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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.
"I also reserve the right to mock you for paying $300 for an extra 200MHz." -- Scott Wasson, TechReport.
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
$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.
Let me guess... It's a few percent faster than the 3.0ghz, and costs more.
Do I win a prize??
Is Intel trying to get laid by the best of the PC market by showing how fast it can swing by?
What happened to the days when CPU's would take their time, and get the jobs done the right way.
It's not like it can make your PC scream any faster or louder, or can it?
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
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?
The pentium 4 architecture (heck the x86) is getting long in the tooth. I foresee intel's next market move :)
Intel Employee #1: We can't make our design any better! Intel Employee #2: Surely you jest. Intel Employee #1: No, but I have an idea. Intel Employee #2: What? I'm clueless! Intel Employee #1: Lets up the clock speed! Intel Employee #2: Touche!
(note this is not meant to be a flame, just a little humor)
- tristan
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
Picture this....
Salesman: and this toaster makes toast .5 seconds faster
Me: great, how much?
Salesman: its double the price of the standard model
Me: Hmmmm
(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?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
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.
Compared to the older pentiums the new pentium IV performs all the same instructions in exactly the same way. You may sense a small speed increase; however you are not likely to notice it (unless you are upgrading from a 486DX2-66).
Integer performance has increased by (New Speed-OldSpeed)/OldSpeed * (OldBenchmark Score) - OldBenchMarkScore, as has floating point. However, the electricity bill also rose by the same percentage.
Pros: No one ever got fired for buying Intel!
Cons: It costs more than a used car!
The 3Ghz version has that too, I believe.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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.
Extreme Overclocking: they actually overclocked the engineering sample. ha! kind of a pricy risk if you ask me. More reviews here, here and here.
Nothing newsworthy in that really.
Thomas S. Iversen
Oh, I agree completely. AMD's chips are twice as efficient as intel. Isn't the XP's pipeline about half that of the P4? And yes Intel is obviously more expensive. With the big name comes a big price to boot. I dunno where the post I replied to is, but it was just another unintelligent post giving AMD fans a bad name. P4's price/performance ratio sucks compared to AMD's. Hands down.
- Xenius
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?
yes of course, but the toast shop making that volume of toast would not be buying toasters built for home use. They would have a toaster farm probably running 'open toast' insted of winToast
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.
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!
Something is missing, oh yea, the Intel vs AMD benchmarks, WTF, how can you compare your own CPU's to each other, I wanna see how they hold up to AMD
If there is nothing left worth living, what are you willing to die for?
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?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
or the expanded dictionary entry:
1. Exhibiting a lack of wisdom or good sense; foolish. Otherwise known as "Slashdot effect"
2. Steve Ballmer on stage.
3. Al Gore attempting humor.
Antonym: Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.
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!
Sorry man, next price cuts aren't scheduled until October or therabouts. 3.0 will be staying at or very, very close to what it is now. That's why I went ahead and ordered mine friday ;)
- Xenius
What about the AMD Athlon64/Opteron? Soon Windows will have a 64-bit consumer version, and Linux already does have.
:-)
And you get x86 compatability too. I'll leave it upto the reader if that is a good/bad thing!
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....
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
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.
"There is no substitute for thinking" - Bjarne Stroustrup
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.
Posted by Hemos on 8:42 23 June 2003
from the cut-and-paste dept.
Nathan writes "Someone else asked us to redirect traffic to their site. We told them of course."
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, I seem to remember Microsoft pushing something I think was called "QuickBIOS" that pursued this idea. One good thing about Windows XP is that it certainly does boot up faster than most operating systems I've seen, so Microsoft wanted to get that long BIOS delay out of the picture. I'm not sure whatever happened to that, or if it only allowed you to boot Windows. But at any rate, Microsoft, of all people, is thinking of you ;-)
While those reviews are more than adequate, I am surprised that Tom's Hardware review is not mentioned. While I would not mention it blindly just because THG was one of the first sites to offer in-depth reviews, after reading it I gained more insight than from the other "here are the benchmarks, mam" sites. Here's the synopsis:
"Intel launches the last P4, with 3.2 GHz for FSB800 and Dual DDR400. Its rival AMD fights back with the Athlon XP 3200+ and Dual DDR400. With the Pentium 5 and Athlon 64 waiting in the wings, it's a historic duel." [tomshardware.com]
Must-not-watch TV!
I have to agree. They're comparing a 2.2GHz AMD chip with a 3.2Ghz P4 and the AMD chip is holding it's own against a CPU that is an entire 1GHz faster in terms of clock speed. If they would A.) Compared the AMD chip with a 2.2 GHz P4 or B.) Compared the 3.2GHz P4 to a 3.2GHz Athlon, if one existed, then AMD would be far ahead. Which is why we recognise the Athlon as the supperior CPU.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
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.
Mod parent off topic. We're talkin' about toast now..not cpu's. :)
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
I agree that this article wasn't that interesting, but I did find the following passing interesting
Next up, weâ(TM)ll be taking a look at FutureMark's 3DMark2001SE. With the recent debacle surrounding NVIDIA and FutureMark, I have chosen to exclude 3DMark2003 from our benchmarking suite for those of you wondering why you arenâ(TM)t seeing any results for it. (from here)
We've all read how NVIDIA fiddled with the results and how FutureMark became complacent with it. Now here's the result.
-no broken link
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
> Uhh, what? First, optimized code will run more
> "efficiently" on a P4.
Not with the crypto code I am talking about. Even when compiling with Intel's own compiler, icc, with Pentium IV optimizations, the Athlon processor is twice as effcient.
> Second, "efficiency" is meaningless.
It can be defined as the number of CPU cycles per byte required to complete a given job. This easy to measure unambiguously, and not at all meaningless.
> Efficiency is a pointless measure in computing
> because there are always multiple ways to get
> better performance.
There are other factors. For instance, my 1 GHz Athlon is much cheaper than the 2.4 GHz Pentium IV, with a very similar specification in the way of memory, disk, etc..
The point is, for the crypto code I am dealing with, the Athlon processor is a far better choice.