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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!
Intel's Pentium 4 3.06GHz: Hyper-Threading on Desktops
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.
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
...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
It runs so hot that it has to be cooled by the blood of a virgin every hour.
tcd004
--Mike--
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."
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
Hey! New Intel marketing hype!
No Pain, No Gain!
Feel the burn!
Be the burn!
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
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.
;-)
How's that working out for you?
I write in my journal
...when they come out with a 4.77 GHz version.
Intel should run an ad where a family sits around the (Apple) computer in coats and earmuffs, shaking from the cold.. everything blue, with icicles (sp).
.. Keeps You Warm! (tm)
Then switch to a shot of a family in a cozy room, all basking around the glow of a warm intel machine..
Intel
Hey, those marketers can sell anything, right?
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.
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.
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 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.
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'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.
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.
"Ooh... they have the internet on computers now!"
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
I have two dual processor machines and they run at 3.2G's but I don't think they would fare all that well against a single processor machine running at 3.06G since not everything can use both and it doesn't seem like all that much uses both effectively.
Actually, the hyperthreading only helps in apps that support hyperthreading. Your dual processors are hyperthreaded. So any hyperthreading app that takes advantage of the P4 will also take advantage of your dual processor setup.
I imagine two different processors would be much better than 1 hyperthreaded processor.
Also, they only mention a 25% performance increase. Dual processors running hyperthreaded apps have at least a 60% performance increase. However, I bet this P4 would beat your machine in non-hyperthreaded apps.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
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?
...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.
Yes, kernel 2.4.something apparently supports it. The only Microsoft OS which supports hyperthreading properly is Windows XP. Windows 2000 and below doesn't utilize it.
So it's either Linux or XP, as far as I know.
-- Jim
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.
"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.
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.
If you do a google search on optimal pipeline depth you'll find some good results.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
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.'"
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.
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.
And here is the link to Intel's view on this...
[alk]
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
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?!
``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.