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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."
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.
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.
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.
Was progress at the speed of Moore's Law always crazy, or did it just become do today?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.