Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the cut-on-out-speed-one-up dept.
INicheI writes "According to Intel, the plans for a release of a 2GHz Xeon for dual processor servers have been cancelled. Instead Intel is planning to debut a 2.2GHz chip codenamed "Prestonia" that will be ready the first quarter of 2002. I would love to see Quake running on a 4.4GHz computer."
some ass actually convinced me that Vquake (and hence rendition) was much better than Glquake (voodoo) and i bought a diamond stealth 3d II with the rendition piece of shit.. Nevermind that it was nearly impossible to run in X, but besides Vquake I think I played exactly ONE other game that actually supported the chipset.
It's still sitting a box along with a gravis ultrasound and a number nine video card:-p
Classic Quake + Software Mode + 4.4GHz = How many hundred fps?
"4.4GHz", first of all, Quake doesn't support SMP, and MHz has the exact same meaning as MIPS: Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed.
Just think of how bad the bottleneck would be at the video card. Heck, with a config like this, software mode would be better than hardware mode.
Well, PCI is running at 33MHz, giving a maximum potential transferrate of 133MB/secs, so if the processor didn't do anything else than pumping data to the graphicsboard, you would get 101.47 FPS in 1280*1024*8. But with hardware rendering, you only have to transfer a bunch of coordinates, enabling a much higher speed than with software rendering.
Re:Just Quake?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
its your own stupid fault so stop blaming other for your faults
"Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) Pro slot boasting a maximum data transfer rate of over 1GB per second."
Most graphics cards nowadays are in a AGP slot, around here i can't even buy a PCI one... so those 133MB/s are way off... AGP X4 gives 1GB/s, of course you might just get x2 but it's still 512MB/s
Re:Just Quake?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Classic Quake would not be the best test of this machine since it doesn't support multiple CPUs. You'd really need Quake 3, but since that usually requires a 3D card it wouldn't really push the box either.
I'm afraid that the only true way to test such a beast is to hook it up to a T3 (or higher) run _all_ of Slashdot.org on it.
But Quake 3 does support SMP. You do need an nVidia video card to get it to work though.
Re:Just Quake?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
actually with the stealth II you could run glquake. just only at 640x480 and hehe the frame rate were good till those fancy rocket battles. but there was always the tweaking:-)
The real question is, what will they say, when they have to switch to clockless chips for performanze and heatefichiency?
Maybe something like the pentium rating of the old k6...
" Hey my nu Compy got 6g P-five rating!"
His point is, no one adds both sides of a full duplex connection together (except cisco marketing departments). You don't say you have a 56+33.6K modem (90.6K modem)
-- I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Umm... so because hard drives have large capacities nowadays, it is useless to buy newer faster processors, because when you have lots of capacity, "resistance is futile"... hehe.. nerd puns!
Add the second CPU, and break the program into two threads, one operates on the first half of the dataset, the other on the second half. Time it.
Take one woman. She has a baby in 9 months. Add 8 more women and get a baby in 1 month! No problem! All operations are, of course, parallizable, right?
MhZ is not analogous to resistance. You want to sub 1/2.2 for resistance. You end up getting 1/4.4 for your answer which isn't surprising -- the "current" in each branch is the same if the flow rate is equal.
This article says the 2GHz processor for dual-processor servers
has been cancelled, but then goes on to say that a 2GHz processor for
dual-processor workstations is coming "in September" (though
they don't say of which year). In this context, what's the difference? I'm
assuming it's onboard cache or something similar, but I'd love to
know.
Re:Stupid Question
by
Dwain_Snyders
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· Score: 3, Informative
There are several advantages to a setup as described in this story... a dual-processor Xeon can have benefits on the desktop. Of course, I'd never push a Xeon processor in this enviroment as I honestly don't think it will be the overall best solution in the near future. With dual-Athlons and Durons on the horizon, I'd take a closer look at them before considering a dual Xeon system, if only for the price aspect. However, I will attempt to explain why the Xeon architecture is superior to a standard Pentium III and why it potentially matters on the desktop.
Intel produces a version of the Pentium II and III called the "Xeon", which contains up to 2 megabytes of L2 cache. The Xeon is used frequently in servers as it supports 8-way multi-processing, but on the desktop the Xeon does offer considerable speed advantages over the standard Pentium III when large amounts of data are involved.
Basically, the larger the working set of an application, that is, the amount of code and data in use at any given time, the larger the L2 cache needs to be. To keep costs low, Intel and AMD have both actually DECREASED the sizes of their L2 caches in newer versions of the Pentium III and Athlon, which I believe is a mistake. (AMD is working on this in the new chips - new technology will be used to increase the size of the L2 cache while retaining the full data-shuttle flexibility).
The top level cache, the L1 cache, is the most crucial, since it is accessed first for any memory operation. The L1 cache uses extremely high speed memory (which has to keep up with the internal speed of the processor), so it is very expensive to put on chip and tends to be relatively small. Again, from 8K in the 486 to 128K in the Athlon.
The next step is the decoder, and this is one of the two major flaws of the P6 family. The 4-1-1 rule prevents more than one "complex" instruction from being decoded each clock cycle. Much like the U-V pairing rules for the original Pentium, Intel's documents contain tables showing how many micro-ops are required by every machine language instructions and they give guidelines on how to group instructions.
Unlike main memory, the decoder is always in use. Every clock cycle, it decodes 1, 2, or 3 instructions of machine language code. This limits the throughput of the processor to at most 3 times the clock speed. For example, a 1 GHz Pentium III can execute at most 3 billion instructions per second, or 3000 MIPS. In reality, most programmers and most compilers write code that is less than optimal, and which is usually grouped for the complex-simple-complex-simple pairing rules of the original Pentium. As a result, the typical throughput of a P6 family processor is more like double the clock speed. For example, 2000 MIPS for a 1 GHz processor. You'll notice that the Athlon outperfoms the P3 family in this regard by a large margin.
--
2DUP *;
Re:Stupid Question
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
One of the reason for which you can't generate optimal 4-1-1 code on the P6 family is that every instruction that stores to memory consists of at least 2 microops: one for the data and one for the address. Given the almost registerless nature of x86, especially when compiling position independent code for shared libraries (which makes EBX unusable): if you need
a frame pointer because you have a variable sized array on the stack or use alloca(), you are left with 5 registers, with another one needlessly clobbered as soon as you need a division (EDX) or a modulo (EAX) by a non power of 2. The other 3 are clobbered as soon as you use a string instruction...
Bottom line: with so few registers you have to keep a lot of live variables on the stack, spilling and reloading them like mad. Of course every spill is a store.
Also when performing an operation between memory and register, you have 2 possibilities: either
loading into a free register and then performing a register to register operation, this is good for the decoders but may indirectly cause another spill because temporary registers are so hard to find, or use a memory to register operation which takes 2 microops and can only be issued by the first decoder.
Actually the rules for the Pentium were simpler and more general: never use a register to memory operation, but use memory to register especially if you can pair them since in this case you win
on register pressure and code size without any
execution time or decoding penalty.
Actually the choice of AMD to extend the architecture to 16 registers is quite clever and solves a lot of the spill/reload problems: the increase from 8 to 16 is often in practice an increase from 6 to 14 or 5 to 13, multiplying the number of free registers by about 2.5. This is enough to solve the spill/reload problems on many, but not all algorithms (with 64 bit addressing you try to keep more addresses in registers
for code size issue while 32 bit addresses can easily be embedded in code).
Having hand-coded myseld some critical subroutines on machines with 8 general purpose registers (x86), hybrid 8/16 (68k family, the address/data
split is sometimes annoying but at least any register can be used as an index for addressing,
with scaled index from 68020 onwards, it becomes
quite nice), 16 general purpose registers (VAX and IBM mainframes, the fact that R0 can't be used for addressing on the latter is irrelevant in practice) and 32 (PPC mostly, with some MIPS and Alpha). I can say that x86 is by far too limited while I hardly ever ran out of registers on other architectures. 16 registers with a rich set of addressing modes is fine, although RISC machines with 32 registers and less choice or addresses
are actually slightly easier to handle.
Bottom line: the x86 architecture sucks and requires astronomical bandwidth to the cache
to run fast because is seriously lacks in registers (and don't get me started on the floating-point stack).
in no way would it be "4.4GHz computer"
by
2ms
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· Score: 0, Troll
Do we really need this kind of meaningless numbers shit/hype on Slashdot too?
Re:in no way would it be "4.4GHz computer"
by
aka-ed
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· Score: 1
Do we really need this kind of meaningless numbers shit/hype on Slashdot too?
Without it, when could we say "Beowulf?"
-- I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
Re:in no way would it be "4.4GHz computer"
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
>>Do we really need this kind of meaningless
numbers shit/hype on Slashdot too?
>Without it, when could we say "Beowulf?"
or "Apple".
(i mean what -IS- a "Performa 6200" or a "G4" !?)
Re:in no way would it be "4.4GHz computer"
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DavidRavenMoon
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· Score: 1
(i mean what -IS- a "Performa 6200" or a "G4" !?)
Can't help you with the Performa quandary, but "G4" refers to fourth generation PowerPC chip, so the 601, was a G1, and the 604, 604e, 603, and 603e's were G2's and so on...
And what is a Pentium or Athlon?;-)
-- --
if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
Re:in no way would it be "4.4GHz computer"
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
i think i've got it now...
start with low (semi-meaningless) numbers, then go up from there....
(same rule applies to prices as well)
"Xeon" sounds cool, but...
by
Dr.+Spork
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· Score: 1
Despite the high-end sounding name, this chip is nothing more than a crappy old Pentium 4 with some extra cache. When benchmarked against a 1.6 GHz desktop Palomino, you'll see that it not all that much faster.
If you want a multiprocessing server in Q1 2002, the chips to buy are AMD. By then 3 or 4 mobos that support dual processors will be online. Load up on DDR and you'll be able to host anything.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the future of Intel Clones. The hand writing is on the wall: Intel Clones faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Intel Clones because Intel Clones is dying. Things are looking very bad for Intel Clones. As many of us are already aware, Intel Clones continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Cyrix is the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Intel Clone leader AMD states that there are 700000 users of Athlon. How many users of Winchips are there? Let's see. The number of Athlon versus Winchip posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 700000/5 = 140000 Winchip users. IBM "Blue Lightning" posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Winchip posts. Therefore there are about 70000 users of Blue Lightning. Through the use of "Performance Rating" numbers, this is consistent with the number of Cyrix Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Cyrix, abysmal sales and so on, 6x86 went out of business and was taken over by SiS who sell another troubled Intel Clone. Now SiS is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Intel Clones have steadily declined in market share. Intel Clones are very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Intel Clones are to survive at all it will be among ghetto hobbyists dabblers. Intel Clones continue to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Intel Clones are dead.
just incase no-one else has posted this info
by
tahpot
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· Score: 0
2.2 x 2 != 4.4 !!!!
OK?
GOT IT?
geeeezz i'm surprised no one else has pointed this out yet geeeezz
Re:just incase no-one else has posted this info
by
Furry+Ice
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· Score: 1
I'm surprised you didn't realize that everyone else was pointing this out while you were in the process of pointing it out.
Re:just incase no-one else has posted this info
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Er, actually 2.2*2 == 4.4...what are you, stupid or something?
Re:just incase no-one else has posted this info
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
only a couple of dozen people before you
jackass
Re:just incase no-one else has posted this info
by
liquidsin
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· Score: 1
now THAT'S comedy!
I'd mod you up, if only I could...
-- do not read this line twice.
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of those....
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Just try playing Quake when the monsters are running 500 times as fast as the original game. Bam! Grendel bites your arm off, and you're dead....
Heh, quake 3 already gets well above 150 fps on an athlon 1.4 with a geforce 3.. which is faster than the refresh rate of the monitor. So in that case, the bottleneck is the monitor.:) Anyway, after about 60, fps becomes a dicksizing thing (my box is better blah blah) and I really hate dicksizing contests.
And.. Yes, I have to say it.. Damn, I'd love to see a beowulf cluster of those!
I have trouble distinguishing between anything above 20 FPS or so. I don't know of any normal video (exception: cameras for slow-motion) that does anything over 30 FPS.
Looks like from everyone else's comments that I must be blind.
Oh well. At least I can't hear very well either.
-- Making today worse so tomorrow seems better
Re:At what point...
by
Osty
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The difference here is that you're talking about a constant 24fps or 30fps (film vs. NTSC -- those numbers aren't exactly right, because most film projectors open the shutter 2-3 times per frame, making an apparent 48-72fps, while NTSC is interlaced, making an apparent 60fps) with motion blurring and other movement artifacts that make frames flow together. For a video game (quake, for instance), you're talking an average fps, meaning that if you're getting an average of 30fps, you're very likely going to drop down into the teens when you run into heavy action. 60fps is the "sweet spot", since you should still stay above 30fps even in heavy action. That said, there are no motion blur effects with video games (well, yet anyway -- when 3dfx tried to do that, they ended up getting an average of 3-4fps), which means that you need a higher fps just to see smooth motion. In other words, the point of having 100+fps in a video game, average case, is to make the worst case still look smooth.
Anyway, once you can achieve an average fps of 100+, it's time to start turning that detail level up. A GeForce 3 may scream with nearly 200fps in Q3A, in 640x480x16bpp with all the details turned down, and even get a decent 80fps or so with higher detail, but the next-gen games are going to be clocking in much lower, simply due to the fact that they are so graphically rich. What that means is that video accelerators will need to continue to improve, so that we can hit the 100+fps mark on these newer, higher-detail games, so that the generation after that can go back down to 30fps with even more detail, and so on.
Re:At what point...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You must be, blind... Anything below 75Hz just screws with my eyes. (3D, and monitor refresh rates)
Well if your running a large quake III server with over 32 connections, (on a very high speed line of course) your gonna start needing that speed.
Re:At what point...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
you may get 150fps on average, but what about when you increase your resolution, have tons of objects in motion on the screen at once, the objects are more detailed, etc? in order to achieve a decent frame rate while all that is going on, your average now becomes 300fps.
They could instead (instead of increasing the FPS) improve the rendering. No more lightmaps but raytracing. Now that would be exciting!
(or radiosity)
--
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
Re:At what point...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
>and I really hate dicksizing contests.
there there... its not about weather you win or lose...
Re:At what point...
by
phil_was_here
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· Score: 2, Informative
brings back memories of school at the medical center. this probably goes under what is called the temporal sensitivity of the human visual system. if you gradually increase the frequency of a blinking light you reach what is called the CFF or critical flicker frequency (or FFF) where the system can no longer detect that the light is flashing (it appears continuous). we got to do all these fun experiments. central vision (foveal cones) has a CFF of 50-70 Hz depending on the lighting conditions (state of adaptation); whereas, peripheral vision (rods) has a CFF of only 15-20 Hz.
another point is that the fovea is not that sensitive to changes in light amplitude (level); whereas, in the periphery small luminance changes can be detected. this accounts for being able to detect the flicker of fluorescent lights out of the corner of your eye... then when viewed fovealy it stops flickering because here it is less sensitive. in summary we can say that peripheral vision fuses at low frequency and that it can detect flicker with small modulation. becoming a doctor was a lot of fun:p.
Re:At what point...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You could always have use for such computing power when it comes to games, a few come to mind:
* higher resolution (thinking 1600X1200X32bit)
* dual screens
Besides, you could always improve the scenery complexity within every single frame!
The problem with those 150fps is that they are measured in a standard test, in real life (or real gamming) situations the frame rate goes way down in a few situations (lots of people, lots of complicated shaders, etc)
If you have quake, try installing ut2 mod and time it with a demo... you will see that a 150 fps card will probably came down to 40-50 fps sometimes.
Re:At what point...
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Kynde
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I have trouble distinguishing between anything above 20 FPS or so.
I'm getting awfully tired of people mixing fps of normal video and 1st person 3D games. Having played quake and it's offspring online for 4 years now, without a shread of doubt I can say that Q3 offers you such playability that telling apart 40fps and lunartic 125fps (which btw is optimal for Quake3 engine physics, which alone would be enough reason for some ppl to go for 125) is relatively easy.
Where you easily notice it is quick glances backwards, i.e. when in midair you just lay a glance what's right behind you and turn right back. Such rapid motions and the smoothness there are actually rather essential in quake-like games (once you get past the shooting-everything-that-moves-along-with-your-tea m-mates-phase anyway).
In other words, the rant usually is that when looking at a screen the human eye cannot distinguish FPS's over 20 (...50 depending on who's ranting), but they usually neglect that with 1st person 3D games it's whole world ahead of you that keeps turning all around and in a very quick fashion even. We're not talking about a rotation of some teapot in a 3D animation. And what's worse, it's usually people that have zero or very very little experience in 3D gaming. The kinda "I've played through quake in hard core mode, I know what I'm talking about". Those people have very little idea how competative things have gotten in the online gaming scene.
I can't understand why people also forget that 20 FPS would mean 50ms rate of flow. Not directly comparable, but still, anyone (experienced) who has played on the net and in a lan know that's there's a huge difference between 50ms and 10ms.
Besides, try telling to some sprint athlete that wether his shoes weigh 10 grams less or more makes jack difference.
-- 1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
Re:At what point...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
In other words, lets say you're doing three frames per second, and you hit your 'turn 180 degrees to look behind yourself, then turn back' button. You'll see three images; straight ahead, straight back, straight ahead.
Now lets say you're doing thirty frames per second. You'll see straight ahead, 18 degrees to the right, 36 degrees to the right, 54 degress to the right, and so on.
Now lets say you're doing three hundred frames per second. You'll see straight ahead, 1.8 degrees to the right, 3.6 degrees to the right, and so on. Much smoother, and you'll be able to pick out details that wouldn't be there otherwise.
-- Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Well at least you can rock in Pinball then Tommy.:)
-- I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Re:At what point...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I bet you dont needledick.
Re:At what point...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
NTSC = 29.97 FPS
PAL = 25.00 FPS
FPS has nothing to do with 'Quality', although you may see in some 'cheesy' movies how scenes look 'sped' up (or fast-forwarded): This is done by filming the movie at a low FPS and playing it at 29.97 or 25 FPS (depending on where you are in the world;)). This gives the illusion of 'fast-forwarding'. That concludes today's lesson...:)
For an ordinary PC consumer? And let's not talk about Quake for this. Everyone knows that nobody can really see the difference between 40fps and 100+fps, so 3D gaming really is a shuck. Between today's modern graphics cards and even mid-range CPU's there's enough computing power to do high-quality 3-D rendering at high frame rates. I haven't upgraded my system (AMD K6-2 450) in two years, mainly because I've never found a good reason to do so. It does everything I need to do.
What the hardware industry needs is a new killer app like DOOM was in the early 1990's. DOOM may have made Id software millions, but it made Intel and its cohorts billions in hardware upgrades. If all you want is word processing, spreadsheets, and a few games here and there, nobody in his right mind would use a gigahertz-class processor, unless MS and Intel are in cahoots in making Office XP the bloated monster it is!:)
-- Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Re:what is it good for?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
hey i read that article to... infact i think it was posted here so please site your sources next time you have an original thought
Re:what is it good for?
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OmegaDan
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· Score: 3, Informative
Everyone knows that nobody can really see the difference between 40fps and 100+fps
This is true but you've missed the point... FPS is a measurement of *average* framerate. Ultra fast cards are an attempt to raise the *worst case* performance of the card not the average case. A mere side-effect of this is raising the FPS.
Re:what is it good for?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Insightful
. Everyone knows that nobody can really see the difference between 40fps and 100+fps
We should play a game of quake 3 and I'll set my fps to max and you can set your max fps to 40.
I like seeing my fps in quake above 100. Anything less and you can see a statistical drop in my accuracy. Theres a reason companies like ati and nvidia are in the business they are in: fps matter. Heck a tnt2 can pull 40fps, why do you think people like geforce3 cards so much?
Re:what is it good for?
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WasterDave
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· Score: 3, Insightful
There is a big difference between 40 and 100 fps, particularly if you have a monitor that refreshes at 100Hz. Not wishing to harp on and get even more off topic, but if you turn 180 degrees, aim and fire in a quarter second that gives you:
40Hz 100Hz (apologies for lame fmt)
Turn 6 15
Aim 3 8
Fire 1 2
..frames in which to perform the operation. Those couple of extra frames for aiming with actually do make a difference. I actually got noticeably better at Quake (particularly the rail gun) when moving to a faster card and an optical mouse.
Back on topic, this is good for databases. Faster processors means fewer processors, less cache contention, good for all concerned really. And this is a really good move on Intel's part - rather than support a.18 micron part they really wish they hadn't made, in a socket they will use for precisely one processor, on a chipset for precisely one processor, they're swallowing pride and just getting on to the next one. Sensible. Very. Particularly when you consider how much the P4 needs its' on die cache to come up before it starts working properly.
I think the driving force behind faster CPUs might be doing more stuff in software. Software modems, software Ethernet - in time, accelerated graphics cards may become unnecessary becuase the processor can do the 3d rendering fast enough. At the moment it is easier just to have dedicated hardware for this, but there will come a time when spending an extra $X on a faster CPU gets more improvement to your system than the same amount spent on dedicated hardware. So I don't necessarily treat USB2 as some kind of Intel conspiracy to force everyone into getting a faster CPU; it might genuinely be the cheapest and simplest way of doing things.
In a way it's a pity for Intel that memory is now so cheap. If things had remained how they were in 1996, 'RAM doubler' type stuff which compresses pages of memory would now be commonplace. That would _really_ munch processor cycles...
-- --
Ed Avis
ed@membled.com
Re:what is it good for?
by
shut_up_man
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· Score: 1
I think you're wrong... but right, and right again.
If the framerate were 40-100, you're wrong... high-action dips in performance cause your fps to drop significantly, taking your 40fps to 10fps where your 100fps would've gone to 50fps. But... gaming machines aren't running at 40fps anymore. Last year's models are running Quake3 at 120fps, and this year's models are topping 200fps. So you're right, we've got power galore.
You're right again when you mention a new killer app, and maybe more than you realise when you mention Doom. John Carmack has stated that id software's new Doom will run at 30fps on GeForce3, likely coupled with a 1Ghz+ CPU. These are *serious* hardware requirements, well beyond your AMD K6-2 450.
The new Doom also sounds like it's designed for an immersive, realistic experience, so it's not the kind of game you can strip down to get extra frames. Avoiding Doom also won't work, since about a zillion game companies will license the engine, so the bar will be raised across the board.
Chip makers really should be stepping up and funding game development in an effort to create a requirement for crunch, and which will create demand for their products. Game companies are dropping like flies right now (Dynamix, Interplay, even Loki is looking sick), that can't help push technology along.
I've got an AMD K6-2 450 at home (among others) and trying to play Max Payne was a sad, daunting experience, going under 5fps at times. And I have a decent enough videocard.
Get a grip, serious gamers need serious speed and anything >2GHz sounds like it does the job! [for now]
If you think about the PC industry's history you'll realize that this is a continuous cycle. First a difficult task is handled in expensive hardware (Say a modem, or hardware encryption, or a raytracing coprocessor). Then the CPU gets faster, and people stop buying the expensive hardware and do the task in software (WinModems, Doom, ssl) to save money. Now that the hardware companies are motivated, and the software has popularized the task they can do volume production and sell the hardware on the cheap ("accelerated" modems, GPUs, system bridges with encryption built in) and the task gets offloaded again and the CPU can be used for the next big thing.
Ethernet is going through this same cycle right now. Most cheap ethernet cards now have stopped doing their address table lookups (for MAC addresses) and checksuming and all the rest of the compute intensive stuff on the chip, and have offloaded it into the driver. This has happened gradually over the last 6 years or so. Now, with 10GB ethernet coming out, you can't process that stuff fast enough on the CPU, so it's moving back onto the chip along with other software like the TCP/IP stack. Ethernet is so intrenched in the marketplace that the manufacturers are guaranteed high volumes and can afford it.
3D processors right now are far ahead of what you can do with current CPUs because of the limitations of memory bandwith, so I don't think that it's a task that's likely to make another loop through the cycle in the near future, but it will probably happen eventually. The real question is what cool technology that now requires additional hardware will soon become available to mainstream users? Video decoders seem to be in the software stage of the loop already, and are starting to move back into hardware by being embedded in regular video cards. Real time video encoding and editing could be the next big thing though...
Everyone knows that nobody can really see the difference between 40fps and 100+fps
Not true,worst-case frame rates over 30 are how computers do motion blur. Remember, the figure 30 came from cinematography, where they get motion blur for free. In computer graphics you need to over-sample in time to reproduce the effect.
-- This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
Re:what is it good for?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
So MS is against open source because there's a whole lot of resource wasting junk in their code. Imagine, intentionally writing inefficient code. That's a pretty sad use of their power.
Maybe we should just head back down the bus board route. Instead of having a (relatively) big motherboard with main memory and CPU and (relatively) small I/O cards (disk, scsi, network, etc), maybe we should have (relatively) simpler "processor boards" which host their own RAM and connect to a common bus. Modular connector(s) on each processor board could have adapters for various tasks -- networking, disk, video and so on.
This way each processor board could be tasked to handle whatever it was connected to. Adding CPUs to a system for actual processing would mean adding a processor board. Adding functionality to a processor board would mean adding the appropriate connector for whatever you wanted it to do.
This way we're not building as much specialized hardware to do a specific task. The bus could really be a half-smart switch instead to eliminate contention between processor boards. With general purpose processors running on the processor boards, specific OS functionality could easily be offloaded to individual processor boards, eliminating the need for the processor boards that actually host the OS to spend as much time manipulating dumb hardware.
Go do a search for "NUMA architecture." You'll be plesantly surprised.
-- Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Re:what is it good for?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I get tired of people thinking that computers are just for playing games... what about real-time audio DSP?
Re:what is it good for?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Doom 3. Of course, by the time it comes out we'll probably REALLY have 4.4ghz machines.
Re:what is it good for?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"I like seeing my fps in quake above 100. Anything less and you can see a statistical drop in my accuracy. Theres a reason companies like ati and nvidia are in the business they are in: fps matter. Heck a tnt2 can pull 40fps, why do you think people like geforce3 cards so much?"
Uh, because they are ignorant retards like you?
Re:what is it good for?
by
Mr.+Piccolo
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· Score: 1
BZZT!
Films run at 24 FPS, except the very oldest ones which run at 16 FPS. But thanks for playing.
-- Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Of course, even though they knew the right number was 30, they went for 24 to save some of that expensive film roll.
ah the joys of trade-offs! On one side my movie would cost 10'000 bucks less to make, but on the other 2000 guys will trow up watching it from the jeckiness. mmm.... decisions.
-- This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
Let me get this straight...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The worst terrorist attack in recorded history happened just over a week ago, and you folks are talking about Intel's plans to debut a 2.2GHz chip codenamed "Prestonia"?
GET SOME PRIORITIES!
Have you pricks even bothered donating $500 to the Red Cross yet like I have?
Insensitive pricks.;-(
Re:Let me get this straight...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I admit the twin towers incident was not pleasant at all but still I'd rather buy a dual AMD mobo with the $500.
Prestonia???
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
What kind of name is Prestonia?
At least AMD comes up with names like Clawhammer...
Speed is very nice, but....
by
Splezunk
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· Score: 3, Interesting
What about reducing the power required, or the heat. How about the cost etc. I have no idea what really needs that sort of power? I know the Xeon is more of a server chip, so speed is important, but this trend is happening on Desktop chips too.
All this speed is encouraging programmers to be lazy and not use good code that works fast, but rather rely on the hardware being fast.
Just a bit of a rant...
Re:Speed is very nice, but....
by
borgboy
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· Score: 1
Spending time coding a faster, more complex, less maintainable widget when you can buy a faster chip and use simpler, more maintainable code isn't always a very responsible decision to make. Commercial software, as a rule, should play to the lowest common denominator, but most programmers aren't writing shrink wrap. Balance the costs of writing AND maintaining the code with the cost of the hardware upgrade.
-- meh.
Re:Speed is very nice, but....
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I agree with the programming part. However, with competition, speed (even a second or two) plays a huge part with end-users.
For any user of Gamespy, you know what it's like to wait for servers to load. However, a friend of mine programmed Kali and the server brower is 10x faster due to tricks he used (that Gamespy would never think of). The word is getting out, and hopefully the "better programmed" utility will prosper.
But anyway, among other programmers at least, good FAST programming demands respect. I'm a 4th year CIS student and I can't turn in slow crap. I wonder if the industry standards are as stiff as universities (UGA).
Re:Speed is very nice, but....
by
prator
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· Score: 0
For any user of Gamespy, you know what it's like to wait for servers to load.
Amen to that. Gamespy has so many "features" now that I can hardly figure out where the hell the server listings are.
Side note: I recently tried out the All-Seeing Eye server browser to find WolfMP servers. I am very impressed with the speed and interface. Plus it auto-updates itself.
-prator
Re:Speed is very nice, but....
by
Lostman
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· Score: 2
While it might cause programmers to get a little more lazy, I think it would be a very good thing.
Everyone knows that hand optimized code runs faster than generated C... Linux was sped up 40% by optimizing 15%. When you have a good algorithm, however, we know that even a GREAT algorithm will not be as fast as hand optimized code. Having a faster processor allows you to work with higher and higher level algorithms -- it may not run as fast but when you get to speed levels that are exceptionally high, you should notice little difference.
So programmers may get lazy.. who cares -- their code will follow established algorithms and be easier to modify.
From what I've heard, after about 900Mhz or so there is really no point in throwing extra cpu cycles at a game like quake. Classic quake would probably look about the same as well. I think at a certain point you need to either throw more video power at it or just realize that you've got room to spare for when the next game comes out (quake5 @ 2G anyone?)
Video editing is a killer app
by
yerricde
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What the hardware industry needs is a new killer app like DOOM was in the early 1990's.
This new app is video editing. After Effects filters run slowly because they have to run 60 times to each second of video. The sheer amount of data involved still makes video compression a very tedious process, even after spatial and temporal downsampling (i.e. cutting res and fps).
Re:Video editing is a killer app
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jhoffoss
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· Score: 2
Video editing is a good suspect, but while the cost of a computer has come down significantly, the cost of a digital cam-corder with which you can transfer and edit video is still high; let's not forget that, for the home user, there really isn't a ton of video editing to be had that I can imagine...
-- Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
Re:Video editing is a killer app
by
tcc
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· Score: 2
3D rendering, I'd rather buy motherboards with dual or even octal beasts than single cpu systems. Saves on space.
Faster is better... until I can rayrace/radiosity/caustics/etc in realtime, I won't be satisfied:)
-- ---
Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Re:Video editing is a killer app
by
edremy
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· Score: 2
the cost of a digital cam-corder with which you can transfer and edit video is still high; let's not forget that, for the home user, there really isn't a ton of video editing to be had that I can imagine...
Your imagination is failing:^).
Digital camcorders are cheap- I just bought a Sony TRV900 for $1500, and the TRV900 is close to the top of the line consumer machine out there. For not much more you can buy the same equipment that Spike Lee uses to make his films (Canon GL-1 and XL-1s.) Single CCD MiniDV camcorders go for $800 on the low end. All of these machine have Firewire interfaces.
On the computer side, Firewire cards are $60-$100. If you have a Mac like my TiBook it's standard. (Macs also come with NLE software bundled- iMovie. Not as powerful as Premiere but just fine for home movies.) Disk and memory are so cheap today it's scary. I bought a DV <-> analog bridge for $250 so I can go either way with tapes.
What am I going to use this stuff for? Well, I have a new baby. I'm putting together a video of him for relatives who aren't going to get to see him, such as his uncle who's stationed in Hawaii with the Army. Another copy is going to his birthmother. (He's adopted)
I've been working on video of my wife's grandmother's farm as well. She's a tough old lady, but she is old and we don't know how much longer the farm will be in the family.
What else? Well, the TRV-900 has the ability to do both time lapse and very high shutter speed photos- I'm having fun filming storms and water droplets. When the current ban on general aviation VFR flights is lifted I'm going to have do aerial still and video shots of the area.
Video editing is never going to be immense on the level of word processing, but I think we'll be seeing a lot more of it in the future. Look at the huge growth in the digital camera market.
Eric
-- "Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Spurred by AMD and IBM?
by
Zergwyn
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I wonder if this delay to increase performance might also be to head off IBM and AMD. Intel says that they will release the new Xeon in the 1st part of 2002. This coincides with AMD's roadmap plans to release its own server.13 micron processor(the Thoroughbred). In addition, that is about the time that the G5 is supposed to be released. While obviously neither Apple nor Motorola do servers, the G5 will be the first fully Book E compliant chip to come out of the AIM alliance, and IBM has plans for Book E chips. From IBM's site:
Since 1991, IBM and Motorola have collaborated on the PowerPC architecture for personal computers, workstations, servers and embedded processor product lines, yet have developed and marketed separate implementations. Driven by the tremendous success of PowerPC microprocessors in the embedded marketplace, the companies announced in September 1997 the start of a joint effort to further enhance the PowerPC architecture to ensure greater consistency in their future embedded products. The Book E project and the new architecture it defines is the result of that effort.
With the chips being 64bit and fully capable of supporting multiple cores, it could give IBM servers and workstations a boost. The chip architecture wars are about to start to hit another exciting stretch, as long research programs begin to produce results for Intel, AMD, and AIM. 2002 should be a big year.
Re:Spurred by AMD and IBM?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
*yawn* - wake me when commodity priced G4
based ATX format motherboards are available - you know, to
compete with what 99 of the real world uses,
priced with the likes of Abit, Asus, Soyo, FIC Tyan, etc.
Re:Spurred by AMD and IBM?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
*yawn* - wake me when the market demands such a thing, and I'm sure it will be available.
For pc-emulation
by
Baki
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· Score: 3, Informative
Such extremely fast computers might be good for virtual-PC environments such as vmware. You Windows-in-a-virtual-PC always takes a huge performance hit due to emulation, so much that it isn't even possible to emulate 3D graphics hardware acceleration (direct-x) in such products.
Having an obscenely fast PC might make it possible to run Windows under Linux, and still have Windows including direct-x run with enough performance to do some serious gaming.
Re:For pc-emulation
by
biglig2
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If you have a dual processor box, can you configure it to make VMware hog one processor and the host OS hog the other?
-- ~~~~~
BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Since VMWare runs as a process that the host OS runs under, you cannot separate the two. You can assign VMWare to a single processor and the host OS will run only on that processor. Processor affinity is only really worth setting up if you're going to be running two VMWare sessions. Stick one OS on one CPU and the other OS on the second, and the OS'es will run simultaneously at about 85-90% of true full speed. It's rather nice for development since you can have a client and server on a single machine that is independent of your development and debugging setup.:)
With 2 * 2.2ghz processors, the most throughput u can get is around 80% of the total speed combined, the FSB of the motherboard is another important factor though. Getting 4.4 ghz is impossible IMHO.
Oh, thank god. What are we going to do without a 2.2ghz $2000 processor... Oh, get an athlon at 100 bucks a pop? ok! G5 anyone?
"This is more than likely about shortening the qualification cycle and saving the customers a bit of money"
That man is living a large at 4:20.
Saving us money? whatever. It's a damn corporation in trouble. The last thing they are thinking is saving us money. Hell with 4:20, the man's on crack.
--
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
You forget: you and I are not buying Xeons. Large companies that need the extra performance in a server are buying them. Two grand is a drop in a bucket in a corporate budget, and corporate folk would rather stick with the most reliable company (Intel) than some "Mom 'n Pop Shop" like AMD. There are certain advantages to those high-end processors aside from the speed, as well. If you saw Tom's Hardware's experiment with Two Intel chips and two Athlons, you know what I mean.
In a mission-critical system (say a large database for orders) you can not, under any circumstances have that system go down unexpectedly. And if it does, it needs to be brought up again immediately.
A corporate customer would rather spring for the Xeons and not have to worry about the system, rather than fill a server with cheaper Athlons and have to keep a few on hand in the slight chance that one of them ups and melts.
You've gotta remember, you get what you pay for. OTOH, you or I are just fine with Athlons, Durons, Celerons, etc. They're cheaper, they're reliable enough for a home user, and they're more widely available.
I'd like to see Quake running on this turdly P-133 I've typing on right now. Now THAT would impress me.
It works, try it. I frequently run Quake 2 between two Dell P133s with crappy old graphics cards (ie not 3D) - one is running a multiplayer server, works fine (apart from when my girlfriend finds the BFG before I do..).
We used to use a college room of P90`s with s3 trio64 display cards to play network quake, and it was perfectly playable in the default 320*200, a p133 would run it just fine
Of course now the machine has been partitoned, so it's not quite that large, but at least there is still a "256 GHz" partition.
Keep in mind that Origin is not a cluster, but a huge mother of a single-image machine. No backplane, but instead a mesh of CrayLink/NUMAlink cables interconnecting the CPU, I/O, and Router modules. My favorite part, though, is that with the addition of a "Graphics Brick" it becomes an Onyx. Add up to 16 G-Bricks!
Dual Xeon 1.7 Vs Dual Athlon 1.2 link
by
Dr.+Spork
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· Score: 1
If you're not convinced that the newest Athlon MP will wipe the floor with the 2.2 GHz Xeon, check out the humiliation that a dual 1.7 MHz Xeon system suffers at the hands of a lowly 1.2 GHz dual Athlon.
I know there will be some of you who'll say "Mah mama told me to not buy no AMD." But for the rest of us, this will be a no-brainer. For the difference in chip prices you will be able to pay for most of the 4 GB of DDR that AMD mobos will support. Or maybe yo' mama told you to send your money to Rambus...
Re:Dual Xeon 1.7 Vs Dual Athlon 1.2 link
by
Afrosheen
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· Score: 1
What you left out was the fact that AMD has failed, and continues to fail, to add thermistors to throttle back the cpu or stop it if it gets too hot. www.tomshardware.com had an article on this recently. If your Athlon loses it's fan or heat sink for even one second, it's roasted and possibly your motherboard also. This is a sad oversight on the part of AMD but something they could easily correct if they felt the need.
Re:Dual Xeon 1.7 Vs Dual Athlon 1.2 link
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Yeah... it sucks when you're playing tackle football with your computer and during one particularly VICIOUS hit, it's HEAT SINK FALLS OFF.
Re:Dual Xeon 1.7 Vs Dual Athlon 1.2 link
by
liquidsin
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· Score: 1
that's funny...because the shop monkey that put the fan/sink on my athlon 1.0gHz (the shop INSISTED that they had to mount it for me) didn't plug the damn thing in (and I, like an idiot, didn't check). About one minute after I booted, it just shut down and I couldn't figure out why. When I tried to reboot, it beeped and gave me a temp warning (asus mobo).
-- do not read this line twice.
Re:Dual Xeon 1.7 Vs Dual Athlon 1.2 link
by
Shadow99_1
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· Score: 1
This is funny... First I've never heard of a fan just 'popping off', in fact have you tried to secure one on? They're a royal bitch to do... they have 40 lbs of pressure holding them in place... Tom is a bloody fool & always has been... Have you ever seen him hammer on anything that wasn't a non-issue..?
Second the Athlon XP (yes that's it's name now officially) will include on onboard thermistor to 'turn-off' the cpu when it gets a sudden heat spike...
-- we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Re:Dual Xeon 1.7 Vs Dual Athlon 1.2 link
by
rmgrotkierii
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· Score: 1
I recently had to replace my heatsink/fan on my Celerey and it was a BITCH and a half to get off. I have NO idea how in the heck the heatsink will EVER pop off, unless you didn't install the heatsink correctly int he first place. But that is YOUR mistake not AMDs. Geez.
-- Reality is for those who can't face Science Fiction.
Re:Dual Xeon 1.7 Vs Dual Athlon 1.2 link
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
What is the L2 cache size on the Athlon? If it is smaller than the Xeon, then no matter what any 3D video game benchmark says, the Xeon is still a MUCH better choice for servers. Anyone who knows anything about building so called "enterprise class" servers knows that when the chips are down, you want as much L2 cache as God could possibly fit.
That's right this dildo boasts a 2.2 Ghz processor. The operating system is imbedded Linux, this variant is called Vibrus GNU(gigantic neurotic unit) Linux.
Well, 2x 2.2ghz procs doesn't exactly equal straight up 4.4ghz--and especially where quake is concerned. My main box for the longest time was a dual PIII 667 running on a Tyan Tiger 230 mainboard. I play Quake3 exclusively (what a great break from class. ..) and I didn't notice a huge increase in performance over my previous configuration, a single PIII 500. In fact, I got about the increase I'd expect from a single 667 processor box.
Now, from reading around, Quake3 was/is supposed to have support for SMP (read this slashdot article). Is this confined to the linux version or is there something I was doing wrong?
--
- - - - - - - - Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
Actually, Windows XP will run quite well on the new Xeon CPU's.
Remember, because Windows XP uses the Windows 2000 code base, it will better take advantage of the features of the Xeon CPU than Windows 95/98/ME, which is more optimized for Pentium II/III/Celeron CPU's.
Re:News:
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I run XP Pro on a P1 266 w/ 64MB ram and it is ok.
Is even a bit better than when i was running 2k on it.
Why would you need this system?
by
vaxtor
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· Score: 1
Besides the lameness of that last sentence, what I'm curious about is what would your average user need a 2.2 GHz system besides running games and maybe getting your SETI workunits completed a little faster?
Re:Why would you need this system?
by
Urungus
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· Score: 1
Not just SETI.
http://www.aspenleaf.com/distributed/distrib-pro je cts.html
Any one of those would be fine.
Movies = 24 fps, NTSC TV = 30 fps, PAL TV = 25 fps
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You don't need that many frames per second
for motion picture quality.
I would love to see Quake running on a 4.4GHz computer.
I doubt Quake supports dual processoring. It will only use 2.2GHz. But you can use the other processor to render a movie or something else at the same time... And 2.2GHz is plenty enough for Quake. My Amd K6-2 300MHz is just perfect:)
Not Quite that simple
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I dont think its quite that simple. Otherwise you could do the same today using 4 x 1.2 ghz chips.
Nonetheless, it would be a joy to behold, and imagine the seti results reaming out !
why is it that quake is the best use you can think of for this processor? with that much speed you could do something a lot more productive like crack encryption.
you philantrophic... yeah right
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Sounds to me like you didn't donate $500 you instead bought $500 of bragging rights and a false sence of supperiority. I'm sure the receivers of these funds did great things with them but since you received something in return (other than the quiet satisfaction of doing something good) I wouldn't exactly call you a philanthropist.
That's not enough to run Pong...
by
Juju
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, this might not be enough power to emulate the game...
There was a discussion about this on the MAME discussion board (www.mame.net) saying that it would probably require 5Ghz machines to run a simulation of the circuits using the schematics of the game. Pong is an analog game, it's got no microprocessor nor ROM. So emulating it is mighty difficult!
-- Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
Re:That's not enough to run Pong...
by
Jagasian
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· Score: 2
There was actually a University student that recreated the circuit diagrams for the Nintendo Entertainment System, and then he emulated the circuits, with with a virtual game cart plugged in.
It actually took an entire night for the simulation to get to the game's title screen and fully render it. I can't remember the exact link for the guy's rightup on what he did (he even had screenshots), but I am pretty sure he did it about 3-6 years ago. I guess you could estimate that he had the simulation run on roughly a Pentium 100mhz. So, uhhh, maybe 5Ghz is a bit low, if you actually want the game to be playable.
Still, if you really want perfect emulation of a game, its probably the best way to go, simulating the actual PCBs. Of course, you could always collect the real thing, which people do. Check ebay for such sales.
Re:That's not enough to run Pong...
by
DavidRavenMoon
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· Score: 1
There was actually a University student that recreated the circuit diagrams for the Nintendo Entertainment System, and then he emulated the circuits...
I remember reading once that the NES was based on an Apple IIG with faster graphics chips... anyone know if this is true?
-- --
if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
Re:That's not enough to run Pong...
by
Jagasian
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· Score: 2
They both use the same CPU, the 6502, but the similarity ends there. You have to realize that the 6502 was a really popular processor for its time. It was basically the first poor man's RISC CPU.
There are now open source implementations of the 6502 circuit diagrams.
I wonder if Prestonia will be the same disaster as Estonia (the passenger ferry)...
The naming of new products is getting more and more difficult, I read that Honda had launched a new compact car named Fitta. Nothing wrong with that, except it means 'cunt' in Swedish.:-)
Doesn't the G4 have a 1MB cache? You'd think Intel would give a chip running at 2.2GHz at least that much...
I hope I'm wrong here and that this is 1MB L2 cache vs 512KB L1 cache.
Re:512KB Cache?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The 7450 has a 32K/32K L1, 256K L2, and 1MB or 2MB L3 cache.
The P4 has the infamous 12,000 uop trace cache and 256K of L2 cache. Northwood will bump this up to 512K.
Easy. UNDERclock
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I'm seriously considering to buy a new motherboard and Athlon Tbird (1 gigahertz + ) and then have it underclocked so it does not produce that much heat.
That way, I can:
* disconnect all fans (and thus eliminate all that %$#@$ noise)
* put it in a smaller form-factor case
* get better performance at the same old clock rate.
If I'm not mistaken, an underclocked CPU is still much better at it's lower clock-rate than a low end CPU of the same clock rate.
We have P4 1.7 here and if you really give them work, the CPU overheat feature sometimes starts to slow down the CPU. So the 1.7 is more like a peak speed when idle.
And besides, the memory and bus etc. are all the old speed. There was an interesting report from Cray about the number of idle steps when a cache miss occurs. That was several hundred ticks a few years ago and will now be in the thousends.
So what you really achive with higher clocks is a CPU that idles faster.
*Bullshit* cough *Bullshit*, either that or you are pulling the hsf off a-la the Tomshardware article.
-- I've got some photographs, I'd like to show them to you. Though you don't know the girls
You'll recognise the view..
Uhhhhh...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Uhh, all mainstream-movie theaters (except IMAX ones) use 35mm film at 24fps. IMAX is 48fps; indie-budget films shot on 16mm are 18fps; there is no 36fps framerate in movies.
Something suspicious going on
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I've trolled and crap-flooded today like I usually do, and I notice that two of my troll posts which actually sparked threads are just GONE. I mean, disappeared -- the entire thread is gone.
It was no more offensive than the goatse pics, so I don't suspect censorship. They didn't even get moderated down below 0, and my IP isn't banned yet, so I know that isn't the reason either. I noticed Slashdot has gone down about 3 times today (no surprise there), perhaps their database indexes are fucked or something?
I know everyone here loves to bash processors by saying they are too fast and there is no need for it. And, yes, you are partially right.
The graphics of a game will not benefit from a 2.2Ghz over a 1.4Ghz processor as most of the work is offloaded to the video card.
Same with sound.
However, Artificial Inteligence will have that many more cycles to use searching state-space trees. That much more time to to prune and anneal its way to a better solution. More time to make more realistic artificial intelligence.
That's one thing that you CAN'T throw too many cycles at. The more cycles, the better the results. It's that simple.
Artificial Inteligence will have that many more cycles to use searching state-space trees
Completely true. However, ask a producer if they want to lose 10% of their bragging rights worth of frame rate or polygon count in return for an AI improvement that they won't be able to comprehend, and they'll stab you in the back and leave for 20% more stock options at another company. No, wait, first they'll tell you to forget the AI, then they'll stab you in the back...
-- If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Hahahah. Sad but true. I still believe that eventually CPU will be meaningless for graphics as more and more work gets offloaded. Then it will just be a matter of using otherwise wasted cycles for the AI and physics work. I can imagine just telling the video card the camera orientation and position and having it do all of the rest of the graphics work. Wow, that'd be cool.
Then, I would think, even the clueless producers would agree.
You see, my thinking is thus:
Right now they delegate around 10% of CPU time to AI, maximum. But, as graphics and sound begin to require less and less cpu time due to speciallized peripheral hardware, they'll be able to delegate more and more to AI. And physics. I can't forget physics.
I guess I eventually see physics and AI being offloaded to specialized hardware as well. Some kind of state-specification meta language which can be compiled and uploaded to a state-space searching chip on specialized hardware.
Same with physics and collision-detection calculations. These would probably be even easier to offload to separate hardware. Oh, that would be heaven. Having a real, dedicated CPU to use for AI calculations. Mmmmmmm....
hi guys, i'm back from vacation and i just wanted to point out two little things:
1. i don't think quake will run significatly faster on the new Intel than on my athlon 1,4 with a geforce 2. as somebody has already pointed out processor speed isn't everything. so stay calm and don't trash your new computers because of a vague promise of processing power
2. may it be that intel canceled the release because of their massive heat problems, now forgoing the new xeon choosing to wait for a new, probaly cooler architecture?
-- ".Sig Stealer" was here
Dual XEON vs. Dual Athlon - Misinformed!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Just wanted to dispell the myth that an Athlon MP core is better than an Intel XEON as far as x86 server / workstations go... It's not true, and there are several reasons.
First off Hyper-Threading (Hmm, I guess that's really two words).
It IS true that AMD's chips have a slightly faster ALU / FPU, but that's because they have a shorter execution pipe. Once Intel starts pushing the clock speed of the P4 core up to something reasonable, the loss in instructions per clock cycle will not matter since the clock speed will be doubled. Problem with this is, morons will always be comparing an AMD CPU that runs at a much lower clockspeed with a higher clockspeed Intel chip and deduct that AMD CPUs are better. NOT TRUE! They're completely different architectures, the P4 is pretty much a 786 as far as I'm concerned.
As for AMDs "MP" line... DON'T BUY them! If you seriously need an SMP server / workstation and your budget only allows an x86 processor, you'll want to go with Intel. Why, you ask? Simple, they're reliable to 9 decimal places. This is especially noticable with the way ALL of Intel's cores handle heat distribution.
No matter how hard you try, you can't get an Intel P4 to malfunction due to operating heat and although you can stop a P3, you'd be hard pressed to permanently damage the core.
There's also the issue of complex ALU / FPU operations... The P4 core can actually use SSE2 at run-time even if the code is written using plain ol' x86. And a lot of MMX instruction calls can simply be replaced with a coresponding SSE2 instruction call with NO other changes to the code.
Another thing that makes it better is the MUCH higher memory bandwidth. DDR is just plain sad compared to the througput you can get using SSE2 and RAMBUS in concert. You can actually exceede the rated bandwidth limit for RAMBUS using both of them together (I've done it).
And finally, all Intel cores are capable of being updated / modified at boot time using microcode... This means if Intel locates a CPU bug / bottleneck / other issue, they can essentially correct it everytime you reboot. This has its limitations, but it's a far cry from AMD's solution (they have none!).
Anyway, do what you want with this...
In the end Intel has the better x86 cores, and theres always IA64 if you really have a need for a multi-processor x86 compatible server or workstation.
Re:Dual XEON vs. Dual Athlon - Misinformed!
by
PRIME
·
· Score: 1
I have to agree with Mr. Anonymous. So many Athlon folk are quick to say "the P4 sucks".
Anyone who's bothered to read the specs on
the P4 will find that it's really designed
to go faster and faster MHz wise and this
is apparent in the longer pipeline and faster
memory buss. Don't be foolish enough to
believe that iNTEL's engineers are stupid
and that they don't understand their game
as well as all of you Athlon owners. =)
--
PRIME - Indivisible by anything but ME!
Re:Dual XEON vs. Dual Athlon - Misinformed!
by
Dr.+Spork
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· Score: 1
It IS true that AMD's chips have a slightly faster ALU / FPU, but that's because they have a shorter execution pipe. Once Intel starts pushing the clock speed of the P4 core up to something reasonable, the loss in instructions per clock cycle will not matter since the clock speed will be doubled.
So you agree then that the present 2.2GHz core is really far too slow to compete with a 1.6 GHz Palomino. If so, we agree. I'd be happy if Intel gave us 3 GHz soon. That would be enough to beat any Athlon. But unless that happens soon, AMD will remain the speed king.
Problem with this is, morons will always be comparing an AMD CPU that runs at a much lower clockspeed with a higher clockspeed Intel chip and deduct that AMD CPUs are better. NOT TRUE! They're completely different architectures, the P4 is pretty much a 786 as far as I'm concerned.
What we morons compare are results on reasonable benchmarks, and I'm sorry to say, but here, the newest Athlons wipe the floor with the newest Xeons. Sure the P4 has a new and unconventional architecture; too bad for Intel and their mindless apologists that it sucks!
As for AMDs "MP" line... DON'T BUY them! If you seriously need an SMP server / workstation and your budget only allows an x86 processor, you'll want to go with Intel. Why, you ask? Simple, they're reliable to 9 decimal places. This is especially noticable with the way ALL of Intel's cores handle heat distribution.
Sounds like someone didn't sell off his Intel shares when they were high! Sucks for you! As for me, I'll install a good heatsink and fan and avoid anything with a P4 core like the plague. I don't need my chip to cut its execution frequency in half right when I ask it to do something interesting! (PS: now admit it, you pulled those P4 reliability figures out of your ass.)
No matter how hard you try, you can't get an Intel P4 to malfunction due to operating heat and although you can stop a P3, you'd be hard pressed to permanently damage the core.
Yeah, I bet your fan falls off your CPU all the time. Good thing you have a P4, the chip designed for the mentally retarded. The rest of us know how to operate a screwdriver and can attach some good cooling gear to a Palomino.
There's also the issue of complex ALU / FPU operations... The P4 core can actually use SSE2 at run-time even if the code is written using plain ol' x86. And a lot of MMX instruction calls can simply be replaced with a coresponding SSE2 instruction call with NO other changes to the code.
That's great. So why does it suck so badly in just about all applications?
Another thing that makes it better is the MUCH higher memory bandwidth. DDR is just plain sad compared to the througput you can get using SSE2 and RAMBUS in concert. You can actually exceede the rated bandwidth limit for RAMBUS using both of them together (I've done it).
So why does the P4 with DDR (VIA's mobo) do so much better than the P4 with Rambus? Because Rambus has such horrible latency. Very few situations saturate the full memory bandwith of DDR, but crappy latency slows down ALL applications.
And finally, all Intel cores are capable of being updated / modified at boot time using microcode... This means if Intel locates a CPU bug / bottleneck / other issue, they can essentially correct it everytime you reboot. This has its limitations, but it's a far cry from AMD's solution (they have none!).
From what I hear, AMDs were designed correctly. Why would they need this? And if Intel can really use microcode to fix bottlenecks in the P4, you should write them and tell them to do it, because if they don't, they'll continue eating AMD's dust.
spork
Re:Dual XEON vs. Dual Athlon - Misinformed!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Which p4, though?
those who foolishly bought the early versions, the newer ones with more pins, or the shrunken die/more cache ones, which if history is anything to go on costs double/3 times AMD solution, remembering that P4 was a stopgap cpu, and a few extra instructions that were left out will be added. Why else is big business being told - buy a 32 way cpu xeon solution now, and be upgraded to itanium later for free. That tells me P4 should be shunned, and a wait for the itanium will be well worth it.
The 2.2 Ghz Xeon box will be able to do so powerful encryption that the feds will NEVER be able to decrypt it (at least within decades). Basically, computers of such power should be made illegal!
--
Stop the brainwash
"I would love to see...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1
...Quake running on a 4.4GHz computer."
by that time Quake V will be out, and it too will run like crap!;)
(ain't technology great!?)
(i remember my 486DX 25Mhz coming to a -grinding- halt trying to render the last level/boss on DoomII when the "respawn balls" really start flying...;)
So you could emulate Pong 102 times
by
swagr
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· Score: 2
Perhaps legislation should be introduced to stop desktops being shipped with anything faster than 1Ghz for a year... that way we force (in theory) companys to write compact and fast software... Intel is just playing to M$'s inability to write tight code.
;)
-- Score:-1, Funny
"You forget that by that time...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
"I would love to see Quake running on a 4.4GHz computer."
you forget that by that time Quake VI will be out and it -too- will run like crap...
ain't technology great!
(i remember my 486DX 25Mhz coming to a -grinding- halt while trying to render the last level boss on DOOM II...the shit REALLY hit the fan when the "respawn balls" started flying!)
20 fpm (yes, M...as in Minute)
Erm.. we're not far from 2.5GHz... should I panic?
by
Lardmonster
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· Score: 2
So, we're not far from 2.5GHz - isn't that where microwave ovens operate?
Should I be worried?
matthew
-- The more advanced the technology, the more open it is to primitive attack
This is absolutely not true. 100 Hz will be much more enjoyable virtual experience than 80 Hz.
Of course, you need to syncronize the updates with
the refresh rate of the monitor. The higher refresh leads to a noticeable decrease in temporal aliasing, i.e., the motion is less jerky. I believe that you
will get an improvement at least up to 400 Hz. Of course, you would get much of this benefit with proper temporal anti-aliasing and a lower refresh rate.
For the common user not involved in this sort of technical computation, a faster processor can take some responsibility from the
user and let the user focus on the really creative part.
--
-- Imperial units must die --
Re:Higher refersh rates for 3D
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"This is absolutely not true. 100 Hz will be much more enjoyable virtual experience than 80 Hz."
You are a blithering ignorant moron. What a loser. You don't know anything about the limits of visual perception.
The 8085 was an old 8-bit intel chip that could get more work done per clock than the 8086. The Pentium 3 does less work per clock than a 486 DX, too. This is getting to be a silly trend. We are not paying these people for innovative clock speeds.
-- "Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
Re:8085
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You're wrong. The 8085 needed several clock cycles to execute an instruction (up to 11).
The 8086, 80186, 80286 and 80386 used a similar scheme (note, however, that the 8086 is *not* an evolution of the 8085).
The 80486, however, used pipelined execution, allowing for nearly 1 insctrucion per clock cycle.
The Pentium added superscalar execution: nearly 2 instructions per cycle.
The later chipes got wider (more instructions executed at once) and longer (with smaller stages) pipelines.
This allows for shorter cycles (= higher frequencies) while keeping the N instructions per cycle, for most instructions.
The drawback is branching: the longer the pipeline, more cycles it takes to know the way to take. Thats problaby the main reason Pentium 4 looks so bad near an Athlon. However, the Pentium4 will go up to clock speeds the Athlons can't keep up. Then, we shall see how AMD responds.
Another thing I would add is that it takes a hell of a lot of work to get the same IPC (instructions per cycle) on a processor with a 13 stage pipeline than it does on a 5 stage pipeline (not to mention, again, that the ppro was a 3 wide, out of order machine, unlike the 486 which was 1 wide, in order, so the PPro actually had far greater IPC).
Honestly, why do people feel they can flippantly comment on something that took for more than 100 man years to develop when they have absolutely no background in the area...
--
I must burn in hell, suffer and pay for my sins
But Gods the one who's losing, Satan always wins!
While it's a 'workstation' processor, increasing the power of processors is important to people who have servers. As processors get quicker, you can support more web traffic with fewer servers. This saves a lot of money in real estate and so on. Bitch all you want guys, I'll keep plugging faster processors into my servers.:-)
4.4
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
riiiiiiiiiight...... -- cause 2.2 = 4.4
look idjit i dont know what school of multiprocessing you come from but chipspeeds dont ADD when you add more chips.
You don't get a 4.4Ghz machine by running 2 2.2 Ghz CPU's. Find a hard disk/RAM/Bus that can keep up with such a beast. It would be an immense waste of CPU to even build such a thing. You'd be far better off with two different 2.2Ghz boxes in a cluster. I doubt any applications today that a person would want to run on an SMP machine could even push the limits of a single 2.2Ghz CPU.
Of course if your heat sink falls off...:) That's bad.
I wasn't saying apps can't be written to use the CPU's as such that they can't achieve the similar performance of 4.4Ghz. I am saying 99% of users won't be doing signal processing. SIMD instructions like SSE or Altivec are great for signal processing too and can be done really well on one CPU.
I was under the impression that you don't really get 4.4g power from 2 2.2g processors in a dual system. It's more like a 3.3g cause of overhead on the motherboard.
-- The simple truth is that interstellar distances
will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
processor truths
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
mhz is not everything..all in all the "speed" of the intel chips is highly questionable these days and how soon do you think it will freeze..they never put enough coolant in the things to keep them from freezing.
besides, when the 1ghz G5 motorolla chips come out once again we will be shown how chip architecture should really be by the people who lead the market by innovation.
If I have understood things right, this Xeon@2.2 is essentially a Pentium 4. And it is supposed to be used in servers (as in fileserver, sqlserver, mailserver, webserver).
The P4 has proven to be really good executing SSE2 float instructions - is a server likely to ever do a single SSE2 float instruction? Any floating point operations at all? The P4 has also proven to have a really weak integer part.
What server applications use floating point operations at all? Mail, WWW, sql, php, file, asp, cvs, print, etc etc, I believe these applications rarely use any floating point operations. Also, I believe they these server applications primarily use integer operations and logical operations (read lots of branches and a 20-stage pipeline).
Are Intel targeting number crunching servers for scientific use? Then the primary issues are bus bandwidth and cache-size. 2.2 Ghz wont impress that much if it does not work with an SGI compiler.
Are Intel really going to put P4s in conventional servers? Will they succeed with this fantastic bluff?
Please, inform me what essential thing I have missed!
Ah, now these are the comments of a silly fanboy who hasn't been around:
The P4 has proven to be really good executing SSE2 float instructions - is a server likely to ever do a single SSE2 float instruction? Any floating point operations at all?
Every Intel CPU since the 386 has been tagged by both Intel and the press as for being used in servers only. It's simply a way of saying "the price is outrageous at the moment."
The P4 has also proven to have a really weak integer part.
If "really weak" means "faster than just about anything out there," then, yes, I will agree. You might mean "really weak" as a way of saying "not as good as it theoretically could be," but it's still damn fast.
The reason that this announcement doesn't make sense is because it leaves out the non-Intel half of the Xeon server platform -- the ServerWorks "Grand Champion" chipset.
Go look at the specs for this beast -- it supports something like 6 PCI-X (133 MHz/64-bit) PCI *busses* and quad-channel DDR memory, with a 6.4 GB/sec memory bandwidth. They've been demoing it at conferences since early this year.
So, given that, the P4 makes a lot more sense in a server. Frankly, I would order one *now* if they were available, because I have a project that really needs to be able to manage multiple gigabit Ethernet pipes, and none of the existing x86 solutions (4x P3 Xeon, 2x Athlon, 2x Tualatin, 2x P4 w/ i860) really have the bus bandwidth that I'd like. They'll probably all work, but the P4 Xeon with the serverworks chipset would probably scale twice as far due to faster busses and faster memory.
Don't say "if you need that kind of performance, don't use x86." We're in the middle of switching to Linux/x86 from Solaris/Sparc for this, because low-end (under $50k) Sun hardware just isn't competetive with high-end PCs.
Re:Erm.. we're not far from 2.5GHz... should I pan
by
archen
·
· Score: 1
I doubt it. Stick your toung on an athlon (without the fan attached) and tell me it can get much worse than that.
What I would prefer to see in more new games is automatic scaling of the rendering. Rather than increasing my FPS from 30 to 50 with a CPU upgrade, how about keeping the FPS constant at ~30 (that's all you really need to see fluid motion) and *automatically* increasing the resolution, "collateral object" count or depth of field based on horsepower? MS FS2000 does it, as did IndyCar-II back around 1996, but nobody else seems interested in automatic scaling. Why should we be forced to manually tweak our games to set the resolution, complexity, etc. when the game is in the the best position to detect idle CPU periods?
Is the bottleneck in FPS the time it takes to render a scene or the time it takes to send it to the display? Most Quake-like games require changes in screen resolution or use framing to keep a 1:1 relationship between the image data and the pixels. Why not render at whatever resolution the CPU speed allows and then map the pixels on the way to the display so that the user can stick with a 1024x768 or higher resolution and still play the game full-screen?
Remapping the pixels from one resolution to another would consume graphics cards resources. That's why modern monitors are multisync. Many classic game emulators compute in a fixed native resolution and then scale upward, and antialiasing is usually implemented by computing at a higher resolution and scaling downward. Both reduce performance a lot.
It sounds like a good idea to have the game automatically adjust the rendering quality, but people are all different. Some want 100+FPS, and others will settle for 20. And some really like accurate lighting while others want better mipmapping, etc.
Re:Erm.. we're not far from 2.5GHz... should I pan
by
liquidsin
·
· Score: 1
Stick your toung on an athlon (without the fan attached) and tell me it can get much worse than that.
Sure it could....you could leave the fan attached and do it.
mmmm....diced tongue...
The perfect example of FUD : "Well what if your fan popped off!" The reality is that while it is impressive that the Intel has systems to thwart that, how many times apart from on initial delivery does your fan fall off? As another poster mentioned it's the opposite and those things are a huge bitch to get off: I'd swear I was going to crack several motherboards in efforts to get those suckers off.
That Tom's thing, while 100% extremist and pandering to Intel, was fascinating as I didn't know that the heat dissipation was so rapid.
Just last year I knew of four Athlon machines in my dorm that burned out because of this very issue. It was actually quite funny because no one could figure out why the machine wouldn't boot up. You can call this pandering all you want but the fact is that it does happen, and more frequently than you could believe.
-- "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance"
-Confucius
Businesses that sell AMD machines state that the failure rate for AMD processors is approximately equal to the failure rate for Intel processors. I believe the words from the people who sell 10s or 100s of thousands of machines moreso than I believe anecdotal evident.
Re:FUD
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Heatsinks don't just fall off (have you ever tried to get one off? I seriously doubt something that can withstand a good 50lbs of pressure trying to get it off would just fall off on its own with only gravity's help.) unless they're put on wrong to begin with. And if they're put on wrong, then it's the fault of whoever put the machine together. If a lot of heatsinks fall of that doesn't mean there's a hardware issue, just a dumbass issue.
Wen are people going to learn that dual whatevers do NOT make the PC twice as fast. I have dual 400's, I don't go around saying I have an 800 mhz pc, because I don't. I can't do any ONE thing at 800 mhz, I can do TWO things at 400. Loads of difference here peope.
Call me picky, but I hate this misconception.
--
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
And people gave me a hard time...
by
adx200
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· Score: 1
about the fact that I always use 4096 bit PGP keys. Brute-force attacks still won't be viable on 1024 bit keys for quite some time (unless you get really, really lucky).
More sophisticated chosen-plain-text or known-plain-text attacks are getting closer and closer to the reach of the average corporation.
Imagine a small company using distributed computing software at night on 50 of the 4.4 GHz machines to break a competitor's encrypted message.
Re:And people gave me a hard time...
by
donglekey
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· Score: 2
Even if it was 128 bit the theoretical company would still never be able to break it. 128 bit encryption should be strong enough for anyone right now. Even if a dual 2.2 Ghz Xeon could try a trillion keys a second (which it obvously can't), 50 of them would still take 215,805,661,416,120 millenium to brute force a 128 bit key. So 4096 is overdoing it big time. It would be easier to crack you computer and log keystrokes for sure.
Re:And people gave me a hard time...
by
adx200
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· Score: 1
Of course. But there is no longer any argument that using encryption of that strength bogs down a PC, because it doesn't. If you have the capability, you should use it.
[Sidebar - More sophisticated attacks beyond brute-force need to try exponentially less keys... there is ALWAYS the possibility that you hit the right key in the keyspace on the first or fifteenth try, as well. Why not increase your odds?]
For the longest time, I played Quake on my s3 Virge. Ran sort of well(about 20 FPS@320x240), but I wonder today how a virge would run if you put a fast CPU under it? Not well perhaps, but better than a voodoo on a p166?
-- It's been a long time.
the PR rating system was unfair.
by
Sj0
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· Score: 1
Cyrix et. al. made some of the fastest 90 and 120 MHZ chips I've ever seen, then shot themselves in the foot by calling the chips by their PR ratings. The integer on a that 90 WAS as fast as the integer on a i166, but in most other tests, the fact that it was really just a 90 shone through. They only hurt themselves with the PR system. Intel should use it because their p4 2 gig would suddenly be a p4 P650:)
-- It's been a long time.
Why just Quake?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I mean, Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
New Xeons are based on P4s not the PIIIs
by
O.F.+Fascist
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· Score: 1
So when you think of these dont think of them like the old Xeons which were just high end Pentium IIs and IIIs.
Back in PIII times, clock for clock PIII and Athlon were about equal, a Xeon being a high end PIII would beat out an Athlon at the same clock.
These Xeons are based on P4s, which clock for clock perform far worse than an Athlon. So these Xeons wont be anywhere near as powerful as an Athlon at the same clock speed.
These arent your old Xeons.
Re:New Xeons are based on P4s not the PIIIs
by
entrigant
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· Score: 1
New Xeons beat the shit out of athlons, there were MANY improvements made to the original p4 architecture for the Xeon. Next time do your research before making an uninformed post.
Re:New Xeons are based on P4s not the PIIIs
by
O.F.+Fascist
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· Score: 1
What are these "MANY" improvements? What is the difference between a P4 Xeon and a P4?
What was the difference between a PIII Xeon and a PIII.
A whole lote more L2 cache is the only signifcant difference.
Clock for Clock a P4 cant compare to an Athlon, sure a Xeon will do better than a stock P4, but it wont beat out an Athlon significantly, and even if it does is it worth the price? Several Hundred dollars mores just for a slight edge.
Who Cares?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Looks like it's something that's happening on Mars. What I really like is a 1.2~1.4 GHz Athlon MP (or XP) which will downclock to 300 MHz when I don't need the power.
re: 'ramping like a hose'
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I believe this'll turn out to be marketron-speak for "I have no idea what the fsck several of the nouns in the question you asked me mean".
If you want low power, then buy a mobile processor
by
megalomang
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· Score: 1
Each chip has a niche in the market. It's good that you noted that this is a server chip because that's its intended market. A server chip is a high-speed, high-bandwidth, heavy IO, efficient multithreaded and multi-processing platform. If you want a low-power (i.e. low-heat) solution, you might think about buying a laptop. You should only pay extra money for things that are important to you, but should you be critical if other people have other priorities?
All this speed is encouraging programmers to turn out applications much more quickly than they used to. I don't think lazy is in their vocabulary. If you don't believe me, why don't you apply to your nearest software firm for that nice cushy job you think you'll get?
Or would you rather wait until 2010 while they hand-code WinXP in assembly so you can run it on your 1994 laptop? I can guarantee you almost nobody would contribute to open-source projects if they required only hand-coded submissions.
Fortunately it's not marketed to the average user
by
megalomang
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· Score: 1
You think Intel will waste money marketing this thing to the average user? Hell no. You think the average user would buy it at a few $K per chip even if Intel were stupid enough to try to market it to them?
Just because this news bit makes it past some/. editors doesn't mean it's intended for the/. mainstream. Hell, even us/. (l)users don't even know what to do with a 2.2GHz machine, so you know your mom and dad won't have a clue.
You can rest assured that the average corporation that buys servers will appreciate the hell out of these. Or what -- did you think they'd be satisfied with an old 450MHz Athlon system?
would probably run at around the same speed as a 733 with 256 megs of ram..People, when will you learn that you can't tell the difference?!?!
Re:Quake
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Preach the Gospel!!!
I have a PIII 733 clunker (by clunker I mean not AMD) with 384 ram and a Voodoo 3 3000 and it runs just as good as my 1.4 AMD with the same config. on Quake. Granted I would LOVE to set up a quad Xeon system, but just to say I did, or maybe to build my time machine, but I'm not going to tell you!:) The young man says as he's flying back to 1989 just to hear a tech say "What's a gigahertz?"
best version of Quake to try
by
sunhou
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· Score: 1
I would love to see Quake running on a 4.4GHz computer.
Me too. By the way, we are talking about Textmode Quake, right? (Quoting that web page: "You're a sick sonofabitch. But um, how can I try it?")
once again I say that we need to be more cost affective to sell this crap
-- We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
frame frate in FPS and movies
by
bored
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· Score: 1
Actually, I play a lot of FPS too.. It seems the more people play quake the more their brain dies. but much over 30 fps you cannot distinguish the frame rate differences.
That said, I will agree that you need high frame rate benchmarks for quake. Preferably in the 90fps range. This isn't because you can distinguish the differences but rather because the frame rates are usually given as averages (this is why Silent Sam is cool) and those quick glances behind are the parts where the frame rate averages get pulled down. So what you really need in quake is a machine that will guarantee that the time between frames won't drop below 1/30 (or more realistically 1/40) of a second
and the frame rate differences won't be maybe 1/8 of the total.
Now there is another thing to think about, it has to do with the motion speed, relative to you field of vision. You want things that cross your field of vision to cross smoothly. This is incredibly important in quake, since you are trying to absorb all the positional information on your opponents. In these cases it seems that the frame rates actually have to increase to compensate for what I think may be an eye to frame refresh rates (I'm not an expert on this so I don't really know if i'm describing this correctly) mismatch. Contrary to what I originally thought, which was that your eye required higher frame rates to compensate for a higher level of awareness for fast moving objects, I think that you eye/brain seems to slow down the when you look at things that are crossing your vision quickly. Try moving your head right and left quickly, think about what you are seeing when you are doing that. Part of the poor information feed probably has to do with your eye being unable to focus on anything. On the other hand movies are similar to FPS in that your eye doesn't have to refocus, yet I often find that quick pans (on real film, MPEG just makes it worse) are too jerky and out of focus. Of course I often find that things I want to look at in movies are out of focus, because i'm looking at something other than the intended subject.
Basically, what I'm saying is that the 30fps figure is pretty close to what your game should be getting, I might even give you 45 or 50fps. The difference between 40 and 125 though i think is primarily an interaction with the way your game frame rates are changing between frames because there has been a lot of real research about the 'refresh' rates of the human eye and human persistance of vision.
Slashdot Mirror
Classic Quake + Software Mode + 4.4GHz = How many hundred fps?
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
Why quake...i wanna see pong on that beast!
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
heh, 4.4ghz.. i don't think so buddy
Somewhere out of a memory, of lighted streets on quiet nights...
adding the speeds to get 4.4 ghz, cmon u sound like Cisco when they talk about 2 100bt lines in a vlan as a 400 meg connection..
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
Dual processor machines arn't working in series, they're working in parellel. So, the computeing power is not simply added together.
They do more work faster, but not twice as fast as a normal chip.
What's up with summing the processor's speeds? 2 processors at 2.2Ghz != 4.4Ghz.
mr
Wow, you're doing processor addition, similar to how Atari made their Jaguar a "64 bit" machine.
2 * 2.2 GHz computers in parallel != 4.4 GHz. Dumbass.
This article says the 2GHz processor for dual-processor servers has been cancelled, but then goes on to say that a 2GHz processor for dual-processor workstations is coming "in September" (though they don't say of which year). In this context, what's the difference? I'm assuming it's onboard cache or something similar, but I'd love to know.
Do we really need this kind of meaningless numbers shit/hype on Slashdot too?
If you want a multiprocessing server in Q1 2002, the chips to buy are AMD. By then 3 or 4 mobos that support dual processors will be online. Load up on DDR and you'll be able to host anything.
2.2 x 2 != 4.4 !!!!
OK?
GOT IT?
geeeezz i'm surprised no one else has pointed this out yet geeeezz
Just try playing Quake when the monsters are running 500 times as fast as the original game. Bam! Grendel bites your arm off, and you're dead....
I was hoping to hear the latest Beowolf cluster joke.
A camel, a red mozillasaur and a penguin walk into a bar...
ahhh.......nevermind
...does the human eye stop noticing FPS increases? At some absurd speed, we have to stop being able to distinguish, right?
And besides, would Quake have the texture mapping to really utilize it? Or the polygon count?
Really, what I'd like to see is a 'make buildworld' or 'make bzImage' on it. That'd be a good dipstick to jam in the ol' engine.
For an ordinary PC consumer? And let's not talk about Quake for this. Everyone knows that nobody can really see the difference between 40fps and 100+fps, so 3D gaming really is a shuck. Between today's modern graphics cards and even mid-range CPU's there's enough computing power to do high-quality 3-D rendering at high frame rates. I haven't upgraded my system (AMD K6-2 450) in two years, mainly because I've never found a good reason to do so. It does everything I need to do.
What the hardware industry needs is a new killer app like DOOM was in the early 1990's. DOOM may have made Id software millions, but it made Intel and its cohorts billions in hardware upgrades. If all you want is word processing, spreadsheets, and a few games here and there, nobody in his right mind would use a gigahertz-class processor, unless MS and Intel are in cahoots in making Office XP the bloated monster it is! :)
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
The worst terrorist attack in recorded history happened just over a week ago, and you folks are talking about Intel's plans to debut a 2.2GHz chip codenamed "Prestonia"?
;-(
GET SOME PRIORITIES!
Have you pricks even bothered donating $500 to the Red Cross yet like I have?
Insensitive pricks.
What kind of name is Prestonia?
At least AMD comes up with names like Clawhammer...
All this speed is encouraging programmers to be lazy and not use good code that works fast, but rather rely on the hardware being fast.
Just a bit of a rant...
From what I've heard, after about 900Mhz or so there is really no point in throwing extra cpu cycles at a game like quake. Classic quake would probably look about the same as well. I think at a certain point you need to either throw more video power at it or just realize that you've got room to spare for when the next game comes out (quake5 @ 2G anyone?)
What the hardware industry needs is a new killer app like DOOM was in the early 1990's.
This new app is video editing. After Effects filters run slowly because they have to run 60 times to each second of video. The sheer amount of data involved still makes video compression a very tedious process, even after spatial and temporal downsampling (i.e. cutting res and fps).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Since 1991, IBM and Motorola have collaborated on the PowerPC architecture for personal computers, workstations, servers and embedded processor product lines, yet have developed and marketed separate implementations. Driven by the tremendous success of PowerPC microprocessors in the embedded marketplace, the companies announced in September 1997 the start of a joint effort to further enhance the PowerPC architecture to ensure greater consistency in their future embedded products. The Book E project and the new architecture it defines is the result of that effort.
With the chips being 64bit and fully capable of supporting multiple cores, it could give IBM servers and workstations a boost. The chip architecture wars are about to start to hit another exciting stretch, as long research programs begin to produce results for Intel, AMD, and AIM. 2002 should be a big year.
Having an obscenely fast PC might make it possible to run Windows under Linux, and still have Windows including direct-x run with enough performance to do some serious gaming.
With 2 * 2.2ghz processors, the most throughput u can get is around 80% of the total speed combined, the FSB of the motherboard is another important factor though. Getting 4.4 ghz is impossible IMHO.
You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance.
Oh, thank god. What are we going to do without a 2.2ghz $2000 processor... Oh, get an athlon at 100 bucks a pop? ok! G5 anyone?
"This is more than likely about shortening the qualification cycle and saving the customers a bit of money"
That man is living a large at 4:20.
Saving us money? whatever. It's a damn corporation in trouble. The last thing they are thinking is saving us money. Hell with 4:20, the man's on crack.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
2 processors running at 2.2 GHz is not the same as 4.4 GHz prosessor
But still lots of people think it is the same...
-- EOF
I like my computer to go fast. That is why I like Xeon 2.2 GHz. I hope to have a 2.2 GHz Xeon someday.
I'd like to see Quake running on this turdly P-133 I've typing on right now. Now THAT would impress me.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Hope this helps.
the machine my university has been working with. 1024 x 500 MHz = 512 GHz ?
Of course now the machine has been partitoned, so it's not quite that large, but at least there is still a "256 GHz" partition.
Keep in mind that Origin is not a cluster, but a huge mother of a single-image machine. No backplane, but instead a mesh of CrayLink/NUMAlink cables interconnecting the CPU, I/O, and Router modules. My favorite part, though, is that with the addition of a "Graphics Brick" it becomes an Onyx. Add up to 16 G-Bricks!
I know there will be some of you who'll say "Mah mama told me to not buy no AMD." But for the rest of us, this will be a no-brainer. For the difference in chip prices you will be able to pay for most of the 4 GB of DDR that AMD mobos will support. Or maybe yo' mama told you to send your money to Rambus...
That's right this dildo boasts a 2.2 Ghz processor. The operating system is imbedded Linux, this variant is called Vibrus GNU(gigantic neurotic unit) Linux.
Well, 2x 2.2ghz procs doesn't exactly equal straight up 4.4ghz--and especially where quake is concerned. My main box for the longest time was a dual PIII 667 running on a Tyan Tiger 230 mainboard. I play Quake3 exclusively (what a great break from class. . .) and I didn't notice a huge increase in performance over my previous configuration, a single PIII 500. In fact, I got about the increase I'd expect from a single 667 processor box.
Now, from reading around, Quake3 was/is supposed to have support for SMP (read this slashdot article). Is this confined to the linux version or is there something I was doing wrong?
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
I have heard that you *May* be able to run Windows XP on these machines..
Besides the lameness of that last sentence, what I'm curious about is what would your average user need a 2.2 GHz system besides running games and maybe getting your SETI workunits completed a little faster?
You don't need that many frames per second for motion picture quality.
I would love to see Quake running on a 4.4GHz computer.
:)
I doubt Quake supports dual processoring. It will only use 2.2GHz. But you can use the other processor to render a movie or something else at the same time...
And 2.2GHz is plenty enough for Quake. My Amd K6-2 300MHz is just perfect
I dont think its quite that simple. Otherwise you could do the same today using 4 x 1.2 ghz chips.
Nonetheless, it would be a joy to behold, and imagine the seti results reaming out !
polyp records
why is it that quake is the best use you can think of for this processor? with that much speed you could do something a lot more productive like crack encryption.
Sounds to me like you didn't donate $500 you instead bought $500 of bragging rights and a false sence of supperiority. I'm sure the receivers of these funds did great things with them but since you received something in return (other than the quiet satisfaction of doing something good) I wouldn't exactly call you a philanthropist.
Actually, this might not be enough power to emulate the game...
There was a discussion about this on the MAME discussion board (www.mame.net) saying that it would probably require 5Ghz machines to run a simulation of the circuits using the schematics of the game. Pong is an analog game, it's got no microprocessor nor ROM. So emulating it is mighty difficult!
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
The naming of new products is getting more and more difficult, I read that Honda had launched a new compact car named Fitta. Nothing wrong with that, except it means 'cunt' in Swedish. :-)
Money for nothing, pix for free
From the article:
"The (130-nanometer) process is ramping like a hose," said Frank Spindler, vice president of Intel's mobile products group.
What the hell does that mean? How does a hose ramp?!!
This must be the same guy who decided Pentium II mad sense.
I tried to explain to my history teacher that King Henry the VIII is the same as King Henry Jr. the VI. She didn't buy it.
I bet the name "Prestonia" will make
the sales soar here... NOT.
Too close to the name of a passenger ship, "Estonia", that went down with 800 passengers
a few years ago.
Prestonia....
Sounds like something from Flinstones 90210...
God spoke to me
Doesn't the G4 have a 1MB cache? You'd think Intel would give a chip running at 2.2GHz at least that much...
I hope I'm wrong here and that this is 1MB L2 cache vs 512KB L1 cache.
I'm seriously considering to buy a new motherboard and Athlon Tbird (1 gigahertz + ) and then have it underclocked so it does not produce that much heat.
That way, I can:
* disconnect all fans (and thus eliminate all that %$#@$ noise)
* put it in a smaller form-factor case
* get better performance at the same old clock rate.
If I'm not mistaken, an underclocked CPU is still much better at it's lower clock-rate than a low end CPU of the same clock rate.
We have P4 1.7 here and if you really give them work, the CPU overheat feature sometimes starts to slow down the CPU. So the 1.7 is more like a peak speed when idle. And besides, the memory and bus etc. are all the old speed. There was an interesting report from Cray about the number of idle steps when a cache miss occurs. That was several hundred ticks a few years ago and will now be in the thousends. So what you really achive with higher clocks is a CPU that idles faster.
Uhh, all mainstream-movie theaters (except IMAX ones) use 35mm film at 24fps. IMAX is 48fps; indie-budget films shot on 16mm are 18fps; there is no 36fps framerate in movies.
I've trolled and crap-flooded today like I usually do, and I notice that two of my troll posts which actually sparked threads are just GONE. I mean, disappeared -- the entire thread is gone.
It was no more offensive than the goatse pics, so I don't suspect censorship. They didn't even get moderated down below 0, and my IP isn't banned yet, so I know that isn't the reason either. I noticed Slashdot has gone down about 3 times today (no surprise there), perhaps their database indexes are fucked or something?
I know everyone here loves to bash processors by saying they are too fast and there is no need for it. And, yes, you are partially right.
The graphics of a game will not benefit from a 2.2Ghz over a 1.4Ghz processor as most of the work is offloaded to the video card.
Same with sound.
However, Artificial Inteligence will have that many more cycles to use searching state-space trees. That much more time to to prune and anneal its way to a better solution. More time to make more realistic artificial intelligence.
That's one thing that you CAN'T throw too many cycles at. The more cycles, the better the results. It's that simple.
Justin Dubs
Ahhh... What I wouldn't give for the chance to donate those spare 4.3GHz worth of clock cycles to SETI ;-)
Enjoy Y2K? Roll-on Year 2037!
Get over it.
its as bad as mhz
hi guys, i'm back from vacation and i just wanted to point out two little things:
1. i don't think quake will run significatly faster on the new Intel than on my athlon 1,4 with a geforce 2. as somebody has already pointed out processor speed isn't everything. so stay calm and don't trash your new computers because of a vague promise of processing power
2. may it be that intel canceled the release because of their massive heat problems, now forgoing the new xeon choosing to wait for a new, probaly cooler architecture?
".Sig Stealer" was here
Just wanted to dispell the myth that an Athlon MP core is better than an Intel XEON as far as x86 server / workstations go... It's not true, and there are several reasons.
First off Hyper-Threading (Hmm, I guess that's really two words).
It IS true that AMD's chips have a slightly faster ALU / FPU, but that's because they have a shorter execution pipe. Once Intel starts pushing the clock speed of the P4 core up to something reasonable, the loss in instructions per clock cycle will not matter since the clock speed will be doubled. Problem with this is, morons will always be comparing an AMD CPU that runs at a much lower clockspeed with a higher clockspeed Intel chip and deduct that AMD CPUs are better. NOT TRUE! They're completely different architectures, the P4 is pretty much a 786 as far as I'm concerned.
As for AMDs "MP" line... DON'T BUY them! If you seriously need an SMP server / workstation and your budget only allows an x86 processor, you'll want to go with Intel. Why, you ask? Simple, they're reliable to 9 decimal places. This is especially noticable with the way ALL of Intel's cores handle heat distribution.
No matter how hard you try, you can't get an Intel P4 to malfunction due to operating heat and although you can stop a P3, you'd be hard pressed to permanently damage the core.
There's also the issue of complex ALU / FPU operations... The P4 core can actually use SSE2 at run-time even if the code is written using plain ol' x86. And a lot of MMX instruction calls can simply be replaced with a coresponding SSE2 instruction call with NO other changes to the code.
Another thing that makes it better is the MUCH higher memory bandwidth. DDR is just plain sad compared to the througput you can get using SSE2 and RAMBUS in concert. You can actually exceede the rated bandwidth limit for RAMBUS using both of them together (I've done it).
And finally, all Intel cores are capable of being updated / modified at boot time using microcode... This means if Intel locates a CPU bug / bottleneck / other issue, they can essentially correct it everytime you reboot. This has its limitations, but it's a far cry from AMD's solution (they have none!).
Anyway, do what you want with this...
In the end Intel has the better x86 cores, and theres always IA64 if you really have a need for a multi-processor x86 compatible server or workstation.
The 2.2 Ghz Xeon box will be able to do so powerful encryption that the feds will NEVER be able to decrypt it (at least within decades). Basically, computers of such power should be made illegal!
Stop the brainwash
...Quake running on a 4.4GHz computer."
;)
;)
by that time Quake V will be out, and it too will run like crap!
(ain't technology great!?)
(i remember my 486DX 25Mhz coming to a -grinding- halt trying to render the last level/boss on DoomII when the "respawn balls" really start flying...
See earlier post.
This line is only here so that this otherwise acceptable post, passes the compression filter test.
-... ---
Perhaps legislation should be introduced to stop desktops being shipped with anything faster than 1Ghz for a year ... that way we force (in theory) companys to write compact and fast software ... Intel is just playing to M$'s inability to write tight code.
;)
Score:-1, Funny
"I would love to see Quake running on a 4.4GHz computer."
you forget that by that time Quake VI will be out and it -too- will run like crap...
ain't technology great!
(i remember my 486DX 25Mhz coming to a -grinding- halt while trying to render the last level boss on DOOM II...the shit REALLY hit the fan when the "respawn balls" started flying!)
20 fpm (yes, M...as in Minute)
So, we're not far from 2.5GHz - isn't that where microwave ovens operate?
Should I be worried?
matthew
The more advanced the technology, the more open it is to primitive attack
This is absolutely not true. 100 Hz will be much more enjoyable virtual experience than 80 Hz. Of course, you need to syncronize the updates with the refresh rate of the monitor. The higher refresh leads to a noticeable decrease in temporal aliasing, i.e., the motion is less jerky. I believe that you will get an improvement at least up to 400 Hz. Of course, you would get much of this benefit with proper temporal anti-aliasing and a lower refresh rate.
Naturally, the benefits of faster processors are not only in entertainment, but also in important things like optimizing radiation doses in cancer therapy.
For the common user not involved in this sort of technical computation, a faster processor can take some responsibility from the user and let the user focus on the really creative part.
-- Imperial units must die --
The 8085 was an old 8-bit intel chip that could get more work done per clock than the 8086. The Pentium 3 does less work per clock than a 486 DX, too. This is getting to be a silly trend. We are not paying these people for innovative clock speeds.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
While it's a 'workstation' processor, increasing the power of processors is important to people who have servers. As processors get quicker, you can support more web traffic with fewer servers. This saves a lot of money in real estate and so on. Bitch all you want guys, I'll keep plugging faster processors into my servers. :-)
riiiiiiiiiight...... -- cause 2.2 = 4.4
look idjit i dont know what school of multiprocessing you come from but chipspeeds dont ADD when you add more chips.
You don't get a 4.4Ghz machine by running 2 2.2 Ghz CPU's. Find a hard disk/RAM/Bus that can keep up with such a beast. It would be an immense waste of CPU to even build such a thing. You'd be far better off with two different 2.2Ghz boxes in a cluster. I doubt any applications today that a person would want to run on an SMP machine could even push the limits of a single 2.2Ghz CPU.
:) That's bad.
Of course if your heat sink falls off...
I was under the impression that you don't really get 4.4g power from 2 2.2g processors in a dual system. It's more like a 3.3g cause of overhead on the motherboard.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
mhz is not everything..all in all the "speed" of the intel chips is highly questionable these days and how soon do you think it will freeze..they never put enough coolant in the things to keep them from freezing.
besides, when the 1ghz G5 motorolla chips come out once again we will be shown how chip architecture should really be by the people who lead the market by innovation.
If you can call a dual Xeon 2.2GHz computer a 4.4GHz then I can call a 100Mbit full duplex ethernet line a 200Mbit line.
If I have understood things right, this Xeon@2.2 is essentially a Pentium 4. And it is supposed to be used in servers (as in fileserver, sqlserver, mailserver, webserver).
The P4 has proven to be really good executing SSE2 float instructions - is a server likely to ever do a single SSE2 float instruction? Any floating point operations at all? The P4 has also proven to have a really weak integer part.
What server applications use floating point operations at all? Mail, WWW, sql, php, file, asp, cvs, print, etc etc, I believe these applications rarely use any floating point operations. Also, I believe they these server applications primarily use integer operations and logical operations (read lots of branches and a 20-stage pipeline).
Are Intel targeting number crunching servers for scientific use? Then the primary issues are bus bandwidth and cache-size. 2.2 Ghz wont impress that much if it does not work with an SGI compiler.
Are Intel really going to put P4s in conventional servers? Will they succeed with this fantastic bluff?
Please, inform me what essential thing I have missed!
I doubt it. Stick your toung on an athlon (without the fan attached) and tell me it can get much worse than that.
What I would prefer to see in more new games is automatic scaling of the rendering. Rather than increasing my FPS from 30 to 50 with a CPU upgrade, how about keeping the FPS constant at ~30 (that's all you really need to see fluid motion) and *automatically* increasing the resolution, "collateral object" count or depth of field based on horsepower? MS FS2000 does it, as did IndyCar-II back around 1996, but nobody else seems interested in automatic scaling. Why should we be forced to manually tweak our games to set the resolution, complexity, etc. when the game is in the the best position to detect idle CPU periods?
Is the bottleneck in FPS the time it takes to render a scene or the time it takes to send it to the display? Most Quake-like games require changes in screen resolution or use framing to keep a 1:1 relationship between the image data and the pixels. Why not render at whatever resolution the CPU speed allows and then map the pixels on the way to the display so that the user can stick with a 1024x768 or higher resolution and still play the game full-screen?
Stick your toung on an athlon (without the fan attached) and tell me it can get much worse than that.
Sure it could....you could leave the fan attached and do it.
mmmm....diced tongue...
do not read this line twice.
Is the Xeon just a P6 core with a ton of cache ram on-die? It's 1-2MB, right?
It's not about Ghz anymore.
It's about GFlops... when will AMD advocate this fact?
This is the perfect CPU for use in... ...The Prestone Zone
Who modded up this troll?
The perfect example of FUD : "Well what if your fan popped off!" The reality is that while it is impressive that the Intel has systems to thwart that, how many times apart from on initial delivery does your fan fall off? As another poster mentioned it's the opposite and those things are a huge bitch to get off: I'd swear I was going to crack several motherboards in efforts to get those suckers off.
That Tom's thing, while 100% extremist and pandering to Intel, was fascinating as I didn't know that the heat dissipation was so rapid.
Wen are people going to learn that dual whatevers do NOT make the PC twice as fast. I have dual 400's, I don't go around saying I have an 800 mhz pc, because I don't. I can't do any ONE thing at 800 mhz, I can do TWO things at 400. Loads of difference here peope.
Call me picky, but I hate this misconception.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
about the fact that I always use 4096 bit PGP keys. Brute-force attacks still won't be viable on 1024 bit keys for quite some time (unless you get really, really lucky).
More sophisticated chosen-plain-text or known-plain-text attacks are getting closer and closer to the reach of the average corporation.
Imagine a small company using distributed computing software at night on 50 of the 4.4 GHz machines to break a competitor's encrypted message.
For the longest time, I played Quake on my s3 Virge. Ran sort of well(about 20 FPS@320x240), but I wonder today how a virge would run if you put a fast CPU under it? Not well perhaps, but better than a voodoo on a p166?
It's been a long time.
Cyrix et. al. made some of the fastest 90 and 120 MHZ chips I've ever seen, then shot themselves in the foot by calling the chips by their PR ratings. The integer on a that 90 WAS as fast as the integer on a i166, but in most other tests, the fact that it was really just a 90 shone through. They only hurt themselves with the PR system. Intel should use it because their p4 2 gig would suddenly be a p4 P650 :)
It's been a long time.
I mean, Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
So when you think of these dont think of them like the old Xeons which were just high end Pentium IIs and IIIs.
Back in PIII times, clock for clock PIII and Athlon were about equal, a Xeon being a high end PIII would beat out an Athlon at the same clock.
These Xeons are based on P4s, which clock for clock perform far worse than an Athlon. So these Xeons wont be anywhere near as powerful as an Athlon at the same clock speed.
These arent your old Xeons.
Looks like it's something that's happening on Mars. What I really like is a 1.2~1.4 GHz Athlon MP (or XP) which will downclock to 300 MHz when I don't need the power.
I believe this'll turn out to be marketron-speak for "I have no idea what the fsck several of the nouns in the question you asked me mean".
All this speed is encouraging programmers to turn out applications much more quickly than they used to. I don't think lazy is in their vocabulary. If you don't believe me, why don't you apply to your nearest software firm for that nice cushy job you think you'll get?
Or would you rather wait until 2010 while they hand-code WinXP in assembly so you can run it on your 1994 laptop? I can guarantee you almost nobody would contribute to open-source projects if they required only hand-coded submissions.
Just because this news bit makes it past some /. editors doesn't mean it's intended for the /. mainstream. Hell, even us /. (l)users don't even know what to do with a 2.2GHz machine, so you know your mom and dad won't have a clue.
You can rest assured that the average corporation that buys servers will appreciate the hell out of these. Or what -- did you think they'd be satisfied with an old 450MHz Athlon system?
would probably run at around the same speed as a 733 with 256 megs of ram..People, when will you learn that you can't tell the difference?!?!
Me too. By the way, we are talking about Textmode Quake, right? (Quoting that web page: "You're a sick sonofabitch. But um, how can I try it?")
...a /. article about faster processor technology with as few Beowulf jokes as this?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Well... it probably also depends on 2 other factors...
how much shielding there is around the circuits?
how much power the circuits themselves will radiat?
I know from experience that an unshielded (improperly shielded) copper FC cable running at 1Ghz acts exactly like a small power transmitter...
once again I say that we need to be more cost affective to sell this crap
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
Actually, I play a lot of FPS too.. It seems the more people play quake the more their brain dies. but much over 30 fps you cannot distinguish the frame rate differences.
That said, I will agree that you need high frame rate benchmarks for quake. Preferably in the 90fps range. This isn't because you can distinguish the differences but rather because the frame rates are usually given as averages (this is why Silent Sam is cool) and those quick glances behind are the parts where the frame rate averages get pulled down. So what you really need in quake is a machine that will guarantee that the time between frames won't drop below 1/30 (or more realistically 1/40) of a second
and the frame rate differences won't be maybe 1/8 of the total.
Now there is another thing to think about, it has to do with the motion speed, relative to you field of vision. You want things that cross your field of vision to cross smoothly. This is incredibly important in quake, since you are trying to absorb all the positional information on your opponents. In these cases it seems that the frame rates actually have to increase to compensate for what I think may be an eye to frame refresh rates (I'm not an expert on this so I don't really know if i'm describing this correctly) mismatch. Contrary to what I originally thought, which was that your eye required higher frame rates to compensate for a higher level of awareness for fast moving objects, I think that you eye/brain seems to slow down the when you look at things that are crossing your vision quickly. Try moving your head right and left quickly, think about what you are seeing when you are doing that. Part of the poor information feed probably has to do with your eye being unable to focus on anything. On the other hand movies are similar to FPS in that your eye doesn't have to refocus, yet I often find that quick pans (on real film, MPEG just makes it worse) are too jerky and out of focus. Of course I often find that things I want to look at in movies are out of focus, because i'm looking at something other than the intended subject.
Basically, what I'm saying is that the 30fps figure is pretty close to what your game should be getting, I might even give you 45 or 50fps. The difference between 40 and 125 though i think is primarily an interaction with the way your game frame rates are changing between frames because there has been a lot of real research about the 'refresh' rates of the human eye and human persistance of vision.