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?

Re:What value are these new processors?

[bmongar]

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.

Re:What value are these new processors?

[orpheus2000]

*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

Re:What value are these new processors?

[Morgahastu]

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.

Re:What value are these new processors?

[Lao-Tzu]

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.

Re:What value are these new processors?

[oingoboingo]

Why would there be an app that would require a processor that doesn't exist?

I don't know, ask Sun...they're the ones who invented Java. It's still waiting for the first batch of 10GHz CPUs to roll off the production line to be useful (drum roll/splash)

They need to produce a premium product...

[Goonie]

This comment has been made every time a new processor comes out, and the usual reply is that there are plenty of applications that still require more CPU performance (which there certainly are), and sooner or later there will be one which is sufficiently compelling that Joe Sixpack will upgrade.

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.

Now We Can Test Serial ATA

[MBCook]

Now we can test serial ATA to see how good it REALLY is. Before now it's always been an add-in, either a card or built onto the motherboard. Now that it's built into the chipset it's not at the mercy of the PCI bus, where it has to deal with your soundcard, your tv tuner, that firewire card you bought, and everything else. This will also bring about more SATA drives now that it's going to be on so many motherboards (I know many have them now, but this is an Intel chipset. This will push everyone to do it if they're not already).

That said, I'm disapointed that you only get 2 SATA channels. Remember, with SATA it's only one device per channel, unlike parallel ATA.

Re:Now We Can Test Serial ATA

[shepd]

Not in this case. The block diagram clearly shows the SATA controller gets 150 MB/s bandwidth, 12% more than the PCI bus.

Re:Now We Can Test Serial ATA

[Zathrus]

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 want cheap SMP, not more MHz

[Gothmolly]

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.

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.

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.

3 GHz Chip Delayed

[lorax]

News.com just updated their article on the chip to state that "a possible problem with the 3GHz Pentium 4, discovered at the last minute, forced the company to delay the chip late on Sunday."

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:400MHz FSB on Athlons is trivial

[gamorck]

If you have a dual box I would recommend using "-j3" instead of "-j2". Typically "-j2" is the default for single CPU systems. Having make create one more thread than the number of processors you have allows you to make more efficient use of processor power. For example on my Dual Xeon with Hyperthreading turned on (looks like 4 cpus to linux and windows) I use "-j5" for maximum processor usage during the compilation process. When I turn off hyperthreading I typically use "-j3". I've found that these settings work very very well especially on Gentoo where you spend a lot of time compiling.

Cheers,

J

Tom's Hardware article

[panurge]

I read the article (pause for shock)
All that stuff about huge speed increases and sackloads of extra memory bandwidth, reduced clock cycles, RAID...but when you eventually get to the performance testing it seems very little faster than top end current boards. Perhaps if you have a daily compute-intensive job that is slowly growing and currently takes 23hours, you would get excited, but as a developer I guess I might gain a few minutes off my build times (and that's staring into space thinking time anyway.)

I'm not knocking progress: the lower voltage and the ability to use a 4-layer board, plus the serial ATA on-board support look nice, but the number of people with more money than sense needed to get a fast R&D payback isn't that high at the moment.

Or is this a cunning plan to make money through selling compute farms to rogue states that have just decided they need WMDs really fast?

Chipset

[devnullkac]

They've also released "Canterwood", the chipset chipset for the P4...

I wonder... How many chips could a chipset set if a chipset could set chips?

Whine, whine

[Sycraft-fu]

"But my 8088 scrolls text just fine! Why would anyone want something more powerful?"

Because there is neat new shit that takes more power. Receant example: HD multimedia. The Windows Media 9 HD demos kill a P4 1.6 and really take at least a P4 2.4 to play well. Means that if you have a 2.4, which is pretty good these days, that is about ALL your system can do, not much room for bacground tasks.

Or how about speech recognition? There are some nifty new technologies in speech recognition the integrate it better with text parsing for far more accurate recoginition. One problem: they take loads more power than normal speech recog, which takes a bit itself. Given that ideally this should happen in the background as a normal part of the OS, more power become critical.

Or how about better game AI? I am so sick of 3d bots that get "good" by becomming aimbots or RTS AI that attacks you in teh same predictable way every time. I want smarter AI. Well, to do that it is going to take more processing power. Teh smarter the AI, the more CPU time it needs. all this while still doing all the other calcuilations a game needs (like physics and game logic).

We are not even close to expending the need for more computer power. As power grows, we'll simply find new and creative way to use it that were not before possable.

After all, my 8088 scrolled text like a champ, but I much prefer my P4.