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Intel Releases "Fastest Chip Ever"
mao che minh writes "From News Factor Network: Intel has released the world's fastest chip ever. The new P4 runs at 3.06GHz, at 3 billion cycles per second. Man, and I'm still squeezing the last bit of life out of my Pentium 233!" Tom's Hardware already has a review up about it, and it looks to live up to most of the hype.
Then you will have THE CHIP FASTER THAN THE FASTEST chip
Is it fast enough to get fp?
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
How high can it be overclocked before melting and turning your machine into a firey inferno?
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
I remember when the Pentium 200 was the fastest chip ever!
AMD will have a chip that runs faster and cheaper at half the clock speed.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
It's too bad that Intel charges so much for their chips.. and this thing being the hottest thing at the moment... or when it's actually in stores.. going to be a while before I can get one. Damn.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
Yup, this chip sure lives up to the hype. It runs at 3.06 GHz, all right. And it's made by Intel. Oh yeah, and it has some mention of "Pentium 4" printed on it. It's great that the hype is so informative.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Will my Internet work faster if I get it?
Intel's Pentium 4 3.06GHz: Hyper-Threading on Desktops
It hasn't been ever since The Pentium 2. RAM IS NEEDED for modern apps. A P3-450 is sweet with 320Megs with Cooker Linux and kde 3.1.
Intel is just like any other capitalist corporation they have found something that works and they try to increase their leverage in a market by promoting equivocations that suit their purpose. It's just another way of taking your money, I guarantee any other architecture would perform better at this clock speed than X86 does.
X86 is a joke and anyone who is buying a processor these days should just wait and watch, that's what I've been doing since 1998. Nothing new and innovative has come out, just the same old shit with more fruity topping.
Thanks but I'd rather not spend the money.
[cx]
I don't understand the need to always be on the bleeding edge of technology. Intel loves to push these newer faster chips down the throats of consumers, but I've got 600MHz Intel chip and a 2ghz intel chip, both running Windows 2000, and I swear I can't tell any difference between 600MHz and 2ghz for normal usage -- and I consider myself a power user.(Granted, I don't do 3D rendering or massive number crunching on a daily basis, but how many of your average consumers do?)
I won't be running out to buy this any time soon -- especially when I can the $200 Walmart computer is less than the cost of this CPU.
Call me old fashioned, but geeze.. Intel already gets plenty of money from my pocketbook for little performance gain. Something needs to be done about the rest of PC hardware before the speed of the CPU is going to make a massive difference.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
Funny reading at the Inquirer. Basically, what they say Itanium and HP in particular sux.
And, the Hyperthreading has sofar only lowered the fps in gaming. Still, Toms Hardware and other sites claim it is a great thing. Why?! When 1 in 10 games show a 2-5% improvement and the remaining 9 lose 2-5% with the HT enabled? Bewildering. Even Quake3 which used to have good 2CPU support i lost since idsoftware's quality assurance failed and there is not dual support any longer...
This week EVERYONE sux. Even I.
That's published in the SPECFp benchmarks. Jesus, don't slashdot readers read anything anymore?!?
I still use a HP Vectra XW/200 PC with a Pentium 200 (non MMX ). All these faster CPUs do is make consumers shell plunk down more $$ for their PCs.
So now slapdown can lose money more smoothly than ever before.
MEEPT!!
And if they had a 40-stage pipeline they could go to 6GHz! Then I'd be really impressed.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
This is something I'm interested in. I currently run a dual-CPU box of two 533Mhz Celerons on a BP6 board. I've wanted my next machine to be a dual-CPU has well, but now I'm not certain. Perhaps the hyperthreading will take care of that for me? Who knows, it's too early to say as yet. But I'll be keeping an eye out on the benchmarks for this chip, whereas I've more or less ignored the Mhz races for the last couple of years.
Cheers,
Ian
We break a new GHz barrier every month? I don't think so...of course, I'd be happy if Motorola broke 2GHz.
thats insane. Thats equal to what, two or three G4s?
I want 2D games back.
According to the Computer Power User magazine, Intel demonstrated a P4 4.1 GHz at the Intel Developer Forum. They even showed it overclocked to 4.65GHz with extensive cooling.
I expect it will still take a year or two before they become generally available.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
...a midi-towering inferno?
---
Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
if you read the article they say that it can use up to 100 watts of power when you are using the chip to the utmost. That's a lot of power. Much more then the AMDs. Anyone else think that's a little extreme? I mean I'm all for more speed, but cost aside, this seems to be a huge factor in actually getting one of these systems. You also have to get a new motherboard.
/. do so I think that running a system all the time (with SETI or whatnot) would be expensive.
For server applications it's not as useful because you can't build dense systems. Since server applications are by their very nature more multithreaded then workstation, I would imageine that they would get much hotter. You'd need a lot more cooling. Also, don't the chips SLOW DOWN automatically when they get too hot, thus negating any increase in speed you might get from them.
Notice that the new heat sink is larger as well.
Not trying to bash it, but it seems like the older chips are still going to be better until they get this whole heat issue under control. I run my system almost 24x7 like I'm sure many people on
From a news article over on ExtremeTech. Some other interesting stuff about how hyperthreading sucks up the audio overhead on a sound card, too.
It runs so hot that it has to be cooled by the blood of a virgin every hour.
tcd004
It's great to see that Moore's Law is still being obeyed at AMD and Intel, but is every "We've got the Fastest Chip Ever!" release still newsworthy anymore? Seems like it's the same story every time with just a slightly bigger number than the last time.
--Mike--
I hear that Web pages take less to download and when you click "Receive mail", the bar across the screen moves much faster. Bound to increase the productivity of office workers out there.
Since every new top-of-the-line chip that Intel releases is the fastest chip they've ever made, one can only take this quote to mean it's the fastest ever, as in "ever more".
I guess Intel finally hit their goal when they started out making chips: to reach 3.0 GHz in clockspeed (at all costs).
Does this new chip have support for Digital Restrictions Mechanisms? Does it still have the universally reviled serial number feature? Can it still be shut off?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
So with a 3gig cpu running with 1gig memory and a 100gig of harddrive space. Is this something we can expect?
User 1 "Did my computer just crash?"
User 2 "Couldn't tell, happened to fast."
Err, any chip that Intel is releasing has faster brothers and sisters in the lab
Oh wait I'm grumpy without the tags anyway...
Err, hasn't their been some other chip that's faster than this? (Ok, maybe not at a competitive price) but... wouldn't calling Intel's fastest desktop processor the "fastest every" be like calling a corvette or something the fastest land car ever?
(Second part an actualy question!)
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Ok, so it supposedly acts as "virtual dual processors"....so where the hell are the benchmarks against a dual Athalon setup? It would be nice to see if it can even stack up to that....
I remember when processors started breaking the GhZ benchmark, people were making jokes about how we're starting to get to the point where the things will be emiting microwaves since they are in the GhZ's.
anyone know how close we are now? will this new chip boil water from a distance?
even if we're a couple years off from that, are we going to need sheilding in our cases soon so that we don't cook our lower legs? if so, does anyone else thing that this would cause a lot of problems since compUSA won't take that into account when they do an upgrade?
Just some thoughts...
Blaze a trail to the New World
Now I'll be able to get a decent framerate in the doom 3 alpha.
Government Secret projects probably got some going over 10 ghz. They Probably use some exotic materials like gallium arsenide or germanium.
Intel are squeezing clock speeds ever higher for Ghz marketing, hence why similarly clocked AMD chips outperform them tick-for-tick. This has been known for a while now.
Intel are forever releasing "The Fastest Chip Ever", and in my experience, AMD will continue to release The Best [for MY purposes] Chip Ever. Also, Intel have a habit of sharply dropping prices on older chips, especially in Q1 of the year.
All the morons about to shout "AMD Fanboy!!!" please do so now, so that you are shown up as the dickheads you are with my next paragraph. All done? Good.
When Intel release a chip that has the most Bang-for-Pound-Sterling for the apps I run, which means mainly games, then I'll consider it for my yearly [times is 'ard!] upgrade.
Ali
Ph33r m3!!!
I'd be happy if Motorola broke its neck. That way it could be left for dead and apple could go full-on with IBM.
Obligitory: Imagigine a Bewolf cluster of these
Imagine the Polar Ice Caps melting from the heat they would pump out
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
don't forget superconducting chips over 100ghz.
No Pain, No Gain!
Feel the burn!
Be the burn!
I've seen this term a few times but still don't get it. What is a power user?
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Such claims have to be backed by benchmark runs. The PIV, when released, had a perf improvemnt of only 15->20% when running at 1.5GHz compared to a PIII running at 1 GHz
The Raven
I often wonder why people put such sigificance to nice big round numbers. Like the year 2000.
Was 3Ghz really a "barrier"? was it so much harder to produce a 3.06Ghz chip than a 2.9Ghz chip? What makes you feel this small increment in Ghz is more news worthy than say the increase from 2.3 to 2.4Ghz?
...when they come out with a 4.77 GHz version.
That's a nice joke, but I find it a huge turn-off when people (self-proclaimed geeks, even) say garbage like "gigawatts per hour" to mean power.
What I want to know is if you get a mobo with two of these chips on it, if it'll give you 4 CPUs?
Of course you'll need to run Linux or the expensive Windows Server to take advantage of it, since WinXP and Win2k Pro don't support more than 2 CPU's...
Tom's Hardware has to produce some of the most ridiculously overblown and long winded product reviews on the internet.
I understand why some people like that. I don't.
Some people blame it on the ridiculous notion that "Gen-X has a short attention span." I don't know who came up with that, but they're clearly not paying attention to the amount of effort our generation (or our society for that matter) actually puts into things.
That being said, it's not the length that makes something interesting, it's the content. Tom's articles generally have good content, but they suffer (like many other websites) from the inability of getting to the point.
So, in the interest of brevity: STOP BEING SO LONG WINDED AND GET TO THE POINT! I'll read a long article, if it's interesting, but just another Pentium 4 chip review is by no means a Charles Dickens novel, nor should it be treated as such.
Sheash.
Bryan
I mean really..what is the point? You have a superfast chip and you're STILL doing everything else wrong. Why are we just speeding up the CPU? Why are we not designing a better computer that doesn't NEED to ram everything through the CPU?
We're only getting a shadow of an idea with our GPU's...I believe Apple is the "first" to start making use of the video card's GPU for day-to-day stuff. And this is a GOOD thing.
Former Amiga users know what I'm talking about. There's a damn good reason why a computer with a "mere" 68000 was able to run circles around the PC's of it's day, and easily keep pace with more advanced intel chips.
How come I see myself returning to this article some day in the near future and scoffing at the "3.06GHz" label?
Does this remind anyone of the Popular Science articles where Planes may someday make transatlantic flights and In the 70's, automobiles will be obsolete, as personal gyrocopters will likely be the main method of transportaion.
Hell, I propose that in 2008, my shoelace-tying machine will be run off of a 3Ghz processor.
I'm not trying to bring down this article, as much as I'm bringing to light the humour behind the title.
Geez. I hope my dog doesn't piss on my shoe-tying machine.
HURD - Hurd's Under Research & Development
This message was brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department, who was happy to bring you this message.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Sorry we didn't make that clear.
We break a new GHz barrier every month?
What GHz "barrier?" It's not like 3 GHz was theoretically impossible or anything. This is just a matter of making something go slightly faster than it did yesterday.
Or is it the big round number that impresses you?
I write in my journal
will this really make much of a difference for playing War Craft 3 any better than my P4 1.6ghz? for $637 (per chip per the article) I think not.
Although for webservers, and airport systems, movie makers, and all "high-end" power needed customers I am sure this is definately a great thing. But I don't see the average "Joe Customer" needing/careing much since all the latest games/appz run BETER THAN PERFECT on there 2ghz , 128meg gforce 4, 768meg ram machines.
Hell even 3D Studio Max runs fucking awesome on my 1.6ghz, 64meg gforce 2, 768meg ram, machine so this is NOT THAT BIG A DEAL. Unless of course the PC people just want to start saying "look were super faster than apple now - NAR"
Ave Molech Setting
Oh my goodness...I fell for this AT WORK!!!
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
Does anyone know if Linux of FreeBSD sees any benefit from the 'hyperthreading' technology? All the things I am reading say that you OS needs to support threads, but how does the processor know what is a thread, and what is a process?
Does anyone want 40" knife in kitchen? yes, if you just want to play games with it.
I'm sorry, but there are only two explanations. One is that half of users out there are running maxxxed out machines that can handle that load (yes, with winblows). In which case, why the push for new chips?
The other explanation is that users really are burning cd's while playing games, in which case, the RIAA can pack up and go home, because those hundreds of thousands of CD's are obviously ending up as coasters, not as pirate booty.
I know, I know... I show my age when I remember the days where you clicked "burn" and ran like hell. I still remember the setup I had that would coaster the disk if I moved the mouse during the TOC writing. Admittedly, it was a brand new 1x burner, but still....
And considering my ole Celeron 300a runs Win2k just fine, why in the blue blazes would I need a 3G? Seems computers have hit the plateau... the average user gets along just fine with what they have, it's only professionals and gamers who really snap up the new hardware.
I'm gonna start a bet... how long can my 300 run before it's finally too slow?
(and to stop your flames, RedHat goes on my 1Ghz. So there)
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Does it play Ogg Vorbis?
So you've got a smoking video card, a super fast processor, and some other fancy peripherals. You've stocked your machine up... except you haven't taken the time to upgrade your RAM about the 256MB of PC2100 DDR...
ooops, mistake!
RAM does definately make a difference. It used to be that after a certain amount of RAM, the speed difference was negligable, but since then OS's and apps have been chewing up more and more memory.
Once your monster-fragging memory-chewing game starts getting near memory limits, you are going to see performance loss, even on a high-end processor. You'll start hearing that annoying clickety-clickety-clack sound, which often indicates your hard-drive is whirring away storing up swap space.
Even if you've got a nice new 7200RPM (or higher in SCSI) hard drive, it's not going to get near the transfer speed as your RAM, as you're limited by the mechanical medium. Suddenly, your game will start stuttering, and some bigass monster or perhaps a dude with a show gun is going to tag advantage of this to remove your head.
I have 2 machines, an Athlon XP and an old Duron. The Athlon is by far superior, faster processor, faster bus, faster RAM, etc, etc. The Duron, however, has half a gig of RAM (and probably more soon, PC133 is cheap and abundant). While the Athlon takes the lead easily at first, it can decrease noticably in performance as I start running into heavy swap usage.
Windows XP is a big fat whale of an OS, and it sucks a lot of my RAM to begin with. Throwing a big game on top of that (and whatever helper apps multitask in the background) can put it in the red zone fairly quickly. In contrast, with 512MB of RAM, the OS tends to put its bloated self into memory, and still leave enough space for my gaming needs.
The moral of this is, that - as always - a PC is only as fast as its slowest component. In many cases, you can bottleneck at the RAM, or - when you run low on memory - a the hard disk in swap.
It's like having a car with a huge engine, and only 6" tires or a really narrow gasline. You have to have balance... and a superfast processor really isn't going to cut a big difference nowadays until everything else catches up.
And IBM has some that run much faster than that in the Power4 serious. However, you must have missed the part where it said commercially avaible to the consumer. I dont think average Joe can pick up this secret chip you talk about at CompUSA.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
According to my girlfriend, I'm still way faster than the 3.06GHz P4. I assume that this is a complement.
I am also on a 233. Us po-folks have to squeeze until we cannot squeeze anymore. Talk about getting the most bang for the buck.
Now, I maybe a geek but when it comes to hardware I am not that geeky. 3billion cycles per second. NOw is that computations? or just cycles?
If it is calculations then I am under the assumption that Intel Chips can't be sold outside the US. After all that is what Apple faced when the G4 was able to do 1 billion computations per second rendering it super computer status. Which in turn is a security hazard or issue for a super computer to be made in the US and sold outside the US. So they had to limit all G4 sales to the US. If this is factual then Intel's sales are gonna drop since they cannot release such a chip to the foreign public.
This is merely an observation. I honestly don't know if cycles and computations are the same quantifiable piece or if they are seperate entities. Either way a milestone in computing. However... Athlon Forever.
~Char Lander
Brothers and sisters I have none, but this mans father is my fathers son
I am looking to upgrade my machine. WIll I be getting the latest and greatest in insanely fast CPU:s? No. My current, aging machine (a 600Mhz Athlon) is actually well able to support just about everything I do today. While a speedup is nice, it has long since ceased to be on the 'must have'-list for me.
Instead, my interest is in getting a big laptop to use as a desktop replacement. Something with a decent-sized screen and keyboard, 3d (read: nvidia) graphics system and plenty of memory. Also needed is the ability to plug in a 'real' keyboard and mouse when I'm sitting by my desk. Whether the machine runs at 1.3, 1.7 or 2.2 Ghz really does not matter for me. What I'll have is a quieter desktop able to bring along wherever I am.
Looking around, this seems to be a bit of a trend; laptops are less expensive today than a few years ago and more capable. A number of my friends are also thinking along the same lines, and so are a lot of other people as well, judging by the increased sales of laptops.
Speed just is not the defining characteristic of computers today that it was just three or four years ago.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Is anyone else noticing that 9 times of 10, when you refresh this page, you get an intel ad?
or, is anyone else with IE 6 having the problem of the browser thinks the entire page is a link to ads.doubleclick.com/jump/bunchofcrap438934?
I'm not saying conspiracy, i'm just saying conspicouos product placement.
sig?
I think you meant "too" up there. "To" and "too" are different words and are not generally interchangable. Love you.
Is there such a think as a "Moore's Law" for thermal design power?
So how many years does it take for thermal design power to double?
When will we have desktop PCs that you can use to fry scrambled eggs and bacon in the morning?
Will we ever use our PCs to heat up our apartments? Will PCs eventually be integrated in our fireplaces? Will we run a fire screensaver then?
So many questions...
--- Eat my sig.
To paraphrase "no one will ever need more 3.06GHz of computing power".
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Here's something that the article left out: can Linux utilize hyperthreading on Intel processors? When HT is enabled, does the hardware do all the work of making the OS know it has "two" processors to work with?
Apparently since everybody's kvetching without having read Tom's review and benchmarks, the gaming performance and rendering performance is good but what you'd expect -- hyperthreading doesn't have a big effect. But the lab video shows what I wanted to see -- that HT could have some benefit in a production environment. I'm regularly simultanteously running PHP, Coldfusion, MySQL, Apache, Photoshop, a couple of editors, Mathematica for homework, and lately a couple of video editing/encoding programs as well. It looks like HT will improve performance for this sort of an environment.
It seems that unless your rendering package/game/other computationally intensive application is written to take advantage of hyperthreading, you won't get a big performance gain running that app all by itself, but that's not the point.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
- The Little Endian Instruction Set
- The 386, no wait, the 386SX, no wait, the 386DX
- The 486 with the coprocessor cut out with a Laser
- The Indivisible Pentium
- The Celeron that outruns the PIII
The worlds fastest... okay, highest clock speed, chip."Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Toms Hardware guide and thats why I can point out the fact that ALL the benchmarks show the P4 3.60ghz FASTER than the HT P4 3.06ghz. This isn't to say that a P4 HT 3.6ghz version wouldn't be faster. I'm just saying that there current chip (the 3.06) is NOT the fastest YET.
Ave Molech Setting
What's yer CPU speed?
[]2.8 GHZ+
[]2.5GHZ+
[]1.5 GHZ+
[]1ghz+
[]500Mhz+
[]233 Mhz+
[]Cowboyneal runs the cage the powers my CPU.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
82 watts of power dissipation...
The VRU has to be cooled (or be of a more expensive design) so it won't... oh god I don't wanna think what it will do... melt? catch fire? explode? Eat through the Earth's core and Bruce Willis will have to team up with Hilary Swank to save us?
On the bright side, people who live in the northern hemisphere can consolidate their heating and gaming bills.
"Bill, we got any space heaters left in the back?"
"No, but we got some of them new Pentium machines."
Where does this end? I know Moore's law will 'eventually' catch up and they'll have to move away from just throwing more transistors at the design (although, like some weird horror movie, they keep infusing a few more months into the x86's life), but, seriously, how much is too much? Where will people draw the line on power consumption for their PC? Once upon a time I thought that 30 watts for the G4e was high. That's peanuts compared to this!
Start ordering more Lieberts, y'all. And invest in air handler stocks.
===
- I am made of meat.
Does anyone know if Linux or FreeBSD sees any benefit from the 'hyperthreading' technology? All the things I am reading say that your OS needs to support threads, but how does the processor know what is a thread and what is a process?
Wow, now my internet will be faster and my music will sound better than ever before! At least that's what the Intel commercials told me.
Call me crazy, but it's not how fast your chip is, but how you use it...
"Never separate the life you live from the words you say." - Paul Wellstone
iMac 800 / iBook 800
I'm all for progress in processor speed, but the consumer is looking for the most bang for their buck. Knowing Intel's past, that's going to be one hella expensive chip. I wish they would focus more on making a quality chip for much less (or just charging more acceptable prices) rather than seeing how fast they can burn the suckers up.
The last few computers I've bought have all had middle of the line processors in them because the price breaks are enormous. I so absolutely no reason to purchase a top-notch processor when you can get one a couple hundred megahertz slower for more than a couple hundred dollars (US) cheaper. Those last few megahertz they're eeking out honestly don't make that big of a difference in the real world - especially at a premium price.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
...and in other news, today is the "Latest Day, Ever."
My
Limekiller
Compared to the average person I do intensive computation, and I feel no pressure to upgrade. For the average user the need to upgrade must be entirely generated by marketing--right now performance improvements in hardware is irrelevant. I wonder what's going to change--assuming anything does--to make us all hunger for faster systems as we used to. I can't think of anything compelling, but i'm unsure because intel etc are spending piles of cash figuring out how to reestablish the need for improvement.
Looks like you're hyperthreading already! ;)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Well, I thought I was seeing things when QVC was advertising a 3.06 GHz computer. Guess this proves they aren't selling vapor.
Somebody on the overclockers' forum got his 1.8 Ghz P4 C1 stepping (from a Dell computer) to 3.5 Ghz. While it doesn't have hyperthreading (which doesn't neccessarily give you performance benefits), it does have a much faster bus rate.
Hope this helps.
SlowDownCowboySlowDownCowboySlowDownCowboySlowDown CowboySlowDownCowboySlowDownCowboySlowDownCowboySl owDownCowboySlowDownCowboySlowDownCowboySlowDownCo wboySlowDownCowboySlowDownCowboySlowDownCowboy
Hello Anonymous Coward,
I am taking time out from my VERY busy schedule to tell you that I did not read your post at all, because your use of "funnily" in the subject line gave me direct permission to ignore you.
You are never going to get anywhere in life, if you give people permission to ignore what you say.
I would like to caution you and other readers never to use "funnily" ever again, in any form of communication, be it oral or written, or even telepathic. No matter how many times the slashdot "editors" use this -- term -- it will never be a word.
Take care,
TEH GRAMMAR PATROLL
Apparently 2.4.18 or higher does support HT...
... but the other day I copied a 3gb folder, burned a CD and played music all at the same time... but I'm on a Mac... and it's a laptop. Guess that's not the same. heh :)
- I am made of meat.
It can fry an egg in less than 30 secs, and if you buy it with the grill option you can cook a chicken in only 35 minutes!
:)
Ask with the original teflon(R), accept no imitations.
You can use it as a furnace. The other ones were just good as space heaters :)
(Shouldn't they be making "the fastest chip in the world" on an architecture that isn't horribly crappy?)
Why won't slashdot let me change my terrible username
When are they gonna build HAL to house it??
In the old days, it was a big deal when we went from a 100 Mhz chip to a 150Mhz one. Today though a 50Mhz difference means nothing.
Don't you all think it is time for Intel and AMD to stop bringing out a new chip which is 0.000005% faster than the previous one, and instead start coming out with chips ONLY when they make a noticiable performance difference???
In other words, I hope that the next chip after the 3Ghz one is a 3.5Ghz one, then 4Ghz, 5Ghz, etc. And by the time we get to a 10Ghz chip they should start making them in 1Ghz increments.
Sure, I know clock cycles is not the whole story to performance, but geez, I see people upgrading their 1.9 Ghz systems to 2Ghz systems for several hundred bucks like if that's going to make a noticiable difference (on the other hand, it is probably because of *those* people that Intel/AMD do what they do)!!!
The intel commercial said so therefore it must be true.
- Toby
The most interesting part of the reviews posted are the comparison between Hyper-threaded and normal mode. These nice graphs show that in all but one case, the speed is not harmed by having HT enabled, and indeed it improved the performance by up to 20%.
This will not make a single process speed up, but will make systems seem faster, as it is rare that you are only doing one thing at a time.
Pricewatch just through the mobo's up. I think I'll get the 1.5ghz chip inside one of the mobo's and that way then the 3.0ghz chips come down, I can afford one.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Wow! I just installed this new 3Ghz machine, and now Nethack runs at over 200FPS, even with full alpha light rendering and environmental audio turned on full!!!
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Really though, who cares? What exactly can this do that the next to fastest chip ever can't? In a few days intel will release the new fastest chip ever, and life goes on. Does this really need to be on the front page?
Don't give me none of this "nature theme" business.
Marketing hype. This is really nothing and I can't understand why THG is hyping this.
All this does it let the CPU have 2 apps it can switch between at. Normally the CPU has to wait on the OS to give it something to do. Now the OS can give it sort of a spare job to keep doing.
Still only 1 can run at at time though. Its NOT a multiprocessing system. Simply where the OS normally chooses which app gets to run, now the CPU can always hold 1 app in the hole, ready to run it when any down time comes along.
For those who ALWAYS run something in the background like Folding@home or SETI, they will certainly see an improvement. if the OS and CPU agree to keep that app on the CPU, it will improve performance. But it will NOT increase your fps because you will only have 1 app going then.
AND if you turn on dual cpu support in quake, you should see a performance hit if anything.
The results from THG bore this fact out. I wouldnt waste time on this if I were AMD. The everyday user still has no benefit from dual processing systems, and the servers will need TRUE dual processing systems.
Maybe they've overrated this chip by 2Ghz, so its really an old Pentium III 1GHZ ;)
Other than that they stuck a lable on the AMD chips and overclocked them a couple hundered mhzs.
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
Is it just me or is this totaly irellvant, Maneframes hawe had this type of performense a long time, But what do i now. When is the speed not usable to the public ennymore 1ghz 2ghz 3ghz 4ghz.. and so on, Do we realy need this much power in your pc ( not that is not nice whit a fast computer ) But who uses ther cpu 100% ennymore. Software gets more hardware heavy all the time. the question is realy where does the line go. As menny I suspekt that companis like microsoft make thear software more hardware hevy then that need to be. my pont is some need this cind of power but thats mostly servers, the awrige desktop dont need the most expensive monster cpu on the market thay need a reliabe and easy to use computer ( not the fastest )to a reasonle price. You migt ask what this hawe to do whit ennything, develoment is good as long the goal hawent been lost. -sorry fore my bad english-
I mean really.. stay with the times, folks.. You might outdate your own website and life. You're doing us a disservice by not using the latest and greatest.
I've had a 3.2ghz (watercooled) P4 ever since the first northwood core P4s came out almost a year ago...
Repeal the DMCA!
Just found a nice little article about how the hyperthreading feature has been available since the 2.4 Northwood chip at http://www.vr-zone.com/#2742 . This is just a ploy to get everyone to buy the chip for a feature disabled in the bios. I am sure that a full and detailed guide will be available soon enough, so before opening your pocketbooks for HT, wait until you can simply turn it on without the $500+ spent for the chip.
No, you 'need' to eat. You 'need' to have a job so you can eat. You might even 'need' a girlfriend, an education, maybe even a decent computer for your job, etc.
You do not 'need' to spend $3000 on bleeding edge hardware.
There are better things in life to spend money on. Or heaven forbid, save!
But thanks for pushing the chip prices down so that we mundanes can get a fast chip for $200...
This news doesn't matter. In a few months Intel will have brought out another, even faster chip that can do more, do it faster and more efficient while (hopefully being cooler then it's precursor.)
Hate me!
Trainer yelling at an Intel Chip astride a stationary bike,
PEDAL, PEDAL, PEDAL! FASTER NOW! DON"T GIVE ME THAT CRAP, YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO 4 GHz CYCLES A SECOND, NOW MOOOOVVVVVEEEE!!!
not without buckets of dry ice in front of it.
The back of a big render wall gets extremely warm.
Even if you could fit small enough heatsinks that would let it fit into a single space rack the heat thrown out the back of a tower of, say, 32 of these would be ridiculous.
Mind you, I *guess* you could hang old pizzas around there to warm them up.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
...And I still care about buying compact-fluorescent bulbs.
Maybe Intel should concentrate on memory bandwidth instead of speed. Seems to me that all these MHz increases aren't nearly as effective as speeding up the FSB. We need a new memory interface architecture, go AMD?
After you hit about 60 fps in Q3 you're not gonna notice anything else higher.
Overkill anyone?
Shouldn't 640Mhz be enough processing power for everyone?
$cat
I always laugh when I see these headlines of fastest chips and what not. I'm running on a P200 MMX, 64mb EDO ram, Win98SELite (95 shell), S3 Trio64V+ & Voodoo 2, diamond mx300, 3com 56k ISA modem. I can do anything a modern cpu can do, it just takes awhile longer.
No but you can still order a mainframe form some company and thay go whay over 3 ghz ( ok thay are a bit expensive but is posable).
Just what the world needs, another means to make popcorn without having to get up from your computer. And oh the noise needed when you have to use a dual fan, muti channel, silver plated heat sinks necessary to keep the plastic on your case from melting. I really think the Major chipmakers should start thinking about better, cooler, quieter PC's people can live with. CPU's that don't require fans. I don't mind the search for speed but the majority of CPU cycles is spent waiting for the next instruction. The speed is wasted and we have to deal with the extra cost of heat, noise and electricity. At this time it doesn't seem worth it anymore. But I could be wrong.
I remember when processors started breaking the GhZ benchmark, people were making jokes about how we're starting to get to the point where the things will be emiting microwaves since they are in the GhZs.
anyone know how close we are now? will this new chip boil water from a distance?
even if we're a couple years off from that, are we going to need sheilding in our cases soon so that we don't cook our lower legs? if so, does anyone else thing that this would cause a lot of problems since compUSA won't take that into account when they do an upgrade?
Just some thoughts....
Now I could spend about $700 to get about a .0000001% improvement in performance over the last P4 which was news on slashdot like 2 weeks ago.
For god's sake can we please stop having advertising for every damn stepping of the P4 as news on Slashdot?!?!
For heaven's sake it isn't even a good processor. Aside from the fact that this processor is basically itself hype personified and the last one in need of extra attention (it's overwhelming advancement over P3 and Athlon was in ability to trick more consumers with high clock rate while doing less work), if I wanted to know what current clock speed of P4, than I'd go to Ace's, Tom's, Anand or any of another million sites which specialize in that.
If we're going to have to have this kind of "news" on here, then let's hear about good processors and/or new processors and/or useful, truly significant news in that kind of thing (for example Apple's recent move to 333 bus with DDR and dual 1.25 G4s which suddenly made Macs twice as fast).
when i leave my pizza out overnight by the computer, will it stay warm?
Because some mods are gonna throw a strop on this post as well, i'll have to post AC.
Granted, the chip IS GOOD, and the hyperthreading is an interesting new tech. If you're the sort of admin that will be recieving systems with this chip in to play with before it is anywhere near a reasonable [read: consumer] price point, then hallowed be thy hardware budjet.
The point of my post is... ready?... If you chuck more money at hardware, then yeah it gets faster, but with diminishing returns. For example, there are many graphics cards exceeding the {insert latest/fastest consumer card here} but for the extra hundreds the performance-for-money ratio is not as great. That is why I'm not excited. I've always known that if I had the money to waste, I could buy some supercomputer or the latest gear such as a fat RAID array, the latest chips(et), etc.
Ali / The_Guv'na / User 180187
Did anyone else notice the rather large banner ad for AMD on the top of the page (haven't tried reloading to see if it stays there).
It gave me a little quiver of amusement anyhow.
-JB
"I love deadlines. I love the "whooshing" sound they make as they pass by." - Douglas Adams.
This chip is more interesting than just the normal megahertz hike. It's the first of the desktop hyperhreaded chips - previously only available in the Xeon range (well, from Intel anyway. Other manufacturers had them).
:-)
It doesn't help a lot, at the very most a 20% speedup, typically much closer to 0%. This iteration just isn't that effective, maybe next time round with better management of cache or something, they might get it working more like separate chips. Right now it just doesn't.
It's good to see this entering mainstream though. It provides an incentive to write the kinds of multi-threaded applications that can actually squeeze out the full 20% speedup, and in turn, those applications will automatically be able to take advantage of real multi-processor boards without further changes. So this process ends with everybody having SMP laptops
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Beware of hyper threading - it is a mixed bag that can cause cache thrashing making things run even slower.
If they start measuring a CPU by its wattage, wouldn't that make most lightbulbs "smarter" since I have plenty of 100W light bulbs? :]
:]
Yeah, yeah, I know. It's marketing, it's not *supposed* to make sense
"With the introduction of its Hyper-Threading technology, Intel has confirmed that constantly increasing the clock cycle is not the only way to skin the proverbial cat."
Yah, AMD has been saying that for years with their performance-ratings, and Intel's been saying that cycles-per-second was the measurement that the consumer truely understood, and was a good way to get a measure of the speed of the processor.
Wonder if Intel will adopt that, now that they have a CPU that, at lower speeds, can process more data.
When I clicked on the link to the article, I had to laugh.
Right above the headline touting "Intel releases fastest processor ever" or something to that effect was a "AMD Me" ad saying that the AMD's did more instructions per clock cycle than competitors.
----- I want my LART.
This particular glorified smurf stovetop is the fastest chip that can run *consumer* Windows.
Laws are for people with no friends.
most reviewers appear to be getting 3.5-3.6ghz out of these consistently with the retail heat sink/fan. it would seem that 3ghz is not as far as they could reach and release.
I was under the impression that transistors had a lower limit on how fast they could switch. A 3GHz chip, in theory, has a clock pulse every 1/3 nanosecond... and I thought transistors took a nanosecond or two to switch? How exactly does this work, then, or are my premises false?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I mean, seriously, what's the point of such a high clock rate? Given, the "virtual dual processor" is pretty cool in my book, but aside from that, why bother running so high when the fastest bus speed I've ever seen on a mainboard is 533MHz? Not only that, you're still severely limited by the bulk storage whether it's a hard drive or cd-rom. I'm using a P3 600 at home and a P4 1.8GHz at work, both with win2k Pro and there really isn't too much of a difference between the two. Hell, I'd much rather have a system with a 1GHz CPU on a 1GHz FSB MB.
My good sig is in the laundry
This is great! Put this together with FreeBSD and you could have the faster single CPU computer on the planet!
Ok so I can buy this P4 with "hyperthreading" to emulate 2 processors or, I can go buy 2 Athalon MP 2200+ processors and a motherboard for less money....
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyists, dabblers, and dilettantes. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
mini-itx form factor, integrated video/ethernet/fanless cpu - just add memory and storage. link
if you wanted to go all-out on skipping the moving parts, you could run the os on compact flash using an ide to cf adapter from pcengines.com and use a cupid case with a dc power supply. just make sure to disable writing, or you'll wear it out! use mfs or a (non-essential) extra standard hard disk for data.
using one of the new 533 dual boards that are due out soon, this would mean a quad system right?
Beats paying an arm and a leg for a quad xeon board.
We've had cool little coffe cup holders that open up magically for ages now. Now with this chip we have a heat source. How about teaming them up into a coffee warmer tray thingy. Use a heat pipe and a copper cd-rom tray, eh?
Seems like a case modder challenge to me.
I suppose you don't celebrate birthdays either.
Are they not forgetting about the Power4 or Intel Itanium2. Fastest x86 yes fastest outright I do not know about that claim.
If you do a google search on optimal pipeline depth you'll find some good results.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Imagine a Beowu--WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM.
This LARTing brought to you by the Narn Bat Squad
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
This thing is faster. English summary at the bottom.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Yeah, but with Windows XP, you need a 3.06 GHz P-IV to equal the perceived performance of a 266 MHz Pentium running Linux :-)
No matter where you go... there you are.
There is not such a thing as too much information. I would say more, but then this guy might strain himself reading it.
<sarcasm>
Waaaait, let me get it straight... 3.6Ghz Pentium 4 is faster than 2.250Ghz Athlon???
Wow, now that's amazing Tom!
</sarcasm>
Think about it. Athlon can keep up and in some test perform faster than 1GIGAHERTZ faster pentium 4 and cost almost twice less!!!
God bless competition
------------ Internet? Is that thing still around? H.J. Simpson
Since this isn't practical to the high-end server market with the insane amount of heat it gives off, where IS it practical?
Buying JUST THE CPU will cost more than buying 2 athlon MP 2200s and a decent motherboard with it.
I'll stay with my athlon 750 which is treating me very nicely right now (although I may take the plunge and get an athlon xp)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Whut is you're CPU sped?
w boyneal runs the cage that powers my CPU
[]2.764ghz
[]2.432ghz
[]626mhz
[]25mhz
[]Co
To bad that wont work anymore once you get past 10GHz. Luckily there are still a few numbers between now and that time.
-Brandon
Quitters never win, Winners never quit, But those who never win and never quit are idiots.
...of hearing that we don't need faster CPU's, that the technology of 5 years ago, or whatever, is good enough for what most people do.
:)
While this may be true, video editing is getting easier and easier for average users to do, and soon (if not already) average users WILL want to edit video.
Perhaps none of you are familiar with the processing demands of video, as there aren't any decent video editing applications for Linux, but I get REALLY TIRED of waiting for my 800 MHz PIII to render my (admittedly effects-heavy) stuff. Surely a processor running almost 4 times as fast would make a big difference. yeah, i know there are other bottlenecks, but shhh! I'm trying to make a point.
This chip is more interesting than just the normal megahertz hike. It's the first of the desktop hyperhreaded chips - previously only available in the Xeon range (well, from Intel anyway. Other manufacturers had them).
Which other manufacturers?
To the best of my knowledge, nobody else has built a SMT chip. The Power4 was a CMP chip (multiple cores on one die, not multiple instruction streams sharing the same core). Everything else that I've heard of outside of paper-land has had one and only one instruction stream.
SMT was a great idea, but with transistor count being less of a limit nowadays, CMP seems to have the advantage (as you don't have functional-unit contention between threads).
-SheWhoWalksWithToesLikeCobras Please enter any 11-digit prime number to continue...
Muahahahahahahahaha...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Someone set up us the bomb!
I run my computer with the side of the case removed!
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
power4 over 10. i will check into that.
Tom's Hardware already has a review up about it, and it looks to live up to most of the hype.
:)
Right. And for readers that want a review by people that actually know what they are talking about, you can read the review at Ace's Hardware.
In other news, the P3 @ 3.06GHz is indeed a fast CPU, but considering that it's maximum power dissipation is 105W to the Athlon 2800+'s 68W, it looks like people should stop making fun of the Athlon for running so hot.
This comparison isn't completely fair (the Pentium IV is faster), but even the P4 2.2GHz spews 70 W of heat.
At 105W, the P4 is approaching the (in)famous heat output of the Intel Itanium! This is not a good thing.
(note: regarding Tom's Hardware, I have no specific complaint about the article, just the website quality in general. The reviewers, except for Tom, have no clue and generally spew pure uninformed BS throughout their articles. Why the site is still respected is a complete mystery to me.)
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Wow. And you could have said "The articles on Tom's Hardware are way too long for the information they cover".
No, that's a different kind of chip, mostly the kind made with olestra.
This is a chip from intel, so it leaves skid marks in your wallet.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The HOTTEST Chip around.
New! Doritos, Firery Salsa and Cheese.
An extreme, mouth-watering combination that will have you screaming for more!
Man, and I'm still squeezing the last bit of life out of my Pentium 233!"
Well, by my guidelines, it's time for you to upgrade. The way I figure it, if everything in the computer world is about an order of magnitude faster, larger, whatever, than it is time to upgrade. I went from a p166 to an amd xp2100 a couple of months ago. The hard drive went from 4 GB to 80. Likewise for other components. This means you would upgrade only once every five or six years.
Nice Marmot
Accuse me of FUD all you want, but examine the evidence for yourself.
.NET .. Looks like PC Mag has some integrity.
:)
Exhibit A
Win NT beats Windows 2000 in SQL Server 7 Benchmarks
What? The new O/S is slower? Must be FUD, doesn't have anything to do with bloated code and forcing users into hardware upgrades.
Exhibit B
Red Hat/Samba far outscales Windows 2000 on identical hardware
Yes your honor, it's true, at a load level of 16 clients Windows 2000 filesystem throughput flat lines vs. Red Hat Linux with Samba which is still scaling up nicely with 28 clients.
Does Windows 2000 mask the true power of the Intel hardware? Examine the report and look at the benchmark graphs. Decide for yourself if it's FUD or FACT. Note: the source is PC Magazine which if you will refer to this months copy contains many advertisements for Microsoft
Shall I continue?
Want to see why TUX stomps IIS and Apache for serving static content?
I challenge you to find the FUD in any of this. In fact, many of you might wish to save these links for future TCO discussions within your local IT departments.
PROVE ME WRONG!!!! Show me how Microsoft is doing it faster and better compared to either a) A Previous Microsoft Server Product, or b) Linux. Wave your hands and shout FUD all you want, but be prepared to back it up.
I wish someone would back me up!
As for my 486, I wrote a user mode driver which allows me to access the data pins on the parallel port to activate a relay and ultimately switch A/C power. (Web page coming soon.) This device can be used to remotely reboot Windows servers that BSOD, or turn on Christmas Lights add/or Coffee Pots via cron or telnet. Did I mention it all fits on a floppy, runs on a 486, and is network accessible? I am trying to shoe-horn a webserver onto the floppy now.
When are these chip people going to realize that the only true advance will come when they can get a 1ghz chip to run on a watch battery. Almost zero heat output.
82 watts. My god. Put a little oven in that puppy and bake up some cookies.
You're older than you've ever been
and now you're even older
and now you're even older
and now you're even older
You're older than you've ever been
and now you're even older
and now you're older still.
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
actually a lot of chips that are marked for sale under slower speeds can be overclocked to over 3.06 ghz using *AIR* (yes, thats right, air) cooling... needless to say rather "impressive". the new C0 stepping 1.8 ghz northwoods are very impressive overclockers, somebody reported on the overclockers.com forum a 1.7 ghz overclock on one.. thats 95% damn impressive, and on air cooling too. PIV's are great chips and very scalable, Intel probably has working chips all the way up to 4 gHz+ right now its just not as profitable for them to produce them (it would drive down the price of there current chips and create a market saturation effect... plus they obviously cost more to make due to yield rates)...
Programs use more RAM because its there and its cheap and that makes it easier for programmers to use higher level toolkits to crank out code more quickly. We have the resources, why not use them??
Besides, the thing that slows your typical desktop down the most is memory. It takes a long time to get data that isn't in cache. That's why multi-process (not to be confused with multi-processor) systems were invented in the first place. It's faster to have a couple programs two run than do nothing waiting for memory fetchs.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
There is no economic incentive for Microsoft to write efficient code with a small memory footprint.
If programmer P1 can modestly abuse resources to get a program out the door faster than programmer P2 who takes the time to be miserly with ssystem resources, P1 will win and P2 will end up working for P1.
Yes! With my new ATI 9700 Pro, 1gb of PC2700 DDR Ram, and now this, I can run games like Starcraft at 10,000 FPS, and Quake 3 at 500FPS! Other fun things you can do with a processor this fast: Brag about it Render the Final Fantasy Movie Beat everybody in Seti@home work units Run all the games you own all at once Heat your home, and probably contact the dead =)
Not everyone is a nerd!!! Heat and power are not an issue to the average buyer.
AMD's cooling is as cold as your mother-in-law's kiss!
Wait! It is your mother-in-law!
'didn't want it to sound like that
dude, if it's just a kiosk, slap a 256meg stick and jaguar into some rev b (1st-gen slotloading) imacs. hell, if you use a ram disk, you can put the hd to sleep permanently and have a totally silent station.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
The new P4 runs at 3.06GHz, at 3 billion cycles per second.
That's nothing. I hear AMD is going to come out with a 3.06GHz chip that runs at 4 billion cycles per second!
but wait! let's say in an ideal situation, when two processes are run simultaneously, one utilizing the integer resources while another utilizing the floating point processor, it is technically feasible to achieve 6 billion cycles per seconds. that's the benefit of HT. now, whether it is likely to occur in RL is another story...
And here is the link to Intel's view on this...
[alk]
in prestone
Fastest. Chip. Ever.
and i thought my 1gig P3 was the "fastest chip ever"
What do you think it would take a motherboard manufacturer to make a board that utilized the "Turbo" switch and linked it to an adjustable BIOS setting for overclocking? Imagine, doing mundane desktop work, leave the thing off. Building a new kernel, while burning CD-ROMs and playing UT2003, hit the button and instant overclock; no reboot necessary.
Or, has this already been done, and I'm just out of the loop?
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...but it is still a P4. Does this mean that WinXP can report my "serious error" to MS that much faster?
Even if we narrow the scope to x86 desktop apps, it seems that based on preliminary benchmarks (with Hyperthreading enabled) AMD's AthlonXP 2800+ still reigns (albeit, by a very small margin) as the fastest chip available.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
It runs in the teraherts range...
Highest clock rate chip, yes. Fastest? Clock speed is not the right metric.
Hah! My Celeron 633 totally 0wnx0rs your 600 chip!
Seriously, though, I work in retail and clearly see the reason for the faster chips on desktops: they come pre-loaded with so much crap from the manufacturer (HP / Compaq) that my 633 really does run faster than the P4 1.8's they come with. Erm.. well ok so those retail pc's also only have a 5400 rpm hd and onboard video, but even in gaming (ahh.. half-life hard at work, at work) using software rendering, my home pc is faster.
Perhaps in order to get real speed instead of higher clock frequencies, pc manufacturers should subject their standard off-the-line pcs to benchmark tests?
Not really, because now you're talking more about operations per second (i.e., "flops") or possibly instructions per second (i.e. "mips"). The "GHz" measurement refers strictly to the frequency of the oscillator that is providing the clock signal to the logic gates. Incindentally, this is why GHz (or MHz in the old days; or KHz in the really old days) is a fairly useless performance metric -- it doesn't really tell you much. On the other hand, it's great for marketing because you know it's going to keep increasing incrementally, so you can keep telling people that their computers are out of date. If you're going to lust after this chip, lust after the HT stuff you were referring to. That really might make a difference. The 3GHz hype is just the latest "Ho-hum" increase in clock speed.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
You hit the nail directly on the head with this one. This is the reason why we can't break the 4Ghz barrier: it's not a round number. I mean, look at all those pointy edges!
If the industry wants, they can skip right to 5, which is round on at least half of it, but I suggest they skip 5 as well and head over to 6. Remember: the popularityitude is directly proportional to the rounditude.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
I think it's a fair question
with this bad boy?
Check it: Slow 'em down
?sp
I knew I was in trouble when the new Zaurus SL-5600 specs came out and were higher than my webserver..
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Intel has a nice tutorial on the subject.
I know that of the Microsoft OS's, only the XP family supports the Hyper-Threading. I couldn't tell you if any other OS's support it.
Distilled down, the processor creates a virtual or logical second processor which assists it in using underutilized resources.
A lot of multimedia vendors would be interested in this, a lot of gaming vendors will jump at this.
'Pleasure is the Disease, Pain is the Cure' - Lilith
Basically, it comes out that the XP 2800+ and the P4 3.06 Ghz are neck in neck for most real world applications, with less than 10% differance between them on anything most home or business users are going to run. So it really comes down to which is the better deal, especially in a depressed economy with tight IT budgets. At the moment, only the XP 2700+ and the P4 2.8 are shown up on pricewatch.com, with prices of $354 amd $389 respectively. Meaning that AMD still has the crown in the Price/performance arena. However, the gap is narrowing.
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
Yes, it's DRM-infected. It's called LaGrand technology and it's built into all new P4s and will be built into all AMD Hammer CPUs. It provides the "trusted" operating mode (in addition to regular x86 kernel mode and user mode) portion of tcpa support. With a fritz chip on board and an OS that uses Palladium, Microsoft will, for the first time ever, be put in the position of being able to charge you to access your documents. I'm not talking about the power they've always had to change file formats. I'm talking about the ability to literally refuse you access to the bits that make up the file if you don't pay up. After all, if it becomes illegal to reverse engineer file formats (How much will that cost in campaign contributions? Peanuts to microsoft.) and you're saving all your documents in MS Word DRM 2003 Palladium Edition, there's no possible legal reason for you to need to access your files with any application other than Word, right? And if Word is available on a subscription basis only and you stop paying....
...and that's just how the designers envision it being used. I'll leave the possible abuses of this internet-available unique pc id to your imagination.
As for the unique ID, no - P4s have no unique id (as far as I know). That's on the fritz chip, and not only will it be unique, but (I strongly suspect from reading the full General and PC-specific tcpa specs) it will be obtainable by anyone that can talk to your machine on a network.
----
Example:
Boss's computer: Hey, I want to send you an email, but I need to verify that you're subject to digital restriction mechanisms before I release the data to you.
Your computer: Ok. As of (this time) (this date), this machine is running in trusted mode with a trusted OS. (RSA signature and public key for verification)
Boss's computer: Hey central DRM authorization server at microsoft!
MS: Yeah?
Boss's computer: Is this public key (public key here) one that was implanted into a DRM-infected fritz chip, or is someone blowing smoke?
MS: Yeah.
Boss's computer: Ok, pc. Looks like you measure up. Here's the message: "Good morning employee! I'm offically ordering you to take risky business action X. I'm aware that this could kill off the company if it fails, but the possible payoffs are irresistable." Do not allow the user to copy, print, or otherwise manipulate this message. Delete all record of it being sent in one minute.
Your computer: Sure thing.
----
``I'm still squeezing the last bit of life out of my Pentium 233!'' :-) Except when I'm compiling, of course. Seriously though, most of my regular activities (web surfing, emailing, chatting, editing plain text, burning CDs, playing music) don't require much CPU power. It's memory that counts for me. So I'm just going to save money and energy by sticking to so-called obsolete hardware. If OpenBSD runs on it, what more can I wish for? (Err...)
My Pentium 200 is mostly running idle.
---
Wombat's Laws of Computer Selection:
(1) If it doesn't run Unix, forget it.
(2) Any computer design over 10 years old is obsolete.
(3) Anything made by IBM is junk. (See number 2)
(4) The minimum acceptable CPU power for a single user is a
VAX/780 with a floating point accelerator.
(5) Any computer with a mouse is worthless.
-- Rich Kulawiec
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Funny that you bring this up, karlm...
The iMac design team used a plastic which provided RF and electromagnetic shielding, yet was totally transparent (this is on the later version CRT iMacs with slot-loading drives, not the translucent first generation, which was shielded in the traditional manner with internal aluminum panels).
I remember the iSub development team (harman-kardon subwoofer for iMac and h-k's SoundSticks, resembles a jellyfish IMHO) had some serious issues in properly shielding the sub's totally transparent case (there's a driver magnet in there which weighs a pound or so and some hefty power supply circuitry) and the sub's launch was postponed over and over again, till it finally slipped out quietly to the public IIRC nine months after its announcement.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
The human eye can only perceive about 12-15 frames per second as distinct images. Caution: the following is not substantiated fact, just informed opinion. You are invited to add corrections.
For the purposes of this comment, all our frames in frame-flipping motion representations contain sharp images by default. Above about 15 FPS, our perception changes. In the case where the frames contain temporaly (yes, temporal, not temporary) progrssive images of an object in motion, at framerates above 15 FPS we start to think we see an object in motion rather than a rapid succession of distinct images. However, as any good FPS (first person shooter, not frames per second) gamer will tell you, most people are acutely aware of the "choppiness" of motion represented by a stream of images presented at framerates between 15 and 50 FPS. In fact, people are sometimes capable of perceiving the presence of framerate acceleration at framerates above 50 FPS.
Note that framerate acceleration is not the same as the perceived acceration of a moving object represented by an image contained in a frame. Framerate acceleration is the increase or decrease of framerate during which time the images in the frames do not seem to have objective changes in motion. Rather, during framerate acceleration we perceive smoother or choppier quality of motion. Although, at framerates above 60FPS, most people can no longer perceive framerate acceleration, we can still register different physiological responses to different framerates. In other words, our eyes can tell the difference between actual motion and a frame-flipping representations of motion even at framerates up to about 72FPS. The physiological response to sharp, distinct images presented at framerates above 60FPS and below about 72FPS (at which point physiological response drops off sharply) is felt as eyetrain. This is why setting a monitor's vertical refresh rate above 72Hz helps prevent eyestrain. It also means that at framerates above about 60FPS, our brains no longer capable of processing incoming image data as fast as our eyes can supply it. In other words our visual perception bandwidth is probably limited first by our brains and second by our eyes.
Having a limited bandwith of perception is not a flaw. It is an adaptation to our surroundings. Things that move faster than we can perceive them either seem blurry or are invisible (if they move entirely through our field of vision). This adaptation gives us special feedback on the world we perceive: things that move too fast are dangerous to us and are flagged in our perception by uncomfortable blurriness.
Blurriness is also interesting because we can use it to better fool our eyes and thus fool our perception. Most film movies are presented at framerates of 25 FPS. How, then, do we watch movies without eyestrain and perceive smooth motion even though 25 FPS is well below the upper limit at which we can no longer detect both choppiness and framerate acceleration? In this case the images in the frames are pre-blurred for us. Consequently, our eyes do not detect the presence of the rapidly changing positions of sharp edges but instead register a blurry or soft edge that is more fluid. Our brains are good at interpolating movement and boundries based on blurry images and so we do not see choppiness but accept the images as smooth movement. The big question is: do we experience eye-strain at 25FPS with blurred, soft edged pictures? If film movies induce eye-strain then we can reasonably conclude that the eye detects and feeds much different sets of data to our brains when we watch the simulated motion of frame-flipping versus when we watch the motion of actual objects in continuous lighting. This would be further evidence that the eyes have more detection capacity than the brain has the ability to process. One mitigating factor in this situation is that movie theaters are darkened and the main source of light is the reflection of the image from the movie screen. In dark situations the capabilities of the eye are limited and it is possible that the darkness limits the eye's ability to detect and feed frame images to the brain due to retinal after-image effects (e.g. this is the same as the after-image we see after we stare into a bright light--the after-image may prevent the eye from properly discerning frame flips).
Your comments are welcome.
my best system is still a pII running at 350mhz. win2k or slackware the GUI is plenty fast. I multitask tons of apps all day and night. in fact the system has pretty much been on 24/7 since 1998 when i got it. ok so i can't play the new 3d games and my compiles could probably be a little faster. but if i don't miss the games and i let my compiles just do their thing in the background with no deadlines to meet, then why should i care? i'm sure there are high end users who really DO need this kind of speed, but it bothers me that computers such as the one i described are thought of as junk these days.
I've figured out what's driving processor speeds up and why it doesn't affect me as much.
Many people only have one PC and they're running everything on it: p2p client, email, web-browsing, games, CD recording...
I for example, with my vast collection of semi-ancient machines have a PC dedicated to p2p, another for playing games, another for recording CDs etc.
graspee
The main problem for me to accept this kind of speed anywhere near impressive is the fact that the design of the P4 is all about being able to deliver high speeds but with a cost: lots and lots of "bubbles".
In fact P4 has a 22-staged (if I'm not mistaken) pipeline which means that if the next instruction requires information from the instruction that just entered the pipeline. The processor will have to spend 22 clock cycles using NOOPs... and this is the common case.
Other thing that happens is that if they were to increase the number of pipeline steps they would be able to achieve faster processors. The problem is that they wouldn't be better. This is clearly the case between AMD and Intel. Intel put their money on increasing speed (long live Marketing) while AMD stayed with a not-excessively pipelined design. What happened? Well... Athlon XP with 1333 Mhz had the same performance as a P4 with 1700Mhz (I have no idea about these numbers but the relation is something similar).
Sorry about the long post... but I had to say something about this.
-- Would it be acceptable to just put my name on my sig?
Is there realy a use for such a chip. I mean the specs are nice but is anyone going to notice the difference between a 3.0Ghz and a 2.0Ghz chip?
Most of the time the bottleneck isn't the processor but memory, HD-speed etc.
/(bb|[^b]{2})/
toms still use sysmark 2002, a benchmark suite suspected to be purposely designed to favorise intel processors, see here:
3 06 ht-21.html
8 22 _AthlonXP2600/020822_AthlonXP2600.htm. theinquirer.net/?article=5274i rer.net/?article=5580
0 20825/bl urb-03.html0 2q3/020825/bl urb-01.html#april_2002_amds_plans_to_attack_bapco
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q4/021114/p4_
more information about the sysmark 2002 affair:
http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2002/08/020
http://www
http://www.theinqu
and there is the reaction from tom pabst:
http://www17.tomshardware.com/blurb/02q3/
http://www17.tomshardware.com/blurb/
i let you appreciate...
my own conviction my opinion is that sysmark 2002 is a scam, designed to mislead consumers..
at the very least this benchmark is suspect and shouldn't be used anymore. there is a lot of others benchmarks. in the worst case it would cause no harm at all to not use this one anymore ?
why does tom insist to use sysmark 2002, even in its latest CPU reviews ?
Signatures are for stupids.
Hi
absolutly point less that sort of speed.
well you might be able to have a chip running
@ more than 3 Ghz but can you get any data to
it so it can use its full potential ?
i think not unless your whole program fits
in cache and this would include most of the OS
overhead as well for irq handlers and the rest off the bloat in there.
when oh when are they going to increase the
IO performance until then theres no point in
having a high chip performance.
PS i got a cpu here with a 128Bit bus which only
runs at 250MHz and would outperform that.
But then again its a dedicated cpu for special things.
I have news for you. The last bit of life left that chip a long time ago. Stop squeezing and let the poor chip die in peace.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
If I'm understanding you, the P4 architecture allows signals to take extra cycles to arrive at their destination. Hence the real performance is bounded by the same rules as an athlon. I'm aware that the GHz is largely an irrelevance, but I didn't know that a P4 would be operating only once every 2 or 3 clock cycles (half or third the GHz rated)..
I'm guess that the higher GHz allows smaller ops and signal-distances to go through quicker than they otherwise would.. hence any performance increase.. I wonder what operations are used most in a PC and whether these are the ones with shortest paths..
I have a dual Pentium PC at work and I notice that it is a lot more responsive than a single CPU system. I.E: If I launch an app I don't have to wait for it to finish opening, I can immediately do other things. Hyperthreading trys to pretens that it's two CPUs, so it probably has this benifit as well. Maybe this is a feature that is overlooked. All the reviewers seem to think speed is the only important thing.
I dunno who this mythical average person is, but anyone who does not care about a factor of two speedup is not doing "intensive computation" in my books. For me this makes a difference between six months and a year worth of CPU time.
But aren't we all a little bored of this back-and-forth? Every few weeks Intel/Amd announces a speed bump. Half of slashdot says "Who needs that power, computers are fast enough" and the other half (including me, oops) says "no they're not, we have hard problems to crunch".
The interesting questions are essentially business questions at this point. Obviously there are applications that can use near-infinite computing power; on the other hand, web browsing and running Microsoft or (Open) Office probably are not them. So the real question is what do the great unwashed (err. the original sense, not slashdot readers) need the power for ?
[]I use a Commodore 64, you insensitive clod.
From what I hear, that may be a good thing (all those trade routes and all...)
3.06GHz is a 9.28% increase in raw clockrate over the last fastest chip at 2.8GHz. That everyone is going nuts over this shows how sad PC hardware fanatics have become.
that's all very interesting, but if your TFT display is running at 60Hz, you REALLY ARE wasting anything above that. My CRT display runs at 100Hz, so it seems sensible to assume that 100Hz+ is a good aim point for performance for me. In practice I know that my favoured flight-sim (X-Plane) is just fine at anything above 25fps. So turn frame sync on and stop worrying about going from 200fps to 300fps, it's just completely meaningless.
That was classic intercourse!
...the FASTEST chip ever was a Pringles potato chip inadvertently dropped by a NASA technician in one of the Saturn rockets.
Does it go all the way to eleven?
82 watts, that's great!
* Higher energy bills!
* More energy wasted as the processor idles!
* More heat meaning:
-New fans, either expensive or noisy.
-More heat in the room. My own apartment is already hot enough on most summer days, and the server room I administrate at work is also too warm for comfort.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Interesting... the AMD athlon XP processor still beats the 3.06 ghz P4 in some benchmarks!
--JonnyBlog
If that is all you use the computer why would you up grade? Get a cell phone, mine has the same features you just described needing.
A 10% increase is pretty impressive, considering the increases we used to get out of Intel (2%ish) ...
...
For what its worth, I think it bears mentionning that a PR2600 from AMD is running nowhere near 2600MHz and is still holding its own against 3GHz parts from Intel. Thats some impressive engineering folks
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I agree totally with your assessment of the current state of bloat. Ever try the QNX demo? They put an entire posix compliant unix distro including the shell, gui, web browser and a web server onto a single HD floppy. :)
My first computer was an Amiga ... True pre-emptive multitasking, Multi-screen GUI, built in text-to-speech, etc. all on a single DD floppy! I fondly remember running the AmigaOS Workbench on one screen, Dpaint paint program on another screen and Pagestream desktop publishing software on another hi-res screen (each screen having many windows open) all simultaneously on a machine with 2MB of graphics memory and NO other ram. (For those not familiar with Amiga architecture, you could run programs in the graphics memory (CHIM RAM) and add additional memory (FAST RAM) if you wanted to expand your system.) The system was running at 14MHz and was ULTRA responsive at all times! Screen switching was INSTANTANEOUS! Amiga users know what I mean. ;) If I remember correctly, the context switching time was about 35ns!
Anyway, it's sad when you have a machine with a chip that is litterally hundreds of times faster and you still don't get that responsiveness. It still boggles my mind to try to imagine a 1GHz Amiga with 1GB ram and a few gigs of HD. :)
A 10% increase is pretty impressive, considering the increases we used to get out of Intel (2%ish) ...
It's a 9.28% increase in raw clockrate. The actual performance increase is less than 9.28%.
My mac plus' os fit on a floppy too.
0xfeedface
Don't remember the Mac plus having preemptive multitasking and text-to-speech, 4096 color output and multiscreen environment, digital stereo sound, powerful command line interface ... Oh ... nevermind. I do remember that it only had a 400k floppy. And gotta love that 9" black and white output! ;) IMHO the macOS was not on the same level.
It's generally idle a lot more than half the time. If you want to increase processing power then it is safe to assume you are not satisfied with the amount you have.
why not use that idle time, like say HT!
The only way to use CPU time is running processes. Hyper threading runs a couple of processes at once, increasing idle time. I hope you're aware that modern processors run other processes while waiting. Even the most remedial script kiddie should know that. That's how come you can have an OS, Freecell game, and browser running at once.
Dick, learn tech before posting.
My name isn't Dick. That's great advice though. You should consider following it. You were right for ACing parent comment. It doesn't reflect on you very well.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
No, the context switch wasn't 35ns. The system didn't even use that fast RAM. 35ns sounds more like the fastest pixel clock timing, the time it takes to display a single pixel. Pushing all the registers on the stack and switching the running task takes at least tens of microseconds on Amiga.
The screen switching magic was implemented using copper *1 lists - at some scanline copper would change the address from where the display hardware fetches the screen data. That's why screen switches were instantaneous - they only involve modifying the copper list. All the screens were drawn in the graphics memory (CHIP RAM) all the time anyways.
*1 Copper, a display coprocessor that can change values in the display hardware, color palette, playfields, horizontal pitch (modulo), scroll registers, sprites, graphics mode, etc. You could even flip the screen vertically just by making a copper list that does it (or having a negative pitch/modulo...) It basically has 3 different instructions - wait, move and skip and also a special code for terminating the list.
Oops... :) Maybe that was 35ms. Next time I'll try thinking a little before making a rediculous statement. My memory isn't what it used to be... or is it? Hmmm.... Can't remember. :)
Like you, I am frequently haunted by profound questions related to man's
place in the Scheme of Things. Here are just a few:
Q -- Is there life after death?
A -- Definitely. I speak from personal experience here. On New
Year's Eve, 1970, I drank a full pitcher of a drink called "Black Russian",
then crawled out on the lawn and died within a matter of minutes, which was
fine with me because I had come to realize that if I had lived I would have
spent the rest of my life in the grip of the most excruciatingly painful
headache. Thanks to the miracle of modern orange juice, I was brought back
to life several days later, but in the interim I was definitely dead. I
guess my main impression of the afterlife is that it isn't so bad as long
as you keep the television turned down and don't try to eat any solid foods.
-- Dave Barry
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