Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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 * ;