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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."

7 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Wall Clock time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Speed? by jkellmer · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:Intel performance by Murdock037 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Somebody correct me if I'm getting my dates wrong here, but...

    It strikes me that the 3Ghz should be out sooner than the end of next year. It's been a couple months since the 2GHz was out, and so the total time in between there would be somewhere around a year, a year and three months.

    The leap from 1Ghz to 2Ghz took considerably less time than that. I know we're all sick of hearing about the widely-misunderstood Moore's Law, but shouldn't somebody out there be screaming bloody murder at this, that it should be out much sooner, that Intel is going to cave in, etc.?

    When AMD and Intel first hit the Ghz mark, they both announced that they were going to slow down their schedules, so they weren't left with a bunch of 600Mhz chips laying around while everybody wanted a shiny new 1.xGhz in their box. But there's shortages everywhere right now, so we know that Intel probably doesn't have a warehouse full of unsold P4s somewhere.

    Just pointing it out. Maybe we're all getting a bit too spoiled when it comes to speed. Anybody know what's up here?

  4. But who's going to buy them? by Pathetic+Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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 ...

  5. Still only 32-bit by morbid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
  6. Re:Speed Kills by jtdubs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes, but that doesn't make it true. I honestly feel that in the near future. Maybe even the recent past, we hit the point where home users will NEVER need more Mhz power. I think the future is SMP, not Mhz. I don't mean dual-proc machines. I mean 32 processor machines and 256 processor machines. Multiprocessing is the future. Threaded applications running across several CPUs is the future. I think.

    More cycles will NOT make Word run faster. Word is I/O bound, not CPU bound. It won't make Internet Explorer run faster either. It's bandwidth bound, not CPU bound. It won't make games run faster. Game's have become bandwidth bound as well, only different bandwidth. Specifically, AGP and North Bridge bandwidth.

    There are things that will benefit infinitely from more Mhz though. Specifically AI and Physics simulations spring to mind. Haha, spring to mind, that's great, a figure of speach that combines both physics and AI. Whew. I kill me.

    Anyway.

    Faster memory, faster buses, more CPUs, that's what I think the future is like, not more Mhz.

    But, I've been wrong before. Almost too consistantly to be coincidence :-). So, we'll see.

    Justin Dubs

  7. err by RainbowSix · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!

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    It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.