Slashdot Mirror
Intel Pushes Pentium 4 Past 3 GHz
denisbergeron writes "Yahoo has the news about the new P4 who will run at nothing less than 3.06 GHz. But the great avance will be the hyperthreading technology (already present in Xeon) that allows multiple software threads to run more efficiently on a single processor."
I just hope hyperthreading is the real deal, not a load of hyperhype.
sig.
"You won't see a heck of a lot of difference in Word, but software like [Adobe Systems'] Photoshop or video-rendering software will benefit considerably," he said.
How can Word appear any faster at 3GHz? I would think that after 1.5GHz, improvement in performance would be hard to notice. Granted, it will be good for people who are still running those 200MHz clunkers but what's the incentive if you're already running in the GHz range?
Humm, this raises a point for me. Of course they claim it is faster, but when exactly ?
...
I mean, is it faster when doing stack swaps or when using TSS to multitask? *BSD uses the TSS to multitask, taking benefit of the i386's way to quickly swap registers and stack. Windows doesn't do this
So, from a pure technical point of view, how does it work? Did they just make TSS switches faster? Some OS-es benefit highly from that, but others, well, don't.
This will make things interesting for software licenses that charge per cpu.
for those of you who don't know, with hyperthreading, the system will appear to have two cpus. If you have a dual system with hyperthreading, then it will look like 4, and so on.
Does this mean that AMD's scale for measuring the performace of its CPUs (the Athlon 2200+ runs at 2200 zlotniks) will no longer compare fairly against MHz for the P4? Perhaps a P4 will run about as fast as an Athlon of the same clock speed (if you could get Athlons clocked at 3GHz).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Securing the physical pathways that transpoty data on a computer's motherboard. This will sure help me against those tiny little hackers inside my computer stealing my data!
Oh wait, you mean this is to protect the data against me? Looks like we have about a year before this is built into the PC architecture. Plan your computer buying wisely.
Bastards.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
The advantage of Linux (and to a lesser extent W2K) and the low end Solaris, AIX servers is that for the first time it was sensible to scale horizontally, so rather than have 1 box that did everything ala a Mainframe you'd have 10 that shared the work, then you'd add 5 more. And because the real bottlenecks now are disk and other IO issues you start using things like EMC, Cached RAID disks and lots of other very expensive storage.
But if you are scaling an application horizontally the last thing these days is the processor speed, sure the heavy duty maths is still sitting on a mainframe, your ERP is still on an AS400, but that is more about reliability than power. Intel boxes fail, period, so having one box isn't a smart move, have 10 is a more sensible approach.
Dual NIC, external disk via fibre channel. That is where I'll spend the cash. The processor just needs to be fast enough, and I'd like there to be at least two in the box. 2 Boxes doing everything, federated systems.
If you lob everything on one box, then yes you need all the processor speed you can handle, you also need to think about what happens when the box fails.
If Intel announced that this new processor could degrade its performance when issues arose then I'd be interested. Overheating ? Turn off hyperthreading and drop the clock speed. Still got issues, move down to minimum speed and start a shutdown process.
I like servers that will run for 5-10 years with no down time. But with Intel/AMD boxen I'll stick with lobbing in lots on the basis that they'll fail.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
What did Intel sacrifice to make the number of Ghz higher for the sake of marketing? Really, I'd like to know, because I've heard this is the case with previous Ghz barrier crossings, and I wonder how it affects the overall performance of the CPU, and the rest of the computer for that matter.
Fine, read this and pick out a prebuilt Athlon MP 2200+ server for your server farm. It's STILL better/cheaper than buying a 3GHz P4.
In any regard the argument still stands that present software can not reprogram itself to take advantage of the P4's extensions. It was smart of AMD to have a stronger floating point unit, when Intel decided it wanted to go technically superior in chip design.
Also it's a given that Intel changed the architecture, they had plenty of marketing to show that fact, it's trivial that this was the case, hence the whole discussion on the 'long and narrow' P4 design, and how this related to what a user (see top most thread) could expect the P4 to be maxing out at. I suggested 8GHz, however I would not be surprised in the least to find 15GHz Pentium chips eventually. (Remember once apon a time 1.036MHz were valid chip speeds.)
"Yes, they are slowly improving, but modern PCs are still behind where workstations were years ago, and a modern Intel based server is well behind a SPARC based machine."
Not exactly true. I work as an Opens Systems Programmer at a major research university. I have a P2-333 and an Sun Ultra 1 on my desk. Which do you think is less painful to use? I'll give you a hint, it doesn't have a 64 bit processor on it. I'll tell you, I'd rather use my P2-333 to serve a website than the Ultra 1. So those sparcs you speak of are rarely as fast as the newer PC's in most everyday tasks.
That being said, it sure is cool to say that you're running sparc linux, and in the winter I'd rather have the sparc on my desk to keep me warm.