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Tom's Looks At The New P-III
Choady McGee writes "Tom's Hardware just posted a review of a new version of the pentium iii. From what they say, it looks like it could threaten the pentium iv and because of that, may not be released any time soon."
A PII clocked at the same speed as a PPro was slower (remember how www.x86.org got in trouble for publishing those benchmarks? ) was hotter than a PPro, etc... then people realised that PIIs were becoming eventually faster and cheaper than PPros, and PPros got phased-out (I think retired early by Intel to force people to buy PIIs is closer to reality).
Conclusion? Don't buy the latest and greatest processors in their early incarnation because besides the hype, they don't run that much faster than the previous generation... but eventually will.
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"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
Intel is no longer in a position where they can spend too much time worrying about internal competition, but they have to worry about AMD which has been trouncing them lately. If the new PIII can let them regain some ground they've lost against AMD then you can be guaranteed that they will push it to the market as fast as they can (remember the original P3 1Ghz?).
There's a strong rumor that IBM can make G3s with clock rates that meet or exceed 2 GHz. But as it stands, Motorola is the only PPC manufacturer that can/wants to make G4s -- which are stuck at 733 Mhz. So the overall platform stagnates because Apple doesn't want its low-end systems (based on the G3) blowing the doors off the high-end systems (based on the G4). The situation is getting out of hand... it sucks when marketing concerns get in the way of performance computing.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
I don't think Intel is backing off the P4, despite its many flaws. Intel will continue expensive development projects around the PIII arch, because the P4 doesn't support SMP, and the next few revs of Xeons will be based on the PIII until they are scrapped for the 64-bit Itanium. The Itanium wont be real and ready for prime time for about 2 years.
Someone you trust is one of us.
The lead vehicle for a new process (in this case 860) is always a tried-and-true CPU instead of something brand new. So, of course PIII will have a shrink before P4 because it's better understood how to shrink it. The P4 shrink is only a couple of months behind it. Remember the transition to 854 when the fast MMX Pentium's came out way before Klamath? This is the same deal all over again.
:-)
Of course, the speedup from Northwood over Willamette will be substantially higher than the speedup from Tualatin over Coppermine. The P4 microarchicture is a lot more scalable; for example, the bus is triple the bandwidth of PIII/Athlon, so it can scale that much more without memory being a problem.
Sounds to me that Tom is just making a big fuss since he got Tualatin samples instead of Northwood's.
Now that the Athlon MP and dual-CPU mainboards have been released, it just restates what we knew a year ago: AMD is slowly but surely beating Intel at Intel's game.
I think that both you and your friends need to try developing (assuming that you develop) or gaming (and I'm sure that you game) on AMD boxes for a week.--
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I like to watch.
Er, Slashdot is the contraception.
I mean, how many of us have been fucked by something other than Unix?
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
It is clearly not easy to rank these processors in any order, especially when you usually get limited information, be it clock speed or certain benchmarks or whatenot. But I would just like to clarify a few things.
First of all the P4 is a larger processor with more overhead so that it can easily reach faster speeds. The estimated maximum clock speed is 10Ghz for the P4, and it will be undergoing a size reduction, it will come out on DDR, and most likely w/ copper interconnects. It also has SSE2 and other special features that compilers are not yet optimized for. When that optimization comes out, you will see a big performance increase. The P4 is also designed to promote maximum bandwidth vs speed. Something everyone will probably start to appreciate when the clock speeds get up there.
The p3 is similar to the Athlon in that they are both have aging core designs and it is becoming increasingly difficult to speed them up. Thats why Intel redesigned the core of the microprocessor to allow for faster speeds. There is a lot more overhead but that is to be expected. There is a lot more overhead when you try and fly a plane instead of taking your bicycle somewhere. I personally favor Intel over AMD, but I have biased reasons to do so. The p3 (imho) beats out the Athlon, and optimized software for the p4 beats out the Athlon (even if it doesn't the Athlon will soon be completely overwhelmed by increasing clock speed.)
Did anyone else see this initially as:
Tom's Looks At The New Pill
I though it was going to be a Matrix II reveiw or something.
Oh well, my mother did tell me it would effect my eyesight.
not really. There is still a PIII market, and Intel is selling to that market. It really doesn't take as much time to move the PIII to 0.13 as it would to do a redesign. I think the real problem is the Duron -- the celeron is underperforming, and so the PIII is competing in the mid-low end with slow Athlons and Durons. Hence, they needed to up the clock speed. A slight tweak to the chipset, and it's ready to go. I think the PIII will hold the mid-low market segment, and slowly ramp in clockspeed.
They design a new chip using an established process. This gives a stable process to debug the new logic. At high speeds one thing that needed fixed was how to get the clock signal to arrive at all parts of the chip at the same time. This debugging and design was done on a known working process. Later they migrate the chip to the new process that that was developed. Making new logic and a new process at the same time is the same thing as going up the stairs 10 steps at a time. Few people make it even after many failed trys. Working out the bugs and tweaking to perfection a step at a time will get you there faster. The latest migration is from the 858 to the 860 process which uses copper interconnects. They are testing it on an established processor (PIII). I also think the marketing department noticed the problem with Rambus and decided the need for fast chips that use cheap memory may sell better. After all they do produce to fill the customers orders. Right now in a stagnet market, faster and cheaper is what sells. Faster cutting edge at any price is a slow market.
The truth shall set you free!
...that Intel is slowly backing away from the Pentium IV.
.. anything .. to save their collective asses when the bomb goes off. Their 64-bit offerings are not ready to go; there is very little software support. That leaves the Pentium III.
If that isn't the spin that you take away from this story, it doesn't even make sense. Why in the world would a bellweather tech company that is having severely difficult financial times all of a sudden dedicate a whirlwind of time and energy to a previous-generation processor? Unless the Pentium IV has serious problems, this expenditure of resources doesn't even remotely make sense.
The Pentium IV has already had a troubled history. It underperforms. It runs way too hot. Machines that use it have had some high-visibility, bad-publicity recalls. Some have estimated that as many as 70% of P4-based machines experience intermittent hardware problems. My guess? Some engineers at Intel have discovered something even worse about the P4. They've discovered that the P4 is a ticking time bomb and are looking at something
Personally, I bought a new machine five months or so ago, and instead of buying a P4, I went with a 1GHz Pentium III. A lot of my friends ridiculed me. Well, they're not looking so damned smart now, are they?