Intel Demos 4.7-GHz Pentium

richmlpdx writes "Silicon Strategies has an article about Intel's latest demo... "Providing a sneak preview of its future developments, Intel Corp. here today demonstrated its fastest microprocessors to date--a 4.7-GHz chip for high-end desktop PCs.""

Comments

Hammer & Intel

[Drunken Coward]

From what I've read, even with the .13 die on the Athlon XP, they won't be able to clock it much above 2.5 GHz. And supposedly AMD is hoping to have sales of 60% Hammer, 40% Athlon XP by Q3-03, so does that mean they're going to take a whopping in the high end market or do they have a .09 Athlon XP up their sleeves?

Slightly misrepresented....I think

[Soulslayer]

I've seen this reported on other sites, and if I recall this is not a demo of production silicon at 4.7Ghz, but rather this is Intel overclocking their own hardware till it crashed to show that with some improvements the chip design is capable of these speeds, if not in consumer quantities at present.

Anand Tech has more information from their IDF report.

Vaporware

[Anonymous Coward]

Until Intel comes up with an actual example of a motherboard that supports asynchronous ram-flushing, the speed of the cpu means nothing.

For any motherboard that still uses conventional ram-flushing, the cpu will top out at ~3Ghz and stay there, I don't care what kind of data bus you're using.

Mark my words, AMD's next generation of motherboards (now documented to support async r-f) will blow Intel out of the water. Hold on to your asses, ass-holders.

Re:Vaporware

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel has already demonstrated carbon tubes which solve any ram flushing problems. These can only be used on CPUs greater than 4Ghz, which is the reason for pushing their chips this fast, if only experimentally so far.

Re:Vaporware

[Anonymous Coward]

I've read about those, but have yet to hear of any plans for integrating them into any upcoming production Intel motherboards. Plus, supposedly they only work with certain brands of memory. We'll see, I guess...

Please.

[SlashChick]

Seriously. Why do people buy luxury cars when a Honda could get them to work just as easily? Why do people buy large houses? Why do lots of people, for that matter, insist on leasing a new car every two years, even though they own nothing at the end of the lease?

The answer is simple: People perceive it as being of some VALUE. People buy new PCs because they look better, or because Internet Explorer will take less time to load, or because right now it's just taking too damn long to print out that document, or the Internet is too slow. Yes, some of these reasons are misguided, and it's our job as those "in the know" to tell people when they do have a misguided assumption ("A Pentium 4 will make my Internet connction faster...") It's also our job to explain to them how best to spend their money if they ask us for advice -- perhaps their money would be better spent on a broadband connection or a memory upgrade or a better video card. Maybe they don't need a new computer.

Whining about why people buy new computers is futile. People buy new things constantly. Don't forget that people buying and upgrading new computers is what keeps our industry afloat, as well. Not only does it make hardware prices go down, thus benefiting more of us, but we get the added benefit of easier tech support (for the most part, computers have dramatically improved in this area since Windows 95 first hit the shelves) and better software. (My personal favorite is finally dragging those last few holdouts off of Netscape 4.7 so I can make great-looking dynamic websites that actually work with their browser.)

Next time, instead of wringing your hands and saying "Why?!", encourage those who are upgrading to spend their money in the wisest way possible. The more people who enjoy using their computers, the more successful the industry will be as a whole, and the more jobs we will all have as a result. ;)

Re:GHz Hunting

[ergo98]

Intel cares more about marketing and big business than they do about truly high-availability and zero-error CPUs

And that would be why a Pentium IV 2.8Ghz is the fastest tested on SpecInt? (Faster than any other processor in the world). That would also be why the SpecFP is dominated by the Intel Itanium2 (with, notably, the P4 not too far behind. The fact that the Itanium is at 1Ghz versus the P4 at 2.8Ghz is irrelevant, as both speeds are the fruits of their respective designs)?

Note that I'm not an Intel "fanboy": I have an Athlon in my machine, and if I bought a machine today it'd have an Athlon in it. However, the strategy of Intel for their P4 is just a different variation on the pursuit of speed, and obviously it works because it's the fastest processor in the world at SpecInt. Saying that it's just marketing is clearly not true when seeing the results of their efforts.

It's interesting that Sun chose the asynchronous architecture instead of taking Intel's route of over-the-horizon pipelines and other tricks.they chose

Let the results do the talking. As it is, clearly Intel is winning the processor war.

Re:GHz Hunting

[dead sun]

The hunt for more GHz will continue until computing demands are met. Given that we still have supercomputers which take up rooms, clustered from thousands of processors, I'd say we aren't there yet. You'd be a complete fool to say that any amount of computing power will satisfy everybody. There will always be new applications. Even when we can go into a digital simulation completely unable to tell that it isn't real, somebody is going to want to make a bigger one. We'll never run out of a need for speed.

That being said, I, in theory, agree with your statement that a better architechture might be smarter than just milking speeds. In practice, however, there already are new architectures being employed, they just have a CISC front end slapped on them for compatability's sake. It's just RISC pretending to be CISC in the x86 arena.

Burning power is an issue, and it is one that is being seriously looked at, at least by Intel. Go check the temp poll (running now at least) for all the people who have P4's running at least 15 C cooler than the lowest option on the poll. Intel, with Banias is going for a big leap in power conservation while preserving performance. I think that's great. I'm not sure what AMD is up to in the power/heat realm, but would hope they're following suit. The P4, as pointed out by somebody else, is the 20 stage pipeline, P3 was 10. But you forget the P4 was designed with a huge pipeline in mind. Its branch prediction is sufficent that it is still incredibly powerful. Not on a clock for clock rating with other chips, but that speed makes up for it. That was the goal. And it still runs cooler with a stock heatsink/fan than a comparable chip with a seriously powered fan.

Finally, while parallel CPUs are nice, you have overhead to deal with and it doesn't do a thing for code that isn't multi-threaded. Moreover, there is overhead for running a single program on multiple processors. The real nicety (I know, I had a dual CPU P3 machine until the mobo went) is in multitasking. Running multiple applications with half the job swapping. Enough processes will take advantage of multiple CPUs quick enough.

However, why not do both? Make the CPUs fast and parallelizable. I was very disappointed when upgrading that there was no multi-CPU option for the P4 outside of the Xeon. The cost of that was only a little prohibitive, but the motherboards were outrageous. I paid only a slight premium for the dual P3 board. I would have paid another slight premium if I could run two normal P4s.

I'm not, however, sure about the sanity of a dual processor on a chip design. I would imagine yields would be lower because if one of the CPU's on the chip was taken out then it wouldn't be a dual chip. That and the amount of heat in one spot would increase as well. It would be interesting to see for density solutions though, getting 4 CPU's into a 1U unit.