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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.
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
...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?