Slashdot Mirror
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."
Now MSWord can bring up the Paperclip animation even faster...
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
Interference with the processor...?
I mean, wouldn't that just suck? Somebody walks in to the room with a new Pentium and your network dies????!!!!!
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Tomshardware has also posted an article today putting it against the latest Athalon XP.
Since they only tested with a single OS, and that OS was Windows XP(a fairly new release of a historically unstable operating system, probably rife with performance bottlenecks that are more apparent on some types of hardware than others) these benchmarks are principally useful to Microsoft Windows users.
It'd be nice to see similar tests with a couple of linux kernel variants (1.0.x, 2.2.x, 2.5.x) and some BSDs, Solaris, whatever. Just get some heterogenity in there and see what difference OSes make, hardware vendors are famous for tuning their systems to meet benchmarks after all.
--Charlie
bigger monitors/screens are better, faster modems are better...why don't CPU's follow the same rule?
I wouldn't want a 21" CPU
Or maybe:
:)
'Linux kernel 2.4.19 is out"
PS: don't forget today is 2/4
Same reason people think the "24 valve" emblem on their car makes it "go faster".
They don't even know what a valve is, let alone what the number of valves represents in engine design, but hey, 24 is more than 16.
--- witty signature
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!
Take the latest from both Intel and AMD
Run standard stuff on it, AMD moves faster at a much smaller mhz.
Run stuff optimized for P4 on it, Intel now has the advantage.
Pay through the nose for Intel's latest and greatest.
So...whenever one of them releases a chip it comes down to do you run something that is intel optimized where you would get the performance boost? Also, do you want Intel on Intel, which'll work with 99.9% of stuff out there, or do you want to save a bundle and get AMD on Via/AMD/AliMagic/Whatever and have some possible incompatabilities?
...reports of fatal data collisions are up 300% today, due to little 1's and 0's comming down off a 2400mhz processor slamming into 333mhz ram and careening down to a 33mhz PCI bus...that's GOTTA hurt!
:-)
Are you kidding... I'd love it if Intel were able to reduce the size of their chips!
Note: That was sarcasm for the humor impaired.
a) 2.4 GHz
b) 2.4 Megabit
c) 2.4 ERA
d) 2.4 Linux Kernel
e) Article 2 Section 4 of the US Constitution
f) 2.4 Cowboy Neals
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
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.
...i'll quit while i'm ahead...
You have essentially identified the root of many, many problems, for example, in my world, I personally consider these issues to be very important:
1) Why don't people listen to Ralph Nader?
2) Why do people listen to Britney Spears?
3) Why do people eat Vitamin C and Echinacea in massive quantities?
4) Why do some people believe Creationism belongs in public schools?
5) Why is Prozac(tm) legal and marijuana illegal?
The discussion required to analyze these issues last longer than 30 seconds, so instead:
1) 97% of the voting bloc votes republicrat
2) Britney spears has sold millions of albums
3) Herbal remedies run rampant w/nearly zero clinical support
4) Evolution is market for extermination by some board's of education
5)
Anything that takes longer than 30 seconds to understand is far beyond the Oprah-fried brains of the masses.
What makes us think the masses would care about facts?
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Why are we comparing a ~$600 chip (P4) to a ~$250 chip (Athlon)? Sure, it's fun for a little ego brawl to see who has the fastest chip on the block, but this has little practical information for the consumer. All this says for Intel is "Hey look, I can build a slightly faster chip for SSE2 optimized apps for 250% more!". I'm not impressed. It's not only the MHZ that don't matter, the AMD "model numbers" should be irrelevant too. What really matters is price/performance. I'd rather see a ~$250 Athlon benchmarked against a ~$250 P4. Then simply mention that if you want P4's fastest offering, you can plunge $600 for it.
We don't compare the MHZ or model numbers between the Geforce and Radeon video cards - we only compare price and performance. The same should go for CPU's.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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.