Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
I think he ment he recompiled his whole system (emerge world -e) with his brand new compiler.
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.
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...
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
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.
Is that a real poncho? I mean, is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?
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).
Dan
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...
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!