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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."
The rumors are that this chips are the same or very similar to the $4000 Xeon MPs with 2MB cache. I wonder if these will work on the workstation class MP motherboards. Would be sweeeeet.
Don't knock it, even if its operating at 1/3 the cpu bus, an extra 2MB of level 3 cache will give a significant boost to things like video games and many other interactive cpu intensive applications.
What I'm really not impressed with is Intel saying desktop users don't need sixty-four bit. Well, we don't need gobs of cache. We need sixty-four bits.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
So it's not just a 2 meg cache but is in ADDITION to an existing amount? 256? 512? I'm confused.
A blog like any other.
This chip would be great for database searches... it has more cache than uni-processor xeons and it probably will be cheaper. Thanks gamers! I guess the wait for Prescott is real... seeing that Intel had this chip on tap.
But at the same time, the Level Three Cache is MUCH "further away" from the core in the sense that it takes much longer for data to travel accross the lines of the processor to get to it. Level Two isn't much closer, but that little edge does make a huge difference in this case. Game developers now have room to seriously push their applications because the processor will be able to cache more (data||instructions). It should vastly improve scores on very memory intensive apps.
On the other hand, I would much rather see them quadruple the size of the Level One Cache. This would improve performance on these processors, but at the same time, without the extra registers that a 64-bit chip would have, these improvements are limited by their usefulness, not to mention they would take up loads more valuable core real estate. I can't wait to see Intel move to a 64-bit chip with a 2 meg level 2 and maybe a 128k level one... we'd start to see chips FLY....
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
"...of all the people who are going to run out and buy it, who REALLY needs that much juice?"
I do. I'm a 3D artist, I do rendering. However, as an artist, the processor must be economically feasible as well.
Am I going to go buy one now? No. But if Intel keeps pushing chips with huge caches, and assuming these caches make a difference in LW, it will affect whether or not my next machine is an AMD or an Intel.
For the record, AMD won the last round. I have a dual Athlon at home that runs circles around a 3.2 gig P4.
"Derp de derp."
With that in mind, and seeing past the fnords, LX or LS (think Lexus LS 400, or whatever the latest is), is the most appealing of all: lesbian sex.
I hope I don't come across as crazy or perverted, but advertising will do ANYTHING to sell crap to people.
What supprises me is that they didn't finally go to 1GHz FSB. , I know, that would mean you need DDR500(PC4000).
Actually, no you don't. Apple sells their dual 2ghz box, that has a 1ghz fsb (dual pipe), and 400mhz ram. goto apple.com/powermac for info. It obviously doesn't talk to the ram that fast, but 1g pipe to the chipset doesn't suck either. Oh yea, and up to 8gb of ram so far. its a bit different in other aspects as well.
I am just waiting to score one of the dual 2.0 boxes used (cant afford $3500) but that will take a while. They also bench out better cycle to cycle that intel (similar to amd or better) Its actually the IBM 970 cpus (reduced power 4 cpu) that IBM is said to be releasing soon in entry level servers, with 4 cpus, for $3500, for Linux.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Perhaps I'm confused here, but I remember TomsHardware doing an article on the new Barton processors with double the cache (512k) didnt produce really noticable performance increases in most 'high end user' applications (gaming/video encoding.
Could Intel be planning a compiler that would utilize this cache??
Wasn't the 80286 in the old IBM XTs the "extreme" chip. At least I thought that was what the XT stood for. Maybe it stood for extra? Anyone know?
All a matter of time.
I remember reading once in a Usenet thread - some guy was trolling and asked 'will my P90, overclocked to 100MHz, be enough to handle the flight combat simulators you guys are discussing?'
The first time I read it it was hilarious because he was either bragging or dreaming, the P90 chip was out in limited supply at the time and was easily 50% faster than the common P60 machine used by the sim-gamers, not to mention the overclocking it. Of course it was going to be fast enough.
The second time I saw it (a few years later) it was hilarious because the bare minimum system for any sim/game was a PII/300 with a 3D graphics card and his P90 was so pitifully underpowered it didn't have a chance.
So we get to enjoy the 'is this CPU enough' question twice, generally, for any given CPU. Just a matter of timing.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I'm sorry, but I get a strong feeling that you're way out in dreamland.
Let's get some things straight first, no hard drive or ram can be 'as fast' as a processor, because that's like saying my coffee cup is as fast as my bicycle, it's meaningless.
A solid-state hard drive has to get all that data addressed, and it has to pump it over some sort of pipe at least several inches long, the addressing will put a buttload of latency in there, and that pipe would bring the bandwidth WAY down.
Now I wouldn't fuck with a solid-state drive at the end of a Ultra320-SCSI pipe, but that's STILL 1/10th the memory bandwidth of a modern DDR400 system. BTW, those have been around for AGES, I used to have a solid-state SCSI drive on my old 25MHz Mac, it was pretty fast, but nowhere near the internal ramdisk's speed.
RAM now works 'at the speed of the processor' if you think about it. My Athlon can chew about 2100MB/sec which is EXACTLY output of the memory I'm running (that's the 'sync' in SDRAM). The only way to change that would be to 'widen up' the CPU FSB. You could put single, dual, or quad-channel memory on your Athlon and it wouldn't make a dime's worth of difference in any benchmarks, the back of the chip is the limit, and current RAM meeets that need.
It's general knowledge that the more storage you can arrange for, the more complex your addressing system has to be to keep it tamed. Here's an example:
When your CPU asks for something it needs from RAM it asks for the contents of a block of memory, whose address is held in a pointer that is dynamic, but readily available. The CPU just 'gets' it. It's even better if that block is already in the cache, as the cache buffers will satisfy the request before the memory controller even bothers to retrieve the block from RAM.
When your app needs something from DISK it has to send a request through the OS (in RAM) to do a lookup in the filesystem and give an address, which is shuttled over to the disk driver to fetch from the drive and back to a generic filesystem driver to present to the app. Should the filesystem not have that data cached it has to perform a complex lookup of where the hell that file actually is on the disk, often traversing several directory files. It's very complex.
What you're saying will eventually happen, but not for at least a decade. Someday we WILL drop the two-tiered approach to personal computing, and ther'll be 'unified storage' for running apps and storing files (like the palm pilot, but better) and it will be good. Until then we've not yet miniaturized the electronics enough to move over to that paradigm. I think nanotech/biotech will play a HUGE role in making the memory, cpu, and IO processor components small enough to run cool and unplugged.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
On-die cache will never be "irrelevant". Even if the main RAM system runs at clock speed (or faster), there is still latency in getting the signals from the CPU, to RAM and getting a response.
The difference could be as much as 10x.
A solid state "disk" (SSD) would suffer even higher latencies with all the command overhead and the several bus systems that must be traversed/translated.
We've been promised SSDs for years. The last time I saw SSD units that were of a usable size, and reasonably priced compared to rotational media was in the mid 80s when 128KB was a lot of storage. Of course, the mid 80s is also the last time I saw a desktop computer that ran the CPU, RAM and system bus at the same clock speed.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
It's amazing how people spew out assertions without first stopping to think.
:) Last time I checked, that's 3e8 meters/second...
The fastest velocity that any human has observed is the speed of light. Some theoretical physicists believe that this is an absolute upper bound on speed
Or in chip dimensions, that's 30 cm/nanosecond. At 10 GHz (0.1 nanosecond cycle time), light can only travel 3 cm in a clock cycle!!! That's approaching the typical dimensions of a chip! That's an absolute upper bound on speed -- this is light traveling through a vaccuum. Electrons traveling through semiconductor material won't go near as fast. You need "on the order" of a clock cycle just to traverse a typical chip. The reality is that as we scale technology forward, it may take several clock cycles just to traverse a chip.
I think you need to stop and reconsider your assertions. Latency is here to stay...it ain't going away unless someone finds a way around the current laws of physics.
What we need to do is realize this and architect around it by trying to hide latency in various ways (caching/buffering, prefetching, etc...)