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What 1.7Ghz Is Like
Beanie writes: "Today Intel announced their 1.7GHz Pentium 4. It's crazy to think about the fact that just one year ago we were breaking the 1GHz barrier and now we're almost up to 2GHz. AnandTech has a review of the Pentium 4 1.7GHz and they compare it to the recently released AMD Athlon 1.33GHz." And Otis_INF writes "Tweakers.net had the oppertunity to run some benchmarks on a system with an Intel Foster CPU on board, placed on an early i860 based board. The complete sneak preview (in english) is here. It smokes the P4 in some benchmarks."
Hrmm.. Most consumers are idiots is true. Most computer geeks aren't. Most computer geeks influence alot of their idiot consumer friends on what to buy when they buy it. The geeky kid in the store who reads slashdot all day, you know;
AMD will survive.
i mean, since when did it become okay to rewrite what was said, giving it an entirely different meaning
You know Murphy's Law? It's not what most people think.
Oh, and Sturgeon said crud, not crap, although the meaning is pretty much captured.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
...is all the Mac users who for the past year+ have said that no one need more than a 400-500MHz machine, and now they get OS X and realize because there's practically no hardware Quartz acceleration, every one of your window resizes forces the CPU to do all the AA, drop shadows, updating the contents, etc. and guess what...a 400-500MHz G4 can't handle it!
in fact, a G4/733 can't handle it. no current Mac is fast enough to handle it. so now Mac users see just how underpowered a 500MHz G4 can be.
- this is not a troll. I am typing this in OS X on a G4/400. I, however, am not someone who thinks MHz is worthless.
I've used it on machines from a G3/400 to a G4/533, and it is slow on all of them. If you think the speed is fine, your standards are pathetically low.
Try opening OmniWeb or IE - slower than opening IE on OS 9.
Try opening a new window in the Finder or OmniWeb. Slower than opening a new window in the Finder or IE in OS 9.
Try live resizing a window in OS X to near fullscren - far slower than OS 9, or than Windows, which also does live resizing.
Try moving or deleting large amounts of files in the Finder. Slower than OS 9(although if you use the terminal it can be very fast).
I've been using OS X full-time for the past three weeks. Don't try to tell me it runs fine. Oh yeah, "handle it" - well my 5200/75LC could "handle" Quake, it was just dog slow - just like OS X. I don't consider 1FPS or less on some window resizes in column view "handling it"
When I have just booted into OS X, and have no apps or anything open(other than Apache, which probably is not serving any pages at the time), wtf is the PMT doing not giving the Finder 100% of the CPU for window resizing? What is it doing, saving 75% of the cycles in case I choose to do something else while resizing the window?
Stop being such an idiot.
As if any other names for chipsets would be any better. None of the modern chipset names tell anything to me...
Okay, I'm a *NIX programmer. I've been using Linux since 1996. But if there's *one* thing that makes me cry mama, it's the kernel compiling.
"Uh, so, does my machine have i39842309843 and i49284? I don't know, do you?"
I'm not a hardware geek. "I just bought my new machine from the store." =) I know what Mostech 6510, VIC2, CIA and SID are, but all this modern hardware babble makes me puzzled. Really puzzled.
(FWIW, it wasn't that bad. I got my kernel to compile back when I got this machine and it works pretty well.)
Does anyone have "An Idiot's Guide to Latest Achievements in PC Hardware"? =)
The i960 was out a fair number of years before the i860. The i860 was a floating point monster for it's day (and the first superscaler I ever used). Oki tried to sell a line of workstations based on it. In fact I think they sold well to NTT, but they didn't sell well in the USA. The only embedded use I know of was in SGI's Reality Engine as geometry engines.
I had two in my office for about a year.
What a stupid name to use for their new motherboard chipset. They had previously used the i860 name for a series of CPUs (which are not compatible with the x86 series). The i860 was widely used for embedded applications. It's successor, the i960, is still available for Intelligent I/O (I2O) usage. Searching for i860 on Intel's web site is really going to be confusing.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I got the fun little error message on page 2 of "Cannot Connect to MySQL". In addition to the database server picture with the caption: "All your database are belong to us."
Error pages are fun.
Well done article.
Agreed. I have a 500 Celeron that is way faster than I need. The only time I wish it was faster is when I'm doing DivX encoding, then I could finish more than one movie a day.
Other than that I could be running a 233 and I probably would never know the difference.
Yes, gamers want the fastest. But damn, if you're into it to the point where you are getting the lastest damn CPU every year, gaming is a pretty expensive hobby.
I think the problem is that even the current kernel for Linux (2.4.3) and the upcoming Windows XP are not going to take advantage of the longer pipelines and SSE2 instructions on the Pentium 4 out of the box just yet.
It's only a few high-end applications and high-end games that will use the power of the Pentium 4, and even those are very uncommon nowadays.
I think people are going to realize that when AMD goes to the Palomino Athlon core, there still will be no advantage to going to Pentium 4.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
The Blade 100 uses a Sparc IIe, not a Mips.
There's Moore's Law as originally stated, and then there's Moore's Law, the marketing strategy of planned obsolesce.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
but don't act like its a game on its own...)
So, who cares ?!?! It's still a lot of fun, and very popular.
- sigs are for wimps.
Why are there so many AMD zealots around? What they fuck do you think you're supporting? The goodness of mankind because Intel is somehow evil? AMD is a publicly held corporation just like Intel and they've made as many hardware mistakes as Intel has in the past (the K6-3 for example). "I switched to AMD because of the FP-DIV erro" or some stupid bullshit just goes to show how easily led you are. If you're going to choose a chipset choose it because you're really getting the most for your dollar. Right now AMD gives you the most for your dollar. So pick it because of that not because of a floating point bug only 1 in a thousand people ever ran into.
Technically the P4 is a pretty good design for a processor and would in actuality be a really good processor if Intel had done some pre-release planning. Before the launch of the P4 developers should have been offered P4 reference boxes and a completed 5.0 version of their compiler at very reasonable (VERY LOW) prices. This would have given them lots of time to recompile and optimize their binaries so when the P4 came out they could offer a P4 upgrade of their applications. This would have provided a better market for the P4 when it was launched. If I'm Joe GraphicsDude working on my aging P2 450 system and Adobe sends out an email saying I can get a P4 optimized set of their graphic design apps for a low low upgrade price, I can take that to Joe PriceWaryEmployer and ask for a small investment to get me more performance and thus more output. The Intel engineers had to stick a simpler FPU on the P4 due to remain within their transistor budget so the FPU performance of the P4 is lower than that of the Athlon. However if some operations were redone to use SIMD instructions as opposed to FP instructions they could bypass the crappiness of the FPU and get similar if not better FPU performance out of the P4.
As explaied so many times to so many stupid people clock speed != performance. The fact a 1.7 GHz P4 competes with a 1.2GHz Athlong Tbird shouldn't really be a point of contention. The 2GHz P4 ought to easily best a 1.33GHz Tbird (assuming the gigaheartz to gigahertz performance ratio is kept) and the P4 can easily be clocked up to 3Ghz while the Athlon line will top out around 1.5GHz. I think the hardcore performance coming out of the P4 core won't be seen until Foster (Xeon) is released at the end of the quarter. The bigger cache with its ultra high bandwidth data channel to the processor will make it a powerhouse performing lots of the same instructions (ray tracing for example). The DP and MP versions of Foster will probably make it a killer in the graphic workstation market. One note to developers, do a better fucking job of threading your apps. The Xeon is going to have hardware support for SMT and deep pipeline of the P4 makes multiple threads work good so write your apps to make better use of threading. I know some things are really hard to thread because you can only do perform some functions once other functions have completed by please try! Anyone with more than one processor in their system can attest to how rarely a program is effectively using both processors. The new Xeons will have lots of bandwidth and a deep pipeline use it!
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
On a related note, AMD is testing a new silicon that is said to help with the heat issues, which will help their own 1.7 GHz chip.
Jethro
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Windows NT Historical Timeline
July 1989 - The first bits of NT run for the first time on a system built by the NT team using the Intel i860 processor.
January 2, 1990 - Bill Gates brings together NT's top designers to discuss the importance of running NT on Intel's 386+ processors and to choose a new RISC processor other than the Intel i860.
cpeterso
> One can't help but notice the overwhelming bias against Intel and towards AMD on slashdot, to the point of zealousness
Yep, some of use are the kind of assholes who expect a product that costs twice as much to actually be better.
> i.e. only noting the benchmarks where AMD is ahead but pretending not to see the benchmarks where Intel is ahead
It's duly noted that the P4 creams the T-bird on Q3 Arena. If I ever set up a dedicated Q3 Arena box, I'll keep that in mind. But I'll also keep that 2x price for the processor and memory in mind, so price:performance might keep me from buying a P4 even for for my dedicated Q3A box (in the unlikely event I ever build one).
> ut Intel will have much higher clock rates in the same price range, and ultimately, equivalent and/or better performance, particularly over the next 1 to 3 years, as Intel puts out CPUs with humongous clock rates
Good for them! Maybe I'll buy one in 1 to 3 years, if your prediction pans out.
More likely I'll be running a 64-bit AMD machine with several gigs of cheap open-architecture memory, though.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> the truth is if Intel shipped a computer with a heatsink that doubled as a Grillmaster, I would buy it.
Problem is, it would only cook meat that you bought from the RAMSTEAK consortium.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> The only ones that are applicable for me are a) constant computing (folding@home) and b) gaming; both areas where the P4 excels.
Actually, several of the review sites are showing that the AMD beats the Intel in about half the gaming tests.
And that at about half the price, both for processor and for memory, based on what's currently listed on pricewatch.com.
I'm also curious about folding@home. Does it run through a lot of memory? The review sites left me with the impression that the P4 gets its advantage -- when it does get one -- from the bandwidth performance of its horribly expensive RDRAM.
If folding doesn't use a lot of memory, then the Athlon might actually win. (Either way, it probably wins at performance/price by a large margin.)
If you happen to have access to both kinds of machine, I'm sure lots of people here would be interested in a folding benchmark, though.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Didn't they actually use the parts with defective FPUs as 486SXs? I would call it recycling. That is very common in the industry. The reason chips overclock so well is that they are mostly made for a high speed and the ones that only work at the slower speed are sold that way for less.
And note that the Half-life stat includes CS Pete
The sole purpose of the Internet is to get porn and bomb making plans into the hands of children.
Why wont have AMD have 0.13 by the end of this year? In this business, half a year is a very long time.
And if it isn't 0.13 micron technology, they probably will have access to other improvements. As was said before in this discussion, the desktop PC's don't _need_ more speed. It's always handy, but for most tasks the things are fast enough.
For servers more power is always useful. But then again, quality and reliability are too. I hate to think of the time a machine has to have multiple processors, just to keep it stable. For that's where we're heading, if we keep pushing
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the pun is mightier than the sword
I have a G4 466 (OSX), a Dual CPU Intel 800, a Origin 3000 class server (Work of course)
I would say the only machines that don't perform in relation to the mhz rating is the SGI Origin 3000 and the Sony Viao. The SGI is clearly much much much faster than my PIII w/equiv total equiv mhz (~1600)... and the Sony Viao laptop is much slower than my Apple G4 466.
But, my Athlon 700 kicks the crap out of my Sun Blade workstation at just about everything I give it. My Dual PIII workstation absolutely blows away my G4 Workstation running OSX at just about everything I do. (Fair enough, my Dual 800 is SCSI, my G4 is not)... and funny enough, my G4 seems to be just a hair slower than my 500 mhz Sun blade workstation.
Of course there are no numbers or hard benchmarks. these are just my personal observations on equipment that my company and myself owns (it's my company)
But again, without this myth alive how would I be able to justify my 2-3x pricetag in buying commercial Risk hardware over Intel?
Anyway, thats my take..
geez.. and what a rant.
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Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
Actually, no, not everyone cares (at least not very much). You'll only see a negligible improvement in boot times from a faster CPU; at boot-up, the bottleneck is in the hard disk, not the CPU. As for making MP3s, in my experience the actual MP3 encoding process takes far less time than getting a nice, clean rip from the CD. Again, the bottleneck is not the CPU.
Sure, compiling and game-playing will see an improvement from a faster CPU, but I personally dont't care if a kernel takes 30 seconds less to compile, or that I can play quake at 80 fps rather than 70. I can understand that some people would care about that sort of thing, but not everyone does.
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"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
Actually, you're quite wrong. Speaking as a computer engineer (hardware, not software), you are quite right that RISC chips have fewer and simpler instructions. That means that you typically have to execute more instructions to do something than you would on a CISC chip. While a CISC chip might have a divide opcode, your typical RISC chip probably doesn't.
However, you are completely wrong that a RISC chip does less per clock cycle. Given a Pentium and a PowerPC at the same clock speed, the PowerPC will average far more instructions per clock cycle (not that you can execute an instruction in one clock cycle to begin with, a typical instruction cycle on any chip lasts several clock cycles, but we're talking the average work done per clock cycle). Why is it that the RISC chip can do more? Well, since there are far fewer instructions and they are much more basic, you can (and do) execute several instructions in parallel. Now, you can't always do this because one instruction might be a branch, and you can't necessarily know which way you will branch before you get to the branch test instruction, but in general you can execute several instructions in parallel. Of course, there are clever ways of solving the branch problem too, such as guessing which one is going to happen, and evaluating those instructions, then discarding the results if you're wrong. In any case, each clock cycle does effectively achieve more on a PowerPC chip than on an intel chip.
Now, at current clock speeds, you've got the PowerPC in the sub-GHz range and the P4 midway between 1 and 2 GHz range, your P4 is going to beat your PowerPC anyway.
As for the P3 and P4 being more RISC-like than the G4, you nearly made me spew chocolate milk out my nose. Get a good book on computer engineering and learn a bare minimum about the subject. Please, if you're going to make totally uninform\ed comments put [troll] in the subject.
Well, I'll probably be accused of trolling, but... who cares about the MHz? For the regular PC user, or even gamers or big number crunchers, the MHz doesn't make that much difference. Especially as far as gamers are concerned, the graphics card is far more important. At this point, there isn't really much difference between a few hundred MHz.
A nice gaming rig still needs a fast processor, or all the power of the graphics card goes to waste. You can put a GeForce3 in a P2-450, but I'll bet you'd see higher framerates with that same video card paired with a top of the line CPU that can run the game and feed the card all the geometry data and such that it needs.
I do, of course, agree that these clock speed increases are largely unnecessary, at least until Doom 3 is released. Allegedly, counterstrike is the most popular online game now, and it uses a modified Quake 2 engine. Year old machines can run Quake 3 pretty well, so there's no need.
chris
My spell check never went so fast!!!
Next test, loading http://www.userfriendly.org/static.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
Actually, there were working computers at the time. Stratus, a vendor of ultra-expensive fault-tolerant servers, has used m68k, i860, and PA-RISC processors in successive versions of their servers. The old Stratus XARs were RISC-based, and I believe that they were out in that timeframe. (It was really funny to have a machine running an i860 chip next to another machine with a i960-based network card.)
Of course, these machines would've been completely unsuitable for development of NT, but they were there.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The tweakers.net article had it wrong. The Pentium 4 uses the i850 chipset, according to links I followed starting at Intel's front page, then to the Pentium 4 page, and finally to the chipset page.
The i860 and its successors were interesting chips. As I mentioned in a reply to a post underneath your original post, at the last company I worked for, we had old servers running an i860 as the CPU sitting next to modern servers with the much, much faster i960 chip running their network cards.
Of course, it was even funnier that my roommate at the time was still using a i386 PC with 8 Megs of RAM. Every day he worked with a network card that had much more processing horsepower and RAM than his PC! I used to tease him about that all the time.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
-- Microsoft, where do you want to go today?
0x or or snor perron?!
- My 500 MHz G4 processor goes faster than it on floating-point tests. These include rendering spreadsheets in Photoshop, generating animations in Photoshop, and word-processing documents in Photoshop.
- No application currently requires a Pentium 4, nor will it ever.
- My fundamental right to overclock my computers until they explode is being violated. Intel has probably put in some clock-limiting circuitry. I want this processor to run at 2 GHz. I don't need that power, but I must run my systems as fast as possible.
- Linux is not optimized for it. Yet.
That is all.For more information, click here.
The 1GHz of a year ago was a PIII which was comparable to an AMD Athlon. Today's "almost 2GHz" P4 comes in SLOWER than a 1.33GHz Athlon in most benchmarks, so it's hardly double the speed.
The P4 may be a good chip one day, but it sure isn't there yet.
Which 'barrier' was that?
Check out 2cpu.com for some hot benchmarks. Interesting stuff on AMD's upcoming 760MP as well.
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
You've become too enthusiastic about benchmarks. These benchmarking suites have gone way too far. The only ones that are applicable for me are a) constant computing (folding@home) and b) gaming; both areas where the P4 excels.
Now, I'm not an Intel jockey, and I was planning on building a 760MP AMD system later this year, but I will make my decision based on the release and limitation schedules of BOTH companies.
I don't want to get caught at the top cycle of a platform, so, I will consider how high each processor will scale before leaving me in the dust.
The situation is a bit more convoluted with the P4, but a 1.7Gz P4 is certainly not the same as a similar speed on a P3. We really should be dropping back to something like the Whetstone/Dhrystone benchmarks. Although they're flawed, at least they're slightly less misleading than the clock speed wars.
On the other hand, I could just take my 2MZ 6809, wrap it in a divide by 2048 clock package and proclaim the first 2Gigaherz processor at under $50. (The Marketing department would love me!).
--
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Out of curiosity, I hunted down a copy of the dhrystone benchmarks, and did some comparisons. megahertz to dhrystone rations go from a low of .02 for an apple 2e on drhystone 1 to a high of 2.35 for my P3/450). (Other than my own benchmarks, the latest results on the table are a couple of years old.)
In any case, the point is that dhrystone to MZ ratings vary by a factor of aabout 100 when you go across CPU families (and compilers). Even for relatively recent CPUs the ratio is still 3-1. I think that this supports my contention that clock times are a really bad way of gauging CPU performance.
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Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I've talked to someone who ran the Windows XP beta, and he says that it's deathly slow. Soon enough, desktop PCs will need more speed, thanks to Microsoft.
Of course, I won't be running XP, but with KDE/GNOME, I can enjoy the same "benefits" (speed-wise).
Window Maker.
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Just to clarify: the instruction set hasn't changed for the Pentium 4. Its still the same tired old x86 CISC ISA from 1980, with a few new added instructions (SSE2) that are of little use to most applications (and users).
Spyky
From the linked article:
This more perfect crystal structure exhibits reduced phonon-phonon and phonon-electron interactions which increases certain transport properties, such as thermal conductivity. It has been demonstrated in the laboratory that isotopically pure Si-28 has 60 per cent better room temperature thermal conductivity than natural silicon with its three isotopes.
Hang on, if they have reduced electron-phonon interactions, haven't they increased the mobility and reduced the heat generated? If they have also reduced phonon-phonon interactions, doesn't that hinder the transfer of heat away from the active devices? Am I the only one that think this story almost got it right, but just missed it?
Did anyone else do a doubletake on this? Or did I just miss a motherboard chipset in the 8xx series that happened to have the same number as Intel's old 32-bit mil-spec CPU line?
You may have missed it because it's not out yet--the i860 (codename "Colusa") is the chipset for the upcoming 1-2 proc P4 Xeon (codename "Foster"; actually, in an effort to be hugely confusing, the official name is now simply "Xeon") systems which should be released in a couple months or so. FYI, the 4+ proc chipset will be designated the i870.
And yes, it is a bit odd that Intel is recycling this rather inauspicious brand number. I suppose not many in the industry have a long memory.
(For more info on the first i860, Paul DeMone had an interesting article at RWT comparing its ambitious but flawed design to Itanium and its potential pitfalls.)
Only 500Mhz to go before I get myself a real microwaveable coffee warmer!
I remember reading (on NYTimes I think)
that Intel really is starting a price war with AMD.
What's important is that chip prices are
dictated by GHz, not by how fast it
really is. So if Intel releases
a 1.7 GHz chip for $400 dollars, they have
set a maximum price limit for AMD's CPUs
which run at a lower clock frequency.
AMD must then drop the price on their
1.4 GHz chips to $(400-X) since consumers
will not pay more
for a lower GHz chip. End result, Intel can
maintain a marginally higher profit margin on
their 1.7 GHz chip while AMD's profit margin is
severely eroded.
How soon until manufacturers need to start looking at via effects, trace-to-trace coupling, board materials, trace loss, etc more closely? Things are starting to get pretty fast. There is a point when standard PCB manufacturing techniques go out the window.
But, you are dead on with the practical point, who cares? As it currently stands, the P4 is a complete waste of money. For the PC, nobody needs a 1.7Ghz chip. For a server, that clock speed would be handy, but only with about 1Mb of onboard cache.
Someone you trust is one of us.
The real story today is not the P4, but the prices. Intel is slashing prices big time, ahead of their .13 micro manufacturing process which wont be operational until the end of this year. Basically, they are starting a price war with AMD, and it looks like it will be vicious. Why? PC Manufactures can read, and the verdict on the P4's real performance frankly no good. The P4 has a long way to go before it can be considered an improvement. Of course, consumers are idiots and they buy CPU's based on clock speed alone. However, the PC market is hosed right now. By the time the PC market recovers, AMD will be there with its next gen chips. This price war is something that Intel can afford. I wonder if AMD can afford it? AMD's manufacturing costs have always been more competative than Intels. However, a 50% price reduction has to sting, and AMD wont have .13 micron technology by the end of this year.
Someone you trust is one of us.
As blair1q commented, I also did a doubletake on the name. The i860 was a really kinky chip that did some things very fast, though it appeared to be too weird for most compilers to do a good job of letting C language tell you which part of the processor to run your stuff on.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The 64 bit arena is where the real fortunes will be made and lost. Hope AMD doesn't misplay their hand there.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The irrational part of my mind cries, "Look! 1.7 GHz! That's almost 2 GHz! Blazing speed! Raw, brute, merciless POWER! More!! MORE!!! I'm still not satisfied!!!"
I can hold off the irrational only so long. When that magicical hertz hits two gigs, the irrational is going to sneak up behind my rational mind with an icepick.
"Everything louder than everything else!" -- Meatloaf
And let me guess - you didn't even bother to read the article, did you? Because this issue is specifically addressed. Here's the relevant section:
During our tests the Pentium 4 1.7GHz always operated at 1.7GHz and did not fall victim to any clock throttling because of heat. You shouldn't worry about the Pentium 4 dropping its clock speed because of heat unless you are running the processor without a heatsink/fan installed.
About a year and a half ago, HP was recruiting Computer Engineers at my school. One of the engineers who worked on the Foster core gave a presentation about the guts of it, and about its history. He told us that basically, because Intel had done such a poor design with the current core, that they went to HP and hired them to completely re-design it. The engineer told us that Intel would be using the Foster core, rather than the now current one, for the next generation of their chips, from the Celeron-ish processors to the high end models with lots of cache. Apparently, Intel has a lot more faith in this new design than their own, so maybe we can expect good things and fewer problems in the future.
I care about the Mhz. With a faster CPU my computer will boot faster, compressing my MP3's from the CDs I buy will take less time, compiling my programs will take less time, and as yet another bonus I'll get better framerates in my games.
Let us not kid ourselves: Everyone wants faster computers.
Make sure to panic now. Get it out of the way.
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
It should also be noted that the Pentium 4 scores better in 3DMark 2001, as well.
It all boils down to this: The Athlon 1.33GHz may be faster in yesterday's apps in general...but why do we need the old apps to run so damn fast? They're still /more/ than playable/runable on the Pentium 4 systems. The difference you get with the Pentium 4 is that future SSE2-coded applications will become mainstream shortly (AMD licensed it, as well) as a replacement to the x87 FPU, and performance will take off for future apps, where it is actually needed.
How do you explain the FlasK benchmarks from Toms Hardware, then? A nearly 4x increase by adding SSE2...
Actually, to be completely anal, it states the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double approximately every 18 months.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
No, that's completely wrong. The computation power required for encryption grows linearly or with n*log(n) with the length of the key, while for brute-force cracking it's exponential. "strong encryption" is almost exclusively a matter of finding and using algorithms that maintain this discrepancy.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Speed doesn't matter, it's what you do with it that counts.
Oh yeah, I really hates the way intel claims in their commercials their faster processors enable faster internetting. As if the processors have been the bottleneck the last years.
It's hard to find how well Moore's law holds up for transistor count. I've only seen it referenced in terms of clock speed. Anybody have some info? Thanks, Mike.
-
Freudian struggle? You're more right than you could possibly realize :) The original posters quote was from Tom Lehrer's "Smut:"
More, more, I'm still not satisfied!
Stories of tortures
Used by debauchers
Lurid, licentious and vile
Make me smile.
Novels that pander
To my taste for candor
Give me a pleasure sublime.
Let's face it I love slime!
1.7GHz is probably not much different than 1GHz, or even 500MHz to the average user. The only real difference the average user will notice is when they get the bill. And of course there are bragging rights.
tcd004
which begs the question is it really a "law"
Its as much of a law as most of the crap outputted by Congress. And Hookes Law is pretty suspect too. The only thing is we don't know the boundary conditions of Moore's Law yet...
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
1 year ago we were breaking 1GHz for speed and today we're pushing 2GHz.
Does the name Moore ring a bell with you?
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
Intel didn't break the 1GHz 'barrier', this was already surpassed by countless other architectures before Intel finally got around to it. Sooner or later, Intel will realize they can only get so far by beating a dead horse. The only barriers that Intel has broken are the barriers of incompetence that would prohibit any competent corporation from dragging out a dead product needlessly and then trying to make it look revolutionary.
As I, as well as the linked articles, pointed out, initial optimizations using SSE2 are not promising. In fact, even applications that have received a good deal of hand-tweaking to use all of the latest instructions run slower than the same app, sans SSE2 of course, on the Athlon 1.33GHz. And the gap would widen even more if, instead of wasting their time with SSE2, they just hand-optimized the program to run faster on the Athlon.
First off, I read a good portion of the reviews that I found linked from Blue's News:
Source Magazine
Target PC
Hardware Unlimited
Tech Report
Gamer's Depot
What's the upshot? That even with each processor's "ideal" system (DDR on the Athlon, RAMBUS on the P4)-- well, the P4 kicks ass at Quake 3: Team Arena. I mean, it's really really good at Quake 3. So good, in fact, that-- well, you won't be running anything else, I hope?
Because in almost every other app, the cheaper Athlon 1.2 equals or outperforms the P4. That even includes apps such as POVRay that did some early optimizations for the P4's extended instructions. I recommend reading the Tech Report's overview if you're interested in that; they have more details on exactly which instructions were used, and the current state of Intel's compilers for the chip.
Keep in mind, of course, that the compilers are still a bit beta-ish-- sometimes they actually make the programs run slower. But they never appeared to actually make it faster than an Athlon 1.2.
Debate what you will about future extensibility, and so on-- but unless you're going to be playing a whole lot of Quake, if you're looking for a new system you should grab one of those cheap Athlon CPU/Motherboard combos selling for $300 at Fry's.
>This price war is something that Intel can afford. I wonder if AMD can afford it?
Why?
AMD isn't only selling CPU's. They are making A LOT of other chips also, so they can afford to cut the prices on CPU's while making money elsewhere.
Just my 5 cent.
Robert Christiansen
Student at the Technical University of Denmark,
Department of Applied Electronics, Datacommunucation Section
Technical University of Denmark
Informatics and Mathematical Modelling Dept
Computer Engineering & Technolo
...pretty much the same. Many of my machines are Pentium 233 MMX-based. A few sport the AMD K6-2. My most powerful is a 350 MHz Pentium II (with a TNT2). Ya know what, it doesn't feel all that slow at all. Apache takes more than a few seconds to compile, but that's about it. I can even play Quake 3 Arena in Windows at 640x480 with nice framerates. The best thing is, I'm not shelling out money every 8 months to keep up with the Joneses.
I'm happy to see that Intel, AMD, and others keep chugging along. My next upgrade will probably be this fall sometime and I'm looking forward to what will be offered then. In the mean time, my current x86 systems (and my SGI MIPS/IRIX and Sun SPARC/Solaris) machines from the days of yore are even more powerful than I'll probably need for the next 24 months. The announcement of the 1.7 GHz P4 is neat, but it's not something I'm drooling/lusting over or "need" in any meaning of the word. Neat stuff, but my hardware is doing fine, thank you.
Why are we going faster? Especially Intel? They need to concentrate on making a better quality chip, not a faster one.
Remember that company that made inexpensive chips? They thought about making a new chip with a better FPU (among other features). It didn't need to be faster than the competition, just a better quality chip. They called it the Athlon.
What's funny is that Intel thought they could compete with this better quality chip by making a faster chip, which they released to early, and had to recall.
Guess some people don't learn their lesson...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
New /. poll:
How long until the new 1.7GHz gets recalled
- 1 month
- 1 week
- 3 days
- When cowboy neal gets one
- its already recalled.
I still find it humorous that they compare the 1.7 Intel to the 1.33 AMD...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
As it is, my sound card freaks out as soon as my phone rings when I have the cordless phone on my desk.
I will tell you what 1.7 Ghz is like... since this came from Intel it is most likely like a 1.3 Ghz Thunderbird... =)
my bad.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
True, but people have been applying it to raw speed for a couple decades now, and the law has applied equally well in that manner. (I'm feeling too lazy to look it up at the moment, but I seem to recall that the notorious "Jargon File" updated their definition of Moore's Law to reflect the alternate aplication of it.)
CPU's have been close to doubling every year and a half for quite some time now, so it should not be shocking to anybody that we have gone from 1 to 1.7 in a year. That was my point.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Mmmm... burgers.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Was progress at the speed of Moore's Law always crazy, or did it just become do today?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
1.7GHz? That's really pushing the speed limit, I wonder how often it has to cut down to 850MHz because it gets too hot.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
"And of course, RISC chips like the G3, G4, etc. do far more per clock cycle than their Intel/AMD counterparts"
ROTFLOL
You obviously do not know anything about RISC.
First off RISC is a Reduced Instruction Set... Meaning each clock cycle the CPU DOES LESS!!!! But was ment to make up for it with simplisity of design, allowing higher clock speeds.
Look up any RISC vs CISC article, and you will see I am right.
But even more than that, current "CISC" chips, like the P3, P4, Athlon etc. are more "RISC" like than the G4. (look up arstechnica's Athlon vs G4 article)
As to end result speed... a 500mhz CPU of any type is fast enough for almost any current computer need. (this will change with new software that will come out)
==>Lazn
well, if you ignorant fucks actually knew moore's law, you wouldn't keep spouting the same crap.
i mean, since when did it become okay to rewrite what was said, giving it an entirely different meaning, and then complain when the people who have a clue call you on it?
(posted at +1 to make you happy)
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
moore's law is not tied to clock speed, but rather transistor count.
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
you don't find it the least bit convenient that there were enough 486's with defective FPUs?
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
well, quite bluntly, intel has fucked us over time and time again... let's go for a walk down 'intel memory lane' for a second...
what's the difference between a 486DX processor and 487 co-processor? the pin arrangement! that's right, intel realized it would make more money by selling a 486DX as a '487 math coprocessor' even though that by installing it, you disable your 486SX. (effectively making your '487 math coprocessor' the main processor)
what's the difference between a 486DX and a 486SX? intel intentionally fucked up the FPU on the 486SX! yeah, on the original 486SX's, there WAS an FPU, but it was disabled. thanks intel!
difference between the older celerons and their pentium 2 brothers? nothing! well, except for the fact that intel broke the l2 cache on them so they could sell value chips. the cache was THERE, you just couldn't use it. if you've ever opened a PII cartridge, you'll notice that it's a socket 370 chip on a slocket. surprise...
the pentium series bugs. F00F!
intel has driven me out of my mind. i'm an amd convert till they start fucking it up.
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
One can't help but notice the overwhelming bias against Intel and towards AMD on slashdot, to the point of zealousness (i.e. only noting the benchmarks where AMD is ahead but pretending not to see the benchmarks where Intel is ahead). These are both just huge corporations that only care about their bottom line --- what makes AMD a "good" company but Intel a "bad" company? I guess consumer branding and geurilla marketing really do work; AMD have succeeded at convincing their market that they are "cool" just as surely as Nike has convinced all the "cool" kids that brandishing the "Nike swoosh" is "cool". Think you're immune to corporate branding?
What amazes me is how incredibly short-sighted everyone here is. Can nobody here think long term, or even medium term? P4 at current marketed clock rates don't perform that great, but that was never really the intention - shrinking the die is going to make the P4 scale seriously well with high clock speeds, and we'll watch AMD struggling to keep up. Sure, a P4 at the same clock performs more poorly - but Intel will have much higher clock rates in the same price range, and ultimately, equivalent and/or better performance, particularly over the next 1 to 3 years, as Intel puts out CPUs with humongous clock rates. Intel isn't slashing their prices "in response to AMD", these price cuts are part of a longer term plan.
Yes, Intel's prices *would* be higher if AMD wasn't around, *much* higher, you can be sure of that, so having AMD around is a good thing --- but Intel isn't on any long-term downward slope here by any means. And yes, I know Intel is deliberately attempting to take advantage of the fact that the "general populace" buys based on clock speed (they know that the "general populace" will choose the 2000 MHz Intel over the 1500 MHz AMD in the same price range, even if the performance is about the same). But none of this implies that AMD is any nobler than Intel.
Of course this post will probably be modded down, as its just not "cool" to not be pro-AMD. Its not "cool" to not be pro-Nike, pro-Diesel, pro-Any-mainstream-brand. But thats different, right?
of id vs ego (and perhaps a dash of superego as well)
Where the id says "More! Grunt! More!"
The ego says "I am satisfied. All's right with the world."
And the Superego says "Consume. Spend. Buy. Just do it!"
You know what? Mac people have had to rationalize for far too long. We've had to settle for 400Mhz!
Argh! When will someone come to quench our thirst for raw power? Motorola? IBM? Apple?
Do not bother to fight the irrational/id. The best you can do is placate it and compromise; promise it a *dual* 2Ghz system!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
1) Increased Bus Speed for faster RAM access 2) Flash memory for storage while the computer is operating. A Gig or so would be plenty. A swap with a magnetic hard drive would occur only when programs start or finish.
Basically, multimedia apps (large array manipulations) are what the P4 was desgned to do. SSE2, being primarily a set of vector math instructions (back to array manipulation, again), can only help the P4 in such a situation. The problem, of course, arises when the program being run is not easily vectorizable (Gah. Is that even a word?). So, video encoding will fly on P4, as well as some kinds of scientific simulations (I'm thinking of organic chemistry stuff). For the rest of the code out there, the P4 just does not do well. It's a specialization issue.
Written by a single drunk monkey in 30 minutes with a copy of MS Word 2000.
I can't even see myself buying another PC until the end of the year. Right now I have a Athlon 550 at home, and it's doing just fine for me. There is an article over at Sharky Extreme about the fact that there hasn't been a "killer app" for several years that has demanded a major PC upgrade - the author cites DOOM. Even now, I switch between playing Alpha Centauri, Master of Orion II, GLTron, and DopeWars.
Yeah, it's just crazy to think that it's almost like every year to eighteen months processor power doubles. Someone should theorise a rule about it or something!
Ok, I'm not such a neo-Luddite that I would come on slashdot and suggest faster processors are a bad thing. Nor will I participate in a pointless flame-fest vis-a-vis the limitations of x86 architecture. For better or worse, it's what most people are running and it's what most software runs on. So be it.
However, I am going to wonder aloud how long it will be until "1.7 Ghz" becomes a requirement for my office suite.
The brilliant minds who formulated object-oriented code, modular design, and reuse could not possibly have fathomed the current state of affairs. The anti-OO crowd claims that reuse is a pipe dream, but I've got a hard drive full of mature products built by reusing and extending code from previous versions. And I do mean full. Those apps are getting huge.
Without even checking, I can imagine the dreamers at Javalobby are already wondering if 1.7 Ghz is what it will take to make Java viable for client apps. How do I know this? Am I psychic? No. I just remember them saying the same things when 600 Mhz and 1 Ghz processors came out.
At some point, we're going to realize that bigger software is not always better. I've found my personal salvation programming for the Palm platform.
As for desktop and client apps, I'm worried. I'm worried that we're using fast hardware to fix inefficient code (when it should be the other way around). I'm worried that the stupid Office paperclip will develop speech recognition capabilities and will deactivate my CD player to verbally ask me if I need help through my headphones.
Perhaps there is a solution. We should consider keeping this kind of speed out of the hands of developers for a few years. If I ran a software company, I would want my developers restricted to about 333 Mhz at the most. Any performance problems will become readily apparent. They can have all the RAM they want (speeds up the compiler), but I want raw CPU horsepower kept to grandma/grandpa levels.
I know this runs counter to current trends, but I think it's a least worth consideration. We have only slow software to lose.
If the lameness filter actually worked, would you even be reading this?
You knew it would happen: Kyle at [H]ard|OCP got his hands on one of these and overclocked it. And just look at the results.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
This is not a troll, and it IS on topic. When sites like this post a review of new hardware, they should understand that they will get lots of hits from people trying to read the story. Having to put 16 hits (waiting each time) on this server (and related ad servers) to read one story is stupid. I don't care if they add in ad breaks between sections, but only make me hit the server once, and give me the whole story please. Tom's is just a guilty of this.
Yes, it is a big day for lowering my karma!
And of course, RISC chips like the G3, G4, etc. do far more per clock cycle than their Intel/AMD counterparts. At this point Intel's sort of saying "LOOK HOW FAST WE CAN MAKE THAT QUARTZ JIGGLE! OH YEAH!" Who cares, look at the practical side I guess.
MHz isn't really a milestone anymore because it's not very significant anymore.
--
--hongpong.com
You said it! And it'll be hysteria-inducing when we go from almost 2 GHz to 4 in the next eighteen to twenty-four months!
Yowza! I'll believe it when I see it!
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
This warms the heart of a solid-state physicist... isotopically homogeneous silicon processors would be very cool. I would be amazed if they can do it as cheaply as claimed- isotopic enrichment is usually very expensive (think Manhattan project- a big chunk of the cost was isotopic enrichment of the uranium), but fundamentally there is no barrier to someone finding a cheap way to make it, since the starting material is very cheap (just Si). Rarely do I see the words "electron-phonon coupling" in the press :-). I love it.
Btw, isotopically enriched diamond (one up from Si on the periodic table) is the best thermal conductor known. The lattice vibrates at higher frquencies than silicon (since carbon is lighter and the carbon-carbon bonds are stronger than the Si-Si bonds) which speeds the transport of heat. At low temperatures (like 20 Kelvins) the increase in thermal conductivity with isotopic enrichment is enormous- 10 or 100 fold. At room temperature this drops to roughly two-fold, but that's still a huge win.
Curtains for windows?
Not to kill a very funny joke, but incidentally the review states that the P4 1.7Ghz actually runs cooler than the AMD 1.3, and never has to throttle down its clockspeed from running too hot.
---
Hey my cheap ass celeron is fast enough for me, but I imagine someone out there really needs more speed. I just wish they would get with the program and get the other bottlenecks in performance worked on. I know, I know its getting there.
Personally I'm not interested in a newer faster CPU. What my moneys going for will be bigger HD (60 + gigs), bigger Monitor (21 + inches, or flat screen) etc.
In response to this, Intel and AMD (and vendors of other computer components) have slashed their prices. In the short term, this will result in a boost to sales. In the long term, it's a disaster waiting to happen. Many users and businesses that would have waited to upgrade at higher prices will upgrade now due to the rock-bottom prices. As a result, the industry will see a lot of low profit sales in the near future. But what happens in a year or two? Will there be some compelling application that is going to compel the average user or business to splurge on a 4ghz system? I doubt it.
In the worst-case scenario, this might lead to the failure of either AMD or Intel. Look at what the price wars did to the hard drive industry already. Where is Micropolis, Quantum, or Conner? Western Digital, once the preeminent IDE drive manufacturer, had losses of $7 to $10 million for its most recent quater. In almost any case, it will be likely to result in higher prices and less competition. And that's probably not good for any of us.
To answer your question, the two parts are unrelated. The old i860 is a graphics processor, while the new one is a support "chipset" for the Foster. There may very well be a graphics i860 inside the chipset i860, but they're otherwise completely different.
-B
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claim with respect to processors? Oh of course you don't... I'll give you 10:1 odds that the thermal throttling never kicked in once... read my explanations in the recent /. article on this topic for an explanation why...
I must burn in hell, suffer and pay for my sins
But Gods the one who's losing, Satan always wins!
Since so many people believe that clock speed==real speed why not make a processor with a divide by 2 (or more) in the clock input? I can see it now:
Using it's patented "Divide-by-2" architecture, AMD announced the new 2.4 Gigahertz Athalon today. When asked for comment, an INTEL spokesman responded, "Oh, yeah? The new Pentium will use our patented divide-by-1k process, and have a clock speed of almost 1 terahertz, so there!"
Of course, there's always a danger that people might start using something like specmarks and then AMD and INTEL would have to compete with processors that have real performance.
Is the faster growth of speed due to convenience provided by physical properties of modern chips, or is it a product of human innovation?
You'll never catch AMD.
That's right.. their chip architecture is so bad unless software is optimized for it AMD Thunderbirds at 1.2Ghz will still blow a P4 out of the water..Oh yes, and pay nearly twice as much for the same speed as an AMD for an Intel chip...even when the cut the prices in HALF!
Oh, and expect next week for them to release the new 'Wintel' core that will be far superior due to it's new Magnetic Ram that costs $1000 per meg and is the only ram you can use...Yet benchmark comparisons will still compare it to AMD's Thunderbird, and will only beat it by a very small margin..
Come on Intel.. stop spending money on the 3 blue guys (even though they are pretty damn funny) and spend more money on making a decent chip.
"Every computer Crashes, cause Every OS Sucks.. Everything since Apple/DOS..Just a bunch of crap"
I read in some news article after it the 1.7 intel started really calculating producing some warmth, it switches down to 750 Mhz .... meaning you've only 1.7 Ghz while you're not calculating anything ... or for short calc burst, like moderm operating systems need them for their flashing/fading menues :)
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Did anyone else do a doubletake on this? Or did I just miss a motherboard chipset in the 8xx series that happened to have the same number as Intel's old 32-bit mil-spec CPU line?
--Blair
The Tech Report have written up a complete article about intel's new P4 1.7ghz. They stack it up to 4 other CPU's, most notably the athlon 1.33ghz ddr, using an intensive set of benchmarks. It's interesting that intel dominates in the quake3 benchmarks, but trails in most of the others. I wonder how these puppies will overclock?
Tech Support: Hello, may I help you?
Customer: Yes, I have a problem with my P4 system, there is smoke coming out of it, and it won't boot.
TS: Did you use the Intel Grill(R) option?
C: Yes, that is why I bought it.
TS: Your CPU is stained with fat, clean it up, and it will work.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
The conclusion of the article has the most important tid bit. Did anyone else read it??
"By taking the dual-processing ability out of the desktop chips, high-end workstation users will always have to get a Xeon, which will cause bigger sales than ever for the Xeon processors."
Intel is in for a rough ride once AMD gets smp sorted out.
Slashdot: droud for nerds. Nothing matters.
After the floating point error and the UID mess, I have stay away from Intel. I have no faith in their product anymore. Athalon is where the action is and the price is right.
The i860 was put out almost ten years ago and was originally intended for accelerating graphics applications. (At least that was what I was told. :-) It was also used in the
Intel IPSC/3 (sometimes called the IPSC/860).
Talk about old school! This is the stuff used in the old Paragons and Delta machines!
Does anybody out there know the relationship to the i860 and the chipset discussed in the article???
In a recent press conference, Intel stated: "Not only is the new Pentium 4 a technological breakthrough in terms of processing performance, but users can cook 4 hamburgers in under 10 minutes on it's new larger-sized heatsink"
Slashdot: Open Source, Closed Minds.
Sure, so it installed easily...how customizable is it? can you attain the same setup that I have had running for the last 5 years on it? I didn't think so. Your puny arguments are no match for the power of the Source. I find your lack of faith....disturbing... :)
Ah.. that's the trick though isn't it. It's obviously customisable enough, or he wouldn't be using it. Why do you keep touting complexity [in the guise of customisation] as a feature when it's not what everyone wants
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
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
Funny how the performace compares. Everyone's comparing ghz against ghz, but what's that help if 1.7 compares to 1.3? Surely then the speed hasnt almost double either, coz a 2ghz wont be twice as fast as a 1ghz from before? this means nothing then. only big numbers and not really better performance, (and i'm not taking sides against or for intel, i'm just stating).
Still not enough to get me to buy a P4 yet. But I have to admit, the gap is getting a little closer.
A good hardware site that has independant benchmarks is Here
Looks like P4 is still the premium processor for Quake 3 Arena -- if your life revolves around that game..
...And, let me guess... when the processor reaches ambient room temperature it throttles back to 750 Mhz as well. Does anyone else out there think that, perhaps, the cycles-per advertised comes close to advertised spec, if you can't really use it because of heating problems? Just my 2K's worth...
Isn't it crazy that the two are even comparable? A reguler user may buy a Pentium 4 computer just because of the comfort of the Intel name and (on the surface) the fastest CPU available. AMD should try to come up with some advertising to inform the public of this, and maybe it can put them over Intel and become the leading chip company.