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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...
Now I *know* my computer is obsolete: my CPU speed is just the difference between reccommended and possible clock speed settings on the new one.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
Some people have had that little gem up to 3Ghz. Not exactly in English, but pictures say a thousand words.
now even quicker !! this page claims it has a world record
3023mhz !
John, Intel's VP of engineering : You mean "gigahertz" I 'spose : well, we can't, CPU core designs are reaching their limits. Technically, it's not very realistic you know.
Richard : Who's talking about technical stuffs here ? I mean, just crank up the gogohertz man, we need more hype fast.
John How about if we designed synchronous processors instead ? now *that* would be sexy.
Richard : You mean hotter than more gogohertz ?
John : Sure, it would impress the technical crowd, and we'd have a real actual breakthrough in CPU design in less than 5 year. That's pretty hot, I'd say.
Richard : Yeah, well, tech people are nice, but the Joe Sixpacks who walk into Fry's and buy a new PC, they want more gogohertz.
John : *sigh* Well, I guess we could double the clock and put a frequency divider inside the CPU
etc ...
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.