Slashdot Mirror
Intel's P4 3GHz w/ 800MHz Bus & Canterwood Chips
OldGrayDave writes "Intel steps out today with their new Pentium 4 3GHz chip that runs on an
800MHz System Bus. They've also released "Canterwood", the chipset chipset
for the P4 that supports Dual Channel DDR400 memory, native Serial ATA 150, RAID 0,
AGP8X, USB2.0 and a host of other bells and whistles.
Check out this showcase and performance analysis at HotHardware, to see what
all the buzz is about. Intel distances themselves again from the Athlon." Or, you can read more at Hardavenue, mbreview, Tom's Hardware, hardware unlimited, or The Tech Report. I dunno...hardware gets faster, bus gets faster. Tide goes in, tide goes out.
I think as long as they can convince people that a new computer is needed, software doesn't really have to need the power.
Plus new computers always seem much faster, because when people get them they don't have all that spyware and trojans running on it yet to slow them down.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
*Sigh*, this argument comes up every time there's a new processor out.
There may be no pressing mainstream need for these processor's insane speeds now, but there are two things:
1) Niche markets which will utilize the higher speeds (video editing, photo editing, music production, scientific computing) and
2) the Future. Software will always find a way to use that extra power. We call it "bloat" normally, but then we usually forget about that and accept it as the norm and shun everyone who's running less than 2Ghz.
Better now? Move along
Alternatively, one could try a reply based on business models. Intel is an R&D-driven company. They don't want to be the next Zilog. If they don't continually introduce new products, that's what they will become, and it's really hard work competing in a low-margin commodity business.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Why would there be an app that would require a processor that doesn't exist? Someone has to create that processor before apps expect people to have it.
The average consumer doesn't need anything about 1 ghz but people (and professionals) who want to play cutting edge games, do some 3d modeling, video editing will love this.
Someday, I'll be able to write a highly graphical game like Doom 3 in a beautiful language like Python. :)
Really, I think that higher powered computers allow programmers to write software more easily. When you need a piece of software, and an in-house programmer can write it in a few hours rather than a few weeks, but only if you have a 3 GHz machine to run it on... that's muchly worth while. It's possible.
That really depends on what kind of work you do. At home where all I do is code and surf the internet, my current P3-700 is chugging along nice and fine.
However I have another rig I use for video encoding, usually mastering old VHS and V8 tapes to DivX or DVD and in that setup I need all the speed I can get.
Just out of curiosity why is there only 2 SATA controllers on all these new motherboards? No room? Too expensive? No need? Whats the point in having SATA RAID with only 2 devices? I'm looking at building a new UBER-Fileserver for my home and want to use SATA but I want at least 4 maybe 8 HD's in the thing.
This P.I.G. will walk on the water, This P.I.G. will walk on the sea, This P.I.G. will walk whereever he wants.
No matter how many MHz you have, broken Java code, lame screen redraws in your browser, compiles set to use "make -j4" and countless other programming adventures can pin the CPU at 100%. I want good, cheap, 2 or 4 way SMP on my desktop. I don't want one app to wait for another, and I don't want to have to wait for any of them. I switched to a dual Celeron board some years ago, and there's really no going back once you've gone duallie.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The value of these new processors can only be seen after the next few releases... the prices tend to drop, and thus making it more affordable.
The speed increments nowadays are much less steep than it was in the mid 90s.
So now is actually the time to purchase that 2.5GHz processor that you were drooling over about six months ago.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
Gigabytes of bloat in software is not born of incompetence. Well, maybe a little. Programmers developing that software keep making software easier to write by adding new technologies and developing new programming libraries. For example, Gnome and KDE have grown in size as libraries like gconf have been added to make software easier to develop.
Windows 3.11 was small and from a user's point of view it may have done 95% of the things that average people do with computers today. But no software developer in their right mind would prefer to write new software for Windows 3.11 rather than for Windows XP. Since those days, common libraries like MS's foundation classes have become more bug-free, new common controls have added functionality to the most basic of objects that previously would take days to write yourself, and technologies like COM and ActiveX have permitted modular and reusable components where previously code would have to be re-written and re-developed for every application.
Now we can test serial ATA to see how good it REALLY is
And we'll continue to see that... shocker... it doesn't make a bit of difference.
The limitation is not on the interface (parallel vs serial ATA), or on the bus (PCI vs insert_chipset_bus_here), but on the drives. There are no drives available that come anywhere close to saturating ATA/100 or ATA/133, so SATA/150 isn't going to help much. Ok, yeah, it'll help for the microsecond that you're reading from cache instead of from the drive itself, but that time period is so absurdly short it's not even statistical noise.
The advantages to SATA aren't in the bus speed arena... the improved cabling, hot swapping, and simplicity of hookup is what it's all about. I would've killed for SATA this weekend after spending an hour fiddling with 3 IDE drives and a CD-RW to get their master/slave jumpers correct (turned out that one was only happy with the master drive as cable select and the slave CD-ROM as slave -- anything else wouldn't be detected. Joy!).
As far as the number of channels go - 2 may be ok for now, but it's going to be deeply inadequate in the future. I'd hope that systems start appearing with 4 channels in 6 months, and 8 within a couple years. By which time standard ATA connectors may be gone entirely. (For more realistic estimates, change 6 mos to 1 year and 2 years to 5 years).
I'd like to see speed/power specs advertised, and not just for laptops.
-mse
Fiat Lux.
Java / C# / VB => lazy programmer..
:) You can always profile an app.
But remember, lazy programmers make good programmers. VB's simplicity means business types don't need to "bother" specializing in programming to perform advanced macros (or crappy web sites).
Java/C# is a more robust language than c/c++ (in my opinion), but allows us to lazily ignore resource management (which has it's pros and cons, but mostly cons), and also is designed to be interpreted (even jit's can't fully transcend the interpreted dynamic loadabled runtime API).
Further, "lazy" also applies to the newer and newer graphical abstraction routines, which go back and forth between enabling more graphics cards to work with the advanced graphics of new games and slowing the begeezus out of our systems. These abstractions are mostly because software developers don't want to rewrite their nifty effects to work properly on every graphics card.
Abstraction is all fine and good, but it's only there for lazy purposes. And the cost is almost always performance.
Poor programming is when we choose lazy solutions over specialized solutions when only cost is the knowledge of an API. (e.g. applying VB/Perl/Java to every problem)
That being said, given that human resources are expensive, I'll take faster machines and slower programs any day.
-Michael