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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.""
In other news, a small heat wave hit San Jose a few days ago. Amazingly, the source of this heat seemed to be centered at Intel's R&D headquarters.
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?
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
Wow! Now my Palladium/LaGrande machine will be able to notify the FBI 8 times faster!
A group of extreme hackers based in a northern section of Finland have shown this processor able to run at 5907Mhz using a never before tried method of liquid helium cooling. "We're a bit dissapointed really, I mean, this is a new record and all, but we still don't think our DVD's are going to rip fast enough till we get up to 6Ghz"
> but what type of application requires that much horse power?
Locomotives. You use the heat to drive the steam engine.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
How long will this hunt for more GHz continue? I'd say that if the major industry companies (Intel, AMD...) would make a since long needed move to a better architecture we could achieve more performance with less means.
What do I have against high frequencies? For starters, high speed, fully syncronized digital constructions rely on switching millions of transistors at the same time (each clock cycle), this burns lots of power which is a limiting factor today.
Also, high frequency does not imply high performance, the CPU still needs to do something each stage, for example older Pentiums (P3, if I remember right) had a 20 (yes twenty) stage pipeline. This yeilds huge penalties for miss predictions for branches etc.
This GHz hunting also leads to other problems, such as huge electromagnetic disturbances in the chip, and in busses, etc. The solution to this is to add more wires and pull them in different directions to compensate. This only wastes more power and emits even more heat.
What I suggest, now when we have lots of transistors to play with, are asyncronous designs! Yes they are harder to design and verify, but that is largely because the lack of supporting tools.
This would reduce the power needs, let the designers make longer critical paths in their constructions (just clock that part slower), and reduce the need for registers used to balance pipe-lines etc.
Another move could be to introduce simpler, but parallell CPUs, perhaps on the same piece of silicon. The software systems of today are multi-threaded already, so why not make the hardware capable of _true_ multi tasking...
This whole time we have been blaming our electricity problems here in California on deregulation, Davis' failure to secure contracts, etc.
It's been those punks at Intel with this chip all along!!
My first pc was a 8088 at 4,77 MHz, somewhere in 1985. This new CPU does 4,7 GHz which is 4700 MHz, which is 1000 times as fast as what I've started with. Impressive. If back then someone would have told me that one day we would be using a 4700 MHz CPU I would probably burst out in laughter :)
The answer is yes and no. For any application that is doing massive ammounts of number manipulation on a small and colocated set of data (i.e. cachable) you will see performance at approx 4.7x10^9 operations per second. This is for the most part completely unrealistic since today's data applications usually operate on large quantities of data that are spread out through memory. For the average case, the computer will operate at somewhere over the speed of the Front Side Bus (FSB) which is still running close to the same speed it has been running at for the past 4 years. You will indeed notice a speed increase due to any computations that do not require the use of the FSB, but it will probably only be around 50% faster as opposed to 400% faster. The intuitive reader will note that the jump from a 100MHz to 400MHz processor was also limitted by the FSB and thus did not acheive a 400% increase in speed.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
I'd hit it.
For the most part, for most apps, SIMD is irrelevant. Yeah, maybe you can use it for data copying or a few other general things, but for the most part SIMD only helps with specific types of data processing until SIMD is further developed and SIMD-savvy compilers are common.
I do think MIPS can be compared due to the similarity in instruction sets.
The 8088 ran at about .3 MIPS (howstuffworks.com) and Sandra benchmarks a P4 1.6 at 3004 MIPS (theregister.com), so
estimate ~8700 MIPS for a 4.7 GHz P4. That's a little crude obviously.
=> 8700/.3 = 29000 times more MIPS, which is only 1 order of magnitude higher than the straight MHz difference. If SIMD had an order of magnitude effect (which it doesn't), that would be 2 orders of magnitude difference.
-Kevin
on x.x Ghz processors that they actually still don't need... my server runs beautifully with a pentium 166 and 64Mb of RAM, AND I still have money to feed the family.
C'mon people... I'm not saying nobody needs this (it does say high-end), or that 166Mhz is enough for everybody (it certainly isn't for a desktop), but why aren't people still not smarting up? Why do they keep buying a completely new PC every 2 years while they don't need it to write their word-document? (and i'm not even asking why they buy such crap that a pc with only half of the specifications could perform equally well).
Does rapid improvement in processor technology cancel out the need for developers to learn how to write better code on a particular platform in order to achieve the maximum possible benefit from Information Technology?
Background:
Remember the BBC Micro, the ZX Spectrum? When they first came out, games were slow and blocky. But then several years went by without any significant improvement in processor performance.
Therefore, in order to produce better software and better games, developers had to learn how to write better code on their favourite platforms. They developed techniques and tricks to make every Hz count.
Today, you can do impressive stuff with crap code, simply through virtue of the raw grunt of the processor.
Hence the question. Do they cancel out? If Intel had not brought out a new processor in the last 5 years, where would software be in relation? Better, worse, or same?
Achieve super high speeds for super short durations to impress the spectators.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
If they don't make it by thanksgiving, don't worry! Just use your Athlon.
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Why don't make it water cooled, then you just put a paper filter and some coffer, and tada... your computer makes coffe. If want hotter coffe, just overclock it a litte. :-)
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
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- U can make coffee with new proc
- I can bake a Turkey with it
- No, I can spit-cook a yak with it
- offtopic rant about u damned meat eaters.
Anandtech recently went "backstage" at Intel and got pictures of a 10 GHz ALU running at Intel with air cooling. Pics here
-ted