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P4 3.2GHz Reviews
Nathan writes "The Intel 3.2GHz Pentium4 has passed its NDA with reviews coming out over the net, including this one at MBReview, This one at HardAvenue, This one at TweakTown and this review at HotHW." Yay. Benchmarks. Wowee-zowee.
$760 for it... A bit much for that "little extra," isn't it? You could build a fairly powerful AMD (or even Celeron) machine with that money... twice.
I dunno why people focus so much on CPU benchmarks. Why can't I have a faster BIOS? I want a machine that passes control to the OS bootloader in under a second. Instead, if anything, it takes longer and longer with every machine I try - a second or two staring at the NVidia copyright notice, a few more seconds staring at the bios, quick memory check, autodetect devices. Some system info, some beeps, some whirrs, some clicks, then finally the OS starts loading. Of course that takes ages as well.
If we are capable of making such insanely fast pieces of electronics, why the hell is the rest so slow?
Find some German Reviews at www.hardtecs4u.com, www.computerbase.de, www.hartware.de und www.hardware-mag.de.
;)
Looks, as there is no chance for an AMD 3200+ Systeme to win a round. Hope it will change with the athlon 64
The 3Ghz version has that too, I believe.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Extreme Overclocking: they actually overclocked the engineering sample. ha! kind of a pricy risk if you ask me. More reviews here, here and here.
Of course it's predictable, it's been on their roadmap for some time :)
Heck, you'll be able to "predict" the next few releases as well!
For those who care, there is also a comparison of AMD 3200+ to P4 3.2 GHz at tomshardware: here
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Processor design needs to change. Just to put things to rest, I'm a Macintosh zealot. Intel keeps pushing the clock rates higher, which places more demand on power requirements (the chip itself and cooling), hence most windows users (secretaries, cublicle workers) in an business office environment never need to have space heaters under their desks to keep their legs warm in the winter time. The PowerPC RISC processors are going in the right direction, but let's take a look at the graphics card processor chips. These chips run at lower clock rates, use less electricity, and move MASSIVE amounts data and calculate a metric ass-load of computations. Processors need wide (128-bit or more) and shallow pipelines to get *the best* performance. Looking at the graphs from the article (yawn), well, they look pretty linear. Ramping up the clock rates with a 800 megahurts FSB (PPC 970 has 1GHz FSB) is eventually going to lead to a starved processor (i.e. Motorola PowerPC G4). Well, enough ranting. Intel marketing (girls dancing, chip technicians in space suits doing the disco) prevails.
Well, iirc Classic mode is basically running the complete OS 9 in a VM. But by this logic, Windows is perfectly backwards compatable because you can run any previous version inside VMware.
So, to measure how backwards compatable an OS is, running complete old versions inside a VM is to me cheating. You should test how well old apps run in the same environment as modern apps. By this measure, Windows scores pretty well.
Normally, budgets are for very specific things -- money for complete systems can not be used to buy spare parts. Unless you're going to buy extra computers (and want to waste the time explaining why), it's better to just spend all the money you get on the best crap you can get.
The way I see it, it's smart marketing.
"Pentium", as you've noted, was used for the series of chips following the 486. In computer years, that's a LONG friggin' time ago. Consider how many OEM systems have "Pentium" and "Intel Inside" stickers stamped to the side.
That amounts to some serious brand-name recognition, and Intel damn well knows it. Go ask the average mom-n-pop user with their 3 year old Dell system about AMD, and you'll probably be met with blank stares. Mention Intel or "Pentium", and you'll probably get at least a glimmer of recognition. That same recognition is likely to spur their next upgrade to be an Intel system, as well.
Um, I said that.
Purchasing cycles have changed in the last 15 years as well. No longer do I have to do a purchase order of 6-8k for a new workstation. I can get just about the latest and greatest for 2k or less.
I never purchase the latest for the office, its foolhardy to think that you ever need an extra couple hundred mhz, especially with diminishing returns in effect.
We are on a couple year (2-5) rotation and everyone has been much happier for the cheaper revolution in memory, mhz, and hdd's.
Taking to the Enterprise level and I no longer need to dole out 25-100k for a new server when I can just about make a bulletproof 1-4u box for 1/10th - 1/50th the price.
-M-
"Life is all about strategy, mathematics and psychological perceptiveness."