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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."
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.
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.
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.
:-). So, we'll see.
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
Justin Dubs