Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Now I *know* my computer is obsolete: my CPU speed is just the difference between reccommended and possible clock speed settings on the new one.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Really, does anybody really need a faster processor? They really should concentrate on increasing the size and speed of the data bus, rather than increasing the speed of the processor.
Actually rdram isn't that expensive anymore, and you shouldn't compare it to sdram.. sdram is obsolete. Ddr ram is the closest competitor, and it's price is now on the rise, and not that far off from rdram's price anymore. Lastly, p4 systems run best with rdram, even ddr speeds are not as good with it. So rdram is not that bad at all, besides the rambus' obviously screwing legal practices.
The Slashdot Effect: A new for
We all want to do that. But the make-or-break point isn't going to come at the difference between 1.7 and 2.0GHz, or even 1Ghz and 2.5GHz.
IOW, spending twice as much isn't getting you twice the performance... and it's usually not even getting you a substantially appreciable difference in performance.
IMO, the bottleneck these days isn't so much with the CPU as the busses.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Otherwise I am spending thousands of extra dollars for the "blessing" of being on the bleeding edge.
I can see the need to shorten compile times, etc. especially for big projects. But otherwise I look at 'good enough"
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
When I bought my home workstation about three years ago, the CPU (K6-II/400) was one of the cheapest parts of it. What really made it powerful are the SCSI cache controller and a fast Seagate drive, as well as an adequate (for these days 128 MB were more than enough) amount of RAM. Of course it depends on what you do with your box, but to be honest, most of the time you're waiting for the harddisk, either for loading data or for swapping virtual memory.
Three years later, the only thing I added was some more RAM, with the rest of my workstation being the same. It is still very usable, and I rarely see the need for a more powerful CPU.
In contrast, my former office workstation was a P3-800 with 192 MB RAM (some of which to be "abused" for graphics), an IDE drive and a one-chip-does-everything Intel i810 on the mainboard. SETI was the only thing it could do faster. On pushing the IDE system or the network, sound playback got distorted, and the X server became quite unreactive, it even stalled for a few seconds. A compile run made it impossible to do anything different in parallel, so I would have needed two machines - one for compiling and one for the desktop.
AFAICT especially on Intel systems the trend goes towards integrated one-chip-does-everything systems like i810 and its successors, which can handle everything from graphics to sound to IDE to networking. Of course the Intel people want their customers to come back later, and save some money by using only one chip instead of several ones. Most users will think it's the CPU which is too slow... and buy a new 2 GHz monster with another i8xx-crippled mainboard.
Does any one really notice the difference in speed between even 1.7GHz and the 2.0Ghz? I know it will scrape time from a kernel re-compile, but what non-IT consumers care about this?
On the contrary. I think most non-IT consumers will care about it. When I walk into a consumer electronics store to buy, say, a stereo, all the components have little tags on them with meaningless quantifications like "frequency response: 20-25000hZ", "power output: 240W". These numbers are all meaningless. They will not have been measured in a meaningful way (most likely the power output is measured across a resistor than the speakers themselves). There is no mention of whether it sounds good qualitatively. Everything in the shop probably sounds terrible, compared to an audiophile hi-fi.
Similarly, your average punter in the shop on a Saturday to buy a computer because he read so much about the internet, or because he thinks he should get one for his kids, is going to look at the first number past the first bullet point on the thing and buy the one with the biggest number. This is why Intels policy of cranking up the number as high as possible with the P4, and not worrying about actually making it go faster, is such a good marketing move.
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
Also To 2.8ghz
:)
But now, a little rant...
Look at the next and last alpha that will come out, it will SMOKE at a fraction of the speed the P4 will be at the end of the year. That's what I call going out with a bang. It's a shame such a technology got obliterated in part because of Intel's markettign muscle, we're going to be set back for 2 years for them to catch up on this technology and performance (they've got some alpha people in their staff now that will teach them how to do more than overclocking and recycling like putting SMT on chips for example, that will be one great leap, it's in at least one of the northwood flavor I think).
Watch out for the Hammer when it will come out, it still going to beat intel's latest offering mhz per mhz in desktop performance (can't speak too fast about the server side though.)
Look at the PowerPC, as much as I hate apple's hyping to keep their blinded userbase into beleiving that they hold the only computer that should exist on the surface of the planet, the powerPC architechture has proven itself to beat the crap out of Intel mhz to mhz side to side (and no I am not talking about that "hey loading an image in photoshop on the mac is 2x faster than on a PC, but I won't mention that it's totally unrelated to the CPU and the mac is running on a SCSI cheetah while the PC was running a 5400 rpm 5 gig drive", I am talking about rendering on different crossplatform software like premiere, lightwave, maya, etc).
This goes without mentionning SUN or MIPS or any other cpus on the planet that has interresting technologies ASIDE FROM CLOCKSPEED.
So again, Screw the MHZ hype, I am a power user, I love doing 3d rendering, I administer a small renderfarm at work, I love raw power, anything that comes out and had a power factor gets my attention, it's nice to see stuff running fast, but I am not impressed at ALL with the MHZ hype. Especially for the PRICE you have to pay to cover all the media and marketting hype... Intel's Hype tax like I often call it. Also, what you see is the MHZ going skyrocket... How much do you thihnk they had to cut in the design so that it stays that stable at these speeds? why do you think the athlon4 can't run at 2.2ghz? design.. intel had to cut in some places so the cpu could be easily cranked up that much, they had to redesign part of it, and that's why you need SSE2 optimisation and the pipeline for standard FPU is so bad. It's not because Intel doesn't know how to design a FPU, it's because they HAD to cut on it...
My precision 530 workstation that runs dual 1.7ghz P4 for the price I payed, I find a dual AthlonXP or MP 1900+ far more impressive for 1/2 of the price. Heck, you want to be in the cool factor? get a Dell 8100 with DVD/CD-RW Geforce2Go 32megs and 1600x1200 15" LCD screen, now THAT'S a nice little piece of technology. And quake plays soooo smooth on it... I won't waste my personnal money or blast my budget for a chip that can generate small blackholes because of it's so great CLOCKSPEED. Gimme raw speed at a decent price. For the price you'd pay that northwood alone you could probably get 2 athlonXP and it's mainboard that beat the crap out of the P4 for the same price of the cpu alone.
enuff
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
huh? If you are really doing calculations that cost so much, I think you wouldn't want to overclock. Just buy the fastest, or if already at the fastest, hopefully you can do some parallel processing.
:).
:).
:).
You won't save money by spending days to get the wrong answer
Only way is if you can certify and test the overclocked chips yourself thoroughly, however that would mean spending more money AND time. And when it comes to time, by the time you're done with those thorough tests, a faster chip may have come out
So it only makes sense in rare cases. Or for overclockers who don't care about correct results.
If 100% correct results don't matter, might as well ask an experienced person to guess
Even though it lost every benchmark except the Quake III one, and the 3DMark by a mere 2%. The small fact that DDR SDRAM is barely half the price of P4 ram, and the entire system is not nearly as expensive. They still recommend it for gamming? This is unabashed Intel hype. Not to mention all that wonderfull waste in the third ALU, poor design, and abysmal FPU performance. The P4 is a joke. Look at the performance improvements made by AMD when they moved to 0.13 micron. They improved the prefetch and release a truley better CPU. 'Intel - we inch forward - leaps and bounds and we could hurt ourselves!' The P4 has nearly twice the memory bandwith, >20% higher clock speed and it's still loosing benchmarks! Pathetic - utterly Pathetic.
Sorry - but I'm not buying Intel anytime soon.
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
Well if I got anything out of reading the benchmarks, it's that AMD is dead on with their "Athlon XP 2000+" marketing game. I wasn't sure I liked the idea, after reading benchmarks where the 1.67 GHz AMD chip ran neck-and-neck with the 2.0 GHz Northwood, I have to concede that it seems accurate.
Bottom line? This might be healthy competition between AMD and Intel. Let's hope these two continue to push each other higher than they might climb on their own.