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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.
Intel's Pentium 4 3.06GHz: Hyper-Threading on Desktops
See this article from Tom's Hardware.
Sadly this trend won't go away anytime soon. When you pack that many transistors running at ultrahigh frenquencies in a tiny package you have to pay somehow.
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
i've had a developer maryville board on my desk at work for the past 2 months (p4 2.8ghz). my experience with it so far hasn't been particularly impressive. i mean, it presents itself as 2 cpus to the underlying os (works w/ xp, .net rc1, and linux), but when you do something that actually taxes both cpus (make -j8 bzImage or what have you) there's a lot of thrashing and no true performance gain. i like the idea that no one program can totally lock up your cpu (netscape / q3 / X / etc), but i haven't seen any gains in day to day use.
i'm curious how oracle / msft will deal with the licensing issues that will come about from presenting virtual cpus.
-BlueLines
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
Linux supports HT. No OS as far as I know sees much benefit from it.
The difference between a "process" and a "thread" is pretty small. A thread is just a process with shared page tables, for the most part. This means that there's less overhead switching between two threads, since you don't have to flush the TLB and caches. The processor per se knows absolutely nothing about any of this - it just knows when the OS commands it to flush the TLB and the caches, and change the page table addresses.
The basic point of HT is that it's sort-of another CPU, but it's just leeching unused resources from the main CPU. So, the scheduling logic in the OS needs to understand that it's not a real CPU, and thus should be grouped with the real CPU it's associated with. Linux 2.5/2.6 will support these tweaks, with 2.4 you'll need some sort of patch currently. Without the tweaks, you still get HT, it just doesn't help much.
But really, it never helps that much. Don't expect a 2x speedup or anything, even if your system is running heavily threaded applications.
while you are of course correct, one may be ble to overclock the overclocked by using super duper cooling. the limit of overclocking is limited often by heat, so if you can get rid of more heat, you might be able to squeeze a bit more out of a given chip.
for practical purpouses you are right, though. there is absolutely no reason you would buy this chip if you wanted to overclock it.
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
Actually this chip overclocks pretty well, [H]ardOCP got it up to 3.68 GHz air cooled and 3.82 GHz water cooled. Not bad at all. http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Mzg4
If you do a google search on optimal pipeline depth you'll find some good results.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Woo hoo! I might just get some "Informative" karma over this one... :)
Here's the deal: the DOOM III demo was a debug build. If you've got it, do a "strings" on it. You'll see a bunch of debug symbols.
That means no optimizations, and tons (I mean tons) of code to make tracking down problems like memory leaks easier. That kind of build will naturally munch processor cycles like crazy.
Corroborating evidence: the alpha is very CPU-bound, which should be surprising given how the algorithms it uses for rendering eat GPUs for lunch.
All the same, with features like per-poly collision detection, I expect the final version to do much better on a 3.06GHz chip than a 1.2GHz chip.
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I got my Linux laptop at System76.