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Intrinsity Claims 2.2 Ghz Chip
PowerMacDaddy writes "Over at SiliconValley.com there's an article about an Ausin, TX startup named Intrinsity that has unveiled a new chip that utilizes a new logic process with conventional fab processes to acheive a 2.2GHz clock rate. The company is headed by former Texas Instruments and Apple Computer microprocessor developer Paul Nixon. The real question is, is this all FUD, will the real-world performance be part of The Megahertz Myth, or is this thing for real?"
Intel's Pentium 4 which is currently running at 1.8GHz is fabricated on a 0.18 micron 6-layer aluminium process too. Neither AMD nor Intel are selling 2GHz processors currently and no one is using 0.12 micron. There's an industry shift towards 0.13 micron, but it's not well established and currently only some Pentium III CPUs are using it. Intrinsic claims to be able to synthesize quad-phase dynamic logic, and this is interesting, but this is something that is present in CPU's already, and it certainly has it's downsides. If you have no latches, verification is very hard. Timing compution is difficult since many tools are optimized for 1-clock static, not 4-phase dynamic. Also, dynamic will be harder to implement in lower process levels due to the higher leakage current (Ioff). This will force up the size of keepers on the interstitial nodes, which will offset the speed advantage while dramatically increasing power.
Rigged? How? Both computers had 1 gig RAM, same Maxtor HD, same version of photoshop.
That sounds slow compared to Chuck Moore's new design.
I don't doubt that it will work as he says since his previous designs ran at up to 800 MHz with a 0.8 micron process (see the middle of this page).
We'll never be as fast as Akamai... Just because Akamai gets to trust all its nodes. Without that, I'm sure all their algorithms fall to shit. And if they are provably the most efficient, then we can never be as efficient as them.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
what have they done latley? by the sounds of it they have made good chip.
Pseudocode is code to demonstrate a concept, not designed to be run. Like certain M$ software.
Not if the patent on the chip manufacturing process is protected. remember, they crated this chip with a fab that was designed to prodec 400 MHz chip. Imagine, if you can, being able to prodeced 8GHz chips in 18 months using the same fabs that they use to create ~1.5GHz fabs.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Fast forward to Today
We lost the complete source code, and our computers are so darn fast that the bit of code that estimates the speed of the computer over-runs it's 16 bit Int slot. The game now hangs hangs.
So we are forced to run our game in Windows to slow it down. It works half the time - it depends on the time slicing. Recently our computers are getting a bit to fast for even that - so we might have to move to an emulator.
The smart thing to do would be to fire up the hex editor and edit the cose, but that would be *cheating*
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
If what you said was true about intel, why do they let AMD keep punching them in the groin? Plus, with this process Intel/AMD could use CURRENT fabs to generat 8GHz chip.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
it looks like it is not actually a processor
they seem to be trying to figure out placment of logic
remeber this is VERY important in chip 80% of wires and therefore heat comes from the clock sync inside of the chip (acording to IBM powerPC paper in the ACM microproccesor journel)
placment is very lucritive Cadence and such make millions from it but this seems to be FUD because you can run process at 0.10 micro @ TSMC now and they are standardiseing on it should be done
it does not seem to be anything but hoax e.g the clock rates mean nothing unless the whole chip runs at that frequancy and is RISC whith no caches no pipelines of which I assure you there are few
what counts is memory bandwidth and how often you use memory
regards
john jones
You realize that's bullshit, right? Jobs and Gassee are both notoriously hard to deal with. Someone got rankled.
You're damn right someone got rankled -- Jobs did.
Saying that their OS was running apps slower is kindof silly when it's not preemptively multitasked.
I never said the apps run slower on MacOS. Freudian slip?
And Apple stopped sharing specs because they didn't want harware competition.
Your history is a little screwed up. It went like this:
Be created BeOS for their own hardware, using Hobbit processors. (The BeBox.)
These did not sell well.
They scrapped the idea of selling hardware and ported BeOS to PPC. BeOS began to win acclaim as it smoked, esp. compared to MacOS on the SAME EXACT HARDWARE.
G3 came out and Be could not get Apple to release the specs for G3 hardware that prevented BeOS from running on the hardware.
Be ported to the more open architecture of x86, for better or worse, and their user base grew beyond what they achieved as PPC-only.
I think it's pretty clear Be was no longer competing on hardware. Apple did not share the specs because they were tired of getting shown up on their own hardware.
That said, Be didn't stop porting because they needed the specs. They didn't need the specs. They stopped porting because they wanted to stop. Perhaps because they wanted to know that Apple would support them in the future, but whatever.
Gee, what an eloquent argument.
"And like that
More importantly - this sounds like a company looking for venture capital...but I get the feeling they are maybe a year too late.
Anyone want a 2GHz chip? I mean...really...
Well, a better measurement than MHz is MegaFlOps. Not great, but better. For some purposes it's even the dominant measure of performance. Once it gets built into a system one can measure kernel compiles, or disk-to-disk copies to get other figures of merit, but for the CPU itself, MegaFlOps, MegaInOps (usually closely correlated with MHz), and MegaBranches are the main relevant figures. We always used to use MegaFlops, but the importance of that is highly application dependant.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
To sum up:
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Is this company having an IPO anytime soon? I think they are trying to cash in on the megahetz myth with unwary investors. They push the story now, have 2 or three follow up stories repeated by news organizations who don't know any better, and voila!, they have a ready-made blip for their first few days of trading.
Notice, the article is quietly misleading people who read it into thinking this chip is somehow compariable/compatible with x86 instruction sets... like they have somehow trumped Intel to the 2.2 gig mark, the same way AMD trumped them to the 1 gig mark about a year ago.
Watch the blip, then sell short.
haha dumbass
IF this does come to desktops.....that is good. More competition = lower prices. But, lots of issues that are still unclear. What kind of packaging will this be in? Will it require a proprietary motherboard? If it does.....well......im sensing that this wont last too long. Intrinsity's test chip achieved faster performance using conventional methods, where other chip makers have generated chips running at 400 to 500 megahertz, or about one-fourth as fast as the Intrinsity chip So whats this supposed to mean? Maybe they should make that clear. Is that saying that any chip over 400 or 500 Mhz uses special manufacturing techniques. Now that would be the majority of chips......so how can that be special then?
Also.....Much of Intrinsity's work has involved making improvements to a fundamental building block for processor chips: the logic circuit. Intrinsity relies heavily on a faster but trickier type of circuit, called dynamic logic, than do conventional processors. Dynamic logic circuits can handle more complex functions with fewer steps than static logic circuits So does this mean specialized applications/OSes? Not worrying about linux....know it will be ported. But if this needs a special OS, and special new (read expensive) applications......think it will go under.
Proves the technology is there, though, which is a good thing
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&o
i tried moslo, but it has(had?) the problem of running semi-jerky in most games that i was interested in. example: it worked fine with wing commander ii, but the game was so jerky that it was unplayable anyway.
jinkusu
Just take a normal processor and put an inverter ring off to the side, running at 100mhz, and connected to nothing but power and ground.
Back in the 60s, the power of a radio was measured by the number of transistors. That is, until one radio company put hundreds of useless transistors on their board and didn't even wire them up. After that, radios started getting measured on real abilities like quality of sound. Maybe computer marketting will catch up some day, marketting meaningful numbers: minimum FPS in Quake 3!
-Ted
FUD mean Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The term you're looking for is vaporware.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
NOT TRUE... I just called his wife. He is fine!!!!
Don't blame linux. BLAME CANADA.
And honestly, just because the G4 does better on some obscure Photoshop benchmarks really doesn't make up for its lack of scalability (as compared to RISC chips like the UltraSparc II and II) and its lack of good performance in real world applications (as compared to AMD and Intel x86 chips). Please stop the spread of pro-Apple FUD now.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
If this 2.2 ghz chip was commercially available, do you think that Intel (and AMD??) would release one to match it/beat it in a week?
My guess.... probably.
As the space between the lines in the article say: This won't be for desktop computers, yet ...
There is an obvious problem that people, keeps forgetting; RAM-speed. The RAM (and mainboard) can't supply the CPU with enough data to process fast enough. Anyone care to elaborate this with some math and tech info, maybe some predictions on RAM vs. CPU-bus speed development?
Look a monkey!
Or is it moslow? Anyway, there is a program you can use to run games slower. Like... "moslow 10 ultima4" runs ultima 4 at 10% speed. One test of how well a game is programmed, though, is whether or not it needs moslow after 10 years. Games like Doom, Commander Keen, and Prince of Persia all run fine without moslow. Ultima 7 is a different story...
-Ted
Big deal. Wake me up when we start talking terahertz .
Apple routinely uses Photo Shop to demonstrate the potential of its boxes. That's just plain nonsense. There is a reason Apple avoids the Spec organization like the plague, you know.
C//
The real question is, is this all FUD, will the real-world performance be part of The Megahertz Myth, or is this thing for real?"
It doesn't matter if it is real or vapour, it will still fall prey to the "Megahertz Myth". Maybe someday, people will understand: non-similar architectures can't be compared by MHz alone. And even most similar arch's can't be compared via MHz, as the Intel v. AMD war will tell you.
It is even worse than that! no single metric will ever give you the whole story.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
How does Fear Uncertainty and Doubt come into play?
Read the link. The pipelines are smaller, meaning the processor runs more efficiently, crunching more numbers. RISC architecture still can whup the P4. Do you read the P4 specs? It is so held up in legacy technology and backwards compatibility that it just wastes precious time and power cycles.
This product looks like a way to create extremely fast logic that approaches the performace of dynamic logic. It looks like it would be used either to make FPGA or CPLD devices, or full custom logic (the site isn't clear on this). They claim this could be used for any high performance logic (which would imply it could be used in processors). Their site is extremely short on details and it looks like this product could be vapor, especially given the fact they start with a Flash animation...
interesting how apple's g4 propaganda manages to leave out any comparison to an amd processor
Actually, the motherboard, chipset, and/or memory can be to blame as well. That is my problem.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
This is fantastic! Hopefully they will be able to live up to the hype unlike Transmeta. Motorola and Intel spend billions is new plants and manufacturing processes, and then a small Austin company comes into the market and will shock everyone.
When I said "And Apple stopped sharing specs because they didn't want harware competition" I didn't mean that Be was the one providing that hardware competition. They stopped sharing their specs with *everybody* because they didn't want any hardware competition. Be was sortof a civilian casualty.
And, BeOS smoked on the exact same hardware... at *what*?
Of course it smoked at multitasking, and most everything that any user cares about. I'm not about to suggest that it wasn't more efficient than MacOS in the general case. But this was a discussion (long ago) of photoshop/media cleaner performance. That sort of app does not benefit from multitasking or any of the modern features of BeOS. They benefit from the ability to monopolize the processor. The only reason that I responded to your original post is that it is not likely that photoshop's performance would be improved hugely by BeOS.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Charles Moore has made several 'clockless' (well, self-clocked) asynchronous CPU designs and created his own CAD tools to do it. He is able to do this by keeping his designs very small and simple... but they are quite fast. Prototype chips of one of his earlier designs are available from Ultra Technology. So far he has been backed only by small companies, probably because he is ten years or so ahead of conventional system designers. -- Mike Losh
Amiga-like technology lives on.
The custom chipset in the A1000 also used precharge/evaluate dynamic logic with a 4-phase clock. 'course it was only clocked at twice NTSC color-burst frequency, not 2.2 GHz...
Actually this was common design methodology in many 4 to 8 micron (not 0.4 or 0.8!) NMOS chip designs of that era.
Dosemu under Linux has better slowdown capability than Moslo.exe. I have successfully played 4 or 5 of the elder Ultimas and they seemed to run decently with the artificial slowdown.
One project I worship is http://exult.sourceforge.net which has rewritten the Ultima 7 engine with timer-based animation, etc. It is *so* cool. Even if you're not into Ultima games, you should check out the project.
-l
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...Exponential... anyone?
The multiplier is just the difference betweent the CPU speed and the bus speed. An AMD T-Bird 1.3 is actually clocked at 1.3 GHz, but a divider makes the bus speed 266 MHz. The multiplier just specifies how much faster than the bus the CPU should be clocked, its not some trick that speeds up the CPU. Besides, a 2.2GHz bus would be *really* interesting.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Too late! The beowulf meme strikes again...
If a shorter pipeline is so much better, why didn't Apple produce a chip with 7 pipelines that runs on 1.8 Ghz? -Yuioup
Actually, Celerons (specifically) have very little L2 cache. All Intel chips have too little L1 caches (32KB? That's SO 1998!) Also, a 400MHz G4 costs more than a 800 MHz PIII, and STILL won't run faster than it in most cases.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The port to x86 was a gamble, and the decision to drop PPC support came suspiciously quickly on the heels of a fat wad of financing from Intel.
Except that they never dropped support for PPC...
"And like that
I hate to add to an obviously silly conversation, but you state that Be could not run BeOS on the new G3 Macs because Apple would not release the specs for the new hardware.
Good theory. And it is what Be said.
Do you know how long it took for the PPC Linux developers to get the Linux kernel running on the new G3 machine? About 2 weeks. How many people work on the PPC specific parts of the Linux kernel? About 2 or 3. I can only guess how many software engineers worked at Be at the time, but I imagine more than 2 or 3. So, how stupid do you think people are? Be didn't get BeOS running on the G3 because -THEY DIDN'T WANT TO- just as Elwood said in a parent post to this. The fact that they lied and whined that it was Apple's fault made me lose a great deal of respect for them.
I'd also like to point out that Apple is a HARDWARE VENDER. Do you think Apple makes money selling MacOS X for err, $89 or so? Of course not. It's a loss-leader to get people to buy their hardware which has a higher markup than most consumer PC hardware. People have been talking for years about how Apple should give up on hardware and moving to software. It won't happen. Apple losing control over their hardware platform would greatly reduce the added value that their products give over consumer PCs.
In a nutshell this is saying "Someone said something, but it might be bogus, and the cycle speed really doesn't mean much anyways.". Alrighty then. This is like a "nothing to see here, move along!" type articles.
Processors are vitally important chips because they execute software instructions that control computers, cellular phones, communications equipment and dozens of other high-tech products.
I'm glad they brought that out. I thought maybe processors were for making Juliene Potatoes! That cracks me up. Who were they writing this for? Fourth graders?
Besides the article fluff, where's the real specs on the chip? Where can we get some specifics?
- Sig this!
*quote*if you want the real deal, look at the architectures and do some mental math. that G4 (the 9450) if completely optimized could do 4 times the number crunching in the same time as a p4.*/quote* Oddly in the physics department at my uni a lot of the postgrads and phds use G4s for simulations....
A 4 cylinder GEO Metro really needs to crank to keep up with a 12 cylinder Mercedes.
Even Grandma understands that.
What's the highest clock rate you can currently get by supercooling the chip?
eetimes
I am an engineer that works for Intrinsity. Our marketing folks asked me to speak directly to some of the points raised in this forum. Since the best technical coverage of what we've done in the latest edition of Microprocessor Report (which is a subscription service that not to many here probably get) here are some details to clarify thingst.
What we have developed over the past three years is the ability to design very fast dynamic (domino) circuits. This is done through a combination of our CAD tools, clocking, and a new logic family (the collection is called our Fast14(TM) Technology). Applying some constraints to the design problem allows us to automate the creation of dynamic (domino) layout much in the same way that others have been doing static for 15 years.
So, with all this innovation, we needed a proof-of-concept.. and this chip was our means.
The test chip has two processing elements, each with the following components:
The device is a small RISC core. It is programmed via scan, loading and unloading both the instruction and data RAMs. The device is controlled via external pins.
After fabrication, we had significant circuit yield at 2.2 GHz.
So, is 2.2 GHz really a great statement? Well, when you compare it to existing offerings at 1.8 GHz it doesn't seem particularly great. But when you get a little deeper you'll see that our frequency is rather impressive. Why?
Our tools and methodology provides fast circuits and a significant productivity gain.
With what we've learned, we're applying it to some products currently under development.
Oh yeah, point of interest. Most of this chip was constructed with CAD tools running on Linux. Our compute farm is over 150 strong and the standard engineering desktop is a Linux box.
As we're hard at work, any direct replies to this posting may be delayed. Thanks.
2.2ghz means nothing in the real world I mean just beacuse its 2.2ghz does mean it could perform any better than say a 200mhz Pentium, too much hype in numbers if you ask me. :)
Rice rockets can go nice and fast, if they're GOOD ones, you just have to drive them right. American sports cars aren't clearly superior, they're 2 different approaches to sportiness, so don't act like your personal favorite is the only valid approach.
Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Or maybe Jobs could have use a Photoshop optimized for the Pentium 4's SSE2 as he used a Photoshop optimized for the G4's Altivec.
Apple's biggest responsibility is to stay in business, not to "not hold us back."
I didn't mean to imply apple was somehow "holding us back", just that apple is holding themselves back. (Unless by the "us" in that sentence you refer to "mac users", and maybe not even then.)
there's a pretty good chance you're right about the whole apple-can't-survive-as-a-software-company thing. I do understand the business problems involved in abandoning apple's ppc-only stance, and i do still see apple's earlier cloning experiment as a horrible mistake (at least the way it was implemented). I do think, though, that were apple to release a Cocoa compatibility layer for windows and linux (the way NeXT did) they could win over tremendous developer support as a write-for-one-platform-ship-for-three solution, and that once they won the developers' compatibility Mac OS X could win the consumer OS market over on pure level of quality. But i'm not sure. (though, yeh, the unethical things microsoft could and would do to stop that would be truly scary, and the government would probably do little or nothing to stop it, and apple's probably smart to not try. i don't know. it's probably unlikely apple could go forever without microsoft eventually labelling them a threat again, though..) Moot point anyway.. it'll never happen, so what does it matter what the effects will be?
Linux will always be there, but owning the desktop?
::re-reads his post to check to see if he actually claimed linux would own the desktop.. oops. yeh. i did. sorry.::
Yeh, probably not. You're right, i was wrong. I do think oss OSes will in the future be at a tremendous advantage, but that doesn't necessarily mean victory.
Not until the American consumer applies to their purchases a little more intellectual horsepower than a hamster's.
WHich will never happen.
:)
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The BeBox was originally spec'ed to run on Hobbits, but the one that shipped was a dual-PPC 604 at (I think) 200Mhz.
When ported to the Macs, it flew. No doubt. But remember, the danger to Apple wasn't that Be was faster on Mac hardware, its that it could be faster on PowerComputing hardware.
BeOS+PowerTowerPro == some serious shit.
The port to Mac hardware was a no-brainer. The port to x86 was a gamble, and the decision to drop PPC support came suspiciously quickly on the heels of a fat wad of financing from Intel.
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
Did you even read the link I threw at you? Smaller, faster pipelines mean more efficient processor usage.
-Legion
you should read the anandtech article (i believe, might have been sharkyextreme or tom's hardware, but i think it was anand) about the spec tests. they do a very bad job as far as real world performance goes, and are easily as memory/cache bandwidth dependent as they are processor dependent. the article goes into a rundown and gives a better benchmark, as i recall. 2 or 3 months back.
anyway, if you want the real deal, look at the architectures and do some mental math. that G4 (the 9450) if completely optimized could do 4 times the number crunching in the same time as a p4. it burns more power, and has less bandwidth, but if you have something that runs native on the altivec units that's well-tuned, then there is nothing better, currently. Of course, if you aren't writing your own software for such things, and you aren't running one of the hundred or so altivec-optimized applications, then you're better off on an x86 platform, but if you aren't running one of those applications, then you probably don't need to be spending $1700 on a computer anyway -- a 1.4 ghz athlon is pretty cheap, after all.
but i digress. those benchmarks you point to don't tell you what you think they do, and any benchmark is going to lean more one way than another. sit down with the hardware and see what your money buys you, rather than point to some 10 year old tests that even the group that wrote them considers to be obsolete.
AMD chips run faster than Intel chips clocked up to 300Mhtz higher in most situtations. They are also sell their superior chips cheaper and more honesty (meaning they don't put out of POS chip that runs SLIGHTLY faster than an AMD chip clocked 300Mhtz lower, slap a 1.8Ghtz sticker on it and fleece the morons for all their money). AMD chips ARE like American cars, they are the Ford Mustang, the Chevy Corvette, the Chevy Camarro, fine pieces of smoothly running machinery that last for many years if taken care of properly (change the oil....install an extra cooling fan). By unreliable you must be referring to AMD in it's early days....when they were starting out fighting an uphill battle against Wintel, today they are the best. If you have an AMD machine and it's not working properly I assure you that it's either a faulty chip (yes it does happen, to all chip manufacturers) or you.
"
Environment 1 - Exponential 0!
I remember the 533MHz model drawing well north of 80W of power -- which when compared to the PPC750 is almost an order of magnitude more, clock for clock.
Apple has shipped at least five million units since those times; imagine if all of them would draw,say, 50W more than they do now? At three hours use per day, that'd be, what, more than 600GWh wasted every year...
Marko Karppinen
Yeah, but it can do Seti@HOME data units in only two cycles.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Now imagine if they used the top of the line dual 800's or the 866MHz G4...
Yeah! Let's start with smarter users!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
A friend of mine recommended going to a 4.10 gear, but I think it would be too low - Im thinking maybe a 4.30 gear would be better. Narrowing or tubbing is not an option, and we've fitted the biggest tires possible. What is your opinion?
First off, it must be a lot of fun when you get a silly little Honda pull up beside you and think it's gonna race you - or is it strip only? (Ignoring slicks, because I've driven on the street with them, that setup is a little wild for Saturday night cruising!)
Okay. Let's do the math. TH-400, as far as I know, is a 1:1 ratio in top gear. If your rev limiter is kicking in at 7,000 RPM, and your torque converter stalls at 4,800 RPM, there's something wrong if your driveshaft isn't spinning at the same speed as the engine.
Okay. Take your engine speed (redline, 7,000 RPM) and divide it by your rear gears (4.56).
I'm coming up with 1,535 RPM. That's the speed at which your rear wheels will be spinning.
Now, once you know the circumference of your tires (you gave me the width, which is good for establishing that you're getting traction), you can calculate your speed. Remember also that your tires will be pulled larger by centrifugal force at high speeds, this will affect your calculations.
Compare this speed with the terminal velocity on your timeslips.
Experiment with the differential numbers and recalculate the speeds (fire up the spreadsheet in StarOffice) until you come up with a number bigger than the terminal velocity on your timeslip. I wouldn't go much higher than whatever rear gear gives you a small rise over your current terminal speed, going too far will eat your 60-foot times - but so will a bad day at the strip, you should be more concerned with wasting power on the rev limiter.
Since they're likely to be the tallest tires you can fit into the factory wheel wells, I'd take a guess that 4.30 gears will put you into range. Consider, though, where your engine's horsepower curve starts to come down - probably before the rev limiter kicks in. Maybe 4.10, but just by gut, I still think that 4.30 would be better.
That's a really cool car. :)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Yep, here it goes again. Everybody needs a PCI bus that allows the sound card to transfer at 8 GB/sec, and a system bus that can keep up with the soundcard... Get real. Bus speed matters, but so does CPU speed. Either one is a welcome advancement.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I would really like one of the 300Mhrz crays out there, but intel makes a faster processor. Right? ;-)
Perhaps this is vaporware, but FUD? What does fear, uncertainty, and doubt have to do with this?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
now that the cpu isn't the bottleneck anymore lets work on memory and other buss bottlenecks..
The company has not yet announced which architecture their chips will use; most likely RISC, and the aforementioned EE Times article speculates that they will use MIPS rather than PowerPC because of lower licensing fees.
This design will not be finished for another 18 months. By that time, Intel and AMD will certainly have passed the 2.2 GHz mark. But still, the embedded systems market should be a little excited over this one.
If you read the article, you would know what the big deal is. If thay can scale this process to the current chips, we could see 8GHz chips.
the big deal is they took a method thats used to creat 400 MHz chips, and created a 2.2 GHz chip.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What's so great about 2.2GHz? Intel is selling 1.8GHz processors right now, will be launching 2.0GHz processors within the next two weeks, and there are Pentium 4 processors -- both within Intel and outside in the hands of overclockers -- running at 2.2GHz or higher already. (And note that the ALU is double-clocked, ie running at 4.4GHz).
If this story was two years old, it might be significant... but it is far from revolutionary right now.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Given that net delays are becoming the gating factor in big chip designs dynamic logic seems to me to just be a sideshow - unless the long wires are themselves the dynamic nodes (transmission lines with solitons moving on them?) now that would be interesting ...
Potentially much more interesting IMHO is clockless asynchronous logic - but CAD tools just aren't up to supporting this methodology (oh yeah and the synchronous clock based mindset is pretty entrenched too).
Some questions to ask
1. What is the FlOp rating?
2. Is it meant to only do one simple operation?
3. Why hasn't many of us heard this before?
4. Does it run Linux yet?
Your pain is funny
...but I think this chip falls in the "MHz Myth" area.
We need a few more detail on what type of operations it can do in a clock cycle...
Can we trust what anyone named Nixon says?
Nothing personal, but it was just sitting there begging to be said.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
I guess the important thing will be how well they market it. If it is widely accepted, then we'll know whether it was built robustly, or whether they just jacked up the MHz and left the rest built real shoddily.
Don't forget the most inmportant benchmark of all:
:-)
RC5
The G4 clearly wins that race. Since I don't do much image processing... and the G4 and Athlon are about the same in terms of compiling code... I would go G4.
Now if only I would buy a G4 for $200 and a motherboard for $100...
What is dynamic logic? How is it different from conventional logic wired together with different types of gates?
-ted
but I don't know what FUD stands for... can a fellow slashdotter be so kind as to point out what a lame posser I am for not being able to keep up with the Jargon of the 3733t HaX0r2, while at the same time catching me up with the times???
Weather it's FUD or not isn't important. It'd be a blast to even try to come up with a real world implementation. Remember, technology fot technology's sake.
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
the only catch is that ADDing and SUBTracting take over 4000 clock cycles to complete.
alright! another 2 fps in quake3!
*sigh* i want a turbo button on my computer. except, instead of halving my speed, i want it to drop down to 33MHz so i can play all my old games properly under dos.
jinkusu
Yes.. Hopefully "similar technology" does not involve Intel coming out with a 2.2GHz CPU 3 months from now but with a water-cooled system or some-such other hack. I would rather see processors run cooler than this constant neck and neck race for processor speed while the number of fans in my case jumps from 1 to 12.
One of the points here, I think, is not just the performance gains or being the first to hit 2.2, but the fact that they have a new technique that *allows* 2.2Mhz, and supposedly fairly 'cheaply' at that.
Any new technology is good. Even if their processors aren't really competitive in the long run, their technology will trickle down, or force similar technology to be developed to compete.
>Photoshop has been running on both Mac and >Windows platforms for years and years now. It >is optimized for Intel with the assistance of >Intel engineers. It is optimized for the Mac by >Adobe engineers all on their own. Oh, they got help from Intel's engineers? No wonder Photoshop is slower on Intel. My experience is that code I've written on Intel chips is MUCH faster than Intel's graphics processing DLLs. Even my none-MMX linear interpolated scaling routine was something like 5 times faster than Intel's "MMX accelerated" routine (I forget the exact number). But the reason for this is a mystery, because when I wrote an MMX accelerated my MMX version was also much faster than Intel's code. They must have left that DLL to a junior programmer.
You realize that's bullshit, right? Jobs and Gassee are both notoriously hard to deal with. Someone got rankled.
Saying that their OS was running apps slower is kindof silly when it's not preemptively multitasked. If you really wanted to, you could just steal the processor from the OS and never give it back.
And Apple stopped sharing specs because they didn't want harware competition.
That said, Be didn't stop porting because they needed the specs. They didn't need the specs. They stopped porting because they wanted to stop. Perhaps because they wanted to know that Apple would support them in the future, but whatever.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
For those of you who want more, gave a great explanation the week before I saw this live.
It's not MHz that determines the speed. It's just one of them. The rest would be:
And many more. If you have learnt Computer Architecture, then you'd certainly able to list hundreds more.
Moreover, Apple wants to play catchup with x86... Hmmm... Do you smell something fishy?
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
2001-08-13 17:55:05 Intrinsity unveils 2.2GHz processor (articles,tech) (rejected)
Ho hum.
The eetimes article clarifies. They are designing chips using dynamic logic which has the disadvantage of eating up significantly more power. It is actually fairly common to use dynamic logic in chips, just not on a wide scale where power is more important than transistor density or speed.
:-)
x86 chips are not simple, and creating a dynamic logic design is not likely. The company seems to have very good background in automatied design tools, but chips on the scale of x86 CPUs are not created in automated tools, they are created by hand and optimized (like assembly coding to the software guys)
"Intrinsity's bare-bones test chip operates at 2.2 GHz..." This is not that impressive on a bare bones chip. They haven't even created an ALU capable of that speed. Nevermind a full CPU. This company also doesn't have any fabs, so they will be at the disadvantage Cyrix and AMD were at in their youth.
Overall, they aren't likely to be making x86 CPUs any time soon. PDAs and laptops can't handle the power draw, so I'm not sure where that leaves them. Maybe they should team with Transmeta to solve their power problems.
The same statement above applies to cars, but most people haven't learned yet.
Just like poor little rice rockets (P4) running, say, 20+ lbs of boost to get a high horsepower rating near the redline. The power/torque just isn't there in enough of each gear to run the cars fast enough. A domestic (AMD), with power distributed through more of each gear, will surely propel itself to victory.
This easily applies to processors; the numbers are slowly becoming useless.
Now I'm wondering how long before our buddy BigBlockMopar posts something like this...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
We're all familiar with the fact that Mhz has become increasingly misleading (and at worst useless) as a form of speed measurement. So what is a better measurement? MIPS? I'd like something a little more broad-ranged than Quake3 benchmarks...
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
Well, I really doubt this will be fud, since that stands for fear, uncertanty, and doubt. This acticle seems to be more of a hype piece.
FUD is tearing down a competitor's product with vague statements and generalizations. FUD is not describing your own new product in glowing terms. That's just marketing BS.
I know, I know...shouldn't nitpick. But when the term FUD is so depricated on the main page at slashdot, I really must object.
Dynamic logic circuits can handle more complex functions with fewer steps than static logic circuits So does this mean specialized applications/OSes?
Short answer: No.
Programs see the chip's high-level design only. Low-level implementation is hidden.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yeah you're right they are far ahed of 2.2 MHz... idiot
... for a while in the late '99-early '00 region as a PFY sysadmin. If they say they can do something, I'd lay good money on them doing it. The level of expertise and knowledge displayed by their staff was stunning. More specifically, I do recall some of the engineers talking excitedly about this stuff at the time and mentioning breaking the 2GHz barrier (keep in mind this was in late '99), so this is hardly a publicity stunt as it's been in the works for quite a while if it's the same thing I was hearing about then...
They were the Austin branch of a company called Exponential Tech. Doing a google on that should bring you up to speed on the Apple connection. I wouldn't really consider them a startup as they've been around for several years and have designed a number of very popular things (e.g. DSPs for other chip manufacturers).
They were a great bunch to work for, especially for being kind to a rather wet-behind-the-ears sysadmin like I was. The only downside to working there was the gawd-awful commute I had to do from far NE Austin to far SW Austin. (If you're an EE type who'd like to live in Austin, they'd IMHO be a great place to work for)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
No copper interconnects. No .13-micron process. These are things that I (as a non-chip engineer) can understand. Is this going to improve my life? Only time will tell. But I for one like technology for the sake of technology.
Quotes taken from the eetimes article.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Just because it denounces one of the Slashdot "Great Satans" (Intel)
Slashdotters love Intel, not so long ago these boards were full of, "look at my cheap overclocked dual-celeron system!"
The Ghz myth (im updating it a little here) is true and Apple makes a point. I would think average consumers would be more comfortable with an Apple link than say Joe Blow's home made linux based benchmark tool. I'd rather refer non-techies to an Apple page than to something a bit more technical, especially if they're considering buying an Apple.
2) They seem aimed at the embedded market. I don't think that you will likely see "meaninful" benchmarks.
This quote is from the eetimes article.
It looks like they are just reviving old technology and have mastered the challenges of the technology's downside, clock-data racing. Check out the EETimes article. Jecker
Even if they stick to their 2003 delivery date 2Ghz+ will still be fast in that market. They would be the leader in both speed and speed/Watt... but I bet they wouldn't be the cheapest... ;)
Using either MIPS or PPC code is smart for the embedded market... just look at AMDs announcment earlier about discontinuing the 486 and other embedded market chips.
Also - if this is normal .18 aluminum technology the potential for someone wielding .15 copper, stretched silicon, SOI - all of which decrease heat/power is pretty amazing...
=tkk
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
The real news here is that the 2.2GHz speed was achieved using a relatively common silicon process (0.18micron, aluminum interconnects). Intel,AMD,and others are achieving higher speeds (~2GHz), but with much more developed processes (.12micron, copper).
Intrinsic claims to have developed a new way to design and fabricate high speed logic using some older ideas and this could be a significant achievement.
Does this mean that Intel, etc will be able instantly make 4GHz chips? Nope. And as we all know, the speed of the chip isn't a great measure of it's performance.
By the way, that siliconvalley.com article was pretty weak. Did they try to omit as many details as possible?
Here is a challenge for Mr. Jobs: run the same Linux distro (ie, Red Hat for Intel and Red Hat for G4) on each machine and then do the bench marks. And while he's at it, try this new micro-processor for speed...
Microsoft doesn't give two craps about Sony as far as Sony could affect their bottom line. In the end they can make more money selling things to people so that the people can rip Sony off than Sony could give them not to.
Microsoft can make lots of money selling Sony technology to force people to buy their products in such a way that makes more money for Sony (such as 30 day licences). Microsoft gets payed by Sony and everyone who buys Windows XP or whatever so they can buy new releases from Sony, and Sony makes much more money by selling the music repeatedly to the same people who still want it in their playlist after their time is up. They care about each other, but only to the extent that it keeps their money coming in.
It seems that the speed was not actually their primary aim. They are doing the same as Transmeta... Read the eetimes article for full data. From the article: "We're a company that will do products in the sub-15-W range, delivering multigigahertz performance."
AC is AC
That, and put the crack pipe down.
Apple is not the only company talking about the "Megahertz Myth". Intel uses it to sell it's Xeon chips to businesses at much lower clock rates and higher prices than the P4; Intel uses it to explain why Itanium runs at 800MHz; AMD's new chip runs at 1.5GHz, but they say it outperforms a 2GHz P4; Alphas run at 1GHz but are acknowledged to be much faster than a P4; Sparcs run at 900MHz, yet are also acknowledged to be better performers than a P4. There is also a precedent from the old Intel/AMD/Cyrix Pentium days, when the "P-rating" was born because the top-MHz chips were not the top performers. With the whole industry using the same process, and the P4 standing head-and-shoulders above everyone else in both MHz and pipelines, it's not hard to imagine that it's an underperformer. You don't have to ask Apple about that.
Apple does real world demonstrations of Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro. If you are working with images at all (in graphics, video, Web browsing even), then the calculations (such as resizing or blurring an image) that Photoshop is doing faster on the Mac are germaine (Photoshop's filters are even used in other graphics apps). If you are doing any kind of encoding or encryption, then the Media Cleaner Pro demos are germaine (the Mac took a clip from tape to Web, then played the clip for the audience, and the Intel machine still wasn't done encoding yet). The files for the Media Cleaner Pro demos are just whatever movie trailer is newest (last time was Spiderman). Apple also demonstrated realtime, high-quality MPEG-2 encoding on their fastest PowerMac at the last Macworld. There is no counterpart on a Pentium for them to benchmark against. These are the things Apple's customers do with Macs, which are built to run these kinds of apps. Apple just demonstrates that their machine is better for those users. What, exactly, makes you think you know better?
TechTV was also skeptical, and they recreated an Apple demo, pitting a G4/733 against a P4/1.8GHz and the Mac won. TechTV is not a Mac-friendly site, and indeed they had openly disparaged Apple's test before they did their own version. They called it a draw, but add up the numbers and you'll see that the G4 finished the overall set of tasks faster.
The reason they use the word "myth" is that it is a falsehood that people WANT TO BELIEVE. It would be great if the 1.8GHz P4 was really twice as fast as a 900MHz PIII, but it is not. At the same time, it's easy to point at the lower clock-speed of the G4 and get in some good Mac-bashing. Unfortunately, it just shows that you're an idiot who hasn't used both platforms. If you had, you'd hold your tongue. I mean, if P4-based machine were doing these huge CPU-intensive tasks twice as fast as Macs, then why are people still buying Macs? Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro are mature apps with the same features on both platforms. In these fields, time is money, and what hardware you buy is almost irrelevant. The cost of switching is nothing if you get to go twice as fast once you get there, yet people who have to encode hours of video everyday are not trading in their Macs for P4's. Two of the three PowerMac models come with DVD burners and MPEG-2 encoding software built-in, and people are making high-quality DVD's at home now, in 2x or real-time. That's very heavy computational lifting.
The real question is...
Will all the n00bs be able to use this as a cheat in Counter Strike?
Aliens? Magnetic Rings?! Bah! Who needs that when we have
If you go to the company's web site, you'll see that their technology consists of tools which allow chip designers to use dynamic logic with low design effort. The performance benefits of dynamic logic is well known. However, dynamic logic is going the way of the dinosaur for one simple reason: POWER. Dynamic logic uses in some cases 5x more power than static. As transistor counts continue exponentially climbing, power is growing out of control. No one in the future will be able to afford the huge power cost of using dynamic logic chip wide. We can't today, and in 2 years transistor counts will be double what they are now. Their technology does nothing to address the power issue, so it will be used only in boutique processors for applications which can afford expensive and complicated cooling solutions. That's why the article was so long on glitz and hype, but short on details.
TechReview's argument: Safe havens typically don't have enough pipe to host Napster volumes of data; and, to deter law-abiding companies in the "goodguy" international community from dealing with these outlaws, you will be punished with asset forfeiture if you so much as look at them.
My counterargument: The first point is invalidated by the eventuality of distributed networks being more efficient with that volume of data anyway (think anonymous, dynamic akamai), and the second only requires that the "outlaws" be self-sufficient. e.g. If/when South Korea cracks down on the physical servers located @ astalavista.box.sk, it would resurface in a nebulous new form.
Myth #2: The Net Is Too Interconnected to Control:
TechReview's argument: Gnutella had to implement supernodes in order to fix its old bottleneck problem. What once was completely distributed now has a bit of hierarchy, and hence, is easier to attack with the help of the mega-ISPs.
My counterargument: There's a big difference between a massive central server being targetted, and hundreds of thousands of potential supernodes, which can also pop into and out of existance with the same ease as regular peers. Also, they mention that ISPs may move from simple port blocking to traffic analysis in order to defeat gnutella, and other 'rogue' packets, by sniffing their signature. That will work, but it also means that they'll NEXT have to blacklist ALL encrypted communication too--fat chance of that happening.
Myth #3: The Net Is Too Filled with Hackers to Control
TechReview's argument: You can restrict free communication most effectively at the hardware level. If consumers won't buy the crippled products, it becomes governments' job to mandate it, "just like [they] insist that cars have certain antipollution methods."
My counterargument: I think people will get off their asses and 'revolt' before their last bastion of freedom be co-opted by the system. Also, as long as ANY communication is still possible, you can hide whatever data you want to communicate within that channel... defeating the orwell network.
Power to the Peaceful
> Why don't they benchmark the mac with anything
... all of your processing is done in realtime. The Mac runs music and audio apps faster, too. I get incredible performance in Cubase 5.0 on a PowerMac G4/733. You can fill up all of Cubase's plug-in slots and still have CPU power left over (there's a CPU meter built-into Cubase ... that's how CPU intensive it is). Latency is also better on the Mac, and that's very important in audio.
... the Mac is the best-performing machine for all of these. These are the tasks that Macs are BUILT FOR. It just so happens that everybody wants to do these things now, thanks to digital camcorders, cameras, MP3's and security. Doesn't magically make Intel machines any better than they are, no matter what the clock speed of the CPU.
> other than PS, ever, ever, ever, ever?
They also benchmark with Media Cleaner Pro, which is a very widely-used media encoding application. At this past Macworld Expo NY, a Mac with a G4/867 in it took a Spiderman movie trailer from tape to Web, and then played the result, well before the similar Intel machine (1.7GHz P4) could even finish encoding the clip. Same task, same media, same application, same RAM, same hard disk, same graphics adapter. Only thing that's different is Mac OS / Windows, G4 / P4 and the mobo. The machines even end up being equivalently-priced (I think they use Compaq workstations for these tests).
> How could anyone question the validity of an
> application that has always been primarily a mac
> application?
Photoshop has been running on both Mac and Windows platforms for years and years now. It is optimized for Intel with the assistance of Intel engineers. It is optimized for the Mac by Adobe engineers all on their own.
I work in music and audio, and it is very performance intensive
Video, music and audio, graphics, encoding and encryption
Yes, and we're laughing. Check out some real-world real world G3, G4, P3 and Athlon benchmarks here. Integer ops seem to scale well across the board with megahertz, I'd say!
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
-foxxz
The below is almost wholly opinion based on vague observations of the universe. You may want to skip over this post, it rambles. I almost either posted it as AC or didn't post it, but i'm osting it using my account so i can get the score so people can see it and respond to it. I don't want moderator points, just responses, preferably from people who think i'm wrong (and can politely justify thinking i'm wrong).
.tar.gz file and it will work on all architectures including future ones. Apple and Microsoft can port their OSes, sure, but what to? Moving an OS to a wholly different architecture is a HUGE undertaking, one i think only apple has done before, when they moved from 680x0 to PPC. Apple did that about as well as anyone could, and it was a tortorous process, in which the PPC macs had to have a built in 68k emulator that the last 10 years worth of software-- and at first, parts of the operating system-- all had to run through. The result was that until OS 8 came and the last bit of 68k asm was purged from the operating system, everything ran at a speed far under the PPC's potential. Emulators are *slow* and not fun, and convincing every app designer to recompile and redistribute their apps and/or release "fat" binaries for every mac app they sell is not easy. Besides which, this is only temporary; you just have to wait long enough, and eventually your architecture will exhaust its limits. Apple can cling to the PPC for a long time, and they can move again if they have to. But even if they do move to a different processor architecture-- which will be stronger? Mac OS XVII, which after much porting work by apple and all mac os vendors runs flawlessly on the Motorola DXM architecture, or ErOS 6, which can run on the Motorola DXM *and* the Intel Ubertanium86 *and* four other completely new architectures with alien instruction sets-- all completely flawlessly because all software is distributed as source code, and the user just compiles everything they install on their own machines, with the compiler optimising things for what the user needs most? Without a way for each user to compile the code, the decision of which architecture to switch to would have to be unanimous for all users of the operating system-- pick one path and stick to it-- instead of letting the individual user choose which architecture has the most cost-for-speed-efficient chips at the moment. There is, of course, the possibility of compiling your entire operating system and all apps into some VM, so that the OS and apps don't know which processor they're running on, but this would be slow too (unless you could have all machines regardless of processor have a coprocessor to do the JIT compiling for your VM in realtime, but that would be clumsy in practice)
Once again, this is a sign that operating systems that tie you to a given hardware architecture are holding us back, and that apple made a horrible mistake in not porting mac os x to alien hardware.
Those companies that make software platforms need to realize that they **need** to learn to be hardware agnostic. Completely. Tying yourself to a platform is just not safe. Your operating systems need to be designed such that the hardware communication bits and the operating system bits are totally seperated-- as os x/mach is-- and you need to find a way to make the practice of distributing biaries obsolete. We need, badly, some kind of abstract machine code that can be "compiled" to any hardware-specific machine code in an equally optimised fashion. I mean-- you would compile your program not to machine code, but to some kind of rpm-like package in a standard abstract machine code, the user would obtain and double-click this package, and the package would compile itself into the machine code of the computer the user is sitting at. (Since this would require retaining some algorhythm information in the machine code, this would make disassembling / reverse engineering easier, of course, but it would still be highly rpeferable from a corporation's point of view than releasing your source for people to compile would be.) And no, unless your hardware is designed to make JIT interpreters transparent, VMs are not the way to do this.
If they do not find a way to do this? Well, wholly open source operating environments (i.e., systems with no closed source portions, such as debian) will then have an incredible, incredible advantage at some indeterminite point in the future (once there is actually a) actual competition in the processor market between a variety of architecture types, instead of the current "you're imitating x86, you're apple, or you are very high-end" situation and b) a large enough portion of linux/bsd users to sustain actual competition in the processor architecture market). Why? Because once the current ways of doing things start to exhaust Moore's Law, and people start looking for incredibly different ways of doing things, we will start to see a whole class of devices that only really shine under open source software-- because the closed-source world has to ship a different installer for each hardware architecture that the OS runs on, and the open-source world only has to ship one
(Please note that i don't particularly think that open source software ruling the software industry would be a bad thing at all.)
I don't think microsoft would bother with either bytcode or emualtion, though; they'll just stay where they are, where they're comfortable, and assume that they'll halt change in the processor market rather than change in the processor market halting them. (Meaning once we're all using chips that realign their logic pathway map for each program, and MS is still using something x86-compatible, game companies will start noticing linux and it'll all be over for MS.) Apple, meanwhile, has ALREADY used their Super Kernel Messaging Mach Microkernel Powers to easily create an OS that, thanks to brilliant design, runs equally well on all architectures it is written for and can be ported to a new one in a matter of days ("there are billions of incompatible wintel devices, and you have drivers for none of them" nonwithstanding). And once they had done this, what did they do? Release it for one system and one system only. Had they come up with a way to distribute software in abstract machine code (in the way i clumsily described it above) and announced plans to at some point in the future release os x versions for all architectures in existence, they would now be poised to conquer the world; but they didn't. And they're not.
Either way. Someday, we will reach a point where the operating system must be completely agnostic as regards hardware. This means abstractly designed architectures like Hurd and Mac OS X will have an enourmous, enourmous advantage, and hardware-tied monolithic thingies like Linux will have to flounderingly transition to each new architecture. (PS: which of the above two camps does NT fall into? HAL? What's that?) It also means that debian's decision to let apt-get compile and install source packages for you as transparently as if they had been binaries is the only correct desicion they or anybody else could have made..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Try it with this: http://exult.sourceforge.net/
My IP is 192.168.1.100 Hack it if you want.
A couple of notes:
1) This is old news. You can find a much better story from yesterday over at the EETimes.
2) This is for embedded systems and is not really relevent for PC based systems.
3) This isn't even taped out yet... matter of fact they are not even planning to have the design done for another 18 months... it is vapour until you can actually buy it and that isn't slated until sometime in 2003.
4) This might give Transmeta a serious run for its money if it is ever produced, because they are both in the same space... Of course, TMTA being still around in 2003 is a bit on the presumptious side.
5) Oh never mind, why do I even bother...
"668: Neighbour of the Beast" is an album my Canadian band My Dog Popper. Came out around 1988.
HTH.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
"So we're supposed to accept benchmarks done at Apple sponsored events specifically to show off their products?" TechTV did a test to show the Apple test was rigged, and they used the bottom of the line G4/766 against a 1.8 GHz P4... the G4 not only held it's own, but beat the twice as fast PC ... and this wasn't an Apple sponsored test!
Go to their web site and look it up...
Intel uses it to sell it's Xeon chips to businesses at much lower clock rates and higher prices than the P4; Intel uses it to explain why Itanium runs at 800MHz; AMD's new chip runs at 1.5GHz, but they say it outperforms a 2GHz P4; Alphas run at 1GHz but are acknowledged to be much faster than a P4; Sparcs run at 900MHz, yet are also acknowledged to be better performers than a P4.
There seems to be some confusion. SPARC, Athlon, Alpha, and Itanium are not faster performers than P4 (except the Itanium which beats P4 at FP).
Let's have a look:
P4/1.8GHz: SPECint - 574, SPECfp - 618
Athlon/1.4GHz: SPECint - 495, SPECfp - 426
Alpha/1001MHz: SPECint - 561, SPECfp - 585
SPARC/900MHz: SPECint - 439, SPECfp - 439
Itanium/800MH: SPECint - 314, SPECfp - 655
No, not the 2.2 GHz, that accutally sounds cool.. but all this stuff about the "Megahertz Myth"..
;P
First of all this story is about a chip, not a system.. and so the Megahertz Myth doesn't apply because the chip should ACCTUALLY run at its clock speed.. weather or not a system can keep up with it is irelivient.
Secound the article on apple.com about this myth is inncreddibly biast... YES a G4 runs faster than a IBM NetVista Alta 1.7GHz Pentium 4.. WHY?!? BECAUSE it wasn't ment to be the fastest system!
The ONLY Reason they poped a 1.7GHz chip in there is to make it "Sound" fast.. The system, in truth is only really meant for at home web users and not much else. and so they didn't add a fast motherboard, fast RAM or fast HardDrive so OF COURSE ITS NOT GOING TO BE FASTER THAN A G4 because a G4 WAS designed to be more than just a web browser!
Ok, now that thats settled I also want to say no I don't have anything against apple, as a matter of fact I have tried there OS10 on a Dual 800MHz Power Mac and was very immpressed. Even though my AMD system is better
Thankyou very much, BBQ...
A.N.N.? Who is that? She hot?
I believe this is the TechTV article referenced in the above post.
~Philly
Latency is also better on the Mac, and that's very important in audio.
... the Mac is the best-performing machine for all of these. These are the tasks that Macs are BUILT FOR.
Video, music and audio, graphics, encoding and encryption
And if Apple really wanted to let you tap into that power, they would have shared their hardware specs with Be.
The primary reason Be ported to x86 was because Apple got pissed at them for showing up MacOS on the PPC architecture. Apple took its ball, and went home.
So if you really want a fair comparison of architectures, why not compare BeOS on x86 to MacOS on PPC? I realize it's not likely, the same types of apps are not available for BeOS and probably will never be... but let's not chalk up these so-called benchmarks to the CPU architecture quite yet...
"And like that
As soon as Slashdot adds a "Gaussian Blur" tag, I'll get a Mac and FP my butt off.
Sorry Steve, but beating my computer in Photoshop won't cut the mustard!
I remember that outfit. Didn't they have some kind of hyper-accelerated PPC implementation? (Or was it a high-speed 68K?)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What's the big deal, my phone has been running at 2.4GHz for well over a year now.
we'll know whether it was built robustly, or whether they just jacked up the MHz and left the rest built real shoddily.
If Paul Nixon comes from the TI school of design, it will be built to last.
Remember, TI makes more chips than Frito-Lay.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.