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Intel Demos New P4 'Extreme Edition'
typobox43 writes "Louis Burns of Intel displayed a "high-definition video stream running on a 'mystery' desktop processor." This processor turned out to be the new Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.20 GHz, with an extra 2 Megabytes of cache."
... I struggle to tax it with anything I do, including some of the more intensive games.
This "extreme" version of the chip has to be aimed at a very niche market, at least for the next couple of years until more processor intensive software catches up.
... with 1MB of L3. The results weren't that exciting.
Not to be labeled a fanboy (although not necessarily denying that status)... but this sounds like a paper launch just to take some press away from AMD.
"He [Burns] said the chip will be available to buy in the 30-60-day timeframe." from this article.
Prescott is going to be late and has been getting bad press for not being backward compatible with current motherboards. Why not make some noise with a product that wont be around for another month?
as usual from Intel... Just add some megahertz and some cache, it'll be good enough. On paper. What about improving technologies, like IBM or AMD do ?
blah
Yeah, you probably were one of those people too.
This CPU is aimed at the gaming/multimedia community. All that extra cache should make Doom3/HL2 speed along a little better. It should also help us that encode DVDs/DivX on the fly. What supprises me is that they didn't finally go to 1GHz FSB. Yeah, I know, that would mean you need DDR500(PC4000). While I'm sure you make have problems taxing your 3.2GHz CPU with MS Word or Counter-Strike, I am left longing for more CPU power with my Dual Athlon MP2100+ when De-interlacing video from my DV cam or running Urban Terror with SMP @ 1152x864x32+2xAA+AF.
You say software needs to catch up? I say hardware has and will be playing catchup for a long time. I'm sure that hardware will never exceed the demands of software. Multimedia has been the driving force behind computers since they became "good enough for Twin/QuatroPro/WP/etc." and will continue to be that driving force.
I remember the days when an increase in only 50 MHz as a big deal! Now they role at a 200 MHz increase and people say "it's only a 6.7% increase, big deal"?!?. What, do you expect them to role out a 1 GHz increase with each new chip they put out? Time for a little visit back to reality.
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What is it with Extreme as the buzzword these days? When you hear extreme you think of people jumping off cliffs or launching motorcycles off tall things. Things that some may consider DANGEROUS or STUPID. It can also mean "on the edge" as in pushing the limits or ground breaking technology. I don't know about the rest of you but I don't want a computer that pushes the edge, is dangerous, or stupid. I want a nice stable (as in doesn't crash 10 times a day) computer that I can watch my pr0n on. Is that too much to ask? Extreme is worn out in my book-pick a new buzzword.
According to this ExtremeTech article about this cpu, its L3.
The gaming-optimized Pentium 4 contains 2 Mbytes of level-3 cache, and will work with existing "Springdale" and "Canterwood" chipsets, Burns said.
If you are using a PC to emulate a real time system, that cache would help out in keeping your processes from having to access the slower memory. That means a few extra operations per unit time.
More specifically, if you are doing real time wave modeling that would mean a slightly more complex waveform. Shure you could use a DSP, but if you are in the development stage, it's usually easier to use a desktop system.
Another example would be if you are approximating physical hardware at high speeds. That's a few extra logic gates.
I'm not going to buy one, but if I had the money I would consider it.
postmodernsideshow.com
This "extreme" version of the chip has to be aimed at a very niche market, at least for the next couple of years until more processor intensive software catches up.
... My systems are not the fastest out there but they are close to the price/performance sweet spot and have good longevity since they are far more than what I need at the time.
While I agree with one of the other posters that many high end CPUs are sold to the "mine's bigger" crowd, Intel naming surely supports this idea, there are some legitimate advantages to getting a faster CPU even when you don't have a need for the additional computational power. I'm getting along well with a P3 1.2G but towards the end of the year I will be building myself a new machine. A P4 2.26G 533FSB would be fine but I'll put together a 3.0G 800FSB dual-channel DDR because it will only have a relatively modest price increase (then, not now) but it will add a year or so to the useful life of the machine. For years I've had the same strategy. A high quality motherboard for US$150 or less, the fastest CPU for US$250 or less, the largest HD for US$150 or less,
Sure, Intel is releasing smaller percentage increments, they make more money from it. The nice thing is that they still follow Moore's law. So ultimately chip speeds still double about every two years.
Microsoft should hire me. I can write code that doesn't work faster than the guys they have doing it now.
You are making a incorrect comparison in computing technologies. UltraSPARC III is for higher precision, but it is way out of its competitive market by two years ago. Pentium 4 is built for highest performance at the expense of power consumption. In a more objective comparison with the UltraSPARC III, we would compare performance/initial cost/power consumption (and forecasted power consumption cost to price barrier). UltraSPARC III is built for good performance on its implemented hardware, thus it utilizes its bus and memory architecture to optimum. The Pentium 4 does not perform with the mathematical precision and architecture efficiency as does a UltraSPARC III. The Pentium 4's memory architecture isn't even being used to full efficiency because of the nature of x86 being a pro-legacy architecture.
The biggest black sheep of the industry is the legendary Alpha architecture. It's a 100% 64bit precision platform with highest efficiency per watt and it was purposely bought by Intel to be silenced and migrate all its users to the Itanium architecture. Not even an Itanium2 can perform as well as an Alpha of two years ago (21264/ev6). The only downfall of Alpha is the legitimate and objective comparison of performance/initial cost as being the notion it is highly non-competitive with other offers. The reason it is not as competitive with other architectures is not based on fabrication costs: it is based on it being the better architecure that was purchased before its parents' bankruptcy (DEC...Compaq?), and to try to recover the R&D costs of the overly-invested lesser architecture known as Itanium.
People who still use Alpha already know that if it is buried then the only logical successor would be a Power4 hands down. All the while, HP's PA-RISC is being incorporated into the same Itanium architecture to migrate its dwindling userbase to Itanium. So much is going wrong in the idustry it makes me sick to the stomach.
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being all pleased with my 2gHz Celeron laptop I just got. I know there's a market for this, but it really strikes as just marketing to piss on AMDs 64bit parade (kind of like how nVidia always conveniently had a new Deotonator release that would boost performance 29% every time ATI released a new card, back when nVidia was on top performance).
His posts are full of the pseudo-technical babble that mods take at face value. He throws buzzwords around that any college freshman studying EE has learned, and he does that to pander to the wide-eyed zombies that think that /. is the tech industries bible.
Here is what I am talking about, point by point:
1) Get rid of 20-stage pipeline, it's too long for anything serious
This is hardly an original thought. He probably read some review at amdr0x.com or intelsux.com about the Pentium 4 pipeline, so now he thinks he is an expert. Nevermind that this is still largely a matter of opinion.
) As a follow up to 1, try to actually get some work done in a clock cycle.
Hm- sounds like he is making a clever observation about the Pentium 4, but it ignores the major design goal of the pentium 4 that makes it possible to scale the clock frequencies at an unbelievable rate. These clock increases have more than made up for the decreased per clock efficiency.
3) Throw out the x86 ISA.
Once again, hardly an original thought. In fact, Intel has been trying to do that since 1981 when it tried to release the iAPX 432 processor and more recently with Itanium. However, the economics of just "throwing out" x86 makes this statement meaningless.
4) Look at the MIPS ISA.
5) Realize that it's actually possible to understand the MIPS arch, and that it still works great for multimedia, math, and general use.
Ooooh- he must have taken Computer Architecture 101 to learn about MIPS! He is so l33t.
And what makes him think that Intel hasn't looked at MIPS?
6) Buy the rights to the MIPS ISA, make small improvements (get rid of branch delay slot, load delay slot), speed it up, and design new Intel processors from the improved ISA.
WOW! He actually knows some specifics about MIPS! Intel should listen to him!
7) Release versions of processors with 4MB Cache (2MB each I$, D$) for consumers, and 24MB Cache (8MB I$, 16MB D$) for servers/clustering/etc.
Yes- increasing cache is good. However, the on chip cache already takes up almost 50% of the die area, and releasing chips with such bloated cache sizes would lead to huge expensive chips with very low yields. Hold your horses until the 90 or 65 nm processes are in full use.
8) Release Motherboards for 1, 2, and 4 CPU configurations
This is trying to appeal to the socialist anti-corporation "everything should be free-as-in-beer" types that frequent slashdot, but if Intel can make more money by keeping the product lines seperate with value added features like MP, I say more power to them.
Yeah- he must be really qualified.