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.

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. ;)