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.

Comments

Where's the Pentium 5?

[Zog The Undeniable]

I'm getting bored of "P4"...at least "Pentium 5" would be etymologically correct again!

(Yes, fellow pedants, I am aware that "Pentium" was used for the chip following the 486, as Intel couldn't copyright a number and stop their competitors using the term "586".)

Seriously though, how long have successive generations of Pentium technology lasted? Is it just me, or was the PIII the primary product line for longer than the PII, and when will the P4 break the PIII's record?

So what's the real news?

[Martin Kallisti]

I find it irrelevant whether the speed of an existing type of processor has increased by less than ten percent, although looking at the price compared to the 200MHz lower clocked variant, maybe this would fit under "It's funny, laugh".

However, this processor does seems very suitable for overclocking (4GHz, yikes!). Did anyone manage to come close to that with the 3GHz model, or has Intel increased the therapeutical window of their processors slightly? ;)

Re:Meh

[ickoonite]

Now this is really pure FUD, I'm afraid, but it does make me laugh.

Yeah, it's true that the masses will probably stick to what is cheaper. It's what they're always gonna do, and that's fine, because most people just want Office and maybe the occasional game. Apple will never really penetrate that market.

But this is Slashdot. We demand more from our machines here. We want high speed UNIX boxen and game stations that we can frag at 150 fps on, and if we're lucky, both at the same time.

The bit about binary compatibility shows that you know nothing about Macs. The PPC 970 _is_ backwards compatible with all the old software - everything will run! And the best thing is, as has always been the case with Macs, backwards compatibility is unrivalled. Macs of today still feature Motorola 68k emulation so that they can run software written for those chips, for OS 9 and for OS X.

Windows XP (the equivalent of OS X in terms of consumer accessibility and reliability), on the other hand, has terrible backwards compatibility, and I find that many, many, many old DOS or even Windows programs will not run...

I rest my case.

iqu

Re:Buying other items with small performance incre

[JanneM]

If you need that kind of toast-making performance, you're luch more likely to either build a toaster-farm with dozens (or maybe even hundreds) of inexpensive run-of-the mill toasters, or splurge for a big, heavy-duty continuous-feed made-to-order beltway toaster.

Sort of like getting either a cluster of cheap middle-performing x86 boxes, or a big-iron type machine from Sun or IBM, come to think about it.

I mean, how many apps really critically need that 2% parformance increase, but do not benefit from a dual or quad-cpu machine, a cluster, or a big non-x86 Unix machine?

Re:Purchasing Cycles

[the gnat]

when money is available, you buy the top-of-the-line computer. You may be using it for the next ten years.

This is the rationale I hear for buying expensive hardware from Sun or SGI (and I agree, for the most part). I've never heard it used to justify buying Intel's latest offering - PCs are retired quicker than any other platform. If you really need to make a crappy PC workstation last for ten years, you're better off buying a cheaper box, like a 2.4Ghz P4 (which isn't slow by any means), and use all the money you save to purchase spare boxes or parts. You'll definitely need them if you want to keep the system going for ten years.

I know from experience that there are few things more annoying than trying to squeeze the last bit of life out of PCs that have been obsolete and off warranty for two years. . . sometimes, when the moon is out, I can still hear those IBM Pentium 90s calling my name.

Re:Meh

[stubear]

I have. Read the line about integer performance and you'll see why Apple will still be playing catchup with Intel and AMD. Most people are going to be doing integer and not floating point calculations when they are running their systems. Those that do benefit from floating point are likely not "Switch" candidates anyway. Either way, it's difficult at best to just drop one system and replace it for another when it comes to FP calculations as you not only need to purchase new hardware, you have to purchase new software and even with Adobe allowing crossgrade licensing, it's going to be a big hit to the wallet.

One example of 64bit gaming benefits

[fegu]

Modern chess engines represent the board as several 64bit bitboards, one for the white queen, one for the black queen, one for the white pawns etc.

This as opposed to the good old days with a 64 byte array containing 1 for the white queen, 2 for the white pawns etc.

Bitboards really benefit from 64bit registers and 64bit (integer) arithmetic.

Re:Processor design needs to change.

[TeknoHog]

I agree that x86 is not the best way of computing. However, there are many factors that contribute to power consumption.

• There are current leaks in transistors that account for a lot of wasted power, but can be solved by new manufacturing techniques. IIRC Intel has already developed some of these. Nanotubes and other fancy tech will probably be even better.
• Wide and shallow pipelines probably need lots of transistors as well. Graphics processors are much more parallelized than CPUs, look (listen?) how much cooling they need. On the other hand look what VIA has done with x86 processors, they can be passively cooled.
• MHz is only one factor in power consumption, just like it is only one factor in performance. And I'm looking forward for some clockless designs.