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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."
Saturday. Saturday! SATURDAY!
At Intel Headquarters!
Witness the unveiling of the next...
Biggest!
Meanest!
Fastest processor you can imagine.
Pen-Pent-Pentium EXXXXXTREME
It's 3.2 gigahertz of binary badness.
Come witness as it peforms calculations at mind-boggling speeds!
Special Guest The Blue Man Group
Tickets start at $20 for adults, discounts for children and seniors
If you miss this, you'd better be dead... or in jail...
And if you're in jail, break out!
they must be reading maddox's site
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Extreme close up! Whhoooooooooooo... Whhoooooooooooo.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
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.
I wanna see major competition between Intel and AMD. That way I can get my 875P motherboard "tossed in free with the purchase of any Intel Pentium 4 Extreme(tm) Processor." It's about time I upgraded from a Celeron 433 anyway. Ghost Recon plays more like Ghost Recon: The Slideshow.
Joe
This "extreme" version of the chip has to be aimed at a very niche market
Yes, it's the 'mine's bigger' market, though I wouldn't call it niche, exactly.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
... with 1MB of L3. The results weren't that exciting.
Intel Developer Forum Cache for questions
By Nebojsa Novakovic: Tuesday 16 September 2003, 18:14
WHEN, AT today's IDF opening, Louis Burns demonstrated a high-definition video stream running on a "mystery" desktop processor, everyone must hve thought it was the upcoming Prescott part. Wrong! It was the (also upcoming), previously unheard of, even at The Inq, Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 processor Extreme Edition 3.20 GHz , with an extra 2 Megabytes of pron. In Intel's own words, "this new processor will be targeted at high-end gamers and computing power users."
As a matter of fact, 2MB cache will help a lot those users whose apps (including games and such) have a lot of big cache-friendly *wink* pieces of code and data, but probably not the data-streaming intensive stuff. I do expect to see speedups anywhere from 2% to 20% depending on the application, maybe some more if using multithreading/multitasking (large cache can keep in code / date pieces from more threads).
However, this doesn't seem to be a new CPU in reality - after all, Intel is doing very well with its XeonMP 2.8 GHz 2 MB cache CPU, and how much effort does it really take to repackage it for the 3.2 GHz / 800 FSB desktop with less stringent thermal and reliability requirements than the big iron, anyway?
Intel would gain a lot with this move. If, touch wood, there are problems with Prescott, a large-cache Pentium4 part will provide some buffer against large-cache Athlon64 (i.e. rebadged Opteron) parts. At the same time, enormous extra benefits from the economies of scale would further reduce the identical die XeonMP manufacturing cost, helping Intel compete better on the quad-CPU server front as well. Interesting move? I think so. Let's see how the beast performs in real!
$740 in 1,000 unit quantities. I think I'll pass.
Louis Burns of Intel displayed a "high-definition video stream running on a 'mystery' desktop processor.
Gosh, one of these days I'll have to take a sneak peak at the hardware they run in that mystery little room in my local theater. The monitor is so big, the soundcard is great, and I can see it all for a buck!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Please send a message to the X-tra stupid Advertising XX-cutives that X in the name is X-tremely dated and not an X-ellent idea.
The new marketing buzzword is 'Shit-Hot', as in "The new Intel Shit-Hot P4!"
Thanks.
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?
The difference is that all the existing apps would need to be recompiled to fully use the 64bit. Even lowly DOS can use performance improvements with a larger cache. And with Hyperthreading the number of clocks per instruction is very small, this lends itself to using a larger cache more often.
See also:
Ars Technia on Caching
Some interesting quotes:
"The performance boost is awesome," Burns said Tuesday during a speech at the Intel Developer Forum here.
"It is a Xeon with a different pin-out, or least that's what it looks like to me," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight 64.
Intel did not disclose the price of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. It likely will be as expensive as its counterpart, the 2.8GHz Xeon with 2MB cache. That chip sells for $3,692 in quantities of 1,000.
"It absolutely will be kind of pricey," Brookwood said.
I'm looking for a HEPA media filter for my TV. I'm alergic to reality shows.
3.2 GHz! That's 6.7% faster than 3.0 GHz! You feel the need to send money to Intel! Fnord! Imagine how fast the Internet will be if you have one of these on your desktop! You will need a neon-colored bunny suit just to look at your computer! You will be assimilated by the Blue Man Group!
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Nope, the only 'desktop' 64 bit processors come from IBM and AMD;
AMD Opteron
AMD Athlon64
IBM PPC970
Intel's 64 bit solutions is the Itanium! Anything with the Pentium moniker is 32 bit. The Itanium is the one which suffers 32 bit emulation lag.
So if you want 64 bit, you're stuck with, realistically, a Mac or some brand of Athlon CPU.
GPL Deconstructed
I need that much juice. My Windows machine typically handles mIRC, Yahoo Messenger, 3D Studio Max, 3 or 4 IE instances, etc.
Of course, most of those programs are essentially idle at any given moment. But when I'm trying to render a massive 3dmax scene while switching over IRC to ramble libertarianesquely about the failings and dangers of big government, while at the same time opening/reading 3 or 4 web documents... my machine bogs down on me. Now, this machine is a P4-2.9GHz with a gig of RAM on SCSI disks... perhaps the extended speed and cache on the new CPU would make a difference.
At the same time, I could use one of these on my colo box, which is hosting 17 domains with about 3,000 pageloads per hour. Then again, I could always get something other than x86, if I weren't a cheap and ignorant bastard.
"The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants." --Thomas Jefferson
The processor-intensive software is already here. It is called HSpice, Verilog, fluid-dynamics simulation, etc. The Pentium 4 has done nicely in the engineering workstation market, and the "Extreme Edition" should do even better.
Please check the SPEC web site for a performance evaluation of the Pentium 4's floating-point (FP) performance. In particular, it outperforms the UltraSPARC III even though the latter has a 2-to-1 advantage in the width of its databus -- 64 bits versus 32 bits.
What changed the x86 chips from also-ran losers in FP performance to the kings of the hill? SSE.
The SSE extension to the x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) opened up a whole new world of applications for the Pentium III and successors. Older Pentiums were saddled with a FP stack that hurt their performance. The SSE extension established a directly addressable bank of 8 128-bit registers or 32 32-bit registers for FP operations. As a result, the Pentium 4 outperforms the UltraSPARC III on video applications.
At 3.2 GHz, the "Extreme Edition" of the Pentium 4 should help the Pentium 4 to capture even more of the engineering workstation market. Nowadays, the first-choice workstation among engineers in Silicon Valley and Boston's Route 128 is Linux running on a fast Pentium/Athlon, not Solaris lumbering on a slow UltraSPARC III.
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.
" I need that much juice. My Windows machine typically handles mIRC, Yahoo Messenger, 3D Studio Max, 3 or 4 IE instances, etc."
3 or (gasp!) 4!!!! instances of IE?!?!?!?
Dude, you are XTREEEEEEEEEEME!
graspee
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.
Some of these people even believe they need more than 640K of RAM.
The second part of their article is here.
Thank you. Drive through.
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!
Err, no. The internal data bus of the P4 is 256-bits wide, at least if you're talking about it's L2 cache bus. L1 cache doesn't really have a "bus", especially not the P4's trace cache (it's replacement for an L1 i-cache), but if my memory serves me correctly, the L1 d-cache of the P4 can read or write a pair of 64-byte values in 2 clock cycles. I guess that makes it's "bus" 128 bytes (not bits) wide. I don't know the bus width of this new L3 cache on this P4 "Extreme", aka a XeonMP, but I would guess it's 64-bits wide.
I haven't got a clue as to the internal data bus of the USIII, but I would guess that it's either 128-bit or 256-bit wide. Side note: the Power4 uses a MASSIVE 1024-bit wide internal bus, one of the reasons for it's impressive performance.
The only situation where the USIII has 64-bits and the P4 has 32-bits is if you are talking about integer registers or memory pointer width, neither of which are going to play a role in Spec CFP scores.
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