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

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?