Slashdot Mirror
Intel Announces New, Slower, Chip
kshkval writes "According to Business Week, Intel is marketing the Centrino, a 1.6 Ghz chip that is slower than previous laptop processors from Intel, but does more. Hey, isn't that what Apple and AMD have gotten so much guff about? The worm turns..."
I mean, you can't blame them. their job is to make money for their shareholders, not impress /.ers with their honesty.
Yup. Just like Apple, AMD, IBM, Oracle, Sun, Motorola, Microsoft, RedHat, and just about every other corporation except maybe Ben & Jerry's.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Looking at the press release, Intel outlined three priorities:
o extended battery life
o thinner and lighter form factors
o outstanding mobile performance
This is a chip to compete on the Transmeta level, if you will. The message is "If you want better battery life and acceptable performance, buy this."
The megahertz myth is irrelevant here.
You think a 1.6Ghz machine isn't snappy? Kids these days...
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Before, the chant was "High MHz good! Higher MHz better! GHz is the best!" Now, since the general public is no longer susceptible to the pimply-faced kid at CompUSA who convinces ma & paw that a 2.4GHz is indeed 17% faster than a 2.0GHz, Intel needs to shift gears and change their tune.
The really sad part about the entire remarketing campaign is that they will get away with it. The general public has a very short memory for these kinds of stunts -- just look at how well Microsoft is doing after countless screwings over of the populace. Windows ME anyone?
The thing to remember is that with enough marketing funds, you can indeed have success even selling snow to eskimos.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
Cool, what will we get in 40 years? Do we get the ENIAC back? Now _that_ is what I call a computer. Woohoo!
I realize you meant this as a joke, but Moore's Law talks about transistors, not speed. It's just that historically they've tended to go hand in hand.
Not quite. Moore's law correlates to gigahertz generally, but the actual statement was that the number of transistors on a chip would double every 18 months or so. More transistors means more power, but not necessarily more gigahertz.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
"I for one enjoy a snappy machine."
I would agree with that comment if we were talking about a desktop machine. But we're not, we're talking about laptops, and they're more specialized than desktops.
Laptops are:
1.) Very mobile
2.) Very Powerful
3.) Very efficient with batteries
The catch is that you can only pick two of the three.
See my point?
What a load of fluff. Is there even anything new here? A slower chip which uses less power - shocking! Bundled technology that's already being bundled by every single vendor - wow! I can't even tell from either link whether there is one single thing that's new about the chip other than its slowed core - the retained bandwidth could just be because the FSB is still the same speed.
Beyond that, who writes these ridiculous press releases? "Intel Corporation said today" - yeah, to ITSELF. "CES Virtual Press Kit" really is descriptive of the press these days.
The Business Week writer tries, but can't help the fact that it's a non-story. "Intel's carrot is a new logo" - huh? In what possible way is this a carrot? You could at least argue that the existing Intel logo is recognised, though widely mocked. What possible benefit is there in the new one to a vendor? Another damn sticker on every device? And for this they have to buy a bundle of three things they otherwise could have sourced separately.
It all seems a pathetic smokescreen way of saying "our competitors were right all along - everything we've said against them was bullshit". Also "we're having trouble moving some of this stuff, so you can't buy this less-useless CPU without it - oops well that would be monopolistic, so you CAN buy it separately, you just can't have the logo! By the way, AMD sucks!".
Just in case anyone was confused by the name, this is the processor that was codenamed Banias. Depending on when this product is publicly available, this could be the final straw for transmeta. Transmeta's Astro looks like a great product, but if the stronger Intel has the first mover advantage, Transmeta may be SOL.
I can't tell if the Centrino logo looks like a pink triangle or a broken heart.
There is a huge market for slower chips. Slower == less power. Less power is great for mobile computing where the foremost concern is battery life. The XScale is a good example of where slower is better. Why don't they just shrink 400mhz Pentiums and cram them into pocket pc's? Because the XScale uses a tiny fraction of the power that any Pentium uses.
Don't forget also that cooling is becoming a limiting factor in CPU design. Not everybody wants their computer to sound like a jet turbine or have water running through it. As "embedded" CPUs like the ARM and XScale get faster, you may start to see them in more traditionally "desktop" applications. Electricity is expensive and low power computers can save money.
And I still don't understand why everyone equates CLOCK RATE with SPEED. Do people think high frequency EM waves travel faster than slower ones, or something? There are have been MANY examples over the last 10 years of CPUs that get more done at a lower clock rate.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Intel's big problem is the binary compatibility they've stuck with since the 80x86 (more or less). Binary compatibility was important because so much programming was necessary at the assembler level that changing the chipset was prohibitive. This has kept a bad chipset in commission long, long after it should have died.
But then, if you can successfully market clock speed as the sole measure of performance, why bother offering something better?
It seems that now, Intel is attempting to drive into Apple's and others main selling point, that is a slower, more efficient computer. So why can't Apple do the opposite?
.85 for Intel's hyperthreading.
Take their new powermac line, the one with the dual 1.43 Ghz processors, and up the numbers in comparison with Intel's chips
Figuring a 20:7 ratio for operations per cycle between Intel and Apple, that comes out to about 2.85. Knock off
(1.43*2=[2.86])
Multiply that by about 1.5 due to the dual processors
(2.86*1.5=[4.29])
Hey Presto, if Apple advertised like that i'm pretty sure that they could sell more units, comprable to intel.
All I've heard over the last several years is that WiFi is inherently insecure, even with 128-bit encryption. From all of this it seems trivial to conclude that 802.11 wireless technology is inappropriate for secure networking.
And yet, Intel is rolling out notebooks which are, by default, insecure at the core of it's Architecture.
It seems very clear that there is really no interest by the Industries of America to support Computer Security in any inherently secure system. They will sell us crappy hardware that can't be made secure and then attempt to sell us extensive and expensive quantities of software to ensure that our inherently insecure computers pretend to be secure on the surface.
I would have hoped that someone in the industry would have not only figured it out, but embraced the idea of making something secure by design besides the *BSD's and Linux. But it seems that this concept is still the exclusive property of the Open Source movement and is not yet embraced by Corporate America.
When will the Open Source people start making, or specing out, their own hardware?
Let's consider the market for lighter laptops in general.
Most users will use these smaller form factor laptops with programs like Microsoft Office and for lighter-duty Internet access. The thing is that with this market in mind it's not neccessary to run the fastest CPU available, since business applications and Internet access doesn't require the latest and fastest computer hardware out there. A 1.6 GHz CPU laptop with Centrino technology with 512 MB of system RAM running even Windows XP Professional is far more than fast enough for the general smaller form factor laptop user.
With Centrino technology, laptop manufacturers can build extremely light (yet fully functional) laptops that are pretty much guaranteed to run with most software out there, yet have quite long battery life. Centrino technology is going to be bad news for Transmeta, that's to be sure.
I can just see the next generation of game requirements. :D
OS: No later than 3.1 windows
Internet Connection Speed: 2400 bps or lower
CPU: 486 or lower
etc.
Brilliant move. Now we know what they are gonna do with all that surplus outdated hardware