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Is Your P4 Working At Half Speed?
"More information can be found in Intels Pentium 4 Thermal Design Guidelines (check out page 23)."
Several readers have submitted news of this clock-throttling, one aspect of the P4's built-in temperature sensor system Intel calls "Thermal Monitor." One thing to point out is that the same design guidelines document goes on to say that "the clock modulation feature of Thermal Monitor is disabled by default ... OEMs are expected to enable the thermal control circuit while using various controls and outputs to monitor the processor thermal status." Other things being equal (even if they never are) is there some reason to prefer a chip for not having this capability? If someone forced me to accept a free and loaded P4 system, I'd rather it be cool down at 750MHz temporarily than toast at 1.5GHz.
Those CPUs should say 1.5GHz MAX like CDROMs are labeled 48x MAX and such. Time for the FTC to smack Intel around. Hell, I'm surprised Intel isn't quoting their MHz in octal. The 2.73GHz P4! Oh wait, that's base 8.
...proudly designed for the 100-meter dash. If your task is the biathlon, then we suggest buying a dual-athlon.
There are two modes to the thermal feature basically automatic and manual. In automatic, Once the temperature rises over the set point, the clock now has a 50% duty cycle. This is what was being referred to. There is also the automatic mode. In this mode the following is supposed to happen: PROCHOT is asserted and software responds. the duty cycle can be set from 12.5% up in increments of 12.5%. The intention is that software can be written that sets the duty cycle to a value that is not so drastic as 50% and monitors PROCHOT and modifies the duty cycle if appropriate. In either mode if the temperature rises above the second set point, the part halts until it cools sufficiently. In practice I have yet to see a Pentium IV enter the duty cycle, this is most likely due to the measures the part uses to divert power from the units on chip that are currently unused. This feature is actually a large plus for any chip intended as a server processor that has been lacking in Intel parts for quite some time. The fact that software has some control in the matter is also a plus. This feature has been rather well thought-out when considerring it is Intel's implementation.
Good point. Intel should really hype the unique fecal skills of their processors.
... if only we could get away from the legacy of the 8086... We might have computer processors that consumed LESS energy than a backyard floodlight... and our PCs might not need radiators.
I just laugh at this whole throttling thing. People are surprised that a processor is so badly designed that when it does what it's supposed to, it has to shut itself down. You cryo people stay out of this; I don't think having some kind of six-pound heatsink with 12 fans on a 73 watt processor is a solution to a problem.
*sigh*
Sun machines for less than $2K these days. G4s with your choice of OS X or Linux. How much longer can the PC hold on?
Whatever, you guys. My machine does everything I need to and it does it cool. If you wanna deal with your PCs, have it your way.
I too have had a P4, personally, for about 8 months now running at 1.6GHz (overclocked 1.4), and it idles at 38 degrees C, and maxes out around 50. This is with a 1.1GHz heatsink tied on with string (because they didn't have P4 heatsinks at the time). At my work, we've had that same machine for about 11 months now (well in April'00 we got a P4 @ 1.1, May'00 1.3 and June'00 1.6) I run tonnes of stuff on this ALL day long, and have NEVER had a problem with it. We're even using it now as our main dev compiler box. How do I have these you ask? We're on Intel's Developers network designing software for their leading edge PCs, so we get everything as soon as it's stable enough to test (and in may cases, even when it isn't). These machines are stable and fast, In fact the uptime on mine is approaching 4 months now.
And I really don't know what all the hub-ub is about. Ever since the PII there has been a "Catastrophic Thermal Shutdown" protection mechanism that would just stop the chip if it got to hot, so now all they're doing is halfing the speed so you don't loose whatever's on your system. I think that's a great idea. In case your fan stops or breaks, your chip won't fry, and you're system won't die either. You have time to save everything and shutdown gracefully instead of a BSOD-style shutdown. And mobile chips have had duty cycling (temp related too) since the MMX pentiums...
I'm really sick of this AMD-loving antiestablishment bull**** of people who misconstrue the facts to make it look like something is better, or something else is worse. Who the hell cares? Buy your AMDs, buy your Intels, but stop spreading unwarranted and ignorant propaganda just because someone else likes a different processor than the one you bought.
pentium4 comes directly from God, and questioning God's precision is blasphemous
Yup, linuxppc is pretty cool.
The only way the heatsink can be below room temperature is if there is active cooling involved. (There might well be, but I've not seen it on Orb-type heatsinks.) The reason metal feels cold is that it conducts the heat away from your skin faster than air does. Your nerves mis-read this as "cooler".
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Some people seem to think this is some huge conspiracy by Intel against the consumer. Far from it. All of you overclockers should be well versed in the need for adequate cooling for your CPUs. Apply the same cooling procedures to your P4 and it'll run at full speed. Put some old brushless 1500 rpm fan and a crappy heat sink with no thermal compound under it on your chip and it's going to overheat.
Why is it a problem that a chip has a feature built in that slows down the clock speed when it begins to overheat?
Am I missing something here?
Would you rather your poorly cooled, poorly ventalated system go into thermal meltdown?
-=e
That may not be too good either. Having too many fans can cause bad circulation pushing air back and forth to each other, doing nothing at all. Check out a pic at this site towards the bottom how "ATX Standards" show how to cool off the system...
Basically, let the fan in the back suck air into the case and blow it over the CPU. If you put one in the front, point it so it blows air out of the case. That will help the other fan. If you turn it so that it blows inward, it will create back pressure for the other fan. As an old technician buddy of mine would say, "NFG".
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Similarly, that post deserved your -2 Bonus. :)
And yea, they obviously rushed this one even more than usual. Intel sucks...
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Although that's not really acceptable for a released, commercial processor, I must say that it sure beats overheating!
:)
Why can't processors dynamically adjust their clock speed based on temperature in the first place? Transmeta does this somewhat, but it'd be nice if my chip could overclock itself, insofar as that is safe.
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You can read about the temp specs in this document: (in pdf.. sorry.. that's all I could find)
http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/athlon/techdocs/pd f/23794.pdf
It says 90C is the maximum die temperature. I guess that means you should start worrying if it hits 80C. My 900MHz T-Bird seems to hover between 60-70C. That bothers me, but I'm not sure what else I can do about it. I have a good heatsink that should keep it a lot cooler than that, but for some reason it doesn't seem to be working. I also added 2 extra fans to my case to help with airflow, but nothing seems to work.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
There is nothing wrong with having a thermal throttle. In fact, it's a good feature.
The real problem shows on page 25 or the Intel doc. That's where they reveal that the rather hefty heatsink requirements are targeted to be adequate for only %75 of full power.
In other words, if you do compute intensive work, you will engage the thermal throttle on a regular basis unless you install an even bigger and heavier heatsink with even better fans.
Most interestingly, it turns out that the full utilization dissipation is more like 73Watts. In other words, it's not actually significantly cooler running than the Athlon, in spite of marketing's sincere wishes to the contrary.
So, the only real 'advantage' over the Athlon is vapor.
Notice however that his statement of 100% utilization was accompanied by "I track its performance and I can assure you that it has not ever slipped into the throttling"
He is not saing that he expected the cpu utilization to drop top 50%, He is saing that he is running his apps at 100% cpu utilization and didn't notice any performance drop.. meaning that his cpu never kicked into the throttle mode. This 100% is meant to say that he is STRESSING his cpu.
You can have a dual p4; you just have to have one of them disabled at any given time...
Actually, I wonder if they could build a motherboard where, if one CPU got too hot, it would switch over to the other one.
When you're gaming, your CPU probably spends a lot of time doing IO to the vid card. It's probably doing less than half the amount of floating point work it could be (if it were running code that did nothing but useless FP ops), which DivineOB says is the thing that makes the CPU hottest. (That makes sense to me, BTW, and I know some about computer architecture stuff.)
:)
The kind of code you have to worry about is SETI@home type stuff. (well, you would if it was optimized, but it isn't...) Reportedly, distributed.net's RC5 cruncher makes G4 CPUs hotter than pretty much anything else, because it makes full use of the Altivec and the regular pipeline at the same time. It only misses a few instruction scheduler slots, so it works things pretty hard. It's all integer, though, but I guess Altivec is different
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
I think you should ammend your "many people have burnt or cracked their chips" with "people who do not follow AMD's cooling recommendations or improperly try to force a non-socket A cooler on to their chips".
Well lets just strap a box-fan on the side of the thing!!
Hehehe looks like someone did..
Your Working Boy,
- Otis (GAIM: OtisWild)
Um... no. It has nothing to do with the throttling. It has to do with Intel advertising their chips 'typical' power consumption, instead of everyone else who advertises maximum consumption, without labeling it publicly as typical. As in, the maximum power consumption of the K7 is the same as the P4, and it is reasonable to assume that the typical would be as well. But Intel marketing has made it seem as though the P4 is a much lower part than the K7, when in fact it is not.
That is underhanded.
The enemies of Democracy are
Okay, so this clears things up a little.
So, basically,
1) if you have proper cooling, it won't ever come into play (which sounded like it was the case anyway, since none of the benchmarks seemed to show this behavior)
2) it is still somewhat underhanded to advertise the part as having a power consumption of 54W, making the P4 seem as though it consumes less power than the K7.
3) it is still pretty silly for AMD _not_ to have some kind of thermal protection (though again, if you have proper cooling, it shouldn't be a problem).
Now that we've got that cleared up...
The enemies of Democracy are
It's not a rumor, the thing exists! A 4-way Foster (codename for the Xeon part) system called P-Shasta (which I got to work on! =D) was demoed last year.
As to why it ain't out yet, I can't tell you. Sorry.
The enemies of Democracy are
he is STRESSING his cpu
I wonder how much stress non-P4-optimized code places on the processor. If one or two of the integer units aren't active because the code wasn't scheduled properly, you'll see 100% CPU utilization, but the CPU won't really be functioning at 100% of potential.
Anybody have any numbers on instruction scheduling efficiency for the P4 on non-optimized code?
Just junk food for thought...
Remember, 100% utilization at 1.5Ghz is going to look the same as 100% at 750MHz. The useful info would be to run a program alongside that could monitor the current clock of the CPU. Either that or keep track of your work submissions to make sure they don't drop off.
What's the difference between a Java applet stuck in a non-terminating loop chewing CPU, and one that's, say, searching the key space for a distributed code-cracking problem? As far as the Java runtime environment, nothing that it can identify.
If I understand you correctly, the problem that you are suggesting that Java should solve is a variant of the halting problem, which is practically undecidable (it's theoretically possible for storage-limited machines, but not in any practical sense). In other words, it can't be done.
Java can be faulted for many things, but this doesn't appear to be one of them.
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Hey, it fits my worldview, so i couldnt be happier.
Allow me the dignity of my blinders. Im an AMD fan now (and building a cluster out of them to boot, if you want my spreadsheet of comparison benchmarks, feel free to ask).
I think intel made the announcement to drop prices to cover for this embarassing admission - so you still loosely 'get what you paid for'.
Sounds fair to me.
AMD's PowerNow will do this too, both AMD and Intel have had CPU throttling in their cpus for a while.. be it for power or heat concerns, it has been around.
I suspect that the P4 is already running faster then it should, I remember stories about Intel boasting about how they could overclock their chips to different speeds a while back.
Anyhow, this isn't a big deal.. who wants their processor burning up anyhow?
Further than who is prepared for? Who are you to make this judgement? Who are these 'masses' you have so little respect for? Who is moral?
Your post bespeaks of a quiet and pig-headed elitism that does you ill. I suspect you are probably a troll, and a stupid one at that.
In addition to this problem with the P4 having nothing to do with the advance of tech in general, the advance of technology will never be halted as long as humans exist. If you feel that technology should or should not be used in certain ways, you'd better convince people you're right instead of hoping in vain for the advances to cease.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Actually the 6 and the 4 of the 8-6-4 were intended to be normal operation. I was responding to hypothetical have-it-both-ways of the post above.
Since you asked, I'd prefer the CPU sensor and the limp-home.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Some people (usually overclockers) have been doing something similar to this for quite a while. The way it's worked until now is that they run a program (waterfall for windows, or automatic under Win2k and {of course} Linux) that issues the idle command if the processor is otherwise idle. This saves energy, reduces heat, blah, blah, blah.
The problem is then exactly the same as here:
You've got a super-fast CPU, but you can't actually use it for long, intensive tasks.
(i.e. 5 minutes into a game of Quake, the system will become unstable)
The solution? *shrugs* Hard to tell. Wait for a CPU that won't do this. (AMD!) and don't overclock so much.
Note: I love overclocking. I've overclocked every system I've had since my 483/33 My current main system won't overclock more than 5MHz. Life sucks for me. But I'll overclock my next system.
Wombats: The Bulldozers of the Bush.
Nathan Brazil?
No, reading Slashdot isn't THAT taxing on my cpu.
Unless you're using Mozilla.
Thanks for explaining this!
Is any on this true ? Anyone found any links which can warrant this story ? Seems like slashdot is upto it's bang up job of screening !
Grok the Demon !
That would be 5400 rpm, did your finger slip two keys over and hit the 6 instead of the 4 ? ;P
---
Fred Ackermann
e-mail: fred@warnerve.net
homepage: www.warnerve.net
mobile: 0402 293 572
Fred Ackermann
e-mail: fred@warnerve.net
homepage: www.warnerve.net
mobile: 0402 293 572
--
I have always wondered whether it would be possible to design chips with integrated heat sinks, or air holes to allow better circulation of air around the chip. This would certainly help in the cooling process.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
> What kind of CPU do you have ( speedwise) ?
I just built a 1.2GHz system.
> My 1100 Mgz thunderbird never goes below 60 C and I have seen it go as high as 72 C.
I have the Global WIN FOP38, which IIRC is one notch above the minimal requirement, so maybe it's making a difference. I also used some extra case ventalation, so that might be bringing it down a bit as well.
Unfortunately, the FOP38 is a bit on the noisy side.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
/. is mangling my posts this morning, so I'll keep this simple on this third try...
Go to Linux Today, and read the announcement about Alan Cox's 2.4.3-ac7, which just came out today.
Maybe it will help you; maybe it won't.
Maybe Slashdot will accept this post; maybe it won't.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> I think you should ammend your "many people have burnt or cracked their chips" with "people who do not follow AMD's cooling recommendations or improperly try to force a non-socket A cooler on to their chips".
Do you know where I can find AMD's temperature recommendations? I just built my first system with sensors on the motherboard, and I got the lm_sensors stuff working with the 2.4.3 kernel Saturday, so now I can watch the temperature on my desktop with gkrellm. But I don't know what I'm looking at. It usually hovers around 50C, but sometimes climbs as high as 57C when I've run an all-night number crunching job.
At what point do I start worrying?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Intel is rumored to be making a Xeon P4 that will have SMP capabilities.
I'm waiting for an SMP motherboard for the Athlons.
"This is not a bad thing, but a good thing."
Ummm, I beg to differ. It *is* good that the CPU doesn't burn itself out - yes. But it is bad that the CPU kicks into this mode on common applications.
If Intel is selling this chip as a performance solution then I want to be able to run it at 100% for 4-6 hours, for a kicking game of Q3 at a LAN party. I want to be able to do FP work 24/7 while I render an animation. If their CPU can't do these perfectly reasonable things they should mark it as such.
Look at it this way - if Intel was selling a CPU for use in WebTV (or some other embedded application) and the user was able to do something, rapidly opening and closing a window for example, that overheated the CPU and it slowed down - that'd be fine. It'd still function as a WebTV box, and while the user was screwing with the CPU it wouldn't be doing anything else.
Contrast that with them selling a CPU that they claim is a performance monster, better than any other x8 CPU. People expect to run their x86 machines at 100%, many servers at my work have been up for months and have been at nearly 100% load the entire time. When I installed a bunch of dual celerons a few years back as a rendering farm, they were at 100% for 18 months, running FP rending - about the hottest code you can get.
If the P4 is sold to a market that expects this performance, it had better perform.
If the only way to get a chip to overheat was to execute a tight loop of CPUID instructions, or something else that had no real purpose, then I would accept it kicking in thermal limiting. That's beyond reasonable operating specs (as in, performs no function, exists just to stress the product.)
To use a car as an example - if I buy a car, I expect it to be capable of highway speeds for prolonged times. It's not okay that the company profiled drivers and decided that 99.2% of the time, a duty cycle of 70% 30mph, 20% 50mph, and 10% 60mph was all that was required. I'd expect the car to be capable of handling 65mph 100% of the time, for 8-10 hours. If it couldn't do this, I would like a thermal limiter where it warned me gracefully instead of blowing up, but I'd still take it back as defective.
Wasn't this previously a feature in the mobile line? Or did the mobiles throttle merely for battery life? I fail to see a problem with the feature as long as adequate cooling can be achieved that will allow you to run intensive apps without throttling coming in to play 95% of the time. Better this I suppose than the ease of frying Thunderbirds that I have heard about. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather have an Athlon than a P4 myself, but I about crapped when I saw Patrick Norton on The Screen Savers on TechTV frying Athlons merely by booting for a couple of seconds without a heat sink installed.
If it ain't a Model M, it's a piece of crap.
There is no 500MHz UltraSPARC III and UltraSPARC III is HOT and requires proper cooling. The lowest
UltraSPARC III CPU runs at 600MHz and it is used in a $7000 Sun Blade 1000.
The chip that you probably have is a 500MHz UltraSPARC IIe which (sorry to disappoint you) doesn't kick x86s ass. IIe is a stripped down version of II with a tiny cache and it was originally designed for low power consuption and embedded applications.
Copied Verbatim from www.hardocp.com
Now that you guys have had a couple days to get excited about what Bert McComas had to say about the P4 clock throttling itself, I thought I would throw in my two cents. First off, here is the statement that is stirring the pot so well.
Intel's Thermal Design Guide has revealed that the absolute maximum power dissipation of the 1.5GHz P4 is actually 72.9 watts. This is 33% higher than the published system design specification, and essentially identical to the 1.33 GHz Athlon. In order to prevent the CPU from exceeding 54.7 watt, thermal throttling is used. 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. On the other hand, you will probably still be able to check your email at 1.5GHz.
While I don't know Bert, I have had the pleasure of meeting him and you have seen his links here on the [H] many times. On this occasion I think Bert has been sucking the crack pipe a bit too hard or either must have been in a terrible auto accident and had his cranium lodged in his rectal cavity and did not notice before he wrote the above statement.
We have been running an over-volted overclocked Pentium4 with the factory heatsink installed now for some time. It has been running here beside my desk folding proteins for Stanford University now for a solid month and has stayed at 100% CPU utilization. I track its performance and I can assure you that it has not ever slipped into the throttling that Bert speaks about above. If Bert's apps are running at 50%, it is because he does not have the sense to put a heatsink on the CPU or either he is operating his P4 system in Hell. Bert is taking an Intel safety device and demonizing the P4 with it. Here is what Intel PR George Alfs had to say about Bert's statements.
Hi Kyle,
You can run benchmarks all day on a Pentium(R) 4 processor with the benchmarks unaffected by the thermal protection circuitry. The key is to have a robust heat sink and thermal solution. With the heat sink setup we designed for Pentium 4 processor systems, I have yet to see thermal protection kick in.
George.
I have to fully agree with George's statements and have a few things to add. Also, I think that "robust" need not be in his statement.
What Bert may not know is that some mainboards have an adjustment in the BIOS that you can set yourself with the temperature that you want throttle to. (On our systems we have left it at default and never messed with the settings on the particular board that is Folding.) Yes, YOU can turn this on and off and fully control it on some mainboards. If you want a shield in between you and a burned up processor, set it low; if you want to forego the safety feature, set the temp high. I know that MANY of you wished that AMD had the courtesy to include a feature such as this instead of leaving their Athlon and Duron CPUs totally unprotected.
We have never seen nor heard of the CPU throttling being active on any person's CPU and certainly have not experienced it ourselves (unless we FORCED it to happen) under conditions more strenuous than 99.9% of the P4s in the field will ever encounter. I do not suggest that DIYers or hobbyist go the P4 route if they want to buy a system for themselves, but bashing it on this front is simply bad journalism and transparent to many people.
We here at the [H] have a lot of respect for Bert McComas' work and think he should step back up to the plate and possibly rephrase the statements in regards to this issue. Bert, we love you man, but you were just totally out to show Intel in a bad light this time, or were simply not thinking through the issue properly because you are being misleading and it looks to us as if you were trying to do it purposefully.
In case of Emergency, Curl up in the Fetal position, and lick a Bible for comfort!
It's a good explaintion
hmmm...
netra x1 - 1U @ $995 (small 1U - I think it's only 13" deep). I've never seen PC hardware
that's as compact (though if anyone has any
pointers...)
You can power it on/off and boot through the serial port. It has dual ethernet interfaces
and uses commodity sdram memory and IDE drives.
Koolance is a company with a "mainstream" water-cooled case.
And it's quiet because water cooling is not only used for the CPU, but also hard disk, power supply and graphics card.
Of course, I've seen 4 way powerpc systems that have no cooling required...
Later,
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
Slashdot would not be happy, for example, if someone began collecting their more interesting articles and reproducing them elsewhere. Hyperlinks were intended for a purpose! HardOCP deserves to have its content seen on its site, IMO.
Although this instance of a post copying from another site (in this case HardOCP) may have been purely informational, the concept that messages with no original content can get modded up may become an encouragement for ACs, and eventually force less genial folks than Kyle to step up their actions, a la Church of Scientology.
Posts exist to publicize original content. What has been done here is not that.
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
i believe it actually lowers the clock speed, but im not sure how much...
if there was more controll, this would be a good feature for overclockers, or people who have to operate their computers in a hot environment. i would rather have my computer run slower, than have to buy a new one because i burnt it out
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" --Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
So what happens if I run SETI@home? My current CPU is going 100% all of the time. (Or, at least the FPU is.) If (heaven forbid) I were to get a P4, would I be getting 50% performance all of the time? Why not just buy a 750-MHz CPU!
The PIII Systems Programming guide has a section on thermal control for the P6 core as well. Read chapter 12: System Management 12.14 Thermal Monitoring. On the P6, software can directly control the duty cycle or a default behavior can be programmed in to take affect when the system goes over a certain temperature. The on demand clock modulation can be a lot worse than 50%, the values range from 12.5% to 87.5%... Oh, BTW this stuff is almost always controlled by the BIOS so running linux won't change its behavior.
I always thought that Redundant applies to when it is a duplicate of another slashdot comment. Calling it Redundent makes it sound like it contains no new information.
How about Overrated?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Most of what I've heard about them has been not-so-good...mostly along the lines of "looks impressive, but doesn't get the job done." They don't appear to have much surface area to them, which is a Bad Thing (TM) for a heatsink.
I bought this heatsink to go with my 1.0-GHz Athlon...it's cheap, but it gets the job done fairly well AFAICT (no lockups, and the heatsink only gets warm, not hot). The thermal pad at the bottom was removed and the appropriate amount of Arctic Silver II was scraped across the top of the die. There's no thermal monitoring on the motherboard (a Biostar M7MIA), so I can't provide numbers for comparison, but I suspect that mine is running much cooler than yours.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Ever hear of KryoTech? Their website is pretty much content-free at the moment, but they sell refrigeration systems for overclockers. They also sell prebuilt Athlon-based systems...they had Athlons running at 1.0 GHz months before AMD shipped true 1.0-GHz Athlons. Last time I heard, their equipment, combined with the latest processors, was supposed to enable speeds up to 1.5-1.6 GHz. If a 1.2-GHz Athlon is an even match for a 1.5-GHz P4 in most tasks, imagine how an Athlon @ 1.5 GHz would compare to a 1.5-GHz P4.
There are other companies out there in this business...KryoTech is the one that popped to mind first. I think Tom's Hardware did a review of a similar product from another company, and continues to use a system built around that product as its reference "absolute fastest you can get" system.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Does this mean that people who over-clock thier P4 systems are auctually likely to SLOW their cpu down?
No, reading Slashdot isn't THAT taxing on my cpu.
According to ZDNet today, Intel is chopping the price of the P4 chips by as much as 50% this month, ostensibly to compete with AMD. Now I see the REAL reason: Price equals performance! Chop the speed by half, chop the price! Crazy! Seriously tho, doesn't this happen on many notebooks when they go into power saver mode on battery?
"Look, Smithers! I'm Davy Crockett!"
When things get too hot at work I switch into my brain-cooling mode. I spend 0.2 microseconds working then switch off to slashdot reading mode for 2 seconds. This modified duty cycle allows time for my brain to cool down. Once frustration levels are within acceptable tolerances, I switch back into 100% work mode.
Actually, my 1GHz Athlon frequently slows to a crawl when I'm doing disk access. I assumed is was something brain dead about the VIA chipset which would be fixed in the next kernel, but I suppose it could be related to the CPU. Any ideas?
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Read the end, he isn't serious. Give him a Funny or 3.
You will be waiting forever as the chip was designed with no SMP capability == multi-processor P4 is not possible.
I don't agree. This is bad faith from Intel, since the CPU doesn't run at full speed when you really need it. It's not a nice feature, it's a very bad one, because you don't get all the power you're told you should have.
"The answer to the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is... 42"
The problem is that I don't see where is the advantage for the consumer. So far, it seems that AMD processors don't rely on this feature and they are great for your everyday computing needs. Why would Intel, the "king" (not anymore, but that's not relevant to the debate) of microprocessors, use such a tactic to lower the CPU temperature. After all, it doesn't serve any purpose to the user to have a CPU that halves it's performance when under extreme stress. If my CPU is under extreme stress, it's probably because it's running a heavy program and it needs all the cycles it can get. I'd rather have a better fan/heatsink to lower the temperature than lower the performance of my CPU.
"The answer to the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is... 42"
Okay then I have to admit it's appropriate sometimes. But I wonder if this protection mechanism kicks in often when I'm doing 3D rendering in 3DSMax (which does it's final rendering in software) or playing some top notch game in 1600x1200x32 with all lighting and physics effects at their full settings.
"The answer to the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is... 42"
What good is a supafast processor if it drops to half speed when doing anything useful? Is this how Intel is getting the faster pentiums out the door? I'm quite happy with my G4, thank you very much...
--
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
-E. W. Dijkstra
Whether the throttling is a good thing is up to debate (and I say it is good: If you don't properly cool your CPU it won't melt down!). However, it appears that Intel *still* mis-represented the power consumption, which is something Intel advocates have been bashing AMD over. In particular, people have claimed that the Athalon will have problems scaling because of its high power consumption. It looks to me like the P4 will face the same problem.
Is basically what they are saying. So instead of leaving the job up to the consumer, they do it themselves, and at a heavy premium.
While I agree that it's probably a good thing that the processor has limits so it won't overheat itself, I think the problem most people are having is Intel pushing a 1.5 GHz chip that doesn't run at 1.5 GHz. If I buy a fast chip, I want that speed when it's needed most, during intensive operations. If my chip will always cut its speed in half when I need it the most, that's not very good. There's no problem with a chip doing this when that's what it's designed and advertised to do, as with their mobile processors and SpeedStep. However, Intel is advertising this chip as a 1.5 GHz chip, period (not 1.5GHz some of the time). I would rather buy a 1.3 GHz chip that's engineered well enough in other ways NOT to need this power cut during peak loads, and will therefore run at 1.3 GHz all the time.
If you buy a car that gets 30 miles to the gallon, that's good. But if this car really only gets 30 miles to the gallon when traveling at speeds under 10 mph, and otherwise gets half that...then that's not very good. As long as this mechanism won't ever kick in for the majority of the people and the majority of the systems, then that's fine, but if it turns out to be kicking in on any mildly intensive application, then that's a serious problem.
Yes! That guy!
I don't know how often this decelerator kicks in, what load is required to push the processor over its maximum dissipation as prescribed in the design spec. If it only kicks in as often as seatbelts/airbags/ABS do in cars, and then it's really needed, then that's good. However, if the processor is constantly pushing the limits of the specification, and having to throttle down, then that's bad. If your airbag in your car deployed every time you went over a speedbump, that'd be bad. From the Intel paper, I get the impression that it's designed not to be used too often, but I'd rather see the results of independent field tests (with a range of normal cooling mechanisms, from good to bad, and external temperatures) than rely solely on marketing/technical papers from Intel. The initial problem is that the CPU is designed to underclock itsefl hugely at all, but then once you realize it could be beneficial, it's a matter of under what circumstances and how often it actually does it.
Yes! That guy!
</offtopic rant>
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Does it alert the operating system that it's slowing down, so that the operating system can tell me that it's slowed down?
The shareholder is always right.
Sure, you might only get half the clock cycles, but the ones you do get, are two times faster, so you are getting even more performance than a regular chip!
? What ? the ? hell ? are ? you ? talking ? about ?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Actually, you should check out: Tomshardware. It's a review of 17 coolers. Thermaltake doesn't do so well.
or here:
slashdot
If you'd have waited a year, you could have got that $450 chip for $50.
Perhaps there's a reason to prefer a chip that doesn't get so hot in the first place. I heard Motorolla and IBM make one, and that some company has released a Unix variant that runs pretty well on it.
Introducing, in the 21st century, a chip without SMP capabilities, and that will still require you to buy a whole new mobo?
You mean the Athlon? Or are you running quad Athlons are your Socket 7 motherbaord from 1995?
The article says that a thermal diode is responsible for triggering the throttled-down performance. But then it also says that the throttling happens due to the power consumption. These are different things: power consumption only causes the temperature to rise if the cooling is not slurping off excess heat fast enough.
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".
-- props to Wreck (leonard@dc.spam.net) --
Reality is just a clever Hack, and the Planck constant is the refresh rate.
The Intel Xeon processor coming out (not Pentium III Xeon, not Pentium 4 Xeon, but simply Intel Xeon) is based on the Pentium 4 and offers multi-CPU options.
no way. until my pentium 9 is running around in a black teddy fixing me martinis and giving me blowjobs, there is a lot more we from them.
100% Pure Evil With The Look And Feel Of Wholesome Goodness
...this can be solved with bigger fans.
Scott
Find, post, and discuss upcoming events of all kinds at EventNation.com
Sorry to be the third to break it to you but thermal take is all looks. I have a 1100 mhz Athlon as well with a Swiftech cooler. When idle I get 32 C and fully stressed (Running prime95) it gets up to 51 C.
Your fan is fine for running at 1100 but if you want to push it to 1300 like I did you'll need to get another one.
You can replace the fan on your FSB with the Orb which will help you overclock it a bit more.
Read those before you reply about the PIV power situation (hint: if you cool it, it won't cut itself down to half speed). But it wasn't nice that Intel forget to mention the thermal diode is what allows that theoretical lower-than-Athalon power consumption; you won't see that benefit if you massively cool it.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
> I can't wait to get myself a dual proc p4! Intel's P4 architecture does not support SMP. Anything to get that clockspeed in the microwave range! That's Intel innovation for you.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
This sounds odd, you'd think the problems with running cpus at such high temps would be timing related. Mechanicaly, it should be able to go well pass 125C (At the semi I work at, we frequently stress our devices up to 125C (using a temperature forcing "thermonics" system). The chip run slower than normal, but they still run and show no signs of mechanical failure. Plus for operating life reliability data, we also burn-in the chips at 125C for 1000 hours).
I use the Supermicro 750-A, here Mine has 11 fans in it. It sounds like a wind tunnel in my bedroom, but you practically have to chip the ice of the system!!!
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If God Dropped Acid, Would he see People???
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Back when computers were sold to engineers, they came with a spec sheet with the environmental specs: allowable ranges on power, temperature, air pressure, and humidity. Compaq still provides them. Here are the numbers for a PIII desktop machine:
Note that any environment that isn't air-conditioned and humidity-controlled will probably go outside those ranges at some point in the year. So some form of overheat protection is essential to prevent component damage. A slowdown is better than a shutdown, which is better than a crash, which is better than a meltdown. You want thermal throttling, fan speed control, and emergency overtemp shutdown on anything used for more than Quake. Fortunately, those features only add a few dollars today.
Surprisingly, Compaq's laptops have a 95F temperature limit, which is on the low side for a portable device.
There used to be a saying in railroading: "Never buy equipment from a supplier who's in a better climate than yours". All the good railroad suppliers were in places like upstate New York, where they experienced snow, ice, rain, heat, and thunderstorms. Computing could use more of that attitude.
I will use this oportunity to plug the Super Orb. I got one and used it on a Thunderbird Athalon 950 Mhz, and I could easily overclock it more, it works that well. I can feel warm air coming off the base, but most of the heatsink is below room temperature. It rocks. I think it costs maybe $15 if that, there is no excuse not to get one, unless you are getting a golden orb or one of the huge copper/aluminum heatsinks.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
"Better to stand still in a meadow of sweet flowers than run forward across the bombpitted, mined and chlorine gassed no man's land of technological advance" is 'informative'?
Hello? What the fuck, folks. Funny, maybe, if a bit ham-fisted. Flamebait, certainly. Troll, assuredly. Look, I like to curl up with a good Philip K. Dick novel and 70 ccs of misery as much as the next guy but my GOD, people.
So...the tribulations of the P4 are going to lead to the stable Chung Kuo heavenly realm of techno-stasis. This is as fucking stupid as the gobot writing how open-source was communism the other day. Shouldn't Katz be writing this bullshit? Or at least interviewing someone about it?
Looks like I'm going to have to re-animate Heinlein's corpse with a team of crack commandos and surprise the fuck out of a lot of people. No stupider idea than this pile of mental dung.
Its amazing how flexible the english language is for creating perjoratives.
I had "fucking goofball" in my head---but "gobot" came out instead. I am such a child of the eighties nerdling that "gobot" had the connotation of "cheap, shabby copy." I guess Hasbro (?) Tanaka (?) really got their hooks into me.
"Ohh--I wasted my life."
But is your last statement correct? Does it really clock down in common applications?
Do you have any evidence of that?
If it only clocks down when the heatsink falls off or when the fan stops spinning while you're playing Quake 3, or your room ambient temp goes up to 45 degrees C then hey that's a good thing.
But if everything is physically fine in your system, and it clocks down whilst you're rendering a 3D scene then it's a bad thing.
Just because it has a clock down feature doesn't make it bad. It's when it clocks down. In fact I think it's a good feature to have.
Better than permanently clocking down to 0MHz
Cheerio,
Link.
This has been said of Intel over and over again. They were deceptive liars when they released the Pentium III, which was almost exactly the same as the Pentium II, except for the CPU ID (and perhaps other minor differences), and that was coupled with the privacy concerns of the CPU ID, which was going to ruin Intel by erroding trust amongst consumers.
The Pentium Pro was also going to ruin Intel, as it was so expensive and didn't seem like it'd ever be worth the money for something that didn't perform much better. And so on... people have said more or less this same thing most of Intel's new processors. Ok, maybe this time it really will happen, but much more likely is that history will repeat itself yet again.
In fact, the only time Intel's ever really had any major trust problems was when the FDIV bug hit, and when they finally did the right thing and offered to replace any FDIV-bug chip for free, consumer/business's trust was almost fully restored.
This certainly isn't the first time there's been a slow-down in the market.
Moore's law has been predicted to have run dry many many times. Right now doesn't seem like such a good time to be forcasting the end of Moore's law, since short-term incremental improvements (1.7 GHz up from 1.5 GHz on the P4) and long-term improvements (IA64, async "clocking", even finer geometry transistors in the lab, etc) are in the making.
Just as predicting "everything the can be invented has been" didn't work in 1899, it's incredibly short-sighted today.
Speech recognition isn't too hard to imagine today. While it isn't likely to become the primary way of interacting with the computer (ala Star Trek), it will certainly become a high-demand feature when it's refined and cost effective. Among other benefits, speech recognition may really open up the possibilities for people communicating with one another by email and discussion forums (like this one), as a great portion of the population has reasonably good speaking skills, but typing messages is "hard work".
It's also not too hard to envision future software parsing natural language, at least with some level of success in understanding the meaning. Today's computer interfaces aren't much more sophisticated than caveman's point-and-grunt (well, maybe except for geeks/programmers who can use the command line). Today's successful user interfaces tend to build their success by arranging objects to be pointed at... but it's easy to see with the massive growth of available information on the web that point-and-grunt doesn't scale well. Quite a lot of research has gone into this dream. In fact, the aim of languages like XML are to facilitate computers being able to "understand" the information, so that new methods of interaction can be built (well, there's other shorter-term benefits too) When/if natural language parsion becomes a useful interaction technique, it will be very compelling (aka a "killer app") and today's computers will seem as ancient as black-n-white television (or perhaps an old Apple ][).
There's many other amazingly short-sighed quotes lurking in sociology's post (hard to believe 3-4 people mod'd it up as insightful), but perhaps the best is "Computers are at the base of all our technological advances." Perhaps that could be said of the written language or maybe even the printing press.
There's plenty more to be commented upon, but, dear moderators, please take a moment to ask yourself how insightful is a viewpoint with very limited historical perspective that predicts no advanments in the future? Sounds to me like the wishful thinking of a luddite.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
This not really news, other sites had this story a week ago. I actually think i saw it on Slashdot last week, well proberly not
I didn't say it was your fault. I said I was going to blame it on you.
Wondering what badgers eat? Visit WhatBadgersEat.com!
I've got a 1Ghz PIII at work and an AMD 1ghz athlon at home - both running Slackware on them and HANDS DOWN the Athlon kicks the PIII's ass!
It's better for GiMP, and it even runs the DISTRIBUTED.NET RC5-64 keycracking client faster!
(I'm getting 3.5 million keys/sec on the Athlon!)
Oh - and I forgot to mention the price difference between the 2 chips - go to Pricewatch.com to see the difference!
AMD - more bang for your buck!
[Connection closed by foreign host]
Heat causes weird things to happen with computers. Radio shack and just about every computer store on Earth sell 3" fans that plug into drive power supplies that you can put anywhere in your case. Whenever I get a new computer that is the first thing I get to put in, blowing directly onto wherever the CPU is. If the case supports it, I get two or three of them for the front of the case to blow in and the rear of the case to blow out. Yes, CPUs get HOT and the more air you can move around/over them the better off you are.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
In related news, President Bush's latest gaffs were explained by stating that his Pentium 4 powered aritificial brain went into thermal throttling mode.
The Secret Service is now charged with the responsibility of making sure his Peltier cooler is always firmly attached to his forehead.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
This story was posted and discussed at length 3 days ago...
In a way, the microprocessor has "grown up". Mainframe processor cores from long ago have thermal shutdown to prevent catastrophic failure. Let's see... Thousands of network-attached clients (terminals) running applications on the server (mainframe). Gobs of disk capacity and error-correcting memory. Thermal shutdown on the CPU to prevent damaging the system. Needs good cooling. Yup, I'd say the microcomputers is the next mainframe.
Lets see, if a 1.2ghz Thunderbird kills a P4 at 1.5ghz, so then what... I guess my P60 would kill at Pentium 4 750mhz.
Download the latest via 4 in 1 drivers. Verify that DMA is enabled in your disk's properties. I'm running an asus AV7 with 256 megs of viking cas3 memory at cas2 (133mhz) with an athlon 700@800 and a asus V6800 video card (gforce256 DDR) with the latest bios's in the mobo and vid card, with the latest drivers for everything (well, not THE latest, I dont want to reboot). I have win2k on the computer, it is rock solid stable. as of right now I have a month and a half up time. I have a 7200rpm HD, my computer is faster then I can window most of the time right now. Anyhow I'm not specifically an intel or amd freak, but the latest drivers/bios help alot. When I can find a notebook with a gforce2 go, and 32 meg of DDR memory linux is going on my desktop permanantly.
Man I love RISC chips....
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
-The Professor, Futurama
Also in the document they state that they update the MSR (machine status registers), so an OS, or any program for that matter, could find out how fast the processor was operating at.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
Page 26, they have a neat little graph that says that if the chassis has 70% of some optimal cooling capacity, the throttling won't happen. So since this is will keep an overheated processor from being cooked, I can only see this as a positive.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
I run mostly on Apple hardware (I have SGI, sparc and IBM RS6k too) but I SERIOUSLY doubt that a 733 MHz G4 Mac is as fast as a 1.5 GHz PIV, though I would easily believe its faster at the same clock rate. From all the "properly cool your chips" posts I'd say any professional benchmarking was conducted with a setup with adequate cooling. For Folks looking to really cool down their intel chips, try and find a used SGI indigo2 case and rip the fan out of it. Talk about a HYOOGE fan. When will we see intel and AMD pushing refrigeration units for their systems? Better be fast...multicore G5's are on the way.
You know how they always compare the Macs to the PCs and show how the mac is faster? I wonder if those benchmarks reflect the processor at 1.5ghz or 750mhz. Is the pentium IV @ 750mhz when most benchmarks are done? If this is so then why is it still faster than a 750mhz machine(except for a mac :-) )?
Well, actually most cars manf. do claim certain milage in the city, and in the country. Plus if you keep your car tuned (read have a good heat sink/fan) and you don't race at the lights (read try and run unnecessary applications when CPU cycles are needed) then you will get the claimed milage. Is Ford/GM/Nissan/BMW/Mercedes...et al... wrong to include airbags and ABS because (say) 99.9% of drivers don't crash? If AMD turned around tomorrow and announced a u-beaut overheating handling CPU thingy, how many would jump on AMD for deception?
The guys at [H]ardOCP addressed this issue. Look under Sunday, April 15, 2001 - Ed 2. "We have never seen nor heard of the CPU throttling being active on any person's CPU and certainly have not experienced it ourselves (unless we FORCED it to happen) under conditions more strenuous than 99.9% of the P4s in the field will ever encounter. I do not suggest that DIYers or hobbyist go the P4 route if they want to buy a system for themselves, but bashing it on this front is simply bad journalism and transparent to many people." Sorry, I don't know of a way to direct link to an article on their site...
I figured that the original post was 5:Humor, not 5:Insightful. I think it's supposed to be funny, but a little too serious for its own good.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
This WOULD explain the rather fucked up benchmarks compared to AMD chips at alower clockrates. Dammit Intel, bad doggie, no treat.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Stupider than that is the fact that this "it runs at half the speed!" topic was already mentioned in an article on Friday: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/13/204123 8&mode=thread
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
This is quite normal. A lot of auto manufacturers now have a 'limp-home' mode built into the ECU of their cars. Should your car suffer some kind of problem, overheating for instance, the ECU will powerdown a few cylinders to enable the car to be driven to the next service point. Mercedes-Benz have been using this technology for years now.
A CPU feature that slows the itself until a 'within-range' temperature is reached is better than having a blackened & useless, BBQ processor. I know what I'd prefer. If you'd rather fry your CPU - disable it and go crazy.
*** I am the real stylewagon
What does every Slashdot user have in common? They all have toasters for processors. Hahaha, its a shame that Linux and Winblows users are being left out of the revolution. I hate to break the news to you people, but, with the advent of modern risc processing it is now possible to run your computer without a fan or cooling of any kind. Get an Mac and you people wont need that wind tunnel for the toaster you guys call a CPU.
"Smokey, this isn't Nam, there are rules." -Walter
I also think this is a good idea - in fact it is great for overclocking. Overclock the CPU for all its worth, and let it handle as much load as it can, but use thermal throttling to limmit temperature. This is especially good for servers, which usually deal with spikes of heavy CPU usage, but are otherwise pretty much idle.
This system is also dead easy to implement in software. I did it for Linux once - simply write a kernel module to halt the CPU for a specified time and a userspace daemon to monitor the temperature, and feed halt periods to the kernel module.
Obviously this isn't any good for CPUs doing heavy simulations/gaming, but for many other apps it is a great solution.
I'll take two please!
I'm surprised they haven't used buzz words like 'Smart chip' or 'Evolution Technology!'
Crap, if they do...I want royalties!!
LFS. Have you built your system today?
It is well known that the development ..
I'm wary of anyone who puts forth an argument using these words. They are most commonly just a cheap way of trying to give one's statement(s) extra "weight" in an argument, without having to worry about the hassles of actually backing up your arguments with references. It also has the additional benefit of discouraging people from disagreeing, since the fact is obviously so "well known", then if you don't happen to agree with it, you must be in a small minority and are probably wrong, so you keep quiet so as not to sound stupid.
I can't say I've ever read a scientific research paper that began with "it's a well known fact".
Related variations of this are "it's a little known fact ..", "experts say ..", and of course the real marketing derivative, "scientists tell us ..".
The sad thing is that these things work on most people. I wish they'd teach all these cheap tricks in school. Perhaps the public would spot these things then, and be harder to fool. Then again, most sheeple probably prefer having their opinions handed to them on a platter, rather than having to form opinions themselves.
Sorry .. this isn't a response to your post at all, just a general OT rambling ..
Hey, I thought that was pretty funny :). Why mod it down?
"Isn't there some corollary to Moore's law that states "No matter how fast the hardware is there are millions of software developers working to bring that hardware to its knees"
Haven't heard it phrased like that, but the one I heard was "Gate's Law: The speed of software halves every 18 months".
I know that I don't need a Ghz processor to run a word processor, but it sure helps when I am running a word processor, browser, MP3 player, regunkulator, etc.
And even in the unlikely event that processors stagnate there is still a lot of work to be done making multiprocessor systems efficient and commonly available. Apple has taken the first step, will anyone else step up to the plate?
PS: I am aware that Linux is capable of using multiple processors, however dual processor MBs are still very expensive.
The problem here is that the chipmakers realized that instead of selling chips that were ridiculously overclockable (Celeron 300A, anyone?) and letting the consumer overclock them, they could overclock the chips themselves, because all Joe Six Pack knows is that 1.5 is greater than 1.3, so the new chip must be better.
If you've been paying attention, you've seen this coming. The current cooling configuration of a modern system looks like an overclocker's wet dream a few years ago. But working this overheat protection into the chip itself just proves that this is a chip not capable of running at 1.5GHz except under extreme cooling conditions. It was a really cheap way for AMD and Intel to keep Moore's law alive without innovation (unless you think "more fans" is innovation.)
We already have a grammar nazi. Go away.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
Yeah, I heard good things about Orb and I got myself one.
...
On my 1100 Mhz Athlon , when idle, temperature nevers goes below 60 C, and on completely stressed system levels out around 72 C.
I have two case fans and my motherboard temp is a comfortable 24 C so the problem here is not lack of air.
It simply seems as if Orb is not able to keep up with 1.1 Gz beast
Is it just me or has the quality of news articles posted by slashdot over the last 3 months seriously slipped?
/. It's typical "lets bash the big companies 'cause there's no real news" junk...
/. get a grip.
This is an _OLD STORY_ which has been discussed previously on
So Intel built some self-protection into the P IV, good for them.. why not? As far as I've seen on the SERIOUS hardware sites nobody has managed to get a P IV to do this..
Come on
I had one.. heated the whole house.
---
"Watch these suckers jump when I get Administrator."
Ahem. I am still waiting for real time raytracing to render asymetric multiprocessing via peripheral pseudo-"GPUs" obsolete.
---
"Watch these suckers jump when I get Administrator."
tbirds run at 73 watts just fine with adequate cooling.... and if the GIANT BLOCK OF HEATSINK FAN that the P4 comes with isn't adequate, then Intel has bigger problems with the P4 than we ever thought
I see NO reason to throttle the speed of a pentium4 to HALF of its RATED speed simply because it's running at ~54 watts
When overclocking, your biggest obstacle is typically heat. If I increase the voltage to my chip, and this temperature protection kicks in, I could be running alot slower than if I were underclocked!!
Personally, I don't know of anyone who's been able to overheat a CPU. I've always heard overheating shortens its lifespan, but I don't use a CPU more than a couple of years anyway and don't really care. I'm actually still running on an overclocked Celeron 300A at 450Mhz.
Gee, whenever a trivial vulnerability regarding Linux or AMD is exposed, it's instantly dismissed as Wintel FUD. However, when it's the other way around, you just stand there and stoke the flames. Slashdot has become the epitome of tech hypocrisy.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
If you know _anything_ about a silicon....you know that it's conductive properties are extremely coupled with temperature. I'm going to be deliberately dumbed down for the masses... The thermal diode is nothing more than an extra P-N junction on the actual processor core. As the temperature of the actual silicon die changes, the effective resistance of the diode will change and allow a current to flow through it. The amount of current that flows through the diode is somewhat proportional to the temperature of the actual processor. The current flowing through this diode is compared to the current flowing through a precalibrated circuit (this is what defines your threshhold temperature where throttling will occur). That's how the processor determines if it's getting too hot. Whoever wrote that article is flat out and simple on crack. It has nothing to do with the power usage on a processor... it has to do with cooling. Provide enough cooling and you wont' have to worry about it and you'll be able to run your processor right up to the full 1.5 GHz(and probably then some). This is more for the el-cheap-o mom-n-pop shops that can't actually validate their designs and just slap a metal heatsink on their processors and call it good. Thermal throttling is not a new idea .... the mobile market has been doing it for years. The mobile Pentium II has a thermal sensor on it too (ftp://download.intel.com/design/mobile/applnots/2 4372401.pdf) however back then the throttling mechanism was implimented outside the processors.
Now that they can get small enough, they just migrated it onto the die itself.
Would you rather your machine just turn it self off like everything else when it overheats? Or worse not do anything at all and just toast it self?
Yeah, and my Commodore 64 was all the speed I needed. That 2GB HD I bought in 1997 was all the storage I needed. And coe to think of it that 80MB hard drive that the teacher in my 8th grade computer lab had was the bomb. I wanted one so bad it was worth the $500 price tag. It would last me a lifetime. I mean who could ever fill up 80MB?
More on topic, how long until we see some benchmarks on Tom's Hardware or some such site that tells us how often this 'clock modulation' kicks on under load? The white paper at Intel's site says the PROCHOT# signal is available on an external pin, it would be an easy thing for someone with motivation to hook up a 'scope or data logger to this pin and watch it do it's thing.
This wont happen if GOOD heatsinks/fans are used. These processors get hot. I wish AMD did this, as AMD is smokin. But for the price, you cant argue on AMD. Though many AMD users have either burnt or cracked their chips, so having protection like this isnt always a bad thing. just use good heatsinks and you'll probably be just fine and dandy.
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
Seriously, Intel's chip fab concept is to throttle down power to avoid chip meltdown when the chip gets too hot, which causes this.
So, either buy a Transmeta, which power saves when loads are light, or get an AMD, which takes a licking and keeps on clock cycle ticking.
But you're better off with a Pentium II in most cases. Or an Athlon 1 GHz if you're not an Intel slave.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Not only is this Heatsink on that thing the size of a fridge, now they tell us its not big enough!
Well lets just strap a box-fan on the side of the thing!!
"Because it runs at half speed half of the time"
Wrong. It runs at full speed half the time. And at nothing the other half. If it ran at half speed half the time, depending on what it did the other half of the time, it could be anything from 25% to 75% efficient.
If voting could really change the system, it would be against the law.
Nice troll. True, Moore's law may eventually break down, but it seems ridiculous to say that hardware innovation will stop. People have been saying this kind of thing forever:
In 1899 Charles Duell (Head of the U.S. Patent Office) said, "Everything that can be invented has been invented."
In 1981 Bill Gates said, "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
In 1996, John Horgan (Senior writer for Scientific American) wrote a book called "The End of Science?".
Invention slows down sometimes, but it never stops.
This
I just saw this on Stomped. 2cpu.com put up a Sandra screenshot yesterday of a 1.99 GHz dual Palamino. I'm skeptical about the accuracy of the picture but if the scores are true then Intel has a lot to worry about.
Well you can not agree all you want, but I would bet you that off the record *every* engineer from *every* microprocessor company would state that something like this (or more advanced more likely) is an inevitability in any processor... or go read the proceedinds for the past few ISCAs(International Symponsium on Computer Architecture, the most prestigious computer architecture conference) or Micro or HPCA etc and see that papers have been talking about features like this for a while, and that a large amount of the great minds in this field agree that it is important (getting an ISCA paper is a very difficult task... If this idea were total BS then it would never have been published there).
I must burn in hell, suffer and pay for my sins
But Gods the one who's losing, Satan always wins!
I said the off the record thing because I'm sure AMD is loving the fact that people are currently treating this feature as a really bad idea right now, whether or not they think it's a good idea...
I must burn in hell, suffer and pay for my sins
But Gods the one who's losing, Satan always wins!
2) The amount of heat generated by a program varies over very short time periods. You could be in a tight FP loop for 10 million instructions (very small compared to a > 1 GHz processor) then move on to different code which is heavily memory limited. In this second phase, you will be generating a lot less heat than in the first.
3) Rendering is not the hottest code around--it suffers incredible numbers of long latency cache misses and TLB misses. While it may be hot, there is hotter stuff around.
4) Where did Intel promise you anything other than that the P4 can reproduce the scores on the various benchmarks they quote? Answer--they didn't
5) If you really care, just pay for a more expensive cooling solution. If this is kicking in too often, keeping the proc colder will prevent that from happening.
My question is... you think it's bad that this kicks in on common applications... how about the current case? Currently, when running certian applications, you could probably kick up the clock frequency a few hundred mhz and it wouldn't crash because that app doesn't generate a lot of heat. However, you couldn't run the proc at this elevated frequency on, say, quake. Well, to me, it looks like you're gretting screwed, since most of the time you could be running at a faster speed, and it's only in these rare cases that it would actually cause any adverse effects. Well, this can be seen as addressing that issue, but from the other direction--you start out at the highest speed, and if the processor gets too hot (so there is danger of a crash or permanent damage) you automatically slip into the slower mode.
I must burn in hell, suffer and pay for my sins
But Gods the one who's losing, Satan always wins!
Well, obviously I'm not looking for anyone to get ripped off... I don't know how this feature is being marketed--my main point is that I was just trying to educate people about what this feature is really for, and how it will ultimately be used in future processors :).
I must burn in hell, suffer and pay for my sins
But Gods the one who's losing, Satan always wins!
Ok, I see let me explain... The primary benefit is lower packaging costs in two ways... As I tried to state before (but didn't say properly), the packaging costs go up by about $1 per watt for each watt over 30... until you reach around 130W. At that point, air cooling will no longer suffice, so you have to use an alternate cooling method which costs lots more (this is always how I'e heard the rule stated--I don't knwo what the alternate method is). So, this techinque allows manufacturers to make processors which have cheaper packaging (saving money) as well as avoiding that 130w number (saving more money). Now, I understand your criticism of the technique. If it kicks in all the time, then it's probably not worth it. But that's not what this is targeted at. As has been stated, this technique never kciks in for 99.9% of people with a properly attached HS/fan, so it's more of just an emergency mechanism (in case the fan dies etc). Now, eventually (as has been published in the literature) people expect this mechanism to be applied more aggressively, so I'll briefly discuss that (but again, I don't think this applies in this case, where it is mostly just an emergency escape mechanism). Most applications are phase oriented... they do work for a while, then stream in a bunch of data, then more work etc. Well, as you probably know, during these data streaming periods, the processor is just sitting around doing nothing, so that would be an opportunity to cool off. Now, some applications (like the FP benchmarks from the SPEC suite) are highly highly optimized, so they spend their entire time in a small loop doing work all the time without ever pausing... Applications such as these which are constantly doing high heat operations (floating point operations generate a TON of heat) are going to trigger the mechanism. But, the majority of apps have this phased behavior where they intersperse low heat work periods between the high heat periods, and most likely, will usually avoid triggering the mechanism. Did I make the distinction clear? If you're interested, I could point you at some papers on the topic which do a better job explaining this than me (power isn't my area to be honest). So, to restate what I said, the benefit to the consumer is lower prices due to lower packaging costs, as well as possibly a higher performance processor in the general case. I don't know *anything* about layout, but I would imagine that you could use this technique also when the heat density of certain parts of the chip were getting to high. Where you get to place different components on the chip make a huge difference in the performance, so maybe you could use this mechanism to allow you to place, say, the fp function units closer to the register file, knowing that if the heat density in that region got too high you'd invoke this technique.
I must burn in hell, suffer and pay for my sins
But Gods the one who's losing, Satan always wins!
Come on people... you even made me log in to reply to this one... This is not a bad thing, but a good thing. Power has been a problem for cpus for a while. This is, in fact, actually a quite cool feature. Generally how processors are designed is you get some guy to generate the maximum heat producing code that he can find. It doesn't do anything useful, and generally consists of lots and lots of floating point instructions. Then, you find out how much this heat this program generates when run on your processor. Now, you design your processor to be able to tolerate the heat generated by this program. However, first of all, no program that does anything useful will ever generate as much heat as this test program. SO really, you're forced to design your processor packaging for a way overkill case just to be sure that you don't have your processor die when someone is doing legitmate work with an unoverclocked processor. It has been shown that packaging costs increase by about $1 per watt generated by a processor for every watt over $30, so you can see that developing your packaging for the worst case scenario can be quite expensive. The alternative, then, is exhibited in the P4... Build your processor packaging for less than the worst case, then use some form of thermal throttling to prevent overheating. This has two advantages 1) It lowers your packaging costs 2) It prevents processor death in the case of catastrophing failure (such as a fan dying). I expected that people would get up in arms about this feature, but really, most of you just need to learn about the most recent research in this field to see this is actually a step in the right direction. However most people on slashdot are primed to jump on Intel at every opportunity, so they interpret this in the worst possible light. And BTW, I'm getting my PhD in computer architecture, so I know what I'm talking about :P. There have been papers at all the major conferences for the past few years dealing with power issues, and I might work on one myself soon.
I must burn in hell, suffer and pay for my sins
But Gods the one who's losing, Satan always wins!
OMG I found a post on a message board!! I think all of slashdot should be told!!
talk about bad reporting..
Usually they say processors won't really reach their highest speed. But half of the highest speed? Come on! Should I buy dual processors to have the speed of what one is? AMD looks better and better.
I wonder what over clocking would do
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
...you want to force labeling to announce that a processor when confronted with an out-of-supported-range thermal envronment slows downs instead of stopping. Maybe it's not unreasonable to rate a CPU in a properly built thermal enclosure, huh?
Smarten up.
Would it be possible for someone to write a piece of software (running on Windows, of course) to send this PROCHOT signal (or otherwise trigger it), regardless of the processor's actual temp?
If so, that would seem like some sort of 1/4 denial-of-service attack (assuming a denial-of-service atack consumes all available resources, rather than just making a system sluggish.)
I'm not good with low-level things, so I have no idea if there's any way to send this PROCHOT signal at anything other than a hardware level. If someone could clarify, I'd be grateful.
Anyway, my original question still stands: could this "feature" be used to effectively cut a user's clock rating in half?
I'm not a real fan of the P4 (as you all may have noticed), but this is an issue of getting sufficient cooling to the chip so it stays within spec. I have a couple of cooked T-Birds for tie tacks that would have benefited from this technology.
Sex is heriditary, if your parents didn't have it chances are good you won't either.
"1.5Ghz. It's there. Except when you need it."
Let's see - you heat it up too much and it automatically goes half as fast. What about the opposite? If I put it in the freezer will it automatically go twice as fast? I think not...
that sounds like why-your-intel-processor-is-bad-hype to me.
you may want to read this posted on hardocp.com:
Hi Kyle, You can run benchmarks all day on a Pentium(R) 4 processor with the benchmarks unaffected by the thermal protection circuitry. The key is to have a robust heat sink and thermal solution. With the heat sink setup we designed for Pentium 4 processor systems, I have yet to see thermal protection kick in. George.
(George = Intel PR George Alfs)
And here is a small excerpt from Kyle's comment:
We have been running an over-volted overclocked Pentium4 with the factory heatsink installed now for some time. It has been running here beside my desk folding proteins for Stanford University now for a solid month and has stayed at 100% CPU utilization. I track its performance and I can assure you that it has not ever slipped into the throttling that Bert speaks about above.
keep it simple.
It is a porn site. It has nothing to do with computers.
I am sure those marshes were not worse than those found in nam, and the SEALS kicked ass in nam....the VC and NVA were teriffied of them, is a SEAL group was in the area the NVA knew that they were dead.
-shut up
Props to Intel! What a way to keep their system in shape! Heat sinks and fans are already at the highest level of heat displacement they could possibly get. Fans have not evolved for decades - they've only gotten bigger. With normal methods of heat displation, Intel needed to find a new way to get rid of the excess heat the P4s create, and what better way than to have them alternate their cycles as on/off? Sure, you might only get half the clock cycles, but the ones you do get, are two times faster, so you are getting even more performance than a regular chip! I can see this coming into wide use in the server market, where most caculations are quick file access requests, because the average user doesn't need pure horsepower ontheir file server, they need faster disk speeds. I think this new design might also save some power in West, where the bulk of those machines will be bought and used. Then, the other west coast states such as Arizona, Nevada, and Texas can sell their extra power to California. Keep up the innovating Intel! I can't wait to get myself a dual proc p4!
That's what extra fans are for...
Berk Watkins
Why do you all hate Intel so much. Seriously, I prefer AMD but only because their chips give you so much more for the buck. One of the advantages to capitalism is that competion brings about better products (most of the time). I personally couldn't care less about who designed and manufactured a chip. I want the best chip for my money without any threats to my privacy. Whatever company can supply me with that is going to get my patronage. Praying for the bancruptcy of Intel is stupid, the only really bad thing about Intel is that they enjoy what nearly ammounts to a monopoly. If Intel were to call it quits than AMD would be in the same position and a few years later you slashdotters would be all up in arms about the evil that is AMD. So why not sit back, relax (it's good for your health), and wait and see which company will give you the product that you want the most.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
"tells the processor to switch itself on/off 50% of the time until it's temperature is within Intels spec-range again." maybe that's why Intel said it might cut the price of P4's inhalf. Because it runs at half speed half of the time.
The real discussion of the thermal detection is discussed from page 22 to page 28 of the thermal guidelines document. They had a few interesting bits in there. For one, the thermister always works (you can always see how hot your core is) but the actual modulator is disabled by default. Now they do have specs that call for it to be enabled on any system pre-built, but for most techies, they should be able to disable it in the bios (provided the SMR is there) or it might need to be enabled somehow to work at all.
I can't say that this whole processor-limiting thing is terrible, I mean, there are reasonable ways around it (big heat sink, lotsa fans) and you actually have to opt-in to use it.
Also I thought I might add that 50% is NOT the hard number of cycles reduced, you can set that value to whatever you want the cool-down duty cycle to be (see page 24-26).
-Rob
Why don't Intel or AMD design chips better? I mean the PowerPC might have a lower clock rate, but it keeps cool, uses much less power, and kicks the Pentium's ass any day. I'm sorry, but I just don't understand. The PowerPC 7410 takes 1.8 and 2.5 volt poer supplies and has a maximum power consumption of 12.5 watts. Now tell me that's better than 70 something.
The post that started this whole thing comes from someone who misunderstood the table they were reading. The processor has a THERMAL sensor that kicks in when the processor overheats. The table lists 72 degrees C as the max for the P4 1.5 (Pretty dang hot) The table (see http://developer.intel.com/design/pentium4/datasht s/24919802.pdf page 70) recommends that those designing a cooling solution design it for at least 54.7 watts since that is a normal load on the chip. A thermal senser senses TEMPERATURE not the wattage the chip demands. So if the chip stays below 72 degrees C, no worries. AND... If you want to know how it runs, I'll tell you. SYSTEM CONFIG: P4 1.5 Boxed (stock fan), 256 Meg RDRAM, ATI RADEON64, Enlight 7237A34 case (stock)and D850GBAL boxed motherboard. The Fan1 and 2 connectors are temperature controlled, and the processor fan didnt even come on for the first 5 minutes from room temperature startup - wasn't needed yet... The case fan NEVER came on until we heated the inside of the case with a heat gun. (It came on at 49 degrees C) The stock Intel CPU fan ran at 2800 rpm while the processor was at a stable 34 degrees C. With the heat gun on the heatsink for a couple minuted I got the processor to register 52 degrees C and the fan was at 4500 rpm plus. After removing the heat gun, the chip colled back to 34 degrees C in about 1 minute. Now - here is the clincher for you naysayers... I ran 3DMark 2001 full test looped and never got above 45 degrees C. SO WHAT IS ALL THE FUSS ABOUT ?!? I think it is a great solution. Oh well- Some people just WANT Intel to be evil. I know this message wont even be a blip on anybodys radar screen, but hey - gotta say SOMETHING.
BTW- Another article citing SpecInt2000 scores distorts the truth in the same way they claim Intel does. They only give you the information they WANT you to see. The score they show was just one part of the test. On the rest of the test the spread was much more significant.
Just a final note: Always check their sources. Even when they say they are quoting from the manufacturers specs/facts, they sometimes interepret them wrong or distort them.
DONT BE BRAIN DEAD AND JUMP ON ANY WAGAON THAT DRIVES BY !!!