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."

Comments

pushing MHz

[recursiv]

While astute computer users know that raw MHz does not automatically translate to application/game speed, not so in the case of the typical user.

When AMD broke ahead of Intel in the MHz race, their marketing department was quick capitalize on this with a media blitz that even included some TV commercials.

However, now that Intel once again taken the lead in the MHz race, astutely AMD has once again retreated its marketing tactics to the knowledgeable and computer savvy.

Every unbiased hardware review page has said pretty much the same thing, clock cycle for clock cycle the AMD is still faster. However, the average computer buyer is still tied down to the more is better idea.

And honestly, that is something that is hard to refute. More RAM is better, bigger HDs are better, bigger monitors/screens are better, faster modems are better...why don't CPU's follow the same rule?

The answer is a pretty complicated one and to explain that would require some basic knowledge that you just can't squeeze into a 30 second commercial. AMD has made noise about a marketing campaign that will educate the public, however so far it has been just that, noise.

Re:pushing MHz

[wik]

I'd argue that in the future, it's going to go down even another level in the memory hierarchy: the network.

I store a lot of my information on remote filesystems (or, yuck, access it through a web browser). How many people use their machines just for email (maybe stored on an IMAP server) or browsing the web? The CPU and even the disk are sitting on their thumbs here. I think that if I finally get one of those palmtop PC's, it's only going to be remote display for something that is stored/running on another machine, just like how I use my laptop now. Sadly, there is no easy upgrade that will "double your network".

In the (database) server market, you're going to find a horrible bottleneck at the memory system, outside the L2 (or L3) caches. Disks, fortunately, are an easy problem to solve. Just throw more spindles at the machine and make sure your database is balanced across them. The number of requests you have hitting the machine can hide the latency of each individual disk. The same sort of thing will not help the PC, since just about everything you do on the PC, to first order, is single-threaded and waiting for an IO to complete (e.g. loading the mozilla binary into memory).

Seriously what's the point.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got an AMD XP 1500+, and an Intel 1.13GHz Laptop and both are faster than I need by far. 800Mhz to 1GHz is all that anyone needs for standard apps. Hell if people would focus on improving the existing apps instead of adding more bloatware we'd need 1/2 of that. (My all anyone needs comment is too similar to the 640K comment from our hero billy g.)

Hell most the clients of my company have pentium class computers and access us via the web. They have no problems outside of bandwidth limitations. Speed is an insignificant issue.

Re:Another Article

[Anonymous Coward]

are you from Texas?

ugh... athalon... sigh...

Re:What's up with the number 2.4??

[felipeal]

Or maybe:

'Linux kernel 2.4.19 is out"

PS: don't forget today is 2/4 :)

If a tree falls in the woods and no one's around..

[moofdaddy]

At risk of sounding like bill gates (no one will ever need more than 64k of ram...) do that many people really care if the mhz line has been pushed forward another couple of yards? In the past it has seemed that the software industry has kept right up with the hardware companies. When they release a new video card they jump on it, a new processor, etc. Now it seems that the hardware companies have gotten so far ahead of the software industry that its going to take years before they take advantage of this. The only people a processor like this will benifit are those doing serious computations in photoshop, digital video or mathamatica and those industry professionals aren't using pentiums anyway. I'm not really sure what my point really is, just that it seems like this war between amd and intel is really pointless. No one is going to need or use this speed for years.

Re:If a tree falls in the woods and no one's aroun

[guiding_knight]

Yes, but if we get a few years down the road and dont have the processors fast enough to handle our software, hardware developers will be in a crunch. Really not much harm done by letting the hardware get ahead so we have the technology when we need it, not to mention getting it to work well, instead of having a quickly developed high-tech piece of crap when we suddenly need some extra speed.

Re:802.11b is on 2.4Ghz.....

[mprinkey]

It's been shown before that electromagnetic interference from processors can show up in a radio if you listen on the same frequency of the processor.

That is very true. Several years ago, I was working on an antenna design project at a university. We had a spectrum analyzer and a small antenna test rig. Even if I connected a low gain antenna to the unit, I could see spikes at all of the "computer" frequencies...20, 25, 33, 50, 60, 66, 75, 90, 100, 133 MHz. Those were the heady days of the fast 486 and the first- and second-generation Pentium I.

Just to check that it was coming from the neighboring engineering building, I put a directional antenna and could "detect" which computers were in which floors. The undergrad lab had all of the crap 33 MHz boxes. The grad lab on a different floor had the 100s and 133s.

Seen better

[room101]

I didn't really like this review because the number of variables weren't reduce sufficently. He compares the older P4s with DDR SDRAM to the New P4 with RDRAM.

I still don't really know how the new and old P4s compare. For all I know, it might be the memory difference.

I understand that you probably can't get the new P4s with DDR SDRAM, but he should have used RDRAM on the old ones to compare, not DDR SDRAM. Both would have been fine, so you can compare those as well.

Where the speed will go

[Pussy Is Money]

Many people are talking about the need for a new killer app to use all this speed. Some people say that killer app has already arrived in the form of video and other signal processing tasks. Ultimately I don't think that is how it works though. I think most of the processing power will just be absorbed by a much more diffuse and amorphous collection of tasks and requirements than just a single "killer app". For example:

• Windows NT. Many people (and most gamers) are still running Win9x. For a variety of reasons, these people will want to migrate to NT/XP/Happy Meal in the future. That takes processing power, both directly and indirectly (e.g. NT uses more memory, which means the OS has to move around more memory, which means it needs a faster CPU, etcetera).
• Improved human computer interaction and other "soft" areas such as localization and internationalization. For convenience I'm including things like 200dpi displays and input devices with very high sampling rates/throughput as well as sane error messages and effective automated troubleshooting -- think Clippy, or the IBM effort towards "self managing" systems (if I got the term right).
• Increased focus on/awareness of security. It is nice if the computer prevents people from tampering with your data by verifying credentials at every step. It also means the computer has to verify credentials at every step.
• Interpreted applications. Someone described Internet Explorer as an "advanced interpreter" on Slashdot the other day. That is a very accurate characterization. Think also of things like Flash, Java(script), and VB.
• Bloat (or, what most of you guys would call bloat -- I don't think many of you could or would want to design their own fonts). Think of things like document templates, fonts (and complex font rendering technology) and desktop backgrounds (200dpi desktop images anyone?). Think also of the incorporation of "real world" quantities into software; things like measurements (pixels, inches, cm), "favorites" lists, ISP lists, stock media, etcetera.
• Backward compatibility, both on the hardware as on the software level. This includes thunking layers, virtual machines, emulators, and what not. Open source software, incidentally, can avoid some of the cost of backward compatibility, because when you change a piece of software, you can usually simply recompile software which depends on it. It is truly remarkable how much code any random application contains because of the requirement for binary backward compatibility.

Obviously this is just a very fragmented list and there is a lot of overlap in the things I mentioned as well. Still you have to ask, why is it that a 2 GHz machines can take anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds just to boot up? That is more than it used to take my CP/M Bondwell to start up Wordstar. And that was over fifteen years ago. Just a thought.