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Intel to Increase Stages in Prescott
Alizarin Erythrosin writes "Further contributing to the MHz Myth, The Register and ZDNet are reporting that the new P4 core, codenamed Prescott, will have a longer pipeline then Northwood. No official numbers have been released, but The Reg is saying an Intel spokesman said that 30 stages seems to be a reasonable estimate. As most of us know, a longer pipeline can lead to slowdowns in the form of branch mispredictions and pipeline stalls. 'And just as the PIII proved faster than the early P4s in some applications, it's likely that Northwood will similarly prove faster than Prescott, which has clearly been designed for speeds of the order of 4GHz.'"
I agree with the argument you are trying to make. But it would probably work better if you were less condescending.
Right, Intel always has had the fastest chip, if you ignore things like Alpha, Athlon, Opteron, Power, PowerPC, and others.
And of course, Intel's motivations are entirely performance, or at least price/performance, not marketing.
The fact that every other company has chosen a different design decision and has made better chips as a result is just an illusion foisted on us by those who think there own thoughts.
I've had this sig for three days.
Intel's engineer's didn't decide the direction of the processor. The whole direction of Intel's desktop line has been controlled by marketing concerns since the initial stages of development on the P4. The engineers got to do as they wished with the Itanium but unfortunatly they went too far the other way and completely forgot about marketing concerns like running legacy code.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I see this as a huge opportunity for AMD. They rate their processors based on how many times faster than a Duron 1 GHz runs. Thus, an AthlonXP3000+ runs three times as fast.
However, Intel rates their chips by clockspeed, and with the less-efficient pipeline, a 3 GHz P4 is not three times as fast as a 1GHz P3.
Thus, as chips get faster, AMD's chips will get better performance, not only cycle-for-cycle, but even rating-for-rating!
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Hello, Pentium M?
...since my next computer is going to house a G5.
Personally I'm tired of trying to keep up with the gHz war between AMD and Intel. With our current technology, the only areas really pushing processing speeds are gaming and video/image applications(that I'm aware of). My grandmother doesn't need a P5 4gHz to check her email, and neither do I if I simply want to write a paper.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
If you were to use SSE2 you would see an incredible performance boost.
I doubt it, I really do. Present-day x86 chips aren't limited by their FP processing speed, the real problem is memory latency and bandwidth. For instance, my 1.8 GHz P4 regularly performs in excess of 1 Gflops when running benchmark tests for the ATLAS BLAS. However, these benchmarks are specifically designed to fit in cache, to have predictable branching, etc etc.
Unfortunately, in real-world situations cache thrashing is difficult to avoid, and accurate branch prediction is a highly non-trivial affair. When a prediction turns out to be wrong, the cost of refilling a stalled pipeline increases in proportion to the pipeline length. The ever-lengthening pipelines of P4 chips means that, although its FP performance may r0x0r, the overhead of stalls makes production code run like treacle.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
We're supposed to be impressed by Intel's latest and greatest chip beating Alphas that aren't even produced anymore?
I'm not wishing to knock Intel but it seems that these days whoever has the newest fabrication plant. Intel brings out a new line of chips: they're faster. So AMD brings out a new line of chips later on: bang! they're faster still. And so the merry dance goes on.
Of course, this is all to the consumer's good as it means there's far more competition. But as far as the consumer is really concerned it doesn't matter so much who currently has the fastest chip as whose chip currently offers the best value while still being "fast enough". For my money that's been AMD for a while now.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
I've not helped to design an operating system or really any part of an operating system, but I can damn well tell you that Windows ME was a shitty OS. It doesn't take any experience for me to tell this; I can determine this by simple observation.
When the tire of my car explodes in an open road, it would not take much expertise on my part to diagnose it as a problem with my tire (they really aren't supposed to explode). And, when it happens to many other people with the same tire, it wouldn't take any expertise on my part to determine that it is probably a flaw in that tire design.
If indeed long pipelines make non-predictable/chaotic software cause more mispredicts, and I notice that those applications do indeed run more slowly (or fail to see a speed improvement) on a new, more expensive, Intel processor, then I can assume without expertise that the design of the processor is not fitting for those applications.
Also, when Intel's experienced engineers make a design decision, it might not be with the purpose of speed. In fact, I think few decisions there are. Intel, like Microsoft, is a marketing company. They like big numbers because they attract customers. Customers don't necessarily want really fast matlab, they want to be able to say "4 Ghz" because it makes them feel special.
So, please don't be frustrated with people for making simple, astute observations. Intel engineers (with over 30 years' experience) don't neccessarily have our best interests in mind.
Ok, so they benched Premiere 6, Photoshop 7, Microsoft Word, and Quake 3.
Please tell me you have at least the 2 brain cells required to know that this benchmark is far from accurate.
Anyone who does ANY form of editting on a Mac wont touch Premiere 6 with a 100-foot pole. Why? Because Final Cut Pro smashes it to little tiny pieces you could use to flavor your coffee.
Microsoft Word? Tell me you're kidding. The benchmark was doing search-and-replaces. This is dependent on so many things ranging from hard disk caches to Microsoft's optimizations that its almost not funny.
And Quake 3. Almost entirely dependent on the graphics card and the drivers written for it.
Nothing to see here, move along.
(yes, I know I shouldn't feed the trolls)
Intel has backed themselves into a bit of a corner, in the process of repeating history. With Itanium, they've proven that they're more concerned with their own strategies than they are with delivering solutions to their customers. But they've sunk so much money and image into Itanium that they can't back out, yet. No doubt there's someone inside the company, probably a wild duck, working on the right time to jump ship and how to spin it.
In the meantime, Intel has the one-two bait and switch with P4-Celeron and the true P4. If they didn't have a TON of money and market clout, they'd be in big doo-doo right about now. As it is, AMD is the one in big doo-doo, not because they have the lesser product, but because of Intel's clout.
Listen to any computer commercial, and they pretty much all have those 5 co-advertising tones at the end. That's monopoly power, that's market clout. (If I were in charge, the antitrust penalty would ratchet up every time those tones sounded.)
Maybe Intel blew it, but they'll survive.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Dude, it's the same with any innovation. You have to wait for the software to follow. Why are you making a big fuss out of it? When they introduced P4 with their new architecture, tests shown that it wasn't all that faster than a good old P3. Then compilers and software in general adapted and it became faster.
Same with the P3, the P2, the Pentium, the 486, 386, 286 (Even though no one adapted to this shit) and the 086. So yes, history repeats itself, and it is for good (at least on this one).
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Intel is trying to move chips. One way to improve your sales is to drum up higher GHz for the uninformed masses. If you can do this while still producing competetive chips, you will outsell a similar performing chip that's runs 700MHz or so slower than yours.
Whats your fucking point?
A stab in the dark here, but maybe he's pointing out that the Bush has got where he is today via ill-gotten gains. Consider this: had Prescott Bush not profited greatly from business with the Nazis, would George Snr. have been able to buy a place at Yale for George Jnr.? Would George Snr. have been able to get George Jnr. out of the Vietnam war and into the Texas Air Guard (where Dubya proceeded to go AWOL for 2 years)? Would George Snr. have been able to buy the presidency for George Jnr.?
Oh, the irony of it all: that the neo-cons, who are rabidly Zionist, have as their figurehead a man who got where he is today because his grandpappy profited from the extermination of the Jews.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Stay away from x86 if you're just starting out...
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However, Intel rates their chips by clockspeed, and with the less-efficient pipeline, a 3 GHz P4 is not three times as fast as a 1GHz P3
I don't have hard data on this, but doesn't the impact of the pipeline depend on how the software it runs is compiled? If the object code is compiled to reduce branches, the longer pipeline should drastically speed up processing. That would theoretically make a 3GHz P4 MORE than three times as fast as a 1GHz P3.
No data, no cry
x86 is old and flawed, but it has such a base of o/s 's and apps for it that its not funny. Look at itanium. There's hardly any programs availible for it, and its hugely expensive. In order to jump to anything new, you need Uncle Bill to port windows to whatever your coming up with, and we all know how fast and effective M$ is at doing such a complicated task (i.e. not very fast or effective at all). Sure Linux and the bsd's can be ported without a huge amount of work, but a cpu manufacter cant survive without a windows base.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
A brief history of microprocessor development:
The company I work for invented the first 16-bit microprocessor EVER, the CP1600 (ok, to be fair, it was a joint effort between us and a partner company), which was released in late 1974, when Intel was a scant 6 years old and PC meant "Pissing Clear." Intel was still a long 4 years away from introducing the 8086, which was only an 8-bit CPU anyway.
Nobody ever talks about the CP1600 because it was not oriented toward "personal" computers. After all, why the hell would anyone want their own computer? The CP1600 was designed and later integrated into Honeywell's TDC2000 distributed process control system, the very first distributed digital process control system.
Chances are, the gas that is sitting in your car was refined using a TDC2000 or descendant control system, so the CP1600 lives on in all of us just about every day.
Intel just got lucky with marketing, and it was the old consortium, LIM, that made the PC a reality. Those of you who were born before the 80's probably remember first hand what LIM was, but I'll leave it to exercise for you newbies to find out. You'll be amazed at who used to be bedfellows...
Not to burst your bubble, but those XXXX+ numbers are just a marketing scam to compete in the mhz myth against Intel P4s. the XP1800+ wasn't called that cause it's 1.8 times faster than a 1ghz duron, it's the 1800+ to compete with the P4 1.8 ghz proc.
Yawn.
"As most of us know, a longer pipeline can lead to slowdowns in the form of branch mispredictions and pipeline stalls
Get off your high horse. Intel architects aren't dummies. Itanium benchmarks are starting to whoop some serious ass and the P4 and Athlon have been neck-and-neck for years. I'm sure Prescott will perform very well.
I can get into all kinds of architecture speak as to why your simplistic notions of mispredictions and pipeline stalls might not be so terrible. Who knows? Maybe Intel will execute both paths of a branch? They've already got partial instruction replay to make squashes much less expensive. With deep speculation, a big instruction window, good bypassing capabilities, and effective non-blocking caches, "pipeline stalls" are not an issue due to branch mispredictions. The bigger issue is memory latency/bandwidth and Intel has always done well with that. A branch misprediction can be easily tolerated...an L2 cache miss can't.
"As most of us know, a longer pipeline can lead to slowdowns in the form of branch mispredictions and pipeline stalls."
Sigh... most of the people I know cannot place the planets of the Solar System in their correct order. What a rarefied realm we inhabit here...
Don't you see, that is the entire point of moving to a longer pipeline: to inflate the MHZ.
Intel don't care if a Prescott 4.0GHZ is twice as fast as a Pentium 4 2.0 GHZ. Just as a P4 2.0GHZ is not twice as fast as a PIII 1.0GHZ. They just want to get to 4.0GHZ.
Intel doesn't care if AMD's 4000+ is actually faster than their 4000MHZ part, they just want to have a 4000MHZ part to market before AMD.
Out here in "Reality World", as I like to call it, it _does_ matter. You see - performance is performance, whether it comes via IPC or high clock speed.
Until the Athlon64/Opterons AMD had no answer to the P4. They just couldn't quite keep up. And you people harped on the same thing "Ooh, it's a marketing gimmick!".
You want a marketing gimmick? How about selling a 64-bit CPU to people who have like 512M of memory. There's your gimmick.
I'm confused. How is it marketing only when you produce a faster chip?
That's like saying a gold medal winner in the olympics only ran for the monetary value of the gold they receive. It's actually quite freaking stupid.
The chip is faster. There are many ways to get faster chips that generally boil down to high IPC or high clock. Why do you nimwits insist on bleating that if you go the high clock route you're only catering to marketing?
The reason Java GUIs are pokey for the most part is that people have been SPOILED by OOP. If you create a New window everytime, then yet, it'll be slow, because Java has to basically learn how to make the window in the given OS, lay it out, and populate it, all before it can display it (as opposed to VB/.NET, which apply very sneaky, often exasperating hints on how to make windows).
Really, the New window should be made once, the optimizations saved in the assembly cache, and the same window used to subsequent calls. Some of the faster, non-Sun VMs do this kind of thing whether you tell them to or not.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Maybe Intel blew it, but they'll survive.
We don't want them to die. We want them to pass through it and come out an older and wiser company, less inclined to pull shit it has learned the hard way it can't get away with, no matter how big it is.
Compare the IBM of 2004 to the IBM of 1984.
If Intel were to "die", the resulting market would have lost the wisdom that Intel is likely to learn over the next couple of years, barring some technical miracle.
My other peeve is that it is proprietary
You should try R. Free as in beer + speech, high level scripting, can link in compiled low level code (C, FORTRAN, maybe even Java), good graphics output, good matrix handling, lots of 3rd party extensions (most GPL'd). Not good for symbolic mathematics, though. Used heavily in the statistical community and actively developed by some very smart people.
For the love of $DEITY, loose != not win!!!!!
Unfortunately, all of 'em (including MatLab) suck if you're working with chunks of data that are bigger than your cache, because you end up pumping stuff out over the main bus.
WTF? Please, just have a look at some IA-64 assembly code! It's NOT pretty, especially if you want it to go fast. You've got to do the whole explicitly parallel thing, manually pack together independent instruction according to what pipelines you want to run them in.
Itanium is NOT a RISC machine like Sparc, not in the least. Sparc is much more closely related to x86 than it is to IA-64. The Itanium is a VLIW chip, or EPIC in Intel-speak. It's a whole different animal altogether.
FWIW, here's a brief article where Intel talks about implementing a bubble-sort in IA-64 assembly vs. the original C. In particular, they start with the code that the Intel C compiler generates and optimizes it. Their final, optimized version of the algorithm is on page 5, and it's anything but easy.