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Two Approaches to the Next-Generation Desktop
puppetman writes: "Tom's Hardware has a review up of a pre-production P4/2666 using 533 mhz Rambus memory (and shows it stomping the competition). The Pentium 4 needs memory bandwidth, and DDR doesn't supply it. Or does it? Anandtech, ironically, has a preview of the E7500 chipset from Intel - dual channel DDR with support for up to 16 gig of RAM. With a new bus architecture, this looks perfect for high-load databases that need wide pipes to hard-drives, memory, and ethernet. Both of these technologies look great for mid-range database servers.
Anandtech claims that dual DDR200 will provide 3.2 gig/second bandwidth, where Tom claims that DDR266 (single channel) offers only 2.1 gig/second. Intel is sure hedging their bets. I wonder what AMD has up their sleeves."
a beowulf cluster of these
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I am partly curious what kind of OC'ing results you will be able to get out of the 2666 MHz P4 w/ the 533 Mhz RDRAM, I would like to see it't benchmarks compared to the OC'd 2200 (to 3760 MHz) w/ slower FSB that was posted not so long ago.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Maybe now I'll be able to run XP at an acceptable speed! At least until Microsoft tells me not to!
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
What exactly am I supposed to do with a machine like that? I develop Java software. My IDE, app server and build scripts each open their own JVM instance. I really haven't seen any performance problems with a 450mhz with 512MB ram.
I know thats no reason to stop advancing hardware, but it seem a good enough reason to slow down on the hype.
Will a 2666mhz beat out a XP2000+? Of course!!! Its about 1ghz faster. It doesnt take a monkey to figure out that its gonna win. How about you stick it up your ass until AMD comes out with something at equilivant speed.
The Pentium 4 needs memory bandwidth, and DDR doesn't supply it.
Do *users* need this memory bandwidth or does the proverbial Quake benchmark need it?
Show me "desktop" (as the headline implies) application that requires this. Even the most cutting edge 3D games don't use current 3D processors to their potential, these days.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
But you know there is at least one photoshop filter that would run faster on a 1ghz g4 and i'm sure we'll see steve jobs demonstrating it at macworld 2004 proving that macs are still twice as fast. :)
yes i run a goth/punk/emo porn site.
The vast majority of systems that are being sold today are somewhere around the 1Ghz mark. They represent the "sweet spot" on the price/performance curve, and quite frankly, users just don't need anything better. Open source OS users, such as most of us here, don't need to ratchet up the speed to 1.5Ghz unless they're running a bleeding edge release of the bloated KDE 2. Windows XP runs just great (well, as well as Windows XP can run, anyway ;) on my Duron 900.
Desktop users don't need anything faster than 1Ghz. So what's Intel's brilliant strategy? Why, they're going to develop chips that are even faster than the overpriced 2Ghz P4s they're having difficulties unloading right now.
And that, my friends, is why AMD is well on its way to winning the war. Intel is putting a product on the market without bothering to notice that nobody needs anything faster. They will lose a lot of money doing this (a friend at Intel pegged the development costs for this chip at $3.7 billion). AMD is sitting tight and refining their core business: solid, stable, speedy, and inexpensive chips that consumers can afford and that consumers actually want to buy.
If I were a stock broker, I would be telling all of my clients to short Intel and go long on AMD right about now. The revolution is underway and the underdog is winning.
Mr. Uptime
Free Open Source Naked Ladies!
I would bet that the RDBMS-like filesystem of the future releases of Windows will require some of the massive computing power of the new Intel chips. Always thinking ahead, those guys... Put the bloat in the filesystem. Brilliant!
Newbies like me using JBuilder Enterprise really like the automatic code recompilation and all the other shiny widgets and other nifty graphical gismos. The thing runs like crap with less than 512 mb of RAM on a PIII-800, although it does feel reasonably snappy on my 1.4 ghz Tbird with a gig of ram.
As the operations manager for a medium-sized business, I am responsible for approving or denying acquisition requests (ARs as we call them). And I will strongly encourage my employees to buy Intel machines over AMD machines if they want their AR approved. Why is that? Although I am very impressed with the speed of AMD chips, and very unimpressed with RDRAM and P4s' performance (did you know they reduce the cache memory clock as they increase the core speed to prevent overheating?), P4s are an order of magnitude more stable than Athlons. Having seen several Athlongs crash and burn in the past two years, I have been refreshing AnandTech every morning awaiting the release of a comparably speeded P4.
Most businesses hire smart people, and there are probably thousands of people just like me who want the speed of an AMD chip, coupled with the reliability and quality of an Intel chip. Well, the day has finally come, and Intel will sell these chips faster than they can restock the shelves. Good for them.
freebsd guy
That's a lot of frames per second. Who needs 339 FPS when they're playing Quake? Is it even possible to view that many frames in one second, for the human eye? Or even on the monitor? Say you have an 85 Hz refresh rate on your monitor. Are any FPS levels above that going to improve your performance? I thought not.
So basically, the Athlon 850 is way more than enough to play Quake on. All you need is 85 FPS and you're as good as it gets. Who needs the extra, unnoticeable 254 frames in each second?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
my personal theory is that microsoft's os' determine the specs of your machine and occupy 95% of it, no matter how much you paid for it. and of course it's never "windows" fault when it crashes...it's that damn 3rd party software! ;-)
Tom's Hardware doesn't do anything relevent, unless you consider Quake relevent. I've never seen anything on that site that would be useful to a real systems engineer. It's just a bunch of whack-off material for geeky college kids and pseudo-techie gadget freaks.
And who could respect such a slow, buggy, messy website anyway?
C'mon. I don't care about dual-channel RAMBUS. I need something to get more speed out of my 64MB of EDO I have in my Pentium 133MHz computer.
At least until I can afford to get a new one that is. Next year. If the wife lets me.
Give me a desktop with no fan, lots of pixels and video RAM, and a reasonable-sized disk and a CD-burner. In a small case. And put the disk in one of those removable-drive drawers so it's easy to replace. If it needs more than 500 MHz, it belongs on the server in the back room. Desktops are for running X (or VNC if you don't have a real OS), and doing light development, and running MP3s. If I need to have a dedicated machine to do development on instead of a shared environment, (which I don't), it almost certainly needs to be a slower machine to emulate a random customer.
Actually, my current desktop is a laptop running Win98. There's never enough RAM, and often not enough disk, but the 450MHz CPU is almost always fast enough.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Because their prices are higher? Or simply because they are #1?
Intel's prices are higher than AMDs because they serve different markets. Get over it people. Intel has made some really neat advances in processor technology, as has AMD. I only wish there were decent, and mostly unbiased reviews of procs.
Check out how fast my 2 GHz P4 is waiting for input!
No security through obscurity: my password is goatse. Stop me before I troll again.
My work requires a lot of heavy scientific numerical computation.
I bring my work home often.
I say bring on the faster processors with more mem for less money. Competition never hurt anybody.
To access data in a Rambus module, the request must pass through all modules in sequence up to the module that has the data and then must pass back through those modules to deliver the data to the northbridge. This is, BTW, why continuity RIMMs are required.
As one can derive, this greatly increases latency as the number of modules increases. Servers, being systems that generally have lots of RAM, often have at least 8 modules available.
Due to this increased latency as a function of the number of modules (and other factors), Rambus is therefore poor memory for servers.
Note that this is per channel, meaning a dual channel Rambus system with eight modules has the memory latency of a four module system because the modules are split between the Rambus channels.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
The next-generation desktop which I'm thinking of doesn't need a single linuxkernel-in-less-than-one-minute-building numbercruncher. I would like to have a seamless multi-host cross-platform desktop, shared among e. g. a Sun running Solaris, a GNU/Linux workstation, a PDA, some recycled underpowered P100-class machines, an Apple Macintosh, maybe even a (ugh) w1nd0ze box. All of them would run different operating systems on many kinds of hardware.
;-)
A modern desktop environment is built on many layers, lots of processes and daemons, many interfaces and abstractions, most of which could be delegated to and shared among other hosts. Poor performance? No need to throw away the old box, just add a new one. With open and interopable interfaces like X11, CORBA, XML, HTTP or whatever, a next-generation desktop of this kind should be possible, especially with Free software.
In my view the most promising solution towards this concept is the GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME), largely based on CORBA, using only a few remaining locks which are likely to disappear within the next few years. If finally a common object model between GNOME, KDE, GNUstep and other backends can be established, the seamless multi-host cross-platform desktop could become reality.
The 2.6 GHz machine could then be used to build SETI packages and Linux kernels to heat up the office
Good god, just yesterday I was reading about the PII/266. When I saw those numbers in the synopsis, I had to do a double take. 2.6GHz doesn't have the same visual impact as 2666MHz. Wow!
If I remember correctly, the NForce does Dual channel DDR right now for the Athlon platform, and is being planned to be released to the Intel platform soon.
Of course the E7500 is in a different league than the Nforce, but the Dual Channel Idea is pretty much the same.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Is it just me, or do others wish that they could get the fan count down in their boxes? I think I already have 3 (PSU, CPU & GFX) and I don't really want another one for the memory.
I accept that this needs to be done in the interest of faster speeds etc, but are just just going to get to a point where everything has a fan stuck on it? I think people somewhere should start thinking about this now for Intel boxes - Macs seem to be able to reduce the fan count and noise - otherwise the future may be faster, but most of the juice I pump into my fast machine is being turned to wasted heat, which isn't smart and hi-tech at all, just dumb...
You don't need to spend $1,000 per user to create a modern, friendly, fast & productive computer system.
I am awaiting the release of StarOffice6 & Openoffice 1.0 with baited breath.
With all of the posts saying that our 1GHz's are fast enough, I say until Quake n looks like Final Fantasy (the movie!) we don't have fast enough CPU,RAM,Video,[Insert Bottleneck Here].
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
DDR 1600(200) does indeed provide 1.6GB/s of memory bandwidth, just as DDR 2100(266) provides 2.1GB/s, and DDR 2700(333) provides 2.6GB/s. The current P4 line of processors use a quad pumped 100Mhz pipeline capable of handling 3.2GB/s of memory bandwidth. This can be accomplished by a dual channel PC800 rambus memory controller or by a dual DDR 1600 memory controller (Which nobody currently has). The future specs for the quad pumped 133Mhz pipeline uses the new PC1066 rambus in a dual channel configuration. This same memory bandwidth can be acheived using a dual DDR2100 bus. However the new DDR 2700 can provide a 166Mhz quad pumped memory bus which would, in theory, be the fastest solution. If intel wanted to increase their lead in the market, they would be smart to experiment with a dual DDR 2700(333) configuration with their P4 platforms. Personally I prefer DDR as it doesn't have a proprietary intellectual property licensing scheme that rdram has. Just my $0.02
Of course a not-yet-released equivalent of an overclocked P4 is going to beat the competition vs. AMD's AthlonXP which is out and available NOW.
I would like to note that while the P4 did pounce the AthlonXP, take a look at the numbers (and i'm not talking about price, as I don't even want to know how much that P4 will cost!)
AthlonXP 2000+ runs at 1,666MHz at a bus which is the equivalent of 266MHz.
The P4 is running at 2666MHz (a full Gigahertz higher frequency) with a bus at the equivalent of 533MHz.
The (essentiually overclocked) Pentium 4 has a full SIXTY PERCENT CPU clockspeed advantage and a ONE HUNDRED PERCENT front side bus (FSB) advantage, yet look at its real-world performance:
MP3 encoding: 6.2% faster than the Athlon. (woop)
DivX encoding: 30% (note that the program is highly optimized, by Intel themselves, for the P4. How many programmers have an Intel engineer handy?)
Xinema 4D: 12.8%
3DMark 2001: 4.9%
Note that that Lightwave was not included--the only common test that runs faster on the P4 is the raytracing test. Guess which one Tom's Hardware used?
I just thought I'd point out that the only conclusion that you can really draw from these tests is that, as many in the hardware community know, the P4's architecture is designed for high clockspeed, with zero regard to actual real-world performance. Which matters more to you?
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Don't be too impressed with the numbers of the Lightwave rendering benchmark, the scene used is heavily Radiosity-based, which Newtek (makers of lightwave) publicly said that was SSE2-optimized, if they'd run the same application benchmark but with any other math-intensive scenes like raytrace, etc.. the gap wouldn't be that impressive. I use Dual Xenon and Dual MPs at work, I've noticed the difference, and Tom being tom, he still goes on doing flawed benchmarks (flawed because he doesn't mention that little fact even if a lot of people told him).
At least he does other benchmarks to round-up the possibilities of errors.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
I call BS. Your entire argument is based on anecdotes. As the owner/builder of many Athlon/Duron based machines, I can easily match you story for story about the impressive stability of AMD chips. Running various versions of Windows even! As the old saying goes, without data, you're just another opinion.
>>Intel will sell these chips faster than they can restock the shelves
More BS. Intel will sell these chips because they offer sweet deals to OEMs who sell Intel products only. It has nothing to do with stability. It has everything to do with low price.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm a bit worried about the sign of the beast coming up on my future BIOS screen everytime I reboot. I suppose it's a fitting follow-up to a blue screen of death.
A hack is just an idiom waiting for wider use.
I don't know what others here think, but while reading the article, I had a feeling that it either underwent several translations through the `fish' or it was severely rushed out the door. Their technical writing, at best, is rather vague, wordy, and at times very confusing.
Why? Just look at the number of mistakes and inconsistency. I observed a handful of mistakes particularly dealing with application version numbers. Since when did WinACE 4.1 come out? Did they benchmark using SiSoft Sandra Pro 2001 as mentioned here [THG] or with Sandra Pro 2002 as mentioned here? Th some inconsistency applies with DivX 4.11/4.12 and mention of the Intel i845e chipset when it's supposed to be i845d in the conclusion (it's emphasized in bold too).
Unless THG writers learn how to proofread (or update their template "wizard", their articles and reliablity will remain questionable.
These are for databases, web servers, etc.
You don't run Quake 2 on a Sun E4500. True, Tom and Anand don't benchmark with Linux/Apache, Win2k/Oracle, Solaris/Netscape, but they should have.
Our database is Oracle with dual P3 933s with 2 gig RAM. A E7500 with up to 16 gig of RAM would take our CPU usage on one of our database machines from 40% to about 20%.
Why do people keep talking about Quake benchmarks, kernal compiles, etc?
that people who say "It's a well known fact" have absolutely no facts to back them up.
;-p
except for me
Like everything else, it depends on the benchmark. Intel wins the ones they cheat best on, and AMD wins the ones that are crappy games (like "Serious Sam").
Here's a not-so-well-known fact: By the time AMD gets to a REAL 2GHz processor (Barton), Intel will be at 3.0GHz, and it ain't looking back.
Intel didn't beat AMD. It just outran it.
---
They benchmarked several things that showed a dramatic improvement with the larger RDRAM memory bandwidth, including mpeg4 encoding, MP3 encoding, and 3D scene rendering. I think it's fair to say that these are all "desktop" applications. It depends on what kind of user we're talking about, of course. One can surf for pr0n on a PII 233 just fine.
Screw Yall that say we need a GHZ. My PII 400 with 256 megs of ram is plenty fast! It runs every app I need it too at this point. (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, MS Office, In Design, Acrobat) The only thing that's a bit slow is writing large PDF's and large In Design files and these are way past the needs of most users.
Still, the processor companies are in trouble. The reason is that the smart money will go towards some nice peripherals. Software just isn't crying out for more processor speed. Maybe a video camera, an IPod and some decent software.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Tom does beanch marks to make the dumb consumer
feel good, but the elistests will complain to no end about how they don't do the beanchmarks right.
Well then do your own review of the newest hardware!!!
WWWWWWHHHHHHAAAAA
I can't get the newest the newest hardware?
Well then shut the hell up.
The world is a better place when the people that complain all the time shut the hell up.
Dr. Suess: 'Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring! I am too small to carry this thing!' 'I can not, will not hold the One.
An interesting development in the market is in regard to the memory prices: currently, DDR SDRAM costs just as much as RDRAM. The high price of Rambus, which we have mentioned in many articles previously, should no longer be a purchase barrier.
Mushkin prices for 256 MB DDR 2700 is $116 and Mushkin 256 MB RIMM is $149. Who knows how much the un-available 533MHZ RIMM will run but it's certainly going to be more than $149.
Secondly, his benchmark charts don't jibe with other reviews where the 2000 XP is pitted against a 2.2 GHZ P4. He's got the P4 trouncing the Athlon whereas Anandtech is giving a only a slight edge to the P4.
Maybe Tom's gone to the Steve Jobs School of Benchmarks?
...anyting but 10 (ten) times faster than P4 1GHz. It simply isn't worth it.
AthlonXP 2000+ runs at 1,666MHz at a bus which is the equivalent of 266MHz.
The P4 is running at 2666MHz (a full Gigahertz higher frequency) with a bus at the equivalent of 533MHz.
How come so many people rant and rant about how clockspeed isn't everything, then they go and use the same argument in a different way to establish the "clear superiority" of the Athlon? Who cares how many Hz one is than the other? (Don't argue about consumers here, that's for another discussion...).
Sorry, but if you're going to paint it as an achievement that the Athlon performs so well 1000MHz slower than the 2.6GHz P4, then why can't the Intel fanboys paint the fact that the P4 runs at 2.6GHz as an achievement?
The (essentiually overclocked) Pentium 4 has a full SIXTY PERCENT CPU clockspeed advantage and a ONE HUNDRED PERCENT front side bus (FSB) advantage, yet look at its real-world performance:
"Essentially overclocked" Pentium 4? It's not a new Pentium 4 chip, it's a new motherboard. Of course it's an "essentially overclocked" Pentium 4. Why add in the negative connotations?
I just thought I'd point out that the only conclusion that you can really draw from these tests is that, as many in the hardware community know, the P4's architecture is designed for high clockspeed, with zero regard to actual real-world performance. Which matters more to you?
I dunno, looking at these benchmarks I'd say the Pentium 4's architecture is damn fast. It's scaling up incredibly fast. Remember when it was first released and everybody called it a disaster?
Intel could easily release those 2.6GHz chips today, but they aren't doing it for marketing reasons. The architecture of the Pentium 4 is incredibly fast, but the management of the company is spreading out the releases over time. You can get a 2GHz today and overclock it to 2.6GHz. People are doing that all over.
The Athlon is a different design: It's very fast. The Pentium 4 is another design: It's very fast. The Athlon is cheaper, by a fair margin, especially at the highest end chips. But painting the picture that the Pentium 4 is so very much slower than the Athlon, especially with benchmarks like this, are just plain stupid.
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=45000219
RDRAM at 1066MHz has the same latency as DDR266 (aka, PC2100) and PC133. A little lower, actually, assuming that you have 2 RDRAM channels, as with the i850 chipset.
RDRAM is not a choice for servers because sheer capacity, chip-kill, and interleaving are critical--think "uptime" not playing Quake 3!
RDRAM is limited to 32 devices per channel. Assuming that 512Mbit (non-ecc) chips are used, you could theoretically put 2GB on a single RIMM. With two channels, that give you 4GB. Plenty for workstations and desktops, not even in the same league for servers.
---
to be blunt and without starting a flame. who cares? I'm as excited as the next guy for newer faster machines. But, who cares. I'm using a 500 mhz amd now and its just starting to show a bit of grey. With the exception of super duper digital video apps and photoshop and super number crunching what does anyone need these machines for? nice to have one but word or abiword or star office work the same at 500 mhz as at 1 or 2 or 10 ghz. whats the app that will make a machine this powerful useful for the great majority of pc users? I'm really curious. I want honest answers.
When do i get to walk up to a screen and say "hey monkeyface whats my check balance" and have it respond "zilch, po-boy and who you callin monkeyface"? when i can get a system to do that then I'll give a damn.
-
Your comment about investing in AMD stock is contradictory. You warn potential investors to be in it for the long haul and also to prepare for the insane price swings.
But it is precisely because of those insane price swings that investors *don't* have to be in it for the long haul. Those price swings provide a serious return on investment in very little time.
Buy now at $15/share, then sell a month from now when the price inevitably hits $20. You just made a 33% profit! Try to do that with Intel stock!
If you'd like to ride again, wait a month for the price to fall back down to $12, then buy some more. Lather, rinse repeat.
What exactly am I supposed to do with a machine like that?
Distributed computing, of course. Lookie them blocks fly!
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
I'm running XP on an ancient PIII/533, and it runs plenty fast enough. The interface far more responsive than KDE.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Not to raise a stink, but I think of next generation as referring to a major change in system performance and design. For instance, the K7 was next generation from the K6's since the 700Mhz K7 was SIGNIFICANTLY better than a (albeit nonexistant) similarly clocked K6-III. It also involved a new processor core, socket, and a lot of hardware that we (at least for a while) couldn't get our hands on.
/.'ers either have or can get shipped to them by tomorrow. This is more like "This week's fastest processor" than "Next-Generation". I like hardware upgrades as much as the next geek, but when I read the title, I was suspecting something cooler than 50% increase in "Office Performance".
.013 seconds, whereas your puny PIII machine takes almost a tenth of a second!!!"
Tom Pabst over there is using some new hardware (basically some fatty P4's, and some juiced up RAMBUS), but his mobo, cards, software, etc, are all things that
"My reports repaginate in
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
Tom's hardware is completely shafting AMD and the benchmarks are horribly misleading. Look at marks for the AMD XP 2000+ vs. the P42200. The Athlon kicks it's ass! Rating for rating, AMD is clearly on top if you look at the comparable chips in the middle of the chart.
Also, the 2666mhz P4 is using rambus's 533mhz rimms-a product that is essentially vaporware at this point since Tom's is apparently the only place with a chipset for it. But look! The athlon is using DDR 2100!!!! I mean, seriously, what the fuck? There is absolutly no excuse for not using DDR 2700 except to provide misleading benchmarks. PC-333 ram exists! Look it up on pricewatch, you can get some today, 533mhz RIMMs won't be available for months!
I think we should petition slashdot to give Tom's Hardware it's own catagory so I can just block it like I did to Katz.
AMD: "Hey Intel, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!"
Intel: "Not again!"
AMD: "Nothin' up my sleave... Presto!"
Tune in next time for "I've got a 'chip' on my shoulder" or "'Chip' off the old block."
Dum dum da dum dum dum.
Dum da dum dum dum dum dum.
Dum dum da dum da dum dum duh, dweedle deet doot doo!
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
The nForce has two PC2100 DDR channels, but the FSB is only 2.1 GB/s, so most of that bandwidth is wasted.
Check out IBM's Summit or ServerWorks' Grand Champion HE chipsets; they have four PC1600 channels which adds up to 6.4 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
His entire conclusion is absurd. Piece by piece:
:)
"Our detailed tests show that forthcoming P4 CPUs with 133 MHz FSB clock used in conjunction with the 845E chipset (DDR SDRAM support) will effectively be castrated."
Intel castrated it their selves. Compare its performance to VIA's P4X266 Chipset's performance and you will see that Intel crippled it to prevent it from competing with Intel's Rambus chipset. Notice that Intel is suing VIA for that chipset because it ruins the facade that RDRAM is better than DDR. Also note that Intel has refused nVidia's request for an Intel license for a DDR chipset. Intel knows that a dual channel DDR chipset would show RDRAM for what it is: A fraudulent attempt to maintain a high performance monopoly. Whatever company "causes to be sold" the most RDRAM gets to own a controlling interest in Rambus Inc. At this point, Intel is the clear winner even though Sony made a race out of it by packaging Rambus with the Playstation 2. Intel suppresses their own DDR performance to make people believe that RDRAM is the fastest stuff out there. AMD would be committing suicide by using RDRAM to capitalize on Intel's marketing hype because that would place them directly under Intel's thumb.
"This is because the Pentium 4 has a problem: the increase in clock speed (e.g. P4/2533 or P4/2666) will be rendered useless by the slow DDR SDRAM memory bus of the 845 platform".
Again, this is Intel's doing for product placement purposes as was done with the Celeron when it competed with the Pentium III and was done by Apple on the new iMac's 100fsb 800mhz G4. A 133fsb does not cost any money, it is just an easily achievable clock frequency with available current chipsets.
"And one shouldn't forget that even a dual DDR platform for P4 should be priced at a level that is similar to a Rambus system, considering that it's from Intel."
Rephrased: "And one shouldn't forget that even a dual DDR platform for P4 will be priced as high as an RDRAM system because Intel will not license the platform to nVidia and Intel KNOWS it will outperform a Rambus system, ruining 2 years of carefully crafted marketing and gamesmanship" The fact is, a dual channel DDR chipset from Intel may be available for the Pentuim 4, but only for the Xeon, a processor not available except from Intel's favored OEM Parteners, such as Dell.
Before you defend Intel remember that Craig Barrett, after AMD went from 10% market share to 40% in a year, said "the market is dropping" to justify Intel's reduced profits. Well, Intel is a bellwether stock and the market believed everything Craig said. The market did drop. We all lost our jobs. We can now say in hindsight that at least a part of the market was due to drop. But because of Craig's statement, it was the tech sector that was hit first, and hardest. Instead of simply saying, "Intel has reduced profits because of competitive pressure", he brought the entire tech sector down with him. The recession that was due could have been placed entirely on Enron's shoulders. The energy sector was in fact dropping. Enron's insiders were cashing out at the same time Craig made his statement. People got scared and pulled their money out of the market. There was less money in the market than there had been and it came out of the tech sector when it should have come out of energy.
Go ahead and defend Intel. They have made poor greedy choices, sold inferior products at exorbitant prices and done it at the expense of all our livelihoods. Shame on them.
Intel's 1.7 trillion dollar market cap has been cut by Tom Pabst on more than one occasion. A series of articles he has had deriding Rambus, causing the 1.13 Ghz recall, and showing the Pentium 4 for the paper tiger it is has seriously hurt Intel. But Tom, like all hardware websites is cash poor. Tom's hardware has resorted to doing marketing research among their readership for Socratic Technologies. Sometimes they have been overt, sometimes they have sent readers to secure servers just for simple popularity polls. Tom's latest revenue generation technique is the introduction of "Editorial Content Sponsorships" which I'm going to guess prompted the recent editorial change of heart toward Rambus. Please notice that in the most recent article no AMD processors were over clocked according to their projected roadmaps and the test is presented as if it was fiction. Unfortunately, it seems we have lost another fair and unbiased journalist. Another because Sharky's Extreme was the first to go into Intel's pocket, prompting Sharky himself to leave the website. Sharky's is owned by INT Media Group. Noteable investors in INT media include Dell Computer Corporation, International Business Machines Corporation, Lucent Technologies Inc., Macromedia Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Nortel Networks Corporation and Oracle Corporation.
Expect wonderful reviews of Intel hardware on Sharky's and unfortunately now, Tom's. Look to [H]ard OCP, The Inquirer, The register, Anandtech and Ars Technica for relatively unbiased hardware news.
Post Intelligently, Thanks
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
It is important for a variety of reasons not to let up upon the current technological pace occurring today. There are so many factors to consider economically, scientifically, and sociologically. If we allowed a slow down of the current pace of technological advancement it could have a devastating impact on our society at large.
First off, it is naive to think that current users wouldn't use or enjoy more powerful computers. It is the software industries fault that end users are unable to fully utilize the more powerful machines being built. Already plenty of comments have suggested a variety of applications from facial recognition to video editing that all would benefit from faster more powerful computers.
It is actually important to me that regardless of the 'need' the average user has for more powerful computers, that the software industry does its job to drive the users to want more power.
Only by nurturing and then feeding the publics appetite for technology does the industry continue to push us forward technologically. If millions of people and companies didn't demand the upgrades and new features that are available with more powerful systems we risk losing all the potential gains for the future that these desires produce.
I'm still running a Celeron O/C to 700mhz, and it runs my games/winXP/RedHat just fine.
Of course I used to believe that slackware linux and Xwindows ran just fine on my old 486... and it did!!
Are faster CPUs leading to lazy programmers? How can we combat this as consumers? Would a minimum install of RedHat and Xwindows run at all respectably on my 486? Is not.. is it because now I'm just pampered by my Celeron, or is "software bloat" and wasted memory feeding the market?
Throw me a friggin bone here!
ok?
Keep in mind that, on the day the 2GHz P4's were released, Tom's was running Intel-sponsored P4 ads on its front page. The 2Ghz P4 they overclocked to 3GHz was an engineering sample while their overclocked Athlon XP was retail. They're hardly objective.
This freaking country still hasn't adopted true broadband yet!
How many modules does this assume? As I said, "Similarly to a series electrical circuit, versus a parallel circuit, the data being requested from an RDRAM RIMM must pass through each and every one of a RIMM's chips. Likewise, when a second RIMM is added, the signal must pass not only through the first RIMM, but through each chip on the second RIMM as well. " Anyway, your quote does not conflict with mine in that it is likely assuming a single module. THink about it--Rambust IS a SERIAL technology. By definition, it cannot access in parallel, and each transaction must go through the same serial bus--hence--each chip. Quoting one website with information that actually agrees with my conclusion (but for different reasons) is not grounds to say that my statement is BS, particularly when it is not. As your sig says, a little knowledge is dangerous.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
There are some NON-desktop applications: Photoshop, Oracle, some vio processing, system emulators, but I would consider them as profession-specific applications, which are far away from to be needed on EVERY desktop.
Are you being facetious?
"640k should be enough for anyone"
The new Sysmark 2002 benchmark includes the following applications:
<snip/>
Office Productivity:
<snip/>
WinZip 8.0
Neat, my 866 just is *way* too slow at zipping up those files.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
Odd you can just about guesstimate the experience time of slashdot posters via their response in saying "we have enough already". I've heard that for 15 years now from guys with their first system that they built that they are convinced will last "forever". The question a builder should ask isn't if it answers todays stuff; rather, the question should be: In the next five years (typical bathtub curve) will this still be a viable system?
Considering reports (www.anandtech.com) from IDF on 30GHz CPUs, Tom's 2666 MHz suddenly seems measly.
Everyone here seems to be bragging about who has the smallest/oldest CPU and how thats "Just fine for me". Thus just fine for anyone else. No one cares that you are waiting for a the best slot proc to drop in price ten more dollars. How about you limit your comments to actual input rather that jizzing all over this discussion board with just how leet you can be. So you think this is more power then we need???? Fine, should Intel stop developing???? Of course not. If you are satisfied with what you have then shut up and move on to the next topic.
http://www.mample.net
I'm right now processing a track from 24 bit to 16 for an album remastering I'm doing, in the background, while reading slashdot, and my _CPU_ is barely as fast as the _bus_ of whatever they're looking at. My bus is more like 33mhz I think...
If I can do this and not think too much of it, no wonder they're not going to sell one to me... I think I'm going to be waiting around for another year or so and then picking up one of the ol' blue and white G4s maybe... gotta love being several years behind the curve, you get the same amount done but for way cheaper. That will be the point when I start running OSX and programming in something more portable to Linux and BSDs... by then I ought to be up to speed with that...
Sounds like Intel is going to become the IBM of CPUs - business-only providers, and AMD will conquer the desktop market if they do it right. And in a coupla years AMD will be the CPU-Microsoft then... Or am I seeing too many patterns again ?
-- Any sufficiently advanced level of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice
... would be to move the CDROM onto Secondary Master instead of primary slave... (See bios pic on first page...)
No Norm, those are your safety glasses; I'll wear my own thanks...
Bring your toyota/whatever short of a ferrari
and you will be *dusted*.
Viper/Vette? old school musclecar ideas with
new tech.
No nissan outruns my '67, and I can walk across the hood without denting it.
For the "we have enough speed, users don't need it" crowd (who I guess are using 128K IBM PCjrs or TRS-80 s hooked to a tv!)
Think about what you CAN'T do with the computer right now.
-Voice Recognition (with ZERO lag.)
-Completely run a computer *without* a keyboard or mouse
-Play a photo-realistic quality Quake III game, with objects generated realtime...
--Ditto for flight-sims, the best benchmark for real-world performance.
-Record video without frame-skipping...
-Realtime, DVD+ quality, on-the-fly video editing with face mapping
well,this intel/amd stability thing goes nowhere once again. Maybe a lot of you should read the hardware reviews more closely ; true : amd machines sometimes have stability problems. Reason : it apparently has something to do with the chipset more than the processor. I know of a few testers who actually built rock-solid systems based on athlons (putting it to 24/7 testing at 100% cpu) using the OTHER chipsets (SIS vs VIA).
Sorry for that.
By the way, I don't agree on the above post being a troll. Moderator must be tired - or tired of seing the same subjects come up again and again...
I care. Like hundreds of thousands of other users out there, I use numerical solvers, logic solvers and the like every day. The incredible development of the x86 processors means that I can get a machine that will do this kind of work very quickly for very little money (which is an important point for academics).
well, you're voice recognition problems are determined mainly by the fact that VR ALWAYS needs good hearing (ie a good NC mic), and no-one ever bothers with that. Believe me, a 1Ghz PIII with a load of RAM is plenty for good VR if your mic is good. define photo-realistic PROPERLY. Flight Sims? You can NEVER model real life perfectly - so give it up already. recording video without frame skipping is a piece of piss - i've been doing it for YEARS. As for your last point - what are you on about? Is that just a random string of words or are you actually trying to build a meaningful sentence there?
That was classic intercourse!
Agreed, I hear a lot of people say "I don't want an Althon, they are unstable!"
:)
I reply with "No, they aren't"
then THEY reply with "Yes they are, VIA chipsets are unstable"
/cue me beating them to death with a clue stick
(I'm sat at an SiS 735/AlthonXP 1700+ rig, no stability problems here
My company sells many, many Pentium 4 cpu's and systems, we have tested time and time again RDRAM and DDR memory on this platform (admittedly, we haven't seen this newer tech yet). Anyway, our findings in the past will probably still hold true to these newer techs and that is that while RDRAM provides higher bandwidth the latency is so high that if your applications is retreiving small amounts of data very often, the performance is very much decreased. RDRAM works great for things like games, graphics, video, etc because retrieving "large" chunks of memory is far more optimized. Most database accesses are going to return much small amounts of data, and considering the high initial latency each time, I think that the DDR will really provide a much more responsive database server. (Of course this depends on the data you're storing....)
w00t!
That was classic intercourse!
It seems to have just as many AMD FUD-spreaders too.
Look at that, a theoretical platform is roughly 50% a processor that is 1Ghz slower for only 5x as much money!
tinfoilmedia
I got one, installed a Celeron 900MHz with the low-profile fan that came with the case. It's over in the lab, not my office, so I don't have to listen to any noise from it (it's pretty quiet anyway), but one bad spot on the tight case.... everything fit in very well, EXCEPT for the Zip drive I installed in the floppy bay. Because the bay was sized for a floppy drive, there's no spare room behind the drive bay, so my Zip drive sticks out about a half an inch. runs fine, but it spoils the aesthetics of the thing.
Still, though, a very sweet little case. I give it a thumbs up, even if you do need to install a Zip drive.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
I'm not using anything from Intel with 666 in the name. ;-)
There's a problem in your idea.
Your P3 1.2ghz probably didn't produce a lot more heat than your celeron 700 did in the first place. So, you underclocked it and it ran almost as cool.
If Intel were trying for this, they wouldn't be going all out for MHZ, and nothing for performance/clock cycle. Of course, the P4's get SO hot that they automatically go down to half speed if they get hot, and they still run too hot for a fan.
You should have got a Cyrix III, which run without fans at full clock speed, and come in models faster than 700mhz celerons.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
"Until then my 700mhz Duron OC'd to 950mhz/1ghz (depending on time of year ;) ) that cost me $40 per CPU (ok so at that price I bought two, wish I'd bougthen four or five. :) ) will have to suffice."
your rendering on a duron? good luck.
"What about even transfering images from a digital camera? You know how bleeping long it takes to load previews of all images in a folder? You know, all 100-200 images? Or more? Most likely of varying resolutions to boot. How lovely."
i dont think thats really base don processor. how are you transfering them? USB? Firewire? if your using USB then yeah of course its goign to take a while. you can get a athlon system barebones for like $700 CAN that will render tonnes faster than your little duron. I myself have dual mp 1600+'s and i can load up about 1000 images in like 10 sec into a preview mode, and it only uses ONE of my cpus. Maybe you shoudl consider buying a dual system. I payed about $1100 CAN for dual mp 1600+, tyan tiger mp, and 512 ECC ddr and that was when they first came out. im sure you can find something cheaper now.
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It strikes me that what users really need are multiple processor machines for when they do regular tasks and run some other cpu intensive task in the background. The speed of the machine is no longeer important beyond a GHz if you think about it: 1GHz = 1ns period whereas 2666 MHz =
Tastes Like Chicken
A bundy stunner!! Oh, sorry, I've been re-reading "Snow Crash" again...
I don't have time to spend 4-8 hours gaming anymore, so who cares. I'll settle for 1ghz CPU with 3 gigs of RAM and 100gig HD. This whole non sense about CPU speed is so past annoying, it's not even funny. I don't plan buying a 2ghz until a complete system with plenty of RAM and HD costs 400.00 or less. For coding, 450mhz is just fine. Heck even if I use JBuilder it is fast enough. Sure every now and then I get annoyed I have to wait 10 seconds on a memory challenged machine, but wiht 512mb of RAM, that problem is solved. And if I really can't stand waiting 30 seconds, I'll just buy the full version of Jbuilder which is more than fast enough.
I think that speech data entry is inefficient and not appropriate in most office environments. Think of how noisy it would be if everyone spoke to their computers!
What would be really wonderful is a Gregg Shorthand recognition system, for palmtop, laptop, and desktop digitizer pads. It would be a lot faster than the current text recognition systems, and maybe even faster than a keyboard for prose input. I don't think that Gregg is being taught as much as it used to be, but a freely available Gregg input system would bring it back for sure. There are already several gesture recognition programs out there. Gregg is something like that.
The film speeds by at 24 fps, but there is a shutter that covers the light (xenon bulb, neat stuff) twice per frame. At 24 frames per second you can see a noticable flicker. When you see a movie on the screen, it's actually at 48Hz.
Not that I'm contradicting what you had to say, just clarifying on a point that I have authority on.
Woohoo.
I have 1024MB of PC133 SDRAM on my current computer (a KT7A-RAID) and I really fail to see how DDR RAM is going to benefit me.
I use a Kyro 2 video card, which is really lean on resources and doesn't require a ton of memory bandwidth (unlike the nVidia line of cards.) It would essentially be pointless for me to upgrade my machine with a new mobo and newer DDR RAM. It just wouldn't do anything for me.
Faster RAM is good, but when will hardware developers stop trying to use brute-force methodology with their hardware and instead start designing more efficient devices? For the mainstream, SDRAM based boards are still fine. The larger problems are slow mechanics in hard drives and inefficient 3D video cards.
I just got spam from you yesterday!
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
you and those like you is why I put in the exception for number crunchers. (no offense not trying to segregate the number crunchers) :)
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What do you mean you don't need a 10 GHz system. How the hell do you think we are going to find ET with SETI at home by cranking out packets on our spare 386 systems?