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Intel's 2.4GHz Pentium 4 Unleashed
EconolineCrush writes: "Intel has released a 2.4GHz version of its Pentium 4 processor, and The Tech Report does an excellent job comparing its performance with previous Pentium 4 processors, and the latest in AMD's Athlon XP stable. There's more to this story than just another notch on the MHz pole, as the review showcases some new benchmarks in an already diverse set of tests, and shows the new P4 leveraging an impressive performance from RDRAM-based platform. Incidentally, the slack demand for RDRAM has it almost as cheap as DDR SDRAM."
Tomshardware has also posted an article today putting it against the latest Athalon XP.
There are some benches on *NIX flavors here: link.
They aren't the most recent, but they effectively show that for us theoretical chemists, nothing beats P4+RDRAM+ifc for Gaussian98 (the timings are in minutes, not the sad seconds on most sites). Of course, more processors help, but the benchmarks looked at single chip+motherboard.
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
The FCC is very carefull about making sure people's hardware doesn't radiate and interfere with various radio services - that's why you have metal cases on boxes rather than cheapo plastic ones -
Not necessarily. The V6 GTI I bought for the wife creates more horsepower than the majority of US made SUVs which are typically based on engines that were originally designed in the 60s. Equally the V8 in my XK8 will easily outperform the V12 engine Jaguar used to use [and still do 20 Mpg arround town rather than 10]
What really matters though is the chasis the engine goes in. For example the GTI will nail any SUV in the street, even if you dropped the Jaguar engine into it. Heck you could drop the engine out of a Ferrari F40 into a Ford Exploder and the Jag would beat it round any track. To go fast arround a circuit you brakes matter as much as your engine.
Its pretty much the same when you get to MHz. A 2.4MHz processor will probably go faster than a 2.0MHz processor all things being equal. However how much faster is pretty variable and all things are usually far from equal.
Unless you have the motherboard and O/S design that will support the beast you will probably notice about as much improvement from a 2.4MHz processor as painting a go faster stripe on the box.
Unfortunately most of the O/S in common use tend to spend a lot of time in unnecessary wait states. They ask a piece of hardware to do something, guess how long it will take and poll for the result. This isn't the way it should be but it only takes one baddly written driver to stonk the whole machine.
Of course back in the days of real operating systems there were these asynchronus service traps...
The bottleneck in UNIX and Windows is the GUI interface in both cases. The Windows GUI has lots of unnecessary blocking states. X-Windows falls foul of the lousy performance of interprocess communications on most modern UNIX boxes.
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This may be redundant since I browse at 4, but I saw no mention in the entire article of the prices of the CPUs and their support hardware.
Pricewatch doesn't list 2.4Ghz P4s yet, but a P4 2.2 mb/cpu combo is $570, and the Athlon 2100 combo is under $300. The fastest Intel mb/cpu combo under $300 listed is 1.9Ghz, which can NOT keep up with an Athlon 2100 setup.
There's certainly more to a purchasing decision than price and performance, and I don't expect every article to cover every angle, but the disparity in price/performance ratios between the companies seems VERY signifiant to me.
Perhaps this article is too targeted for gamers. Business and home users will be more concerned with economy, and professional high-performance users (server/workstation/research) will probably spring for dual processors if raw throughput is so important.
In any case, I look forward to AMD's next moves.