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.

Comments

What value are these new processors?

[The Briguy]

I have to wonder what the point is with some of these new faster processors. At this point, almost no applications can really take advantage of the fastest chips available. My sister uses a 500 MHZ machine at home, and as far as I can tell she has no real issues with its speed. I have to wonder if Intel is just shooting itself in the leg, spending needlessly large amounts on R&D to produce chips that no one actually needs. PS - FP?

Macintosh Processor Speeds

[masq]

This isn't meant as a troll, but I'm sure many of the more... sensitive ... Mac users will take it as such anyway.

This speed boost is great for the x86 world. Speed keeps getting better. Intel and AMD keep competing and leapfrogging each other to greater heights. My sorrow is that Apple's offerings really are *years behind* right now. I know, I know, speed doesn't matter when Macs are slower, but when Macs had the speed advantage, the Mac users claimed speed was all-important and there was no problem attacking the PC users based on their sorry speed. Mac users, like everyone else in the world it seems, aren't objective - if the PowerBook is thinner, they claim size (ahem) is important. When the PC world shows us the Superthin Vaio, we say that Size doesn't matter, it's how you use it (ahem again). And that's the problem; that's why Apple doesn't feel the need to force speed increases out of Moto and IBM to keep up with the Joneses - Mac users are so damn faithful, that they don't apply any market pressure to Apple to force them to compete! Instead, the "Mac Faithful" DEFEND Apple's weaknesses, allowing Apple to slack off in the processor department.

Next time a MacZealot defends Apple's 1 Ghz processors on a slow bus, tell him that he's NOT helping Apple. The way to help Apple is to absolutely demand faster processors, and threaten to switch to x86 if they don't deliver. If we give Apple a "Get out of Jail Free card" with regards to processor speed, we'll NEVER be competitive with Intel.

And yes, I've heard the RUMORS about the IBM chips. They'll still be far behind this, RISC or not.

Couple of thoughts.

[Glonoinha]

Someone else (Gothmolly) said 'I want cheap SMP, not more MHz.' earlier on. I thought about his reasoning for a while and have to suggest at least considering RAIC as a way to get cheap SMP. Redundant Array of Inexpensive Computers - similar in thought to the original purpose of RAID (RAI Drives) - use a few cheap pieces to get the same or better performance of one wickedly expensive piece of hardware.

Today, if you were to search around a little to scrounge up one of the 15% coupons floating around on the net (www.fatwallet.com for example) you could go to Dell and have a fully loaded system (Celeron 1.8GHz, 128M DDR266, 40G IDE, 8M onboard video, Intel Gigahertz NIC, 48xCD, keyboard and mouse) delivered to your house for $240 after rebate ($100 rebate but they are pretty good about paying them.) I think you can upgrade the hard drive to dual 80G drives (buy one get one free if you upgrade) for another $60, bringing the total price to $300. Add a $50 two port KVM (I use the Linksys, has build in cables) to your existing rig and now your monitor, keyboard and mouse can instantly switch between the two systems. Have a massive process that hogs the CPU, swap over to the other machine to do whatever you want while it runs. I have been doing this for a while and the ONLY drawback I have seen so far is not being able to cut and paste from one to the other. Other than that they are effectively one machine with two discrete workspaces.

As for the new hardware ... nice. Honestly though I am way more excited about the SATA/RAID 0 performance than I am the additional CPU horsepower. Sustained serial reads of 96MB/s and sustained serial reads of 86MB/s - not burst but sustained -:- DAMN. That is easily twice the performance of my current rig, possibly three times the performance. I care less about a CPU running 7% faster; I wouldn't even notice the extra 40fps on Quake3Arena going from 410fps to 450fps but the ability to move data back and forth to the hard drive three times as fast is going to make this one machine worth upgrading to.

IMHO the advances in hard drive performance are the real story here. Running the P4/3G on a 400FSB vs the old 333FSB is nothing compared to getting 3x the performance from the drive subsystem.

400MHz FSB on Athlons is trivial

[Brian Stretch]

I've reclocked my Athlon 1700+ (TBred core) to 8x202MHz (404MHz DDR) on my ASUS nForce2 chipset board, using a single Corsair PC3200C2 DIMM (yes, two DIMMs would be better, but they were too expensive at the time). It's just a matter of selecting the right BIOS settings. I left the voltage levels at their defaults. MemTest86 verifies that the memory is stable at that speed. Red Hat Linux runs until I need to reboot for the usual kernel/glibc upgrades. I went this this approach because I wanted to optimize the performence/power consumption balance, what with the machine running 24x7 and all.

Of course, tweaking speeds like this is not guaranteed to work, yadda yadda, but it generally does if you built your system right.

If you want serious firepower, build a dual Athlon box, which should cost no more than the uniprocessor P4 being reviewed. time make reports a bit over 9 minutes when building Wine with MAKEFLAGS=-j2 on my dual 2400+ (not overclocked). Nice, especially when you forget the --with-nptl switch the first time around (d'oh!).

Of course, next week, the Opterons ship, starting with Opteron DP 240's and 242's. It's unclear whether there will be cheap workstation motherboards available right away or just the seriously nice (and expensive) Newisys-designed 1U rackmount servers. It appears that AMD is going to use the Opterons to slap the high-end P4's around, saving the Athlon 64 until they want a low-to-midrange 64-bit desktop platform. I'm surprised the various hardware site reviewers haven't picked up on this.

Re:I want cheap SMP, not more MHz

[whig]

I think the "make -j4" example is a good example of using all your SMP processors for maximum performance, but not really why I prefer a dual system to a single processor. Frankly, one P4 3GHz is still gonna significantly outperform a dual 1.5GHz Xeon system even for this operation..

I have a dual Celeron 533 MHz at home, and while it's by no means a speed demon, I still prefer it to a single processor system of even 3GHz class.

The reason: No matter how processor intensive a background task I may be running, my computer continues to be smooth and usable. And if it's a long-running task, this is especially important. While it might be nice to be able to run the background job in an hour instead of six, if I cannot use my computer for that hour, I'm actually significantly more inconvenienced.

Yes, I could have two systems and a KVM, instead. But really, SMP is so much less cumbersome. And Intel's Hyperthreading does not provide this benefit, so the next system I'm hoping to get will be a dual Opteron.