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Intel Northwood CPU Review
gcshaw2nd writes: "Here it is, the first hands-on review I've seen of Intel's new Northwood chip, running at two gigahertz. It overclocks like a hog, easily to 2.5Ghz."
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Aside from the meager "5-10%" performance boost per clock that GamePC reports, the new PC1066 RDRAM and 533MHz FSB coming in a few months offers a "12%" performance boost per clock, when used with the original P4.
Northwood + 533MHz FSB/PC1066 RDRAM should be quite nifty.
The PC1066 benchmarks are here.
According to that chart there, PC1066 RDRAM actually has lower latency than PC133 SDRAM. I don't know how accurate that is, but it says PC1066 RDRAM takes 207 cycles for 128 bytes, and PC133 takes 229 cycles (PC800 took 270)?
Maybe I'm reading that wrong or don't know some specifics about RDRAM architecture, but that sounds nifty...
2 GHz = 2000 MHz = 2000000 kHz = 2000000000 Hz. Metric. With bytes, however, 1 K = 1024 bytes, see below. 1 Mbyte = 1024*1024 bytes. 1 Gbyte = 1024*1024*1024 bytes. In metric we use a lowercase k to indicate 1000, the uppercase "K" was introduced in the seventies when RAM banks, which are addressable in binary, appeared. Thus 2^10=1024, which is close enough to a k that it's called a K.
That's not true, they use RDRAM or SDRAM or DDR SDRAM. In fact there's a brand new artice that benchmarks them all.
Take your pick of RAM (although RDRAM and DDR are the only real choices).
Yes, of course we need faster processors. Not only does it bring down the cost of the mainstream processors, but you always need more power. Always!
The big deal here isn't the 2GHz anyway. 2GHz has already been done, the big deal is the new core. The Northwood core is the first Pentium 4 chip to use copper interconnects instead of aluminum, it's much smaller (read: cheaper to make), it runs cooler (2.0GHz ran at 31C maximum temperature, overclocked to 2.5GHz it was 41C max temp). And it can clock much higher.
It's the new core that matters, not the speed (although Northwood is debuting at 2.2Ghz...)
Here's a printer-friendly version of the article, which is easier on the viewer and the server.
The usage of computers changes along with the possibilities and there's still a lot that's not possible. Think about photo-realistic realtime interactive movies (have you seen the latest Chemical Brothers video-clip "Star Guitar"? THAT's what I want to do in realtime and interactively), multi-track samplers that can do a lot of effects without any latency, predicting the weather more exactly without the use of what we call supercomputers nowadays, SETI, simulations of large neural networks etc. etc. That's why we need the Hz's, not for the stuff we we're doing nowadays. As long as I cannot easily create my own Hollywood-production in 16384:1024 with 16-channel sound on my desktop, create the soundtrack for that with a software sampler with professional quality (latency) etc, we're not there yet.
0x or or snor perron?!
now even quicker !! this page claims it has a world record
3023mhz !
Try 2.8 GHz
Or why not 3.0!
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In the articles, the tester admits to having the SSE-2 patch installed on all the machines prior to the rendering test in Photoshop. Even with the advantage to the Pentiums, the athlons still beat them out. Not to mention that in the other benchmark tests (IE: quake 3) are specially optmized for the Pentium. I give credit to the review in the fact that they are giving the honest results, but this is far from impressive coming from intel. It certainly won't want to make me buy a much more expensive Intel based system over Athlon for a few FPS in quake.
-Lance
eh, food for thought...
Intel's CEO has an engineering background, and he doesn't let marketing dictate technology. MHz certainly isn't the only issue with regards to performance, but neither is it a non-issue. The P4 is a very intesting chip due both to the technology that enables clockrate scaling and the technology that makes use of clockrate scaling.
In the past 3 months, 4 of the 30 people in my work area have picked up DV cameras and looked at DVD burning their home vids. Every one of them has been greatly disappointed to find that they can't do it with their "old" 800MHz PIII boxen without leaving the job running over night.
So I guess the point is that you don't need much more power than currently available for raw compiles and such, but you can expect the upcoming flood of DVD burners and DV cameras to push a significant number of people to upgrade.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.