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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?
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.
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.
Secured Party, Without Prejudice, UCC 1-207: Creditor