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."

Comments

what's my motivation

[rob-fu]

"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?

Re:what's my motivation

[cybrthng]

I think you over simply todays word & document processing.

For example, we use Microsoft word with built in excell spreadsheets and ODBC queries that update charts in real time from an Oracle database as well as include visio stencils and other good stuff. This is a 40+ meg file in raw format and a lowly 1.5ghz with 512 megs of ram takes time to re-draw. We daw a huge performance increase from 1.5ghz to 2.4 Maybe "hyper threading" will help out even more.

BTW, it is about the same performance under linux using staroffice or corel office. KDE Office is even slower, so i know its not just the tools :)

For people who *WORK* using there pc, you can never have "too much" power. Its like race cars, maximizing performance for the job at hand.

Hyperthreading ...

[RinkSpringer]

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.

Re:Hyperthreading ...

[Doctor Faustus]

Ignore Intel's "Hyperthreading" name. There was already an established name for the technique, Symetric Multi-Threading (SMT). The basic concept is that, since most of the CPU's pipeline is usually going to waste due to stalls, especially in a CPU with a pipeline as deep as a P4, the one physical CPU can pretend to be two CPU's. When instructions for one CPU stall, the pipeline can switch to instructions for the other.

This would have been a lot harder a few years ago, but most of the hard parts (like register renaming) had already been done to implement out-of-order execution.

As for what can benefit, it's pretty much anything that can benefit from dual CPU's.

Hyperthreading

[echophase]

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.

Anyone notice this???

[FuzzyDaddy]

The LaGrande initiative will coexist with existing security initiatives such as Microsoft's Palladium to create a more secure computing environment, Otellini said. It will secure the physical pathways that transport data on a computer's motherboard, and will be available for both servers and desktops. The technology will take until at least next year to come to market, however, probably with the next generation of Intel's desktop Pentium processors.

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.

Scaling horizontally...

[MosesJones]

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.