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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.
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.
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 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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