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CPU Wars
msolnik writes: "Whether you say "0.13-micron" as most of us do, or "130-nanometer" as PR flacks prefer, the phrase is weighing heavily on both Intel's and AMD's minds. Indeed, each company's timeline in reaching that mark may determine who calls the CPU shots in 2002. Read more here at Hardware Central." Other submitters noted that AMD and Motorola have both updated their development roadmaps.
This was the news of 1971
Before we get to 0.09 microns, lets start using nanometers to get rid of those preceding decimal places. Plus, unlike micron, a nanometer is an accepted SI unit (see http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html). Strange the PR people should use it first -- could this be a sign of the Apocalypse?
"Luncheon meats make the sawdust in your stomach explode."
Next year looks like the best time ever to buy a new performance PC.
Well, duh. Just exactly like every year since they were invented.. And just like every computer magazine pundit has said since day one
The Gardener
--
A mil is approximately 592 meters.
You get that dividing a "mile" (1609 m) by "e" (2.7183).
Well IMHO you're not really correct. All this is relative to what you're used to work with.
... but then again you'll always be saying this.
You're only naming two games, both using the same engine, that are now approx. 5 years old. These days all games are trying to be as immersive as possible, using 3D graphics and sound, enhanced with special FX, and playing against an army of bots trying to mimic our behaviour. They are already using dedicated coprocessors (called GPU's these days).
GUI's have evolved from crappy crammed black and white boxes with hourglasses to 24-bit 1280x1024 alpha-blending anti-aliasing semi-intelligent "interfaces". This all takes memory, memory bandwidth and CPU cycles.
I find myself amazed, even as a software developer, that these days I can take pictures with my digital camera and send them to my mom using e-mail. I predicted this could be done a long time ago. But now I'm doing it I have to stop at moments and find myself simply stunned by the world we live in. We're ordering pizza's from our PCs using broadband network connections. My audio software (Propellerhead's Reason) can emulate a jampackked rack of synths and samplers, and the sound is generated in realtime. I don't have a digital camcorder, but if I owned one I'd spent my nights making my own movies. Picture this 10 years ago.
If you think OO is what makes softwar bloatware then you don't understand OO, in my opinion. OO is one of the ways to achieve true code reuse, which is what we're all striving to do because we are all lazy asses. Code reuse means you get a lot more done in less time, and if done right it should take less space all at the same time.
What really makes software 'bloatware' is the addition of functionality beyond what is needed by the majority of the users. But then again the markets have widened and software has become one of the biggest business in the world today. More users want to find software useful and software vendors respond with more and more features which will always sound like bloatware in the eyes of a few geeks who like to hack together their own kernel and run it on your average pocket 'PC'.
Sure games were fun 20 years ago just as they are fun today. I like to play tetris myself a lot of times but if you really think about it, same now as back then, only 5% of all games are classics and 95% are crap. We're all just spoiled now and the only reason we'll play pong is because it makes us feel nostalgic.
In 10 years you'll say that you don't need the latest AMD XP 22000+ (16Ghz nominal) with 512GB of battery-backed-RAM and a semi-optical harddisc of 600TB
I say, keep 'm coming.
Dave
Personally I'd never go back to the days where i had to wait
for every more powerful cpu to come out there's people saying we don't need it. I wonder how long it has been going on? Windows 3.11 was nice on a 486 66Mhz but I'm sure happy that chip development didn't stop there.
I think it would be interesting to see the effect of CPU power on software pricing. With faster CPUs software might be less optimised thus costing less programmer time. It's just a thought...
No friggen way I'll ever own a 13 nanoM chip. I'm just too supersticious. I've got enough to worry about with my data, and (jpg)'s to trust them to an unlucky number. It's worse than a hat on the bed!
They should switch to Angstroms.
Oh wait a minute, my calculator tells me that 0.13 Microns equals 666 Angstroms. Holy Ess, The end is Nigh.
Unless you are ripping Divx movies left and right or a Seti@home freak you don't need a faster cpu, It will do nothing for you. Anyone notice that you pretty much have the same Harddrive as you did with your pentium 1 120, the size has increased but if you go IDE it is still 7200rpm and the data transfer rate isn't any faster.
It is funny, Xp Pro runs the exact same on my PII 400 with 384 meg of ram as it does on my PIII dual 1 gig with a gig of ram machine. The 400 actually boots faster!. So what does processor speed to for you in every day apps? everyone here knows exactly what i am saying. I am just complaining becaue we always hear about the new processor that is supposed to be so great that is coming out next year or whatever. WHEN AM I GOING TO SEE A SOLID STATE HARD DRIVE? Sure Serial ATA is coming up but the transfer rate on that is only starting at 166MB/s. ok. show me a harddrive that actually needs anything better than ata 100 first.
The bottleneck in every modern computer is still the hd, and the bus, we should fix those first and then jack up the mhz..
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
No, but we do use the micrometre. The same way we use microfarads, microseconds and microvolts. I guess in the US you still use microns, but then you still use feet, inches, pounds and ounces, too. You have a perfectly good system of SI units, so why not use them? At least micron is just another name for a valid SI unit. Unlike Angstroms, which are just an abomination against nature (they should have just used nm or pm as appropriate).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
bloody hell, they really are hyping the G5, and they haven't got any confirmation of what technologies it will use, they simply assume that motorola's latest chip will be the basis, how much would you have to pay for a mac for them to make returns on their production process?
Well, actually.. A G5 powermac will cost almost the same as the current G4 machines.
The PPC8500 is a 64 bits processor which is 100% backwards compatible.
I've seen some preliminary SpecFP and SpecINT figures and if those are correct a PPC8500 running at 1,6 Ghz is equal to a P4 running at 3 Ghz.
It is twice as fast as a Itanium running at 80 Mhz. and uses only 15 watts peak.
Compare that with around 60 watts for a P4 running at 2 Ghz..
The difference with this chip is, that most of design work was done by Apple itself.
This chip uses 0.13 micron technology and SOI.
So
Don't forget that the PowerPC chip is based on the Power architecture of IBM.
Am I the only one who notices that every week /. posts a news article about Intel or someone coming up with supar-dupar-mega-fantabulous technology that we never hear about again?
Like New Optical DSPs With Tera-ops Performanc
Or Intel Cites Breakthrough In Transistor Design
Perhaps Clockless Chips
Not forgetting Intel Promises A Cool Billion (Transistors)
Notwithstanding Intel Claims Smallest, Fastest Transistor
But who could forget Intel Claims 10Ghz Transistor
Which looks a lot like Intel Says 10GHz By 2005
But is just as vapor as Intel Creates 30-Nanometer Transistors
or my personal favorite: Intel Goes for Display Encryption
How can they get any work done when they're too busy telling us what they predict in a bajillion years?
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
I'm looking forward to ever-increasing clockspeeds, as this could get us away from programming applications in a low-level language like C/C++. Let's face it: Most of the bugs in current programs stem from the fact that C was not designed to handle sloppy or lazy coding. Dangling pointers, buffer overflows, memory leaks etc. result from the low-levelness of C (that's OK - for it to be efficient it needs to have the ability to do all kinds of things with the hardware directly). C should only be used for developing operating system kernels and device drivers, as no other higher language would handle the task well.
Faster processors and more memory would make higher languages such as Lisp or Python viable for applications (such as Browsers, Desktop environments etc.), which in turn would result in less bugs and increased stability when applied correctly. The current state with software makes me sick. I don't blame it on C per se, but on programmers using the wrong tool for the wrong job.
Writing in such a higher language would probably even increase portability (which C can't fulfill by a far shot) as you would program at a higher abstraction level. No need for autoconf/automake or ugly defines scattered throughout the code, making maintainance more difficult.
I hope that more coders switch to some better suited language than C/C++ for application development. I've switched to Lisp myself.
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
I consider the Northwood to be the "real" Pentium 4, just as other second-generation products like the 100MHz Pentium and "Coppermine" Pentium III have proven to be the "real" versions of Intel processors in the past.
I agree with this. The Pentium 4s we see today are just puppies with very big feet. They will grow up and become something much more impressive.
Bush's education improvements were
That's too late. They need it sooner to compete with the Inanium.
I'm thinking about writing agent ai code in *asm*, because compiler generated code won't be fast enough.
You're in a position to write a thesis involving AI, so I assume that you already have a bachelor's in CompSci.
Did you learn nothing from it?
I mean, do you honestly believe that you can increase the speed of your programs enough by abandoning an easier-to-maintain language to make it worthwhile? What happens when the next generation of compilers comes around that's faster than your hand-tooled assembler, and you have to re-write your code yet again to squeeze out those extra cycles? What if your code gets executed on a modern processor with deep pipelining, advanced branch prediction, and out-of-order execution? Are you that confident that your manual re-write will take full advantage of the hardware it's running on, moreso than a computer-optimized version?
I'm sorry, but unless your AI consists of a very few tightly-rolled loops that you can super-optimize, I just can't see the benefit of throwing away 30+ years of compiler design experience for a theoretical gain that may or may not appear.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?