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."

Comments

Desktop?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Desktop?!?

[Cyno]

Hardware doesn't advance because geeks want to encode mp3s or write java apps. Hardware advances because of money, and hype is used to generate that. So, yes, my grandma NEEDS a 3Ghz system so one day I'll be able to afford a 10Ghz system. If we don't buy them, forcing our chipmakers out of business, then we won't have new hardware to play with next month.

Re:Desktop?!?

[tcc]

>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'm doing 3D animation, the fastest, the less hours I spend waiting for my renders to come out. That's ONE application... it's not because you're still playing tradewars in ascii on an XT that some other people won't benefit from advances in technologies.

In your everyday life, other technologies benefit from it, CAD benefit from it, movies studio benefit from more power, Science, etc. I can't beleive some people are SO much self-centered that they pull out comments like this (neither moderators modding the parent up), I mean, if you have the IQ to come here and read the articles, how can you think like that?

Granted, these changes are kinda pointless for most people, after 1GHZ cpu and a geforce2, you don't need much more to enjoy what most end user technologies have to offer, but there are still DESKTOP users out there that enjoys powerfull machines for other things than showing off :), just ask any hobbyist 3d animator for example, and no, buying a lot of cheap machines to do a renderfarm doesn't always cut it, at least not when you want to preview some effects like volumetrics before sending them to a final render.

$0.02

Re:Desktop?!?

[pdp11e]

I could not agree more!
Every now and then one can find opinions like: Nobody normal needs such speed or that much of memory... I can still remember zealous defenders of "good ol' 286" and their arguments that 386 is "unnecessary complication".
I agree that every new development of the cpu muscle is usually wasted on making office assistant doing more fancy tricks. However, a new hardware development eventually gets employed for the more useful purposes.
Geeks that frequent this board often discuss things like DV cameras and editing video material. Only few years ago such things were reserved for expensive SGI-s. Today you can do it on a platform with the price tag below $1k (only hardware though).
Bottom Line: Every new breakthrough in technology is Good Thing (TM). It means that by the time it hits consumer market, geeks will have plenty of inexpensive toys to play with.

Re:Desktop?!?

[pdp11e]

My 386 DID run faster than any 286. It was 33 MHz :). Granted, early adopters had no benefits in DOS applications.
You made the valid point that "some hardware development has a much higher payoff than others" but I am not sure it applies to 386. Protected mode, introduced by 386 is THE advancement that enabled "modern" OS-s on consumer desktop. One may argue that X86 architecture was the worst possible one to start with (bunch of legacy crap: 1Mb barmier, etc, etc), but it is the standard accepted by the market. I would say that this particular development brought handsome payoff at least to Intel.

As for your remark about "OS and Apps that don't run 'fast enough' on any existing hardware" it is hen or egg seniority paradox. Every new generation of software prompts (commercial) development of hardware and vice versa. Conspiracy theoreticians drool about unholy alliance between hardware and software vendors. Funny thing is that they are probably right. However, the end result is that we have more powerful computers at affordable prices. Computer hardware is one of the few things that has millions of engineer-hours behind its development and still sells for peanuts.

Need and want:

[swordboy]

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.

Re:Need and want:

[JPriest]

Actually what users *need* is faster HDD read/write time. 3 GHz will not make much of a difference for the users pulling the data from a 5400 RPM and running it on a $20 OEM motherboard.

Re:Need and want:

[ergo98]

Even the most cutting edge 3D games don't use current 3D processors to their potential, these days.

What games are you playing? Firstly, of course games are usually limited by the lowest common denominator (meaning that you severely limit the polygon count if 50% of the population is using the Virge 3D), but secondly there are some games that seriously tax current hardware: An excellent example is "Operation Flashpoint", which on a GeForce 3 Ti200 has a visibly stuttering frame rate at 1024x768/32-bit colour with a reasonable set of options (I'd say that the frame rate is from 10-25 FPS), yet even that game represents a massive set of compromises: Visibility is limited to 800m or so, there is a limited number of units in a set area, land is mostly defined by textures rather than polygons as polygons are too expensive. Even in the venerable Quake 3 with the mod urban terror, some of the maps (which still represent a massive collectin of compromises) send the previously mentioned video card begging for mercy in parts (and Q3 is OLD). And 1024x768 is hardly a great resolution, and of course if you want to use FSAA you'd better knock down to 800x600. Saying that "cutting edge" games don't use the hardware to its potential makes me presume that the most demanding game you've played is The Sims (though even it can get stuttery when you have fully decked out a multi-level house, and it is hardly an example of photo-realism).

The "too much power" argument has always been flawed, going back to when the 486 was introduced and countless pundits exclaimed that a 386/33DX was all anyone needed. This same argument has gone on, foolishly, since the beginning of computers I'm sure. Actually probably back to the abacus.

Why AMD won the battle before it even began

[Mr. Uptime]

As Tom Pabst, a speed addict himself, was quoted as saying, anything above 1Ghz is nothing but overkill for most users.

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

Re:Why AMD won the battle before it even began

[Anonymous Coward]

Your logic is astounding, sir. Or, it would be, if people didn't keep buying faster chips. Logic doesn't matter here.

Neither does Tom pabst. No average consumer gives a damn what one computer guru says, or whoever the hell Tom pabst is. They care what the stoned, look-you-got-a-dell kid has to say, and in a couple months, he's gonna say you want that 2GHz Dell. Adveritisng is everything. And Intel's ad budget is big.

Re:Why AMD won the battle before it even began

[darkwiz]

Nothing above 1GHz is needed right now for most users. However, history has shown us that every time we say this (processors are faster than they need to be, blah blah blah), someone comes out with killer apps that drive the need for faster machines. You know by the time Warcraft 4 (or its equivalent) comes out, 1GHz will be painful to run it on.

Until we have machines that can perform (near) perfect speech control/dictation, face recognition (in real time, reading expressions), and can make realistic holograms (ala STNG Holodeck), I will not even begin to believe that CPU's have come far enough.

In the meantime, AMD rides the gravy train.

Re:Why AMD won the battle before it even began

[Brian Stretch]

Most people don't need $40K+ SUVs and what not, but they're fun. (Well, they look fun, I drive an old Buick and spend my money on technotoys...) Compared to the cost of one of those, what's $1K-$2K every year or two for a state-of-the-art PC? (Monitor extra, natch.)

Which is AMDs contribution: bringing the price of heavy desktop computing firepower down to "Why not?" prices. And my HDTV PCI card chews serious CPU time, so having several hundred MHz to spare is rather nice.

On investing in AMD stock: speaking as a 2+ year AMD shareholder, if you buy in, prepare yourself to be in it for the longhaul and for the insane price swings. AMD is one of the most manipulated stocks on the market. It's insanely undervalued right now, but there's absolutely no way to tell when its valuation will reflect reality.

Maybe the Hammers will do the trick. At the least they'll beat the crap out of those souped-up P4s Intel let Tom play with :-).

Re:Why AMD won the battle before it even began

[fiftyfly]

I think you've nearly touched on an important point:

We don't really need systems that are any faster, unless they're orders of magnitude faster .

What we need now (until some bloke figures out something new & spiffy to tax a P10 or an athlon whatever) are systems that are rather more flexible. Right now cost is a pretty significant limit agent, as is reliability.

Come to think of it what we really need are appliances that cost $99, work more reliably then my toaster & can, with minimal fuss & expense relapce my worprocessor, PVR, fax, email station, cd burning station etc.

Re:Why AMD won the battle before it even began

[Alan Partridge]

the problem here is that you can identify and replicate the EXACT specifications of your IBM or Compaq box for around half the cost with a self-build. putting it another way, you could upgrade a self-build TWICE as often. It's all IBM and Compaq's fault for offering NO ADDED VALUE in their systems - they could be and should be offering more than you could build yourself - that they aren't is a testament to the failure of their management teams - sooner or later they will have to leave the market - IBM lost over a BILLION dollars on desktop PCs last year...

Great Server, Silly Desktop

[billstewart]

This sounds like a really nice high-end compute server machine to support a herd of developers, as long as you give it enough RAM and Disk Drive and the 300 Watt Turbo-Charged Fan. I don't want it anywhere near my desk - put it in some server room somewhere. (In my current office environment, that means "back in the mailroom next to the Really Loud Xerox Machine".)

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.

My wishes for the next-generation desktop...

[DocSnyder]

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 ;-)

Doesn't Nforce do dual channel now?

[Deathlizard]

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.

Unfair post

[Glonk]

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.

hardly "next generation"

[Bobartig]

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.

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 /.'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".

"My reports repaginate in .013 seconds, whereas your puny PIII machine takes almost a tenth of a second!!!"