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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.
Yay. Benchmarks. Wowee-zowee.
If it isn't important, if it doesn't matter, then don't post it.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
Of course there are those that will, and they do not necessarily deserve to be mocked. Certain applications still require a lot of horsepower, and some people can use all they can get.
Of course, this is becoming rarer and rarer, but it still exists.
My journal has hot
Numerous times I've seen people accuse moderator and editors of being on crack. This one by Hemos might just have me convinced. :-)
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
Whilst I would extend my sincerest thanks to dear Intel for yet more predictable inching up of the top speed for x86, I would like to point out that a far more interesting processor revolution is to take place today at 17:00 UTC, in the form of the PowerPC 970.
64bit for the consumer and the world's most beautiful OS or a meagre increase for a 32bit chip with Microsoft Windows. I know what I'll pick...
iqu
Yay. Benchmarks. Wowee-zowee.
If it's that boring, why include it on the main page as a story?
Trolling is a art,
Because the general sheep public don't understand or care about that stuff. They just see the ever widening "GHZ" label and buy away every time intel releases a new chip.
If you run a toast shop, and you're making 5000 slices of toast a day...
http://twitter.com/onion2k
There are many organizations that do not have a budget or process for replacing obsolete/outdated equipment. Like rain in the desert, money for new equipment comes in infrequent deluges. When money is available, you buy the top-of-the-line computer. You may be using it for the next ten years.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Come on beyond a few people this sort of speed really isn't necessary is it!
For most people when processors hit 750 mhz that was enough for them. And then MS released XP but that only raised the stakes a slight bit. 1.2 ghz is enough for 90% of people out there!
Yet some people still crave speed, I have an aunt who does nowt more than send a few emails a month and play minesweeper and (much to my annoyance as I may use it for maybe 5% of my tasks) she has a faster cpu than me!
On a side note, what's happeneing with AMD these days? they seem to really be losing it at the high end, it terms of both value and performance. there 3200 seems only about as good as a p4 2800 of so.
Still they still are the better choice at the same end of the pricing scale below the curve of insanity!
Personally I'd much prefer some nice advances in some other area, cpu's are dull these days and I doubt 64 bit will convince me otherwise.
+----------------- | What is the question!
The same way that old PPC chips are faster. The performance per clock cycle is a lot higher, of course if you can't clock them high enough this doesn't really help.
Look at the price performance ratio though, you can build a whole AMD based PC for the cost of high end P4 processors.
My Ti Powerbook G4 running at 800MHz runs just fine and it gets 6 hours of battery life. When are PC users going to realize that you don't need any more performance than that? Power savings is more important these days.
No, I don't give a flying fig about buying a 3.2GHz P4, but once it's out, the price of the 3.0GHz model (i.e. the new next-to-fastest) will get much more reasonable. And I'm planning on building my next system soon, too.
real world perfomance doesn't seem to make a lot of difference, for what you have to pay extra and who is will to cough up that extra $$$ to see UT 2003 jump from 223 to 242 fps, you can't even see the difference with your naked eye!
These days, those people are probably buying multiple systems in a cluster, in which case it makes sense to save $200/node and buy a lot more nodes.
There's still some problems which can't be easily split that way -- but then, people who have those probably aren't crunching them on PC hardware.
Ok, I have a small rant concerning benchmarks. I'm in the sciences and often look at graphs of data. I am getting SO TIRED of benchmark results being posted with y-axes that go from 2500 to 2600 showing the relative "improvement" of newer, faster cpu's when they ought to be scaled from 0 to X "mips", "flops" or whatevers so that you can see at a glance that the changes are or are not significant.
Better yet are plots showing how much they have "improved" relative to simple clock speed increases (if at all!) and normalized "mips/dollar" for cost evaluation....
Not every CPU intensive application can be done on a cluster. It depends on if the work can be distributed or not. Not every problem can be broken down into discrete little chunks that can be done on separate nodes in a cluster. It doesn't always work out that way.
My journal has hot
While not earth-shattering news this is still good news for people who use computers for more than an excuse not to interact with live humans.
Yet every single time there's a news item like this, some moron like you comes along and wonders aloud why he needs a faster computer just to use Mozilla. Guess what: you don't! Guess what else: other people have real work to do, and we DO need faster CPUs.
So to you and everyone else who keeps asking that same dumbass question: STFU already! Just because you're an idiot doesn't mean you have to advertise it.
Thank you.
Because the general sheep public don't understand or care about that stuff. They just see the ever widening "GHZ" label and buy away every time intel releases a new chip.
It's not the "general sheep public" that does that; it's the hardware fanboy types who build giant cooling systems and drool over benchmarks posted to hardware fanboy sites (like Tom's). The "general sheep public" no longer cares about upgrading.
There will be dozens of people saying that they're sub 1 GHz processor is "fast enough". Why bother saying that. Some people want faster computers. Simple as that. It's their money, let them spend it. Personally, I haven't upgraded in 3 years and I could use more speed to process digital video.
... that the P4 has pretty much stalled around 3 GHz fr a while now. They were really ramping up the MHz about a year ago. Sheesh, are the suffering from motorolia? As a Mac user, I feel your pain.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
I had planned to buy a 3ghz P4 machine next month, but now that I know the 3.2 is the last P4, I don't think I'll do that. It would be silly for someone like me, with limited funds, to buy top of the line when an entirely new chip will come out next year. I'd rather buy a cheaper 2.4ghz and save up in anticipation of the new hotness.