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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.
Ah, but when the Pentium 200 was out DEC had a 500 MHz Alpha.
I hold a patent on sigs...
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.
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
thats insane. Thats equal to what, two or three G4s?
I want 2D games back.
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.
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?
Don't you get it? They've already overclocked it. That's the only way they could get these out... and the only reason why they are so hard to find (it's so overclocked only a very tiny percent of the chips can even handle it).
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
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.
I have to wonder though, WHY? Todays software seems to need insane amounts of RAM compared to five or ten or fifteen years ago, and yet we don't seem to be all that much better off. Programmers just seem to squander the RAM faster than the RAM manufacturers can make it. Software expands to fill all available RAM. Its not even a joke. Why should "calc.exe" need 1-3MB RAM? The process running the task bar on my Win2K machine needs about 3MB of RAM, which is ridiculously high since all it has is a few buttons and icons and shows the time and has a menu, and yet the same thing in Windows XP typically needs close to 10 MB RAM. Windows Explorer in XP is MUCH slower than in earlier versions of Windows. Something is wrong with this picture.
I wish programmers would make some effort to optimize the stuff. Perhaps better tools would be useful. As a C++ developer, I would like a tool that shows me a breakdown of how much RAM is being used by which parts of my program. If such tools were commonplace, programmers would be able to quickly isolate the parts of the their programs that are hogging the most memory.
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.
User 1 "Did my computer just crash?"
User 2 "Couldn't tell, happened to fast."
Light travels less than 10 centimeters in one clock cycle. Of course you didn't see it crash.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
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.
You contradict yourself. You say you wish AMD could keep up with intel, then you mention that not many apps use both CPUs (and thus hyperthreading) effectively.
I think AMD realizes that multiprocessing is not something the average user will ever benefit from. But they are falling behind in the marketing department on this one.
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?
Why does Microsoft use insane amounts of RAM for simple applications you ask?
Simple, because it gets you to upgrade. It all starts innocent enough, you are running Windows 98 and your buddy gives you a copy of Windows ME. Wanting to be at the same level of modernity as your buddy, you install it, only to have your machine run slower. Eventually, your machine suffers from the dreaded Windows O/S decay and conveniently christmas rolls around. You then decide the old computer is going to the kids (or trash) and you get yourself a spiffy new Dell or eMachine.
This moves hardware, software, and yes another OEM Windows license that is locked to your genuine Intel processor. It also moves money out of your bank account.
I hope that clears it up. It's about getting consumers to buy more, so the latest and greatest bloat code will perform at an acceptable level of performance. Windows does a great job of masking the true power of the Intel architecture. In fact, the gap between Windows and Linux performane is growing and on identical hardware, doing identical work, Linux is 10-15% faster and tends to scale higher and support more clients as we have been seen in Samba vs Win2K, and tux vs. IIS benchmarks on identical hardware. Again, Win2k scalability has more to do with selling server licenses than creating better code. If your Win2k server runs out of ummpphh at 50 users and you have 75 users, then the solution is to buy another server from Dell and of course another OEM Win2k license locked to the CPU in the new server. Or, if you are just doing file and print server, you can scrap it all and put in a Linux box running Samba.
There is no economic incentive for Microsoft to write efficient code with a small memory footprint.
In contrast, the Linux kernel is constantly under the microscope running of embedded devices, strong-arm CPU's, and I still run a single floppy micro linux distro on a 486 (that even gets me a network stack). I am amazed at how much throughput I can get out of an old 486/100 with 32MB of RAM running Linux that booted off a floppy. It's just amazing how much power is there.
If I am wrong on any of these points, please correct me. If not, mod me up.
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....
I love it when an idiot interjects personal bias into a debate. ...and it's "probably"...
hmmm,
Well let's think about this. Even though I don't believe or care that you did compare this to a 1.9 Dual AMD, you are missing the point. This Hyper-Threaded machine is not 2 processors. It is one processor. The dual system you spoke of probably has huge amount of system resources, memory, maybe larger cache sizes? The thing of it is if you want to make true comparisons get your Xeon Dual processor out and bench it with HT on versus your 1900+ machine and see what the results are. I am guessing not favorable. For me I think the 15% or more that I am getting for free is pretty sweet. If the algorithm you are benching is threaded, then it should be obvious that a single cpu will have to work harder.
Signed,
A little more educated user!
Correction, Tomorrow, AMD will ANNOUNCE a chip that runs faster and cheaper at half the clock speed...
Of course, actually seeing in a store will be a different matter.
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?!
``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.