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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."
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
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.
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.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
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?
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?
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 ...
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 ?
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?
Are you currently searching EBay for that "steal" on a 486-DX4-100?
At one time the difference between, say, a 386-33 and 486-66 were astounding, in terms of *feel*. But a few years ago I used NT on the job running on a 200MHz Pentium. Today I use an 866MHz Pentium III and it feels about the same. Compiles are faster, sure, games run better, yes, but it's not astounding. If I upgraded to a 1.4 GHz processor I doubt it would even matter to me.
So I can profit from silly people who think that "1.4 GHz is slow" and constantly have to upgrade to whatever comes along next. The rest of us, the people doing actual work, have given up caring about CPU speed.
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
That said, even if Intel does produce a 3-GHz processor, what will its real-world performance be like? We know their current 2-GHz P4 runs no faster than an Athlon running somewhere between 1.4 and 1.5 GHz, and I doubt that AMD will be standing still for the next year. It's also worth remembering which company actually had 1-GHz processors to sell and which company was only able to announce future availability.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.