Intel's New Pentium 4 Chipsets Reviewed

RainDog writes "Intel has released its 845PE and GE chipsets for the Pentium 4 processor, and reviews are hitting the web. The new chipsets officially support DDR333, but are stuck with AGP 4X and ATA/100 support. What's most interesting about these new chipsets is that they're faster than VIA and SiS' latest Pentium 4 offerings, both of which support faster AGP 8X and ATA/133 graphics and disk interfaces. As if that weren't enough, Intel's new "Blue Mountain" motherboard comes on a black PCB with all sorts of multimedia ports and memory timing options. Not bad for the traditionally conservative Intel."

Comments

Anandtech has 3 motherboards reviewed

[McVeigh]

http://anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html

Is it me....

[trims]

... or don't we see chipset manufacturers avoiding the hard problems completely? I realize that cost is an issue, but for the most part, we're talking about high-performance workstation and server boards, which cost $500+ or more.

The biggest issues these days are:

• Data Starved Processors - and this is all about latency (and, to a lesser extent, bandwidth) to main memory. I don't care if there is DDR400 memory support, what I want to kow is why isn't there a L3 cache? I mean, even the high-end Xeons these days have a max of 1MB or so on-die L2. Sure that's great, but do you know how many common datasets blow right through that? It's often dozens (if not hundreds) of cycles to access main RAM. The alpha architecture did L3 on the motherboard way back in 1994 or so. Why don't these modern server chipsets support 16MB or so of SRAM for L3 cache? Hell, they should probably support 64MB or so.
• Improved hyperthreading support - go check out the Ars Technica article on this. Hyperthreading can potentially really help performance, but it's being held back by (among other things) problems with cache coherency and loading. While much of this is on the CPU (and thus, a chipset can't help), there are a bunch of stuff that could be moved into the chipset for help.
• Useful shit in the Chipset - ATA/133 isn't that useful (vs ATA/100). Firewire is OK, as is USB 2.0, but what I want to know is where are nice stuff like block data copy between video and RAM (like the SGI chipsets for the Indy/O2 had) for high-performance video processing? AGP is a joke for this (as anyone doing video processing will tell you). These chipsets are aimed at workstations, after all.
• Standard interfaces for custom silicon - no, I'm not talking PCI-X or crap like that. There should be a standard interface directly to the chipset for people who want to do custom silicon ASICs and have them have direct access to the high-bandwidth internals of the chipset. I mean, even in the low end, why should a FCAL controller chip have to pass the PCI bus? Or a hard-core encryption coprocessor? Or a hardware routing ASIC? All need several GB of bandwidth directly to memory (or each other), and I can't see any reason not to have them surface mounted next to the north bridge with a dedicated interface.

Unfortunately, there seems to be little innovation going on in chipsets these days. The high end looks very, very, very depressingly identical to the cheap consumer crap. WTF folks?

-Erik

Re:Is it me....

[Pulzar]

Standard interfaces for custom silicon - no, I'm not talking PCI-X or crap like that. There should be a standard interface directly to the chipset for people who want to do custom silicon ASICs and have them have direct access to the high-bandwidth internals of the chipset. I mean, even in the low end, why should a FCAL controller chip have to pass the PCI bus? Or a hard-core encryption coprocessor? Or a hardware routing ASIC? All need several GB of bandwidth directly to memory (or each other), and I can't see any reason not to have them surface mounted next to the north bridge with a dedicated interface.

Expect something like this in the early 2004, when 3GIO chipsets come out to production.. most will have 4+ side-ports directly to the northbridge to used as you please. The plan is to use them for peripherals, but you'd be free to attach anything that talks 3GIO. It probably won't be quite "a few GB of bandwidth", but that really depends on the chipset designer, and not a protocol/interface limitation.

Improved hyperthreading support - go check out the Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] article on this. Hyperthreading can potentially really help performance, but it's being held back by (among other things) problems with cache coherency and loading. While much of this is on the CPU (and thus, a chipset can't help), there are a bunch of stuff that could be moved into the chipset for help.

What usefull stuff can the chipset do for hyperthreading? I'd love to hear some ideas.

The high end looks very, very, very depressingly identical to the cheap consumer crap.

"Cheap consumer crap" is what sells the most, and most companies do not have the resources to do work on more than a couple of chipsets at a time, so most of the R&D time is spent on implementing the new standards and getting things to work at the new frequencies that CPUs and RAM require. Maybe things will get better when the economy picks up and high end becomes more profitable once again.

Re:Decline of the hardware reviews (and Slashdot)

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get them here: http://www.xoxide.com/glowindarsil.html

Re:Decline of the hardware reviews (and Slashdot)

[tshoppa]

It's the natural color of the epoxy resin usually used in PCB's based on G-10 glass epoxy.

Masking to get other colors is generally pretty cheap. In some cases (for example UV resistance) dyes can be put in the glass epoxy at manufacture time.

Re:Decline of the hardware reviews (and Slashdot)

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a PCB designer and I don't know. The color comes from the solder mask, the PCB itself is grey. I've made boards with clear solder mask and black silkscreen, red, blue and black soldermask. It's all the same price, and I have no idea why the color isn't changed more often.

Black Cools Faster

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, as any physics geeek knows, these new BLACK motherboards will radiate infrared heat faster, thus meaning cooler computing.

That's not the only review

[nenolod]

Anandtech has a very good review at http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1723. It compares and contrasts many motherboards with the chipsets on them, comparing features, etc, and it also has some very good benchmarking information. It also supports hyperthreading, which looks like it will be a very promising technology. It also points out some problems with some of these new motherboards. This chipset looks like it can offer great potential, for both the average home user, and the typical overclocker, especially the Albatron PX845PEV Pro, which has a interface that is similar to Softmenu 3. The ASUS P4PE also has great potential for overclocking, yet it doesnt look like it's as tough as the Albatron. Their technical support is also not as good. If it is USB that you are looking for though, the Gigabyte 8PE667 Ultra definately offers the most functionality (10 Ports, wow!). In all, this review is quite long, with 25 pages of content, which offers more information than the mentioned review.

Re:ATA133 _is_ important, for size

[cheezedawg]

Incorrect. There are ATA 100 controllers out on the market now that use the 48 bit LBA. In fact, Maxtor is pretty much the only company that does any ATA/133 (and that is because it isn't a finalized standard yet). The IBM and WD drives that you cite are ATA 100.

Re:No Serial ATA? No Sale...

[stratjakt]

Parellel to USB converters dont work for every parallel printer, and rarely ever work for other things that interface over the parallel port.

Same with USB emulated serial(COM) ports..

I'm talking about stuff like PSX-N64 DexDrives/Dreamcast VMU/GB/GBA/NeoGeo Pocket/OpenXBox readers/flashers, all of which I have, and all of which have had 0 success trying to interface over anything but a true parallel or serial port.

AFAIK, you cant get register level control over a USB/parallel port, or some such technical blibber-blabber. I just know it doesnt work. Nor can it drive the old bubblejet in my closet.

So while I'm all for the idea of moving ahead, I want all my gizmos to work. There should be (and are) boards without the legacy stuff, and those with.

BTW I need my FDC too, to move data to my SuperUFO32 SNES backup unit. And I still need maxell 650 discs burned at 1x, as they're the only media my TurboDuo reads correctly. So dont talk to me about 72x burners and bootable cds.

I'm sure there are many other similar, if unrelated, situations where legacy stuff is necessary.

Re:is intel even relevant in the geek community?

[Hoser McMoose]

Ohh I love the uniformed idiots that just mindlessly repeat things without ever bothering to check for facts.

Fact: Heat is directly releated to two things and two things along. How much power a chip uses, and how good your cooling system is at getting rid of that heat.

Now, check out the power consumption of AMD and Intel processors, it's quite clearly documented in their respective tech docs (or at least it is in AMD's tech docs, Intel uses the rather ambigious "thermal design power" number to describe how much power the chip uses, with the TDP being a little bit less than the actual maximum power the chip can use).

Here's a sample for ya:

AMD AthlonXP 2000+ (180nm fab process): 70.0W Max, 62.5W typical
Intel P4 2.0GHz (180nm fab process): 75.3W TDP

AMD AthlonXP 2600+ (130nm fab process): 68.3W Max, 62.0W typical
Intel P4 2.60GHz (130nm fab process): 62.6W TDP

Long story short, these chips are all in the same basic range, all within about 10% of one another except for the old 2.0GHz (Willamette) P4s.

So, if the power used is roughly the same, than the only real differences comes down to how good your cooling system is, and this is why the P4 seems better. See, almost all P4 heatsinks are at least 70x70mm at their base, and most are around 80x80mm. By contrast, a lot of Athlon heatsinks are much smaller 60x60mm. However, if you use one of the 80x80mm heatsinks for an Athlon, guess what? The chip is nice and cool, even with a slow-spining fan that hardly makes any noise.