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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.
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.
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).