Pentium 4 2.8GHz

DigitaBiscuit writes "The new 2.8GHz Pentium 4 has been officially launched by Intel today. Sporting a 533MHz System Bus, this new P4 looks to put the hurt on AMD's new Athlon XP 2600+. Benchmarks and a full review with performance versus AMD's new chip, can be found here." The NDAs must be expiring today, since we already have another review submitted as well.

Comments

that fast?

[Simon (S2)]

i think the *speed* of the cpu is not really important anymore... performance is a lot more useful definition of the overall cpu power.

Re:that fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

not to mention price.

an intel cpu may only represent $100-$300 difference premium over AMD...but in todays commodity priced computers....that can represent beer money, motherboard money, video card money or ram money....or all of the above!!!!

most of my friends and family would be absolutey impressed with an XP1500 system i could build them for less then US $350 (sans monitor) anyway.

Re:that fast?

[NanoGator]

Depends on who you're aiming at. Somebody running on a P4 processor is already going to have a good idea what 2.8 gigs is gonna be like. An AMD user isn't going to make as much sense of it, I agree.

Frankly, I think they should benchmark these systems on time critical processes. I can't outrun Office on my P2 350, I dunno why they think I care about benchmarks involving that. Quake FPS can be improved (to an extent) with a new video card. Us dudes using LW/Maya/Softimage/Max are the ones who REALLY need the speed/performance rating tested. Time = Money. Benchmark on those progs.

Re:that fast?

[Performer Guy]

That is the oldest line in the book. Historically it has been proven resoundingly wrong. Apps use new power and resources and new applications are enabled by faster CPUs and more memory. People have been saying "we don't need this much power" since the 486DX 20MHz, and how many people use those today? Damned few. Get over it, stuff gets faster and people keep buying the stuff and developers write their applications for the newer stuff.

Re:that fast?

[NanoGator]

"People have been saying "we don't need this much power" since the 486DX 20MHz..."

I always found that type of comment amusing. They don't realize that the extra horsepower goes into making the interface better.

Technically, word processing could easily be done on a >486. However, what the extra mhz gets you today is real time spell checking, graphics, and a buncha extra interface options that just weren't possible on slower machines. You can make today's software work on earlier machines, but the optimization to do that will throw away a lot of the UI stuff we take for granted.

Re:that fast?

[13Echo]

Tell me about it. X86 clock speeds are now officially *twice* as fast as the CPU in my home machine, which was brand new last year. I installed my CPU when it was the best of the bunch. In a years time, they are twice as fast.

This fight to have the highest clock speed is driving me nuts. It doesn't even really matter any more, does it? Do we need to to shave a few extra seconds off of compile times?

Anyways. It looks like the Athlon holds its own pretty well, considering the near 700 MHz speed difference. But it doesn't matter to me. Opteron will be my next upgrade. When that sucker comes out, it will be a battle for blood between AMD and Intel.

Re:that fast?

[joib]

Hrm, you know, the computing world is bigger than office+quake+rendering. There are plenty of cpu hogging stuff besides rendering. But of course, your advice is entirely correct. Benchmark the stuff that's important for you. Not what all those hardware sites think that is important for their on average 14-year old readers.

Re:that fast?

[saider]

There should be a multi-tool suite that you can look at to compare numbers. Something like...

Office Apps
- office suite
- image software
Game Engines
- Quake, etc.
Development
- popular compiled and interpreted languages
Server Apps
- see how the thing handles IP traffic
Engineering Apps
- FEA and simulation

Then what you do is go through the list and see which scores you are interested in. The big houses could do an aggregate score, but they would also have to publish the individual scores so that people could make sense of the numbers.

Having a barrage of tests will keep vendors honest and prevent them from tweaking their hardware/drivers for one specific test.

Re:that fast?

[axxackall]

For personal (as well as small to mid size corporate) information and document management the CPU speed today is less important. I still see more suffering from the lack of RAM and from slow system buses.

Re:that fast?

[NorthDude]

Dude, I'm still up and running with my good ol'
PII 266 512 meg ram and a 3dFx voodoo 5.
Had served me flawlessly for more then 3 years now!
Its new nickname is TRex ;)

Re:that fast?

[AlgUSF]

Damn straight. If you look at those charts, the AMD Athlon 2200+ (which I am going to get next week for my new system), performs just as good as most of the higher end pentium's, and cost like 200-300 less! I'm a college student, and that couple hundred can go to so much more tuition, beer, car payment, etc... Guess what the intel name isn't worth that much to me....

Re:that fast?

[ibpooks]

But obviously doesn't have enough horsepower for a grammar checker.

Re:that fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote this post from the job, p4 1.2Ghz 1gig ram.
And you know what? I did not run any spell check cuz I just don't give a f*ck!
I have other things to do then double check every single word of a post written in a language which is not even my primary one.
Shut up and go play in the traffic

Benchmarks

[Jacer]

Are they all hacked up in favor of the P4 too? It's hard to build identical systems that only compare the procs when the FSB is so different. Is AMD just trying to standardize on one motherboard or is there a reason I can't go above 266 without overclocking? I won't upgrade until amd increases the FSB on the procs. I hope I'm not alone...

Re:Benchmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

barring the fact that Intel will ALWAYS be one CPU RELEASE ahead of AMD (which is fine, I'd never buy the absolutely latest of either, your an idiot to pay exponentially higher for THE most current processor from either)

that aside lets look at the facts (from most benchmarks)

1. Your statement, Jacer, looks pretty much dead wrong. How can you explain that a CPU that has a lower CPU frequency AND a freaken lower bus frequency, perform as good or better then it's competition.

because jacer, i look at each cpu release from both intel and amd, and i examine the COST, and which model is supposed to compete with each other.

for example: just a gross comparison

US $146 athlon xp2200
US $246 p4 2200/533

a quick look at ANY site with benchmarks shows that the xp2200 actually holds up VERY WELL against the p4 2200/533.

whether INTEL likes it or not, AMD targeted the p4 2200 with the XP 2200 ...WITH OUT A DOUBT, IN NAME AND IN PRICE.

if the P4 cpu and 533 bus is so superior.....

i'd like to see where..

show me you prick. show me where the 533 is making a dramatic difference.

if anything, the only thing i see, is that INTEL can release one step quicker on their speediest cpu.

$546 - Pentium 4 2.8GHz from pricewatch

no thanks, i'll pass on the latest $600 cpu from Intel.

i can build an ENTIRE system for that much money, and it will perform within 20% of a p4 2.8

Re:Benchmarks

[Jacer]

The cost is where AMD shines, granted. My point was if AMD could get a faster FSB, they could easily pull ahead, not nessicarily in the CPU frequency. You're an idiot good sir, if you don't the the advancement of the proc is a significant step. With a faster FSB you get more responsive ram, and PCI slot, combined with the fact that the 2200 isn't 2200mhz, it'll make it that much better, closing the gap on 20% margin you're bragging about.

Re:Benchmarks

[Jim Norton]

There have been benchmarks conducted already with an OC'd Athlon XP CPU running with 333 MHz FSB - the performance difference was barely noticeable - like a fraction of a percent.

Re:Benchmarks

[checkyoulater]

With a faster FSB you get more responsive ram, and PCI slot

Faster PCI slot? I thought the standard for PCI slots was 33 MHz? Are Intel boards running PCI out of spec? Isn't that the reason FSB speeds are always multiples of 33?

Re:Benchmarks

[Fredpro]

It's been said to death, but comparing clock frequencies across processor architectures is not kocher.

If big numbers is all you want, then sure - go for P4's. But if you are after real performance (read: high bang per buck) then AMD is without a doubt, unarguably THE choice for the user with a FINITE budget. The fact that AMD is actually holding ground to the P4's is just amazing -- and they are neck and neck -- but the other, and perhaps more important comparison, is cost. Here you don't need to be a Computer Engineer to work out which one is the leader.

Re:Benchmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

And

lets

press

enter

a

bunch

to

make

the

post

look

longer....

Geez, not only that but you resort to personal attacks on someone who just gave their opinion. What an asshole you are.

I'm shocked.

[magicslax]

My next prediction: AMD will release a processor that's even faster! Nobody will expect that one.

Distant future (more than one week): Intel will release a processor that's faster than that one!


What if the video chipset industry was the same way? Whoa. ;-)

benchmarks ???

[dr.Flake]

quote: "Benchmarks and a full review with performance versus AMD's new chip, can be found here." "

Didn't we discuss the value (more precisely the lack of) of benchmarking just the other day ???

(http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/24/125 32 51&mode=thread&tid=142)

Re:benchmarks ???

[Technician]

Read the review. They mentioned in the review which benchmark was the one mentioned as favoring Intel. They posted that along with the other well known benchmarks. They did not hide the fact one of the benchmarks is being disputed as favoring Intel. If the results were bad on all benchmarks except the one favoring Intel, it would stick out like a sore thumb. The other benchmarks also favored Intel, even though they didn't have the optimum MB and memory for the test, even when the AMD setup was optimum. I would love to see the test again with the preferred hardware for the P4.

Who cares?

[Newer Guy]

I'm typing this on a homemade computer that uses an AMD K6-3/350 overclocked to 392 Mhz. For what I do (web browsing, word processing, email, simple games like Tetris and listening to streams and MP3's) it works great! Why would I want to buy one of these? I'd much rather take a trip to Hawaii with my honey then blow a couple of grand on a Pentium 4 computer. Besides, let's get real...in about three months this will be obsolete...replaced by the newest whiz bang 3.0 GHZ processor that works about 7% faster then this one does. I think I'll wait until a real reason comes along to justify my spending a lot of $$ on a processor this powerful. For what I do, I simply don't need this much power. Do you?

Re:Who cares?

[Billly Gates]

Install Gentoo Linux on your k6 or better yet wait untill demo's of doom3 and ut2003 hit the net and then tell me how great your k6 is. I do not use alot of processing myself but gentoo is a pain on my old pIII.

fyi, gentoo packages are actually source based and are compilied automatically when installed to avoid rpm hell. Hmm lets upgrade to gcc31?.. this took litterally 2 days on my pIII. I was even thinking about upgrading to a dual athlonMP system but I had nothing but stability problems with AMD and VIA chipsets. I find it hard to believe a slashdoter nerd would just use his/her computer for web browsing but I could be wrong. By the way even Windows2000 or XP will be leaps and bounds faster by the upgrade. Even a p4 19.8ghz will make your system smooth for only a few hundred. Its worth it.

Re:Who cares?

[Simon (S2)]

doom3 and ut2003? why spend a lot of money for a pc just for playing games? buy a ps2. that's cheaper and it's made just for that! and if gentoo is a pain for your pIII, use something else.

Re:Who cares?

[Billly Gates]

If I am puting down serious dough on a pc it better as hell do as many things as possible including games, cad, programing, etc. I get what I pay for.

I am not an avid gamer per say but I have over a 1024x768 resolution with the latest 3d technology that I can replace when I feel like it, a keyboard and not a horrible gamepad, and the absolutely most important is internet play. Its pointless to play agaisnt a cpu. Playing against a real human on the other hand is different. I can't stand consoles. They are for kids. Gentoo is also worth it because when your done its fast as freakin hell because everything is compilied for your system processor with maximum optimizations and little bloatware is added.

Re:Who cares?

[Library Spoff]

a p4 19.8ghz ?
where do I sign up.....

(and can u clock em ?)

Re:Who cares?

[NanoGator]

"For what I do, I simply don't need this much power. Do you?

Yes. I do 3D Rendering.

Re:Who cares?

[fmaxwell]

Why would I want to buy one of these?

So that you could do more with your computer than "web browsing, word processing, email, simple games like Tetris and listening to streams and MP3's." You would buy one of these so that using your computer would be a pleasure, with everything from booting up to program loads would occur in a fraction of the time. You would buy one so that you could run any program without concerns about your hardware's ability to keep up.

If I were an employer, I'd be suspicious of hiring any computer professional (and maybe you are not one, I don't know) who was using antiquated hardware and saw no reason to upgrade. I'd be looking at that and asking myself "if this guy has so little interest in computers that he's running an ancient POS like that, how much enthusiasm can I expect from him in a technical position?"

I'd much rather take a trip to Hawaii with my honey then blow a couple of grand on a Pentium 4 computer.

Most people on Slashdot have the technical savvy to upgrade their existing computers. Thus the "couple of grand" price you're talking about is grossly inflated for most people on here.

For what I do, I simply don't need this much power. Do you?

No, but I need a lot more than I could get from an AMD K6-3 running at 392mhz! I've got an Athlon XP1700+ and I'm getting ready to upgrade. I can't imagine how glacial a K6-3 would be for video encoding (e.g., Divx), MP3 encoding, hi-res Photoshop work, or running modern first-person shooters like Unreal Tournament 2003.

Re:Who cares?

[FigWig]

Sure, you go shuffle the beads around your abacus while I chisel the last couple lines of my dissertation on this stone tablet. Happy with yourself Mr. Flinstone?

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be suspicious of hiring any computer professional (and maybe you are not one, I don't know) who was using antiquated hardware and saw no reason to upgrade.

So now, in addition to all the other bull**** reasons to disqualify someone from feeding themselves, we'll add the applicant's computer clock speed to the job application.

lol The job market is so utterly screwed...

Re:Who cares?

[red flavor]

I think you have a problem with your machine if it took 2 days to compile gcc 3.1. I just emerged (downloaded & compiled) my gentoo gcc 3.1.1, on my PIII laptop (600MHz), and it took less than 2 hours.

Now, if you were talking about OpenOffice, that took something like 13 hours.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is offtopic but may help someone get a job/raise/girlfriend/wife/life

When I hire nerds for IS/IT, I do not hire the extremely geeky, I know everything and can recode linux to run your washing machine types. I do also not hire the people with the latest greatest technical knowledge or with the longest list of capital acronyms on their resume.

I would not hire someone if I knew they had the latest greatest hardware at home, simply case and point being that the sound obsessive. Spending hard earned money constantly for maginal improvement does not sound like the kind of employee I would want working for me... and you may make the point, it's my money fuck you, but I make the point #1. obbsesives at home are obsessives at work.
#2. I have all the money, as your employer.

It's fine to spend money on technology, but here is a lesson to go along with that attitude. A healthy-systemwide RAM upgrade and the rest of the money spend on user-training would be 10x as effective as the latest greatest anything.

"If I were an employer, I'd be suspicious of hiring any computer professional (and maybe you are not one, I don't know) who was using antiquated hardware and saw no reason to upgrade. I'd be looking at that and asking myself "if this guy has so little interest in computers that he's running an ancient POS like that, how much enthusiasm can I expect from him in a technical position?""
That's like saying if my mechanic didn't drive a expensive car, I wouldn't hire him. Many many many people in management see there as a lot more to life than going home to sit in the same position you sat all day, staring at another screen. They value something called balance. Breadth. Experience. I would much rather take someone with who was not as technically savvy, but had hobbies and a diverse lifestyle over the King Overclocker ot the Universe for the simple reason you can teach someone computers, but the King Overclocker will always have an arrogant attitude. Get the point? the specifics can be taught to anyone with a good grasp of the basics, technically, but it's a lot harder to break a geek of his (arrogance/condecision/asociality/pensiveness/etc) . Bad attittudes and latest greatest belong only in programming. IS/IT are service fields where a good personality goes a hell of a lot further and having the latest-greatest attitude. Furthermore, anyone can throw money around and get a great computer system, but it takes true creativity to get the most out of what you have/need.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

i doubt you will ever be in a position to hire anyone. i think companies would rather hire someone who can work with less expensive hardware, if it gets the job done. they shouldn't/wouldn't give two shits what someone runs at home, unless they are paying for that person's computer. stupid.

Re:Who cares?

[tconnors]

fyi, gentoo packages are actually source based and are compilied automatically when installed to avoid rpm hell. Hmm lets upgrade to gcc31?.. this took litterally 2 days on my pIII.

Crickeys! You sure you are not running out of memory? I have a 500MHz AMD, (but with 384 megs RAM) and have never complained (I did when I only had 128 megs)! Of course, I used debian, and so don't have to compile from source often, but still, 2 days? Mozilla only took me a couple of hours, last time I tried it.

Hell, I would get sick of things after a day and kill the compilation -- the kernel didn't even take a day to compile on my 486 with 8 megs RAM.

I'm sure most peoples speed problems would be neutralised by them installing a decent window manager instead of the KDE or GNOME crap. I don't beleieve it takes ~30 seconds to start KDE on a top of the line workstation these days. FVWM took about 3 seconds on my 486 (and is there instantly on my ~500MHz laptop and desktop)!

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

"if this guy has so little interest in computers that he's running an ancient POS like that, how much enthusiasm can I expect from him in a technical position?"

What an amzing leap of logic - just because someone has an old machine they can't ( or won't ) answer a technical question - is that right? I think the problem is not with the guy with the slow computer, the problem is with the 'slow' employer...

Re:Who cares?

[Economist]

I think he ment he recompiled his whole system (emerge world -e) with his brand new compiler.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is the point of this comment?

"I don't need this much power so why should anyone else"
or
"I don't need this much power and you all probably care about my tetris playing so I just had to write this post"
or maybe
"Never buy a new CPU because better ones will inevitably arrive".

If you don't need it don't buy it, but don't come preaching I shouldn't get one either. It's fine to run a low spec machine, but why is that their owners often tend to be condesending towards those how have top of the line systems? We're all at least moderately knowledgeable about computers here, I'm sure people can assess their own needs Just Fine.

Re:Who cares?

[fmaxwell]

So now, in addition to all the other bull**** reasons to disqualify someone from feeding themselves, we'll add the applicant's computer clock speed to the job application.

There are plenty of applicants out there that are genuinely enthused about technology and try to keep their skills and systems up-to-date. I'd hire them before hiring some guy that apparently has little to no interest in computers. I've had my fill of people who got into the computer field solely because it was a way to earn a good paycheck. Their work and productivity are seldom as good as that of someone who has a real enthusiasm for computers.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um well you do realize there are people in this world who do more than that right? Maybe you don't need one but there are quite a few people who do.

Re:Who cares?

[Darren Winsper]

Show me a PS2 playing Warcraft III, Neverwinter Nights, Counterstrike, RTCW at a resolution of at least 1024x768 and I'll consider it.

Re:Who cares?

[fmaxwell]

What an amzing leap of logic - just because someone has an old machine they can't ( or won't ) answer a technical question - is that right?

I don't look for drones who can answer technical questions. I look for enthusiastic employees that genuinely love their line of work. Some guy that views his computer as yet another appliance for which he has identified only a handful of task is unlikely to be such an employee.

Re:Who cares?

[tconnors]

If I were an employer, I'd be suspicious of hiring any computer professional (and maybe you are not one, I don't know) who was using antiquated hardware and saw no reason to upgrade. I'd be looking at that and asking myself "if this guy has so little interest in computers that he's running an ancient POS like that, how much enthusiasm can I expect from him in a technical position?"

I do run "POS"s like that. I am very interested in computers. Furtunately, I am not a computer professional. I bailed out of my CS course in third year, in favour of a more challenging physics degree. The shits that were around the CS department where amazing! They knew nothing. Sure they all had the latest fastest computer, but didn't know how to use it. Indeed, they didn't know how to interpret the performance of computers, beyond the marketing hype. A 5% increase on the last computer you bought? Why?! In the average 3 hour exam, I would end up leaving after 45 minutes, along with the rest of my friends, and we find out we are in the top 10% of the class all get greater than 90 percent on the exam, and the others with their fast laptops score below 10%. There truly was a gap in the exam marks between 10 and 90%, but I digress!

No, but I need a lot more than I could get from an AMD K6-3 running at 392mhz! I've got an Athlon XP1700+ and I'm getting ready to upgrade. I can't imagine how glacial a K6-3 would be for video encoding (e.g., Divx), MP3 encoding, hi-res Photoshop work, or running modern first-person shooters like Unreal Tournament 2003.

Personally, I don't waste my time or money on games, so my requirements are obviously differnt to yours. But the desktop sitting in front of me is a "POS" 500MHz Tru64 machine, running a "POS" OSF/1 v5.1. The only time I complain about it, is that every 2 months or so, I have to reboot, because the X server starts leaking memory, stealing the 196MB RAM I have available. Then, and only then, do things start to crawl. I wouldn't even reboot (just restart the X server), except that I like to clean things up occasionally, in case I have any stray processes doing stupid things, and I don't have root access.

With this 500MHz and 196 MB available to me, I run mozilla (a memory hog on the OSF/1 arhcitecture), xemacs, several GV sessions with big .ps files behind them, and about 15 or so xterm sessions, and occasionally the GIMP (oh, and a lightweight window manager - FVWM).
Recently, I had a need to generate a 800MB data file, and get a program to generate a ~100,000 by ~1,000 pixel .ps file from it, and open it up using the GIMP - I admit that I had to go to one of our cluster machines with 3Gigs of memory to do this, but other than that......

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

mod this up. but i guess it described a lot of slashfags, probably moderators too

"but the King Overclocker will always have an arrogant attitude. Get the point? the specifics can be taught to anyone with a good grasp of the basics, technically, but it's a lot harder to break a geek of his arrogance/condecision/asociality/pensiveness/etc). "

the lamest thing you can be is an arrogant geek.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

...you are still applying the same flawed argument - you are making a link between use of old technology and lack of enthusiasm for new technology. There is no link! Someone could be in a situation where they can't afford an new maching but still, are you ready for this, be interested in new technology.

Re:Who cares?

[fmaxwell]

i doubt you will ever be in a position to hire anyone.

I have already proved you wrong on that prediction.

they shouldn't/ wouldn't give two shits what someone runs at home, unless they are paying for that person's computer.

What an ignorant statement -- and so eloquently presented, too. I want people that know about modern software. As an employer, I don't want to hear "I've never run that. My computer at home is way too slow for that. You'll need to give me some time and/or courses so that I can come up to speed."

Oh, and try learning about the shift key, moron.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's fine and dandy but you still have countered the italic quote you give...

Re:Who cares?

[SQL Error]

Around 1995, computers got fast enough for my work (software development). I wasn't waiting on the compiler any more, the editor was nice and snappy, even the GUI desktop was decent (CDE in those days).

On the other hand, my previous employer paid $180,000 in 1995 for an IBM server with dual 75MHz CPUs. We quickly outgrew it, upgraded to 4 CPUs, then were forced to move to Alpha at huge expense.

In 2002, you can get a dual Athlon or P4 Xeon box that will outrun a 1996 10-way Alpha - for around 1/100th the price. That's real value for money.

And then there's the games, of course.

Re:Who cares?

[fmaxwell]

Someone could be in a situation where they can't afford an new maching but still, are you ready for this, be interested in new technology.

Read the original post to which I initially replied:

Why would I want to buy one of these? I'd much rather take a trip to Hawaii with my honey then blow a couple of grand on a Pentium 4 computer. ...
For what I do, I simply don't need this much power. Do you?

Does that sound like someone enthused about new technology?

I don't care if someone has the latest and greatest CPU, but something that's at least within a generation or two of current isn't setting the bar too high. For f***'s sake, a 1.3ghz Duron is only about $40 and that's probably more than five times as fast as the CPU he has now. If someone spends an average of $100-$200/year, he can keep his computer reasonably modern.

Re:Who cares?

[evilviper]

Just think of it this way... If I was to UNDER-clock this processor to your speed (400MHz) it would run so cool that it would actually ABSORB HEAT!!! Take THAT, all you physists!

But seriously though, I'm running a 750MHz Athlon system myself. I had to upgrade from my 233 because I just couldn't watch any videos at that speed. Now, I'm resonably happy with 750MHz, but I would like to upgrade. I'd like to get a fast processor and underclock it so my system doesn't run at 150F degrees (underclock a fast processor enough, and you wouldn't even need a fan). I'd also like a faster processor just so I can do thing like encode DivX at a reasonable speed, and compile Mozilla in under a month.

Which brings us to the biggest issue. So many people jump on the upgrade bandwagon because many programmers are using up ungodly ammounts of CPU and Memory. It's relatively few causing the problems, but for Unix, programs like Mozilla are practically required. So, even surfing the web brings my 750 to it's knees. Hopefully the Dillo project will add the handful of needed features to their browser soon, and I'll be able to trash Mozilla, and be happy with my 750 again.

Re:Who cares?

[fmaxwell]

This is offtopic but may help someone get a job/raise/girlfriend/wife/life

Try not to be so condescending. It's very unlikely that you're relationship with your spouse/girlfriend has lasted as long as my relationship has with mine. And I don't need a raise. My clients pay my billing rate or I don't work for them.

That's like saying if my mechanic didn't drive a expensive car, I wouldn't hire him.

It's more like refusing to hire an auto mechanic that relies on a moped for his transportation. Since when is a $40 Duron or Celeron CPU or a $90 motherboard expensive? Even a modest investment each year could net a performance increase that would drastically change what the original poster could do with his computer, yet he is unwilling to even make that minimal investment.

Many many many people in management see there as a lot more to life than going home to sit in the same position you sat all day, staring at another screen. They value something called balance. Breadth. Experience.

In addition to being a computer enthusiast, I am an avid fisherman, boater, motorcyclist, RC airplane hobbyist, woodworker, and scuba diver. Having a reasonably modern (Athlon XP1700+ based) computer does not preclude having a life.

Re:Who cares?

[Tim C]

If he's running gentoo, then he's clearly not using his PC just for playing games.

I'm a Java programmer by trade, and use JBuilder, and my old P3 450 was *painfully* slow. Now that we've finally got our new 1.9GHz machines, work is almost a pleasure again. I'm happy that so many people here are happy with their old, slow machines, but ours drove us to distraction (literally).

Cheers,

Tim

Re:Who cares?

[fmaxwell]

Let me start out by saying that you are an arrogant ass with delusions of superiority. See the quote below:

Furtunately, I am not a computer professional. I bailed out of my CS course in third year, in favour of a more challenging physics degree. The shits that were around the CS department where amazing! They knew nothing.
[...]
In the average 3 hour exam, I would end up leaving after 45 minutes, along with the rest of my friends, and we find out we are in the top 10% of the class all get greater than 90 percent on the exam, and the others with their fast laptops score below 10%.

Yes, it is fortunate that you are not a computer professional. I am relieved to know that it is unlikely that I will to have to work with a self-impressed, aggrandizing buffoon such as yourself.

Personally, I don't waste my time or money on games, so my requirements are obviously differnt to yours.

Since when is Photoshop, video enocoding, or MP3 encoding a "game"? And who are you to announce that someone else's chosen form of recreation is a waste of time or money? You need a serious dose of humility. If you ever get out of academia, I am sure that you will get it.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dillo is very nice. I wrote a proof-of-concept patch recently that someone could use as a basis for implementing tabbed browsing, but I really don't think anybody is up to the task. Obvliously, I wasn't. Dillo is fast and all, but to add mozilla-like feature-packed goodness, I think you'd really need to squash the current way Dillo manages it's browser widgets.

Anyway, if you want to check it out (and a screenshot), it's at http://malefactor.org/dillo/

Re:Who cares?

[Surak]

Just think of it this way... If I was to UNDER-clock this processor to your speed (400MHz) it would run so cool that it would actually ABSORB HEAT!!! Take THAT, all you physists!

Hmmmm...a P4-based air conditioner.... :-P

Re:Who cares?

[13Echo]

I'm sure that the biggest issue isn't with memory, but is due to the fact that with Gentoo, you compile *all* of your software from scratch. It is very time consuming, but is worth it to some people.

Normal Linux distributions can make due on just about any old Pentium class CPU, as long as they have sufficient RAM... But Gentoo, needs a fast CPU, if you want it to compile before you grow old and die. :)

Re:Who cares?

[fmaxwell]

That's fine and dandy but you still have countered the italic quote you give...

Yes, I know that I have countered it. Thanks for noticing.

Re:Who cares?

[warrax_666]

i doubt you will ever be in a position to hire anyone.

I have already proved you wrong on that prediction.

Then $DEITY help us all.

Anyway, who the hell cares if software is modern? I run software that works. For example, I'm running TeX version 3.14159 which was released around 1995. I have never, ever encountered a bug (and by all indications noone else has, either) with this "non-modern" piece of software, so why should I change? The fact that I haven't changed doesn't mean that I'm not interested in software, it means that I don't need to change. Simple as that.

Ah well, guess IHBT.

Re:Who cares?

[Billnvd65]

"If I were an employer, I'd be suspicious of hiring any computer professional (and maybe you are not one, I don't know) who was using antiquated hardware and saw no reason to upgrade. I'd be looking at that and asking myself "if this guy has so little interest in computers that he's running an ancient POS like that, how much enthusiasm can I expect from him in a technical position?"

What kind of care does your mechanic drive? Does he drive a 5000 HP Funny car or a 3 yr old chevy with rust on the quarters? Does that make him a good or bad mechanic? What kind of stupid method of measuring a persons skills is that?

Considering how you have defined all of your needs for processing power, you "really" validated your point on how "Computer Professionals" should use Multi-GHz machines.

Let's see, you need speed for Divx, MP3, altering your porn in photoshop and running FP games. Yep, you are a computer professional allright. Unless you have the "need" for raw cpu power, it's just a penis extension. Get a life!

Re:Who cares?

[warrax_666]

If someone spends an average of $100-$200/year, he can keep his computer reasonably modern.

... and have fvwm start in 0.01s instead of 0.02s. Why not spend those $'s on something which will have a perceivable effect instead? Why not wait until you actually need a faster computer?

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it actually possible to underclock modern CPUs, without using a soldering iron or some such? Even if you have to fiddle with bridging tiny jumpers -- there is a lot of information to be found fo overclocking, but none for underclocking.

We have a couple of gateways running Celeron 800s (which were the smallest readily available at the time) which would be more than fast enough running at 200-400 MHz. And quite a bit cooler, which is an issue (small cabinet).
Anyone have a pointer?

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be looking at that and asking myself "if this guy has so little interest in computers that he's running an ancient POS like that, how much enthusiasm can I expect from him in a technical position?"

Oh dear. You'd be happier with a guy who's bought a box so he can get WinXP and Office running, and to play RTCW (or some other done-before bland shooter), rather than someone who makes use of the technology he has through careful design and programming?

Some of the most impressive people I've ever seen in the computing field have worked on "obsolete" hardware. Guys running clusters of old 486 boxes, guys writing demos for Atari STs... that kinda thing. They really know technology, not some loser whose ego is infinitely tied to his Q3 framerate.

I recently got hold of a P75 16M Toshiba laptop. Play MP3s, chat on IRC, deal with large amounts of email (lovely Pine), browse the web with Dillo and Links... is that a "POS" for being a usable computer that does everything I need?

Fortunately, you're the one with pseudo-penis-envy over MHz and eventually your latest-and-greatest bit of kit will be a "POS" in someone else's eyes too. Meanwhile, I'm touched that people give me respect and ask me for advice because I can carefully make good use of old hardware.

Eh, whatever :)

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla took two hours on a system like that? When was this, Milestone 6?

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like beer?

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually you can run your CPU at full clock rate if you use one of those CPU cooler software that halts the CPU from time to time when it is idling. Win2K does that automatically.

Re:Who cares?

[13Echo]

Underclocking a newer, faster CPU is not going to make a substantial difference in the heat that it produces. The odds are, that you won't normally be producing full load on the CPU anyway, so underclocking it, even by lowering it by 1 GHz is probably just silly.

Basically, you can compile a program, producing full load at 1.4 GHz, or full load at 2.8 GHz. Either way, the CPU will get hot. What is better: a few degrees for a shorter period of time, or a marginally lower temp for a much longer period of time? These CPUs are designed for hight temps. Unless you live in an oven, then they will operate just fine. This reminds me of the silly posts of people that claim that they need to aim fans on their open computer cases. It is just really rediculous.

It just makes little sense to lower the clock speed of your CPU, unless you have stability problems. No modern CPU gets that hot that you need to drop its clock speed. Even the standard K7 Athlon is fine at 60C-70C.

Re:Who cares?

[Nameles]

I assume XP does that too. Then why does my Thunderbird 1.2 still run at 120F with 3 case fans and 1 proc fan for the processor (1 case fan for hds), or did I answer my own question?

Re:Who cares?

[Nameles]

What about heat generation from the processor that feeds out of the case? My computer, albeit in between a desk and a tupperware desk type thing, puts out a LOT of heat, sometimes to the degree where it's about 10 degrees F hotter in this room than any other room in the house.

I did patch this problem, by moving it to a different case (bigger and made of steel, a UNEEC(sp?) rip off of the Antec full SoHo server style case.) and adding in more fans. Before I had a midtower plastic/aluminum(sp?). Now I have to deal with the noise though...

Re:Who cares?

[evilviper]

Unless you live in an oven, then they will operate just fine.

Some people call it an oven... I prefer to use the traditional term: 'desert'. When room temperature is already 130F, then we have the PC in a room with practically no airflow, in addition to the heat the computer generates... Yes I do need a cooler CPU.

It just makes little sense to lower the clock speed of your CPU, unless you have stability problems.

Not constant problems, just, on occasion, a lockup will occur. Before you even ask, I have traced it to the point that it can't be anything other than the CPU or MoBo chipset (the latter isn't likely).

Even the standard K7 Athlon is fine at 60C-70C.

In the short term, it can handle very high temperatures. That is a risky practice for servers, as well as generally just reducing the lifespan of the processors, and any other devices in the case.

Re:Who cares?

[evilviper]

Can't say how to do it with your specific setup.

Newer Athlons are configured via BIOS. I know for a fact you can underclock them, as I have done it several times, with several different chipsets.

If your MoBo has jumpers or dip switches for multiplier, just reduce your multiplier and give it a shot. If not, check the BIOS. You should get lucky.

Re:Who cares?

[swagr]

I just don't beleive you.
I have an Athalon 750 at home, use Mozilla, and have no reason to upgrade.

Which brings us to the biggest issue. So many people jump on the upgrade bandwagon because many programmers are using up ungodly ammounts of CPU and Memory. It's relatively few causing the problems, but for Unix, programs like Mozilla are practically required. So, even surfing the web brings my 750 to it's knees. Hopefully the Dillo project will add the handful of needed features to their browser soon, and I'll be able to trash Mozilla, and be happy with my 750 again.

Are your for real? Did you ever own a 386, 486, or P90. Have you ever run win 95 in a 486 with 16M of RAM.

My experiences with my Athalon tell me either
1) you're clueless,
2) full of shit,
3) the rest of your hardware is ancient, or
4) you should run top and see what's going on.

And finally, why stop at Dillo. Use lynx. I'm sure that'll hum on your slow 750.

Re:Who cares?

[GigsVT]

it means that I don't need to change.

How does Slashdot look in Netscape 1.0? I always wondered that.

Re:Who cares?

[13Echo]

Well, there is nothing wrong with living in the desert, I suppose. :) That seems like an incredibly hot environment for a PC, though. 130 F degrees? You must need a liquid cooler for that thing.

Re:Who cares?

[evilviper]

Dillo is fast and all, but to add mozilla-like feature-packed goodness, I think you'd really need to squash the current way Dillo manages it's browser widgets.

Tabbed browsing is a great feature, but certainly not a requirement for me. Here's the features I think Dillo needs before it'll be useable as a primary browser (listed in order):

SSL

Select external programs to handle tasks (edit page, mail, etc)

Ability to copy text from a page

Ability to easily save an image from a page

Tables would be nice

Better Bookmark system (folders)
After that, I'd toss Moz and use Dillo. I'd like to see more features added, but just those above, would be enough for me to stop mozilla from eating memory and CPU cycles. I'd be willing to work on some of those very features, if the license changed to something less restrictive than the GPL. But for now, Mozilla gets to much on my RAM.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better than Netscape 4.x, that's for damn sure.

Re:Who cares?

[evilviper]

I have an Athalon 750 at home, use Mozilla, and have no reason to upgrade.

My Experiences with my Athlon tell me either:
1) You run Windows
2) You don't have a broadband connection
3) You don't surf with dozens of windows open
4) You just don't mind waiting. (Some people are happy with Win XP on a 166MHz system)

Have you ever run win 95 in a 486 with 16M of RAM.

Yup. That was back in the day when computers were genuinely not fast enough for the software's features. Our situation now is completely different. Mozilla uses up huge ammounts of memory and CPU power just to render HTML (a 486 with a DOS web browser could do the same job faster).

Re:Who cares?

[checkyoulater]

But Gentoo, needs a fast CPU, if you want it to compile before you grow old and die. :)

Actually, the latest Gentoo release has ISO's for 386's right up to Athlon/P4. Still in beta, mind you, but still helpful. The part that takes the longest is the bootstrapping and the system build. These beta ISO's have all that done for you.

Re:Who cares?

[be-fan]

A gentoo install does take in the neighborhood of two days. It takes about 3-4 hours to bootstrap and merge the base system (something most people leave on overnight) and upwards of 6-7 hours (because of all the C++) to merge the full KDE desktop. If you add in some actual applications here (like KOffice, another hour or so) or OpenOffice (something like 18 hours) then yeah, you can easily blow two days on it.

BTW> That FVWM comment is crap. FVWM doesn't have 1/4 of 1/8 of 1/16 the power of KDE 3.x. Besides the eye candy (which is nice mind you) FVWM (and the traditional X applications one tends to use with it) have nowhere near the level of integration and polish as KDE desktop apps. Besides, they lack anti-aliasing, which (on my 1600x1200 LCD screen) makes them look horrid beyond comparison. It is true that GNOME and KDE are pretty bloated, but compare them instead to something like Windows 2000, which is comparable in features but lightning fast.

Re:Who cares?

[evilviper]

You must need a liquid cooler for that thing.

That wouldn't do as much good as you think. Just think, the water wouldn't be much cooler than room temp.

Actually, I have a 5"x5"x2" fan mounted to my case, aimed at the CPU. That's enough airflow to keep it just a few degrees above room temp.

Re:Who cares?

[Citizen of Earth]

So many people jump on the upgrade bandwagon because many programmers are using up ungodly ammounts of CPU and Memory. It's relatively few causing the problems, but for Unix, programs like Mozilla are practically required.

Use Galeon instead. Same power, less bloat.

Re:Who cares?

[Dave2 Wickham]

I can't stand consoles. They are for kids.

So Die Hard is for "kids"? Goldeneye? Black & White? Half-Life? Resident Evil? Halo?

All of those titles are on consoles, and they are just off the top of my head. I wouldn't consider them "kids" games.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Gentoo is also worth it because when your done its fast as freakin hell because everything is compilied for your system processor with maximum optimizations and little bloatware is added. "

Someone really needs to benchmark this once and for all. I would love to see proof of Gentoo's superior performance somewhere as compared to say Debian or Slackware. Lies, Damn Lies, and Benchmarks as the saying goes. My guess is the Gentoo system would compare favorably due to the lack of crap like FAM running, not due to the optimizations of the incredible gcc used. That gcc remark was a joke. Gentoo is "cool" because people think they are special for dealing with a horrible install and stupidly compiling everything from source. Wow! My computer is 1% faster in Mozilla [ the two days a week it is not compiling ] !!

Re:Who cares?

[tconnors]

Mozilla took two hours on a system like that? When was this, Milestone 6?

About then ;)

I gave up trying to build anymore, and just waited for the debian packages :)

Re:Who cares?

[xsbellx]

OK, against whatever "better" judgement I have, it's time to jump into the fray.

I look for enthusiastic employees that genuinely love their line of work.

Good idea. But how are emthusiasm and monetary expenditure linked in the computer world?

IMHO, based on a few decades of experience, the best employees are not those who merely have the latest toys but those who understand the concept of "a computer is a tool" and can best utilize the tool(s) available to perform a task(s).

I believe your previous posts are indicative of a person with a very narrow mind and an even smaller penis.

Re:Who cares?

[fmaxwell]

Good idea. But how are emthusiasm and monetary expenditure linked in the computer world?

They aren't. You can get blindingly fast CPUs, fast hard drives, motherboards, etc. for under $100. So for a hundred or two hundred dollars a year, you can keep your PC up to date and able to run modern software. You don't need to buy the latest and greatest, but neither should you be using some ancient (in computer terms) system at home.

I believe your previous posts are indicative of a person with a very narrow mind and an even smaller penis.

I worry when a discussion of computers makes you think about strangers' penises.

Re:Who cares?

[fmaxwell]

What kind of care does your mechanic drive? Does he drive a 5000 HP Funny car or a 3 yr old chevy with rust on the quarters? Does that make him a good or bad mechanic? What kind of stupid method of measuring a persons skills is that?

A better question is what kind of tools your mechanic buys for himself. If you went to his house and discovered that his tools consisted of an old hammer, two cheap screwdrivers, and a rusty adjustable wrench, then you would have cause for concern.

Let's see, you need speed for Divx, MP3, altering your porn in photoshop and running FP games. Yep, you are a computer professional allright.

Who said anything about "porn"? I use Photoshop to touch-up and alter photos used on commercial web pages. Since his examples were all things like web surfing and playing MP3s, I tried to give him some examples that he could relate to.

Unless you have the "need" for raw cpu power, it's just a penis extension.

Maybe your reason for assuming that everyone is looking of a "penis extension" is because you have a 3.5" floppy.

Re:Who cares?

[EastCoastSurfer]

Someones computer clockspeed won't disqualify them, but lack of genuine interest in technology will. An easy way to check interest is how by gauging how much of the applicants personal time is spent tinkering, etc... with computers. I expect an applicant to a highly technical position to have at minimum two machines at home(preferably self built and networked). They don't have to be state of the art brand new machines, but having a single 486 at home just so you can check e-mail won't cut it.

Re:Who cares?

[xsbellx]

Your assertion of yearly hardware upgrades equating to enthusiasm is not correct. Upgrades should only be performed when there is NEED to upgrade, not merely to maintain a false perception of self-importance based on newness of one's toys.

I happily use a P75 (16MB and a 1.2GB hd) to control a telescope and digital camera as part of my astronomy hobby. The telescope is positioned by servos controlled by an RS232 conection to the PC. The camera is digital and controlled via USB (add-on card). I consider this system to be far more idicative of my ethusiasm than the 800Mhz PIII or 1.4Ghz Athalon sitting in my den.

As an ethusiast, I should know and understand the capabilities of the hardware I have available. Blindly upgrading on a yearly basis as you advocate, implies "band-wagonism" NOT enthusiasm.

Re:Who cares?

[pmz]

...programs like Mozilla are practically required. So, even surfing the web brings my 750 to it's knees.

I don't see how. I run Mozilla on an AMD K6-200 (GNOME 1.4, 128MB RAM@100MHz, 5400RPM disk, 56K modem), and Mozilla runs just fine. It takes a tolerable while to load. Once loaded, its performance is very tolerable.

The only things that tend to bring any computer to its knees are Flash, overly complex tables and mega-long web pages, Java Applets, and badly done JavaScript. Most good websites don't use these things, so surfing generally isn't a problem for me.

Re:Who cares?

[ncc74656]

I can't imagine how glacial a K6-3 would be for video encoding (e.g., Divx)

Been there, done that...and yes, SVCD encoding on a K6-III-450 was dog-slow, even at moderate quality settings in TMPGEnc. I just upgraded from a 1.0-GHz Athlon to a dual Athlon MP 2100...encode times at TMPGEnc's highest-quality settings went from 11-12 hours for 40-50 minutes of video to 2.5-3 hours. The same task on my old K6-III would've probably taken at least 24 hours...hell, it more than likely would've taken even longer than that.

Re:Who cares?

[p3d0]

Underclocking a newer CPU allows you to run it at a lower voltage, which does have a substantial impact on the heat generated. Heat is proportional to CPU usage (which, I think, is what you are thinking of), but also proportional to the square of the voltage.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck You. I can accomplish plenty with my PII 400 box running FreeBSD. It is no where near the fastest system I have either. Other systems at home include a dual 750 with 10K Ultra 160 drives, a 1Ghz Athlon, hell even my laptop is faster than the FreeBSD box. So what is your point? The slowest box of them all happens to be my fave and is easily as functional for my uses as any of the others. You truly are a fucking idiot. Would your hypothetical employees get a bonus if they upgraded their motherboard?

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're the guy with the 3-D Rendered Pokemon on his web page.

That's Cool, Dude!

Re:Who cares?

[SN74S181]

I would rather have the ten-way Alpha.

I like older stuff that's made the way $180,000 worth of hardware is made better than cheap stuff that's faster, yet built the way a $28 toaster is made.

But then, I am a geek, not a hot-dog. I have 8 bit machines here that I appreciate for what they are.

Re:Who cares?

[evilviper]

Well, it would be less if I already had GNOME loaded into memory. No, I use much lighterweight window managers, so the overhead of the libs Galeon needs would certainly negate the benefit.

Re:Who cares?

[fmaxwell]

I happily use a P75 (16MB and a 1.2GB hd) to control a telescope and digital camera as part of my astronomy hobby. The telescope is positioned by servos controlled by an RS232 conection to the PC. The camera is digital and controlled via USB (add-on card). I consider this system to be far more idicative of my ethusiasm than the 800Mhz PIII or 1.4Ghz Athalon sitting in my den.

I plan to get an appropriate laptop to use with my Celestron C8 (with aftermarket digital setting circles) and my NexStar 5. But, like your use of the P75, that will show my enthusiasm for amateur astronomy rather than computers.

I have a 486-100 laptop now that I use for automobile diagnostics and burning ROM/PROM/EPROM/Flash. But it's not my primary computer.

As an ethusiast, I should know and understand the capabilities of the hardware I have available. Blindly upgrading on a yearly basis as you advocate, implies "band-wagonism" NOT enthusiasm.

I don't "blindly" upgrade. I upgrade when, with a cost-effective purchase, I can make my system more responsive, powerful, and pleasant to use. I do that both because many software engineering and simulation tools assume a reasonably high-powered system as do the enthusiast aspects (gaming, multimedia, etc). My primary system is not exactly state-of-the-art. My CPU is an Athlon XP1700+, a chip that can be bought for $75 now. My hard drives are only 80GB when 160GB drives are now available. The video card is a GeForce 3 Ti200 -- not exactly the fastest thing available. But it's a reasonable system for a software professional.

Look, if you want to attack people, why don't you go after the idiots that do case mods and install neon lights so that they can show off their computers' guts? I'm just a software engineer who understands the need for a responsive, fast computer in my line of work. I don't have pictures of my computer on a web page. I haven't published benchmarks for chest-thumping. I have not cryogenically cooled it so that I could brag about how much it is overclocked. I don't engage in pissing contests over frame rates, hard drive size, SETI benchmarks, amount of RAM, etc.

That said, I recognize that a 300-and-something mhz Socket 7 system is just too slow. Something that slow would definitely impair my ability to work efficiently -- I know because my customer has provided me with a Dell 400mhz PII system and even that is painfully slow for many tasks.

Re:Who cares?

[NanoGator]

3D Rendered Pokemon? I don't have anything '3d rendered' on my webpage. Think you got me confused with somebody else.

Re:Who cares?

[fmaxwell]

Fuck You.

Can we cuddle afterwards?

I can accomplish plenty with my PII 400 box running FreeBSD. It is no where near the fastest system I have either. Other systems at home include a dual 750 with 10K Ultra 160 drives, a 1Ghz Athlon, hell even my laptop is faster than the FreeBSD box.

Then it sounds like you keep up with modern technology. But if the PII 400 met all of your needs, why did you throw away money buying those other systems you don't like as much?

You truly are a fucking idiot.

Chances are that I am both more intelligent and successful than you are.

Would your hypothetical employees get a bonus if they upgraded their motherboard?

And you say I'm an idiot? Of course not. I hire people that have a genuine enthusiasm for computers. Such people tend to have reasonably modern computers and it's a real warning sign if I learn in an interview that someone has not upgraded their system in the last four years.

Would you hire a an interior decorator whose house was furnished with Lava Lamps and bean bag chairs? If not, then why would you hire a software engineer with a grotesquely outdated computer?

Re:Who cares?

[NamShubCMX]

Hire me.

Then I'll have the money to upgrade.

Re:Who cares?

[Gooba42]

I think there's a prejudice among certain sectors of the population that PC games are for "grown ups" and consoles are for kids. Seems to me that I recall hearing at some time how *games* were for kids and "grown ups" didn't play them.

I played Final Fantasy 7 on PC first and hated it, but later played it on console and it wasn't so bad. I kinda figured that my expectations had been set up by playing everything else on console and the PC gaming experience just wasn't even close to the same.

Re:Who cares?

[Gooba42]

No worries. His money is probably better spent on surgery to reduce the swelling of his head anyway.

Get well soon! Do you have a place we can send flowers?

Re:Who cares?

[Sj0]

If I were a manager...blahblahblah...

Let me guess...Out of work Dot-bomb manager?

Re:Who cares?

[damiam]

Even a p4 19.8ghz will make your system smooth

I'd certainly hope so.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

if my boss was judging me on my ability to pirate video or play UT, I'd probably want another job.

In fact, I don't believe the size of my dick, er I mean the speed of my computer has ever come up in an interview...

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of applicants out there that are genuinely enthused about technology and try to keep their skills and systems up-to-date. I'd hire them before hiring some guy that apparently has little to no interest in computers.

HEY Einstein, Maybe the guy managed to stretch his savings for 19 months so he could feed his KIDS or make a HOUSE PAYMENT. It doesn't make a #%*(&@$)( bit of difference WHAT CLOCK SPEED HIS COMPUTER RUNS AT.

BEING OUT OF WORK FOR 19 MONTHS MAKES IT A LITTLE DIFFICULT TO FILL A BASKET AT COMPUSA RIGHT NOW.

I've had my fill of people who got into the computer field solely because it was a way to earn a good paycheck.

Oh, well then let's throw them all out. They wanted a good paycheck. What'll they want next? Adequate water and a roof? The horror!!

Their work and productivity are seldom as good as that of someone who has a real enthusiasm for computers.

And people actually wonder why they can't get a job. I'll restate: the job market is SCREWED. Irretrievably, totally, utterly SCREWED.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well there you have it folks: buy an off the shelf box, lose your job.

Notice how not a single one of these requirements has anything to do with being qualified? It's "do we like this person? Are they "technical" enough? Is their computer fast enough?"

The job market is SCREWED SCREWED SCREWED. Don't be surprised if unemployment hits double digits (it already has). We're already in the longest sustained unemployment in four recessions.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

This has to be a troll.

I don't have pictures of my computer on a web page. I haven't published benchmarks for chest-thumping. I have not cryogenically cooled it so that I could brag about how much it is overclocked. I don't engage in pissing contests over frame rates, hard drive size, SETI benchmarks, amount of RAM, etc.

But you won't hesitate to throw someone who really needs a job out in the street because they didn't load up the gold card with a nice shiny new box instead of feeding their kids.

SCREWED. The job market is COMPLETELY SCREWED.

Re:Who cares?

[xsbellx]

that will show enthusiasm for amateur astronomy rather than computers.

Sorry but you are wrong on this one. This type of setup shows an ethusiasm for both astronomy and computers. Who but an ethusiast would devote the time and effort for such a setup.

Look, you want to attack people, why don't you go after the idiots that do case mods and install neon lights so they can show off their computers' guts?

Because their logic isn't flawed.

I'm just a software engineer who understands the need for a responsive, fast computer in my line of work.

Perhaps you do need a responsive system, I never said you didn't.

That said, I recognize that a 300-and-something mhz Socket 7 system is just too slow.

For what task(s)? I agree, things like GUI/Java development would be tedious. Fortunately, computers can and, believe it or not, are used for other purposes. For example, my current employer has provided me with an older Thinkpad (600E). For my current situation, this is more than sufficient. After all, how much horsepower do you need to run eight or nine xterms.

The "enthusiast" is capable of recognizing the requirements of the task at hand, the resources available to complete the task and then making an informed descion to upgrade or not.

Re:Who cares?

[fmaxwell]

BEING OUT OF WORK FOR 19 MONTHS MAKES IT A LITTLE DIFFICULT TO FILL A BASKET AT COMPUSA RIGHT NOW.

I'm sorry if you have been out of work for that long, but don't blast me because you can't find work. I didn't tell you what to major in, what courses to take after college, or what career path you should follow. I didn't write your resume or cover letters. I did not pick out the clothes you wear to interviews and I did not coach you on what to say when you were there. If you are failing to impress people in a hiring position, it's your fault, not mine. I haven't turned you down for a job, so don't yell at me.

And the guy who started this thread was talking about a computer that had a four year old CPU, not one from a year and a half ago.

And people actually wonder why they can't get a job. I'll restate: the job market is SCREWED. Irretrievably, totally, utterly SCREWED.

When the dot-com boom was going full-swing, anyone who could spell "PC" could get a job in the industry -- usually at a high pay rate. Now there are more jobs than applicants. When I have the opportunity to choose between two otherwise equal applicants, hell yes, I'll go for the one that genuinely loves what he/she does for a living. I like employees that come into work enthused because of some new compiler/library/language/etc. that they discovered. I prefer it when team members can bring something to the table other than skills they were required to in school or at some previous job. I don't see why that should come as a great surprise to anyone.

Re:Who cares?

[fmaxwell]

Sorry but you are wrong on this one.

No, it is you that is wrong. Keep reading.

Who but an ethusiast would devote the time and effort for such a setup.

Someone who viewed the computer as nothing more than a tool to improve their ability to do astrophotography would. I have a winch on my Jeep, but I don't consider myself a winch enthusiast. It's just a tool I use to get unstuck.

Fortunately, computers can and, believe it or not, are used for other purposes.

Yes, I know. I program and design embedded systems for a living, so I have probably used, and programmed, computers of more types, and for more purposes, than the vast majority of Slashdot readers -- including you.

The "enthusiast" is capable of recognizing the requirements of the task at hand, the resources available to complete the task and then making an informed descion to upgrade or not.

The enthusiast isn't doing a "task." A computer enthusiast is actively looking for new, interesting, and exciting things for which they can use their computer. One week it might be to learn about setting up a firewall. The next it might be 3D rendering. After that, they may want to try their hand at GUI software development under C. Later, they may want to try developing crypto code. I have a modern computer because I am a computer enthusiast and don't want to find myself hamstrung.

If someone told you they were a "car enthusiast", would you expect to find them driving a Yugo because they "made an informed decision" not to buy a better car based on some utilitarian evaluation of minimal needs? Of course not.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry if you have been out of work for that long, but don't blast me because you can't find work. I didn't tell you what to major in, what courses to take after college, or what career path you should follow. I didn't write your resume or cover letters. I did not pick out the clothes you wear to interviews and I did not coach you on what to say when you were there.

As if any of that matters. Nobody cares what's on my resume (unless it perfectly matches the job description), they don't care what I majored in ("put your education last"), they don't care what is said in the interview unless the word "worship" is included.

If you are failing to impress people in a hiring position, it's your fault, not mine. I haven't turned you down for a job, so don't yell at me.

Yeah. It's always the fault of the interviewee. The hiring managers are never employing unfair criteria. Management is always blameless.

When the dot-com boom was going full-swing, anyone who could spell "PC" could get a job in the industry -- usually at a high pay rate.

That's a myth, foisted on job candidates by management to get them to lower their salary requirements and work weekends. A tremendous number of people who are *quite* competent programmers have been lost to the industry in the irrational approach now being taken by hiring managers.

I prefer it when team members can bring something to the table other than skills they were required to in school or at some previous job. I don't see why that should come as a great surprise to anyone.

It doesn't, but the speed of someone's computer has nothing to do with how much they enjoy working with computers, not to mention the implied elitism. It's time management started looking at qualifications instead of checklists.

Re:Who cares?

[fmaxwell]

This is something that I'd normally say in a private message, but that's not an option in this forum: You are clearly angry, bitter, and frustrated. You need to talk to someone about it and not just rant at strangers on Slashdot. The last thing your family needs is for you to lose it -- either through depression or anger. I suggest that you speak to the people at your state unemployment office to ask if there are counselling services for people having difficulty handling the stress of a long-term job hunt. I am certain that you are not the first, or last, person to go through emotional stress related to a lengthy job hunt.

There is an art to the interview, the resume, and all correspondence related to the hiring process. Maybe you should talk to people who could coach you so that you make the best possible impression. I also hope that you are not restricting yourself to direct, W2 employment. There are options of 1099 contract work and indirect employment through tech temporary agencies.

That's a myth, foisted on job candidates by management to get them to lower their salary requirements and work weekends.

No, it's not a myth. I knew someone with an MCSE and no college degree pulling $80K/year from a now-defunct dot-com. His skills and very limited experience never merited the position or pay rate that he enjoyed.

It's time management started looking at qualifications instead of checklists.

If there are 100 respondents to a help-wanted ad, the company has to get the list down to a manageable number that can be interviewed. Sometimes that means that they have criteria designed to cull out candidates. Often, that means that very good candidates don't get an interview. If this were a seller's market where there were far more jobs than people available to fill them, management would be more than happy to consider a candidate that had less experience than they wanted or that was demanding a higher pay rate than the firm wanted to pay. I'm hoping that those days return soon.

In closing, don't give up hope. All hiring has not stopped. There are people getting jobs in the tech sector. I've recently been approached by someone who would like to hire me as a W2 employee, so there are jobs out there. I'll now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, already in progress, where you can go back to telling me what a stupid prick you think I am.

Re:Who cares?

[swagr]

I run linux, with an ADSL connection (~1.5Mbit/s), and surf with several windows open. And it doesn't seem like I have to wait that long (or at all). Maybe we just have different standards. Maybe I surf simple sites. It could just be that I use Gentoo so everything is optimized for my system and it makes a difference.

Anyway, I know people who can do way more productive work with a 486 then most could ever hope to do with a P4. And with that in mind, an Athalon 750 IS fast.

Re:Who cares?

[evilviper]

Well, one issue may be that I'm using Mozilla on FreeBSD, not Linux... However, if anything, it *should* run faster (unless there are some really lowsy programmers working on Mozilla that optimize it JUST for Linux).

Just with Mozilla idle, two windows open, and typing in this window, Mozilla is using up 10% CPU power. Scrolling through a page (as you would if you were a reasonably fast reader) instantly jumps mozilla to 20%, then, as you continue to scroll, it continues to climb up to 70%. That is only a site with all text, and just one banner.

That in itself is acceptable, actually. What isn't, is when I open a new window/tab, or click on a link that begins a download.

Opening a link in a new window, it takes 5 seconds just for the new window to materialize. That's while all other browser windows are fozen, so I can't do anything else in the mean time.

Clicking on a download link of any kind freezes Mozilla for AT LEAST 15 seconds before the slightest sign of activity (that exponentially incresses with the number of browser windows/tabs open). That is incredibly intolerable when dowloading dozens of small files from a site.

That's not even mentioning how much slower pages are rendered with Mozilla... It's even worse becuase I've got a very fast connection, but generally only get to surf at near-modem speeds.

So, you might ask why I use mozilla. I use it because it's the only browser even reasonably stable on Unix... That's why I'm so anxious to see Dillo comming along. It's fast and stable, but missing a handful of featues that are needed in the majority of my browsing (copying text, saving images, SSL support, etc).

Re:Who cares?

[swagr]

My stats, if interested:
Mozilla idle CPU - 0%
Rendering slashdot frontpage, 46% for well under a second.
Scrolling much faster than I can read, 3%.
Scrolling as fast as I can spin the mouse wheel on a story with >300 comments 17-25%.
New tabs as fast as I want them. New windows between 1 and 2 /second.

There must be some farily substantial Mozilla FreeBSD/Linux difference. Probably not worth the OS switch to fix.

Re:Who cares?

[evilviper]

There must be some farily substantial Mozilla FreeBSD/Linux difference.

As I've said time and time again, Mozilla is anything but portable. Just one of the reasons I like Dillo. Small, simple, fast, portable code.

Mozilla may be running about 3x faster for you, but that's still rather slow. For instance, new browser windows with Netscape 4.97/Dillo 0.66/Opera 6.3 open almost instantaneously. Things like that, where Mozilla eats up CPU power for no good reason, bug the hell out of me. Especially considering how acclaimed Mozilla seems to be.

"Intel ups the anti once again"

[khuber]

I'm normally not a spelling Nazi, but "anti"? It's ante, dammit.

Learn your gambling terms, kids, or they'll laugh you out of Vegas.

-Kevin

Re:"Intel ups the anti once again"

[NanoGator]

"I'm normally not a spelling Nazi..."

No fluke for you!

Re:"Intel ups the anti once again"

[Aceticon]

They really meant "Anti". It's all an extraordinarily inteligent word game that us, Average Slashdoters, cannot even begin to compreend.

Re:"Intel ups the anti once again"

[bakes]

I'm normally not a spelling Nazi, but "anti"? It's ante, dammit

No no, he means "Intel ups those who do not like Intel, once again".

Re:"Intel ups the anti once again"

[goodhell]

"Learn your gambling terms, kids, or they'll laugh you out of Vegas."

You mean they'll be able to read my spoken words???

That's a lot of nuts!!

Re:"Intel ups the anti once again"

[Anonymous Coward]

They won't let you in a casino unless you know how to spell "ante" correctly.

Hot Hardware: Intel ups the anti

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is with these low calibre wannabe 'hardware review' website these days...

Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Sucks giant donkey balls. Anybody who buys their chips has a craving for punishment and deserves what he gets.

On the plus side, I heard the 13-year-old Chinese girls they hire are great at the fucky-sucky and will love me long time.

Beeeeeeeeeyotch!

Another review

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MzQ4

The only problem is, Kyle (again) uses too many variables with the RAM and chipsets used in the tests.

*Sigh*

FSB speed matters!

[pesc]

You know, system speed is not all about what frequency your CPU is clocked at. The memory system (FSB speed, cache size) matters too!

This is, IMHO, what all these benchmarks show. It is no surprise that a Pentium FSB running at 533 MHz can beat an Athlon with a FSB at 266 MHz. I'm actually more impressed that the Athlon managed to beat the Pentium on some benchmarks.

Re:FSB speed matters!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you surprised? There is a better CPU design here. If the Athlon were 700 MHz faster (the speed of the Intel), then it would be no contest.

Re:FSB speed matters!

[Citizen of Earth]

You know, system speed is not all about what frequency your CPU is clocked at. The memory system (FSB speed, cache size) matters too!

Indeed, they should be using the revised benchmarks that Intel and BAPCo recently cooked up.

Did any other late-night owls...

[guttentag]

...glance at the headline and read "Pentium 42.8GHz?" I wonder what kind of cryogenic storage compartment that box would require... I'll bet it makes the Internet really fast(TM), though.

OK, I officially need sleep now.

Re:Did any other late-night owls...

[Joe Tie.]

...glance at the headline and read "Pentium 42.8GHz?"

I'm back from late night coding induced insomnia, and my somewhat dulled mind thought the same thing for a few seconds. Now if Intel would just license sega's advanced Blast Processing technology, perhaps we finally could get that high!

Sigh... I want a *cooler* processor...

[Kjella]

PIV 2.8GHz should be about 72.6W (based on the numbers for 2.53GHz @ sandpile.org), AMD 2600+ is 68W, and my 1.2GHz Athlon @ 60W died already.

1.4GHz+ certified fan, was still running after it died, fan still in place, no airflow blockage, but 30C outside, 40C in my room, then some in the case and running at 100% load. Sigh... back to Duron 700 :(

Kjella

Re:Sigh... I want a *cooler* processor...

[tconnors]

.4GHz+ certified fan, was still running after it died, fan still in place, no airflow blockage, but 30C outside, 40C in my room, then some in the case and running at 100% load. Sigh... back to Duron 700 :(

Wow! 10 degrees extra in your room from your computer.

I am perfectly happy with my 650 MHz laptop (I expolicity bought the slowest one I could find at the time - 1.x years ago), and occasionally investigate getting it go slower (by either cpufreq or APM or ACPI. I also used to use a key combination on the dell inspiron laptops which took the speed down to 200MHz or so on the fly, but I have forgotten it now :( ). My desktop is 500MHz, and also is perfectly fine for everything I do. It's processor is room temp to touch! The fan failed once, and it stopped working, but it didn't kill the CPU, despite being and AMD K2 chip.

If I want speed (for my research), I will come into work, and use our cluster, but for a home computer, my two are perfectly happy.

I still don't understand people's facination with speed (especially the 5% or so we see in these benchmarks reported in the article), outside of the researching domain.

Games shmames.

Of course, our cluster is now (as of about 1 week ago) composed mostly of rack mounted dual p4's - 60 of those, and you can hear the whine from the fans outside the bloody server room and up the escalators! I haven't been inside yet - but I am told it was real bad before our sysadmin installed the bios update that had the fan speed control stuff in it!

Re:Sigh... I want a *cooler* processor...

[Kjella]

Wow! 10 degrees extra in your room from your computer

And the sun hitting the roof & (closed) window didn't have aaaaaaanything do to with it. 60W is like a lightbulb, it's hardly a big space heater. I wish AMD could release TB rev. B at lower speeds...

Kjella

Re:Sigh... I want a *cooler* processor...

[Anonymous Coward]

A complete computer system produces quite a lot of heat. There's the processor, graphics card and the harddrive. The power supply is rarely efficient and does its share to heat the room. The worst offender however is probably the monitor. Overall, there's much more than 60W coming from your computer system.

Re:Sigh... I want a *cooler* processor...

[tempfile]

1. Buy 2.5 GHz processor
2. Clock at 2 GHz
3. Profit! Also in terms of power savings and processor lifetime.

Re:Sigh... I want a *cooler* processor...

[tconnors]

A complete computer system produces quite a lot of heat. There's the processor, graphics card and the harddrive. The power supply is rarely efficient and does its share to heat the room. The worst offender however is probably the monitor. Overall, there's much more than 60W coming from your computer system.

True. Almost. The power supply is quite efficeient. Switch mode power supplies are typically 95 percent efficient. But yes, the rest does pump out a bit of heat. Interestingly enough, since almost all of the energy going into your computer comes out as heat (the monitor puts out a bit of light as an added bonus, and the fans make a bit of noise, but this noise gets turned into heat if it doesn't escape the enclosure, and is bugger all, in terms of energy, anyway), and airconditioners (by the second law of thermodynamics) will spend the same amount of energy plus some to extract that heat, if you are using your air-conditioner, then you have to more than double the power used by your computer! Quite a concideration when you build your next beowulf (as we are - I don't know whether we have the extra air conditioning installed yet, that our new nodes require).

Re:Sigh... I want a *cooler* processor...

[ncc74656]

1.4GHz+ certified fan, was still running after it died, fan still in place, no airflow blockage, but 30C outside, 40C in my room, then some in the case and running at 100% load. Sigh... back to Duron 700 :(

If you'd turn the A/C on, you wouldn't have that problem...104's kinda toasty. While I'm sure the temperature inside my computer is in triple-digit territory, the A/C keeps the room temperature in the upper 70s.

Remember: a heatsink can only maintain a certain difference between ambient temperature and processor temperature. Letting room temperature skyrocket means the processor(s) will also run hotter.

Re:Sigh... I want a *cooler* processor...

[jedrek]

I still don't understand people's facination with speed (especially the 5% or so we see in these benchmarks reported in the article), outside of the researching domain.

I didn't... but now I do. The faster Intel and AMD rev up their chips, the cheaper their old chips will be. I bought my last processor - actually a pair of c366s - some 30 months ago. At the same price, I can today get a pair of Athlon XP 1900s today. That's a clock rate jump of 500%. The performance gain is even higher when we calculate in all the other technological advances (pipelines, faster FSB, etc). So while I don't really care about the latest and greatest myself, I'm happy that Intel and AMD are pushing them.

Re:Sigh... I want a *cooler* processor...

[Anonymous Coward]

Try the VIA C3 processor. It is cool (pun intended) at around 12 W for the 800 Mhz version. It is SLOW (by current standards) though. But it is enough for most purposes

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on Intel, just stop cranking up the MHZ, you know you cant tell the difference when you get above 400mhz and that was back in 1998!

I don't care if you can get a few more hundred fps on Quake, our eyes can only see 25 FPS. I run games at 20 FPS at 640x480 and Im perfectly happy.

I don't need this, and I am staying with my 450 P3 and my 800 Duron.

Re:Why?

[nuxx]

Here's one reason why I like a faster frame rate. I don't know about most people, but I can clearly see a difference between 25 FPS and 60 FPS. I'm one of those people who gets headaches from florescant lights and monitors that are running at 60 Hz. With a first person shooter (or similar game) running at anywhere below ~60 FPS (even if the monitor is at 85 Hz) I tend to get motion sickness after maybe 20 minutes of play.

Maybe it's the fact that I'm using such a large monitor, but it really gets irritating.

Damn ....

[aliebrah]

... I just picked up a 2.26GHz chip today.

Not going to happen for video

[Wrexs0ul]

Sadly the two big boys in the video industry aren't really up for that. nVidia and ATI have enough of a market share in their own niches that the overlapping region doesn't have to become too competitive. ATI has a serious focus on real-world graphics (video editing, etc.) while nVidia's GeForce rendering technology is out of this world (and onto the XBox!).

Besides, aside from a FPS and resource comparison there's really no numbers on the boxes for Laymen to read and say "I see!". Compare an ATI Radeon 8500 vs. GeForce 4, to non-geeks these sound like apples and oranges instead of competing systems for the GPU market.

-Matt

Re:Not going to happen for video

[Anonymous Coward]

no. you are wrong.

non geeks buy computers from dell with whatever video card dell decides to give them ( usually an extra LE shit model of either ati or nvda)

when it comes to the lucrative premium market, nvda and atyt are ABSOLUTELY in a heated competition, which heated up with the 8500, and now the lead goes to atyt with the 9700.

geeks buy $400 video cards.

the masses dont.

ON TOP OF THAT, the post you were replying to was COMPLETE SARCASM you dumb ass.

pshawwwww

P4 is still not all it's cracked up to be

[Dwain_Snyders]

Although the P4 has improved since it's initial release, it still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of real-world performance. Add to this the price/performance factor, and the scale is still tipped well in favour of the AMD Palomino/Thoroughbred chips.

The P4 offerings require at least 50% more clock cycles than their Athlon XP counterparts, which would suggest that either individual floating point operations each take more CPU cycles on P4 chips. The real answer, however, is that the P4 is *still* being throttled by the cache and decoder, a problem which should have been fixed long ago, but, thanks to the poor design of the P4, is a change very difficult to affect.

Unfortunately, to fix a lot of the problems that the P4 currently has, Intel will have to change the actual design of the chip. A perfect example is the new P4's trace cache, which can STILL only handle 1 instruction of micro-code ops per cycle. Add the slow shifts and rotates to this, and you get a chip which really doesn't live up to its considerable hype. What it all means in the end is this: The only way to get reasonable performance out of these chips is to customize the code specifically to take advantage of the P4's extra instructions and peculiarities. Some apps do this, but the consequences on standards-compliant code will be disastrous for Intel.

Re:P4 is still not all it's cracked up to be

[Anonymous Coward]

Real World performance? What the hell are you smoking? At least you have the honesty to admit you work for AMD before spreading your FUD.

I'll be honest too...I used to work for Intel, and since we're being honest...lets just admit that INTEL delivers a better product. I'd explain myself, but I seriously believe your posted is a joke (although a bad one).

Re:P4 is still not all it's cracked up to be

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell should they care? I mean look at their IA series. It's not a good design either and WILL require the whole world to rewrite compilers, operating systems, and slews of other stuff just to get it to work. Which is why I'm pulling for the Hammer to come out on top, it'd be nice to do AMDs plan for the future (what with all those Alpha engineers intel ditched in that camp).

Tom's Hardware review

[nojayuk]

...has some serious overclocking comparisons (plus an Athlon 850 for laughs).

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q3/020826/inde x.html

we showed how overclockable the Athlon XP 2600+, which officially runs at 2133 MHz is. We were easily able to overclock it to a stable 2400 GHz using a conventional CPU cooler.

I want one of *those*.

Just contributes to that mountain in China

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't it? I mean, instead of optimising software, and making better use of existing systems, the trend is to put faster processors on the market, and write sloppy software.

No, I'm still using an MMX-200 with 128 megs of RAM for all of my work, and it's not a limitation. Latest stable Linux kernel, everything 586 optimised, using good quality applications, (e.g. Dillo web browser), and the lack of processing power isn't stopping me from earning 15 quid/hour from writing PHP and MySQL based applications.

Still using a 4 gig HD as well, and it's only 28% full.

I'm not saying that nobody needs a faster machine, but realistically, there are a lot of people who do not.

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[fmaxwell]

No, I'm still using an MMX-200 with 128 megs of RAM for all of my work, and it's not a limitation.

I would not hire a doctor uses ancient tools and neither would I hire a software engineer that does. If you have so little enthusiasm for technology, then find a field that interests you more.

lack of processing power isn't stopping me from earning 15 quid/hour from writing PHP and MySQL based applications.

Since you are posting anonymousely, I'll be frank: That's not good pay. If my math is correct, it's less than $23 U.S. per hour. Maybe the amount we get paid is related to the speed of our computers...

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[martyn s]

This is slashdot! Do people on car enthusiast sites talk about the fact that most people don't need 500 HP cars? I mean, seriously, what planet are you living on. Luddite ;)

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[RupW]

Doesn't it? I mean, instead of optimising software, and making better use of existing systems, the trend is to put faster processors on the market, and write sloppy software.

For bespoke solutions it's cheaper to buy better hardware to run the solution on than to pay software engineers to optimize it.

No, I'm still using an MMX-200 with 128 megs of RAM for all of my work, and it's not a limitation. ... writing PHP and MySQL based applications.

The basic edit and unit testing, sure, but you'd struggle to perform any useful stress, scalability or performance testing on that rig.

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[archeopterix]

I would not hire a doctor uses ancient tools and neither would I hire a software engineer that does. If you have so little enthusiasm for technology, then find a field that interests you more.

I would not hire a doctor who is enthusiastic about his tools. I would not hire an engineer who is enthustiastic about his tools. I would not hire anyone enthustiastic about his tools. I want a person looking for a solution to whatever problem i have, not a nerd who seeks a way to use his newest toys. 'When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail'.

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[Anonymous Coward]

He doesn't need the power for writing that kind of stuff. Besides, having a full compile take ~15 mins encourages programmers to write code well instead of just compile-and-see-what-the-errors are. Having slower processors also encourages them to optimise the app that bit more.

Jamie

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[RupW]

He doesn't need the power for writing that kind of stuff.

He needs power to run php and MySQL with a setup of any complexity. He needs power to perform any sort of useful testing on his finished application.

Besides, having a full compile take ~15 mins encourages programmers to write code well instead of just compile-and-see-what-the-errors are.

No, that's the first line of defence. No-one sets out to write bugged code. Self-review is a good idea but it's pointless duplicating the effort the basic syntactic sanity check compiler can do for you automatically. Once it compiles cleanly *then* you review.

Having slower processors also encourages them to optimise the app that bit more.

Yes and no - the only real win is using efficient algorithms but then an experienced programmer would do that anyway. If you did it right first time then you're only going to squeeze a few percent worth of performance out at the end and that really isn't worth it commercially: extra development cost vs bigger server, delivery deadlines, simplicity->maintainability/ease of testing, etc.

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[fmaxwell]

I would not hire a doctor who is enthusiastic about his tools.

Fine. Get laser eye surgery by someone using old equipment and outdated techniques. And you don't need a doctor who's enthusiastic about new medicines (the primary tools of the medical profession). He can treat whatever ails you with aspirin and penicillan.

I would not hire an engineer who is enthustiastic about his tools. I would not hire anyone enthustiastic about his tools.

Then I hope you get a mechanic with no modern computerized diagnostic tools and he f***s your car up. Every craftsman, whether a woodworker or a computer professional, takes pride in having good tools. He takes an interest in finding the best tools for his line of work.

I want a person looking for a solution to whatever problem i have, not a nerd who seeks a way to use his newest toys.

Great. Then maybe I can develop a BASIC program for you on a Commodore 64 to meet your needs. You wouldn't want me to use anything too modern.

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[kai_payo]

My God! Would you hire me?

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[fmaxwell]

My God! Would you hire me?

Absolutely! Anyone who can create a sophisticated web page like yours is a shoe-in at any tech company. I mean, it not only has a link labelled "Test", but clicking on that link brings you a message of "Hello World." Wow!

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[Anonymous Coward]

I am the original poster, and I would like to point out that my work is very highly regarded by the people who employ me.

The argument that nobody who is dis-interested in the technology can be any good is invalid. On the contrary, I think that anybody who doesn't take a step back and think that using a 1000 MHz CPU as a word processor is stupid.

The ONLY industry that is getting it right is the video arcade industry. Look at the SNK NeoGeo(tm) system - it's got a fraction of the processing power of my main machine, and yet it is the most successful video arcade game system EVER BUILT, based on the length of time it's had new games released for it.

Also, look at Capcom's CPS-2 system - that's about as powerful as an Amiga 1200, and yet the profits from a few of those machines probably paid most of the wages of the staff of your local arcade for SEVERAL YEARS.

So, processing power has nothing to do with quality of end product.

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[fmaxwell]

Look at the SNK NeoGeo(tm) system - it's got a fraction of the processing power of my main machine, and yet it is the most successful video arcade game system EVER BUILT, based on the length of time it's had new games released for it.

You are confusing the development system and the target system. I've developed code to run $5 microcontrollers -- but I didn't develop the code on $5 microcontrollers. A developer's workstation should be fast, responsive, and capacious.

The argument that nobody who is dis-interested in the technology can be any good is invalid. On the contrary, I think that anybody who doesn't take a step back and think that using a 1000 MHz CPU as a word processor is stupid.

And the person that does take that step back is probably someone who is intensely interested in technology. I've been advocating a stripped-down, low-power notebook for simple word processing, e-mail, and maybe web browsing for several years. Preferably something with a flash-based storage system rather than a hard drive and, perhaps, an ARM family CPU. The average notebook used for word processing work is insanely overpowered, overpriced, overweight, oversized, and battery-limited. Basically, something more than a PDA but much less than a standard laptop is what I'd like to see. But, if that machine is built, it's going to be designed and programmed by engineers using modern development systems.

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[Anonymous Coward]

fmaxwell, all I can say is that you have demonstrated the lack of ability by the people you hire to develop a solution successfully on anything but the latest development kit. I refer you to the story of Mel, would you not hire him? Mel

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[fmaxwell]

fmaxwell, all I can say is that you have demonstrated the lack of ability by the people you hire to develop a solution successfully on anything but the latest development kit.

No, you have shown that you know practically nothing about professional software development. My own computer has an Athlon CPU that now sells for under $75 (an XP1700+). The hard drives are a pair of modest 80GB Maxtor IDE drives. My CD burners are half the speed of the current state of the art. Hardly is that "the latest development kit."

Don't lecture me on this. You have neither the programming experience nor the management experience that I do. I've developed code on front panels ("switches and blinky lights" to you), punch cards, Z80 systems running at 2.5mhz, and on 20 year old Intel MDS development systems.

If you ever run a successful project (which seems highly unlikely), you will learn that there is an appropriate balance between personnel and equipment expenditures. Just because you CAN develop an application on an 80286 running MS-DOS does not mean that you SHOULD develop it on that. The fact that you CAN debug hardware and software on an embedded system without an ICE (In-Circuit Emulator) does not mean that you SHOULD.

If you want to hire some guy that has so little interest in computers that he has not upgraded his own system in four years, feel free to. I'll stick to hiring people who have a genuine enthusiasm for computers and who keep their hardware, software, and skills up-to-date.

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehehehe, I think it's really funny how you're getting so wound up about this.

I would never stoop to such a low level as to comment on the level of technical knowledge of somebody who I'd not only never met, but don't know in the slightest.

You seem to be under the mis-impression that there is some magical 'brick-wall' which separates 'still usable' kit from 'non-usable' kit. That makes no sense.

The applications I develop typically run on ~600 Mhz Pentium IIIs. That's an average. I earn about 80% of my living from writing PHP and MySQL, not becuase it's really exciting, but because people will pay for it.

Apache, Dillo, PHP, MySQL, EMACS, and the X-Window system run *fine* on a 200-MMX, and yeah, I might benefit a bit from a faster machine, but I can tell you right now that doubling MHz will NOT double my productivity. All it will do is help the CEO of Intel to buy a new Porsche, (no, I'm not talking *literally* here).

Shock, horror, what are you going to say when I tell you these facts:

* The CASE I'm using is the one I used for my 386 DX-40, and I can't even bother to remember how long ago THAT was.

* I still use a Toshiba laptop which is about ten years old, and has a 486 SX-25 CPU, and 8 Mb of RAM, to do WORK on, and it cost me 10 quid a few months ago. It has paid for itself many, many, MANY times over. Would a 1500 quid laptop have paid for itself already? Easy answer - NO.

If I was just being the stupid idiot geek, 'Oh I only need a 386', I would have kept my 386, but I am sorry, the PC architechture went right downhill after the Pentium MMX - and if you really want to discuss that we can, frankly I think it's a waste of time.

Frankly, I am disgusted that somebody who has worked on such machines with switches and blinky lights, (your terminology, not mine), can have such a wasteful attitude.

All I can say is that you have probably contributed more to the mountain in China than I have, which was my original point.

Also, you said I was confusing the development system and system being developed for when I mentioned the SNK Neo Geo, (and for some unknown reason got modded up for it). Try re-reading my post - I was mocking people who use fast processors for the end application, not the development system.

I developed Sinclair Spectrum games on a VAX in the 80s, and I didn't whine on about how we should have been using the actual machine, swearing everytime the tape loops got caught in the microdrives, no I was swearing everytime I had to debug the VAX with just the FUBAR, (oh, that's Failed UniBus Access Register, since we obviously need to spell things out to each other), to go by.

Unlike you, who seems to have no respect for me, I do have respect for you, because you obviously believe that your argument is credible, but I do not believe that it is.

Also, your doctor analogy is flawed - the medicines administered are more closely paralleled with the *target* system than the development system. The age of the doctor is more closely paralleled with the *development* system.

I am writing this on my MMX-200, and enjoying it.

I am just about to play a game on my SNK NeoGeo, that works just fine.

What are you going to do? Fire somebody, because they have too many wait states in their BIOS?

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[Anonymous Coward]

For bespoke solutions you may well be running on a 2000 MHz processor, but you may well also have a few thousand concurrent users.

In the end, you reach a brick wall - no faster processor on the shelf to buy and plug in - what do you do? Beowulf cluster? Yeah, right. You employ somebody to optimise the code. Suddenly, your old hardware is enough.

The MMX-200 is only used for application development, of course I don't do any proper stress testing on it, that is done on other boxen. The MMX-200 is my home machine. When I'm not working, I want to get AWAY from computers.

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[fmaxwell]

Hehehehe, I think it's really funny how you're getting so wound up about this.

This coming from someone who just posted the longest message of the thread...

You seem to be under the mis-impression that there is some magical 'brick-wall' which separates 'still usable' kit from 'non-usable' kit. That makes no sense.

I've been very careful throughout this to differentiate between "state of the art" and "reasonably modern." I'm fully aware that there is no "brick-wall" for system usability when talking about megahertz (vs. architectures). That said, if someone has an ancient system that is rarely updated, there are many applications and development tools that they simply won't be able to experience.

All I can say is that you have probably contributed more to the mountain in China than I have, which was my original point.

Since you continuously harp on this, I'll explain. I use my retired components and peripherals to construct PCs for people who haven't the money for new machines. The last one I built went to a cash-strapped family. The mother is divorced (for very good reasons) and supporting two children and her elderly mother on a single, modest income.

Do you think you could lose the attitude of moral superiority now?

Try re-reading my post - I was mocking people who use fast processors for the end application, not the development system.

Nowhere in my many postings on this subject have I suggested using fast processors for target systems. In fact, I have made it a point to stress that development systems are what need to be fast (within limits) while target machines may be very humble -- depending on the application.

Unlike you, who seems to have no respect for me

I apologize. I have become rude and unpleasant as a result of the flak I've gotten in this thread. I was wrong to allow that to happen.

What are you going to do? Fire somebody, because they have too many wait states in their BIOS?

This is just another example of this being blown all out of proportion and taken to absurd extremes. My point all along has been that a computer professional that does not keep his hardware, software, and, hence, skills, reasonably up-to-date is generally not a good hiring risk. I contend that such a person is less likely to be a computer enthusiast. It's not that way 100% of the time. There are plenty of incompetent people with fast machines and talented people with slow ones.

I would worry about hiring an interior decorator whose home was furnished with bean bag chairs and lava lamps. It's analogous.

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[Anonymous Coward]

I like bean bags and chairs :-)

OK, well apart from not keeping my own hardware up to date, we seem to be in agreement on most other points, (software up to date, skills up to date (assisted by working on other peoples' systems in my case)).

Also, we agree that development systems need to fast, (within limits). About 90% of my development is in EMACS, writing PHP, so obviously my requirements are low. I suspect that you are developing projects that require a more advanced development environment, (quite reasonable/likely).

Good move on the recycling of old hardware - I advocate that kind of thing myself.

Re:Just contributes to that mountain in China

[fmaxwell]

OK, well apart from not keeping my own hardware up to date, we seem to be in agreement on most other points

Glad to hear it and, again, I apologize for my unpleasant and uncalled for remarks. Going back through the thread, I realized that I had been, in my mind, attributing things to you that had actually been 'said' by other anonymous posters.

As to keeping your PC's hardware up-to-date, look into it. With very high performance CPUs going for under $60 U.S. (e.g. Athlon XP1600+) and motherboards and hard drives at all-time-lows, it's fairly inexpensive to have a very fast system. Then you can not only do your work under EMACS, you can also freely sample everything from 3D rendering to modern video games to CPU-intensive simulations. Never forget that computers can be fun, too.

Peace.

First Beowulf Post

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!!!

Let's all work on the REAL bottlenecks...

[teamhasnoi]

Like Disk access, and video, and whatever else keeps me waiting for things to happen.

I'm sorry (not), but I should NEVER have to wait for anything. Not with a P4 2.x Mirkwood. Or AMD 2xxx+ GTZ. I want instant reaction like Beos had. On my pentium 225. Click, Click. Off I go.

Hard drives are fast(?) and cheap, but still saddled with the bloat code that gets written for this new stuff.

OT, but I would like to see an office suite written by John Carmack. That would rule. Misspelled words would have 3d blood dripping out of them, and fast, fast, fast.

Ok. Time for sleem.p

Re:Let's all work on the REAL bottlenecks...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to see an office suite written by John Carmack. That would rule. Misspelled words would have 3d blood dripping out of them, and fast, fast, fast.

Somebody, somewhere is adding this to their quotes file. I don't blame them.

Impromptu Poll

[Perdo]

Paper releases of fast processors:

() bore me to death.
() make me want to claw my eyes out.
() bore me to death.
() makes me wonder why 3% performance gain is worth 100% price.
() bore me to death.
() Makes me think of people in cubes typing 180 wpm.
() bore me to death.
() CowboyNeal

Re:Impromptu Poll

[Anonymous Coward]

100% = factor of 1, ie thats like saying a 2 dollar cookie costs 2 dollars.. FOOL.

Re:Impromptu Poll

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

You forgot "all of the above".

Re:Impromptu Poll

[duren686]

What happens when I pick "bore me to death." ?

Re:Impromptu Poll

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for contributing.

What is NDA?

[uncl_bob]

Hmm....just wondering.

Re:What is NDA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Non-Disclosure Agreement

Basically it means the testers get to play with really cool (and sometimes not so cool) stuff, but they can't tell a soul about it.

Re:What is NDA?

[Hes Nikke]

to tell you would be a violation of my NDA. sorry

Re:What is NDA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonoscopic Dick Anomoly. Its what all these morons that have to have the latest/greatest products suffer from.

Re:What is NDA?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can tell you, but my lawyers will sue you.

Re:What is NDA?

[Duckz]

Non-Disclosure Agreement

Pentium V will be even faster !

[Taco Cowboy]

I had the priviledge to witness Pentium 5 in action. When compared to the 2.8 GHz Pentium 4, Pentium 5 (also 2.8 GHz) ran at least 20% faster !

Now let's hope that AMD will do something about the front side bus, and turning up the heat on Intel.

Re:Pentium V will be even faster !

[CMiYC]

What? How on earth could you have even seen a "Pentium V"? First of all, the first silicon release of this P4 won't happen until the end of the year. The "P5" is still in its design phase. As far as AMD doing something on the front side bus, that idea is moot. AMD is moving very fast to their star-configured Hypertransport FSB. Once they've moved into that direction you won't be able to compare the P4 FSB to the K8 FSB.

Re:Pentium V will be even faster !

[Anonymous Coward]

You're telling me! Just imagine how fast the Pentium VI will be.

Re:Pentium V will be even faster !

[ncc74656]

The "P5" is still in its design phase.

Last time I checked, the P5 was introduced about eight years ago. It started at 60 MHz and got pushed to 233 MHz before Intel decided to move on to other things.

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Ahhh so what

[Anonymous Coward]

so this thing can crash windows 10-15% faster,

how many stages is this intel pipeline monster up to now?
So far the only strides I have seen in actual performance gains are with IBM's Power4 series chips.

Absolute limit of 0.13 micron technology?

[jukal]

I am not quite sure, where is it - around ~5Ghz? When we reach this, is < 0.13 micron technology ready for production. According to this article for example, design of 0.10 micron technology based chips is up to three times more expensive (based on current calcs).

Anyone with enough data to answer?

Re:Absolute limit of 0.13 micron technology?

[SQL Error]

That's not the design as such; that's the creation of the photomask for chip production. Even at the higher cost for 100nm process masks, it's still a minor part of the overall cost of developing a new processor. Where it will hurt is the smaller companies producing short runs of specialised chips.

Foundries are working to combat this by combining multiple designs from different customers on a single mask. So a mask might contain 5 of product 1 from company A, 10 of product 2 from company B and so on.

Also, at 100nm the mask gives about 70% more chips for a given size than 130nm, and 3 times as many as at 180nm. For 90nm the figures are 2 times and 4 times, respectively.

Re:Absolute limit of 0.13 micron technology?

[vofka]

IIRC, the more recent Intel P-IV's have been manufactured using 0.09 micron tech - leading to less thermal output, and higher possible clock rates... Perhaps this (partly) explains the $500+ price tag on the 2.8GHz part!

Re:Moderation Mistake!!

[fmaxwell]

"Troll" means someone who is saying something he doesn't believe, merely to cause trouble.

There is no "myopic" or "shortsighted" option for the moderator to choose, so he probably chose the next best way to mod the post down.

What I am really intersted in.

[Kasmiur]

I would like to find benchmarks comparing Rambus to DDR at this speed.

Talk about adding insult to injury...

[rubinson]

I knew that my P200 was getting old when they released this newfangled "AGP" slot. And I realized that it was obsolete when GHz processors started coming out. But approaching 3 GHz?!? That's just rubbing salt in the wound.

Re:Talk about adding insult to injury...

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah... my P200MMX is running fine. I haven't had any problems. runs win98, nt4 fine.
runs linux fine.

I'm still wondering what these GHz things are but I'll look into it when I find GCC is too slow. abiword's fine. Access97's fine. Mysql's fine. I can program my FPGA/PIC/AVRs without hassles.

I guess I'm too busy making money using it.

whatever. YMWV

Re:Talk about adding insult to injury...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thankfully, the slowness of GCC is about to disappear soon. Checking out the GCC developers' mail archives recently, I found something interesting: Apple has made GCC compilation speed a top priority, because old-school Mac developers, used to the much faster Metrowerks compiler, were complaining about the OS X compiler (which is GCC). This is what all the compiler guys at Apple are working on now. And get this, they're talking about a 36x speed increase on top of current GCC: 6x by finally supporting precompiled headers, and another 6x by internal algorithm improvements!

Re:Talk about adding insult to injury...

[zenyu]

I knew that my P200 was getting old...

Yeah, it was a sad day when I turned my dual pentium pro 200 into a print server. I couldn't even give it a new hard drive guz the BIOS wouldn't recognize a 30Gig dive. I had to stick an old 4Gig one in there that was sitting in my dresser from some other antique. (The old 6G had a dozen bad blocks, getting more each time I checked, it's disk is now a small shaving mirror.) That was a cool machine in 97.

Re:Talk about adding insult to injury...

[sebol]

I knew that my P200 was getting old when they released this newfangled "AGP" slot.

I'm still using Pentium 75 Mhz at home, and planned to upgrade it to athlon XP 1700+

I asked a salesperson about it, she said XP 1700+ is out of stock, there are only Athlon XP 2000+ available.

But i keep referring it as "two hundred" (200)

Arghh I'm old...

Re:Talk about adding insult to injury...

[SN74S181]

Why would you turn a dual processor machine into a print server?

Why would it need a 30 Gig drive?

Printer servers chug along fine with 486 processors and 400 MB drives. They run cooler, less noisy, and they last forever.

Re:Talk about adding insult to injury...

[zenyu]

Printer servers chug along fine with 486

*shrug* I didn't have a 486 to spare.

I have a spare 30 Gig drive that is nice and quiet.

I disabled one of the processors to save power, but I can use the horsepower since I have an old laser without postscript. Thankfully the motherboard has powersaving features so it runs cool.

Good benchmarks

[BrookHarty]

Good article with benchmarks over at Aces Hardware

What I like is how the AMD 2600+ is very close on most games either 1-2FPS behind or ahead, and the 2800+ isnt out yet. Go AMD! P4 2.8 $570 or AMD 2600+ $265

Re:Good benchmarks

[Jeppe Salvesen]

P4 2.8 $570 or AMD 2600+ $265. Yup. Your framerate will improve more if you stick the price difference into a better video card, or more ram. There is no good reason to buy an Intel-based system for home use.

Re:Good benchmarks

[Artifex]

This scares me, about how closely the benchmarks come in.
If it was CPU speed alone that was different, I could see why. But geez, the FSB is a lot higher on the P4. If it still doesn't flat out blow away an Athlon XP in every test, something's got to be said about the usefulness of the chip internals.

I have a long history as an Intel fan, and my Athlon XP 2GHz was a "value" choice to tide me over for a while. But I'm questioning my loyalties...

Re:Good benchmarks

[SN74S181]

Well, the Intel P4 2.5 something (it'd be called a 2800+ if Intel used AMD's marketing trickery) is about the same price as that AMD part.

Putting the hurt on AMD?

[Chicane-UK]

Well if I was going to put together a fast desktop system, I can tell you it wouldn't be built around an Intel Pentium 4 Processor (insert jingle here) - as far as I am concered, Intel price their CPU's so far off the scale it isn't true. Add to that the fact that AMD's processors no longer have issues with stability or floating point speed (like the old K6/K6-2) - I cant see any reason to buy such a top of the line Intel chip unless you were absolutely *desperate* to eek every last drip of performance out of a system. But at 2.6GHz and beyond, people aren't really counting - right?

The thing that bugs me is still the stigma attached to AMD.. its similar to the old 'No one got fired for buying IBM' - it is the same with Microsoft, and the same with Intel. People still avoid AMD because they consider them to be inferior..

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[Snowbeam]

Well, shouldn't AMD do something to fix that stigma? Your saying it, won't change people's minds. Get AMD to do something to show that they are equal if not better than Intel.

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[JKR]

People avoid AMD because the majority of motherboard chipsets are not very good; anything made by Via is junk, with either CPU, and no-one seems to make good high-end AMD motherboards. The manufacturers are all marketing AMD hardware at the spotty gamer who's just going to wreck it trying to overclock his CPU anyway...

I'd buy AMD if I thought the motherboard might actually have been through some sort of quality control, but my experiences to date have been pretty bad, whereas I've never had a bad Intel-chipset board since the days of my first 8 MB 486DX33.

Jon.

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[vofka]

...anything made by Via is junk...

Just like AMD Themselves with their old performance issues with Floating Point Math, VIA have had some poor chipsets in the past, however, the KT333 as used on the ABit AT7 Motherboard is exceptionally stable - I have a Linux Server with 8x80GB Maxtor IDE Disks arrayed to one 640GB disk which (aside from a driver problem for the Highpoint 374 controller, which is nothing to do with the KT333 or the AMD CPU) runs perfectly.

I'm actually quite keen to get my hands on the new A Bit KT7-MAX2, which has the KT400 chipset, and a host of extra features not present on the original AT7

I can think of a number of other VIA / AMD motherboards which I have used, and found to be exceptionally stable, most notable of which is the ABit KT7A and ABit KT7A-RAID.

In short, if you put aside the past of both AMD and VIA, and look again at the technical specs, and real-world performance of these CPU's and Chipsets, you will find that they are both now a viable, low-cost, alternative to the traditional Intel Only way of thinking and working.

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[jpmorgan]

AMD chips also have a reputation for being significantly less reliable than Intel chips. I think I've only ever seen one Intel chip burn out, but I I think almost every AMD chip I've come across I've eventually seen go toasty. Most hardcore overclockers I know will tell you to buy an Intel chip over an AMD, since the AMD chip comes pre-overclocked.

Until AMD does something about this reliability issue (either real or just perceived), a lot of people will continue to avoid AMD chips.

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because a HUGE number of PC users overclock their systems, eh?

I'm a total enthusiast, but I've never overclocked any of my processors.. (Although that's largely because most I've bought haven't been overclockable to a degree that'd make it worthwhile.. I don't buy the newest generation stuff)

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[Jim Norton]

They've already done something about it - they're pushing motherboard manufacturers into implementing overheating protection (see the Asus A7V333, for example)

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[velocipenguin]

Some older Via chipsets (the KT133, for example) had major stability issues. However, their newer releases have shown great improvement over their older chips. One of their spokespersons recently stated that they would not do an A-revision of their KT333 simply because they have been more careful and gotten things right the first time. Via had problems in the past, but their products are now more trustworthy than the chipsets made by SiS, ALi, or any of the other manufacturers. My KT333 system tends to be VERY fast and stable, even under Windows. My KT133A system crashed more. The newer Via chipsets are not dogged by the problems found in their older products.

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[velocipenguin]

If you're careful and use a good heatsink/fan, the risk of burning out your CPU is fairly small, even if you do overclock. The reason that Intel chips don't burn out is not because they run cool (they don't), but because their on-board thermal diode automatically clocks the chip down when the temperature gets too high. One of my friends who recently purchased a Pentium 4 chip did not clamp the heatsink down all the way. It did not touch the CPU at all, yet the machine booted and ran at about 400 MHz. I was thoroughly impressed by this, being an AMD guy. AMD's Palomino and Thoroughbred chips have on-board diodes too, but they do not support speed stepping when the CPU overheats. However, *if* you have one of the newer motherboards that can read that diode, it can shut the system down before damage can occur. When people burn out their CPUs, it tends to happen because they screw up when they're installing the heatsink, or because part of the heatsink fails (e.g., the clip holding it to the socket.) AMD's processors certainly run hot, but the risks can be minimized by being careful when working with your system.

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[photon317]

I agree on the processor front. My most recent home box is an Athlon XP, because I liked the price/performance ratio versus intel, and I can deal with the issues for the money. However, I still lean towards Intel for real servers that I depend on, and there's solid reason why.

On a processor level, AMD has Intel beat in the overall - the processor is just as good if not better for less money depending what part of the leapfrog cycle we're in. The problem is in the chipsets. Intel's motherboard chipsets have a history of being extremely well supported in all OS's and very good quality. Every AMD-compatible chipset I've ever used has had problems. You name it: VIA, SiS, even AMD's own MP760 or whatever it was called. Invariably all the chipsets available for AMD processors have problems. Sometimes it's hardware bugs, sometimes it's instability. More often than not, it's just that driver support isn't really there in Linux or Windows, or IRQ tables are kinda hosed.

In the end, it's the chipsets that keep me buying Intel for production. If Intel ever released a chipset that supported an AMD processor, I'd deploy the two in a heartbeat, but fat chance of that happening soon.

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[smcn]

I avoid AMD because of my personal experience with them. Motherboard problems with a K6 400MHz, and software stability problems with an Athlon 900MHz.

Forget about speed, I'd rather pay more for a chip I'm 100% positive will last.

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[Keeper]

That's funny, because every single AMD chip I've ever seen is still running without problems.

"pre overclocked" my ass; overclocking is making the CPU run faster than it came from the factory; by definition a chip cannot be overclocked from the factory. Gotta love the FUD spread by Intel zeleots. Of course, the poster will probably reply that AMD raised the voltage used by the chip at some point, to which I'd respond "so does Intel"...but of course, since intel does it, it doesn't count...

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[ProtonMotiveForce]

Let's see, for about the same price I can:

1. Buy an AMD system, worry about incompatibilities, various quality isues, not have access to most stable/quality motherboards, etc..
2. Buy a _previous_ release Intel chip (e.g. the 2.53GHz) at the same price, with about the same performance. Stability. Speed (faster in optimized apps). Best motherboards money can buy. Most reliable chipsets (I845G running DDR333).

I wonder...

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. The temperature of the running chip is the only indication of how "overclocked" it is and AMD chips are constantly on the verge of burning out woth 60+C normal loaded operating temperatures. They sure as hell are "overclocked", running far beyond what would be considered "safe" engineering tolerances.

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[ScannerBoy]

I think AMD is losing more points with the people in its marketing game. No one cares to know why AMD chips aren't listed by Mhz (yes we all know that doesn't matter but the marketing hype runs deep in those with the check books) they just know it doesn't say "faster than the other guy!"

Unfortunatly, one can make a pretty good argument (to someone without extensive CPU knowledge aka most corporate purchasers) for Intel based on clock and bus speed alone.

Cyrix lost the CPU game with its silly marketing schemes and Intel is handily playing AMD into the same corner.

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[ncc74656]

I know I shouldn't feed this troll, but here goes anyway...

AMD chips also have a reputation for being significantly less reliable than Intel chips.

Since when? I've used everything from the K6 on up to the Athlon MP, and I've never had a processor get flaky, burn up, or have compatibility problems with a program.

I I think almost every AMD chip I've come across I've eventually seen go toasty. Most hardcore overclockers...

That's your problem right there. If you run the processor within its design specifications, you won't run into problems. Blaming AMD when your misconfigured (overclocked == misconfigured) computer crashes and burns is just plain stupid. It's as stupid as Tom Pabst getting bent out of shape when an Athlon running without a heatsink commits hari-kari.

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[velocipenguin]

If your processor is running above 60C, it's because *you* have not configured the system properly. My Athlon XP 1700+, overclocked safely and carefully to the speed of a 1900+, rarely reaches temperatures in excess of 40C. I am not doing anything extreme like water cooling. I have a few case fans, and a decent heatsink. Intel systems run hot too if the case isn't properly cooled. I've seen it happen. The fact is that AMD and Intel chips don't run at temperatures that are that different; Intel just designed better ways of dealing with the excess heat.

Re:Putting the hurt on AMD?

[Chicane-UK]

Dont quite know where you get your hardware from.. but looking at Overclockers UK - an Athlon XP2200+ Thoroughbred cpu is the same price as a Pentium 4 1.8GHz..

Yes, AMD/VIA type combo's were flaky in the past.. especially when Athlon first hit the streets. But stability is no longer an issue - even my old KT7/1.2GHz Athlon run perfectly. No lockups.

And some of the latest VIA based boards offer some stunning features.. the legacy free AT7 for example.

Re:fp

[Anonymous Coward]

*SMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOCH*

You have a tasty ass indeed, my friend. May I tongue it?

Nice Ads..

[Diabolical]

Come to visit /. Nice oss advocacy site, news for nerds stuff that matters etc...

Real nice article about P4.. with the right amount of opiniated comments as usual..

See ad about visual studio.net

Something's not quite as it should.. but what it is?...

Use of old technology != lack of enthusiasm

[Anonymous Coward]

[ Different AC to the one mentioned in the above post ]

Your logic is flawed - using old technology does not necessarily mean a person has no enthuisasm for technology. The one does not follow the other. Someone could be just be happy with what they have but still be interested in every new development... ...I sincerely hope for everyone's sake you aren't an employer!

Re:Use of old technology != lack of enthusiasm

[fmaxwell]

I sincerely hope for everyone's sake you aren't an employer!

I have been in hiring positions throughout my career and will be hiring for a new position that's opening up in the near future. In those years of hiring, I've learned that people that don't keep their own computers reasonably up-to-date, seldom have the skills and enthusiasm to make them stand-out employees.

Note the word "reasonably." I don't care if someone is running a 1ghz Duron or a 2.8ghz P4, but something with an old Socket 7 motherboard is absurd as a computer professional's primary home system.

Re:Use of old technology != lack of enthusiasm

[Anonymous Coward]

That's silly. I had a 133MHz 486 2.5 years ago when I got this job. ;) I had double digits wage increases for the last few years.

Re:Use of old technology != lack of enthusiasm

[Anonymous Coward]

So I would have to throw away my trusty old K6-330 in order to work for you. Cool.

One quick question though, why do I need a noisy heat generating GHz machine on my desk when all I do with it is "ssh" into the server - dual 2.2 Xeon - in my storage room? I am probably missing something ...????

Re:Use of old technology != lack of enthusiasm

[fmaxwell]

One quick question though, why do I need a noisy heat generating GHz machine on my desk when all I do with it is "ssh" into the server - dual 2.2 Xeon - in my storage room? I am probably missing something ...????

Yes, you are. You have a real, modern, decent computer. And, like me, you have some older stuff that you use occasionally, too. No problem. The guys I worry about are the ones that have only ancient stuff and no modern machines.

Help me!

[Snowbeam]

My 486 cried as I read this news. That's it, my 286 is coming back to life. The two of them together can last me another 6 months before I consider buying my first penttium ;)

AMD Kicks Some Ass

[miketang16]

You really have to take these benchmarks and processor comparisons with a grain of salt, because the performance difference is not completely dependent upon the processor speed. For example, the top speed of AMD-compatible DDR RAM at the moment is 400 MHz with a VIA KT400 chipset mobo(tho its not out yet), and the top speed of Intel-Compatible RDRAM is 1066 MHz. It makes a difference. Also the FSB's are quite different. My advice for AMD, up your FSB, help DDR RAM get faster, and you'll leave Intel crying in a corner.

Re:AMD Kicks Some Ass

[vofka]

...with a VIA KT400 chipset mobo(tho its not out yet)...

Check out the ABit AT7-MAX2... Unless there is something I am missing (quite possible!), then the KT400 is shipping already, as are mobo's based around it.

Re:AMD Kicks Some Ass

[Jim Norton]

The KT400 chipset doesn't officially support 400 MHz DDR.

Re:AMD Kicks Some Ass

[velocipenguin]

Keep in mind that RDRAM accesses the chips in serial instead of in parallel, which means that the performance gain from that higher speed is not particularly exceptional. Also, you have to consider that each CPU has different strengths and weaknesses - the Athlon is better at integer math, for example, while the Pentium 4 shines at floating-point.

Re:AMD Kicks Some Ass

[miketang16]

Vofka: I apologize, you are correct. The last I had checked I didn't see any motherboard releases yet. Jim: I haven't heard that. Do you have a source with information?

Re:AMD Kicks Some Ass

[ProtonMotiveForce]

Why would you take them with a grain of salt??

You can't compare single-component performance. It's an overall system benchmark. The winner wins - period. No whining about "Waaah, my FSB is slower!", "Waaah, my IDE drivers aren't as good", Waaah, Waaah, Waaah.

It's simple - which is faster in a given task - systemwide.

Re:AMD Kicks Some Ass

[ncc74656]

Also, you have to consider that each CPU has different strengths and weaknesses - the Athlon is better at integer math, for example, while the Pentium 4 shines at floating-point.

My understanding was that the P4's x87 performance sucks eggs...that it's not only slower than the Athlon, but that it's even slower than the P!!! it was supposed to replace. Maybe they've improved things in more recent cores, but you'd think there would have been more mention of such an improvement if that had happened. (Yes, I know there's SSE2, but faster performance there does bugger-all for performance in most apps, since most apps use x87.)

More reviews

[MagPulse]

How does Slashdot decide which of these hard-working sites gets loads of free traffic?

• [H]ard|OCP Intel Pentium 4 @ 2.80GHz : Intel is breaking out the big guns with their sights set directly on the competition. Will the 2.80GHz Northwood be enough for Intel to hold onto the performance crown?
• Anandtech Intel's Pentium 4 2.80GHz - Moving to the Head of the Class
• Tom's Hardware Speed Isn't Everything: P4/2800 Meets Athlon XP 2600+
• Ace's Hardware Faster Still: The 2.8 GHz Pentium 4
• FiringSquad Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz Review
• Hexus.net Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz Review
• SimHQ.com Intel "Northwood" 2.80GHz Pentium 4 Processor using .13 Technology
• Tech Report Intel's Pentium 4 2.8GHz processor - Two billion eight-hundred thousand hertz
• Hot Hardware The Pentium 4 2.8GHz Processor - Intel ups the anti once again
• xbit labs Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz against Athlon XP 2600+

Re:More reviews

[jpmorgan]

Considering how blindly pro-AMD Tom's Hardware is, I find it amusing that they chose to describe the battle between the Athlon and the P4 as a Ferrari(Athlon) and a Mercedes(P4) racing on the Autobahn. Why?

The top-end Mercedes are consistently faster than any Ferrari. Whoops? Looks like they should have done their research! Nothing I like more than a zealot screwing up.

Re:More reviews

[miketang16]

I think perhaps you missed their subtle point, in your blind pro-Intel-ness. Perhaps they shoul've chosen a slightly lower priced car than a Ferrari, but the point was, that the Mercedes fit Intel CPU's well, because they are extremely expensive and have a lot of luxaries. The stripped-down Ferrari fits AMD well, because they are fast and cheap(like I said before, there could have been a better choice).

Re:More reviews

[HeavensTrash]

Ferrari's are stripped down and cheap eh? I'm glad we're all living in the real world here.

Re:fp

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmmmmm.. asl?

What? Numbers matter?

[Martigan80]

O.k. we all know the numbers game they play with the CPU's. The numbers don't matter as much as the architecture does.

And for the second review that says "Apple-like marketing" Apple's use a totally different CPU Architecture. It's like trying to compare a 500HP car with a 500HP boat. It all depends on what you use it for.

HOMOSEXUALITY IS WRONG

[Anonymous Coward]

Take your perversion away. God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.

Little by little...

[haggar]

With this trend, I can resume writing applications in Qbasic.

But seriously: with processor speeds like these, efficient programming will be even less appreciated. Sadly.

Re:Little by little...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep... and once programs are 'fast enough' on the developer's 3GHZ machine, it's fast enough for everyone.

Re:Little by little...

[SN74S181]

Developers who think like that need to be pounded upon until their brains squirt out their ears.

Really. Developers should have two machines on their desktop. A fast machine to compile on, and a slow machine (say, a PII-300) to test the code on.

If gcc were written by Turbo Pascal/C authors...

[r6144]

As one who frequently programs, desktop delays does not matter even on my p2/233 (if a huge page take more than 10 seconds to render in mozilla, it probably works in dillo or links or lynx), but waiting for gcc to compile my programs are a PITA. I once wrote a full-screen editor (with some complex data structures) with about 5k lines of C code, and it takes 5 secs to compile w/o optimization, and 7-10 secs with -Os! (later I ported the program to dos with minimum changes, and TC made it in less than 2 secs) When writing a gnome program, or dealing with even larger projects, this is more painful.

If gcc is as fast as turbo C (when optimization is off or at as low a level as TC), I probably won't think of updating at all.

Nice reply

[fmaxwell]

Thank you for that sane, and well-considered reply. I'm tired of reading the rationalizations for the notion that computer professionals should use outdated, underperforming computers. You shot holes in this particular argument rather nicely. Such rationalizations are just self-serving tripe meant to justify cheapness or laziness.

Can you imagine these people as doctors? "I don't need any of those new-fangled medications or diagnostic equipment. By not keeping up on new drugs and medical equipment, I have more time to spend with my patients and that's what's really important."

Re:Nice reply

[Alioth]

I think there's a lot of difference between the tools you use at home and the tools you use at work.

I'd be quite concerned - to use your doctor analagy - if a doctor didn't have the new-fangled diagnostic equipment at his professional workplace but I wouldn't be particularly bothered if all he had in his home medicine cabinet were over-the-counter drugs.

Similarly, if a programmer had a 266MHz machine at home, it wouldn't really be of any concern to me. Just like I don't expect a professional limo driver to own their own limo for personal use, when all they need is a Ford Escort.

Re:Nice reply

[fmaxwell]

I think there's a lot of difference between the tools you use at home and the tools you use at work.

If there is a monetary reason for it, sure. But computers are simply dirt-cheap. $75 will buy you an Athlon XP1700+ CPU. Fast, large hard drives are under $100. I just got a 24x CD-RW drive for $10 after rebates. I'm not expecting anyone to go out and buy a dual Xeon machine with 3GB of RAM. But at least have something that is not more than two generations removed from current technology.

Just like I don't expect a professional limo driver to own their own limo for personal use, when all they need is a Ford Escort.

Take a look at what professional race drivers drive on the streets. You will find nicely engineered cars, not race cars. If a race driver was not discerning enough to appreciate the difference between a Ford Escort and, say, a BMW, then I would worry.

Re:Nice reply

[Stonehand]

Nice troll.

More careful people might want to consider, however, that this attitude would lead to hiring people who simply have more money than they know what to do with, and buy expensive computers like Falcon Northwest customs as prestige objects.

You probably don't want somebody who's solution to just about any problem is "throw more money at it" -- because that attitude probably will cost you money in unnecessary expenditures. If somebody's using his l33t system to, say, play something old like Quake 2, that's a very wasteful use of resources. If he's got a dual-Xeon box for Microsoft Word and Exploder, and that's about it, then it screams out "imbecile".

Enthusiasm != clue. New != clue. Expensive != clue.

And if your doctor is always pushing the latest and greatest pharmaceuticals, he's probably being a shill for the companies in exchange for perks, because he knows damn well that you don't /always/ need the latest-and-most-expensive drugs to treat common ailments -- unless he's an incompetent idiot. He should be aware of them, but if he automatically reaches for the Claritin rubber stamp when some (OTC) Benadryl would do, he's working for the drug companies, not you.

Re:Nice reply

[fmaxwell]

You probably don't want somebody who's solution to just about any problem is "throw more money at it" -- because that attitude probably will cost you money in unnecessary expenditures.

There is a difference between a development system and a target system. I often develop software for embedded systems that cost very little and have low performance, but that does not mean that my development system should be the same as the target systems.

More careful people might want to consider, however, that this attitude would lead to hiring people who simply have more money than they know what to do with, and buy expensive computers like Falcon Northwest customs as prestige objects.

If you don't earn enough money as a computer professional to keep your own computer up-to-date, then you must not be very good at your chosen line of work. Would you hire a lawyer that could not afford to replace a worn-out briefcase or a plumber that arrived by cab because he didn't earn enough to buy a work truck?

My computer is quite modest. It is based on an MSI motherboard with an Athlon XP1700+ CPU. I have a pair of 24x CD writers, and 2 80GB IDE hard drives and 384MB of RAM. It's got a GeForce 3 Ti200 video card and a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz audio card. It's hardly state of the art and I did not list a single item there that costs more than $100 if you shop carefully and it's still a modern, responsive computer. So you don't have to be on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to have a decent computer.

There's a big difference between looking down on anyone who does not have this month's CPU and making the perfectly reasonable observation that an old K6-3 at 300-and-something megahertz is just not reasonable in this day and age for a computer professional's primary system.

Re:Nice reply

[Anonymous Coward]

>Would you hire a lawyer that could not afford to
>replace a worn-out briefcase or a plumber that
>arrived by cab because he didn't earn enough to
>buy a work truck?

We weren't talking about what an individual could or could not afford, we're talking about what they choose to spend their money on.

It depends on what the computer professional prefers to do in his free time. I'm running Windows 2000 on a 900MHz Athlon w/ 768MB of ram, 20GB and 60GB hard drives, a GeForce2 Pro, and an M-Audio Delta 44 sound card.

I do software development 8 hours a day at work. I don't do development at home. I don't play many video games, and the only really processor intensive app I run is Cakewalk Sonar. Currently, my computer's abilities are more than sufficient for my musical abilities.

What do I do at home that would warrant spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a new system?

-Dan.

Re:Nice reply

[fmaxwell]

We weren't talking about what an individual could or could not afford, we're talking about what they choose to spend their money on.

Actually, we were. The post to which I replied said:

this attitude would lead to hiring people who simply have more money than they know what to do with

That makes it sound like one must be rolling around naked in piles of money before being able to afford an upgrade.

But even looking at it from the aspect of a spending choice, I am concerned when a professional software engineer does not choose to keep his system reasonably modern -- and by reasonably modern, I'd certainly say your system fits that description.

I do software development 8 hours a day at work. I don't do development at home.

That's your call. I prefer employees who are active in open-source development, private programming projects, on the lookout for new development tools, etc. Those that just put in their 8 hours to get a paycheck have not been stellar performers for me. Maybe you are different and, if so, no offense is intended.

What do I do at home that would warrant spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a new system?

Nothing. But there's a big difference between a 900mhz Athlon and a 392mhz K6-3. You've got a reasonably modern system. You've got plenty of RAM, hard drive, CPU speed, etc. I was not trying to say that everyone needed a P4 at 2.8ghz. Nice sound card, by the way.

An order of magnitude in only 4 years

[gelfling]

Basically we've seen an order of magnitude raw CPU clockspeed increase in 4-5 years. What have we accomplished with that?

It seems that the faster we make the chips the more we squander their power.

Re:An order of magnitude in only 4 years

[Fjord]

Personally, I been doing the Folding@Home project (although only at 30% CPU because I don't want the fan in my laptop on all the time).

It has been getting a lot more real results than SETI@home has.

Too artisan an audience...

[balloonhead]

This is getting ridiculous. Why so much Intel bashing? I realise that they are associated with 'the enemy' to most /.ers (i.e. Microsoft, big business, probably DMCA, RIAA and Disney...) but they release the fastest processor on the market and all they get is abuse.

Who cares that their processor is inefficient, poorly designed, and expensive? Not the ones who buy it certainly; there is a market fpor it, and they should not be penalised for serving their market - they are a business after all.

For all those arguing that these tests ar 'not fair' (memory, RAMBUS, blah, blah, blah) - you are missing the point. Boo hoo, they are using different equipment; I could equallly argue that AMD is shooting itself in the foot for not utilising the fastest memory architecture available. For most people, 700 or 800 MHz is more than necessary to do almost anything - above that only specialised areas will see any real benefit. Is it really any benefit to be able to play games at 32 bit compared to 24? Can you actually tell the difference at speed? Isn't it more to do with the graphics card anyway? Scientific applications, yes - these can be markedly improved with faster processors. But most readers here do not work in a render farm in Hollywood.

But back to the original point, we shouldn't be so aggressive towards them just because of who they are. They are serving a market, doing if very successfully, and for those people who do have $$$/£££ to spend, they represent the maximum performance. I will continue to buy AMD because I think they give more value, and my XP 1500+, although now slow compared to newer processors, is far faster than I need, even for compiling Mozilla or running KDE3, WinXP or Serious Sam 2. But that doesn't mean I should refuse to talk to people with an Intel chip in their machine.

And don't mod this down as flame/troll just because you disagree -use your points properly and mod up someone you agree with. And stop being small minded too...

Re:Too artisan an audience...

[balloonhead]

that's meant to be partisan, sorry

Then look at this..

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q3/020826/p4_280 0-15.htm l

Long and the short is that RDRAM 1066 is fastest, RDRAM800 and DDR333 are about the same.

Upping the anti?

[Oculus Habent]

From the article's title:

Intel ups the anti once again

Sheesh, you would think that such an obvious malaprop would have been seen by at least one person.

Or, perhaps they were referring to the P4's lack of performance over the PIII...

--
void life();

Re:Upping the anti?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I checked, the current P4s are all higher performance than any P3.

Re:Upping the anti?

[Oculus Habent]

Let's take a look:

The P4 pipeline is 100% longer, but the prediction algorithm is only 33% better. A miss causes 200% of the delay, per MHz, that a PIII has.

I wish I could find the link, but there is an article on Intel's own site that says the P4 is not as powerful as the PIII, merely able to clock better.

"ups the anti"

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... they meant the "ante", right?

And is it "raise the bar" or "raise the barre"? I've always wondered.

Surprise Surprise - P4 Optimizations

[euphline]

Surprise, surprise, the reviewer comments that, In closing, once again it seems as though Intel has one upped AMD in their clash for the PC processor performance superiority. The edge goes decidedly to Intel's 2.8GHz flagship, in most all areas of performance, with perhaps the rare exception of older legacy code based applications.

According to them, "older legacy code based applications" are applications without Pentium 4 optimizations.

Will we ever get reviewers that aren't incredibly biased... and stupid? Of course P4s do better on software with P4 optimization! And software w/o it isn't "older legacy software"... it's software that isn't written to favor a particular chip in the marketplace...

Gotta love it.

-jbn

Re:Surprise Surprise - P4 Optimizations

[TheAwfulTruth]

Typical slash(and burn) attitude.

The p4 SSE2 instructions are an OPPOURTUNITY for software companies to kick ass. A small amount of optimization on a codec can quadruple your performance. Who wouldn't do that? Who wouldn't also do it for both P4 and AMD. It's pretty simple to create CPU specific engine libraries that take advantage of various archetectures.

Video encoding and reatime editing still suffer from CPUs being AT LEAST 10x too slow. Realtime 3D has also got a LONG way to go to be able to render photorealistic billion poly scenes with 5 mile horizons in real time. 3 Ghz is NOTHING.

Course if all you do all day is web surf and iChat, then I guess none of that means anything to you...

Re:Surprise Surprise - P4 Optimizations

[velocipenguin]

Yes, they are an opportunity to create better software. Unfortunately, the reviewer's attitude is fairly silly. They claim that the new P4 is the best thing since sliced bread for everything but older legacy applications. However, when they say "older legacy applications", they mean "anything that doesn't use SSE2". It simply is not a fair comparison to say that a CPU is better because the benchmarks optimized for it worked better on it than on a different manufacturer's product. Perhaps the optimized applications should be singled out and labeled as incompatible rather than the older, more standardized ones.

Putting things in Perspective

[edibleplastic]

I know this is Offtopic, but just thought this would be interesting to think about. ENIAC, the first general purpose digital computer was used in part to calculate artillary arc tables. ENIAC could do in 30 seconds what it took a human 12 hours to do, so it was approx. 1400 times faster than a human. The amazing thing is that ENIAC ran at 0.1 Mhz.

Just think now, a 3 Ghz machine is 30,000 times faster than the first computer. Amazing how far we've come in 40 years.

Re:Putting things in Perspective

[Alioth]

Actually - a 3GHz Intel machine is probably more than 30,000 times faster than the ENIAC. Consider how AMD and Intel chips get a different amount of work done with the same clock frequency - it's quite likely that a Pentium 4 gets a lot more done per clock cycle than the ENIAC got per clock cycle.

God forbid that you make a *fair* comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting that you mention prices on the 2.2Ghz/2200 models but you fail to mention that the Athlon 2600 a) hasn't even hit the shelves/wholesalers yet and b) will be more expensive than the Pentium IV 2.8Ghz.

I honestly don't understand why you AMD fanboys feel the need to misrepresent facts like that to make "your" processor seem faster. Is it making up for a small penis, or do you work for AMD marketing?

Athlon XP 2600 way cheaper than 2.8GHz pentium 4

[David Jao]

you fail to mention that the Athlon 2600 will be more expensive than the Pentium IV 2.8Ghz.

Can you read? The Athlon XP 2600 is way cheaper than the 2.8GHz Pentium 4.

Your point about there being no Athlon XP 2600s available at retail is legitimate, but I do not see any way that you can interpret the $269 price of the Athlon XP 2600 as higher than the $499 price of the 2.8GHz Pentium 4.

I honestly don't understand why you AMD fanboys feel the need to misrepresent facts

Who's misrepresenting facts here, you or me?

ROFL@ Megahertz Myth

[catwh0re]

I love how the author talks down the "Megahertz Myth" as if it's something that is merely a marketing ploy. I wonder how he could explain a Xeon outperforming a P4 chip, despite having similar or same clock frequencies.

Intel no longer loves MS?

[n-baxley]

It seems to me that processor speeds have relly shot up in the last 6 months. Before, there was always a nice tie between the advances in processor speed and the extra needs of Windows. This arrangment worked well for both parties in that everyone felt they had to have both to be right with the world. Has Intel (and AMD) now said to heck with MS we're going to put all the speed we can into our machines? Or, are we seeing a MHz race between Intel and AMD? With a viable competitor, Intel can no longer trickle out improvments at their own pace, they have to deal with someone else matching and exceeding their pace. What does this bode for the future of processors?

Hooray for clock speeds!!!

[locutus2k]

After looking at the hothardware.com for about 30 seconds I thought I was at an Intel site. Seems to me they are preying on the id10t folk who think higher clocks are better. Like anything else, the AMD vs. Intel debate can stretch on for ages, but that is pretty disgusting. Personally I wouldn't have a P4 if you gave it to me. Intel has a terrible track record, and are trying the marketing advantages because they can't compete with AMD. It seems strange that Intel's clocks are much higher, but the chips are either neck and neck or Intel is losing ground ( depends on which banchmarks you read)

Quality Controlled Boards...

[cnelzie]

AMD has a new program to guarantee stability and long term performance with motherboard manufacturers.

Currently there is one motherboard variant developed by ASUS, it is the A7V266A (Note the 'A' at the end of the designation.) This particular revision of the board is designed for corporate desktop and lower-end servers. Sure, it is not the latest and greatest in speed performance. However, the purpose is to certify a mainboard for long term CPU/Mainboard longevity and stable performance. Of which speed is not an issue.

These boards are designed for desktop office use, but would also be quite excellent mid-range gaming rigs. (Of course, since it will be nearly 2 years before games come out that will TRULY tax this hardware, that is debateable.)

Currently, I am unsure of any other boards that are released. However, at the seminar the AMD representatives mentioned that they were working with Gigabyte, ASUS, Abit and a few other mainboard manufacturers to develop other approved guaranteed mainboard/CPU combinations.

I am unsure if Intel as anything similar to that, as I have never heard of any particular MB/CPU combinations that are guaranteed by Intel.

-.-

Re:Quality Controlled Boards...

[robhancock]

Intel makes motherboards, they'll guarantee those MB/CPU combinations for sure..

2.8 gigawaste

[billcopc]

I must be missing something big here. I've been happily chugging along with my year-old 1400mhz Athlon, and despite my 'power-user' status, I still think it's more than fast enough for anything I do, be it code, audio/video/photo editing, or any games. I'm trying very hard to justify another 300$ investment in a Geforce4, even though my GF2 suits me just fine.

It seems we've reached a transitional plateau, where we need to refocus and figure out where we're going with all this untapped bit-fiddling power. I'd much rather see hyper-cheap PCs, than yet another overpriced 5% mhz step-up. Give me a 500mhz basic box for 100$, and I'll get my whole extended family on the web playing Bejeweled day and night.

Re:2.8 gigawaste

[Stonehand]

Do you also post to F1 racing fora about how a Ford Taurus does everything you need it to, and there's no reason for more speed?

Slashdot is not you. It's not me either. It's a heterogeneous group, some of whom (such as myself) /do/ have CPU-bound applications that take significant amounts of time (as in sometimes more than a week).

Re:2.8 gigawaste

[TheAwfulTruth]

Lets take hard drives as an example. By your logic, by now you should be able to buy, say, a new 1 gig hard drive for $5. In reality, it doesn't matter much at all what the drive capacity is. It costs $50 to manfac a hard drive. You can't manfac a drive for $50 then sell it for $5 just because it's only one gig in size. There is an absolute minimum charge that the manufacturer has to charge to stay in buisness. This is true for CPUs, MB's, Cases, CDROMs, everything.

So you are right, we have reached a price plateu (actually a price valley). We've reached the minimum possible price for manufacturing all the parts necessary to build a computer. (THat seems to be about $300, without a monitor for a general purpose PC machine) The parts just continuously get better, but the lowest end prices are not going to fall from where they are now.

Re:2.8 gigawaste

[billcopc]

Indeed, some people have a use for the added power. I have friends who spend their time ripping DVD's. For those, I'm sure they would love a quad-Athlon 2800.. but for _general use_, which is what these common market CPU's were built for, well, who gives a fuck ?! There have always been special-purpose processors for the power hungry, like Suns and Crays and SGI's. Cheap cluster computing has only recently struck mass popularity, so I feel most of these Athlon power plants will die a slow death running the same Bejeweled I play for hours a day on my workplace's 366mhz Celeron (I do nights in a video store - what else is there to do :)

There is room for everyone in this market, but you know they will be force-feeding these things to Auntie May, convincing her that her email will be faster and the internet will be more colorful with an Athlon 2800.

Does your Auntie May post to the F1 forum about how she's always rear-ending people in traffic with her MacLaren, and how the fuel economy sucks ? Maybe she'd be better suited in a Ford Taurus.

What the P4 needs is a decent FPU, not more MHz

[Anonymous Coward]

The 2.8 still only manages to tie with the 2600+ on 3DS MAX and still lags behind in Maya. No thanks. This is why Intel is losing its market share in the effects / rendering market. Who in their right minds would pay this much for a CPU that's actually slower than the competition? It's bad enough with one system but when you add up the cost of an entire dual-CPU render farm, it's just ridiculous.

The only renderer where the P4 is faster than the Athlon is Lightwave, and that's because they have terrible floating-point code (but very few people use LW professionally anyway).

Rather than insist on the P4's (bad) design, Intel should start working on its successor. The Hammer will be released at about 2.4 GHz (that's "3600+" in PRspeak), will have an FPU that's even faster than the Athlon and will be able to run SSE2 code (which is one of the few things that lets the P4 keep up with the Athlon in some floating-point operations). Not to mention 64-bit code, memory allocation above 4GB, etc..

It's not that I want to buy an Intel CPU (I don't really care about the brand, just the price and performance), but if there's no competition for the Hammer / Opteron, AMD will probably price it much higher than if there is a credible alternative from Intel.

So Intel, please stop wasting time speeding up this truck and start designing a Porsche.

Huh?

[muffel]

Underclocking a newer, faster CPU is not going to make a substantial difference in the heat that it produces. [...] even by lowering it by 1 GHz is probably just silly.

Are you saying that overclocking won't make the CPU hotter, either?
Or is it that when I increase the clock speed on a CPU, it will run hotter, but decreasing it won't make it cooler?
That would be quite fascinating. (What if I decrease the clock of the CPU that I just overclocked? Will it stay hot?)
Could you please explain or back up with some references? Thx.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you didn't read it. He said that there would be a *marginal* difference, which is true, due to CPU core designs. 1GHz doesn't magically add 50C degrees. Look at the new core designs... They get faster speeds at cooler temps than the last run (comparitively).

Re:Huh?

[muffel]

Maybe you didn't read it. He said that there would be a *marginal* difference, which is true, due to CPU core designs. 1GHz doesn't magically add 50C degrees.

I would expect that overclocking a CPU by 1GHz would create more than a *marginal* difference in heat. Are you saying it wouldn't? (You are probably talking about a new CPU design for the 1GHz increase. I was not. I was talking about varying the clock speed on *one* CPU.) And yes, I read it.

Again, to be clear:

1. I assume that overclocking generates (significantly) more heat. I havent't tried it but it makes sense from what I know about physics, and there is a lot of anecdotal evidence (Overclockers crazy about cooling).
2. I would have expected that underclocking would vice versa result in a cooler CPU.
3. 13Echo says 'no'.
4. I'm surprised and seek explanation.
5. For some reason that I don't understand you posted what you posted.

So, if what 13Echo said is true, does that mean that every CPU has a certain minimum operating temperature, regardless of clock speed? This would be new to me and I'd be interested in an explanation.

is this using Optimized for Insel Intide benchmark

[Anonymous Coward]

nt

Another reason to forget about megahertz

[geoswan]

A recent article Benchmark Program Rewritten to Favor Intel? suggests even greater skepticism in evaluating the performance of intel CPUs.

This article Pandering to the Masses: Does Engineering Still Matter? explains how the Pentium III beat the Pentium 4. If the P3 and the P4 are run at the same clock speed the P3 performs much better than its anemic younger sibling.

Re:Another reason to forget about megahertz

[Sebastopol]

If the P3 and the P4 are run at the same clock speed the P3 performs much better than its anemic younger sibling.


Well fucking DUH!

Sure, my Saab 900T gets great gas mileage out of a 4-cylinder, better than a Testarossa with it's 12-cylinder engine, but my Saab tops out at 115 mph, and the Ferrari tops out at 210 mph.

The PIII architecture was specifically designed to run at ridiculously high clock speeds, which means it does less per clock, but this tradeoff was specifically targeted.

You'll see when you take your Computer System Architecture classes -- pipelines vs. frequency.

Re:Another reason to forget about megahertz

[djohnsto]

Why does everyone think that the processor with the most work done per clock is automatically better? Sure the PIII has a higher IPC than the P4 does, it was by design!

The P4 was designed to get the most performance out of whatever process it was fab'ed on. If you look at the results, by and large they succeeded. Sure the PIII is more efficient, but at 180 nm, they could only be clocked reliably up to about 1.1 GHz. The P4 hit 2 GHz. On 130 nm, the PIII tops out at ~1.4 GHz, the P4 is up to 2.8 Ghz, and will probably top out at 3 - 3.4 GHz. So, is a P3 running at 1.5GHz "better" than a P4 running at 3 GHz because it does more work per clock? Your argument assumes that you could run a P3 at the same clock speed as a P4 - it can't.

The funny thing is, Intel also makes one of the highest IPC (and highest performing) processors currently available, the Itanium II. For floating point code, it has the highest IPC of any processor currently avaialble. At 1 GHz it's floating point performance is just a smidge under IBM's Power4 running at 1.3 GHz. It's integer performance isn't too much under the latest P4/AthlonXP procs - and it's only running at 1 GHz!!! Does anyone on /. laud Intel for making such an efficient processor? No, they bitch and moan about how the P4 is so "inefficient" and how uber cool AMD is for releasing fast processors really cheaply.

Here's a thought, maybe they sell Athlons really cheaply because the HAVE to, not because WANT to. Companies don't lose money because they're trying to be nice to their customers. The best price/performance option in *any* industry is almost never with the market leader, because the people trying to catch up will trade profits for market share. So, I guess in the end, yay for competition (just try not to be so biased, open your mind).

Re:Cry me a river

[balloonhead]

If the entire community is wrong, then why not lecture it? I'll be happy to admit I'm wrong if I am. My point is that people are almost automatically modded up or down depending on the subject rather than the content - an OSS/AMD/Linux zealot gets +5 insightful and the anti-MS/Intel/Disney zealot also gets the same +5; someone with more big-business friendly commecnts gets modded down just as automatically.

On the other hand, these same people who you say care about the specs go crying to their parents because the best specs do not belong to their favourite company. This is just missing the point. I can get a top-of-the-line Ford or a top-of-the-line Jaguar. The jag is likely to be more expensive, go faster (and incidentally get me more chicks) but at a price. If I am prepared to pay the extra cash then why shouldn't I get it? Because the community favours Fords? Don't be ridiculous.

Anyway, the community would just start spouting some shite about how the comparison was unfair because the Jag engine had more valves or BHP or something; but the Jag would still go faster regardless. And the Ford still wouldn't have more valves, so why even compare?

What if Microsoft were to do something great? Like all the money Bill Gates gives to charities? They would still get shit from /. (he doesn't deserve that money / it's a drop in the ocean for him / he's just trying to look good). I buy AMD, I like fast processors, I run Linux, I hardly ever give to charity, and I don't expect to do so if they don't want to. But to arbitrarily decide that all actions a company or individual make are evil based on their other actions is small minded. Just because Microsoft have an abominable record does not make every single one of their actions wrong, so to just say that they all are is being fairly pathetic and petty.

Re: Mozilla

[Bisqwit]

I'm running Mozilla on my 233 MHz laptop and I can play mp3s too. The music only cuts when I switch virtual desktops or move windows, but Mozilla doesn't cut it.
Mozilla isn't that heavy.

Already have a XP 2400+?

[r6144]

Do you work for AMD? Are they engineering samples?

is moores law dying?

[oooga]

I remember I was in eighth grade when Intel announced their first gigahertz chip. It's been nearly four years, or well over 36 months; according to Moores law Intel should be selling chips faster than 4 gigahertz. What's going on?

Original poster laughing his head off

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, your replies make me laugh, (most of them anyway).

The MMX-200 is the main machine I have at home, which I do all my coding on, because I work from home. The code I write is all destined for much faster boxes, and is beta tested on faster boxes.

I was offered a PII 450 *free of charge* by a client a few months ago, and he would even have dropped it round, on the basis that he thought I could develop more easily with it. I said that I didn't need it.

Why? Because I don't have the physical space to store another machine, (really, I don't, I have a room about 8 foot by 16 foot), and anyway, the MMX-200 was built from scratch by me, and I can guarantee it's reliability, because I bought quality bits to begin with.

As soon as I find the MMX-200 a limitation, I'll replace it. At the moment, EMACS runs fine on it.

Incidently, it's much more important to keep up with the latest VERSIONS of SOFTWARE than to upgrade your hardware.

Also, somebody pointed out that 15 UK pounds/hour isn't much. Here's news for you - that's the minimum I've EVER charged. There are people who would pay me more than 60 pounds/hour for emergency work out of hours.

Oooh ... an article duplication!

[The Droek]

Let's see if I can score some extra karma from this mishap!

*THIS* is "flamebait"????

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I just don't know what to think when moderators nuke legitimate posts like this down simply because it expresses a view he or she might dislike.

I really did buy twenty Athlons for a batch queue and every single one of thoses hosts required a new MB after a year and a half of service. I won't name the Linux vendor who sold me these machines because I still have a relationship with said vendor, but I'm NOT happy about this outcome. I expect a machine to last at least 36 months without failing, hopefully longer. What happened here has completely soured my taste for AMD products. Our batch and MPI jobs take from seven to forteen days to complete, a single node crash can take down the entire job. No screwing around, I can't have that kind of instability in my queue. It's worth an extra few hundred per node to know that the machines I buy will actually stay up and online under high load. Unfortunately, my experience with Athlons has been that they DO NOT perform well under these conditions.

And if you think this is flamebait have I got a reply for you in M2.

Jeesh!

Useless Intel Chips

[http101]

Until we write code that will use the chip to its full potential, my Athlon (Slot A) 750 will continue to reign on my desktop. Intel is going to hurt themselves badly if they keep pushing to break the Gigabarriers. Oooh, look I have clock cycles I can't use...

100khz!? I think NOT!!

[SHEENmaster]

Eniac run at a guelingly slow 3hz, which REALLY puts things into perspective. It's replacement ran at 3khz, which is one hell of a leap compared to today's progress.

A 3ghz machine is a BILLION times faster than ENIAC, not a mere 30 thousand.

I know that ENIAC was not 64 bit like my incoming iBook or 32 bits like my Linux server. Asuming that it was 8 bits(4 seems more likely), a 3ghz PC is four billion times faster.

Other things would effect the equation. For example: If we take into account all the copies of "AOL & Internet FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE trial" in the startup menu of the average windos system, and adjust the results accordingly, ENIAC would be able to boot 10-100 times faster than a windos box. I don't know what kind of Unreal Tournament framerate that would justify, but it is worth mentioning.

A purely technical decision?

[geoswan]

Okay. We are both agreed that megahertz doesn't matter to the extent many columnists, reviewers and computer salesclerks contend.

Correct me if I am wrong. Are you suggesting that the decision to design the P4 so it accomplished less per clock cycle, but was able to do them more quickly was purely a technical decision? Are you suggesting that it wasn't influenced at all being able to exploit a foolish confidence in megahertz?

You seem to know what you are talking about, so I would welcome learning how you came to have such confidence in Intel's ethical standards.

Isn't intel the company that tried to slip CPU serial numbers past us, on the Pentium III?

Isn't intel the company that told their customers they would have to prove to them they would have to prove they needed flawless floating point before they would replace defective CPUs? Let me quote from the Doctor Dobbs Journal article:

When this bug was first reported, Intel denied that it existed. After this bug was proven to exist, Intel denied that it was a problem. When customers wanted a replacement chip, Intel demanded that *THEY* (the customer) prove that they were affected by this bug. Yet to this very day, Intel refuses to acknowledge that this is a bug; instead they always refer to this as a flaw -- whatever the difference may be.

And how about the intel 487? Didn't they introduce an expensive 487 floating point co-processor, to augment the 486sx cpu, which was actually just a 486dx in disguise, that totally disabled and replaced the user's existing 486sx?

Re:A purely technical decision?

[djohnsto]

To be honest, I don't know how much influence marketing influenced the design, but I would guess that it was a small, ableit tangable, presence.

If you look at Athlon vs. P4, they have different design goals, yet result in similar performance. Looking at ItaniumII, I would guess that Intel is just as able to go the high IPC route as AMD, but chose the clockspeed route for the desktop. So, that may have been a marketing push, and looking at sales figures, it paid off. However, even the original P4 was designed for hyperthreading, a technology designed purely to get more work done per clock on applications that are most used by servers and power users. Intel has also stated publicly (a news.com story?) that they are looking to multi-core designs to increase performance. Even they recognize that ramping up clockspeed has diminishing returns.

I don't know anything about the 487, although I would imagine they built it because their customers asked for it (seems like something an OEM would love). As for the FDIV bug, I found out a little about that when I interned for an Intel customer support group in '97. That $500 million fiasco totally transformed their entire customer support infrastructure. Intel now publishes erratta on all known and confirmed deviations from spec for every processor they sell (something that AMD might want to consider if they hope to get Opteron adopted in the server room). I can say with confidence that something like that will NOT happen again (well, maybe the bug would, but the response would be much better next time).

BTW, I didn't have to prove I had the flaw/bug/whatever. I just called up, told them I had a P90, they sent me a new one (that would overclock to a P100 - woohoo!). This was before the internship...

Re:A purely technical decision?

[geoswan]

I don't know anything about the 487, although I would imagine they built it because their customers asked for it (seems like something an OEM would love).

Hmmm. When I wrote my reply to you I was surprised how hard it was to dig up authoritative references about the 487 that were as critical as I remember at the time.

Intel has often had two versions of their processors. A more expensive one, for "power users", and one that was crippled in some way, but available at a lower price, to compete with their low end rivals.

I have heard some wags refer to the 8088 as the "8086sx". I know there was an 80188, to serve as the 80186sx. I have heard some wags say the "SX" versions are called that because they suck. I have heard some say the various versions of the Celeron were really the Pentium II SX, the Pentium III SX and the Pentium 4 SX.

At the time, it was widely believed that the 486sx was exactly the same chip as the 486dx and the 487. And if you check these three intel web-pages describing the 486sx , the 486dx and the 487 , you will see that they all extremely similar. They all have 1,200,000 transistors. The buzz was that as 486 chips were baked, they were tested at different speeds. Those capable of working reliably at 33MHz were destined to become 486dx chips. Less reliable chips had their FPU burned out by a laser, and were packaged as 486sx chips.

Some 486 chips were packaged in a different pinout, and marketed as the 487, the floating point co-processor for the 486sx. Plugging a 487 into 486sx motherboard turned off the 486sx. My recollection is that the 487 was more expensive than the basically identical 486. It is interesting that intel is still maintaining the fiction that the 487 was a separate chip.

I have been told I should be more forgiving. But I decided six years ago that I would never buy another intel CPU.

Re:If gcc were written by Turbo Pascal/C authors..

[bogado]

I don't know if I should answer that, since it is off-topic, but ...

I do belive that turbo-C and pascal, and many other IDEs for that matter, do something before you compile the program while you edit. Somethings are quite easy, like tokenization, pre compile header files. The integration could gain a second or two also by not compiling the same header 3 or 4 times for diferent files in the same project. Gcc is a stand-alone compiler and cannot have this type of integration (could?).

Maybe gcc team could create a gcclib to make it possible to access some lower level structures and doing things ahead in ides.

Re:If gcc were written by Turbo Pascal/C authors..

[Ed Avis]

Isn't Borland C available for Linux now? Have you tried that?

While they might...

[cnelzie]

I haven't heard or read of them stating so before.

Commies Rule!!

[Anonymous Coward]

If it makes you feel any better, it was only five years ago that I replaced my Commodore 64. :)

Re:If gcc were written by Turbo Pascal/C authors..

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a question-

Why are you pulling something out of your butt and acting like you know what you are talking about when it is obvious that you don't have a clue?

Thanks.

[OT] Yes! Re: Precompiled header files

[achurch]

The integration could gain a second or two also by not compiling the same header 3 or 4 times for diferent files in the same project. Gcc is a stand-alone compiler and cannot have this type of integration (could?).

I don't see any reason why this couldn't be done standalone. Back when I used an Amiga, my compiler of choice (DICE)--a standalone compiler, by the way--had an option to precompile header files and store the results (macros, structs, typedefs, etc.) in a separate file, and then read the results of preprocessing/compiling those headers from that file directly into memory. This sped up compilation of large projects by 2-3x IIRC (and this was in the days of multi-hour compiles).

Re:[OT] Yes! Re: Precompiled header files

[bogado]

This could be done easily, but I do think turbo-C goes a little further then this and actualy start compile as you type.

Sweet Rambus Irony for Intel

[deaddeng]

1. Intel shoves Rambus down the throats of anyone wanting a Pentium-III.

2. Rambus sues world, loses, fades into background.

3. RDRAM prices fall, P-4 is launched.

4. Intel moves away from RDRAM, embracing DDR.

4. Intel 2.8GHz loses to AMD 2.1Ghz unless the P-4 is using PC1066 RDRAM.

"We want our benchmark to reflect typical PC users. Since Intel has 83% of the market, we optimized 83% of our benchmark to favor the P-4"