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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."
Now MSWord can bring up the Paperclip animation even faster...
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
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
...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!
:-)
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.
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.
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