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.

Comments

100 watts....

[Steveftoth]

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.

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 /. do so I think that running a system all the time (with SETI or whatnot) would be expensive.

Re:100 watts....

[EvilTwinSkippy]

I really miss the days when you could set up a box with no moving parts. I have 2 applications for computer where a cooling fan is inneffective, or where a cooling fan in completely undesired.

I run the network at a science museum. We have kiosks (Linux of course) that sit and run all day, every day, unattended. Every so often a power fan starts making noise and vistors complain, or it quietly quits and the processor french fries either itself or surrounding electronics.

My second appliction is running a server for volunteer checkin at a folk festival. We set it up at the begining of the week in a dusty, damp, humid shed that serves as the office. It has to run, hot or cold, dry or damp, all weekend. A fan sucks (literally and figuratively) because it draw in dust when the weather is dry, and spins to almost no avail if the weather is too humid. I presently use a clocked down K6 that doesn't need a fan.

I realize I am starting to wander into the realms of embedded devices, is it so much to ask that my next computer be quieter than the diswasher?

microwaves

[kippy]

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...

HT on Linux or FreeBSD...

[cowmix]

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?

I call bullshit...

[Cervantes]

...with 50 percent saying they play video games while also burning CDs

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)

Re:HT on Linux or FreeBSD... (fixed)

[cowmix]

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?

Re:Personal PC's

[_ph1ux_]

Exactly. The thing is that the testing that is done on Intels latest chips is done in a subjective manner for marketing purposes. They test the chips on machines that are not Identicle - with software that is optimized for that chips instruction set - then push it out to people saying "Look at Intel's latest chip! The new $Pentium-X will runs your applications so much faster!"

but there is a threshold we will hit - on the consumer level - and that day (although still a bit away) is coming faster and faster with every release. It is the subjective speed threshold, where the Human is the bottleneck. Where the computer can do anything the user can so fast - that the computer is then waiting on input from the user.

All input from a human comes in little spurts - and therefore will be processed by the CPU before the next batch comes in.

The point is that there is a somewhat finite desktop market incentive for faster processors, in that, for the average user - there will be a time, sooner than later, where they find that the machine they have is fast enough, featureful enough and big enough (storgage) to meet their (rather long term) needs.

everyday math stuff

[sstory]

There are computer labs at NCSU with old Sparcs (running SunOS 5.7, for all you geeks in the audience) which seem to be practically equivalent, in ordinary usage terms, to P 200's. There's a huge difference, HUGE, between Maple or Mathematica on these systems, and on the PIII 500 in my office. But there's very little difference, it's almost unnoticeable, between those programs on my office computer, and the same thing on my home computer, an Athlon 1200 mhz. And I've used mathematica on a 1.7 ghz Dell in our office, and again, there's no practical difference. Maybe computing a bunch of Fourier coefficients takes 8 mins on the 500, and 4 mins on the 1.7.

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.

Is Intel going to add a performance-rating?

[puppetman]

"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.

Re:Overclock it

[ncc74656]

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).

...and it's probably still slower than a dual Athlon MP rig. I compared a 2.8-GHz P4 rig we recently built at work to the dual 1900+ in my office (both with 512 MB of DDR and 15krpm SCSI hard drives). On a TMPGEnc MPEG-2 encoding job from a Huffyuv-compressed AVI, the dual Athlon ran 41% faster (7:56 for the Athlon vs. 13:21 for the P4). Cost for the two was about the same. Dual Xeons would be faster still, but one 2.6-GHz Xeon costs more than double what you'd pay for a pair of Athlon MP 2200s (so sez Pricewatch). Dual P4s? Forget it...Intel doesn't support it.

Re:Personal PC's

[be-fan]

..sigh... Every time one of these articles come out. First, if you can't tell the difference between 2GHz and 600MHz, you're dead. My 2GHz machine is nowhere near fast enough, even just running Konqueror and KMail. Second, more people need the power than you'd think. I write C++ code with some very heavily templated libraries. G++ eats my processor for lunch (I've got enough RAM that it's not HD-bound). Add to that 3D rendering (messing around with Blender for some 3D work) and numerical computation (simulations, Octave, Mathematica) and I probably won't ever have enough CPU. And I don't even do gaming!

Re:No FUD, just Facts

[Proudrooster]

Accuse me of FUD all you want, but examine the evidence for yourself.

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 .NET .. Looks like PC Mag has some integrity.

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.

Fastest chip ever?

[tshak]

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.