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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..."
Perhaps now we will see a new wave of marketing, measuring and such from Intel, although I doubt it.
/.ers with their honesty.
They have made a tremendous amount of money due to the ignorance of "moms and dads" who assume that bigger numbers mean faster computer.
They are more typically going to say "yea, but this is for laptops only, they are different" and still focus the race on ghz. I mean, you can't blame them. their job is to make money for their shareholders, not impress
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
The Centrino is not a single processor but a "mobile technology" including microprocessor, wireless networking, etc.
Processor is a misnomer.
So now Intel is removing a laptop user's ability to easily upgrade his/her wireless capability...say from 802.11b to .11g?
I wonder how easy it will be for PC Cards, etc to override the CPU's wireless functionality....
The bottom line is "Do you want to exchange performance for battery life?" and "Do you not want to have to purchase a wireless card (sd/pcmcia)?" For some, that may be appealing, however, not a big enough reason for thoes of us who would hopefully know better. I for one enjoy a snappy machine.
One has to realize that the new chip competes directly with the Transmetia Processors, not with Intel P4. So instead of looking at it as a step back 1.5 Ghz, look at it as an increase of 600 Mhz over the 1 Ghz Crusoe. I wonder what the will market it as (fade to daydream of "Intel-Pentium-4-Mobile-Hyperthreading-Altra-Mobil e")
Vector processors are much cooler running than conventional processors. They are much better at 3d graphics . Why has the computer industry dropped the ball on vector processing ? If more more effort were done on parallel/matrix computing then we wouldn't be worrying about cooling for everything from laptops to supercomputers. Even US. scientists are jealous of the japanese NEC vector supercomputer. Price to performance ratio for the computer can not be beat by US computers. We dropped the ball on electronics , soon cars and soon high performance computing.
What exactly are they doing to achieve these goals, other than slowing the ship down to compensate for the fact that it's a powersucking hog?
Two of those (battery life, thinner and lighter) are essentially the same thing inasmuch as Intel can affect them. The other is basically contradictory to them. So I can have it fast, small, and low-power? And the North Bridge is in Brooklyn? Sold!
This is a chip to acknowledge that they have nothing to compete on the Transmeta, AMD, and PPC level. Intel-powered notebooks will continue to suck (power, and generally).
Actually, you'll need to get one of the new 3.06 GHz P4s; it's power dissipation is above and beyond any Athlon. The highest an Athlon ever got was ~74 W max; the current P4 has an average of 81 W and a max of ~105 W.
5
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=5000036
AMD said several months ago they are getting out of the megahertz race and focusing on application of technology, meaning doing more with the die space instead of doing faster. Intel is now taking back leadership by...being sure to have a slower chip than AMD that does still MORE with the die space.
The speed race is over. You will continue to hear about who has the fastest, but it will be more "gee whiz" stuff than "I need that" because you just won't need it. Before long you won't be able to even FIND a retail desktop computer that runs over 2Ghz, and when you open the hood it will have ONE chip in it, right in the center of the logic board. In the end probably everything sold as a desktop system will have power consumption below that of today's laptop computers, power supplies the size of a deck of cards, no fan, 1.8 inch HDD, wireless input on all I/O (including the monitor) and the whole thing will fit in a pocket and run for an hour on a built-in backup UPS battery, thus finally bluring the distinction between what is a portable computer and what is not.
Think iPod on steroids, and yes you will use your "portable desktop Pee Cee" to listen to MP3s most of the time, using a wireless headset.
That's just the way it is going folk, because with all the price pressure that is where the profit will be. Besides, all that sounds tre kewl to me!
Give it...what? Two years? Now that the race has turned to "less is more" it might not even take that long. And to the winner go the spoils.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
stunning. If AMD had released something that performs as well as their top end desktop processor but at half the clock speed, would it have been billed here as a "slower" processor? I don't think so.
No kidding. I am so sick of all that Intel FUD and fanboy cheerleading.
Say it with me, ladies: "A Pentium 4 without proper cooling will die just as quickly as an Athlon without proper cooling."
...but I can't be the only girl who'd rather get hardware than flowers or chocolate.
Can I?
...they're trying to be more like Apple! What a GENIUS plan!
No, seriously...where is this going to get them? They've been flaunting the MHz myth like mad for at least 5 years now. Is the fact that the processor is "more efficient" going to get those who make purchasing decisions based solely upon processor "speed" (in MHz) to buy this new chip?
Somehow, I think this will ultimately lead to the downfall of the MHz myth. With CISC and RISC being so neck-and-neck (at different MHz though) in terms of relative speed, there will be a "revolution" of sorts. Bare with me here...
This revolution I speak of is simply that of measuring the actual real-world processor speed -- not just clock speed. People will soon realize that the MHz measurement isn't all it's talked-up to be. Apple, IBM, and Motorola have known this since 1994 with the introduction of the RISC-based PowerPC processor architecture. No wonder Intel (in all of it's wisdom) is finally catching up.
The future brings savvier PC purchasers who see MHz as just that -- clock speed. It will be interesting to see what happens if this trend continues...
$DEITY bless $NATION
When are we going to get that blasted 'turbo' button back? You know - the one that reduces processor speed so we can play Space War at sane speeds.
Oh... wait...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
There is no new pipelining. There are no new instructions. The CPU is tightly coupled with a video chip, but that's usually not a productivity bottleneck. The CPU is also tightly coupled with a WiFi chip, but that's usually not a productivity bottleneck either. So I guess I'm missing the point. Are we talking ANY performance/productivity gains or simply battery life improvements?
I would really like to see this aggressive power management available for non-laptop boards.
I currently use a VIA C3 running at 800MHz for my Linux server doing a bunch of tasks ( firewall, VPN, WWW, SMTP, FTP, NTP, Samba, NFS, MySQL/PHP, Answering Machine, etc.). The C3 is about as fast as a Celeron 500MHz. But, it uses very little power and runs cool enough to use only a passive heat sink. With a quiet Seagate Barracuda hard drive, and a quiet power supply fan, the system is nearly silent - which is great in my small apartment.
I would like to be able to use a processor that idled down 90% of the time when it was doing very little. For those few tasks that need CPU horsepower, it could go up to it's 1.6GHz potential, and turn on cooling fans if needed.
Power / Heat / Noise savings apply to the desktop too!
IMHO, one of the better reasons for getting an old G3 imac at this late date is that the entire machine (including monitor) draws a maximum of 150 W. The new one is 130 or 160 depending on the screen size. Not too shabby...
/ www.apple.com/imac/specs.html
http://www.apple.com/imac/g3/specs.html
http:/
> Intel's big problem is the binary compatibility they've stuck with since the
:)
2 .2/0107 .html
1 98 .html
:)
> 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.
I think you mean "instruction set". Intel changes their chipset like they do their underwear (that is, frequently, though perhaps not as frequently as the analogy implies).
> But then, if you can successfully market clock speed as the sole
> measure of performance, why bother offering something better?
Yeah, that's annoying. I always hated how the clock frequency is always called the clock "speed". I mean, it's not in physical motion. You don't call the cycling of your car engine its "piston speed", or whatever. That is perhaps a trivial sore point for me.
Still, the current version of the P4 is not bad at all. It is arguably an equal or superior microarchitecture to AMD's K7 family, though it's difficult to really make that determination solidly, since Intel has a six to eight month process technology advantage over AMD, and that gives them a frequency advantage somewhat independent of the base microarchitecture.
The Windows user in me is torn between getting an SMT P4 or a K8 ("Athlon 64", I think they're thinking of calling it) at the end of this year. The K8's on-die memory controller should give a boost to some of my operations, but the P4's SMT functionality would likely benefit me, as I have a tendency to run lots of apps at once (I make most power users look like AOL newbies in some respects, heh). Certain cpu intensive programs (like SmartPAR) that eat up all my time might run better on the AMD setup, while other programs (like WinRAR) will likely enjoy the benefit of the Intel box's higher raw memory bandwidth and cpu frequency. I guess that's a "wait-and-see" type of thing.
The Linux user in me is a steadfast AMD supporter. This has nothing to do with any "WinTel Conspiracy(TM)" or whatever; it simply appears to be the case that any AMD chip is substantially faster than an equivalently rated Intel chip in most Linux-based benchmarks. I am a little interested in seeing how much of a benefit the SMT gives to gcc, but it would take a lot to convince my Linux side to move over. The Athlon XP 2700+ seems faster in Linux than the 2.8GHz Pentium 4, and that's without the added benefits that the Barton brings to AMD's K7 core. Heck, that little Linux daemon (hrm, or maybe it's the FreeBSD dude) inside my head keeps telling me to drool about how much faster than Barton the K8 will be given its advantage of far lower memory latency (due to that on-die memory controller), 64-bit registers, doubled GP register space and those HyperTransport connections. I keep telling myself that only the memory latency and extra registers would make a difference, and even with that compiling probably won't be that much better per clock than with the K7, but even with minimal improvements, K8 should be faster than K7 in compiling, and since K7 is much faster than the Northwood/P4 in compiling, the K8 should be substantially faster at the task. Except for that unknown variable of SMT. I'm going to have too look and see how much it can add to the fray. In addition, it is not unlikely that the P4 will simply scale in frequency by a greater degree than AMD in the next ten months.
Oh, new data:
www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/021
Allegedly, you get something like a 15-20% increase. Not bad.
www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0212.2/0
But this guy is getting some sort of substantial decrease in performance due cache problems between threads (I guess that there's more cache misses since twice as many threads needs twice as much data).
Interesting.
Damnit. Why can't companies give me this stuff for free so that I can test it all for myself? I'm a coder, and I have to know what hardware can render my code AFAP!
But it's all fun, anyway, this talking about microprocessor technology.
-JC
one of the coolest things I read about banias/centrino was this IDF demo, where it was drawing only 7 watts while doing 30fps mpeg4 encoding, then dropping down to 1 watt when it was done.