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Intel Chips For The Near- And Semi-Near Future
Brian writes "This
article reports that Intel will release new chips at the Comdex
trade show, its first low-power designs for super-thin servers. The
new Pentium III model is a
gussied-up chip taken from the company's product line for portable computers,
which share many of the same constraints as ultradense
servers. These systems can't consume as much power or give off as much heat as
ordinary CPUs because overheating causes processing errors. The systems
are the first swing of a one-two punch against Transmeta,
whose low-power designs caught Intel
flat-footed, first in the mobile market and then in the low-power server market. Intel now is fighting back just when most
server companies using Transmeta chips
are on the ropes." And albat0r writes: "Intel says that it will hit 3GHz on the mainstream Pentium 4 by the end of 2002. Intel will advance its Celeron line, currently based on Pentium III technology, with Pentium 4 technology by mid-2002." I look forward to good values on eBay when 2GHz is "obsolete."
Their current roadmap still has them at 2.4Ghz next summer. At that rate, I seriously doubt they will have a 3Ghz out before the end of the year. I bet 3Ghz isnt released until some time near the end of the first half of 2003.
.13 capability and the new SOI technology to go with it. They will
be sampling Thoroughbred processors next quarter.
Intel demonstrated a Northwood P4 running at 3Ghz with _supercooling_. (it actually got up to 3.5Ghz, but the demos were run at 3Ghz). Who the hell told you Intel had a P4 running at 5Ghz? Yeah, they could probably make it to 10Ghz within 3 years pretty easily if they use the same design concept behind the current P4. Maybe they will increase the pipeline to 40 stages and get there even faster!
Oh boy.. Clock speed isn't everything. The P4 architecture is brilliant for a company trying to sell their CPUs to people like you. The chips are a hell of a lot easier to market when people just look at the clock speed. Rambus has little to do with being able to run between 3 and 10Ghz. Intel just doesnt want to admit that after spending all this time doing nothing but saying RDRAM is the only way.
AMD already has
In other, slightly unrelated chip news, ZDNet reports that motherboards with the new nVidia nForce chipset will hit the market next week. Boy howdy do I want me some of that!
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
What?
Are you currently searching EBay for that "steal" on a 486-DX4-100?
who cares what intels chips can get up to in MHz. I can design a chip that runs at 200GHz, does some useful processing and is slower then a 486.
Transmeta wasn't originally meant as a low power processor. They tried to optimize transistors vs performance and did a good job. Unfortuneately they forgot that nobody really cares about it. They then decided to try the low power market, but since Intel made a chip specific to lower power of course Intel will beat them out.
What does the expression "on the ropes" mean?
Can you hear me, Major Tom? I'm not the man they think I am at home...
Who cares about speed?
From the various fans inside (motherboard, graphics card, power supply (2x)), my machine sounds like a twister.
Bring down the power consumption or I will stay with my "Low-End" 1GHz machine forever.
Oh forget it.
Low power is great, there is a definite need for using less power and producing less heat in some systems. As for MHZ increases, I truly wonder what is driving the need for speed anymore other than media types and gamers. Where are the next generation apps that will utilize this kind of firepower? Media producers, avid gamers, engineers, and server roles excluded, who else needs or even wants this kind of power? What will you do with it, besides *everything* you do today "faster"?
Wanna get high?
The economy is in the toilet, no one is working, the machine you bought two years ago is just fine for your needs: revising your resume and dialing up Monster ...
I'm waiting for the PV (unless my PIII starts bugging me too much before that), the PIV line is just too plagued for me to touch. Which of course is not Intel's fault and all, but who cares? Maybe if I find a REAL STEAL on eBay.
3GHz is all well an good, but we're coming up against the 4GB RAM addressing limit of 32-bit machines. Granted, the Pentium architecture can address 36-bits using segments, but we're back to the bad old days of LIM Expanded Memory and segments (who could ever need more than 640k?).
I think AMD are on to a reall winner with their 64-bit Hammer architecture since that's completely backwards compatible and has a flat, 64-bit address space.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
I wonder what Linus would think ?
Looks like somebody bought a P4 and regrets it.
=P
>
Not bloody likely. a three year old PIII 500 is still going for 80+ on ebay....where for 80 you can buy a brand new 1Ghz/100 celeron.
With CPU prices lower then ever now, they don't seem to have the same rapid depreciation that they used to. This probably makes CPU's a fairly good investment.
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
You guys bitch about "oo 3ghz isn't a sign of speed" and "40 stage pipeline" crap...
But then when AMD announces they are not going to use clockrate any more you bitch about that too...
Wierd...
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Anyone know when intel plans to release SMP enabled versions of the P4 and/or chipsets that support it? I've seen SMP P4 Xeons on their roadmaps, but nothing about the P4. They were supposed to announce something about it at microprocessor forum, but didn't. Any clues?
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
I think the P4 was an especially telltale sign of the times ahead for the PC chip industry. While the AMD rivalry has helped to spark fierce pricing competition, I also think that it has prompted Intel to go the "MHz at any cost" route. Don't be suprised to see the P4 as the first in a long line of "let's increase that pipeline to pump up the clock speed!" While undoubtedly this can make a chip faster if IPC is not just cut equivalently, it also smacks of "MHz at all" marketing strategy.
Intel has realized (more than AMD, who is still trying to "educate" those consumers) that the general mass of people don't pay attention to SIMD instructions, double clocked FPU units, superscalar speculative execution, full speed caches, or any of that other jive that gives you higher IPC. They look at MHz and just want to see higher numbers. And also more CPUs can't = bad either, can it? I mean, that's the next marketing blitz campaign once MHz stops working.
The P4 architecture is not brilliant, pushing up the clock speed won't help the fundamentally stunted technology. There are major problems with the architecture, the worst of which is probably their decoder implementation.
The new architecture implements the U-V pairing and 4-1-1 in a nonsensical way. Multiple decoders have been eliminated and only one functioning decoder operates... the result of this is that just one instruction can be processed per clock cycle. Intel's theory was that the trace cache would eliminate the need to decode an instruction every clock cycle.
However, this falls apart when a set of instructions is put forward that does not go into the trace cache.... the processor must call upon the L2 cache or put all that code into memory to pull in another 64 bytes of memory for each instruction - and then decode the 64 bytes of code each time! The end result is that the P4 takes a lot more cycles to decode these instructions. Compared to the AMD Palomino XP processor (the fastest Athlon chip at the moment, in fact, the fastest X86 chip at the moment!), the P4 performance is a bit underwhelming.
The new Thoroughbred line of processors will introduce even better performance and completely blow Intel's offerings out of the water.
2DUP * ;
I also don't see any attribution to the original author.
The reason why machines are getting faster and faster is simple: every operating system I know are adding more and more functionality as standard, and that requires more and more computing power.
Sure, you can run Linux in command line mode quite well on older machines, but if you plan on running either the KDE or Gnome graphical environments better plan on something a bit more modern. This is especially true if you want to be involved with digital media content in any serious fashion.
I look forward to good values on eBay when 2GHz is "obsolete."
Why??
Let's see... you can wait a year until the 2ghz P4 drops to $100 and get one used on ebay, OR, you can take that $100 today and buy a new 1.4ghz AMD Thunderbird. You get similar performance... but on yea, you don't have to wait a friggen year!
How much you pay = amount of money + transaction cost. A years worth of computing sure has value to me!
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Low power CPUs certainly can help drive down the costs in less than obvious ways. With a CPU running at maybe 20W less power - a data centre of 500 dual processor servers will be saving an incredible amount of power - both in terms of electricity required to power and aircon to cool. My bad math says maybe 20kW, 24x7...
Evil ZEN Scientist
Dwain,
What makes the AMD CPU's extremely good compared to the Intel CPU's is the fact that because AMD designed their CPU's with more much efficient FPU units (no Pentium Pro FPU legacy) and also more efficient access to L2 cache, the result is extremely high performance on a per MHz basis. Indeed, the Athlon XP 1800+ on a DDR-SDRAM motherboard will run rings around the Pentium 4 2,000 MHz on most apps except those that are optimized specifically for SSE2 multimedia extensions.
I look forward to good values on eBay when 2GHz is "obsolete."
For almost all purposes, it is. AMD's top chips blow it away, for a lot less cash...
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
It looks to me like Intel and IBM are playing catch up once again.
My company bought a RLX chassis fully populated with 24 600 MHz Transmeta processors... all in 8U. That means that you can pack 336 processors in a standard 42U rack! They are quiet, run cool and are ultra easy to set up; and soon they will have 800 MHz blades with DDR-RAM. (We're mavericks running Debian Linux on them but they come preinstalled with Windows or RedHat Linux.) They're not cheap though. I just wish I could populate a whole rack!
Check them out: http://www.rlxtechnologies.com/.
Any mention of an Itanium counter to AMD's Hammer. With mid-2002 not so far away this would be the time for them to be drumming up interest in it. To be fair, I've checked the Comdex site for news or presskit from AMD and nothing so far, but I expect they must have something there, as this is where they'd run it up the flagpole and try to get potential customers to salute it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
We need to put more time into the memory hierarchy and interface to I/O devices! Sure it's not the sexiest job, but the performance gap is just getting greater every day!!@@$ Down with mechanical parts!
Perhaps the only thing that Intel can reall do with their P4 CPU line is slap a "We were the first ones to reach X Ghz barrier" in order to sell their CPUs to the ignorant masses. There is nothing wrong with the P4 really, but in most cases, the slower (clock speed) AMD CPU is nearly always a better choice. How does AMD counter this marketing ploy from Intel? Why, they pull the old Cyrix PR idea. AMD has become a very resourceful company. I hope that they have a better idea in their bag of tricks.
Hrm...maybe we have some priorities
maybe we know that life must go on
Maybe we will keep complaining about Intel and Micro$haft Winbl0ws and looking at lego porn until Afghanistan (or Bill Gates) drops a nuke on us, but we will damn well have done our part. Not everyone is needed to fight a war - people are needed at home to keep the country running smoothly, the economy up, and the bastard monopolies from buying america while the general public isn't looking.
I know if someone like me was holding a gun on the front lines, I'd be worried about america, cause I couldn't hit Shamu from 10 yards.
Personally, if i can't die in my old age by being stepped on by an elephant while having sex (i believe thats from a Zelazney book), I hope to die directly after winning a game of ID software's latest hit, or finishing the conclusion of the Wheel of Time saga.
Then again, you probably don't read novels...I'm kind of suprised you know enough to post a troll. --Corwin StormSinger, supporting america from the desktop.
"Who am I" and "Why are we here" are not the problems.
The problem is when someone asks "Why are they here."
Sucker.
OK, so we all like Transmeta technology. But this statement is so blatantly untrue it rings of zeal. Intel were not caught flat-footed by Transmeta. Transmeta were caught flat-footed by the lack of a market for their product. In case people are forgetting, Transmeta were targetting the mobile market, and sold about 10 chips into it. Fortunately for TM, the dense server market arrived. Now they give Intel the second-mover advantage.
There's one flat-footed company here, and it ain't Intel.
...RAM (which I expect to start seeing in cereal boxes)....
Just have to say that was funny. And it wasn't designed to karma whore either...I like it. Someone being clever on Slashdot for the sake of being clever. Whaddya know.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
I recommend a visit to Tom's Hardware to check out some benchmarking done on P4's and AthlonXP's. "comparable in some benchmarks" isn't accurate, but of course neither is the idea that the pentium 4 is blown away. Exaggeration is retarded; we are (or, should be) intellectually debating, not flaming. Yes, I am an idealist.
In reality, AMD's best chip can compete with and usually beat the P4. (shrug). that's the way it is. But, the point is that AMD's pricing is better, they are loved as the underdog (and not hated because of Intel's Monopoly Price Gouging ((tm), licenced from Microsoft).
Anyone remember the prices of Intel chips (especially high-end) before AMD came on the scene? I do. It was insane...the CPU was about half the system price. Now, I spend about $130 for a good chip, instead of $800. I attribute that to AMD. That is one of the reasons I love the company, that is why i drove 2 hours at 6 this morning to Detroit to their XPerience Tour to get a chance at a free chip and motherboard. People love AMD. No one 'loves' Intel.
And yeah, it was worth it, to hear the chant of, "INTEL SUCKS! INTEL SUCKS!"
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
I can just begin to imagine the prices of the 3Ghz chip (if they do get one done in time, which they most likely won't... I trust the mid-2002 date as I would trust a video game console date).
Intel knows most people think more numbers=better. Especially higher price=better quality. Which isn't always true....