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Pentium IV study
InQuest has published a study of the Pentium IV. It
found that because of the P4's cache design, it uses 4 times the memory
bandwith a PIII does on random access data benchmarks. Even on benchmarks which
benefit from the larger cache-line size, the P4 shows no benefit due to its
higher clock rate. Furthermore, the 1.5GHz P4's thermal diode throttles the
part to effectively 750Mhz as soon as power consumption exceeds 54.7W. Without
this limitation, a P4's maximum consumption would be 72.9 watts, similar to a
1.33 GHz Athlon's 73 watts.
god!
that's got to hurt.
so that's why the p4 performs so badly.
it's surprising it took this long to realize, that it's so cache hungry for no gain. no wonder intel has gotten itself in the unfortunate position of needing rambus.
those sdram scores will be rather embarrassing.
on another note, it's odd to be reading the article, then come here to slashdot and find it's just been posted.
so, how is intel going to do this quarter? they report april 17.
"Oh."
"It has 1024 mb of RAM!!
"So .. what are you doing with it then?"
"Umm, surfing the Internet. And playing games."
Ha ha.
- A.P.
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Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Oh, but I do appreciate thermal management in my buying decisions. That's why I have a G3 upgrade card in my PowerMac :) cute little (no fan) heatsink on it, much smaller and tidier than the huge (no fan) heatsink on the old 604e :)
I realize this is dramatically off topic, but in the early days of portable transistor radios (early '60s - ancient history), one measure of the quality of the radio was the number of transistors used. This lasted exactly as long as it took for some sly company to start mounting dead transistors in the radio (not even bothering to connect them to the rest of the circuits), just so they could up the transistor count and therefore be counted as a "higher quality" radio.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
You guys seem to like throwing out numbers. Could you do us all a favor and give us some links or at least explain where you managed to come by these numbers?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Yes, the P4 has WAY more memory bandwidth. But if you read the article, you'd see that because of the much longer cache lines (among other things, I'm sure), the memory bandwidth is being used FAR less efficiently. So that additional bandwidth is just getting completely wasted. In applications that use large chunks from system RAM, they can benefit from the longer cache lines, but if an application does quick jumping around in memory, the longer cache lines end up being a liability.
Intel needs to do some severe retooling of the P4 before it's really ready for the market. Until then, I have a feeling AMD's market will be doing nothing but growing. I know if I were buying a new box right now, I'd be going AMD.
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Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
And of course having to lug around a pound of copper pretty much eliminates the P4 as a candidate for LAN parties...
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
A popular local supplier (in Calgary, Canada) doesn't even stock any P4 parts. They could probably order one in for you... but obviously if you can't guarantee enough volume you won't stock P4s. There are massive price cuts already on the way for the P4, and the platform will be totally revamped in the coming months (copper, die shrink, form/pin layout change, possibly support for DDR), which means stocking the P4 is a money losing proposition.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
And what do you mean you need a good heat sink? Doesn't the P4 already come with a 1 pound hunk of copper? What more do you need?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Not nearly as much as far as I can tell. Then again it doesn't need as much.
To run IA64 code you need a IA64 OS. To run 64 bit AMD code you need a minor change to the context switching code (you need to save 64 bits of data per GPR, and twice as many GPRs). Of corse you need more OS support for a 64 bit address space.
To produce good code for the IA64 you need some extremely advanced compiler technology. Unrolling loops isn't enough, you have to modulo schedule them. Good AMD64 code is hardly different from normal x86 code.
Now there are IA64 OSes, and at least a compiler or two. Intel did get something for their hype machine efforts, and for having some machines around for people to test on. I don't think the AMD 64 bit stuff is as far along, but it won't take long to catch up.
Besides a lot of the IA64 mind share is folks calling it the "iTanic", AMD may not want that kind of mind share :-)
I don't think anything in the IA64 is as useful as SMT (as seen in the next gen Alpha, and rumored to be in the next IBM Power CPU). Pretty much everything in the IA64 has been seen before BTW. I do admit it is more innovative then the 64 bit AMD CPU though, but not all innovations are worth the price of buy in...
Of corse two years ago I felt differently about the IA64 (and I have a stack of IA64 docs to show for it), and in two years I may change my mind again...
If you read Tom's Hardware fairly regularly you should know that the Pentium IV is not up to snuff yet. I think that, just like the Pentium Pro, the Pentium IV is just the first iteration of what will eventually be a great CPU.
Of course, I'm really rooting for AMD here, they're pushing Intel to its limits and the consumer is benefitting.
pw:secret
You are comparing AMD's current products to Intel's future/unreleased/imaginary products. Let's compare apples to apples, shall we? Currently AMD beats Intel in both price and performance hands down. Intel will have better CPUs you say? Well, AMD is not going to sit idly either. They will shrink the die to .13 microns, improve the core (Palomino, followed by Thoroughbred), and (guess what?) release Sledgehammer! Yes, *that* Sledgehammer, the first 64-bit x86 CPU. I say the first because it looks like Merced (err, I mean "Itanium" or whatever it's called this week) will never see the light of day. It is what, 3 years late now and still counting....
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Especially since Dell is the only large vendor that still refuses to sell AMD....
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Did anyone else claim otherwise? All the article said was that random access is 4 times as bad on P4.
Nice troll though.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I can answer this question: it won't. Because P4 does not support SMP, and the future incarnations will not add SMP support any time soon. But yeah, if they ever do, the performance would be abyssmal. Especially compared to AMD where each CPU has a *dedicated* 266MHz bus, instead of sharing it with all other CPUs like Intel. Intel will definitely have to fix this. Come SMP boards for Athlons and I doubt that even extreme marketing will be able to save Intel.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Thing is though, the increase you are seeing is due to Rambus memory, not the CPU. And there are *very* few applications where higher bandwidth of Rambus matters. In 99% of applications the, the higher latency of Rambus totally negates any performance gain you might get due to higher bandwidth.
Oh, btw, redo your benchmark taking price/performance into account...
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Uhhm, please pull your head out of your ass and re-read my comment. Specifically I said that the performance increase has absolutely nothing to do with the CPU. It is due solely to the Rambus memory. For that matter, if you could put Rambus memory into an Athlon board, you'd see the same increase. In fact, the Athlon system would be even faster than the P4. And speaking of FPU -- it has been shown to be abyssmal in P4. Even P3 outperforms P4 on FPU!
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
It's too bad these benchmarks are useless, as 99% of applications don't require anywhere near as much bandwidth, and are in fact hurt by Rambus's high latency. The one exception, as you pointed out in your other comment, is scientific computing. Other, more realistic benchmarks showed a different picture. I especially liked the ones where 1GHz P3 beat 1.5GHz P4 :-)
BTW, do you work for Intel?
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
You know it's bad enough that you can't use AMD or Intel in the same motherboard anymore, and I wonder if the hardware companies are happy about that or not, but now it's getting to where upgrading your motherboard with a better CPU is going to be an exercise in futility. I wonder how soon we're going to see motherboard, power supply and case form factors only compatible with certain CPUs from certain companies, not to mention all the overtime work they're going to do to make your current RAM useless.
Anybody want to buy some 5volt DIMMs?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Intel to cut up to 60 per cent off P4 prices
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
It doesn't happen if the system is working properly.
That isn't clear, actually. According to the Intel thermal design guide, all the applications they tested fell below 75% of maximum power dissipation, which is the suggested thermal design point. However, from the list, it isn't clear to me that there aren't common CPU-intensive apps that would rise above that mark and possibly trigger the sensor. Maybe if it was set to trigger just shy of the maximum power setting.
Obviously having a better cooling solution would make it even less likely, but the point of the previous post was not needed it.
The enemies of Democracy are
So, we need to factor in the price of additional heatsinks, fans, and peltier coolers when we do price comparisons.
Yes, and you also need to factor in the 50% drop in clock speed the P4 makes to avoid needing that fan when you do price/performance comparisons.
Though what I really wanted to see was benchmarks demonstrating this effect. As in -- run UT for a while, watch temperature rise, watch framerate drop when temp hits 55 degrees.
The enemies of Democracy are
But eventually the x86 architecture will run out of steam
Okay, I've said this before, I'll say it again, but no more.
x86 was supposed to 'run out of steam' 10 years ago when the RISC revolution started then died. It didn't. RISC lost, CISC won.
But then again, RISC won, because CISC only won by keeping its external form but becoming RISC on the inside. Every x86 chip since the PPro has had a RISC core with an x86 decoder front-end. Thus the limitations of x86 as an ISA have been decoupled from the performance of the chip.
There is no reason for x86 to 'run out of steam'. There is no inherent limitation in the ISA that prevents faster processing. Yes, the decoders are large and complicated, but Intel and AMD have a handle on that. The P4's trace cache is a beautiful example of getting x86 entirely out of the critical path.
Given that, why are both AMD and Intel making 64-bit ISA's instead of sticking with ol' IA-32? Because servers need bigger address spaces for things like terrabyte databases. That's all. The only motivating reason.
AMD won't ever be making IA-64 machines. Why? They don't have a license, and intel sure as hell isn't going to give them one. I suspect this is a major reason why Intel isn't making their own 64-bit extension to x86.
Lastly, while IA-64 is both VLIW and RISC, it does involve new technology not encompased by either term, so the new phrase 'EPIC' is suitable. Not that I think it is a good idea in the first place.
The enemies of Democracy are
The number of registers is being increased to a healthy 16 by AMD. I never said that the ISA shouldn't advance, I said it needn't be scrapped due to inherent limitations. Though the lack of registers can be largely eliminated by having a 1-cycle access l1 d-cache.
The floating point architecture is the same as the rest of the ISA - an illusion provided to the external world, re-arranged into something sane by the decoders. This is why the Athlon's FP performance rocks so much.
Sure, having this baggage isn't _good_, but it isn't bad either, outside of the extra die area it takes up. But what having that baggage does let you do is take advantage of the dearth of x86 software out there. That's the whole reason it's still around.
The enemies of Democracy are
Yabbut, VA Linux is working on new machines using two AMD CPUs and the AMD 760MP chipset. The news has been on several hardware sites and VA employees have been posting to linux-kernel their patches to make the AMD 760 MP work well in Linux.
(snip)
For those who didn't click the link above, let me iterate it here: [why the P4 is a dog]. It's a well-written, accessible technical article that documents the development of x86 generations, and describes why the design choices in the P4 are sub-optimal (and why design choices in the K7 family have been optimal).
It's a pretty factual examination of things. Worth the read -- it might save you from pissing your money away on something that's not any good.
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Intel has a market cap of 24x AMD, actually. INTC has 6.7B outstanding shares; AMD has only 314M.
:-)
But because Intel has more shares outstanding than there are greenbacks in North America, it has essentially devalued its share value:
AMD: basic income of $3.25 per share.
INTC: basic income of $1.57 per share.
Put quite simply, AMD's share is providing a better bang for your buck. AMD's share should, if one were to use Intel as the benchmark, be priced at $150...
Guess I should buy some.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Why would you say Intel is likely to dominate the platform?
Fact: AMD now holds twenty- to thirty-percent marketshare.
Fact: AMD Duron and Athlon processors are now spec'd by all but one mainstream, brand name supplier.
Fact: The latest AMD processors outperform -- and are widely reported as such -- the latest Intel processors.
Fact: AMD K6-2 mobile processors have a 20% marketshare, and AMD K7-family processors are gaining marketshare.
Fact: Intel keeps fucking things up. And I mean *seriously* fucking up. From backing Rambus to failing chipsets to bolloxing up its relationship with their customers... oh, gahd, the list is endless.
So, how do you foresee Intel dominating the platform war? What I foresee is a an ungainly beast of a has-been chip design and manufacturing company, shooting itself in the foot and chopping its own legs off, while an upstart executes cleanly and quickly, soon to overtake it...
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Why would you put a fuse or circuit breaker in a house? Why not just draw less current?
So we just found out how the current PIV sucks up all your memory bandwidth and the solution is to put a 2nd cpu in there? I can just see the benchmarks now, "Worlds fastest while(1) loop!"
By an amazing coincidence, I was just reading this article when this story came up on /.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Actually, one big problem about Pentium 4 systems is the fact you need a completely NEW system case design and a new power supply with a totally new type of motherbord power connector--cheap it isn't!
Pentium III and Athlon systems can still get by with standard ATX cases, provided you have a 300 watt power supply and decent system case cooling.
It'll be a while before Pentium 4 systems become common.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
I built my P4 system into a two-year old generic ATX case, which previously had a 100 MHz Pentium in it. The only thing I needed to change was the power supply (which you likely would need to do if you got an Athlon also, since it has such high power requirements).
:(
If you're using an Intel-brand motheboard for the Pentium 4, sticking it in a regular ATX case ain't going to work.
The problem is that the Intel P4 boards require a special motherboard mount, and the Intel boards also use a new-style power supply connector, too. That's why they're not cheap.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
The P4 is slower running current apps, but if you re-compile and optimize for the P4 it runs much better. Too bad it'll be years before there is enough software optimized for the P4 to make it worth buying, and by that time there will be other CPUs.
I do agree that for current operating systems and applications, they are not written to take advantage of the architecture of the Pentium 4 CPU.
Yet, remember what I said about the Pentium Pro from six years ago: refinements to the CPU core pioneered by the Pentium Pro led to much better improvements in 16-bit app speeds, starting with the Pentium II, then Celeron, then Pentium III. Remember when the Pentium II first came out operating systems such as Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 recognized it as a Pentium Pro CPU.
I expect the second-generation Pentium 4's due this fall to be a bit faster as they will "tweak" the Pentium 4 CPU core for faster performance.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
SSE2 will become popular, because even AMD has licensed it. If you buy an Athlon now, you may accomplish more FPS in 3D games (amazingly enough, the P4 still wins clock-for-clock in Quake III framerates compared w/ the Athlon). If you get a P4 (I'd wait for the new socket version ones, though), you'll have SSE2 support and will most likely get a performance boost in FUTURE apps, when it'll actually press your hardware.
However, unless it's a high-end game, I don't see any real apps coming soon that will truly take advantage of SSE2 (well, maybe Adobe Illustrator and PhotoShop, but who knows when will fully SSE2-supported versions will be available).
Besides, remember that AMD plans to have the third-generation Athlon based on the Palomino core coming this fall. I'm sure AMD will make many improvements in order to keep up with the Pentium 4 in regards to integer and FPU speed.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
I still think it is still too early to pass any judgements on the Pentium 4 CPU.
The reason is simple: we are repeating history in terms of Intel CPU architecture development.
I think many of you remember the Pentium Pro CPU, which came out in 1995. While it was very fast for its day in terms of 32-bit applications, it was a bit poor for 16-bit applications. Yet, the P6 CPU core that the Pentium Pro pioneered became the basis after numerous refinements for the Pentium II/III and Celeron CPU's, which run very quickly with both 16-bit and 32-bit applications and was not matched until the AMD Athlon came out in 1999.
As it stands, the Pentium 4 CPU core design--which is brand new in many aspects--has only begun its development curve. I expect dramatic improvements in performance as this new core design is improved over the next few years.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Can you point me to a corporate desktop from IBM or Compaq that ships with AMD? It's not here: http://www.compaq.com/products/desktops/index.shtm l
(Hint: A "Presario" is not a corporate machine.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Correct. And the real money corporate customers buy Intel primarily because
1) Intel has better OEM vendors lined up for their market (Dell/Compaq/IBM). This channel is the key. AMD primarily gets what's left (home/soho/BYOB).
2) Intel has a much better reputation. Little things like that "What chipset bugs?" scene when the K7 was launched don't help. The key here is that if Intel tries to force RAMBUST or buggy shit like the i820 down Mr. MIS's throat they are dead in the water, so they are dancing on pinheads.
3) The corporate market could give a shit which processor can do 10fps better in Quake or if some CPU is slightly suboptimal at running legacy code (which after all was designed to run much slower computers to begin with). They are simply looking for a price/performance/supportability sweet spot that they can standardize on.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
- they pointed out the fact that P4 performance is no greater than lower-clocked Athlon. This is true. However, with Northwood P4 should be scaling to 2G and above where it will eventually beat Athlon. (Of course, AMD is not sitting still, but P4 is supposed to have more headroom than Athlon due to its superlong pipes.)
- They criticize the power throttling; this would be a moot issue after the processor is shrunk, at least for the lower end P4s.
- They point out that nobody wants to buy the current P4 due to its dead-end packaging. This is also true, but presumably the new socket for Northwood will be around for a while. (I have no idea why Intel thought to introduce the 850 while admitting that it would be dropped in less than a year, but that's what they did.)
They even acknowledge the price drop. AMD competed for years with inferior processors priced low. Intel can certainly compete with Northwood.Anyone care to comment on this seeming discrepancy?
Assuming that it really is thermal throttling, I would love to see what a good tech site like Tom's might be able to determine about the throttled down CPU when using various heatsinks. If that feature is really there then you should expect more powerful heatsinks give the same temperature as lesser heatsinks, but higher performance.
In other words, it is possible to see this as a feature, not a bug. You get 1.5G when the processor is capable of it. You get half that when you are running hot; but with good enough cooling you should always get the highest performance possible.
"Overclocking" may go away, replaced by "overcooling".
If an american pilot crashed his F-15 into a slow moving Chinese spy plane, he probably be court martialed and likely not fly in the Air Force again.
Further, the chinese crew would be treated very well, proably taken to some toursits site for photo ops and the chinese government would have full access to them. The crew would be returned in a few days, tops, and the Chinese would be welcome to pick up their plane anytime. That happened when the russian sub caught on fire off the east coast. I remember they fed the russians mcdonalds.
In the news today: A chinese man on a jet-ski ran into a cargo container in Long Beach harbour. He is suing the ship captain for not moving out of the way, and wants an apology for 'making him crash'.
MAX
Have you seen the power supply on a PIV? It's a totally different MB, RAM, and power supply.
AMD uses the ATX PS, at least my K6-2 does. What's to regret? Upgrade you K6-2 by swapping in a PII, PIII, DURON, TBird M/b. Can't say the same about the P IV...
MAX
intel although defines x86 has little want to be in the market anymore
it supports the x86 for the long term but its profits lie elsewere
datacenters want 64bit because of the accuracy and speed
hell how many boxes does SUN microsystems shift ?
datacenters and Uni's are the big buyers how many banks have intelx86 to do their math ?
very few would bet their storage on them that market is filled by NetApp and the wanabies(robs new employer)
and well number crunchers go and find a sun exec or a dig-ugh-Compaq exec and ask alpha is doing SMT on chip @ 1.33 GHz now (their old OpenVMS cutomers turned out usefull after all !)
Intel Know this and oh what a surprise went with H(i know how to engineer but not market)P and created a arch which works and scales well
not only that they took one look @ the embeded market and bought a DSP firm and told the lawyers to get the StrongARM platform then the PR guys called it Xscale after retooling a bit and low and behold they have a kick arse core running on mW
face it AMD pays intel royaltys and it would not surprise me that the engineering group that deals with IA32 is full of middle engineers trying to eak out anything cool anyone with any sense would go to IA64 or SPARC v8 or Alpha EV8
anyone in the appliances world gets ARM or Mips & maybe Power
thats how the world is
regards
john jones
Otherwise, why would the sub $400 USD computers be so popular? Show a consumer a 1.2 GHz AMD based computer and a 1.5 GHz computer, at a even $200 price difference and expect to see the AMD win.
Nobody cares. Consumers just see "1.5ghz!!!!" and say "thats fast!!". These studies and all are preaching to the choir. We already know that the p4 isn't clock-for-clock as fast as the thunderbird. Sigh..
This has been a problem from the get-go...there was a recent slashdot article awhile ago (Like 4 months back) where the guy details all the problems that the Pentium IV is going to have. Basically, it sounds like they sacrificed all the gains of the last 10+ years for raw clock speed. Now, it seems, it is coming back to bite them in the ass. Too bad. Unlike MickeySoft, Intel actually had some competition, and managed to stay afloat. Looks like the tides gonna be 'aturnin'.
JoeLinux
The world is coming to an end. Please log off.
The K6-2 was very crippled by the chipsets out for it at the time. It wasn't a stellar performer on its own, but the chipsets would have held anything back.
I played with an ASUS P5A (Super 7, Ali chipset) at work recently when I put a 233MMX in. What a dog. Slower than the 166MMX next to it on a XP55-T2P4. (A bunch of data entry terminals, speed not terribly important.)
You need special IDE drivers, AGP Drivers, etc. It's like a Via chipset, except that Via actually makes decent drivers. Maybe Ali and ATI are the same company? They both make hardware that should be good, yet prevent anyone from ever using it properly by withholding stable drivers.
But I've also seen a K6-2 do very well on some real-world things... I think it's largely the mobo.
Really? You make over $100 an hour? Wow!
The OEMs always charge $100 - $250 more for a system than it could be built for, with quality parts, if you did it yourself.
And maybe I'm just really fast, but I've rarely had a new PC take more than an hour to assemble from parts.
You could be talking about how they come with the OS pre-installed or something, but I've rarely seen a business that's used the pre-installed OS. Everyone I've worked for has wiped it and reinstalled something else. They've also usually had something like Norton's Ghost to automate this procedure. (Not like installing takes very long, base Win2k is a 30 minute install, Win98 takes 15, and *nobody* uses WinME...)
But, you go ahead and pay those companies an extra couple hundred dollars, and accept the low quality parts you're likely to get. (Dell and Compaq both have custom mobos that are trash, and tend to ship with the slowest HD and Video you can buy, just to save a buck.)
I'd rather spend a few hours on research (not too much, because I keep caught up for my own purchases) and then specify, to the specific parts, the exact computer I want. And then get a local store to send me exactly that. Hell, assembly is free on a full system, so there's that much less to do.
It's nice, knowing you've got quality parts that you'll be able to find a BIOS upgrade for, or replace with off-the-shelf components in the future. Nicer yet when you realize it was much cheaper.
Customers don't really go with the 'Well, I must buy an Intel' processor when purchasing an OEM computer, their thought process is usually, "Hm, let's go to www.[oem].com and see what their top of the line is!'
Dell sells nothing but Intel procs and motherboards, Gateway does Athlons. I've not heard of too very many problems with the latest gateway systems, but a dimension 8100 is wrought with problems.
As to why companies don't sell decent computers.. because people will buy a WebPC. Don't forget, no one is in it to make the world a better place.
Fact: my preferred PC hardware manufacturers (VA, Dell, SGI) don't offer models with AMD processors.
Their Pentium 3 and Xeon based gear is still pretty good however.
(And don't start "build your own" type of comments... my time is worth more to my employeer than what they gain by building their own PC servers or workstaitions).
We got in a single p4 1.5 Ghz machine with 512 megs of RDRAM along with a dual 1 ghz machine with a like amount and kind of ram. We ran some benchmarks. Actually, we ran real applications that the scientists at our lab run (chemistry codes).
The short of the story is this...the p4 plastered the p3, the athlon, and everything else, save for an alpha, which it gave a run for the money.
The first test we did was a large matrix inversion in octave. Same version, same kernels, etc. Same disks (scsi/160). The p4 ran it in 1/3 the time of the p3, with only 1/2 again as many ghz. Same speed ram. That memory bus mooooves things. Boy does it move.
We ran Gaussian on it. We saw a linear increase in relation to processor speed. This may seem "normal" but it is not. You almost never see that in this particular application.
We ran lmbench on it vs a ultrasparcIII. It embarassed the US3 so badly that we felt that it just wasn't a fair benchmark (gotta find something better for the suns).
I like the p4. It'll be a win for scientific ocmputing, regardless of what the consumer market thinks.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I've used a dual prosessor system for a while, and love it. I never have to experience the jerkiness of a computer in the grips of that slow all-CPU-consuming task not behaving correctly.
My question is, how will the P4's increased bandwith-usage/demand affect an SMP-system?
If performance critical applications drive CPU power above its artificially low 54.7 watt limit, the CPU is halted with a 50% duty cycle (alternating 2 microseconds on; 2 microseconds off) until it cools down. This effectively turns your 1.5GHz processor into a 750MHz processor - just at the moment you demand peak performance. ;-)
The way I see this is that you will have peak performance for a while before the CPU slows down. The way most people uses their computer, this should be OK, since they only need peak performance in short bursts.
However, for heavy scientific computations the P4 will effectively run at closer to half speed as the article expresses. And not to forget, running the Distributed.net client or similar will have the same effect! I, for one, could not live with that.
My second question is, if AMD's prosessor can run fine comsuming 73 watt and P4 will consume 72.9 watt at max speed, why does the P4 need this cooling procedure? Is the P4 smaller and thus hotter?
Strangely enough, I have actually been able to get my P3 550E to cook at 825MHz using a nice heatsink and fan combo. The lower MHz .18 P3s overclock nicely. With all that said, my next chip will definitely be AMD.
WERM
So Intel released a beta processor, a prerelease effort. The P4's architecture has many good points, but only above 2GHz. I am ignoring the CPU-protect feature (halving the speed when the CPU gets too hot - this is a cooler issue, not a CPU issue, I would like my CPU to protect itself! However Intel should have written that their CPU dumps 73W max at 1.5GHz).
What I would hope for is an optimised P4 later this year, i.e., the real release version. At 0.13u, with more L2 cache, etc, the P4 will actually start to be a better platform. Shame that they are going to couple it will PC100 SDRAM with the first SDRAM chipset, but then again, maybe they have fixed that bandwidth hogging problem...
Still, the extra problems are not doing anything for Intels reputation. IT managers are starting to notice that there is more beyond Intel, Athlons are starting to ship to corporates instead of PIIIs. Integrated motherboards for AMD processors are starting to appear by the bucket load (KM133, SiS730, etc).
So, AMD for me this year. Can't wait for summer and beyond - Dual AMD processor action! Now, what do I need one of those for?
. Furthermore, the 1.5GHz P4's thermal diode throttles the part to effectively 750Mhz as soon as power consumption exceeds 54.7W. Without this limitation, a P4's maximum consumption would be 72.9 watts, similar to a 1.33 GHz Athlon's 73 watts.
Yep, but I'd rather have a chip slow down a bit when overheating than melt like Athlons do. AMD managed to make use power hungry/heat generator chips, yet didn't even think about emebedding a thermal diode and protection like all P3 and P4 have. Results ? Lots of burned Athlon at 1 Ghz and more.
Since it came out I've been advising friends and coworkers to stick with the III's or Athlons until the IV gets its act together. Nice to see I wasn't blowing smoke.
But the sheer percentage of these people who were going to buy a P IV if I hadn't said something is a testament to Intel's strategy. People are going to buy it just because of the name.
So this is a bad thing, right? /. just posts that there are 6.022E^23 molecules in 22.4 L of O2 at STP.
Come on...it's like
Enough with the hardware gibberish, tell me if that's bad, or give me a good link.
When MOS Technology introduced the 6502 processor, famous mainly for past use in Apple II's, it performed as well at 1Mhz as Intel's 8080 did at its max 2 Mhz. This caused MITS, the maker of the early Altair 8800, to pass the 6502 up as "too slow" in favor of Motorola's sluggish 6800 which used a faster clock.
You'd better, they don't work in even dual-processor SMP mde.
If the P4 even has any SMP circuitry, what makes you think it was ever debugged by Intel? Not to mention the lack of SMP chipsets.
Only makes sense considering the immense P4 memory bandwidth requirements would double with two CPUs. Intel probably knows two PIII/933s would outdo two P4/[next MHz generation] anyway.
I want to see what a dual Athlon does against Dual PIIIs before I would spend my money on a pair. Let's see how fast they compile a Linux Kernel with make -j 3 then...
From what I've read, the upcoming Palomino won't provide that much of an improvement (ie. it will allow Athlons to reach 2GHz)[...]
Which would probably be about as fast as a Pentium 4/3000, then...
See sentence following one you quoted.
I suppose if you paralleled a few banks of Rambus memory the problem could be softened somewhat.
I couldn't find anything about it on amdzone using their search, btw. URL?
Intel is usually known to play around to make the power consumption of their chips to look really good. One instance is the mobile Pentium III processor with SpeedStep; there have been several claims that Intel intentionally reduces the voltage down further (using their best samples to do so) and only run the most simple apps... then when idle, Intel takes a snapshot of the approximate power consumption.
In reality, it's very hard to believe that a 1.5Ghz processor with a die that is almost twice the size of the Athlon T-bird can have a lot less power consumption than a 1.2Ghz T-bird. Intel may have a more refined process, but the numbers still don't add up.
Partly the reason why the higher memory bandwidth overhead is that it uses the dual-channel Rambus memory subsystem. I could be wrong, but isn't the Rambus memory architecture packet-based? As with TCP/IP packets, there is overhead that cannot be avoided and could be higher than SDRAM's overhead. The [possible] overhead would in turn increase the latency memory access even more.
The sorta same thing happened with the 386SX/DX and the 486SX/DX bit.
InQuest is a paid "Marketing Consulting" company. The article is a crock, nicely documented here:
p hp ?message_id=30014614
http://www.aceshardware.com/board/general/read.
---
It's all well and good that the Pentium IV has some design "issues", and I think many of us here at /. expected this. Unfortunately, much of the purchasing decisions in the real world are based on sheer numbers: Dollars, Gigahertz, or both.
Look at the success of Microsoft Dos and Windows. There were certainly better alternatives out at the time for everything DOS and Windows did (PC-DOS, DR-DOS, even Macs). Microsoft primarily won the OS and Apps market because of its hugely successful marketting push. The only thing the average person heard in conjunction with "Computers" became "Microsoft".
Or consider America Online. There were many ISPs before them (remember netcom?), but the veritable hailstorm of "Free" floppies and CDs bought AOL the lion's share of Internet Service Provision.
The fact is that unless the Pentium has a serious flaw in it (fdiv, F00F), it will do reasonably well just because it has "1.5ghz". And as we all know, that more gigahertz must mean better technology!
In future news... Watch as Intel attaches a Ring Oscillator to their P5 chip running at 10ghz, unused by the rest of the chip.
-Ted
I don't have the direct link for this, but in order for Intel to reach 2 Ghz they are going to have to change the Socket design again (something like Socket 473). There are not enough pins to reach 2 Ghz. I am waiting for the intel processor that needs a separate case and a heatsink the size of my house.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
I think we are seeing the end of 'upgrading' your computer.
Things are moving so fast, becoming so cheap...that by the time you want a new computer,, you might aswell just replace the whole damned thing!
Its only the true hardware junkies who spend the money to get the latest and greatest hardware every week.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
For the last few years the Mac hardware has been pretty cool...and ever since OSX, its started to look really promising for Macintosh...I hjope they don't screw it up.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
The thermal throttling is going to generate a huge (and well-deserved) backlash.
It all depend on the AMD's supply. I'm not sure how they are doing now but they were recently in a position of having more buyers for chips than they could actually produce.
They could up the price but then they would lose a lot of the inertia that they have built up with the number of people leaving Intel.
In this position, any large advertising campaign would just be needless expence.
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
54.7W? Damn! I remember hearing that these things were going to be hot, and I've joked with the guy with the Athlon cluster up stairs that he better not fall asleep with the door to his office closed, or he'll cook, but Damn!
As a point of reference, take a look at page 5 of 6 of this PDF document from Motorola:
PowerPC MPC7450 @ 733MHz (Full-on Mode)
Typical : 20.8 W
Maximum (w/o Altivec): 22.0 W
Maximum (w/Altivec): 26.0 W
Intel... lure the mainstream... just plain bad... lost market share and customer respect... unwise... poor... many new alternatives... not...thrilled.
Intel...predicted...fastest... shipments...below expectations... bad omen.
The market...will not pay a premium... Intel is hoping... frustration.
Intel...criticizing AMD...Athlon. P3...well supported.
But now...instability of the P4 platform...P4 lacks...market...confidence.
P4...will undergo...five major changes...
Users...aware...weaknesses... Intel's...problem is the platform... band-aid.
Brookdale...difficult...DDR...competition.
Intel...frustrated...cripple... wide open for all...competitors.
P4 needs...strategy... DDR... escapes...Intel's marketing folks... familiar territory.
Intel...deny...problem... vigorous defense of Rambus.
elaborate thermal and power regulation requirements... toaster oven.
Intel... publicizing... amazement... only 54.7 Watts... below the fastest Athlon.
Pentium 4... unbalanced... weakest.
Intel's... elevated costs... horrific... price slashing.
--
314-15-9265
What I don't understand, is why companies don't sell decent computers that are low powered and quiet for web surfing.
.3 dot-pitch el-cheapo monitors and commodity motherboards and cases.
I thought thats what iMacs and GV Cubes were. Being fan-less, they are amazingly quiet. An iMac won't set your pocketbook back by too much (although its a bit more than the assemble-it-yourself screwdriver set thinks it should be - but then those guys can't build a fan-less, dependable box either)
Sitting in front of a fan-less machine with a flat-panel display has a certain qualitative difference to it that is hard to describe to people that buy
Well, AMD has already thought of this. In case you haven't noticed, AMD is no longer in the business of catching up with Intel. They are poised to take a bite out of Intel's ass.
Need evidence? Okay. The reasons Intel became so wildly successful in the processor market is due to a number of factors. But I think the most obvious one should be that they did what no one else had done at the time; they made their next-gen processors backward-compatible. This, of course, elated consumers because it meant that they didn't have to throw away all of their familiar software (and sometimes hardware) to get the performance boost that a new CPU would offer.
Now, fast forward to the late 90's. Intel dominates the market, but sees a threat, so it does what nearly every company does when in fear of seeing their previously solid sales figures start to dwindle due to competition. They change their product to make it incompatible with their old product line, but most importantly their competitor's product line. Then then sit and pray that brand recognition will propel them through the transition.
In the current case of AMD and Intel, this may or may not work. But AMD has a distinct advantage. They didn't wait for Intel to make their move first, but set to work on their next major cashcow product. We know it as Sledgehammer: AMD's 64-bit chip to compete directly with Intel's. The advantage lies in that AMD's chip will be backwards compatible with the 32-bit x86 architecture, while Intel's will not. To see why this is an advantage, I direct you towards the first paragraph of this post.
(In Intel's defense, they claim that they will have an x86 emulator ready at the time their IA64 chip ships. How well this will work in comparison to backwards-compatible 32-bit hardware instructions remains to be seen...)
On comp.arch we were kicking this around a few weeks back, trying to access the average roundtrip latency of memory. Some of the same ideas for defeating the cache were employed. The truth is that these benchmarks are particularly stupid in that they test a random sequence of accesses, which, hello, defeats the purpose of a cache anyway! What exactly were they trying to prove? That memory is slow? Of course. We already knew that.
Why don't they mention something like bandwidth scores or something similar? Take a look at the PIV's scores in Sisoft Sandra (a widely used metric in the overclocking community). It absolutely crushes both the Pentium III and the Athlon in memory bandwidth.
Yes the PIV is slow. Yes it has an overly long pipeline. Yes the cachelines are big. And yes, random accesses are bad on caches. ALL CACHES.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
You can run x86 software on both.
AMD started as an company that Intel outsourced to. Then suddenly they decided they could do better. They don't clone. Neither did IDT. Heck neither does Intel. They all use their own RISC arch with an x86 frontend instruction set.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
AMD is made of ex-DEC and NexGen programmers.
And Alpha companies are licensing AMDs tech.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
What sort of crap motherboard did you buy for gods sake? I've worked with tons of boards, some of which are over 5 years old (S7/SS7) & I've never had a fan connector on my motherboard die... I'd be bitching to that mobo maker for ruining my athlon not bitching at AMD for needing to down-clock their chips if it starts to heat up to much...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I was going to point out some points with counters spefic to them, but decided not to... Instead I'll just comment on the last paragraph...
.13um & in fact such will take place in Q4 from the information I have. Besides that athlons (whatever flavor for the time frame) will always clock within 200-300 Mhz of their Intel counterpart (such as Tbird clocking at 1.2 vs. 1.5 P4). This will stay the same til Clawhamemr & sledgehammer start major production...
Your wafer comparison is off by a good bit... AMD's fab30 is setup for easy transition to both 300mm wafers &
Oh side note: K6 still takes a sizable protion of AMD's fab space in Austin... If they can ever kill that market off theyed have a much larger production capacity for K7 cpu's...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Well I've seen some low powered msotly for webmachines that are pretty silent (& weren't Macs). Most of them were custom Duron systems with quieter low cfm fans (they don't oc so it doens't matter) & large slow case fans (120mm front & rear, but less than 2000 rpm so make little noise)...
I've also seen some Via demo systems using their new form factor & C3 cpu's that are spookily quiet (after 10 years of my computer nearby at all times I need that fan noise to sleep well)....
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I at times sell computer systems at work instead of just installing/trouble-shooting & selling periphrials. When I'm with a customer my first comments gather what they are willing to pay & how stuck on Intel/clockspeed (they are interchangable) they may be. After that I work the AMD Duron/Athlon angle & price/performance with a small discussion on clock-speed vs. end performance & how AMD's cpu's perform better even with a 50-100 Mhz lower clock than an Intel system. I'm known for selling Duron's for just this reason. Not to mention the crap we sell is like: Celeron 850 with 64MB of Ram & integrated Intel video vs. Duron 800 with 64MB of Ram & a TNT2, It' smuch easier to point out benefits of the Duron system even if it isn't that great.
I've even sold a few 'high-end' athlon systems that my place of employment sells to some that thought their was only Intel because I come off as knowing enough to make them believe what I tell them instead of the hype... Intel would hate a world of salesmen like me... & I'm not even a good salesmen I just know the subject matter & can answer all their questions...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Strange my old trusty K6-2 450 is using a Tyan Trinity 100AT... Ok well it may nto run so great since my PSU fan died & fried a few capacitors but it still runs & without all that many lockups & other strangeness...
But then again I always tell everyone that no hardware vendor can ever be 100% perfect... There are always duds...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
The P IV requires RAMBUS, much more cost with little or no performance benefit AND a manufacturer that is sersiously ethically challenged. (Witness the suits stating they patented ideas that came out of JEDEC meetings, which they are now using to extort..uh, extract license fees form other manufacturers.) Since Intel is limiting its cusomers's choices with P IV, I will limit my choice to non P IV processors ( and maybe to non-Intel processors).
--
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Hardly anybody cares about wasted memory bandwidth on a single processor machine, as long as it doesn't affect performance (and the data doesn't suggest this).
However, suppose you've got a SMP machine with four CPUs, I guess you'll get into big trouble. The Intel architectures are not really known for impressive I/O bandwidth, and if the memory subsystem has to deal with 1.6 GB/sec instead of 400 MB/sec, performance is probably affected.
So Intel should fix this rather quickly. May be this is thust an optimization issue, the 32 byte cache line is rather old and many programmers have adjusted their data structures accordingly because you can gain a few percents just by looking closely at the data access patterns. More recently, Intel has added explicit cache line prefetch instructions, and if these are used improperly (assuming 32 byte cache lines), the effect can be pretty devastating on the P4, I guess.
>> maybe in american where the clueless factor is high, <<
If we are so clueless, how come you guys let your dicktators screw your ecomonies up?
Table-ized A.I.
What about the 760 chipset? Tyan is already making an SMP Athlon board.
Without having access to some good equipment it is hard to say, but I would guess that the thermal inertia of the sink is low enough that you could cycle rapidly...it wouldn't be a sudden, sustained drop after a few minutes.
For all the low C/W modern fan-heatsinks have, you'll note that there really isn't much to them when you compare it to a nice 0.5 C/W passive sink. This is fine for cooling if you have a fan, but the inertia of the sink isn't affected by the fan.
-nt-
This is incorrect. Intel has 84% of the market, and AMD has 14%. Contrary to popular belief, Intel actually gained market share in 2000. The real market change is that Intel has almost completely captured the sub-$1000 market (it now has approximately 95% of it now, and had less than 50% in the 1998 timeframe). AMD has shifted away from the low-end into the mid-tier (where it has about 25% share - by far its largest share of any segment). This has been good for AMD because it has given it a higher ASP. Intel still has a virtual monopoly on high-end, X86 workstation, servers, and mobile (I don't know where you get 20% share for AMD in mobile; AFAIK it's less than 5%).
Intel's main strength is its manufacturing capacity. Intel has 7 or 8 fabs, and AMD has 2 (which is not enough to feed more than 20% of the market at current demand, which puts an upper limit on their market share). It would be in AMD's interest to continue to trend toward higher-end and leave the low end (but high volume) to Intel.
Interestingly, despite the fact that the Celeron is more than double the price of the equivalent Duron, Intel has a virtual monopoly on the sub-$1000 market, which makes me very seriously question AMD's marketing abilities. The Celeron is smaller (i.e. cheaper to manufacture), while the Duron has a relatively high opportunity cost (manufacturing Athlon's). Intel has been quietly cleaning up on this market (low margin, but very high volume), while AMD has almost complete lost it.
Intel's biggest weapon is its 0.13um process on 300mm wafers, which is coming early next year. This technology literally quadruples the capacity of a fab (AMD won't have 300mm until FAB35 is completed, which is projected to be in 2005). This means that one single Intel fab has the double the capacity of all of AMD, _and_ it lowers prices. Basically, Intel will be manufacturing tiny 2.5GHz Northwood's in tremendous quantity at a lower price than AMD's 1.5 GHz Athlon's (or whatever they will have in early 2002). I'd be pretty surprised if AMD didn't go back into negative earnings by Q3'01, and shocked if not by the Q1'02.
In other words, they're having problems moving them out, so they are going to slash prices.
So that's why AMD almost always cuts prices first?
If the P4 even has any SMP circuitry, what makes you think it was ever debugged by Intel? Not to mention the lack of SMP chipsets.
Well, for starters, according to almost all industry rumor sites (the register, amdzone, etc.), dual P4 is going to be launched within a matter of weeks.
Hm, sounds like an American:) George *demanded they give back the plane*. That's idiocy.
toeslikefingers.com - because
I can't belive they get away with this stuff like it's the norm. Are there not any tech related consumer advocacy groups to go pound on washington when stuff like this comes to light? If there is where do I go to check them out for contributions.
Oh, maybe not. I had assumed that using a "thermal diode" meant that it really just made sure things didn't get too hot. As I read the article, it may not. It may actually try to determine thermal output, not just current temp...hmmm...doesn't sound like a self-preservation thing for the chip, anymore...
Apparently, of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.
Okay, last post. Intel's stuff indicates that it really is a thermal sensor, not a power consuption sensor. I stand by my first post. :-)
Apparently, of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.
I just hope there's some way of alerting the OS (or BIOS, or something) that you've had a heat related speed change. Otherwise, you might not realize that things are screwed.
Apparently, of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.
4 in roman numerals is IV. When the average consumer realizes he spent triple the money on something worth half as much, the paramedics may need to give him one of those. Cooincidence?
I am !amused.
Play la cucaracha when you honk the horn?
No doubt, a .13 process with a 512 cache will improve the P4s performance. But what if Intel prices it too high? What if the DDR chipsets fail to exceed the performance of the RAMBO chipsets? I'm beginning to think that's likely.
I believe that Intel's .13 Pentium has the potential to be competitive in the short term, but what if Intel cripples it so it won't take market share from the P4?
I'm not convinced AT ALL that Intel will continue to dominate the platform war, as you suggest. All I've seen for the past year and a half from them are serious strategic and engineering blunders.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
You have to take anything that Bert McComas says regarding Intel with a grain of salt. He is probably one of their biggest critics and I've never heard him say anything positive about their technology.
I'll give you an example: He says that the chip will slow down when you try to extract useful performance from it. He bases this on his misunderstanding of the THERMTRIP circuitry. Yes, it is true that the P4 will dissapate more energy when you make it run a heavier load. Yes, it is true that if the die on the chip gets too hot, the chip will slow down to protect itself. But that completely ignores the fact that it is up to the system vendor to insure that the chip never gets too hot. Right now, I'm looking at a P4 system that I was a designer on. Not only do we have a fansink on the P4 itself, the chassis has four separate fans to dissapate heat, and one of them is a monster 5-incher. There is no way that one of our systems is going to overheat the P4 and cause it to slow down.
Unfortunately, customers don't seem to appreciate thermal management in their buying decisions. But keep in mind that all 1.5GHz P4 systems are not alike.
despite the fact that the Celeron is more than double the price of the equivalent Duron, Intel has a virtual monopoly on the sub-$1000 market, which makes me very seriously question AMD's marketing abilities.
Consumers probably think that "Duron" is a paint not a processor. Plus, AMD doesn't have the Blue Man Group doing cheesy commercials (QuickTime).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Try buying a MP AMD system from your local vendor. If a corporation needs SMP, they _must_ buy Intel (for x86 servers).
Recent Athlon processors use a bus protocol similar to that of Compaq Alpha processors. Somebody else wrote that VA Linux Systems (Slashdot's parent company) is building an Athlon-based SMP server and patching Linux to improve its SMP performance. But still, can you imagine...
Will I retire or break 10K?
OK, you have that "effective SMP" web cluster of maybe 100s of machines. Fine. Now what's your database server?
This is also an Athlon cluster. Specifically, an Oracle8i Enterprise Edition Parallel Server cluster. (MySQL doesn't seem to support clustering.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Intel has been proving that they only want to be on top with #s... they say they have the "fastest PC processor" just because it is clocked at 1.5Ghz, yet their own processor downclocks itself when it actually reaches full usage at 1.5Ghz to less than half that.
Is it just me or does a dual athlon sound good right now?
Anyone know the status on the dual athlon chipset arriving and motherboards shipping with it? I'm ready!
Ever need an online dictionary?
If it's still in development, it shouldn't be up for sale.
As someone else mentioned (I don't know if is true) some cips will melt in 8 seconds without cooling. That gives VERY little time for a fan monitor (like the lmsensors for Linux or LanDesk for Windows) to detect the condition and initiate a shutdown. That is bad. If you poll every 30 seconds (common) you fry. If you poll every 1.5 seconds (fastest the system monitoring chips can be polled) you have 6.5 seconds left to initiate a power off. Forget about controlled shutdown. And if the machine is running a lot of processes or thrashing, the poweroff signal might not get sent it time.
A melted blob of silicon would be all the remained of your chip.
Ideally you'd have enough time to have the OS detect a failure, send a page or an email and do a controlled shutdown before burn up. Or allow it to survive at full speed with no fan long enough for the OS to detect it and cut the speed - at which point all the above (paging/email/shutdown) could be done at reduced speed.
Cooling failures happen. Fans stop. Cars have overheat protection modes on the engine controller, so should CPUs.
That said, a CPU should NOT go into its "overheat protection mode" or thermal throlling as part of normal operation. I.e. room under 100 F and even at 100% CPU load, if the fan is turning at least minimum spec'd speed, it should NOT overheat.
Simple as that.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Games are a prime example of intense periods of computation. So what I'd like to know is if anyone has noticed a sudden drop off in frame rates a few minutes into a game, possibly following by an alternating cycle of high and low performance priods?
Or is the cycling between full performance and throttled performance so small that it is perceived to average out to a constant FPS in a game?
I could imagine it being difficult to certainly attribute FPS changes to this, but I'm very curios to know if anyone has firsthand knowledge.
Thankfully when I bought my Athlon, the P4 cost about 5 or 6 times as much (when purchased w/lots of memory)
I can say one thing against the P4. The two people at work that got brand spanking new Dell w2k boxes with it weren't much impressed with it over their old 500MHz machines.
---
I just held the fan stopped on my Athlon for 10 seconds.
Guess what? Nothing happened. It still works fine.
The only failure that will cause your athlon to burst into flames in 8 seconds is if the heatsink falls off.
If that happens, trust me, you have much, much, more major problems to worry about. Like the earthquake going on outside, or whatever moron just backed the 1/2 ton truck into your machine.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
And so, a Pentium Pro 200MHz CPU's cache will operate verry well at 200MHz, with the previous 166MHz and 180MHz models also operating at their core clock. Increasing the system's main memmory from 128MB to 512MB only causes slightly lower latency data transfers, otherwise I have seen verry little data transfer performance, but of course transfering larger files will cause a performance hinder; so it is good to have alot of system RAM available anyway. So, the larger files that must be sampled via ftp or http, then it is well worth your money to invest in more system ram.
As you must have realized, the Pentium Pro CPU still remains quite successfull in one aspect of data transfer performance. When competing with other CPUs on graphics acceleration or running applications, it will only compare with floating point calculations and data bursting. By far, the Pentium Pro 200MHz CPU is available with three different cache sizes: 256KBytes, 512KBytes, and 1MegaByte. The 1MegaByte version of the Pentium Pro CPU is most sought after. No other CPU, other than the Xeon, can compete with it. It also outperforms the Xeon in a few detailed aspects! And in the realm of cost versus performance, the Pentium Pro CPU is most worthwhile. It will eventually fade away because the later applications demand higher data bandwidth which is simply not the purpose. Whatnot with its 66MHz Bus, 200MHz core, and well-implemented caching system, the latter and poorer CPU designs will simply overpower its performance ability no matter how they compare to the Pentium Pro's specs.
Truthfully, in my observation, I see no resemblance of the Pentium Pro CPUs in todays's Pentium II's, III's, or IV's. Some people claim that Intel has been reusing the Pentium Pro's core design, but it is not apparent to me in the bencharks I have conducted. The only similarity I have seen between the Pentium Pro CPU and Intel's latest CPUs are its core power consumption. Nothing more. It simply gets real hot on the top. My system is a simple Dual Pentium Pro 200MHz-based system built upon a Micronics W6LI motherboard, with 512MB of EDO ECC DIMM DRAM, and a High Voltage Differential SCSI data storage system. Compared with the latest computer systems, it is noticably fast for its series.
Socialists and Communists have nothing to fear,
without prejudice
Ok, so a P IV runs well if there's an army of fans working on keeping it cool. But who on Earth wants a boxed-hurricane on their workdesk?
-There is no
So, how do you foresee Intel dominating the platform war?
Remember when Intel was the unstoppable giant and everyone thought AMD was going to go belly-up?
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
From the Asus A7V manual, page 45: "Beep: High frequency beeps when system is working Meaning: CPU overheated, system operating at a reduced frequency"
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
The sorta same thing happened with the 386SX/DX and the 486SX/DX bit.
Error! The 486DX was an SX with an integrated FPU. (Actually, early SX's were DX's with a defective FPU disabled--Intel was selling trash.) And the 487SX "FPU" was a 486DX with an odd pinout that turned off your 486SX, similar to the OverDrives (Pentium core.)
But you're right wrt 386SX=16bit and 386DX=32bit busses.
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
oh well..
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Besides,
fuckit.
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
why did you use a motherboard connector? Its cheaper to use the ones that plug into the regular computer power connectors.
Oh.. slight brag here, I got 80cu ft of air going through my box. If the main fan fails, no biggie. I got a bit heat sink, hell, I built my box around the premise that the cpu fan would fail.
Damn thing is just about silent - 45db. Just have to get good fans and drill a few more holes.
Yours failing sucks though - you get $ from the board manufacturer?
Dude, also, doesn't the board have something that shuts down when the processer hits 65 Celcius? Mine does, and its a POS soyo....
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Guess he doesn't run seti@home on a regular basis on that box.
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
The 'graveh' shutdown - Powerbutton. Or make a script that kill -9's a whole bunch of processes.
Sure, it makes a mess, but hey.
Under linux, if you're not doing anything, it uses very little cpu power and generates very little heat (unlike windows/dos). I've run a 333 celeron, at idle, without the heatsink, and left it, at idle for a few minutes. The processor was cool to the touch when I got back.
Wonder if the same thing would happen if you went and minigunned all the processes down? any thoughts?
I'm just starting linux, so I might be full of shit, so correct me if I'm wrong.
Oh.. A heatsink should help a lot. Your heatsinks and fans should be able to stop smoke from coming out of the box if you know what I mean. And epoxy the damn things on so you know that they wont come off.
And yes, it should not over heat under normal operation.
Shouts!
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Of course it's flamebait.. fuck.. read the next sentence.
Okeedokie. begin by pouring gasoline on ground, light zippo lighter, get ready to drop and run.
Blah.
Fuckit, I aint a karma whor.e
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Overheating? It is called a heatsink and fan.
Thermal grease also helps, you know, the white/silver/copper shit that costs $2 an oz?
Mounting the friggin heatsinks right would also be a plus here. Using one meant for the processor would help too, i.e. not a heatsink for a pentium pro.
I suppose geniuses like you who burned up their athlons/tbirds are bitter.
AMD makes good products, you just have to know a few basic things about them, like how to properly install a processor.
Oh, the P4 throttles when it reaches a specific wattage, that means, even though it is running cool, safe temperature, it still throttles down.
oh.. and in case you didn't pass grade 3 math, "a bit" is not 1.5ghz to 750 mhz, thats "half", which isn't "a bit".
What the hell is with this intel fetish with some people? Intel, at the current time, makes sub standard stuff. AMD makes really great, and cheap products. Your choice should be clear.
And FYI, a p4 will cook just as good as an athlon if you do something stupid.
Fuckhead.
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I noticed that pc's use a lot more power than macs. What is the cause for this? Macs only draw a few watts of power while pc's draw like 75w. Don't give me the pc's are faster blah blah blah if you were to compare a 500mhz pc to a 500mhz mac you would find that the mac draws a lot less power. Does the mac's layout have a better design or a worse design that it's limited so thus not using a lot of energy?
In other words, they're having problems moving them out, so they are going to slash prices.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Furthermore, the 1.5GHz P4's thermal diode throttles the part to effectively 750Mhz as soon as power consumption exceeds 54.7W.
All your power consumption are belong to Pentium, it seems.
Stupid like a fox!
Why would you say Intel is likely to dominate the platform?
Fact: AMD now holds twenty- to thirty-percent marketshare.
Fact: AMD Duron and Athlon processors are now spec'd by all but one mainstream, brand name supplier.
Fact: The latest AMD processors outperform -- and are widely reported as such -- the latest Intel processors.
Fact: AMD K6-2 mobile processors have a 20% marketshare, and AMD K7-family processors are gaining marketshare.
Fact: Intel keeps fucking things up. And I mean *seriously* fucking up. From backing Rambus to failing chipsets to bolloxing up its relationship with their customers... oh, gahd, the list is endless.
Just because you, and every other computer guy/gal knows this, does not mean your average consumer (assumed to be reasonably informed -- we'll ignore the idiot consumer for now) also knows.
According to the average consumer, Intel is the only game in town. And don't tell me that they're stupid for thinking that, or anything equally naive. They are simply uninformed, and it is not economical to them to become properly informed. For them, anything being sold now will be grossly overpowered for their web surfing and email writing.
What I don't understand, is why companies don't sell decent computers that are low powered and quiet for web surfing. I mean a "real" computer, not a stupid internet terminal (that are only useful for haxoring and installing free OSes). Something like a Celeron 400, 128 MB RAM, and 20 GB drive.
Well, unfortunately for Intel the IA64 has been an embarrasment so far. It's godawfully slow, and it looks to remain that way for a while longer. That's probably why AMD isn't all that worried by it right now. The lead engineer at HP responsible for IA64 had tried to market VLIW a decade ago with his Multiflow company. The company flopped very quickly. They made some very useful advancements in compiler technology, but it wasn't enough to get VLIW to RISC performance levels. EPIC is a reformulated VLIW. It tries to overcome some of the efficiences of VLIW.
But in order to gain any benefit from EPIC, you need a compiler with a really awesome global scheduler that will consistently schedule large numbers of instructions for execution in the same cycle. Otherwise you just get hurt by the drawbacks of VLIW. And that compiler technology has still not seen the light of day.
AMD really has all the time in the world now. The smartest thing they can do is snatch up as much as the x86 market share they can while Intel continues to bust their brains on IA64. If Intel and HP can deliver a compiler that proves IA64, AMD could design an IA64 processor which the compiler will run on. And while they're developing an IA64 processor, they'd still have the IA32 market open to them. Even if Intel releases a fast IA64 processor, they won't be able to eliminate the IA32 market right away.
I think the main point should be : is it possible to SMP P4??? Without GOOD smp support, p4 is nothing else than a corvette with flat tires. Since bandwidth on the bus is a huge problems, I don't want to see a smp p4 running!!!
Keep in mind that INTEL has a head start on IA-64 architecture, and that IA64 will be "incompatible" with x86-64 from AMD. So a rift is created. What happens after that? Who knows, but I vote that AMD and INTEL will both dominate and eventually work together. Sounds like a fairytale I know, but it's possible that INTEL will figure out that it's been bested in several areas, and that their feigning marketshare is due to their lack of trying to keep the customers they have versus only gaining new ones.
Who in their right mind would just go buy a P4, until after they've tested both an AMD and INTEL for the things they need it to do. Office tests, Linux tests, etc. Speed, etc. I try to find reviews, etc, before even thinking about it. Then I look at the price. Most of the time AMD is 1-2 hundred bucks cheaper than Intel, on their newer stuff. Just my $0.02.
--SuperBug
"Scotty, I need more power!" "Sorry, Cap'n, but the speed limiter just kicked in - I can give you warp 1.3, or if you turn off the shields and the phasers, I can give you our full rating of warp 9. Of course, then we'll die anyway ..."
...
Yup, sounds like Intel
Fuckin' mod this up someone!
+1 funny
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
You'd think if his time was so valuable he would have already thought of that....heh
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Why would I see intel getting ahead? Because money talks, and well, look at AMD, then look at Intel.. Wait a sec.. I'll shut up now..
OS X, or more specifically Quartz.
Makes a huge difference.
---
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
There is no doubt. The circumstances around the P4 is way too unflexible and perhaps still too expensive. All the good reasons for bying an Intel-based PC there existed in the past, are slowly diminishing (in my opinion).
As far as I see it the P-III was the last good breed from Intel. Now AMD has catched up and are even (perhaps) ahead of Intel. Not just in speed terms, but also in terms of choices and price. And as far I am informed (correct me if I'm wrong), the P4 isn't designed for multi-processing. In contrast AMD are now beginning to think in multi-processing terms. They are even working on new bus-architectures to support just that.
So my questions are:
- Why would I wan't to buy a P4?
- Why should I not buy an Athlon based machine or some other new AMD based machine?
What I think is even more important is the Octium Octium chip. For furter details, see http://www.octiumchip.com
--------
Sounds exactly like what happened with 3dfx and nVidia!
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Also there was an EET article that came out last December in which an Intel engineer confessed that the released Pentium 4 falls short of what they originally envisioned it to be. They scrapped the L3 cache, cut the L1 size in half, and gdumbed downh the FPUfs.
Download Mazes and Puzzles from www.puz.com
Hire an intern for $15/hour to build and configure computers. You can save hundreds off of the prices these OEM's charge.
I love going down to the elementary school, watching all the kids jump and shout, but they dont know I'm using blanks.
why would you throttle power consuption on a desktop? Seems like it would make more sense just to disipate the heat better.
Just doesn't make sense.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
That the Pentium IV is a marketing ploy by Intel to keep AMD from grabbing all the market share with their superior products.
Didn't we already know that?
The only plus side from my viewpoint is I was going to buy some 500 MHz Pentium II chips, which should drop in price.
What about the power consumption claims from Intel on the Pentium IV - anyone got any specs on that?
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Note they say: "Perhaps Intel was a little frustrated that its own 815+PC133 platform beat RDRAM last year. This time Intel will not screw up - they will doubly cripple SDRAM to make certain that it cannot match RDRAM. In other words, Intel seems willing to publicly impale Northwood on an entirely inadequate Brookdale platform in order to make its point. It is this type of agenda that causes further doubt about Intel's commitment to the P4 platform and leaves the door wide open for all of Intel's competitors."
..."
...
And note the CPU rampup - yeah, it will run faster than a P3, so long as you don't ask it to run fast for very long. Kind of like a car that goes 0-60 mph in 0.1 seconds, but if you actually try to get to top speed of 125 mph, it will suddenly kick in the limiter and drop you back down to 115 mph. Sure, the car's rated to do 250 mph, but it can't actually run at 250 mph.
Translation - very sucky. Trying to fight AMD on "bandwidth" by faking it and also fight Transmeta on low-power by using a heat limiter (faking it). It saves power when demand gets high by cutting throughput, instead of Transmeta which saves power when demand is low, but lets you use full power when you need it.
"Scotty, I need more power!" "Sorry, Cap'n, but the speed limiter just kicked in - I can give you warp 1.3, or if you turn off the shields and the phasers, I can give you our full rating of warp 9. Of course, then we'll die anyway
Yup, sounds like Intel
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I almost wasted my life savings on a pentium IV computer. Now I can buy a car again! yeah!
Doesn't this guy have anything to do besides tricking people into clicking on his silly links?
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I think it's time for P4 + DDR
I could of sworn the 1.3 came out *after* the initial release of 1.4 and 1.5GHz chips.
- dave f.
If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?
-- Seymour Cray
I don't think we need an analyst to tell us that the P4 is a big load of crap. Any informed individual knows this already, so I suppose this is useful to IT managers?
--
...All your memory bandwith are belong to us.
Athlon. 'Nuff Said.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Once I finish this reply, I will return to the air-cooled T-bird on my dining room table that is being happy as happy can be running at 1.6 GHz. This is with a $140 mobo, a $220 chip, and a $10 fan in a good case. After I get an OS on it, I will run Tim's benchmark. Dare say if past is prologue, it will surpass the 2.2 GHz P4 when that turkey is released.
Sorry to say, but Intel has let the marketing types run their company a bit too long. The blue man group is probably going to be the folks that are blue because their investment in Intel stinks so maybe their use in their advertising is more than appropriate.
Sex is heriditary, if your parents didn't have it chances are good you won't either.
...because it is the first generation of a redesign. It's kinda like the Pentium Pro, which led to the Pentium II's and III's.
.13 micron P4 comes out with higher clocks speeds and bigger cache (and a wide range of new versions of software which take advantage of the P4 extensions).
The P4 is just meant for early adopters... Athlon's probably going to be ahead on price/performance until the
Athlon's approaching the highest clock rates it'll manage (it might make 2GHz, but will probably need a freon-based cooling system), much like the barrier P3 hit at 1GHz... Pentium 4's clock rates are just beginning. Combine that with Intel's generally better record in terms of motherboard chipsets, and I think AMD's time in the sun will be over in a year or two...
--
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
- Nietzsche
Well we already knew that the Pentium IV is slower than the a lot cheaper Thunderbird. But the average Joe User (90%) doesn't care when he's left with the choice between a DELL Xxxx Thunderbird 1.2GHz and a DELL Xxxxx Pentium IV system. He will just think: "wait a minute
Especially since the Blue Man Group told him how great the Pentium IV REALLY is. And it will even accelerate the hell out of his 56K modem (ok, that joke is old).
And AMDs Marketing Department isn't really doing anything about it. I wonder why.
keep it simple.
The Pentium II and Pentium III processors all share the same core: Pentium Pro.
Those jokes about Intel just painting another line on the processor are not all the far off the mark.
The core of the Pentium Pro has gone way above and beyond the call of duty for Intel. The Pentium IV is the *first* new core to be developed by Intel for some time now. Unfortunately, market pressures got the Sales & Marketing at Intel to push the P-IV out the door before it was ready. That's why it has more execution units than it has bandwidth. If the P-IV was able to "feed" all of its execution units then it would be a very impressive processor. Sadly, Intel botched the timing and structure.
Right now (for consumer X86 processors) it's all AMD.
If I had to pick one reason why Intel is likely to sell lots of inferior P4s at higher prices than AMD's superior chips, I would have to say: GHz. P4s simply run at higher clock speeds than AMD's and Joe Consumer doesn't know that AMD chips are faster per Hz than Intel's. He'll simply buy the one with the bigger number. And the clueless sales people at consumer electronics stores don't help much either. I'm sure the following conversation is happening in stores across the country right now:
_________________________________
Clerk: Can I help you?
Joe: Yeah, I'm looking for a computer.
Clerk: Oh, what you want is the new spiffy Intel Pentium IV that has 1.5 GHz!!!
Joe: What's a GHz?
Clerk: It's, uhhh, a thing that tells you how good your computer is. Having 1.5 is really, really good!!!
Joe: Oh, OK. What about that one over there? [points to a less expensive AMD-powered computer]
Clerk: Oh, well, that one only has 1.2 GHz. It's not a bad computer, but I'll tell you, personally, I'd never buy it. 1.2 GHz aren't nearly enough for today's demanding applications such as web browsing and e-mail!!!
_________________________________
As much as I hate to admit it, Intel made a good decision when they increased the depth of that pipeline: They decreased the speed, but they increased the only thing that matters to computer buyers, the GHz number. What AMD really needs to do is start an advertising blitz showing how much faster their chips are at a lower clock speed (and a lower price). Otherwise, Joe Consumer (and those clueless clerks) will never hear about it.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
One of the major problems with the Pentium IV is there continued use of Rambus memory over faster/cheaper alternatives like DDR-SDRAM. Rambus is a one BYTE bus. It can only output one byte per clock. SDRAM/DDR is a 8 BYTE bus. So for every clock on a SDRAM module it can return 8 bytes while the RDRAM (RIMM/Rambus) can only return one byte.
Now, one major diference between rambus and sdram is its second modules support. With SDRAM they use the same bus. With RDRAM they add bus's together. This means that with 2 SDRAM modules you still only have 8 bytes for your bus, where as with RDRAM you now have 2 bytes. Add enough RDRAM and you get enough bandwidth to compaire with SDRAM. Watch those benchmarks, most the cases where RDRAM wins have more than 2 modules.. 4 in most cases..
The PIV gets hurt by the fact that they run RDRAM instead of SDRAM. Unless they start using more than one RDRAM module they get a major speed hit. And several RIMM's will cost you an arm and a leg. Regardless of processor cost the RIMM's alone will kill you!
An athlon tbird 1.33 ghz with DDR RAM is already faster than a p4 1.6ghz. And with the palomino coming out soon (planned debut at 1.5ghz, afaik), I know my next computer won't be a p4, and it won't carry RDRAM...
And I didn't even mention the price difference.
----
And some of us instead see two companies clamboring to be the best at emulating an obsolete soon to be retired instruction set.
Perhaps we should say should soon be retired. I am yet to hear of either Intel or AMD giving up on it... hell even the PIV still emulates it...
Why are you unable to make any sense in your post? For that matter, why is your grammar so awful, your spelling disastrous, your thinking muddled and chaotic? And the .sig -- exactly what does it mean? Can it be true, that you're sentimentally attached to the Pentium Pro despite the fact that a modern PIII is much faster?
At any rate, you confirm a suspicion of mine: that gun-loving, commie-bashing weirdos are mostly found among the least educated, stupidest sectors of our society.
"It must be something truly enormous, Trismegistus"
I don't like the P4 design. It's complex, has a messy instruction set, and consumes too much power for the performance they deliver. But the same is true of the whole Pentium series, and we have learned to live with it.
Overall, I think the Athlon may be a somewhat better deal than the P4, but the P4 isn't a slouch either. Now, I am looking forward to Sledgehammer: the 64bit AMD chip might end up being a much better compromise than Intel's 64bit offerings.
What I was alluding to is that in the future, AMD will have to support a non-x86 platform. After all these years, the x86 platform is truly a well-documented standard. Even its undocumented features are very well-known.
However, when Intel moves to their own VLIW RISC solutions, (which they call EPIC instead) AMD will likely be forced to follow them, sooner or later. And cloning that chip (or even creating a compatible interface) should prove to be a far larger challenge than merely making yet another x86-compatible chipset.
AMD hopes to avoid all of this with Sledgehammer, and keep people on at least a quasi-x86 platform. And that might work for a couple of years. But eventually the x86 architecture will run out of steam, and when that happens, Intel will be there to take over again, for at least a few more years, until everyone else catches up again.
The Pentium IV is essentially still in development. And considering that it debuted at 1.5Ghz, I don't think this should be any surprise.
We already knew that the P4 offered less performance, clock-for-clock, than other modern chipsets, but it is nice that someone has identified why. Also, it's about time that more people realize just how important cache performance can be.
However, the real question here is, what can we do about it? I mean, switching to AMD is fine in the short term, but Intel is likely to dominate the platform war in the long-term. And the P4 will likely be the first step in migrating people to their new architectures. Unless AMD's Sledgehammer is wildly successful, they will have an enormously more complicated cloning job on their hands.
That article is almost complete garbage. They make incorrect assumptions about the cache system and even site benchmarks that seamingly prove they are wrong. The P4 is certainly not the end all of microprocessors but there theory on wasted bandwidth is completely incorrect. Also, the power consumptions they speak of is the max power consumption, which means little when the average is in the 50~60Watt range. I really like the added touch of adding a user poll from a form site where probably 90% of the users are AMD fanatics... I could easily find a site out there that gave the opposite results. I think Bert McComas needs to do a little more research next time, he might want to start with the datasheets on the product.
Ok, I am not a huge Intel advocate but I have to say that stating the chip is slower Mhz. to Mhz. is really stupid when they don't actually run at the same clockspeed. Hell, based on that arguement we should all run G4's, UltraSparc's, or Alpha processers which are all much faster Mhz. to Mhz. then then any Pentium or Athlon. The P4 sure needs some work, and I wouldn't be caught buying one these days, but the chip is not worthless. You will notice since it's creation AMD has started talking about putting SSE2 into there new chips because they realize just how good it is. AMD can also easily adopt the new, more powerful, spec. power supplies and such Intel now calls for so they don't have users having power issues with there processors and the latest and greatest graphics cards.
The truth is they probably have no credentials. I don't trust anyone who uses polls from Anandtech as "market information". I wouldn't doubt at all that AMD pays them off.
Ya, most of us have probably already seen the results of the flask-mpeg4 decoder program when it was optimized for P4..it absolutely killed everything else. P4 is young, and costly, but it is not horrible. AMD users were certainly love SSE2 when they have it on there chips....
If it is faster, of course I'll put a boxed hurricane on my desktop.
As usual, tom's hardware has a really good story on the P4.
But figuratively, the only people that will benefit in the end for buying a computer with a Pentium 4 processor in it are the people that won't upgrade after a year or so passes and it comes time for that annual upgrade. The way things are going, the Pentium 4 is in development, but a year from now, the people with the then-slower AMD Athlon chipsets (which are cheaper) will just upgrade to a faster processor. They're essentially paying AMD the same that they would pay Intel, except they get more bang for their money. They pay 1/4th the cost of a Pentium 4 processor now, to get the same performance now. A year from now, when the Pentium 4 is expected to shine, they pay a bit more for a newer processor to beat that aging-yet-still-kicking Pentium 4.
:)
Lather, rinse, and repeat, because the bottle doesn't say when to stop.
Actually, I invite you to ask any Xeon owner whether or not they would willingly part company with their Xeon (or multi-Xeon, in most cases) server for a "new and faster" Pentium 4 server. I bet most of the responses you will get would go along the lines of "hell no". Xeons have massive amounts of cache, as opposed to the Pentium 4's and even the AMD Athlons. I think this is a much more accurate description: Xeons are/were targeted at the corporate server market because of their large amounts of cache, something that seems inconsequential to most home users. Durons are targeted at die-hard gamers with a tight budget. Athlons are targeted at die-hard gamers with a slightly larger budget. Pentium III's are targeted at gamers that don't trust AMD or are afraid that they might fry/melt their processor. Pentium IV's are targeted at average consumers that don't know enough to prevent themselves from being ripped off. They see "1.5 GHz" and think "wow, that's gotta be faster than my friend's Athlon 1 GHz!", and they buy it out of being fooled into thinking that raw MHz/GHz is what really matters.
I was reading an article about the P4 just prior to it's release explaining the technology behind it. I must admit that at the time I thought to myself "That is the stupidist thing I have ever heard!" The article talked about it's branch prediction and cache issues, as well as it's staging. Appearently the p4 uses a MUCH higher (I don't have the article handy but it was like 3 or 4 TIMES the norm) staging process than anything before it. I remember asking myself how doubling the amount of work a processor has to do to get a job done is going to make it faster...I guess it doesn't! Add to that the fact that the branch prediction requires the program to be at least somewhat predictable in it's execution...most aren't (or at least most users aren't).
The thing I don't think you are getting the concept on is that the chip is STILL SLOWER Mhz to Mhz than the P3 or the Athlon. Oh yeah, great I get a machine with a nify 1.4 Ghz speed but it's hardly any faster than that 1.0 Ghz machine that costs almost half the price!!! And why in hell should I have to worry about the heat in my case from a NON-OVERCLOCKED chip? Put a fan on a t-bird and go...Intel humped the bunk on this one and I think the market is shortly going to figure this out.
Come on, intel have being doing this stuff for decades. They know what they're doing and all their products have been top-notch. Remember the pentium bug? They [eventually] fixed that, so surely they can sort out the P4. Intel have got this far, they're the experts. Now you're implying that they've totally screwed up? I don't think they have. AMD may be faster in some cases - but aren't as good quality. And no, i don't work for intel. Just consider the fact that intel know what they're doing eh? :]
You were expecting a sig?
if the "herz myth" is to be followed then go for Motorola's G4. although they have been slacking recently a 733mhz G4 compares favorably to an AMD cpu of twice the clockspeed. especially when combined with it's 128-bit processing (although few apps take advantage of it). if only motorola were to get their act together or apple were to find a new supplier i'd be more than pleased...
Shouldn't You expect more from your DJ?
Not true... A-Bit and Tyan both are selling dual athlon boards right now with the 760MP chipset... full SMP. Pop a couple o' 1.3 gig t-birds in there and fly away....
"Remember kids, those who disagree with you are not just wrong, they're evil!" BOYCOTT GREED -- BOYCOTT METALLICA!!