Slashdot Mirror
Intel's Tualatin P3
DavoKid writes: "Intel rolls out the .13 micron Pentium III processor based on the Tualatin core at 1.2GHz. This chip really shines and overclocks to 1.47GHz. The benchmarks are fairly impressive too!
Reviews at: HotHardware, Anandtech, and Tech Report." Also given plenty of attention is Intel's new D815EEA2 motherboard, since that appears to be about the only choice for the new chip. The consensus seems to be that this chip is at least intended to be "the new Celeron," but marketed also as a power-frugal chip to impress server-farms with electrical savings.
The other day, I noticed that Dell had started offering a 1.1GHz PIII option on their Precision 4100. Is this one of the Tualatins?
(BTW, my box at home is still a 550 MHz PIII Katmai, the last one produced on 0.25 micron. I have major process-shrink envy.)
Crap... I've been referring to it as the 'Guffaw'. No wonder my Mac-loving friends have been so snippy lately.
I always assumed higher clockspeeds would eventually give way to lower power and slower speeds in future chips. First to go was SMP. Now it's clockspeed.
Obviously at 1.2 Ghz Intel has stepped back from the speed deamon days of 1.4Ghz P4's and started retooling for lower power consumption and portability. Those of us who want to crunch numbers will have to spend big bucks for mainframish chips with weird names and companies with 3 letter names.
Vector graphics for 32bit-600dpi colour displays, fewer compromises in voice recognition, some of those cumbersome comp-sci alorithms to deal with stuff like process starvation, richer GUI programming environments, condensing server clusters into single machines, real-time dvd-quality video compression, games games and more games...
Most importantly perhaps for the short term, lower energy comsumption in Notebooks, fanless silent desktops, stuff like that.
Finally it can be used for the ultimate user interface... specialized devices which are cheap, disposable, portable and secure. The high end of technology pulls the low end with it.
Since when does a sugarpill induce vomiting, nausea, headaches in 0.0001% of patients studied?
Having both a degree in Psychology, and working in an IT job, I'd bet that it's more like 1% of patients reporting a lot of this stuff. My grandmother swore that Sudafed made her drowsy, never mind that it's a stimulant. People always like to blame their meds for causing some problem with them. They'll report that the test drug caused diahhrea, and forget to mention that they ate four pounds of greasy Mexican food the night before.
Kind of like the users who swear that installing the latest version of Netscape caused their printer to break.
In short, you'd be surprised at the large large number of people who don't or can't grasp the concept that correlation doesn't equal causation.
---
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
MHz != real life speed
The 750MHz PPC is much faster than a Pentium III at 750MHz. As far as I know the 750MHz PPC is about equal to ~ 1.1GHz PIII in most operations.
There is of course faster x86s than PIII-1.1GHz, but it is definitly not the slowest x86.
two-AH-lah-tin
It's a river in Oregon.
thursday
Sure, but with a mass-produced hardware encoder you could do the same with a 100Mhz part.
Consider how much slower a general-purpose CPU like the P3 is compared to custom hardware like the NVidia GeForce3 for doing realtime 3D. You probably would neet a 10GHz or better P3 to equal the performance of the GeForce3 at this task.
With the increasing popularity of video-processing on consumer desktops, it would be nice to see hardware manufacturers putting some hardware into their cards to support encoding functionality, as well as just augmenting software decoding.
Realtime MPEG-4 encoding is not out of the question, since realtime MPEG-2 encoding is now a consumer-level proposition - TiVO, cards from hauppage etc..
It would be interesting to see Matrox take back some market share by building a programmable video compression engine onto one of it's upcoming cards.
They have tried this with the 'Rainbow Runner' and it's ilk, but these products were never billed as a 'Complete PVR and DVD-ripping station', which i'm sure would be vastly more attractive to joe average than 'Record and edit your own home videos'
This is not to say that a 10GHz CPU would not be nifty, but rather you could get more done with a set of lower-clocked chips, each optimised for specific functions.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
How is this flamebait? Seems like quite a good summery of the respective respectibilities of the two companies!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Actually, NVIDIA has been consistantly making quality hardware for years now. Just as you don't expect a reliable company like Intel to produce buggy chipsets, you don't expect NVIDIA to produce buggy products either. It sometimes does happen (Pentium FDIV and i820) but not often enough to get cynical about.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Really? Empirically, NVIDIA's graphics drivers are the best out there, quality-wise. They've never frozen on my machine (the GF2/3s might be different) and they have by far the best OpenGL support of any consumer cards.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Linux or Windows 2000? Because there are SMP problems on Linux, but I haven't heard of any on Windows.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
How do you pronounce this? Tualatin? Towel a Tin?
Intel is getting ridiculous. At least i can pronounce my processor. Power PC G4 "GEEE FOUR" Easy =)
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
The result is that the new CPU compares poorly to the Athlon CPU, which processes three FPU instructions per CPU cycle compared one instruction per CPU cycle on PIII's.
P4 also only does 2 FP ops/second but outperforms K7 by about 50% on SPECfp. FP performance typically has more to do with memory bandwidth than with the speed of the FP unit.
i compiled xfree4 yesterday - 10 hours (and it didn't work :( on my p133 laptop.
:)
:)
.oO0Oo.
a 10Ghz cpu would really help voice & handwriting recognition.
besides other intensive apps like compiling, editing video (more in demand than you might think) faster processors mean you can revise your approach to your problems.
Remember when OS's and a lot of apps (such as Windows 3) were written mainly in assembler?
As machines get faster we are able to increase the complexity of the systems we use. As usual it is a double edged sword. There does come a time when we should throw out all of our slow cpu based software and start again. The free unixes are fabulous and I use them every day but I also want them to die. I'm a plan9 user and fan (I had to mention it in somewhere
It does amuse me, however, that I use faster and faster computers financed mostly by editing plain text with vi
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
At some point the die size is gonna stop shrinking and we are going to have to start going multi processor. Any guesses on when this will start happening?
"Athlon T-bird become the value market chip once Athlon 4's hit the streets?"
I'm just making an educated guess here, but I would strongly suspect that any 'Duron 4' would be a reduced cache version of the Athlon 4, just as the Celeron and Duron were cache-inhibited versions of their siblings. As well as this, I'm sure AMD want to maximise the number of chips with their new instructions on as well; the enhanced performance of Athlon 4, just like the Pentium 4 relies to some extent on those new features being exploited.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
About motherboards: Do you know who is making the new MP chipset? AMD themselves--and according to all reports, it rocks. And it's not like Intel hasn't had its share of problems with chipsets. Sure, Athlon+VIA will always probably suck, but for the same amount of money as a P4+MB you'll always be able to buy a faster Athlon with a better MB.
I personally think the P4 is Intel's curse, and bad news for them is far from over. I would be biting my fingernails if the earnings of my company depended entirely on something as shoddy as the P4 design.
Anyone who's checked pricewatch would have to be insane to buy a P4.
That's irony for you...
What piles the irony on even thicker is that Tom's Hardware got their hands on a prerelease version a month or so back and found out that it overclocked to be even faster than a P4 at the same speed. At the time the author of the article had a hunch that Intel might not even bother releasing it because of the marketing snafu it would cause.
/Brian
Even this isn't enough. In the case of PowerPC vs. Intel, because of the AltiVec unit, the problem set can be chosen to be better on one system vs. another.
The entire thing right now I think some folks miss seeing in the race to have the best is that 99% of stuff out there will do what most folks need. I had a friend (thanks to Intel Inside-eous marketing) ask me if his 800Mhz Celeron would let him surf the Internet faster. Umm, Idunno if libpr0n has been optimized for MMX, but I'd say yeah.
On another note with 'optimized' benchmarks. I remember some story of some UNIX vendor a long time ago that rewrote their compiler so that it would detect a certain canned benchmark. If would then "optimize" it to become nothing but a giant no-op loop. You can go through a loop pretty fast if it does nothing. For some reason they always won that benchmark test. Though they obviously violated the spirit of the benchmark, thoy could honestly claim they were the fastest through that code. Be careful what you're testing.
While Athalon's may be fast they are not always stable and can run exceptionally hot. This aside I would still buy an AMD chip over an Intel at the moment, (just based on price alone, never mind performance.) Yet some don't necessarily trust AMD, be it Intel's propaganda machine, or consumer distrust after such great processor manufacturers like Cyrix. To this day I know people who prefer Intel's exclusively (not including the P4's) the Intel line has always been reliable (okay ignoring the Pentium bug as well.) So it almost goes back to the old fable of the tortoise and the hare, while AMD might be a superior processor speed wise, Intel has maintained stability. While AMD completes for market share with low prices, Intel plods along with new technology a little slower, and a lot more expensive.
This won't be the same forever, as Intel brings its price down, and now that AMD has (in my mind) more then established itself as a solid competitor we should soon see a all out pitched battle for supremacy that should in the end have a net benefit for the consumer. (Well here's hoping at least)
Geoffrey Cameron Peart
McMaster Software Engineering
Geoffrey Cameron Peart
McMaster Software Engineering
Monkies? I like Monkies
Judging from reading the Anandtech review of the new 1,200 MHz Pentium III CPU, I think the problem is that the CPU--while it is very fast indeed--still sports the older-style FPU unit. The result is that the new CPU compares poorly to the Athlon CPU, which processes three FPU instructions per CPU cycle compared one instruction per CPU cycle on PIII's.
The poor FPU performance is why I don't think there will be much interest in the new CPU, especially since the 1,200 MHz Athlon CPU will substantially out-perform the new PIII CPU with any application that is FPU-intensive such as CAD and illustration programs.
Encoding DVDs.
With my 1GHz Athlon, it takes ~10 hours to encode 1 hour of MPEG-2 DVD video (720x480 MPEG-2 7M-9M/s).
A 10GHz CPU with linear scaling from my current 1GHz CPU would reduce the time from about 10 hours to about 1 hour. So, if I could just get a 100GHz CPU, I would finally be able to encode 2 hours of MJPEG DV or VHS capture in just about 12 minutes.
That would be nice.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Just-dreaming-ly-yours,
Madcow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
At AMD, the latest generation of chips are currently being designed with flow-through core transistors, so it'll really be more like a "smart capacitor" than a integrated circuit, like most CPUs. I have been tasked with writing the VLIW compiler for the new chips, and I can tell you that they really do fly, and use less power than teh traditional Athlon/Duron series, while retaining the power and in fact doing a lot of optimisation thanks to the new VLIW instructions that are being ingrained into the core.
All I can say is, folks, look out for this one. It will be hot. (but not because of excessive power consumptionDwain Snyders
Research and Development, AMD2DUP * ;
Don't feel bad... my "chip" is only 4"
Oh God... you're all talking about microprocessors... I thought you were talking about... I'm so embarrassed...
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
"This new Pentium III, code-named Tualatin during its development"
Did you see that? It says 'code named', meaning it's not neccesarily going to ship under that name. Read the article...
Remember the AMD Duron's code name was 'Spitfire'. You don't need me to tell you it didn't ship under that name.
Sham on
It's great to have speed, but it's even better if you actually have stuff you do that uses all of it; what's your favorite CPU-intensive activity? Decryption? Creating 3D movies? AI? Computing the entire Othello game tree? Playing hand-coded-assembly Pong at a blinding pace? Or has clock speed finally surpassed practical use?