are plentiful. We compare what's available, not vaporware.
also, did you notice that the pentium 4 machine had a top of the line hard drive (ibm deskstar 75gxp) and video card (geforce2gts) whereas the amd machines used an older ibm hard drive and a diamond stealth 3d pci(WTF?!!?) on the ddr machine and a western digital hd + nvidia tnt2 m64 on the sdr machine?
All of this is irrelevant for SPEC, which is a CPU only benchmark.
or how about the fact that all the tests were done with an intel compiler????
Well, where's AMD's compiler then? The benchmarks are compiled with the vendor's compiler of choice. WHat the results mean is that with the best available compiler, the P4 performs much better than Athlon. With the average compile, this might not be the case, but anybody who is the least bit performance conscious is going to recompile everything.
Then there's the system prices, I have no idea where you got these prices, but assuming all 3 systems use the same components except cpu+mb+ram, the prices would probably look like:
The CPU prices are irrelevant; people buy systems, not CPU's. You can buy a P4 Gateway system for $2000. I have never seen a namebrand 1.2 GHz Athlon system for less than $1500 (though I haven't been shopping for them).
so based on these figures, the p4 is OVERPRICED!
Compared to Alpha (less than 10% more performance, at quadruple the price)?
I think a lot of people need to take a chill pill. The guy's not saying Intel sucks, period. He's saying that the P4, in its present form, is not a good value for your money. That's it. That's all he's saying.
He didn't say that the overall architecture is bad. He didn't say that the P4 will lead to bad designs in the future. He said that some of the choices for the present P4 configuration are bad and that people would be better served by spending their money elsewhere. If people buy Intel chips no matter what the actual price to value ratio is, then Intel has won and the consumer has lost.
The author gives very good explanations of the limitations of the present incarnation of the P4. He also explains what he thinks needs to be fixed. With all those fixes, the P4, in a few years, will likely be a really good chip. The design isn't beyond repair, it's just flawed.
I remember the 486SX clearly - and how my father was duped by the hype. The same thing's happening here. Also, if Intel really believed the P4 was its best chip, why are the colored guys on TV hyping the P3 like there's no tomorrow? (No, that's not a racist remark. If you've seen the ad, you know what I mean.)
The bigger problem is that, even though you can get around the limitations of the P4 chip by writing a really smart compiler, the P3's and below will be around for years, so you won't necessarily be using the optimization settings in generic code. You'll likely see 'Word 2005 for the P4' and 'Word 2005 for the P3 and below', although there's nothing preventing them from being on the same DVD and the installer choosing the right version.
If you can get past some of the strong language in the article (Intel engineers are stupid; boycott Intel; etc.) you can see that he's not anti-Intel per se. He's anti-Intel's marketing guys, who seem to be running the company at the moment. The decisions made in the present P4 incarnation have to be marketing's - no other explanation holds water. You can't design the next generation chip and then deliberateley cripple it. That's like having a son and then cutting off his foot to see how he gets along in the real world. I doubt engineers had much to say in the present P4 configuration.
The author provides pretty convincing proof that the best value for your money is an Athlon system, right now. I haven't seen anyone here able to refute that statement. It's the same conclusion that a couple of other people have reached. From all I've read over the past few months, I have to agree.
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Another technical flaw in the article is the assertation that the processor in the original IBM PC was the 8086. This is incorrect. I've actually got an original IBM PC sitting in my basement, and it definitely has an 8088 in it. For that matter, even the IBM XT had an 8088 in it. Some early IBM PC clones and other "MS-DOS but not quite compatible" machines like the Zenith Z100 used the 8086, but IBM didn't use the 8086 until later machines like the IBM PC convertable (early attempt at a laptop) or the PS/2 Model 25 and Model 30. The reason that IBM picked the 8088 is that its pinout was designed to be more closely compatible with the Z80, which was the CPU used in IBM's early engineering prototypes for the IBM PC. Those early designs were basically formulaic 8-bit CP/M machines.
It is also worth noting that to a certain extent, history is repeating itself. The Zilog Z80 was itself a clone of the Intel 8080. By the late 70's, Zilog, which was originally an upstart clone chip vendor, had overtaken Intel by building a better and cheaper product. Intel's follow-on to the Z80, the 8085, much like the P4 today was largely a disappointment. Intel was forced to move to 16 bit with the 8086 (and the 'ginsu' 8088) in order to grab back the market they had lost to Zilog. Intel was successful mainly because they succeded in selling the 8088 to IBM, which bailed them out. Zilog's 16 bit processor the Z8000 was a failure because it was too ambitious, and not at all compatible with their 8 bit designs, despite the fact that many people thought it was superior to Intel's 16 bit chips which were largely just warmed over 8 bit designs with larger registers.
It remains to be seen how things will sort out now. For all intents and purposes, Intel's P3 and P4 look to be beaten technically and price/performance wise by AMD. Intel appears to be largely betting on the IA64 to win back the market, but unlike the 8 bit -> 16 bit transition, it is Intel who is betting on a totally new and mostly incompatible architecture for 64 bits rather than AMD, who appears to be charting a much more conservative extension of the basic x86 architecture to 64 bits. If AMD gets software support for their 64 bit architecture before Intel does, which may happen because it is less of a jump, or AMD is able to push 64 bit processors into lower pricepoint boxes quicker, which also seems doable, Intel could be in trouble. One other big thing will be whether the AMD architecture runs existing 32 bit x86 code faster than the Intel IA64 processors do. Since many people will be largely dependant on legacy applications, if AMD can offer the promise of 64 bit applications in the future and better performance for existing 32 bit apps, then Intel will really be hurting.
It may seem obvious to some, but thats exactly the point. Who cares if it's shoddily produced and a poor performer, it's got two very important things going for it.
1. It's got the fastest clock speeds out there.
2. It's got the Intel (tm) brand name.
The average computer user doesn't have a clue that it performs slower than a slower clocked AMD chip. They see the higher number, and assume that means it's better. Who's AMD? They don't have all those nice commercials with Blue Man Group and all, and the nice logo. Selling chips isn't really about technology as much as it is about marketing. For example, Cyrixs PR266/PR300/etc - they didn't actually run at 300mhz but they said that they performed equal to around a 300mhz processor, so they sold them as "300"'s, figuring consumers would assume that means 300mhz. That was all bs - Cyrix just couldn't keep their clockspeeds rising at the same rate as Intel, and realized that they could take advantage of the average consumers ignorance. Intel seems to be banking on that same ignorance today; I think this line sums it all up the best:
What it boils down to is this - just like at Microsoft and just like at Apple, the marketing scumbags at Intel have prevailed and pushed sound engineering aside.
We can't allow Intel to charge a premium for poorly performing chips, nor can we allow them to lie about their ability. The only solution is to boycott the P4 and all Intel products. Buy AMD, you'll be happy you did (I am).
- tred
People keep saying that the P4 is a "different kind of beast" that is designed for pure clock speed. They argue that the P4 will attain such a high clock-speed, the inefficient architecture will not matter. The problem is, that its not certain whether the P4's clock advantage will hold. According to Intel's road map, they should have a 2GHz P4 out by the end of 2001. According to AMD's, the Athlon should be at 1.7 GHz by then. Quote from this Sharky Extreme article
"AMD is hoping that the re-worked core will bring the Athlon to at least 1.7GHz by the second half of 2001. By this time the 1.2GHz Athlon CPU on 266MHz front side bus will occupy the lowest rung on AMD's performance ladder. Once the Palomino runs out of headroom, the next horse will escape from the barn."
If the road-maps of both companies can be followed, then Intel has a serious mess on its hands.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Incorrect. There is no Athlon DDR moterboard released yet, but RDR (and SDR, obviously) motherboards are plentiful. We compare what's available, not vaporware.
RDRAM motherboards for the P4 are not "plentiful" The only ones that exist are the intel boards and the asus, two motherboards does not count as being plentiful.
And DDR motherboards are not "vaporware." Vaporware products are products that do not exist. DDR systems are available from places like Micron.
Well, where's AMD's compiler then? The benchmarks are compiled with the vendor's compiler of choice. WHat the results mean is that with the best available compiler, the P4 performs much better than Athlon. With the average compile, this might not be the case, but anybody who is the least bit performance conscious is going to recompile everything.
The fact that the benchmarks were done with an intel compiler shows that the results are biased toward one vendor. What if the test was done with gcc? how would the results turn out then? And as for recompiling everything to get the most performance, how are we going to get the source code to closed-source programs?
The CPU prices are irrelevant; people buy systems, not CPU's. You can buy a P4 Gateway system for $2000. I have never seen a namebrand 1.2 GHz Athlon system for less than $1500 (though I haven't been shopping for them).
of course the cpu prices are relevant, assuming 2 systems have the same monitor/case/video card/hard drive, everything else comes down to cpu+ram+mb prices. If a p4 system can be built for $2000, then the same system can be built for a little ore than $1000 with athlon/sdr ram. Places like gateway just happens to be selling their athlon 1.2 ghz systems for more than they're worth to make more profit whereas they probably are barely making a profit with that 1.4 ghz p4 for $2000.
Zetetic
Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.
Elench
A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.
That is excatly what people said about the Pentium Pro when it came out and ran 16-bit code slower than the Pentium. And look what happend. The P6 arch proved to be extremly scalable, extensible, and yes, profitable. At this early point, I see no reason to assume that PentiumIV can't repeat this.
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Secondly, I thought the entire point of the Pentium IV is that it is focused on different areas to the PIII and others. Specifically, it is designed for a media rich environment, and was designed with the future in mind. I would guess (bear in mind, I don't have any credentials) that we won't see the best of the PIV until a year or two down the line, when compilers are properly optimised for it and people start programming with its architecture in mind. Until then, I fear we are making unfair comparisons. Just my guess!
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
Lets say Pentium 4 is the biggest blunder Intel made. What would happen next? I for one would think it would be the final nail on the coffin for 32 bit chips from Intel. And yes, Intel wont die :) They are far too huge to die. But their 32 bit plan to extend the life of the Pentium XX chip would have ended. And a very welcome end too. Once that happens, I would feel that they would focus more on their 64 bit architechture (IA64). The 64 bit architecture is a plan that would bear fruit in a significently longer time than Pentium IV would. But it would defintaly be better for consumers, competitors (AMD) and the likes. Intel has the power to eridcate 32bitness from the desktop and replace it with a pure 64 bit machine. Lets hope the Pentium IV really dies :)
Trust the source!
Seems to be an eternal issue with Intel : people claim their newest CPU is crap, buy it anyway and after several months just say to anybody they meet it is the best ever. I personnally believe the P4 might have some design flaws but it also might be interesting in specific applications. I especially think that Intel has not (co-)developped Xscale for nuts and this is from where the actual future might come.
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
The fact that the benchmarks were done with an intel compiler shows that the results are biased toward one vendor. What if the test was done with gcc? how would the results turn out then? And as for recompiling everything to get the most performance, how are we going to get the source code to closed-source programs?
That's not the point. The point is, using the Intel compiler on a P4 is faster than using ANY compiler with the Athlon. Thus, if you wanted a system with the fastest possible performance, you would use the combination of the P4 processor and the Intel compiler. The P4 with GCC, or an Athlon, would be an inferior choice (for performance).
of course the cpu prices are relevant, assuming 2 systems have the same monitor/case/video card/hard drive, everything else comes down to cpu+ram+mb prices. If a p4 system can be built for $2000, then the same system can be built for a little ore than $1000 with athlon/sdr ram. Places like gateway just happens to be selling their athlon 1.2 ghz systems for more than they're worth to make more profit whereas they probably are barely making a profit with that 1.4 ghz p4 for $2000.
Typically, only complete system prices are compared. It may be true that a P4 is double the price of an Athlon, but that's comparing the CPU itself. But the CPU is a small part of the system cost, so a computer using Athlon costs more than half for a comparably equipped system. To compare CPU prices is to magnify their actual effect.
Comparing CPU prices is to repeat Transmeta's fallacy (who claimed that a CPU with half the power consumption would speed up battery life of the system, when in fact, the CPU was not even the main power hog in a system)
He put up a good facade, but in reality his article wasn't a decent analysis -- it did have its good points, but there was so much BS in there that it was hardly worth the effort.
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
And imaging processing in publishing and the music and video industries seem to be doing just fine.
I'd guess you have never tried to push a video clip through a Sorensen CODEC.
a cpu that costs over $1000 in a $2000 system is not a small portion of the system price dammit.
Zetetic
Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.
Elench
A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.
I have a tendancy to consider the x86 line to be similar to a bike as an analogy. What would you have: a bike with training wheels to a bike without, to one with 6 gears, 12, 18, a motor, a motorcycle, a bike with afterburners, and finally now a bike with warp engines. It does get faster, yes, but it's *still* a bike. Or you can get a car. =)
In this extremely well written and technical article...
Yeah, right. Ok, lets address stuff in order:
1. Prime95. Prime95 right now is optimized for current processors. The author received a Pentium 4 system a couple weeks ago, and is rewriting his code right now. When the reoptimization is completed, expect a factor of two improvement.
2. Small L1 cache. The author seems to believe that a larger L1 cache is always good. What he fails to address is that larger caches are inherently slower, and going from a 3 cycle 16KB cache to a 2 cycle 8KB cache improves performance, given a fast L2 cache.
3. No L3 cache. Sure this would have been nice -- but also expensive. Given the intelligence of the i850 chipset (including memory look-ahead reads) and the bandwidth of RDRAM, it isn't really necessary.
4. Instruction decode. Hello? Anyone home? At most 1% of instructions will have to be decoded. That's the point of the trace cache. And yes, Virginia, that cache is large enough.
5. Slow rotates and shifts. That's the price you have to pay if you want a fast clock. Variable shifts are algorithmically expensive (in fact, within a factor of log log N of multiplies, but that's a different matter).
6. Etc. I could go on point by point, but the pattern remains. The author clearly doesn't understand the tradeoffs necessary when designing processors, and looks at one side without considering what it is being traded for.
My opinion is that the Pentium 4 is a very well designed processor. Not only did the designers build a processor which can be run at high speeds, they allowed themselves room to add improvements later without requiring a lengthy redesign of the entire processor. High clock speeds mean that signal flight time is a problem? That's why there are two cycles dedicated to moving data across the processor. Got extra silicon? Double the number of SSE units to allow SSE instructions to complete in half the time. Decide that you want an L3 cache? Throw one on.
Sure the Pentium 4 doesn't perform great on code not optimized for it. But neither did the 486, the Pentium, or the Pentium Pro. And which would you prefer to have right now, a 250MHz 386, or a 1GHz Pentium III?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
However, that's not the whole story. Intel has always introduced new chips, tweaked them, put production in gear, lowered the cost, then inundated the public with high quality, high performance, low cost processors. I doubt the P4 will be much difference. With the process change (to 0.13 micron I believe) for the P4 comes, combined with the normal bug fixes, combined with better memory support (such as DDR SDRAM), combined with much higher clock speeds (we're talking over 2 GHz), combined with major production volumes and lower prices, the result will be a screaming fast processor that will be hard to beat. The P4's main advantage (and essentially it's entire raison d'etre) is that it has a whopping 20 stage pipeline. That means one thing, you can shove gigahertz down it's throat like you can't do to any other processor. Sure the P4 may not be as "tight" and efficient as some of the other processors out now (which is why it's foolish to be an early adopter), but what it lacks in effectiveness it will eventually make up for in raw cycles. Right now (with all of the P4's flaws, including those that can be fixed, mind you) the P4 runs at maybe 80% of what the idealized speed of a PIII or Athlon would be at the same clock speed, but they expect the P4 to hit 2GHz by Q3 '01 which means you need around a 1.6 GHz proc. of the old style to keep up with it. And this assumes that some of the weak points of the P4 (most importantly, the horrendous memory system forced on it by the Rambus contract) remain, which won't be the case.
I'm not saying the P4 will blow everything out of the water next year (it won't), but it will be fully mature and it will be leading the pack and will be very difficult to compete with.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1. Prime95. Prime95 right now is optimized for current processors. The author received a Pentium 4 system a couple weeks ago, and is rewriting his code right now. When the reoptimization is completed, expect a factor of two improvement.
I'd contend that it's a fair comparison with what AMD had to put up with -- FPU benchmarks intended for two FPU pipeline chips on a three FPU pipeline system (Athlon). Were benchmarks rewritten right away? No.
I have a 1.6GHz P4 computer system (prerelease, not overclocked) and a IA64 system here at work, and as *Tom's Hardware Guide* clearly points out here in their *latest* comparison:
That's meaning that the P4 1.5 ran at 1.7+GHz without issue while the 1.2GHz Athalon only could reach 1.466GHz.
And *most importantly* the P4 is at the beginning of their production run, while AMD is straining their current clock speeds. 1.8 and 2.0GHz P4s will be out pre-fab within months, and AMD is stressing their line to do 1.2.
See for yourself
So *please* don't flame Intel needlessly unless you have hard evidence.
As well the IA64 architecture is *awesome*. 128 64-bit general purpose registers, an additional 128 64-bit floating point registers, and much much more. The coding that I am doing runs like 10x faster on a 666MHz IA64 than it does on a 800MHz PIII (literally!).
I don't mean to flame, but this type of I-am-going-to-spread-biased-misinformation-becaus
According to our own software, a 1.5 GHz P4 clocks in at just over a 1.1 GHz PIII. Not too bad in absolute terms, though there's no doubt the TBird kills it in price/performance, especially when the whole system price (including RAM) is considered. Still, I'm not ashamed to have one on my desk, I just don't want to be the one paying for it. Nothing new there - the Pentium Pro sucked at 16 bit software and cost far more, but it (and the P6 core) were still very successful.
The P4 has two decent advantages - RAM bandwidth (for those who need it), and SSE2, which is finally really useful to me. I can double and sometimes even triple the performance of all my MMX code, and that easily outstrips the Athlon. This won't apply to most code, true, but it sure makes a difference to my software.
However, 95% of all my customers don't use P4s, or even Athlons - they use dual PIIIs. 2 x 900 MHz PIII chips beats any P4 or Athlon system comfortably, and is still doesn't quite break the bank :-) This, and only this, is what has kept my customer base loyal to Intel while the Athlon has been storming the castle.
Biggest flaw in the P4? No SMP! I still can't believe it. Their one big advantage over AMD in the higher end systems, the one they've been pushing to all their workstation customers, and the P4 WILL NOT DO IT. And now, of course, when AMD are finally on the verge of releasing their SMP chipset (can it be true?), Intel neatly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, letting AMD through the gate, and locking themselves outside...
Of course, there's still the Foster, AKA P4 Xeon. It will do dual, quad and 8-way systems, and this promises to be the ultimate system for my software (I use a dual Foster too, and it is nice, no question). But at what price? It's bad enough my customers having to mortgage their homes for 1 GB or 2 GB of Rambus RAM, but to have to pay Xeon-level prices for a dual system as well is going to drive them into the welcoming arms of a waiting DDR dual Athlon.
Guess which system I'll be buying next for myself.
Namarrgon
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
A good editor would have removed the BOYCOTT ALL INTEL stuff or at least moved it down a bit. But I feel for the author here: he paid $4000 for a system which isn't as good as a (much) cheaper Athlon.
Crusoe watchers take note: there's a nice little summary of the Crusoe's performance and why he's very impressed with that CPU's architecture. That summary alone is worth reading.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
I'm stuck in an endless loop trying to parse that last sentence. I think it makes sense though. Now if only I can break out of it by lunchtime...
Bleh!
We can look at this with SPEC2000.
1.5 GHz Pentium 4:
SpecINT2000: 536
SpecINT2000: 558
System price: $2,000
833 MHz Alpha 21264:
SpecINT2000: 544
SpecFP2000: 658
System price: $8,000 (???)
1,2 GHz Athlon:
SpecFP2000: 350
SpecINT2000: 458
System price: $1,500
So what is the FACTUAL basis that The Pentium 4 is slow and/or overpriced?
The truism that NYT is the standard bearer for print media still holds, I believe, so consider this from the article linked in the blurb:
Case in point that the open-source movement hasn't gone far enough in educating the reporters. Sure, blather technobabble all you want at them, and they'll glaze as surely as I have today here at work. But to get them to preach your stuff, you've got to make them understand that Windows isn't the only solution out there.
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-- Geof F. Morris
Go back and actually read the article. Intel cut parts of the silicon that would actually improve performance (second FPU), however left in silicon that is never used (extra double speed ALU) because of bottlenecks caused by cuts earlier in the pipeline (single instruction decoder and low throughput trace cache). If you can get past the author's bone against Intel on the first half of the article, he does make very valid points.
It is needed for work and for play:
At work:
- To route PCBs, simulate heat dissipation and other modeling applications (not only nuclear explosions)
- To run 3D CADs (ProEngineer), real-time photorealistic renderers (Alias)
- To process images in publishing industry, sounds and videos in entertainment
- To run SSL-enabled Web servers
At home:- Play highly compressed audio and video streams
- Encode video and audio
- Play games
There are more uses for high performance, but that gives the idea.I use to remember times where Alpha was more than 3 times faster than anything Intel would build.
They also had the highest clock speed (150Mhz vs. 66Mhz for Intel).
But the situation has changed!
The following figures are Spec95_int and Spec95_fp
AMD Althon/650Mhz ---> 29.4 - 22.4
Alpha 21264/667Mhz ----> 32.1 - 49.0
So at the same clock speed, Athlon is as fast as Alpha whereas it is half the speed for floating operations.
But this is at the same speed. Athlon reaches way higher frequencies so the gap is very small in fp and Alpha is beaten in int. And the price difference is massive.
I have got an Alpha server, a Dual ultra-sparc workstation and a whole bunch of PCs, believe me, the speed is about the same for 1/10th of the price.
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
yeah, I would say so too, especially considering the P4 isnt THAT bad of a chip. It may not have the FPU muscle of the tbird, but if a program is optimized correctly for SSE2, then it's actually a quite powerful chip. I think intel's biggest mistake recently was adopting rambus, which is what caused a lot of the mess with various chipsets for the CuMine. I wouldn't say that the P4 is the best chip ever, because it has it'd problems, but it's an ok design, and by Q2 2001, we should see some nice ~2 Ghz chips rolling out, while AMD is stuck ~1.5 most likely. I don't think the P4's are worth the money at the moment, but they should be an ok buy around august 2001. I for one, am going to buy a dual tbird 1.2 ghz asap....
Shit adds up at the bottom...
In my mind, this is indeed a very significant flaw of the P4 that this article overlooks. After running a dual Intel Celeron SMP box for several years now, I'm not really excited about upgrading to an expensive uniprocessor P4. However, if AMD releases their SMP chipset, I would be very excited to upgrade to dual Athlons.
Hey!! M$ Does suck.
It won't support my hardware. Thats why it sucks.
It won't support my CPU either. Dunno why M$ doesn't support Sparc. But THEY SUCK. The wintel P4 Sucks too.
M$ stock dropped in 1/2 since last year. If you are a MCSE, you will be broke.
well that was a very very good read. Take it with a very very small ammount of salt. I mean he did forget to mention a huge problem with the P4.
I mean how bad are things getting at Intel ? ? ?
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
Buying products from everyone doesn't accomplish this. If you buy both Sega's and Sony's systems, both companies get what they want: your money. Sega has no reason to improve its products because you already bought one; and Sony has also no reason to improve because you also bought one of theirs as well. If consumers don't discriminate between quality and non-quality goods (or cheap and non-cheap goods), then no competitive situation exists.
So if you really want to see forward progress, don't support both. Support whichever one is putting out the product you believe is most worthy of success. If you like Sega's system better, buy it; now you're giving Sony an incentive to make its system more attractive to you by being more like Sega -- which is good for you! And if you like Sony's better, buy it and give Sega to do business like Sony.
Of course, competition also requires consumers not to be very brand loyal. A lot of die-hard Linux or Windows users would be reluctant to switch operating systems even if they'd be happier with the other one. So, there's no harm in changing your "loyalty" and finding a new "adversary" (as you put it) to go up against. In an ideal world, people wouldn't have any consumer loyalty at all -- they'd always vote with their money and buy whatever product is the best product available.
Yu Suzuki
Yu Suzuki
Deamcast. It's thinking.
No the PIV is not a great chip. Hell, it's not even a good chip. But once AMD got onto the scene, it looked like we were itching and scratching to find a way to go against the "bigger company" (Intel, Microsoft, and now RedHat notwithstanding). In 6 months, we'll have a whole new "adversary" to rile up the tech community.
Enough is enough. Yes, the PIV has flaws. Every chip has flaws. You pay extra to get just a smidgen more performance, but that's why AMD is referred to as the "price/performance leader".
However, if we don't root for Intel, and AMD suddenly takes over, who won't put their money down that we will go against AMD? I say support both (I use the same mentality in buying a Sega Dreamcast/PS2; boxed distros of Linux and Windows 2000). Without competition on both sides, even "the Man's", there will be no forward progress.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
If I'm not mistaken, the 8086 and 8088 were both manufactured in 40 pin ceramic (and later plastic) DIP packages. There was no reduction in pin count but rather in internal drivers.
Although I'm sure the author knows a lot about processors, he is so obviously biased against Intel (and towards AMD) that getting any information from this article is like learning about Linux from Microsoft
What this guy needs is a good editor, and perhaps a few chill pills...