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Intel, OEMs Face Lawsuit For Megahertz Marketing
prostoalex writes "A group of PC owners filed a lawsuit against Intel, Gateway and HP, stating that companies spread misleading information about Pentium 4 processor performing faster than Pentium 3 or Athlon. The complaint alleges that 'the Pentium 4 is less powerful and slower than the Pentium III and/or the AMD Athlon.' PC World has more details in its story." I wonder if the same litigants have a suit against the USPS for ads leading one to expect prompt service from courteous, competent employees.
Well, it would be interesting to see them succeed, but I don't see it happening. Exactly what damages are they claiming?
-- If it ain't broke - overclock it more.
For 34 cents, someone will pick up a letter from my doorstep, put it on a plane, fly it across the country, and deliver it to someone else's doorstep. Seems like a good deal to me.
The Pentium 4 makes the Internet Run Faster !!!
- DenialX
Speeds should be measured by overall system performance, not the speed of the CPU.
I am Lord Snowbeam. Heed my call!
Upon reading the article, they do specify some damage limits by California law, but not what the suit is claiming..
The amounts do appear to be *rather low* on the maximums...
Does anyone think that a mere $75,000 in damages each for a "small group of PC Owners" would be enough to push Intel to advertise truthfully, even if they were to lose the case?
-- If it ain't broke - overclock it more.
... a class action suite against Microsoft because WindowsXP isnt any better ExPerience than any other version of Windows.
:)
Seriously though...
WTF? So AMD doesn't even use Mhz rating anymore so they get away with saying 'mines's is better?'
But guess what? the P4 DOES bench faster on some benchmarks than the p3 and Athlon, likewise, the p3 does better in a few, and Athlon does the best in still other things.
Anyway, its not like the processor's slowing the machine down. "It's the DRIVES, stupid!"
[Leary]"Does this mean I can sue Dan Fogelburg for making me a pussy in the mid 1970s!?"[/Leary]
"I wonder if the same litigants have a suit against the USPS for ads leading one to expect prompt service from courteous, competent employees."
Just because your gay magazine subscription arrives late, it does not necessarily mean that it is the fault of the postman.
When the P4 came out I had to stop and say to myself, "Self, what the hell." I understood the engineering logistics of why we had more MHz and slower actual speed, IPC, LBC, IHOP, etc. But, a side of me said Intel marketing people put on the bunny suits and hit the clean room and said hey, just give us more MHz.
But I got over it, what is wrong with these people? I smell money grubbers.
Quite frankly, AMD should step up to the plate with Intel on this and so should every other CPU maker incase this ever comes back on them. Esp. AMD with their current PR 1900+ lingo. Check out Ars's coverage of this story where you see what I have seen, the lacky sales clerk saying No no, 1900+ means 1.9 GHz, even though the sign says different.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
This case is almost too stupid to comment on. Its not misleading to say your processor is as fast as it is, in actual MHz. Its up to the consumer to be smart enough to realize that MHz are not the end all. Whoever is taking this to court is dumb as a rock. ~geogeek
These people are 100% right. The early pentium 4's at 1.4 1.5 and 1.6 MHzs were slower then the Pentium III's at 1.0, 1.13 and 1.2 Mhzs at certains tasks mainly running office apps. and number intensive programs because of the architecture of the FPU on the P4 and several other reasons. ALL P4's are slower than Athlons at the same clock speed, and Intel blatantly lies about this. All you have to do is run some benchmarks to prove this. Now if the P4 cost less than the Athlon it would be okay, but the P4 is more expensive. So intel is useing its reputation to screw uneducated consumers into buying more expensive and slower processors. They deserve to be sued. My only problem with this lawsuit is that EVERYONE knows all this already, so if you are stupid enough to buy a P4 you deserve to be screwed.
Can we also sue AMD for those lame "Athlon 2100+" markings, which aren't the clock speed, and for bullying motherboard makers into NOT displaying the clock frequency of their chips?
revs and horse-power if you use the car engine analogy. Just because it can get higher cycles per second doesn't mean it does "useful" work. In fact, thermodynamically speaking, you can probably measure the efficiency of a chip by its heat dissipation.
The problem is that Intel is stuck in a marketing problem of its own design in that by going all-out for Moore's Law they've emphasised the internal clock frequency rather than the system efficiency (think memory latency). Not much use if you've got a super-charger if the fuel lines can't keep up (one reason why SGI still excels at bandwidth intensive tasks despite the lower clock speed).
LL
Class action law suites are about law firms making money and almost never return anything substantial to the "class". I must have been in 10 classes over the last ten years and none of them provided any meaningful settlement to the class (IMO). The law frms on the other hand made a killing.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
discussion at ArsTechnica
OK, I'm quite familiar with the fact that MHZ is a bad speed rating for a CPU in the sense that it does not always correlate with performance (i.e., 50% more MHZ does not always equal 50% better speed). Any computer scientist/engineer worth his salt has heard a thousand times that if you really want to know how a system is going to perform, test it out on *your* target workload.
This is like suing the Big Three over the fact that horsepower is a terrible measure of a car's performance/power/speed because other factors (tires, the four fatass guys in the back, whatever) can make the "50% more horsepower" not add up to "50% more power".
Tastes like burning! - Ralph Wiggum
I wish someone would. So I could sue the NYC MTA transit authority. The people working the token booths are some of the most abnoxiously rude people I've ever encountered.
Do not read this
Thanks for your insightful comment on the USPS, Timothy. It will certainly help keep the conversation intelligent and on topic.
I'm not an Intel fan, but as far as I see it, their claims are legitimate. They say their chips run at a certain Mhz, and that may be true, despite the fact that the performance may not be as good as a slower speed Athlon.
For example, let's get a 4cyl engine next to a 8cyl engine. You COULD redline the 4cyl at say 6000RPMS and only run the 8cyl at about 5000RPM. Most likely, the 8cyl will still perform better than the 4cyl running at 1000RPM faster. (Just an illustration, I dont know how accurate an actuall test would result)
While I don't agree that clock speed soley determines the overall performance of a computer, Intel may be telling the truth when they say they have the FASTEST CLOCKED cpu, but other claims after that may get them in trouble. Sure, their P4 runs at 2.2 or whatever the max speed is now and if you were to gauge it, it'd be correct. I think this is just a case of consumers needing to be more educated in shopping for computers.
This does bring up an question. If we disreguard cpu speed as a selling point and use overal performance rating, judging computers becomes more subjective. Just changing out RAM, or chipsets, or some other small item can make a significant difference in a PC's value. More reason to build your own system.
$cat
And how is the p4 slower than the P3??
Besides, it is sad to see that people seem to have forgotten to think for themselves and not rely on corporate propaganda, whether from VA Software, Intel or Hewlett-Packard.
One has to wonder wether we would have moved on to asyncronous computing by now, at least inside the core, if marketing didn't need to push the clock speed.
We've already seen that this silly chase for faster clocks has caused certain processor makers to abandon computational efficiency in favor of getting to 3ghz as soon as possible. What other engineering breakthroughs have we missed out on because we're too obsessed with fast clocks?
--
Preview should do a spell check. It can't possibly be more then 30 or so lines of code. Highlight the potential misspellings, and provide a list of suggestions below the comment. They wouldn't even have to do the hard part, since there are great scriptable spell checkers already available for free. I'm tired of cutting and pasting my posts through ispell
Lawyers inside!
First -- what specific, bogus claims has Intel made about P4 performance? A literalist might suggest that Intel claims that P4's help game performance in alien spacecraft, but that's a little hard to falsify, as far as I know, and probably wouldn't fly (unless, say, the plaintiffs include a bona fide literally minded extra-terrestial of the Roswellus anthroabductus variety).
/might/ be considered puffery as it's a fairly vapid claim (does "the internet" include, say, running the Flash / Shockwave / Java applets that abound online?).
/have/ been making specific, non-puffery, bogus claims however, then I wouldn't mind seeing them smacked around for it, so long as the same reasoning gets applied in other cases as well.
Second -- it's a generally established principle ("puffery") that commercials are allowed to exaggerate to some degree. Chevy can claim that their vehicles are tough, "like a rock", which is a far less specific claim than, say, "this product is so tough that it can be driven two hundred thousand miles without maintenance" or "its windows will withstand sustained 9x19mm fire: perfect for the urban gangland outing". "Making the internet run faster"
If they
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
when Mr. Tom underclocked the P4 to see how it matched up against an Athlon or P3 with the same Ghz. It wasn't a pretty picture for the P4. You'll have to go look at the archives for fun though. It's a nice laugh!
Just recently I had a neighbor hire me to do a concept animation of a machine he was going to build. I used truespace 5.2. It was insanely detailed down to individual links on the bicycle
chain drive.
The poly count got so high that my P4 was going to take 3 days to render it. My computer could hardly handle moving around in the scene anymore. I told the neighbor I had brought the scene as far as it could go on my P4
and I couldn't go any further without a new machine. He gave me $2500 to work with so this was what I built.
Dual Xeon P4 2.0ghz
1 Gig RDRAM
Maxtor 80gig IDE drive
DVD-R(by his request)
The system definetly cut the rendering time down, to 24 hours,but something just didn't feel right about the new render time. I could
have bought 2 more p4 1.4ghz and accomplished the same for less. What really got me was when my friend rendered the scene on his single athalonMP 2200.
14 hours
A single athalonMP 2200 was smokin my dual xeon setup! Well, this is all it took for me to write off intel forever. Intel fuck you and your shitty CPU's, you've lost my trust forever!
Anyone that is even considering using a Intel solution as a renderstation, please don't waste the money. You can do a lot more with a lot less using AMD.
And remember, the Pentium 3 "opened the door" to the Internet!!!
What did the Pentium 2 do?
Blue skies, Barthy Burgers, girls...
While most Slashdot readers see through computer marketing hype, the average person (you know, the other 99%) doesn't have the time or the inclination to do real research on every PC component they purchase. Is that Intel's fault? No. Is it Intel's moral responsibility to at the very least not imply that a 1.8GHz P4 isn't faster than a 1.6GHz Athlon, or a 1.4GHz P3 Tualatin? Yes.
How many advertisements from the companies in question had lines like, "Tired of that old 1GHz PC? Get the latest 1.5GHz screamer!"
I believe that the primary complaint was that people were being misled into thinking that, say, a 1.6GHz P4 system is 60% faster than a 1GHz Athlon or P3, which is definitely not the case unless the only application the system runs is Q3, or a few of the rather limited number that the P4 runs very well. While I don't believe any vendor really explicitly stated anything similar to "a 2.0GHz system is necessarily twice as fast as a 1.0GHz system!", the companies did imply such a conclusion by comparing clockspeeds (without coming to any conclusion except the higher clockspeed is fast, though not saying "faster") or by using ads with lines that implied the same.
One can be misleading without blatantly lying.
Whether the companies in question were just unethical or did something illegal is the question. I would hazard a guess that the lawsuit has no strong legal grounds.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
MGhz for Mghz a RISC chip kicked the shit out of CISC and stole their lunch money. If I'm not mistaken, they still do. Oh course you can't make the same comparison today. The Pentium II and Pentium III series use other techniques internally to boost throughput.
In any case, there was talk back then of using processor benchmarks instead of Mhz. This is not all that new.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Built the door?
Are Mhz a misleading figure? Yeah. But that's because people associate higher clockspeed with higher overall speed. Intel and the rest shouldn't be held responsible for someone's own interpretation. Sure, in the past a higher clock did normally mean a faster comp. But thank's to AMD, this is no longer true. It's just like the bit system when it came to videogames. There was a time when a 16-bit system did look better then a 8-bit, purely for the reason of it's bit-count. Nowadays the console manufactures don't even advertise how many bits their system is. Instead they choose to advertise by listing how many polygons per second their system can do with absolutely no effects, textures, etc. One would then think that PS2 would have the best graphics, afterall, they said it could to some ungodly high number or polygons per second (60 million?). But no, it doesn't, x-box beats it in my opinion, and gamecube has better rendering. But even if it could do that many polygons in the real word; it could still look worse then gamecube. *Ecscuse any errors; i am not a videogame geek.
Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive.
Running OS X, it takes about double the clock on the Mac side to equal the speed of Windows 2000 on a PC. (Thus, it takes a Mac at 1ghz to run OS X as fast as a 500mhz PIII runs Windows 2000). This is the exact opposite of Apple's claims.
It really is not fair to the consumer, especially the more novice-type users who tend to buy Macs. I recently visited my family who has two Macs, and they could not believe how fast web browsing was on my wintel laptop. Keep in mind my laptop is about 2 years old!
Run hampster! Run!
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
No, I'm pretty sure The(r) Door(tm) was designed on a Mac.
Indeed. I was in NY for the first time last week. I bought a metro card for all-day travel. Unfortunately I got on to the wrong platform, so realising my mistake I left and crossed the road to enter the opposite platform. The turnstile said "just used" when I swiped the card. I asked the token-booth woman why and she said
"Didn't anyone tell you about the 18 minute rule"?
"What 18 minute rule?" I replied
"You can't use the card twice in any 18 minute period."
"No, nobody explained that, I just used the machine over there to buy one. I went onto the wrong platform. Can you let me onto the platform please?"
"No."
After a lot of arguing I thought 'fuck it' and got a taxi. On the whole I really enjoyed NYC, the only two things that pissed me off were that woman, and the fact the platforms aren't air-conditioned. It was like a furnace at the 34th Penn station.
Yeah, the internet wants to get away from those Pentium 4's really badly!
Centralization breaks the internet.
In latin, Let the buyer beware. It's also a central principle in common law. Courts have recognized since the Romans that the buyer has a responsiblity to ask the right questions. The courts can only intervene where there is a blatent attempt to decieve.
This is just like automakers marketing SUV's as safer than sedans [when hitting a wall straight on]. Sure they are safer when you hit a wall straight on. Now, rolling over, tire blowouts, and repair costs, they are not included in the benchmark. Nor is fuel economy.
But as a bonus, you can get one of those funny propellers for the tow hitch, and 0% financing...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
We all believe you. Macs are sooooooo sloooowwwwwww.....
PS: Your mother is an obese whore.
At my work we got in about 60 IBM Thinkpads to set up for the students there.
:)
The students and parents bought the Thinkpads and we set them up.
One set - P3 256-640 MB of RAM
One set - P4-M 256-640 MB of RAM
From an Altiris image the Thinkpads with P3s took about 30 minutes to image and finish.
The P4-M Thinkpads took 56-68 minutes to image.
Same networking setup for the switches used in imaging, same number of hops.
The P4-Ms are much slower at some tasks.
The Powerbooks and iBooks I imaged from Firewire took 6 minutes each. But that is a different flamewar
Intel and competitor AMD for years leapfrogged each other by launching new CPUs at higher MHz speeds, until last year, when the latter firm introduced the so-called PR rating. This claims to measure the performance of a chip by reference to the real world results of applications, rather than just raw speed.
:)
This may be the case, but AMD actually make it look like their CPUs are faster than they really are, where as Intel jsut displays the true MHz rating. A lot of people complained when AMD did this because it hid the true Mhz rating rom the consumer, and now they are doing exactly the opposite? Far enough!
Any court which tackles this kind of case will have to face the horrors of benchmarketing, a quicksand that has trapped many over the years.
Yes, this is going to be a huge problem, probably because benchmarks are honed to certain aspects of the system. There is no such thing as real world benchmarks, because the real world is so diverse anyway, so what are they going to base this on?
Chooseing a PC based on Mhz ratings is much like choosing a car based on how it looks in hte showroom and what the car sales man tells you. How many people buy a car without taking it for a test drive? In this case, almost all PC shops will allow you to have a play with a PC before any purchase is made. Yes this may be hard when buying mail order, but go into a shop, and have a look round.
As for any potential arguement that Intel was producing false advertisments, i bet Intel can trot out benchmarks which make the P4 perform jsut the way it said it would but in "ideal circumstances". Just how much advertising actually does what it says truely? Has anyone really had refined pores in 7 days? Has anyone really lost 20 stone while on a advertised diet in 2 days? I doubt it
What about:
1. Taking AMD to court for not forcing motherboard manufacturers to implement mb shutdown due to heat - especially taking in consideration the heat the AMD processors operate at.
2. Taking AMD to court for contradictory technical documents. Is anybody out there capable of differentiating between MP and XP at the bios level.
3. Taking AMD to court for incompetent technical support. One day they say non-recommended motherboards can screw up the warranty of the processors, the next day they "re-phrase" the answer, and say, they'll work with the customer to fix any problems.
4. Taking both AMD and Tyan to court for misleading the public - Tiger S2460 is "NOT" a recommended AMD/SMP platform inspite what Tyan claims, and inspite AMD failure to warn the public that Tyan claims otherwise - call it "internal politics".
I seem to recall that Mosaic was originally written on a NeXT machine, and the designer of the HTTP protocol (whose name escapes me at the moment) used one as well.
That could be an interesting precedent for this case.
When mechanical typewriters first came out, the keys were arrange alphabetically. Secretaries would get so fast at typing, they would jam the keys. Back to the drawing board, someone [name escapes me] layed out the keyboard to be monsterously innefficient. The vowels are scattered all over the place. It favors left-handers. The only "enhancement" to the QWERTY keyboard is the fact you can type TYPEWRITER using the top row.
Like all standards, once set in, it is not easily dislodged. Rather like a certain Office Suite and Operating System.
On the other level is the fact that the slowest part of the computer, far from the drives, the RAM, the baud rate of the modem, is THE USER. Humans can only process information at 12 frames per second, and can only process signals less than 22Khz. We have between 5 and 9 registers for processing information (YMMV) with a latency that exceeds 1 second! Our eyes can only see to about 300DPI, and can recognize about 1 million colors.
Short of plug in the back of the head, computers are never going to get any faster for the average mammal than they are right now. Our senses can't process any of the extra speed, color, or fidelity.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Sure, per MHz a P3/Athon is faster than a P4. BUT the P4 is (at least in general) the fastest processor you can buy today because it can run a much higher clock speeds. These days with AMD using the PR rating to denote the equivalent speed of their processors the playing field is reasonably level (comparing the MHz of a P4 to the PR rating of an Athlon) so I don't see what all the fuss is about.
We should sue just about every software company for the crappy products they put out. When was th last time you were impressed with something or had it run bug-free? My PC has benn plenty fast for years now, but when will the software catch up?
For me it was KDE2. But I didn't pay for KDE. From my word processor to the OCR that came with my scanner, there is so much junk sortware it's depressing.
Mozilla 1.0 came close.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Well to some degree. The Chip makers are playing the numbers game we all know it. They will try to tell the consumer that 1.6 GHz is better than 1 GHz because there is a 600 MHz advantage. Most NEW computer buyers don't even know what a Hertz is besides a rental car company! The little companies are a bit pissed because the "Big Guys" are winning the money from ignorant consumers by making them believe only the numbers matter not the applications or even the OS!
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Its almost like choosing a truck over a sportscar because the truck has a bigger engine.
Its better to look at price / real performance.
HTTP/1.1 400
Overclockers everywhere are forming class action lawsuits against all major chip manufacturers because the chips aren't running at the advertised speeds... :)
Someone needs to start a class action lawsuit against lawyers for promoting frivolous class action lawsuits.
At the time the P4 came out, AMD's Athlon processors were SMOKING Intel, and that is Intel's fault, they certainly could employ enough engineers to destroy AMD. Fact is, they got lazy. Previously AMD processors hadnt been as stable as Intel and they could still sell on that point but to AMD's credit by the time the Athlon came out it was a stable platform (still had a couple minor issues). And Intel was worried.
... Anyways, this is really like putting more tires on your car. It SOUNDS like more, but you ain't goin any faster, the fact is that 4 execution units and 4 wheels is about as many as people will ever need. The problem is, that it becomes impossible to schedule instructions for 8 units, having 8 instruction units is essentially saying, your code should have 8 seperate threads [using the term threads loosely] that dont depend on eachother to avoid interlocks ... *IMPOSSIBLE*. Second of all, intel stretched their pipeline to 40+ stages, this means that the penalty for pipeline stall, branch perdiction miss, context switch, etc is *HUGE*. AMD's Athlon pipeline was a lean 7 stages.
What Intel has been doing to make chips faster ever since the 486 has been adding more execution units. The 386 had 1 execution unit, 486 had two, PII and PIII had 4, and I *think* the P4 had 8 units?
Why did Intel do this? They were scared because AMD beat them at their own game. Intels self esteem was damaged -- So they launched an agressive marketing campaign, and used these tactics to maniupulate the marketing metric, MHZ. Ceartinly sleazy.
You'll notice now that Intels best P4 is faster then AMD's best part right now -- they've backed off the agressive advertising. However, they burned enough geek karma that I'll never buy intel again.
To remedy the situation, processors ratings need to be measured in IPC*MHZ [instructions per cycle] for both integer and floating point operations. Then it would be pretty clear to consumers what was going on.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
So when are we going to see a lawsuit against AMD for marketing their XP and MP chips as faster than what they actually run at?
I think it was P.T. Barnum who said that.
If the guy was stupid enough to believe Chipzilla's
hype and buy a P4, then he deserves what he gets.
Anybody with a clue could have checked the
benchmarks beforehand and determined what
provides the most performance for the price.
Another frivolous lawsuit is all I see.
SiliconSlick (happy in Athlon-land and waiting on the Hammer)
The complaint alleges that "the Pentium 4 is less powerful and slower than the Pentium III and/or the AMD Athlon."
.NET)
The article later states that benchmarks would be more reliable. However, I've seen some benchmarks saying that the Athlon is a lot slower than the P4 (at least on Tom's Hardware).. Of course, this is comparing the P4 2400 vs. the Athlon XP 2100. Article here.
Tom's hardware mentions that you still get more processer power for your money, but it concludes that Intel is faster (at least in this comparison).
I doth quote:
"In the last "AMD vs. Intel" comparison, the Athlon XP 2100+ took the leading position by a nose, but now, the Pentium 4/2400 easily overtakes its arch rival. Meanwhile, you should keep in mind that that the P4 has a 666 MHz core clock advantage over the Athlon XP. "
So "whats up" with this article? Did the plaintiffs read this before they filed the lawsuit?? Is Tom's Hardware just another victim of the megahertz marketing machine? (Actually, the tests would seem to indicate no). By the way, I'd love to see the plantiffs win, because I get really sick of the megahertz crap that they ramrod down everyones throat. Not to mention, any computer illiterate person knows that "Intel is better" because of this.
At any rate, I don't really think benchmarks are the answer- everyone knows you can make a benchmark say whatever you want (see for instance the Pet Shop application debate w/ Java vs.
I have a 2.4 ghz P4 with 533 mhz rambus and 512 mb 1066 DDR ram.
My older machine is a P3 650 mhz with 512 mb SDRAM.
The P4 is at least 2-3 times faster when I load windows and applications.
There are a few things to consider in addition to the processor speed.
First, the speed of the memory bus is important. That determines how fast it can move around pages of memory. If Rambus hadn't tried to screw everyone then Intel wouldn't have had to scale back the memory bus speed in the P4s by bringing back SDRAM. As a result, using a motherboard with SDRAM slows down the P4.
Second, the amount of memory hasn't improved much. The P4 boards have the same number of RAM slots as the P3 boards did. If you have a lot of programs open or a huge 600 mb file, then 512 mb on a P4 will feel like a Pentium Pro when it starts having to use the hard drive for swap space.
Third, check your hard drive bus speed. Is it a 66 or 100? Mine is older than that and i'm sure I takes a performance hit.
Guess who is left-handed... me I love my keyboard, in fact I can type very fast and with very few errors. I like my keyboard. Although that "home row" bullsh*t sucks a**. And alphabetically would byte because alpha does not take into account common usage amounts. Eg: we use A and E a lot more than say...uhhh....Z. As suck, A is where one your fingers is, and E is right by another one. Z is stuck in the corner of the keyboard. Ok, done ranting. Bye bye! (Black Heaven - Cautionary Warning.mp3 playing at 60% volume on a 5.1 stereo system attached to my computer.... and shaking the house)
RoundTop
do the research" on their 3rd most expensive purchase they will make, then fsck them. This is the same as the idiots who buy POS quick and cheap houses then dont understand why their house is falling apart after 10 years.
If your too stupid or lazy to research anything you're going to buy that costs over $500 then you (they) get what you (they) deserve.
>My only problem with this lawsuit is that EVERYONE knows all this already,
I guarantee that most of the people I know, including tech people, were not aware of the P4's slowness. I mean, just the other day some lame-ass best buy employee sold a poor non-tech friend of mine a CELERON processor claiming it was the best cpu he could buy. (and this was after I told him to explicitly not buy a celeron)
The average joe-sixpack, and the average joe NIC monkey just don't know.
recompile.org
The first browser was written on NEXTSTEP (WWW.app) by Tim Berners-Lee, as his protocol was nice, but needed a browser. Mosaic was written by Marc Andreessen (sp?) for some other platform.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
The case won't reach trial. These people are rolling the dice on threatening Intel with some negative publicity and getting a settlement. Remember how much money Intel lost on the PR fallout from the F00F bug? Intel does, too.
AMD never really clarified it!!!
The Pentium 2? The Pentium 2 box held my front door open while my friends and I labored to carry the huge Pentium 3 box into the house.
We could use that to benchmark processors.
Do a quarter mile test and it'll be obvious which is faster. But which benchmark do you use for a computer?
its that they have been fooled. While its obvious that /.'ers can tell the difference and have the time and interest to look into what truely makes a computer faster the rest of the world, and theres a lot more of them than there are of us, needs something simple to look at. The world needs something from which they can simplify these complicated machines into something that they can understand. Mhz just happened to turn out to be it thanks to Intel. This suit though shouldn't really cover Intel, it should cover companies like Gateway and Dell whom I've seen sell P4's with PC133 ram and a freakin TNT2 video card.
;)
While recently companies like Dell and Gateway have gotten better about things like that it just proves that The consumer will still look to Mhz and Mhz only when seeking out a computer because they don't have the time to research into what FSB is or the different types of ram or what the video card plays into all this. I hope Intel will lose this case but it won't change a thing in the market. Until that change occurs we'll still see "compelling" reasons from Intel on why that 1.5 Ghz machine is outdated and we need to double up to a 3 Ghz machine, since we all know that means EVERY application will run TWICE as fast as before
Oh and just one more cent to add to the pile, do people REALLY need a 2.53 Ghz system on a truckload of RDRAM and a GeForce Ti 4600 for office apps, playing The Sims, and Internet browsing? Intel, Rambus, and Nvidia surely think so...
Do you research every engine part and electronics component of the cars you buy? Do you inspect the materials under the plaster and wood of a new house?
Even then, ask yourself: Are there any *unreliable* but popular sources for hardware information? No?
Read a review from Tom's Hardware or C|net recently?
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I remember way back in the 486 days, I heard a joke that still rings true today.
.... Thank you Thank you I will be here all week.
Q: What is the difference between a car sales man and a computer sales man?
A: The car sales man knows when he is lying.
tada da boom
I remember seeing this on a compaq comercial recently "and it has a Intel Pentium 4 processor for quicker access to the net". I think they are still showing the comercial.
Hacker Media
The funny thing is when MTA wanted to strike, last year sometime, one of their complaints was that the token booth puppets are being replaced by machines/computers, and that there is a need for a doorman.
I say fire them all, and replace them by machines, except the conductors... You won't have the hear them bitch, no more $17 in singles in change after purchasing 2 tokens (especially an hour before shift switching), no more, "We don't accept $50 bills, not even the new ones!", and on top of everything you'll be able to hear the announcements.
What a difference between the new 6/L trains and the old trains.
Um....wow. You mean to say that Intel's 2.53 Ghz chip "edged" past AMD's 1.75 Ghz chip (that's only marketed to beat an Intel 2.1 Ghz chip) --- real impressive there guys...thanks for pointing out how quickly that gap is closing.
???
--noah
Ferrari and other exotic car rentals in New York
British Telecom having an advertisement removed (banned) by Trading Standards for saying that they provided "fast internet access". :)
You were expecting a sig?
What do you USPS? If you want first class crappy service why don't you visit your local UPS office. Those are first class worthless bastards... At least with USPS you have people behind the counter who work, instead of standing there and talking among each other while there is 20 people in the line.
they're about as fast as an Athlon XP 2000+. Pity they're also about twice as expensive.
Those athlons really rock!
It is common to hire an inspector when buying a house. I suppose that might not hold for "new" houses, but the "new" house market does not dominate the general house market. So in general, most people *do* hire a professional to inspect the house, and part of that inspection examines the house's construction and past care. For instance, signs of rotting are likely to be found.
-Paul Komarek
I now am typing this on a p4 1.8, and am quite happy with the performance, and stabillity with the intel chipset. Had Via solved the PCI bus bottleneck problem they were wrestling with, I would have gone with AMD. No dice, though.
This is much faster than my P3 800, (and light years ahead of my p1 225) so I'm fine and happy with my purchase.
The don't like comparing Mhz or Ghz because they know they they can't compete. Mhz or Ghz are exmaple of performance of integer instructions which most the software the typical user runs is compromised of. These PPC and AMD whiners want to use their tests that focus on floating point and multi-media instructions, that they focus on. So that is as boogus and only looking at Mhz or Ghz alone.
Bottom line you have to look at what you're going to using the computer for. Do you need better floating point or multi-media instructions. Then look for benchmarks related to those areas. If typical user then look for benchmarks that focus on integer instructions and Mhz or Ghz.
Reality is for most users 1 Ghz is the point of diminishing return on CPU size. Unless a hard core gamer or running simulations CPU's over a gigahertz you're mainly just paying for bragging rights not additional performance. The bus speeds, memory, and IO devices are you bottleneck. The CPU is idling most the time.
Haven't you heard of metro cards? I haven't used tokens in years. $63 a month for unlimited subway and limited bus travel is pretty good.
All you have to do is run some benchmarks to prove [that the Athlon is faster clock for clock than the P4].
In that case, Microsoft SQL and Oracle are infinitely slower than MySQL and PostgreSQL because I can't even get past the stupid EULAs that make me promise I won't release benchmark results to the general public. Watch for Intel to start pulling the same sh*t when the AMD Opteron trounces both the Pentium 5 and the Itanic.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yes, but you probably can't wait around one year for the next-and-better. You know, there as a problem that had to be solved; rendering and modelling was too slow _TODAY_.
I'm well aware of the general strength of the Athlon FPU, and the choice of Intel to forsake generallity for specialization via SIMD and vectorization, and focus on memory bandwidth.
But that doesn't matter when you're staring at your renderer or compiler, trying to figure to best invest to make it go faster.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
No.
Mosaic was written by a team that included (in 'me too' mode) Marc Andreessen.
Marc is one of those political guys who slings just barely enough code to get into the source tree.
(* The Pentium 4 makes the Internet Run Faster !!! *)
I remember a 6-year-old kid in my neighborhood who used to think that "cool stickers" made bikes and cars run faster.
I bet he is purchasing a P4 right now based on such an ad.
(However, he is probably also a successful PHB because he thinks like the CEO.)
Table-ized A.I.
This is going to take a long time to get through court, and there's a good question as to whether the non-scientific minds who will be perusing the case will make the right decision, but Intel is in the moral right.
Intel didn't design the chip just so that it would have a higher clock frequency and therefore mislead people into thinking their chips were faster. They came up with a whole new processing architecture, that simultaneously created a large efficiency drop in instructions processed per clock cycle but allowed for much higher frequency operation. The end result was faster processors, but the clock frequencies didn't correspond. Not their fault.
Further, end users should have been used to the idea that clock speed and processing speed didn't correspond; AMD's processors had been outperforming pre-P4 processors, clock cycle for clock cycle, for a while. AMD didn't start their "processor equivalent" labeling scheme 'til the P4s came on the market, though.
If you've ever witnessed a Pentium 166 box rendering a complex website, you'll know what those marketing guys were getting at.
I have a 486-50 laptop and have occasionally used it to browse the web away from home. It barely works with Opera, and is impossible with IE.
You can connect as fat a pipe as you want to the machine, for fat Flash-infested web pages, a Pentium 4 does give you quicker access.
Fast does not always translate directly to 'bandwidth.'
It's just another sign of geek politics that everybody chooses to make these marketing claims into jokes rather than acknowledge they know what they mean.
There's nothing wrong with Tom's Hardware. Most of the time people shouting "bias, bias!" should look int he mirror.
there's a form of lobbying, microsoft and others (oil companiaes) use it, it's called astro-turfing, aka artificial grass roots campaigns. they bring in a group of people they've selected, show them certian propaganda, and then supply them with a cubicle, phone, and phone number of the senator most crucial to changing/stopping somthing.
this sounds suspiciously like AMD is astro turfing (or a variation, involving filing lawsuit rather than calling your local congressman) some bad PR for intel to me...
moox. for a new generation.
I don't buy a computer based on adds, I go to hardware sites and look at benchmarks and read reviews. People who are too lazy to do this deserve to get ripped off. I don't expect companies to be honest about the quality of their product in any industry and no one else should. I will say this though, if this law suit is won by the customers, I'll be suing Cheer for misleading me into buying their product when I later find out that Tide is clearly better.
This is probably not one of the better ones, but how about the novel CPU architecture patent to boost the clockrate where you:
have the CPU consist out of 2 units, the main "real" cpu, and then a dumbed down co-processor. for each clock cycle, offer the instruction to the main unit; if it is ready the instruction will be processed; otherwise pass the instruction on to the co-processor which is only able to handle limited cheesy instructions (like no-ops, reset, sleep). If the co-processor can't handle that instruction wait till the next clock and repeat.
You could pretty much adapt this CPU to have any clock rate to out-clock the competition. It's like giving those "Spinal Tap" amplifiers that extra kick with just a simple step, making the max volume be 11 instead of 10.
At work, I can rip a CD with CDex in about 16-18 minutes per disk using the SSE enabled Lame encoder. On my laptop at home, it takes less than 5 minutes to rip a CD with iTunes. What gives?
How much of that is the physical speed of the CD-ROM drive? My PlexWriter 12/10/32A burner reads data at 10x to 32x (CAV) but reads audio at 10x across the whole CD, limiting me to an 8-minute rip.
But still, I've never understood how people can just rip and encode to MP3 simultaneously. Without an intermediate step where the recording exists as a wav file, there's no chance to fix up pops in the audio, silence explicit language for a play-in-front-of-your-parents edit (I'd rather not pay twice for the clean and dirty versions), or remove leading or trailing silence.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The headline was "A group of PC owners filed a lawsui..."
It should be "A pair of lawyers engaged in extortion...: Of course, that is so common that it doesn't need a headline.
No, this isn't meant to be a troll. Most people don't realize that "a class action suit filed on behalf of X million..." usually results in tiny rewards for those million (or no reward) while it results in vast sums for the lawyers who file the suit. Furthermore, because of the absurd state of US tort law - especially in some tort friendly states - Texas and Louisiana.
Note that the complaint claims that the total aware will be no more than $75,000. Of course, this does not include lawyers fees! My guess is that the lawyers put this in so that a court will find it easier to give them a win, or so that the companies will settle.
Once that is done, the real fun will begin. Having already either lost one of these cases, or settled one, the companies will then be attacked in Texas or Louisiana or another state where the tort lawyers routine win obscene settlements. They will cite the previous attack, and pocket zillions of bucks in the resulting easy win.
What will PC owners get? Probably discount certificates allowing them to buy a new processor from the defendant at a lower cost. This is how a typical american class action consumer lawsuit works!
Note that none of this has anything to do with the merits of the case. Personally, I think the case has no merit. The companies didn't lie(although AMD *does* act in a more deceptive matter - did you know that an AMD Athlon 1700+ does NOT have a clock speed near 1700 Mhz?). The consumers weren't deceived, unless they fooled themselves!
The only good weather is bad weather.
I really don't care who wrote it, but whomever did so didn't do it for/on a NeXT. That was my point.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
This is an AMD backed lawsuit? Intel claims P4 has different instructions and if they aren't used, the CPU will perform the same as P3. So, without the code change, that CPU offically sux.
;-)
I don't like whole those x86 stuff at all, will switch to mac but... I mean,someone has to say it. E.g. how well would i386 spesific codes would run on P3 for instance?
Oh point me -1000 now...
MGhz for Mghz a RISC chip kicked the shit out of CISC and stole their lunch money. If I'm not mistaken, they still do.
Not especially. Modern CISC CPUs such as the Athlon, the P4, and the Crusoe recompile CISC bytecode into RISC micro-operations internally. The problem with the P4 is that the decoder isn't fast enough (one micro-op per clock for non-cached instructions; three micro-ops per clock for cached instructions) to feed the P4's nine functional units.
Will I retire or break 10K?
it is also the people's responsiblity to inform themselves!! you might as well fall for one of those million-dollar prize scams in the mail. take things with a grain of salt.
What they actually said was 100% accurate -- that the new processors run at a higher clock speed. This might mislead people who don't realize that clock speed and processing speed are not identical, but I don't think that's Intel's fault. Take for example cars -- you regularly hear car manufacturers talk about a car with "260 hp" and advertise on that basis. Now anyone who knows anything about cars will understand that a car with 260 hp is not necessarily twice as fast (either in top speed or acceleration) than a car with 130 hp. But your average person who doesn't know anything about cars might be mislead into thinking that. But I don't see anyone suing car manufacturers.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
> This little naming issue gets worse as sizes get bigger too. I built several multiterabyte
> RAIDs and it really becomes apparent then. 1TB in hard disks are really only 931 GiB.
You're flat out wrong on this one as far as official standards are concerned. Check out the UK Metrication website. And I quote...
On 7 April 1795 (18 Germinal, year III) the Convention decreed that the new "Republican Measures" were to be henceforth legal measures in France
* mètre (length), are (surface), litre (volume), gram (mass), bar (pressure). The prefixes were Greek words for multiples
* déca- (x 10), hecto- (x 100), kilo- (x 1 000), myria- (x 10 000) and latin prefixes for fractions
* déci- (1/10), centi- (1/100), milli- (1/1 000)
Last I heard, there were still 1,000 metres in a kilometre and 1,000 grams in a kilogram. For the official US standards, check out the NIST website for official prefixes. In Canada check out The WEIGHTS AND MEASURES ACT and click on PART V
"Prefixes* for Multiples and Submultiples of Basic, Supplementary and Derived Units of Measurement". They use a weird "folio" system for maintining the webpage, so deep links aren't stable.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
X-Box: 120 millon polygons/sec. GCN: 6-12 million polygons/sec. Guess which has better graphics! You guessed right: GCN
That's because Nintendo measures performance with lit textured triangles of a decent size, rather than one-pixel flat shaded triangles. An XBox developer attested to this: one of the tech demos included in the XDK uses one-pixel triangles to render a particle system and does manage to break 1.7 million triangles per frame (100 million triangle per second), but this situation won't occur very often in a real game.
The GameCube has a comb filter, which reduces flicker and covers up non-antialiased edges on NTSC 480i, PAL/M 480i, and PAL 576i displays, which cover the vast majority of displays used for game consoles in Japan, the Americas, and Europe.
But the real reason GameCube games look better may not be because of technical ability but because Nintendo has Mr. Shigeru Miyamoto producing exclusive titles.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You get about 6-10 inspections per house depending on which city and county you are building in.
f ....
Foundation
Frame
Plumbing
Gas
Electric
Roo
Driveway
And yes I do check out cars ratings and reviews. Like I said, if anyone is stupid enough to purchase any product without doing research they get what they deserve.
When someone said a sucker is born every minute, it rings true because most people don't want to put forth the effort and will believe what is told to them.
If you had a doctor saying you had a problem with your health and he wanted to prescribe a experimental drug would you a) believe the doctor, b) get a second opinion or c) ignore him.
The correct answer is b) a second opinion. Ever heard of that? That is why you dont JUST read tom's hardware, or car and driver. Research pays for itself. Thank god the internet is available as a resource.
Let me get this straight:
The only performance metrics Intel issues are non-subjective GHz numbers. You'll never see public benchmarks from Intel against AMD (their lawyers won't let them do it) - and benchmarks against Pentium III will always be current SSE2-code tests that will indeed, legitimately show strong speed improvement of Pentium 4 over P3.
AMD on the other hand, uses a synthetic, subjective "PR" rating system, the authenticity of which was audited by Arthur Anderson (see http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=1207 ) which may or may not reflect an intention to compare against Intel or other competitors or other AMD products.
Which do you think is more misleading?
I woulda just hopped the turnstile. Unless of course it's one of those large, multi-barred cage-like turnstiles that you can't..
see subject.
But the adverts mention "connection" instead of website rendering.
Besides if you run a better OS on your P166 it would be bearable.
Sorry folks, but the P4 stomps ass. Especially a northwood 533mhz fsb job with 512kb of L2 and good DDR Ram. This is redicuoulous. So some dumb fucks went out and got 1.6ghz P4's on a slow ass MB that uses SDRAM and complain that its not faster, when its their own damn fault.
The likely responce to this from intel will be that they come down HARD on MB manufacturers and chipset manufacturers that build boards that allow the use of anything other than RDRAM. INFACT, i wonder if the whole damn things hasn't been setup by Rambus!
A brit friend of mine was sending a package back home (from the southeast US to New Castle, England) and I overheard the teller at the USPS state that overnight service would take three days. What is that if not false advertising?
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
My approach is always to treat "ethical advertising" as a contradiction in terms.
If we can have "truth in advertising" (another contradiction in terms) for corn flakes, soap flakes and vitamin pills why can't we have the same thing for a CPU? Corn flakes cures cancer? Why not?
Come to think of it, why couldn't we have had "truth in advertising" for Enron and all those "stock market analysts" (another contradiction in terms) who recommended it to greenhorn investors?
Better yet, why couldn't we have had "truth in advertising" about Enron by the president who was then the best friend of the CEO of Enron?
I conclude that there is no such thing as practical ethics!!! And those "born again Christians" (Dubya and his best friend above) seem to be the least ethical of all!!!
Far as I can tell there isn't a "all encompassing" benchmark that produces a overall number that accurately reflects the total system performance.
/. crowd could write a program that would fill the void? It could be very profitable, since that single program would be necessary to benchmark every computer.
Closest benchmark that attempts to achieve such a goal is 3D Mark, but I've read reports over the years that in some cases 3D Mark scores are fake, giving extra points to certain processors or brands of video cards, regardless of actual framerates. Not only that but 3D Mark allows different settings, resolutions and color depth, so unless you know the exact settings that were used the score would not be reproducible, something that would be very important in order to agree on one set standard.
But now that we've identified a need, perhaps someone (or some companies) in the
Yea, as if the regular consume would know what "render" means
16,777,216 comments ought to be enough for any forum!
I don't think customers are suing because they feel mislead about the clock speed, they feel mislead that Intel said it was "superior processor to Intel's own Pentium III and AMD's Athlon", and it isn't.
It's like if Honda made a Civic with 10 more hp but added 1000 lbs to the car and said "look, it's faster!" when in fact it takes 3 more seconds to reach 60.
I could understand if there was only a 10% difference, but according to PC World "in a recent test of each company's top CPUs, a system with Intel's 2.53-GHz P4 edged past a PC with an Athlon XP 2100+ chip (running at 1.73 GHz) in PC WorldBench 4". That's pathetic, it took 800 more mhz to "edge past" the Althon chip, almost 50% more mhz.
If I were customer that bought a 2.53ghz processor and saw that review I'm sure steam would be coming out of my ears right now.
One more note is that whether people should research their purchases or not, misleading advertising is still misleading advertising.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
As a USPS employee, I have this to say about your unwarranted and unfair comment about "courteous, competent employees": fuck you!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
that's a whoooooole other story.
I'm sure you didn't mean to compare the processing speed between the Intels and Powerbooks, right?
Agreed! I'd also *love* to see laws forcing EULAs to not lie about people's Constitutional rights. Same for FBI warnings on videotapes, and copyright notifications in books. Oops, way off topic now.
-Paul Komarek
Computer parts? More like his mechanical vagina!
I have always noticed ass saving phrases like in TV commercials.
* Under special test conditions only * Limited offers - only till stocks last
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
All Intel really needs for such vauge language as "superior processor to Intel's own Pentium III and AMD's Athlon" is the tinyest feature or benchmark to indicate such. For example, Intel could argue that because the P4 throttles when it gets too hot, as opposed to the P3 (which ceases to work until a reboot) or the Athlon (which burns up), it is superior. Not that they would, except from a legal standpoint.
For a more realistic argument, the fastest P4s have been beating Athlon's on most tests, simply because the Athlon's have a disadvantage of hundreds of MHz. You referenced one such test yourself. As such, Intel could claim without any twisting of the truth, and even maintaining the vein of thinking we expect, (that is, that the processor really does do calculations faster) and be correct in saying that their processor is faster, or more "superior". While the customer is getting ripped off, Intel's claims are no longer off base.
It may be pathetic, but it still remains the consumer's responsiblity for not getting himself ripped off. Just like anything else, all it takes is a little research and quereying of those who know the truth. When people ask me, I suggest an Athlon. I'm sure you do the same. People don't have to be experts, they just have to make smart decisions about where they spend their money.
~geogeek
General awareness of Intel's problems started with this article.
There were a series of follow-ups until Intel regained the speed crown. (And now looks to hold it indefinitely.)
I remember reading 56k ads as being 'blazing fast'. Heh.
"Derp de derp."
just like MSN has the SMARTER and FASTER internet...
Yes, the P4 would give you quicker access. So does an Athlon. The claim by Intel would seem to indicate that it is comparing the P4 to current processors, and we know that making the claim that the P4, by design, gives faster 'net access than its current competitors is ridiculous.
Interesting thing about the platform temperature. My cousin's husband is an engineer at Alsthom, who makes the trains that run in the new lines in New York. I was pretty bothered by the temp in those stations myself and I asked about it. He said the problem with any subway system is friction. Huge trains stopping every five minutes, and then using large electric motors, which also give off a lot of heat under acceleration. This is a problem in any subway, and why the stations are always hotter than you would expect an underground room to be.
But New York is way hotter than most, the reason for that is the A/C in the trains. The are nice and cool, which already makes the stations seem hot. But the other problem with air conditioning is the fact that all that hot air coming out of the trains is getting dumped into the stations, along with all the heat from friction.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
Even though (I fully agree) they do have a point, is megahertz marketing outright criminal or merely sucking? I mean, that should be pretty central to the issue, no?
Actually, when people ask me, I suggest a P4 or P3. I have owned four Athlons, and I've had it up to here with the lackluster *chipsets*. (Haven't tried Nforce yet, tho.)
God, why not just use GigaFlops like real scientists do? These are numbers which actually mean something.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Actually I have. In fact, I'm enrolled in the Transit Check program. I haven't had to buy tockens in a long time. The problem comes when the card reader can't read my card...
Do not read this
be suing AMD for using Cyrix-like PR ratings that are obviously intended to deceive non-technically inclined consumers into thinking their chips run at clock speeds at or faster than their Intel competitors?
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
I wonder if the same litigants have a suit against the USPS for ads leading one to expect prompt service from courteous, competent employees.
or for the "2 days, 2 pounds, $2.90" really meaning $2.90 for the same old delivery.
Tomshardware.com has published some articles that really knocked the stuffing out of Intel. They published articles which exposed the failure of the Pentium 1.137 gigahertz. They exposed the poor performance of the Rambus memory.
But for the last year or too they seemed to be taking a lot softer line towards Intel. I was puzzled over this. Until recently, when I came across the following article about a former columnist at Tomshardware. He has his own hardware site now. If I understood this article properly, Tom re-edited and re-attributed Van Smith's articles, after his departure. And it sounds like when he was caught he yanked all of them. Altering the past like in 1984.
They are definitely all gone now.
I can't help wondering whether his departure was connected to THG cozying up to Intel.
Dude, it's true that it wouldn't be more than 30 lines of code, but the processor requirements of checking through the whole damn dictionary every time somebody clicks "preview" would be nuts.
You make some telling points. Your history is accurate, and your predictions for the K8 are cogent, and stand a fair chance of coming true. However...
When Intel designed the P4's core, they went down one of the possible optimisation paths, that of lengthening the pipeline to improve clock speed scalability. It's certainly working, and now that Intel have got their RDRAM vs. DDR position sorted out, their future looks a lot brighter than it did 12 months ago. But there are other valid approaches too.
AMD have chosen another way, that of settling for the more modest MHz gains of process shrinks and focussing on improved IPC instead, mostly by attacking the memory bottleneck. The K8's drastically lowered memory access latency is due to its onboard memory controller, and that gives a very nice bump to your effective IPC. The P4, OTOH, while having bandwidth aplenty, will see greater restrictions as its clock speed scales from the increased latencies of its memory design.
As for bandwidth, the Sledgehammer's dual DDR design keeps it fed too, and better, it scales as you add CPUs thanks to the NUMA design. The P4/Xeon (and Itanium) multi-CPU architectures are limited by its traditional shared-bus approach. Maybe my perceptions are off (as I deal almost exclusively with multi-CPU workstations each day), but it may turn out that this is a greater limiting factor for Intel in the longer run.
And then there's the Itanium - still a shared-bus design (though now with Even More Bandwidth), but with a strange new ISA that puts the optimisation load on the compiler instead - and almost completely breaks with existing code. A clever design? Only if they can make it work acceptably before x86-64 gets too entrenched. Remember how Windows beat out OS/2? Backwards compatibility is often more important than a fancy new design. AMD have learnt that lesson.
Time will tell, of course. Both companies have chosen sensible but different approaches. It may just come down to marketing or staying power, and Intel do have the edge there.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
"What did the Pentium 2 do? "
got its floating-point operations right?
This comment is yet another example of a slashdot poster speaking out of his nether regions and making things up.
The reason they say that the damages will be less than $75k per plaintiff is to keep this in state court. The minimum amount-in-controversy sufficient to allow a suit in federal court is $75k.
I won't comment on any of your other statements.
Besides, if you really want to look at bloated Flashy web sites on a regular basis, you probably need to get your head checked.
Intel has invested so much in making space between transistors as small as possible, that they just had to release a new Pentium. I guess we won't see the real benefit from this researching before they go above 3ghz.
The public pays for the future Intel.
Good point. Although I do advise them of the price preformance issues neverless. And SIS makes a great chipset ;)
The P4 uses a new core which isn't as good (per MHz) as the PII and PIII at running existing code.
Recompile apps with P4 specific features and it'll kill the Athlon speedwise.
The relative performance of AMD and Intel equipment is highly software dependent.
Actually, the AMD only outperforms the Intel if you run software.
}B^)
-- Terry
There is one thing that Intel got very, very right: the P4 will keep itself from burning up by dropping its internal clock speed until its internal temperature remains below whatever its internal cutoff is. And it seems to do so smoothly (so that even when it's running more slowly, it's still running smoothly).
I can't tell you how cool that is. I've disconnected the CPU fan while running a benchmark test in a loop and watched as the system slowly dropped its speed to about half its original speed, and then it stabilized. And kept going as if nothing had happened. I did the same thing while a CPU-intensive screensaver was running to see if there would be any noticeable jerkiness and it was completely smooth at the visual level.
This is perfect for servers. If you lose the CPU fan or if the heatsink falls off, the system keeps going, which is exactly what you want for server duty! You, the admin of the box, may notice that the system is running slowly and investigate, but at least the system doesn't go down.
I'm sold on the P4 for that reason alone. The Athlon may be faster on a per-clock basis, but the P4 has it where it counts in the reliability department. And for some of us, reliability trumps speed.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Exactly how often have you had a heatsink fall off? Yes, fans die, but in all cases I've seen they die slowly and with a horrible grinding noise.
One thing I do wish AMD stuck with was an IHS, though. Not the K6 kind either, I'll give the P4 points for that.
Understood.
But there's a big misconception out there that Andreessen wrote Mosaic. He's put a real effort into changing history to read that way.
It's important to keep history from being changed.
Nah, he's more likely super-gluing a "VTEC" emblem onto the back of his Ford Focus, and duct-taping a Folgers can onto the exhaust pipe.
N/T
So, it's acceptable to lie to the consumer when it's clear they wouldn't understand?
A P4 offers almost no advantages over a P3, especially with regard to browsing web pages.
I'm pretty sure the Opteron/Hammer line of chips will have an IHS a la the P4. I agree, lack of an IHS, especially in the later athlons, is a big problem.
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
The G4 got "schooled" by a 2 x 1.6 GHZ Athlon Multiprocessor system.
Regards
James
They should just sue a fast food chain because the fast food chain forgot to tell them that coffee is "hot" and could "burn" them. It really hurts my head to see all these idiot lawsuits just out for money. Yes, the idiot user might believe that more megahertz is better, but the fact is that no computer salesman who is at all ethical and intelligent would fail to explain that megahertz is not the sole determinant of computer speed.
Where was the uproar over the change to 1000 bits = 1K vs 1024? This was a blaitent marketing spin that went unheard except for the geeks.
is that it has about twice as many and as lengthy pipelines as PIII.
:)
Why, shouldn't it run faster with more piplines? As you may know execution involves out-of-bound branching and interrrupt/exceptions would invalid all the pre-fetch/pre-executed instructions in pipelines and cause pipeline-flushing. Longer/more pipelines with poor design would only cause more execution cycles to be wasted. That's why some benchmark would show better performance in PIII when such pipeline-flushing happens too frequent.
While I mentioned poor design, what is a good design? In Athlon(iirc tbird too), on average only half of the pre-fetch/executed instructions are flushed during exceptions thanks to some genuine algorithms. That makes Athlon better in some case even when it has lower Mhz.
I realized I'm oversimplied the details. I welcome comment, no flame please.
Read their words carefully!
Would unbiased journalists write in this manner?
I mail between 10-15 pieces of mail per month ranging from 1st class letters to small ( 35 lbs) packages.
For a cut-rate price, my mail gets to most points in the continental US in 2-3 days. NY-SF is two days, NY-rural Alabama in three days.
Being a mailman/mailwoman for the USPS is a frustrating and sometimes maddening experience. Give them a break. I have had some shitty customer service experiences with the Post Office, but I've never encountered any as pretentious as the Slashdot crew.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Jumping a mass-transit turnstile in NYC is a class-A misdemeanor, with a maximum sentence of $5000 and/or 2 years in prison.
I wouldn't recommend it.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Pentium 2 allowed Al Gore to make the Web.
Only in slashdot are posts of solidarity modded at -1 Redundant, while posts of antagonism are modded as -1 Flamebait.
And then many other people suddenly pop up who experienced the same thing, but were just too afraid to mention it until now. Ya, right.
And of course Intel Corp. conspired to create a worse processor than the last, and decided to market it for a laugh -- because that's what professional companies do, right?
If these customers are suddenly unhappy, then they should upgrade their computers (not just processor), or try AMD, or something else.
Good luck to the users trying to push one set of benchmarks over another.
So then admittedly I too was duped by the so-called "megahertz myth". So then I'm an idiot -- I shoulda' done my homework first.
What's the point of the lawsuit unless they want money?
The outcome should be interesting, but I expect it is already too predictable.
I get a kick out of people who seem prejudiced against Flash and Shockwave. Go to homestarrunner.com and shut up.
Check my profile, read my previous post about sites that use FLASH and don't offer anything else to those who won't or *CAN'T* run it...
The site you mentioned (homestarrunner.com) has *NO* accessability in it, loads slower than petrifying amber, and I got so many script-warnings popping up everywhere it makes me wonder what you/they were trying to do...
No thanks, I'd rather visit a site that someone used a modicum of forethought on & considered the fact that not everyone under the sun has a fat pipe and the ability to see flashy crap.
Are you sure this is a new feature?
My gateway solo laptop with a PII-266 has a BIOS setting for enabling temp. controlled cpu clockspeed. And this computer is a few years old now. Maybe this is functionality that gateway added on.
One has to wonder wether we would have moved on to asyncronous computing by now, at least inside the core, if marketing didn't need to push the clock speed
asynchronous designs are orders of magnitude harder to verify than synchronous ones. This is why no such major design (IIRC) has left the academia in the last couple of decades.
Not everything is the blame of the great satan of marketing.
Working for necessity's mother.
I find comments like this rather interesting.
Absolutely NO ONE would have ever considered the consequences of ripping a heatsink off the processor if it hadn't been for that ridiculous Tom's Hardware video where they did just that (hint to the general readership: Tom measured the P4 at a constant 29C, the overheat protection circuitry on a P4 kicks in somewhere south of 60C... do you see a problem with his results?).
Heatsinks do NOT fall off, or if they do, your processor burning up is probably the least of your worries as compared to, for example, the severe physical thrashing that your computer case is receiving to cause that heatsink to fall off.
If the fan fails, any processor will shut the system down, either by using the RPM detection circuitry built into all modern motherboards, or by using the temperature sensors in the motherboards. Sure, the P4 could keep running without a fan, though if it's not throwing an obvious error message, this might actually be worse then completely shutting down. Why? Because then you've got a server running at 50% (or less) of it's normal performance for no immediately obvious reason. And besides, since we're talking x86, we're not looking at high-reliability servers here (if you're looking to build high-reliabiity servers with x86 equipment, you NEED completely redundant systems anyway), so I'm not real sure how big of an advantage this sort of thing would give you anyway.
Both the P4 and the Athlon are good chips in their own right, and while I do applaud Intel's improved thermal protection circuitry, this isn't exactly what I'd call a really important feature. At best it's good idiot protection in my mind. It's strongest point is to prevent people from frying a chip by improperly installing a heatsink in the first place, which is NOT hard to do unless you're a.) REALLY lazy or b.) not very smart.
Too bad the Xeon was not used as intended. A Xeon is not the best graphics rendering chip. It makes a great data and transaction server (it is a server chip).
A Truck may have lots of torque for pulling a 5th wheel trailer up a hill, but it won't corner well in an indy circuit. Use the right tool for the job for best results.
Computers are no longer general purpose arithmic logic units anymore. They have become specialized. Some are better at some tasks than others. That is why there are many benchmarks. Choice of OS and applications also play a big role.
The truth shall set you free!
Wow, I never heard about this before. It sounds great.
On a related note, I just spent the day servicing a server that lost a number of fans all at once. I've never seen anything like it. The box had lost the CPU fan, the power supply fan, the case fan, and one of the bay fans, and it was still running! Swapped all of the fans out for new ones, and the machine booted up just fine.
And to the person who said that dead CPUs make a hideous grinding noise, I can't hear that "hideous grinding noise" over the rest of the noise in a busy server room. Dead fans are found during scheduled checks.
A bit of a side-note to the above, I have tried an nForce, and I HIGHLY recomend it to anyone looking for a reliable chipset with drivers that don't suck.
I've had problems with drivers from virtually EVERY chipset manufacturer out there. Intel had previously been the best in my mind, but they were FAR from fault-less. The early PIIX4 drivers (ie when the 430TX and 440LX chipsets first came out) were TERRIBLE! If you installed them in Win95 with the wrong order of patches your only recourse was to format and reinstall everything. They also OFTEN did not end up working, and when they did they often decreased performance over the stock Windows drivers. Similarly the early i8xx series of drivers were piss-poor as well, though at least these just caused the system to fail to boot in most cases.
The upside for Intel though is that they did eventually get their drivers right after 6 months or so. VIA's drivers usually aren't quite as bad right from the get-go, but they just never quite get the bugs worked out of them, even 3+ years later. SiS has been better, though a bit up and down, and besides, they mostly just stick to Microsoft drivers for most things (it's kinda scary when Microsoft writes the most reliable software for other companies hardware).
nVidia's nForce drivers aren't 100% perfect, I did have one slight problem with them when I first installed my motherboard, but that was using the pre-release drivers shipped with the motherboard (yeah, cutting myself on the bleeding edge again). However I was able to download the release drivers which were available at that time from nVidia, and they worked flawlessly (as have the 1.05 drivers, as well as several versions of their video drivers for the integrated video). Their Linux drivers have had a somewhat bumpier road to stability, and the audio driver still leaves a lot to be desired, but at least they HAVE Linux drivers, which is a good start (though it would be nice if they were open-source).
Allow you to watch cinema-quality movies on your PC. Unfortunately that does not include a screen capable of showing it (Jurassic Park was raytraced in 8000x6000) or any media with enough space.
The 2.2GHz Xeon IS a P4!
Well, ok, they aren't 100% identical, but they use virtually identical cores. The only real difference is that the Xeon runs at a lower clock speed and bus speed then the fastest P4's but has "hyperthreading" (symetric multi-threading) capabilities. It also comes in a different socket and is designed to allow dual-processor use.
However, other then those relatively minor differences, the two chips are the same, and this particular Xeon is very much designed for workstation use.
Now, the Xeon MP, well that's another beast altogether (though still based on the P4 core). There's also the PIII Xeon and the PII Xeon, which are different chips again and designed for different uses.
Long story short, the name "Xeon" doesn't tell you a whole lot about what the chip is designed for. Similarly the name "Celeron" is even worse, since there have now been 5 distinctly different versions of the Celeron processor.
*Fucking* Jesus!
I get a large white box with an image of a jigsaw puzzle piece in it - that's some nice work!
The web is not a multi-media system. Go to w3.org, start reading, and get a *fucking* clue.
There's PLENTY wrong with Tom's Hardware, but it has nothing to do with bias. It has everything to do with the fact that Tom doesn't know NEARLY as much as people seem to think he knows. He's a medical professional by trade, and only stumbled into the computer world a few years back. His benchmarking methodology leads a bit to be desired, and the conclusions he draws from these benchmarks are typically misleading if not flat out wrong.
That being said, he still does a WAY better job then most of the trade-rags and many of the other hardware websites out there (which is kinda sad).
Okay, I see a large "loading" screen ... waiting ... now I see a lame animation of something running ... now back to the loading screen ... waiting ... ah, a menu. Select "toons". A new menu. Select "toons" again ... another menu of what looks like an episode guide ... loading ... waiting ... a picture of some old guy with a crown bouncing up and down on his head. Presumably this is some stupid flash-cartoon, but I'm not interested ... close browser. Well, that sure was worth it! What was any of that crap supposed to be about?
And this is an example of a good flash site! Pathetic.
I hate Intel due to some of their business tactics (mafia-like), but I hate lawyers even more. This lawsuit is groundless. They advertise their processors run at x mhz and they do. End of story.
I do believe if you took a 6 year old 'mentally disadvantaged' person an placed them as CEO of Intel 5 years ago, they would've made better decisions than have been made. Intel is a powerhouse with lots've smart folks working for them, but good god, how can they be so dumb?
Mistakes:
1) RDRam
2) A new socket every 3 months
3) It seems marketing had a large role to play with the P4's architecture (GHZ is all that matters; screw performance)
4) The biggie: The Itanic (their 64 bit proc). I doubt we'll have a compiler that really works for it in the next decade. AMD's Hammer (and the P4 and the Athlon XP and the P3 for that matter) basically do the compiler's job of scheduling multiple instructions per clock cycle in hardware. I doubt anyone can write a compiler for the Itanic to come close to the efficiency of hardware (with the possible exception of a few simple applications).
I will enjoy wathing Intel die; their only chance IMO is Yamhill (which I hope will take them at least 3 years to release, therefor giving AMD a huge headstart and some profit to put into R&D).
The Intel Web site is misleading at the higher levels- with many references to broadband as though that has anything to do with the P4
d /benchmark s.htm
/ tech_in fo.htm
http://www.intel.com/home/index.htm
"Get the Perfect Combination
"Experience the digital world like never before with a Pentium 4 processor-based PC and broadband technology."
There there are comparisons which turn out to be to 500 MHz P-III systems:
http://www.intel.com/home/tech/broadban
"These advancements enable a Pentium 4 processor-based PC to:
* Provide 2 to 3 times higher performance for media-intensive broadband content
* Convert songs into MP3 format 6 times quicker than the fastest PCs of three years ago
* Perform almost 5 times better when editing MPEG-4 videos
* Produce almost 7 times higher frame rates when running today's online games"
Finally pretty honest at the spec sheet farther down:
http://www.intel.com/home/desktop/pentium4
"The Pentium 4 processor delivers maximum performance for:
* Cutting-edge Internet technologies such as streaming video and MP3 audio
* Quickly creating, editing and sharing professional-quality photos and video
* The ultimate gaming platform for immersive 3D experiences
* Internet technologies such as Java*, streaming audio and video, 3D, and Web animation
* Multi-tasking environments
* Background tasks such as real-time virus checking, encryption, compression, and e-mail synchronization
* Reduced compiling and rendering times for multimedia applications
* Longevity and headroom for future technologies and innovations
* Operation of Windows® XP operating system
Cute.
With some insane new heatsinks wheighing in at over 700 grams, I would no longer place any bets that a heatsink will never tear lose.
However... i have a feeling that if one of these Godchillas go a-tumbling, they'll rip the entire cpu socket out with them, and the CPU will probably be saved because it is no longer connected to anything _but_ the heatsink. What that behemoth of a cooling device will do with the inside of your computer case and the remains of your motherboard as gravity makes it plummet down through cables, graphics cards and other peripherals like a giant mutant lizard through a major japanese city. I do not wish to speculate about.
The damage claim is essentially this:
When user A bought Pentium IV, based on
Intel's claim that 1.4 GHz Pentium IV is
much faster than 1.26 Pentium III, when
in actuality 1.26 Pentium III is faster,
user A of course felt cheated.
Now, to remedy the situation, Intel should come up with Pentium V (which will be on the market starting Jan 03, guaranteed !), Intel should start the Pentium V with 2.8 GHz, while the Pentium IV reaches 3.3 to 3.5 GHz range.
In that way, Intel can not be accused of false advertising and so on.
So let's wait until this coming January. Let's hope that Pentium V (at 2.8 GHz) runs faster than Pentium IV (at 3.3 GHz).
I have insider news that Intel is prepared to do just that.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It's quite simple: CDex uses software error correction (based on the xiph.org paranoia library), iTunes does not.
What this means is that CDex reads each sector off the CD several times, compares the reads, and attempts to correct for jitter and other common read errors.
iTunes, on the other hand, doesn't. It simply reads each sector once off the CD, and believes what the CD drive hands to it.
This software error correction causes a major slowdown - my audio rip speed goes from about 16x down to about 2x. You probably won't notice the jitter correction either unless you've got good ears.
However, if you have some scratched CDs, compare the output of the two. The CDex rip will probably be listenable - even if the CD is so badly scratched that several sectors are totally unreadable, the paranoia library will attempt to smoothly interpolate between known good data. The iTunes rip, on the other hand, unless your CD drive is really good, will be unlistenable, with gaps and nasty audible errors.
This, of course, has precisely nothing to do with the relative processor speeds of your PC versus your Mac. Switch off the error correction in CDex and the Dell will almost certainly be faster.
Unfortunatly I'm still stuck coding to the desires of managment ratherthan the customer. Going on two years of CMM mumbo-jumbo and we still have a moron middle-manager shooting from the hip when it comes to requirements. Not to mention that any attempt to guage user satisfaction or ask for user input is shot down.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
- Athlon XP 1600+ == 1.4GHz
- Athlon XP 1800+ == 1.6GHz
And so onOf course when I bought my PC last November, I was sold a "1.6GHz" system with (you guessed it) an XP 1600+.
As for performance, yes, this CPU rocks, no deception implied here.
actually a p1-166 with 64 meg or so of ram is pretty decent when setting on a 100mbit line going to a t3 regardless of the website content..
Actually, ummm, the web is a multi-media system.
(you can pretend otherwise if it suits your needs)
This statement is completely idiotic. What you mean to say is that the pipeline for RISC architectures could be far more easily designed (than true CISC implementations) and be far more deeply pipelined to obtain a more optimal parallelism, therefore maximizing the instructions per second that can be executed. BUT... RISC chips have a far inferior instructions per clock ratio, so when you get down to it: MHz for MHz, the CISC chip actually kicked the shit out of a RISC chip.
Know the facts.
I always thought this (VTEC stickers on other vehicles) was a hilarious comment on the people who obsess about having the right stickers to describe their car's engine.
... wah.
You just need a car that's so obviously not a Civic... A huge Buick or something.
I don't see why people with real VTEC engines mind, it just means that they'll have an unexpected performance advantage if they ever race, because nobody expected their sticker to be real. And if they're upset because nobody can tell that they spent more
I use a 33 MHz Color Turbo Next station running Omniweb to browse the web sometimes. Flash doesn't work at all (for some reason, they haven't ported the plugin to NextStep), and pages still take some time to render. The machine's on a 10Mb pipe to an 11Mb internet connect, and somehow I doubt that more bandwidth would make it faster... :)
Yeh, even on a 667MHz PIII with 700 megs o' RAM, Omniweb 3rc2 renders like a slug. I'd say it's more Omniweb, with it's conversion to RTF and whatnot, that make it so sucky.
Ive done that and all they give you is a 50$ ticket, but Im a minor.
Of course, that would be because I'm using them as X-windows thin-clients to a modern computer...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
- 1. Read up on something called torque.
- 2. Find out the diameter of the wheels.
- 3. Look at the rating of the tires on dry cement pavement.
- 4. Test drive the configuration.
ONLY THEN do you know your ride is pimp!Don't you do your homework before buying something? Heck, everyone knows Intel is expensive garbage. Why do you think AMD is still in business?
The logical outcome of this (from the suppliers' point of view) is to adopt MS-style EULAs for the licensed, not sold processor in your system. You can't publish any benchmark that would reveal their latest whiz-bang performs most tasks just as slowly as a 16 MHz 386SX (but at a far higher price).
Flash, Shockwave, and COBOL. They all have a few uses, and they all are liked best by crazy people.
as well as selling under false pretenses.
Intel makes it out that you want to get a P4 because it provides higher performance and is faster than a P3.
This is not the case.
It's like If I sell you a car, tell you it's faster than last years model, so you buy it, then it turns out to be slower.
Jeeze, then when stupidly buying such an overspec heavy thing get a friging desktop case. Is it that hard?
Here in the SF Bay Area the indoor BART stations are always at a nice cool temperature.
There has to be a reason why Intel still has not released a daul processor P4 board.....
My uncle spent two days in a lockup, because the judges stayed home in a snowstorm.