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Intel 800 MHz FSB Processor Family Review

David writes "Techware Labs recently had the opportunity to spend some time with Intel's new 800 MHz front-side bus (FSB) processor family. The review includes a overview of the features in this processor family, Intel's new Springdale and Canterwood chipsets, and an analysis of processor scaling within this family. The article focuses on how the relationship between CPU and video card affect various aspects of performance."

31 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Enough! You insensitive clod! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I already feel bad enough having bought 5 486's at $2000 each. Now, my ebay auction to sell one for $10 got 0 bids. I mean, a 99.5% decerase in value is bad enough - you don't have to rub it in by telling me about the latest in computing!

  2. Spending some time with .... by watzinaneihm · · Score: 5, Informative

    Spending time is nice but This is the page I think they should have linked to .
    Basically in the review they compare different chips (2.4Ghz, 2.8Ghz) etc. against each other all with 800Mhz FSB

    --
    .ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
    1. Re:Spending some time with .... by crisco · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Heaven forbid they benchmark the CPUs against earlier P4s at the same clockspeeds. Or compare different memory technologies / mboard chipsets.

      Pages and pages of pretty graphs and charts all to tell us that yes, higher clock speeds mean higher performance.

      --

      Bleh!

  3. Bah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    In 1980 I had a 1.023 MHz Apple ][+ and I could type ~70 WPM. Intel is pushing 3+ GHz chips and I can still only type ~70 WPM.

    1. Re:Bah by KingDaveRa · · Score: 5, Funny

      Ah yes, but could you play an MP3, encode a movie, search for the cure for cancer andtype at ~70WPM?

    2. Re:Bah by verbatim_verbose · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well clearly you're upgrading the wrong parts. Go overclock your keyboard, silly.

    3. Re:Bah by Some+Dumbass... · · Score: 4, Funny

      In 1980 I had a 1.023 MHz Apple ][+ and I could type ~70 WPM. Intel is pushing 3+ GHz chips and I can still only type ~70 WPM.

      Clearly the solution to this problem is a benchmark-specific optimiation to your typing. Try typing just the word "I" and see how many wpm you can get...

  4. Tom's hardware had it first by nounderscores · · Score: 4, Informative

    Read all about it here

    ___________________________________
    The spiders are coming

  5. too much power != good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The more powerful the chips intel pushes the less effcient the coder becomes, i remember when i used to tweak my programs so they would run optimally on a slower machines, now a days its like you need 192mb and 500mhz for word processing. People need to get back to the old school days when a 486/66mhz and 4mb RAM was minumum. I can understand how games evolve and more power is needed, but it's not just games that have this high requirement these days.

    1. Re:too much power != good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The more powerful the chips intel pushes the less effcient the coder becomes, i remember when i used to tweak my programs so they would run optimally on a slower machines

      Yeah, I said that too when the PII came out. Sure there is always going to be bloat in code, especially in large projects. But you are more than welcome to go to ebay and get an 8088 or an Apple II and enjoy a machine that fits your computing needs (floppy drive or tape drive your pick).

      Me, I would like to have a computer fast enough to do things like audio/video editing, real time ogg encoding, or whatever. I surely would not mind buying a computer today thats 4x faster than these new P4s for about $1000. I'd find a need for it or enjoy the lack of bloat feeling, who cares?

      Although I have had 0 formal training in programming, one thing I've read and have incorporated into my coding is early optimization == bad. 1st write good code, then find out where the bottlenecks are (if any) and then optimize those bottlenecks. There are even great profiling tools out there to help you do these things.

    2. Re:too much power != good by Angry+White+Guy · · Score: 5, Funny

      Although I wholehartedly agree with your comment about the proliferation of inefficient coding styles, the additional power allows us to write higher abstraction languages, almost to the point of natural-language programming. More structure introduced into programming can only mean a shift to programming in english, and that can only mean less poor spelling on slashdot.

      I see it as win-win

      --
      You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
    3. Re:too much power != good by Tancred · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Some people need all the processing they can get. It's allowing some of us to do things we couldn't before. If you don't need it, don't buy it. And you can always stop buying bloatware and write your own software or optimize your favorite OS program.

    4. Re:too much power != good by drsmithy · · Score: 2, Interesting
      People need to get back to the old school days when a 486/66mhz and 4mb RAM was minumum.

      Why ?

  6. It'd be nice... by Mister+Black · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It'd be nice if they normalized all their charts with some current non 800FSB proc+board so I can see how much of an improvement there actually is.

    --

    You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
  7. Obligatory Pentium Jokes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Q. How many Pentium designers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
    A. 1.99999289345, but that's close enough for non-technical people.

    Q. The Pentium conforms to IEEE standards for floating point math. If you fly in an airplane designed using a Pentium, what's the correct pronounciation of IEEE?
    A. Aiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

    Q. What's another name for the Intel Inside sticker they put on PCs?
    A. The warning label.

  8. dualies by bloosqr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Anyone know why the dual xeon motherboards aren't flipping to 800mhz? I would think that a faster bus would make more of a difference on dual processor boxes. Currently the memory bus is at 2*266 = 533 and I think it will move to 667 either late this year or early next year. On the other hand, i've noticed iwill is now selling a dual xeon motherboard for $300 and the chips are not much more expensive than their "normal" equivalents. (Note I am talking about the dual processor xeon chips not the "made of pure gold" 4 processor xeon mp chips)

    -bloo

    1. Re:dualies by doormat · · Score: 2, Informative

      They will be in early 2004 it seems...

      http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9823

      --
      The Doormat

      If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
    2. Re:dualies by bloosqr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Ahh the 266*2 was wishful thinking :). You are right about its 133*4, apologies about that.

      My understanding is that xeon mp line is for their
      4-way based motherboards. The main advantage is they have a meg of cache on them. But the normal processorshave 512k the same as the new p4's I believe.

      The xeon mp motherboards are $2k and the processors are about $2k each (pricewatch 1.6ghz/1meg cache i.e made of gold :)

      In any case the normal xeon dual systems are actually not that much more than buying a 875pe
      motherboard and processor. Btw here is the road map I found on the inquirer. Apparantly the xeon mp's are going up to 2.8ghz/2 megs of cache and the normal xeons are going up to 3.06/1 meg of cache and selling for $700.

      Here's the weird part, while it looks like intel skipped 667 fbs for the PIV line, the xeon line will "ramp up" to 667 early next year.

      In anycase I'm probably going to build a "normal" xeon/iwill running at ~2.66 which comes out to really not much more than a normal PIV/865/875 series. The selling of 800mhz memory/bus speeds on the PIV line while keeping the xeon line at 533/667 makes no sense to me. I was going to wait until a new set of mbs/chipset came out for the xeons but it doesn't look it will happen.

      -bloo

    3. Re:dualies by akuma(x86) · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Multiprocessor bus speeds and CPU frequencies always lag behind uniprocessor systems. It takes much longer to validate multiprocessor boards when compared to a uniprocessor system. This is because the number of things that can go wrong goes up exponentially with the number of CPUs on the board. The typical customers of multiprocessor systems value this sort of reliability even more than performance.

  9. You know it's time to upgrade... by splerdu · · Score: 5, Funny

    When the new processor's FSB is higher than your rig's CPU clock =(

  10. Buy the 2.4 by wpmegee · · Score: 5, Informative

    The 2.4c will be finding a home in my box soon because of it's amazing overclocking.

    At this forum (click on Intel cpus) almost everyone has successfully overclocked theirs over 3Ghz on air, with most hitting 3.2 or 3.4 (and don't forget a 1 Ghz fsb).

    A popular motherboard to go with it is Abit's IC-7 with the i875 chipset. The processor and motherboard are just $180 and $145 respectively over at Newegg, so don't waste your money on 3.0s.

  11. No Athlon XP benchmarks? by Alereon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What good is benchmarking the new P4-C processors without comparing them to Athlon XPs, or even older P4s? Really, you can just multiply the performance of a P4-C 3.0Ghz by 0.8 to get a guesstimate of the performance differences within the family; what really matters is how they perform in comparison with the competition.

  12. Not the best article ... by vorwerk · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've been planning to upgrade my computer at the end of this month, and have been keeping a pretty close eye on the 865/875 motherboard and chip performance reviews. This article didn't really enlighten me as much as the following Tom's Hardware reviews:

    here

    and

    here

  13. Actually 200Mhz QDR [also, bits vs. bytes] by Alereon · · Score: 5, Informative

    The FSB on a P4-C is actually clocked at 200Mhz, but data is transferred four times per clock cycle, boosting the effective bandwidth to equal that of an 800Mhz FSB. Latencies are, however, still equal to that of a 200Mhz FSB.

    I believe the problem with your calculation is that you calculated that the bus is 8 bytes wide. 8 bytes is 64 bits, the standard bus width on modern systems.

  14. Re:On Performance... by Pulzar · · Score: 4, Informative

    That article showed that lower latency doesn't mean higher bandwidth (and this is only true if your original latency is low enough, mind you!), but it didn't consider overall performance. Latency has indeed an impact on the performance -- look at Tom's Hardware article on performance improvements when Intel's PAT is enabled. All PAT does is lower latency by 2 cycles.

    --
    Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
  15. Re:um what?! by kramer2718 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Bus Speed IS more important than processor speed. The bus is what keeps the CPU supplied with data from the memory. If you have a very slow bus it doesn't matter how fast your CPU is, it will have to wait on memory accesses.

    Smart caching can keep values in the cache that will be accessed frequently and smart compiling can execute the code in an efficient sequence (so that a lot of memory accesses can be done at once), but even still the gap between bus/memory performance and CPU performance 200/400/800 MHz vs 1/2/3 GHz is so great that this still slows down execution quite a bit.

  16. Comparison ? by Elie+De+Brauwer · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What is really missing in the article is the comparision betwoon other cpu's running at 533 and/or 400 MHz. How can one interprete the benchmark results if there is no comparison to another product ? It's like saying that something is 600.1 gigaquats without defining a gigaquat.

  17. Re:Ha! by Schugy · · Score: 3, Informative

    AMD has Opteron and Athlon 64 with Ultra Low Latancy controllers. Previews say that performance often is not a matter of maximum bandwith (3,2GB/s Athlon 64 and 6,4GB/s Opteron) and the Athlon 64 performs just like a P4 xxxxC with FSB 800 in memory dependent benchmarks like q3a. Have fun :-)

  18. Intel Won't Upgrade Xeon FSB by Hiro2k · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Anandtech

    Read the article at anadtech. It's the roadmap for Intel. And discusion of all the processor currently in the market. They Discuss why the Xeon isn't getting the nice FSB upgrade even though they need it the most.

    From a performance standpoint, things make even less sense once we start looking at Intel's plans for the Xeon MP line for 4-way configurations. Intel's Xeon MPs will continue to use a 400MHz FSB through the first half of 2004, even as the processors reach speeds as high as 2.60GHz. Intel's reasoning behind this is mostly to allow for a single upgrade path without forcing enterprise customers to upgrade their motherboards as frequently as we have to on the desktop side, but it's clear that the performance of the processors will be limited by FSB bandwidth. Remember that Intel's MP solutions rely on a shared bus protocol, meaning that in a 4-way Xeon MP server all four processors must share the same 400MHz FSB. This essentially quadruples the FSB bandwidth requirements of the server, and the Xeon MP happens to be the processor that will have the least amount of FSB bandwidth out of all of Intel's enterprise CPUs.
  19. Re:Fixed link and more information by Alereon · · Score: 2, Informative

    No modern CPU will continue to operate through a catastrophic cooling failure. The P4 will crash when it throttles below 25% (errata), and will completely shutdown if the heatsink is removed. The P3 will burn up without a heatsink, unless the motherboard shuts it down (I don't know of any motherboards that do this). An Athlon XP will be shut down by the motherboard before damage occurs (ideally). Regardless, what possible set of circumstances could occur that would cause your heatsink to come off your processor without destroying it or the motherboard in the process?

    THG's infamous video was clearly faked, or at least misleadingly edited. The P3 was shown running at 38C after it crashed, which is lower than it would run WITH A PROPERLY OPERATING COOLER. The P4 was also shown clocking back up to full speed immediately after the heatsink was merely SET on top of the processor, this is completely impossible. The processor would have shutdown due to the temperature it was running at, and regardless it would have taken at least a few seconds for the processor to be cooled enough by the heatsink before it clocked back up, and it wouldn't be cooled at all if the heatsink was merely SITTING ON TOP, unmounted!

  20. Re:The real question is... by drsmithy · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I'm a bit concerned with Intel opting (again!) for overclocking hardware, rather than improving it.

    This word, "overclocking", I do no believe it means what you think it means.

    That was a raw 50MHz chip, no overclocking, that outperformed the 486DX-66 with ease.

    Hate to break the news to you, but pretty much every CPU in use today uses exactly the same asymmetrical bus/CPU that the 486 DX2s did, that you are calling "overclocking".

    Oh, and a DX/50 would only outperform a DX2/66 in tasks that were bus-bound. If the bus wasn't a limiting factor, the higher clocked CPU would be faster.

    The supporting hardware was too expensive, and Intel never bothered working on making it cheaper.

    Yes, they did - it's just that by that time (ca. second generation Pentium CPU - P90, P100, P100 and P133) the 486 was obselete.

    This is a tougher fight, and it's one Intel is losing, every time someone produces a faster processor or chipset. (Or even just a more reliable one.)

    I've yet to see any manufacturer produce a more reliable chipset than Intel. Even the ones that are faster only tend to be so because they lobbed into the middle of an Intel release cycle and aren't outperformed until the next model (in general).