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Intel Plans CPU Naming Change
Jemm writes "According to The Globe and Mail, Intel will start using performance numbers rather than clock speed to number their chips. 'Under the model number system, processors will be given numbers to describe their performance, in addition to being described as running at 2GHz or other speed.'"
Ahhhh, I am sure it will be said again here, but payback is in order. This sort of marketing angle will only go so far though as Apple and AMD have found out. What really matters is real power. This will translate into more sales as Apple is now finding out with significant interest in the G5 Xserve from a large number of corporations and government agencies. So, if Intel can get around some of the performance bottlenecks and deal with the loss of backwards compatibility, they may be able to get back on track.
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Good news for the average computer idiot who wants to upgrade or buy a new machine. I think it's past time to undo the damage Intel's marketing has done with the Megahertz Myth. I'm weary of explaining it to people. It will be nice to have something more helpfully descriptive to a consumer than "cache" and "bus", or at least clarify that they don't refer to paper money and vehicles that carry children to school. :P
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
They go from lying to you subliminally to lying to your face.
It might just be time for a standard.
Really, the technical community needs to sit down and figure out a universal cross-platform benchmarking method.
I apparently forgot that sig != uptime...
FIrst Intel adopts the x86-64 ISA in their new chips, and now they start using performance ratings. What next? Jerry Sanders to replace Craig Barrett as CEO? How times have changed.
Their naming convention will be 2 steps away from gHz performance now!
Presenting the AMD XP 5500+, which runs at 4 gHz, but is equivalent to a Pentium V 5.5EE, which is equivalent to a 4.0 gHz!
Wicked Fast 7 million chip!
Why the hell is this flamebait? It's a valid point that Intel's reliance on clockspeed, with no mention of instructions per cycle is effectively a form of lying.
Worried you might not keep your virginity forever? Try new Linux(TM), guaranteed twice as effective as LARPing
AMD 3700+ = Intel 7400+
The planned system, which would focus on the chips' overall performance and de-emphasize how fast its chips run,
One of the effects I foresee is that consumers (and corporate management) will latch onto Intel's new system and use it to make hasty decisions and brag -- except this time, they have a better chance of being right. In a sense, Intel will have already done the work for them.
I see no problem with a marketing machine that actually helps to dispose of the "Megahertz Myth" in favor of a more accurate measurement of a chip's performance.
The coolest voice ever.
Will they finally call the Pentium 4 3.2GHz a Pentium 4 2.4? Their fmul/fdiv operations take twice as long as on the Pentium 3, after all.
If not, they're a bunch of hypocrites.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Intel is no longer the market leader - AMD is.
First the 64bit codes, and now the speed "measurement". Intel has falling behind and is now mimicking the new master of silicon.
Just when you think you understand the naming conventions, the marketing droids go and change the names. Don't they have anything better to do?
From what I understood, AMD got the numbers by comparing itself to the latest Pentimum chip running at that frequency. Now, what is it going to be. AMD 128 at 100GHZ has performance 150000+ measured in units of Pentium X that has performance 50000000+ of Pentium 9 running at 1THZ.
Seriously though, the perfomance numbers are beginning to be as confusing as the speed numbers. In the end it is what you "feel" gives you a better performance. Or more scientifically, which benchmarks you choose to run to fit your expectations.
Intel has long coasted along on what Apple likes to call the "megahertz myth." The power of a processor is more than just its clockspeed, as Apple and AMD have struggled to point out for years. Intel ignored the debate because they were ahead in clockspeed, so it was a convenient metric that always showed them to seem ahead of the competition. This change in CPU naming might indicate a recognition that its rivals may overtake it in clockspeed. Perhaps they're planning strategic changes that could take them below Apple or AMD in clockspeed and want to jump on the "clockspeed ain't everything" bandwagon as soon as they can.
The problem is that you can't measure processor performance with one number. There's just no way to do so.
Before, AMD and Intel used to use clock rates. They didn't pretend to actually be summing up their chip's performance with the metric they slap on the box. It was even okay when just AMD had a performance number, because there was no sense of putting an industry-wide metric on a box. Now, one of two things will happen:
Possibility 1) AMD and Intel will decide upon a standard benchmark suite to determine "performance" and processors will be optimized around that benchmark instead of around real world software (i.e. consumer loses).
Possibility 2) AMD and Intel will come up with *different* measurements to determine their "equivalency number". AMD will focus on chip feature X and Intel on chip feature Y, each probably choosing the one that best supports their case. Both will accuse the other one of using an inaccurate and artificial metric. Each one focuses on improving their score in their chosen test. The performance profiles of the two chips diverges more. Since most software must be least-common-denominator, all developers except those few that choose to include custom-compiled or assembly bits and processor-specific support will make software that runs slower on average. (i.e. consumer loses).
I liked it much more when Intel and AMD's marketing departments stuck with slapping stupid stickers on boxes and making deals with OEMs -- neither one directly affected me.
May we never see th
I imagine their ads will start sounding like razor commercials. "Introducing the new and improved 'Mach 19'! Now in candy-apple red and midnight blue!"
With more than one company providing relative performance indices as "names" for their processors, and none really providing a basis for these relative ratings, the consumer will now be forced to rely on product review sites like Tom's Hardware or Anandtech to evaluate the real performance of processors.
...Which is probably exactly what Intel wants.
That's a good thing in as much as the numbers will stop meaning anything to those with the technical know-how to get useful information from Tom or Anand.
But there are a lot of Stupid People out there using and buying computers every day, and they will be completely in the dark when it comes to evaluating their choices. For them, the deciding factor when choosing a processor in their premanufactured desktop machine will be only what a further descent into Marketing can tell them.
Yeah! Maybe Intel should do the Mhz in Italian. Then they could sell to those Mac people, they like European stuff and stuff.
Or anime hyperobole. The 'super mega ultra rating' vs the 'super ultra mega excellent rating'.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
The Intel 7,000+
When Intel abandons this scheme, what precisely will a 4500+ processor actually mean? It's bad enough trying to quantify it now, but at least we have the actual P4 GHz to compare against.
Something will clearly need to be done - independant benchmark-wise - to prevent abuse. It's going to get bad folks.
The good news: I think we're going to see '5000+' processors before the end of the year now.
The bad news: They will run like 4 GHz models.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Well, there's SPEC and TPC.
e sults.asp
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_price_perf_r
Look who holds the top ten spots for price/performance: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 on Microsoft Windows Server 2003.
I would advise anyone making technical/economic arguments against Microsoft to examine this list, if for no other reason than being able to explain it.
The coolest voice ever.
It is either a 90 or a 100MHz part, don't know which.
The practice of inventing a silly(TM) performance index that looks better on your chips than your competitor's, or can't be used without a license, is pretty old.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
I hope they name them Extreme something. Cause everyone knows that things are better when they are EXTREME!
"This processor is made for the extreme priority the good looks. The sharp socket which electrifies well is contained generously within..."
Guess the rumours of Intel's problems with 90nm, Prescott's severe ramping problems, issues that even 775 can't solve, and the incredible heat dissipation of the newer chips are all true. This seems to be yet more confirmation, even moreso than the release of 2.4GHz Prescott chips this week. Gee, boys, guess we should have listened to Bob Colwell when he was standing around screaming about the unsustainable clock ramping and heat dissipation curves.
When the architect of the P6 says something, you usually ought to listen. Perhaps next time you'll get off your high horses and follow the suggestions of the smart people. Now he's gone, you're fucked for '04, and you're in serious trouble on the desktop front if Tejas doesn't turn out to be a rabbit out of a hat.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
"It doesn't matter."
I realize it sounds trite but these days, it's true. They can buy pretty much any new computer they can find and it's perfectly capable of doing what they want to do because, in truth, what they want to do rarely requires a state of the art machine. To simplify things further is the fact that comptuers are getting cheaper and you are getting way more for your money. Buying a new computer isn't the financial hardship it once was.
My mother doesn't care what kind of CPU is in her computer or how fast it is. She just wants to send email to her grandkids and play bridge and she can do that quite happily on a computer she can pick up at Wal*Mart for a few hundred bucks. Power to the people, indeed.
Obviously related to the Bitchin-Fast 3D 2000. Quite a product. Capable of over 400 Bungholio Marks!
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Don tinfoil hats now.
Older intel CPUs used a performance metric named iCOMP which was stamped on many CPUs. A bit of googling suggests this is still around. Perhaps this is another case of reinventing an old idea?
This seems to bear out the rumours that "the next big thing" from Intel on the desktop will be based on the Pentium M which is a chip which ably demonstrates that more Megahurtz isn't necessarily better.
I guess Intel is starting this change in numbering early so it doesn't debut a new chip and a new way of labelling the speed of the chip at the same time. Launching both at the same time might look suspicious to less informed buyers, especially if Intel goes from selling 4Ghz chips to 2.4Ghz chips with a PR of 4500+. By starting early hopefully people will be more accustomed to the new numbering scheme and less likely to think they are being conned. A friend recently told me he had bought a new 3Ghz Athlon XP, he was ready to take it back to the shop after I explained what the 3000 meant!
I wonder how compatible this will be with AMD's PR ratings? What would the equivalent to an Athlon 64 with a PR of 3400 be? I hope Intel doesn't invent a PR system that deliberately uses bigger PR numbers than AMDs. I can see confusion amongst consumers who will think an Athlon 64 4000+ is not a match for a "Pentium 5 6000" even if they are equivalent performers.
While Megahurtz has long been a poor way of determining the speed of a chip, I think having two different PR systems that aren't compatible could be worse.
But there are a lot of Stupid People out there using and buying computers every day, and they will be completely in the dark when it comes to evaluating their choices. For them, the deciding factor when choosing a processor in their premanufactured desktop machine will be only what a further descent into Marketing can tell them.
So what's changed? Stupid people are already completely in the dark; they already don't know whether an Athlon 3200+ is better value for money than a Pentium 4 3.2 GHz or not, so how is the Intel chip being called a Pentium 4 7192 (3.2 GHz) or whatever going to make things worse?
good thing it's not gonna be retroactive....especially since the early P4's (Williamettes and some early Northwoods) got creamed by P3's of equal clock speeds.
I was looking forward to the Pentium 5, Pentium 6, Pentium 7, etc...
Learn something new.
...they will have to start using fast-sounding marketing names instead. We'll start seeing things like:
* The Intel sooper-sizzler
* The AMD ass-burnin fireball
Of course, that will get done to death, and then we'll just use sounds, eg. the Intel Vrooooom.
"Is that the sales desk? I'd like to order an AMD AAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHH, please."
I think VIA started it, but I'm pissed at AMD for continuing it, and now Intel for jumping on board. Mhz are a useful and TRUTHFUL stastic. It tells you how fast a given chip cycles at. This is a fact, not a bunch of marketing BS. Further, for within chip comparisons, it is a useful number. For example:
I have a P4 1.6ghz, I know that the max my board supports is a P4 2.4ghz. Supposing I want to upgrade, how much speed will I gain by maxing my processor? Answer: A bit less than 150% of my current performance. When all else is held equal about a chip, performance scales slightly less than linear. So if you need to double you performance, you need to a bit mroe than double your clock speed.
But PR numbers seem to just come out of the ass of marketing people. When AMD first went to their PR system they claimed it was based off of some benchmark comparison to their old Athlons. In reality the formula was increase the PR number 100 for every 66mhz in actual clock increase. This, of course, meant there PR numbers become more and more BS the higher they went. Chips can get, at best, a linear imporvement out of clock speed increase. It is simply physically impossible for a doubling in clock speed to result in more than a doubling in performance without an architecture change. I also recall when AMD moved to a new core, I think with the 2800+, that for a lot of things ended up being slower, hence making the PR seem even more like BS.
There just isn't a singular way to measure chip performance. Different designs are good and bad at different things. What's more, it depends on how something was written and compiled. Some apps may be well optimised for Intel processors, not for AMD, so they seem to run slower than numbers might suggest on AMD chips.
At least with Mhz you have a real, factual, non-BS number that is useful for internal comparisons. PR numbers just turn it into total shit and confuse the situation.
Just out of curiosity, what would you have them do? Are you saying that any time Intel or AMD wants to show you a CPU, they should list clock frequency, L1, L2, and L3 cache sizes, each of their individual latencies, main memory latency, clock multiplier, average IPC, number of pipeline stages, instruction set extensions (SSE, Powernow, etc), architectual information, die process size, average and max heat dissipation figures, speculative execution capabilities, out-of-order operation specs, core stepping and revisions, a picture of the actual die, and about 10,000 other things that contribute to performance?
And just what the hell are you going to do with all that information, let alone the average consumer? I seriously doubt most of the engineers at Intel or AMD could even take all that information and have a good idea of what Spec numbers or other benchmarks would look like. At some point, you've got to figure out a way to simply things so that most people can at least have a rudimentary understanding of what it is they're buying. AMD attempts to do that with the model numbering scheme, which is designed to denote the relative performance of each CPU. Intel is now moving to some sort of similar system, now that clock ramping on the P4 is reaching its limits.
There is no measurement of absolute performance. There is no single number that gives you an honest picture of how things are. You can take 100 benchmarks of different applications, and you'll still have only a relative idea of performance, at best. Intel would be lying if they sold you a chip rated at 2.4GHz, which was only actually running at 1GHz. AMD doesn't mention GHz, and until you can produce a 3GHz Thunderbird core Athlon, their model system is perfectly legitimate.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Maybe, in additional to the current marketing reasons, Intel found that they can't make the CPU clock follow Moore's Law anymore. This in itself would bad news for not only Intel but the whole industry as it cannot keep up its image of rapid growth.
This change will de-emphasize raw clock rate, but I wonder if it is also meant to de-emphasize raw processor speed in general as we move on to showing how to get more real work done by other means like putting multiple cores in a package or speeding up the I/O subsystems.
I am sure people will find a way to massage the data to show Moore's Law is still valid, but I wonder if the days of CPU clock following the law is going to be over.
Intel has NEVER stated that Mhz equals performance. Go look on their site. They like to quote SPEC, and their own performance tests, and all the rest of the BS that companies do. Never Mhz. The Mhz myth comes from two places:
1) Fanboys. I first remember it gaining real popularity among the Apple fanboys when Apple went PPC. They claimed that the PPC showed a positive second derivitave (growth of growth) in Mhz where Intel showed a negative second deravitive and how PPC could scale to huge speeds that CISC just couldn't handle. That of course, neve came to pass. Which lead us to:
2) The anti-Mhz myth. That Mhz don't mean anything. This is just FALSE. When you compare a single architecture (meaning one kind of one brand of processor) mhz give a VERY good idea of how performance will scale. If something gets X on a processor at 500mhz, you can with confidence say it will get nearly 2*X with the same kind of processor at 1000mhz. That doesn't mean it's the be-all, end-all benchmark, just a useful (and truthful) was of evaluating chip performance within a line.
PR numbers are just a bunch of crap. So far, I've never even seen any that are reliably based off of benchmarks. Even if they were, it wouldn't matter. Show me any benchmark, I'll show you how it's not relivant to things a lot of people do. Like take SPEC. It is a big industry standard benchmark. People doing scientific and engineering work place a lot of faith into it since it benchmarks what they do.
Well Intel LOVES SPEC, their processors when mated with their compiler do very well at it. Does that mean we should use it? Hell no. SPEC isn't applicable to everyone. It's got nothing to do with games, audio, video, bussiness, servers, etc. It's a science and engineering benchmark. What's more, it's a benchmark designed to come form source code, so to bench the compiler as well as the system. It's a good, open, standard benchmark, but it won't work as the single number to completely describe chip performance (nothing will).
PR numbers improve nothing, and just confuse and BSify the situation. At least Mhz are factual numbers and have some basis in reality. From what I've seen of PR numbers, they are mainly a dream of marketing and don't apply to the real world.
There might not be any benchmark that gives a "true" indication of the performance.
But all the chips generate heat. So we should rate them in terms of heat output density. A good number might be a nuclear power plant (chips are quickly approaching this number anyway).
So you could say, I'm running a Beowolf cluster of 256x Pentium "10" Nucs. Which means that you can heat up enough water to keep all of Chicago running.
It would appear that some child is running an attack script at the moment. It's kind of hard to make original posts that aren't buried behind 9 pages of the same lengthy post, so better off to reply.
chances are, the child could be fixed by a single line of iptables... and a phone call to his mom
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
What I find interesting about this article is the inherent variability inherent in the way that modern chips are made.
For those of you less familiar with how chips are made, there is a standard sized silicon "wafer" which Intel uses... I forget the exact diameter, although it's round and about the size of a large diner-plate. Anyhow, it comes as a large cylinder, and they slice off diner-plate sized wafers, and try to fit as many chips on it as possible.
Now, making a chip involves lots of chemical-etching and photo-chemical reactions using ultraviolet light. The interesting thing about all of this is that they'll print hundreds of chips with each go, and each print doesn't create the exact same patterns. It's really alot like using an old typewriter... Ever notice how one of the keys might get bent or out of alignment and it types letter's inconsistently? Same thing happens with printing chips, apparently.
Anyhow, because of photonics angles, chemical flow dynamics, atmospheric pressure, and all sorts of odd little variables within the clean room, the chips are variable, even though they're printed from the same wafer. In the end, a 2.0 Ghz chip may have come from the same wafer that a 2.2 Ghz chip, or even a 2.4 Ghz chip (for example). As I understand it, chips from the outer edges of the wafer are more likely to be slower than ones in the center (increased angle from the lasers, chemical and atmospheric turbulence effects from the edge of the container, etc.) Apparently, the technology is getting to the point where slight changes in entropy within the chip production process will get magnified into performance differences in the end product. Butterfly effect of sorts, actually...
In the end... it's the same chicken producing eggs, but sometimes the eggs are different. And the eggs eventually get graded (A, B, C, etc).
note: I've never worked in a chip production facility, so my post is bound have some technical errors in it. Feel free to supplement my post; try not to flame. Just paraphrasing other articles I've read about the process...
AMD will use Mirage, Veloce, Centaur, Chorus, and Record... Intel will use Sora, Tiagra, 105, Ultegra, and Dura-Ace...
Everyone knows they're roughly equivalent, but the former is always better...
How about we as the technical computer consumers come up with our own designator? We could start by basing it on a known quantity, for example a 1GHz P3 with a 133MHz bus. Then we benchmark the different parts of that CPU. FPU intensive, Integer intensive, MMX intensive, SSE intensive, cache hit intensive, cache miss intensive, and a mix intensive. Then whatever score is produced is weighted and collectively called 1.00 Then from that point on all CPUs are to be referred to by their number based on their weighted scores. So perhaps a 2GHz Pentium 4 is only a 1.5 when compared to the P3. Or even better, I'd love to see the individual scores of the different sections. I'd like to make it really easy for people to get specialized processors that best suit their needs. In some cases, it is hard to determine what would be the best cpu for the application. You may need one that can fly through compiling software but you don't really give a crap about SSE, MMX or FPU.
Intel and AMD's competition had been going crazy over the years, especialy after the athlon, and has driven up performance to insane levels.
But I guess that's ending now, and the two will simply compete on model numbering.
Using the pentium 8 2.4*10^24 (4.1ghz) will give me mad bragging rights over the Athlon 6 33*10^8 (4.08ghz) lusers. h4w.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
they all run my word processor faster than I can type...
Can I copyright or trademark that? :-)
When I saw Intel was doing this I immediately thought "that's the end of Moore's" law. Intel has been trying to win the clock rate race for years. But, consider there newest Pentium, Prescott. This chip now has a 31 stage pipeline and is built for high clock rates. Yet, it still is clocked at less than 3.2 Ghz -- the highest speed of the older Northwood. Why is this? Even the earliest Pentium 4s were able to greatly out-clock the pentium III's when they first came out. They weren't faster overall, but did have higher clock rates than the PIII. But now we have the 31 stage Prescott and the about same clock rate.
If Intel thought it could keep bumping the clock rate up, they wouldn't move to something like AMD's performance rating. Yet here we are.
Something has changed.
and please mod this person up. (S)He is correct in stating that the AMD model numbers are derived NOT from the Pentium 4, the Athlon classic, the Centrino, Celeron, PIII, Crusoe, 8088, or any other God-forsaken chip, but from the Thunderbird core Athlon CPUs. Those were the last Athlons to advertise the clock frequency, and thus were the obvious choice for a comparison chip for the next generation of processors. If I just bought a 1.4GHz Thunderbird Athlon (common chip for the time), I would expect that an AthlonXP 1500+ would perform better than it, and I would be correct. An AthlonXP 1500+ under the new rating system, were it to be compared to the Athlon classic core (far less efficient than Thunderbird) would probably run at about 1.1GHz. As it is, the AthlonXP Palomino core 1500+, being a relatively minor revision to Thunderbird, ran at 1.33GHz.
So mod this guy up. He's right, the post he's replying to is wrong.
Have a nice day.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
help consumers compare chips on a "good," "better" and "best" basis
;)
if they are refering to celeron as good, p4ee (emergency edition) as better, and xeon as best...
then the translation would be:
slow, good, and waste of money respectivly.
-judging another only defines yourself
You can do so easily. And accurately. Just not precisely. That's what this comes down to. Accuracy and precision are very different things, and are only relevent in the context underwhich they're evaluated.
People want simple. This is not simple. So, precision has got to go under these circumstances. You can either accept this, are keep crying out to a n apathetic world.
Well, when Intel starts dishing out their performance rating, they're gonna have to call their new P4 5.0GHz a P4 3000+ :)
I think this is a great thing, not because the marketeers will stop lying (they won't), or consumer will be any less confused (they won't), but because at least it will take a bit of pressure off of Intel's engineers to keep ramping up the clock speed.
Currently, when faced with a choice of implementation strategies, there's got to be enormous pressure from marketing to choose the one which increases the base clock speed, even if it's the poorer choice for actually improving average performance.
Of course, if they start using some benchmark to name their chips, then there'll be huge pressure to choose the strategy that makes `the number go up' (since it's basically `the number' that consumers look that, they haven't a clue what it means) -- even if technically another strategy might be better for the future -- but surely that's got to at least be better than the current farce!
We live, as we dream -- alone....
The only saving grace in all this is that, for all the Stupid People (parent's term, not mine, in case any Stupid People are reading this) out there using and buying computers every day, for the vast majority of tasks that those people do, a 550 Mhz. K6-2 would be more than adequate. In reality, the hardware vendors have so ridiculously far outstripped the needs of the typical user it isn't funny. I mean, not all that long ago each new generation of Microsoft Windows had us clamoring for faster processors. Now, even Microsoft can't throw away machine cycles fast enough to force us to upgrade our hardware. I have a 1.4 Ghz. Athlon here (admittedly on a top-of-the-line motherboard) but I just can't justify the expense of upgrading because, well, it's still way more than I need. The only people that really need blindingly fast machines are gamers, and even that's not so true anymore given the performance of a high-end video card.
... it's more than good enough for the applications we use today.
... nobody needs them. Many of these same companies are especially irritated because, while they don't see the need for vast expenditures on new hardware (and new copies of Windows XP) Microsoft is putting the financials screws to them to try and force rapid upgrade cycles. See, the thing is that the personal computer industry used to be a growth industry, in that each new generation of products provided significant new benefits in terms of performance and/or features. Corporations and individuals gladly plunked down their hard-earned dollars (or rubles, pesos, whatever) because there was a clear benefit to doing so. However, after nearly a quarter of a century, things are starting to plateau. This has outfits like Intel, AMD and, of course, Microsoft nervous because they have come to depend upon regular customer upgrade cycles for their very survival.
Eventually, of course, we will find a good use for all that speed (other than cool games.) I have no idea what that will be, but at some point a "killer app" or other widely accepted technology will be created that will really need performance. Expert systems applied to consumer applications, perhaps. Conversational speech-recognition. Something none of us have even thought of yet. I don't know, but for ordinary consumer use it doesn't matter whether a processor has a 3400+ or 9000000+ sticker on it
A lot of corporations that used to upgrade hardware regularly are putting off new purchases because
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I always referred to AMD's numbers as being in GiggleHertz. I propose this term be used for the Intel chips as well.
The centrino tests/comparisons were heavily rigged (using 16 meg video ram for the comparison processor)...I recently tried to help a young friend buy a laptop, and while researching came across Intel notebook comparisons with what appear to be rigged tests. I was amazed at the obviously crappy centrino selling everywhere... why are they using 16 megs of video ram? This seems to be their common practice, as the tests they have up now seem to be a newer version of the ones I saw a few months ago.
All your preview button are belong to Hello Kitty.
1. Retire MHz as speed benchmark.
2. Use ??????? in place of MHz.
3. Profit!
Unfortuately, nobody told Intel they're supposed to fill in the ??????? part of the plan.
Come on, what do you think Intel will do. Deliberately make the number smaller?
They have no choice but to stay close to AMD or to chose a "scale" that is non confusable with AMD.
I think it is unlikely they will go 10x or so higher as a Pentium 50000 sounds silly and might even get them sued by some assinine lawyer representing class of Grandmothers that feel they were mislead.
They can't go lower. One or two digits will be confused with the Pentium Number itself. Pentium 7 - 11.
The hundreds series has already been taken by AMD. 140 / 240 etc. So my guess is they will adopt the AMD type numbering.
They copied the AMD64 aclling it IA32e, so why not tak the AMD numbering while they are at it.
Help fight continental drift.
What exactly is a "suicide girl"? Does that mean she's already dead? I'm not into that kind of stuff, you know...
"Even the earliest Pentium 4s were able to greatly out-clock the pentium III's when they first came out. "
Yeah, you can do that when you do a complete core overhaul. Going from Northwood to Prescott is a fairly large change, but nowhere near as big a change as going from the PIII to the P4.
"But now we have the 31 stage Prescott and the about same clock rate.
If Intel thought it could keep bumping the clock rate up, they wouldn't move to something like AMD's performance rating. Yet here we are.
Something has changed."
What has changed is that Intel is having problems with the 90nm process, Prescott produces massive amounts of heat, the LGA 775 socket isn't going to solve those problems enough to ramp Prescott beyond 4GHz, if even that high, and the changes being made with the introduction of IA32-64 (aka AMD64) will give processors a pretty decent bump in performance.
Intel knows now that clock frequency ramps have limits. Sure, Bob Colwell told them as much when the P4 was being designed, but now they're actually slamming into walls of fire (heat). Right this second, they're not in such a serious situation that changing to performance ratings is necessary, but they will be fairly soon. Thus, if they do it now, it looks like a new initiative to give Intel an advantage in the marketplace. If they wait until their backs are against the wall, it looks like Intel is struggling to keep up and has lost its edge in the marketplace.
You see now why this is being done? It's just management finally starting to get a little smarter.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
that's a distributed attack, skript kiddies with a botnet. i'm suprised it doesn't happen more often.
Can't they do ANYTHING for themselves. What's next, they fire their CEO and hire an old guy with white hair? OOPS! They already did that! ;)
True. But she can't say yes either.
The better joke is that this got modded informative, damn moderators.
Just what we need.. another 'standard' way of talking about perfromance.
But then again, for most applications, it really doesnt matter.. most people wont notice the difference anyway. Only that its 'new' and 'faster'..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Given the current problems with patent madness, how long will it be before someone files something like 'Method to describe the relative performance of a microprocessor architecture using a multi-tiered numbering system independant of the architecture clock speed'?
For the sarcasm imparied, I'm semi-joking. Still, I'd not be surprised if something like that was tried. Patenting something silly like 'single click purchasing' soundes ridiculous too after all.
If moores law is at its end then good. There are more ways like solid state data storage, hopefully getting rid of the damn bus somehow, amongst loads of other things, oh and make more advances in thermal technology (overclock :) Doing that would improve a machines performance and stability by 10fold... So maybe this will shift us into the right direction.
In modern CPUs, IPC depends on the parallelism of the code, hyperthreading, and so on. Take a look at LAME benchmarks sometime: both Intel and AMD CPUs manage to retire the same amount of IPC for that task, so a P4 kicks Athlon butt in direct relation to the clock difference.
Here's a question for you: a 2GHz chip averages 2.5 IPC and a 1GHz chip averages 3.3. Which is faster?
__CmdrTHAC0__
In Soviet Russia, Spanish Inquisition doesn't expect YOU!!
And really good things are called "Evil Dragon", at least that's what you would think looking at the retail packaging for video cards.
If something gets X on a processor at 500mhz, you can with confidence say it will get nearly 2*X with the same kind of processor at 1000mhz.
This is true if your benchmark (or something) is able to effectively isolate the CPU. Otherwise, you have to start worrying about bus latency, page faults, and the speed of everything else in your computer.
There's also a myth that CPU performance equates to the performance of an entire computer. This one has folks going out and buying all-new computers when what they really needed to do was buy more RAM or uninstall RealPlayer, Gator, that weather program, etc.
This myth is definitely supported by Intel, which likes to run ads that imply that buying a Pentium MCCXVI processor will help you get better audio and video streams on that computer that's still dialing into AOL with a 28.8 modem.
Around my house, any new purchase must score high on the WifeMark, which is a complex combined index of software and hardware performance. The benchmark is simply my wife's reaction to me maxing out the credit card again on a computer. The levels are:
"Feels about as fast as what I have now. And last time she almost killed me for buying a new box."
"Nice, seems faster, but the wife will kill me if I spend this kind of money for nothing special."
"Damn that's fast. I want. She's just going to have to deal with it."
I've been using that benchmark for years. I don't even look at the official numbers. Once it gets to the point where the kit I run now is clearly sh*t for anything normal, I upgrade. Just come home one day with a new box and figure she'll come around.
Got a Mac G4/466 right now, specifically to run OSX. She likes OSX. Before that a used 7600/200 (G2ish) because web browsing got slow and she likes web browsing. Before that a Quadra 630 (486/33ish) because it was best for desktop publishing and we were big into that at the time. Before that, I owned a SE/30 (386/16ish) but that was before we were married. For sure, I more than double performance each time, noticing when something is finally "damn fast" for what is currently important and figuring it scores high on the WifeMark.
Happy with the G4 running Panther, it does email and web browsing and web development work Real Well (as does the 7600 to be honest, but no OSX for that one). I'll upgrade the G4/466 chip someday, maybe when I can get a G4/2000 for cheap on EBay. But otherwise I might run this box for a long time as I can't see anything coming along that scores highly on the WifeMark.
BTW, I still have all the machines listed above. Old Macs never die, they just become web servers.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Now that's a trend I think is broadly continuing. Multi core CPU's are a part of it. We may also see async processors coming out with zillions of transistors, but no central clock.
delete from posts where subject like '%GNAA%';
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
the whole discussion here seems to be based on the assumption that intel will roughly adpopt the infamous "PR" rating (####+ where #### is the clock speed of an imaginary cpu that performs equivalently to the cpu being named).
the way i interpreted the article, the new naming scheme would be more similar to the way opterons are named, some longer number consisting of shorter numbers representing various features of the cpu. cache size, fsb, core voltage would be my candidates.
[i have an opinion and i am not afraid to use it]
confirms Intel's intentions? All of google's news links to Intel's renumbering scheme aricles point to the same CNEt/Spooner source. I highly doubt it, but then again, I'm a skeptic by nature.
When people buy a car, there are a number of 'performance metrics' they get...
0-60 in x.y seconds
n miles per gallon
60-0 in x feet of braking
x.y liter engine
n number of cylinders
y horsepower
headroom/footroom in the cabin
number of cupholders
r decibels of road noise
I never hear anyone complaining that all these metrics for buying cars is confusing. We need a SET of metrics by wich we measure an entire COMPUTER, not just a processor.
We actually don't have any shortage of these metrics, we just don't have them being applied consistently so that the average consumer can use them. The average consumer latched on to 'megahertz' as if it were 'horsepower', and the marketing wonks perperuated the myth.
What's to stop Intel form going an equally or more BS route? Maybe Intel decides that PR numbers shoudl equal Mhz*2. So the 4Ghz chip gets called the P4 8000. Does this mean anything? No, not at all.
Consumers will be dumb about ratings, this is true of ANY industry (horse power in autos for example). That doesn't mean that companies should just start making shit up up. It makes a bad situation worse. When they use real numbers, at least those of us in the know have something to base our conclusions on. When it's all made up, how do you know where to start?
Independent benchmarking is done all the time... and no one saying that they're hiding the GHz.
moores law has nothing to to with GHz
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
...1) Fanboys. I first remember it gaining real popularity among the Apple fanboys when Apple went PPC. They claimed that the PPC showed a positive second derivitave (growth of growth) in Mhz where Intel showed a negative second deravitive and how PPC could scale to huge speeds that CISC just couldn't handle. That of course, neve came to pass. ...
I think what the Apple fanboys were excited about is scalability of the number of processors. An example of this is the Big Mac. x86 architecture has difficulty scaling beyond 8 processors while the G5 architecture scales beautifully.
Shh.
Not system speed. Believe it or not there are plenty of CPU intensive applications that don't hit much of the rest of the system. Also, there are plenty of cases (like the case I'm in now) where the CPU is the limiting factor. My disks are plenty fast for what I do, almost nothing slams my memory bus, all my other system and IO busses aren't even close to peaked. Any time I slam my system it's either the graphics card or the CPU that is the limiting factor. For the work slamming the CPU, I will get basically 150% performance by increasing CPU speed to 150%.
Ya, it's not the be-all, end-all number. I noted that. The problem is that there is the thinking that somehow a BSified PR number will somehow be better. Errr, no. I'd prefer that all my components be rated in real, factual, terms. I can then use those to make SOME kind of meaningful comparison. I want to buy a 7200rpm harddrive, not a PR 12000+ harddrive. I want to buy 1024MB of RAM, not PR 3500+ of RAM.
Going to BS PR numbers improves NOTHING. You are still faced with the situation of picking which part you need to improve, only now, it's difficult to make any kind of sensible comparison.
so i guess the new batch of p5's clocked at 3000 mhz will start as intel P5-1200 ?
I quote myself (emhpasas added) "That doesn't mean it's the be-all, end-all benchmark, just a useful (and truthful) was of evaluating CHIP performance within a line."
I KNOW that the chip isn't the only thing in a computer. There is a reason why I'm still running a 1.6ghz P4, I spend my money on other subsystems since for me, they are the ones that make the most difference. However when evaulating CHIP performance specifically when evaluating, again quoting myself "a single architecture (meaning one kind of one brand of processor)" Mhz is an effective comparison. A P4 Northwood at 2.4ghz on a 400mhz bus will be able to do calculations roughly 150% the speed of a P4 Northwood on a 400mhz bus at 1.6ghz.
Now if you compare different bus speeds (533mhz vs 400mhz) different architectures (Northwood vs Prescott) or ESPICALLY wholly different architectures (P4 vs Athlon) it breaks down. But SO DO PR NUMBERS! There is NO gaurentee, and in fact a high degree of probablility, that AMD and Intel will have DIFFERENT BS schemes that have nothing to do with each other and less to do with reality.
I am not saying that Mhz is the ideal benchmark. I am saying that it is turthful and facutal and useful in limited in-line comparisons. PR numbers are the dream of a marketing department and have shit to do with shit and are worthless, even in comparing like chips.
Yup, and fries too.
That sounds similar to how AMD names their CPUs, and frankly I never understood what they really meant in terms of one being better than another. How about giving the power of a CPU in gigaflops?
While no measure can be truely accurate, the number of floating point operations a CPU can do per second is a more accurate judge of cpu power than the clock speed.
I'm glad Intel is choosing to use a different naming convention, hopefuly it will be something more meaningful.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Here comes all the AMD fanboys piping up that Intel will be dishonest and AMD isn't because they're all charitible saints and not out to make money like evil Intel.
Give me a break.
i'll agree with everyone here about mhz not really meaning a whole lot by itself..
whenever i had to consult people about their pc purchases, i found the best way that they understood was basically the 3 parts of the cpu.. mhz, bus speed, and cache memory..
your cpu is a vehicle.. the mhz is the speed the vehicle can carry stuff from one place to another (this is what you are buying this ehicle to do - moving stuff) the bus speed is how fast you can load your stuff onto your vehicle.. and the cache memory is the amount of stuff the vehicle can carry...
then i go to explain how whats the point in having vehicle A that can go 1.5 times faster than vehicle B, but vehicle B can carry twice as much stuff each trip.. in the end Vehicle B is the one that gets more done.. until you get into things like it doesnt matter how fast vehicle A can go, if vehicle B can be loaded and on its way and back in the same time that A is still being loaded (bus speed)
its probly not the most refined explaination, but its the way i've talked many people into getting athelons instead of celerons, and in the end getting a better computer (dunno about the states but up here i can get an XP2200 for about the same price as a celeron 2ghz -give or take $5- and we're talking HUGE difference in performance)
My next machine's gonna be a nice, quiet and cool-running Mini-ITX. No fan, and a whopping 600 MHz of see-pee-yew! ;-) And hey, guess what... taht little box plays MP3 and OGG files and stuff, and even MPlayer works if you don't crank the resolution to 1280x1024@32bit. And the board+chip only cost ~ $130 (USD) and that's a sweeeeeeet fucking deal man.
No really, I don't need any faster chips. I already tried the old 533 MHz version and it fullfills all my needs. And I imagine that many other desktop users don't need much more speed either. I'm not talking about hardcore gamerz or make-buildworld dudez. I'm talking mom and pop "gonna check my email" type people. And people like me, who mainly use console applications in Debian.
And hey, did I mention the servers I manage only have dual 400 MHz pII's? And guess what man, that shit runs sweeeet still after all those years. Course they don't serve as many hits as slahsdot, but guess what... most sites don't! You know what I'm saying?
BTW, what's up with this: 1897 replies beneath your current threshold. Somebody set up us the bomb?
If we knew that the FUD-source was false, it wouldn't produce any FUD.
Even if "we" know that the FUD-source is false, the targets may not know. Often, "we" regular Slashdot users are not the targets for specific negative advertising campaigns. Rather, companies aim for the PHBs who control purchasing in large enterprises. PHBs seem to respond more readily to commercial attack ads than do those who actually use the products in question.
If you want to know the performance of a computer, you look at benchmarks. The best ones that are available right now for general purpose computing are the SPECmarks (spec.org).
People have used, and continue to use, Megahertz as a basis for comparison within the same processor family and generation. There, clock speed has a predictable meaning for raw CPU performance, and that is entirely legitimate.
The real "Megahertz Myth" is a marketing concept used by certain companies who have been trying to peddle underpowered and outdated CPUs as state-of-the-art by making inflated claims about their performance.
Let's say hypothetically that moore's law is coming to an end and the race to higher megahertz has reached a point where it's not desirable. If Intel decides to focus on other markets and ease way back on clock speed. Their best option to improving performance and maintaining sales is to improve multi-CPU support. If that happens, I think the future for Unix, Linux and Java looks brighter than Microsoft. Recently I ran a ton of benchmarks with a 4-way Dell box with 4Gb of ram. When I had 8 clients hitting Sql Server and Microsoft Analysis service, the performance was good. As soon as I cranked the number of clients up to 12, the performance degraded significantly. I forget the exactly numbers, but it was almost twice as slow. Even though the Sql Server team has worked really hard the last 5 years to improve performance, window's pre-emptive threading model is keeping it from scaling well under high concurrent load. Unix on the otherhand came out of time-share systems and has the benefit of 30 years of refinement for supporting large number of concurrent users. Until Microsoft implements time-share style threading with better threading primitives, scheduler and monitors, they will have a harder time taking advantage of multiple-cpus. Since a large part of using multiple CPUs effectively is scheduling and coordinating processes efficiently, windows has a long way to go. Atleast based on the performance I see from OleDB drivers hitting SqlServer and MS Analysis Service. If you don't believe me, run your own benchmarks on Windows 2K3 server with .NET 1.1 and Sql Server 2K.
I can fell the LOVE!
this is rediculous.
I hate intels, they are slower than AMD Athlon XP's. Intel's system is just fine enough, NOW they need to change because consumers realize that its not just about the processor clock speed, and bus speed.
Does it mean a QDR 1600MHz bus on a 800FSB proc on a P4 is faster than a rival AMD 3200+ 400FSB -- NO! However, most amd owners overclock to make it whip intels even harder.
stock; my 2600+ (2.09GHz) beat an intel 2.8... laughable. After overclocking, I now beat a 3.2Ghz.... hilarious!!! FOr those wondering, I have a AUIHB stepping for only $80 about 6 months ago.
Honestly, I wonder how high the PR ratings will go before general public just wont even care. Like no one will care about a AMD-FX-51 11000+ vs. a 12000++ Intel P5... seriosuly... we need to get a hold onto reality... NO ONE CARES!!!
Now intel will just try to grasp the sales deceptivly. I think the IEEE should be a performance standard [not a benchmark], just a equal standard that AMD, Intel, and Apple can faily be rated at.
So does this mean that a 2.8GHz celeron is going to have a PR rating of 1200 (or less)?
Question everything that you've accepted without thinking.
It's called SPEC. SPEC may not be perfect, but it's pretty good.
It was created because the 486 DX2/66 run at a higher MHz than the Pentium 60Mhz. Also, the 486 DX4/100 was a way higher MHz.
Intel most definitely rated and marketed their chips with these numbers at the time. And I believe they even marked them with it.
It's no different this time. I don't think it will catch on this time either, just like last time.
CPU rollout roadmap:
Q3 2004: Pentium Fast
Q2 2005: Pentium Really Fast
Q4 2005: Pentium Reeeeeeeaaally Fast
Q2 2006: Pentium Flies
Q4 2006: Pentium 0wnz
all developers except those few that choose to include custom-compiled or assembly bits
What makes it so hard to include custom-compiled bits? Can't the publisher just tell the user to compile the program with -mcpu=athlon or -mcpu=pentium4 (or whatever they're actually called in a popular compiler) in the program's Makefile Wizard? And for proprietary software distributed on CD, can't the publisher just include BazQuik-athlon.exe and BazQuik-pentium.exe and then choose one to install based on a quick benchmark at installation time?
The centrino tests/comparisons were heavily rigged (using 16 meg video ram for the comparison processor)
Many architectures divide their solid-state volatile memory into work RAM and video RAM. The NES and Game Boy did, the GBA does, and the PC does as well. Most 2D applications, such as GIMP, need less than 16 MiB of video RAM because they do most of their work in work RAM. Remember that a video buffer at 1600x1200 pixels (greater than most laptop displays' pixel count) and 32 bits per pixel takes less than 7.4 MiB of video RAM.
Most 3D games on laptops and tablets aren't CPU bound but rather GPU bound, and if you're playing 3D games on a notebook PC, you'll usually want to either play older games that need only 16 MiB (such as Quake III Arena) or play newer games on a desktop-replacing luggable rather than a maximum mobility laptop.
and neither can she testify against you!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I just wanted to tack on another pointless post to this story to get see about pushing this up into Slashdot's top three stories (by postcount). I can't really see why this story's generating so much feedback since it's such an obvious thing to do. There's only so many threads about "benchmarks lie" and "AMD/Apple did it first" you can have without some major redundancy.
At first I suspected some major troll action but it looks to me like they're mostly legit posts. Very odd.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
and then I get modded Insightful, this is F$@#ing great!
What exactly is a "suicide girl"? Does that mean she's already dead? I'm not into that kind of stuff, you know...
Err..."already" dead? What, you have to do the honors?
May we never see th
Headline: "Intel's new Performance System based on Ratio between MFlop rating of Orange Peel and Current Mainstream Offerings"
Or: "Infinite Loop Error, Intel based on AMD, AMD based on Intel. Does not compute...."
So at any rate, when did they legalize crack for Intel Executives?
That really is my homepage, no kidding.
The new No Execute (NX) bit in AMD64 CPUs is used by Microsoft's upcoming Windows XP Service Pack 2 to neutralize buffer overflow attacks, arguably the largest class of self-executing Windows worms. Intel's upcoming x86-64 clone attempt lacks this feature. (Itanium has it, for the three of you that have one.)
The Cool 'n' Quiet feature of the AMD64 line drops power consumption dramatically while the PC is idle. 800MHz @ 1.25V currently, lower than that with the upcoming CG stepping. Even at full CPU load an Athlon 64 is going to burn less power than an equivalent Intel P4 CPU, especially a Prescott-core P4. CnQ is helping to keep my electric bill reasonable.
Finally, if the newbies plan on keeping their PC for several years, having an AMD64 compliant CPU is a good idea given the minimal incremental cost since it sure looks like the instruction set is taking over, what with Intel's capitulation and all.
Okay, so the few hundred $ machine can be ditched and replaced without much damage when and if needed, but it's something to keep in mind.
Of all the posts here, will anyone have anything insightful to say other than "Blah blah [Apple, AMD, Sun, Cyrix???] will always be better blah blah blah because blah blah does more work per cycle"?
Anyway, I'll bite.
What people miss here is that it doesn't matter if you do less work more quickly or more work slowly... as long as you rate of work is the same.
Sure there are situations where each one will show signs of being better, but on the average it still doesn't matter. What really matters is 1) Power consumption (...heat) and 2) running the rest of your motherboard at a high clock speed (since the smaller, less complicated chipsets don't fall victim to this efficiency twist... especially RAM).
Frankly, I don't give a damn about the core speed... to me its the FSB that counts (dual, quad pumped, whatever you want to pull together to make the bandwidth bigger... just do it).
Now, as for actually commenting on the article...
I don't like this idea at all. This throws away a common ground for comparison. Since AMD was basing their model numbers to compare to the Pentium speeds, you have a good comparison in performance. But, now that Intel is throwing that away, we'll have XT500's vs. 2430+'s (or whatever they come up with) and you will have no idea how to compare them without digging through pages of benchmarks.
The common measurment will be lost... and consumers will be more in the dark then they ever were..
This is interesting. I'll bet that by doing this, Intel's aim is to confuse the average consumers even more. AMD has been touting performance rating number over MHZ clock speed, so Intel basically is saying fine, you want to play this game, I can play this game better then you could.
I would say that this time AMD has some choices to make. If AMD stick with the same stuff, I think eventually Intel's marketting machine will win by convensing Joe Average that AMD's number is meaningless, you need to go with Intel's rating system to determine true performance. The other choice is for AMD to follow what Intel is doing. However, this would allow Intel's marketting machine to tell the rest of the world that AMD is just a follower/clone maker. If you want quality and trusted name, you must go with Intel, not some clone maker that could go out of business at any time. Remember Cyrix?
This is an excellent move on Intel's part. The Intel marketting has slap the gauntlet in AMD's face and they are expecting AMD to respond. AMD's marketting really needs to be smart about responding to this challenge or Intel is gona walk all over AMD's face.
IMHO, the ultimate losers would of course be average consumers because they still have no clue as to how to pick the right system at the right price for the tasks that they expect a computer to do for them.
you have to start worrying about bus latency, page faults, and the speed of everything else in your computer.
Hell yea you have to worry about the page faults! One little spurt of those and its BSOD all the way to... uhh... wherever the uhh... BSOD... leads..... you...
Is that so? Care to back that up with a link?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
He, thank your very much. :)
Moo!
will they start takling about the new revolutionary 16, 32, 64, 128 etc bit systems? Will we finally see the Intel64?
this will bring isssues like if NEC comes out with a system that has 2 128 bit processors, is it a 256bit system? Bitness is where it is folks. Im'm glad Intel finally got it.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
. . . don't trust benchmarks. This naming scheme is just going to create yet another benchmark which will probably be biased by those marketing it. Again, stick to Tom's Hardware and don't even look at what they call it.
...I can hardly wait until the BFC-9000 cpu chip is released.
AMD never kept thier spec numbers close to intel. They just wound up that way. Their benchmarks were all based off performance relative to a duron 1000 mhz.
Photos.
Not thinking in terms of engineering and architecture, when integrating computer hardware and software, introduces bugs and instability. Computer professionals need to be precise. Any of this dumbing down of hardware and software specs hurts the profession.
This new CPU naming convention won't really matter. Any new computer sold these days will have way more than enough power for Mr. or Ms. Average.
Does it really make a difference if your grandma gets a 4800 or a 5000? Either will check her e-mail just as fast.
Anyone who cares enough or has a really good reason to be on the bleeding edge will check Anandtech or Tom's Hardware or somesuch to find out how the chips are really panning out for any given task. A hardcore gamer may go with one chip while a person who renders 3-D objects for a living may go with another, and someone who crunches numbers, still another.
Processors are so fast now it is really very few people who can benefit from a faster one.
I wrote a rather long reply, and it's offtopic, so I thought I'd spare the other readers & mods and put the response in my journal instead:
http://slashdot.org/~MyHair/journal/65161
But that tells you JACK as soon as you start looking at (branch prediction misses, hyperthreading contention, L1 cache latency, L2 cache latency, memory bus wait states, hard disk paging...)
And so essentially it tells you jack. This is why you have application oriented benchmarks (SysMark, 3dMark, SPEC, LAPACK, TPC, etc.), because you want performance estimates based on the variety of workload you have (I/O vs. RAM vs. CPU bound, parallelizable or not, etc.)
Think about what you imagine yourself doing, and then spec a system whose components score well in the benchmarks relating to that application domain.
The processor included.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I sell computers every day and I'll have to admit I get damn sick of explaining every time that there is more to a computer than just the MHz.
I have to go into a real complex argument about how there is not only the MHz but the front side bus, L1 cashe and L2 cashe, and onboard instructions etc.. Then there is the size of the ram, Speed (400 MHz etc..) and Latency (CL = 2.5 etc..). Then there is the Hard drive size, RPM's, Onboard Cashe, connection platform (serial ata etc...), and RAID configuration.
So I would love if considering all those factors for each piece of equipment there was some single number I could use to rate that one piece. That way it wouldn't take 15 minuets to tell someone how fast the computer is. I just think that the people making the product shouldn't get to create the definition of that one special number. It's like if you had Chevy say their new corvette had 380GM power.
~DeusOTdeuS
what benchmarks they will use to determine this speed and how AMD will compare their processors to Intel's if their benchmarks are biased. It also proves that Intel has a new strategy where processor speeds will be too close from a marketing approach (customers will not buy a 5,2 GHz if it is twice more expensive than a 4,8 Ghz).
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Matlab comes with about 10 different optimized versions of the core matrix manipulation libraries. It detects which architecture you have, then loads the right DLL/.so at runtime. It's quite nice.
mplayer uses cpu features/flag detection to pick certain core algorithms at runtime (scaling, decoding, etc.)
This stuff isn't hard...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Basically it was an observation that the transistor density would double every few years... for a while.
But the gist of the parent may be right. Frankly I'd like to see the standard benchmark be porn related in some way.
Cordially,
Proud owner of a G3, G4, G5, and of course a G6 and G7 when they ship!
The Computer stores I go to (In Toronto) gave up on trying to explain to people the diffrences between various video cards. So they just printed out 2 of the Toms' Graphs, Quake 3 and something else. It's hilarious watching noobs staring at the thing and comparing it to the price list next to it.
Let's look at some of your claims:
You other examples either refer to system integration issues (e.g., supposed first use of a 3 1/2" floppy--developed by Sony), or are vague and meaningless from a technological point of view.
For a few years, Apple had an R&D department that actually published a little and was fairly high quality. However, I can't think of any fundamental breakthroughs that came out of that, and they disappeared again in the mid-1990's.
In addition to demonstrating your ignorance, I find your posting just offensive: I actually know some of the people who developed the technologies you talk about and I assure you that they didn't work at Apple when they did it. For their own financial gain, Apple has deliberately created the impression that they invented a lot of things that they didn't invent at all--and you fell for that dishonest marketing. Read up on the history of computing--you'll be surprised what you find.
Intel has a plan to release 300Mhz Prescott, which would run blazing fast and quiet!
seems to me that intell had to use it, then it would be the intel fanbot dumbasses that needed the protection again forgeting the heatsink when building thier own systems.
as far as your p4 running circles here? i got a big mac wiating for ya to get tired on. i guess after your done you really could say it sucks.
Maybe it's time companies realize that designs forced by marketing are mostly bad in the long run even if they generate profit in the short term. Sound design == long product life (mostly).
I have Athlon Thunderbird 1.4 GHz, which is named 1600+. If you were right, it would be named 1400+, wouldn't it. Could someone explain, how this is possible?
Ah... I was wondering why this article had 3000+ comments (but was too lazy to switch to a -1 view and deal with /.'s dumb-as-a-post pagination).
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Something has changed.
Intel has changed. Pentium 4 was specifically designed to have high frequency: performance-per-MHz was a secondary requirement. But now, intel is in the early stages of designing their next-generation part, and they have two choices- even-higher frequency, or lower/same frequency but better architectural performance.
I suspect they found out (or are finally starting to admit) that pure frequency doesn't buy as much performance as people thought, so now they have to fight the inertia of their own "GHz is king" mantra.
I am not a sig.
If Intel thought it could keep bumping the clock rate up, they wouldn't move to something like AMD's performance rating.
I hope I do not sound extremely naive, but I like to think that Intel is not led by marketing people. And Intel's engineers do not directly care about selling more chips, they care (I hope so) about making ever faster (for actual applications, all of them) processors. Thus if they decide to concentrate on other things than upping the frequency for a while, this is probably a sound technical decision. The best Intel's marketing can do is reflect this good decision in a better performance metric.
Intel could have increased the GHz, but if they decided another approach is better, I tend to believe them.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
but you're using cisc processors...
so its actuall taking you 8 clock cycles on your athlon and 9 clock cycles on your pentium...
my ultra sparc goes, insert trowel, lift trowel, dump contents... in one tick each!
so even at half the clock speed, i still win
and the best part is, i can can also do: insert trowel, lift trowel, flick snad in face of pc users... still only takes three ticks
Yeah, I could do it at least 10 times per night, but thank god I've got spermal throtteling to protect me from exhaustion after doing it once!
Even for the Stupid People (tm), I don't see this as being worse than it is now. Right now if someone goes out to buy a chip based on clock speed they might see an Intel Celeron 2.8GHz system for $700 and an otherwise identical P4 2.8C GHz system for $900. Which do you think they'll chose? Probably the Celeron, despite the fact that it's a SIGNIFICANTLY slower processor (much more than the $200 price difference would seem to indicate).
It's even worse with laptop chips, which is where the initiative to use a model number scheme started with. Here Intel's 1.5GHz Pentium-M chip is a faster processor that their Mobile Celeron 2.5GHz processor, but most Stupid People would prefer to buy the Celeron because of it's big clock speed number.
Hopefully the model numbers will be really arbitrary so that at least people will know that they're just bullshit numbers. Nobody would think that a Mercedes S600 is "20% better" than a Mercedes S500, everyone simply recognized that they are model numbers.
...there sure are one hell of a lot of people placing far far far too much weight on the supposed expertise of Tom's and similar sites....
By and large these hardware sites know absolutely fuck all about anything except advertising revenue and click thru.
I'm sat here typing this on a P4 / 2.6 Ghz / 800 mhz fsb / a-bit box, prior to this is was a xp1900+ / a-bit box, why the switch? Intel is FAR quieter as well as representing a big jump in performance... sure, I could have gotten damn siminal performance from an overclocked xp2500+, at the expense of cpu core MTBF and at the expense of my fucking ears being assaulted by fans whining away.
At the end of the day it makes no odds on the desktop, my cpu, like most of them, spends most of its life and 5% utilisation, and in the server only a fool would use a cpu with a lower standard of thermal management than intel.
(I still miss my old cobalt raq2 that didn't even require a bloody CPU heatsink, much less heatsink and fan...)
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Actually, it is the Duron 1GHz core those numbers are based off. Same as the t-bird core, but with less L2 cache.....
originally.
But it panned out against the P4 of a certain spec, so that's what they say now.
Because of their long pipelines, Intel chips perform worse than what their clock speed suggests.
Remember how the P5 performed better per clock than a 486 (a P75 performed better than a 486 100 or something). Same thing occured with the P6 (the Pentium Pro 166 or whatever performed better than the P55 200). Yet the P4 (by the previous naming convention really a P7) performed worse per clock than a P!!! (by the previous naming convention really a P666). Yes a P!!! 1ghz performs better than a P4 1ghz.
Where as the AMD K7, beats both the K6-3 & P4 clock for clock
And I thought AMD made Intel 'clones'.. seems its the other way around now ;P
really. . .
the history of the world
If you have a Thunderbird 1.4 it is a 1.4 GHz CPU using the Thunderbird core. The Athlon XP chips used the Palomino cores and Athlon XP is where the Performance ratings took over.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
Wow, at this rate intel is going to lift AMD's entire playbook. AMD must be doing something right.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
When I was younger, I had all the time in the word to research hardware to get the biggest possible bang for my buck.
This is no longer the case.
I was shopping for a replacement CPU for my motherboard in order to replace a dead one. The old CPU was a Celeron, the new one could be either a Celeron or a P4, as the motherboard could take either.
I went to Pricewatch and saw that for $X I could buy a Y GhZ Celeron, or Z GhZ Pentium 4, with Z always being smaller than Y for any price-point X.
So how the hell do I, without having to research for hours, figure out which CPU (higer GhZ Celeron or lower GhZ P4) is better for what I need to do?
It would be very valuable to me if all of these CPUs were just ranked on some performance scale. That would, at least, be a much better starting point for future research.
Now, you can tell from my attitude above, that I want my computer to "just work!." If I was really interested, I'd do my research and figure out the best CPU for me regardless of the naming convention. If I was buying in bulk (ie for busienss purposes) I'd research more, too.
But hell, for people who don't really care to research that much (like me, and average consumer) it's good to have CPUs ranked in terms of performance in an obvious and visible way.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
Absolutely, the pc industry has reached a state of temporary maturity and the desktop pc is becoming a commodity. Consumers are begining to realise that they do not need to pay for a race tuned engine in their daily runnabout and are spending the money on other things.
This change in processor naming may also signal another significant change away from the general purpose processor. Given that clever design has given AMD chips similar performance to Intel chips with higher clock speed it is apparent that clock speed increases are losing their marketing appeal. It is also mind bogglingly expensive to keep on ramping clock speed through improved manufacturing processes.
My guess is that Intel has taken a strategic decision to spend more money on a new range of diversified processors targeted at different markets. Multimedia consumer devices are a case in point, a processor to play DVD's and games on a television could be produced with the video processing onboard. A business cpu could be produced with thin client capabilities built in. A traditional cpu could continue to be produced allowing offboard graphics processing for gaming.
It is apparent that consumers are just begining to realise that they dont need to spend a premium for a faster clock speed processor. Almost all consumer applications can be run on the slowest clock speed processor made these days. Intels marketing bang for a buck is probably going to come from bigger chips with more integration of pheripherals in the short term rather than from smaller faster chips. Hence a need to de-emphasise the clock speed and to concentrate on the function of the chip. I look forward to the Mediaplexor, Servertron, Deskexec, Portacoolon and Gameboss processors, all available in Super04 Mega04 and Exreem04 versions (04b if the process changes this year and 05 versions if they change next year).
Why compete with AMD when you can create a completely new market and own it from the start?
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
The problem is that you use the term "Linux" to refer both to the kernel and the useful libre/open source distributions that include that kernel. So, yes, Mandrake Linux is version 10 but the kernel is version 2.4 (or 2.6).
It seems that almost everyone is writing as if Intel is adopting an AMD-like system, where they replace MHz with some number. This is not the case. The numbering system will be like model numbers, and the clock speed will still be there. This doesn't replace clock speed as a measurement.
Instead, Intel's going to take something like "800 MHz FSB, 1MB L2 Cache" and make that a number. Of course the higher numbers will be those that should perform better, but that's always how it is with model numbers.
In my opinion this can only be a good thing, because instead of having to know the difference between P4 A/B/C/E, instead there'll be a number that encapsulates the non-clock speed related statistics.
In any case, these numbers are not intended to compare Intel chips to other manufacturers, rather to allow the different P4s running at 3.2 GHz apart (for example).
Not really. FLOPS is an attractive measure when comparing machines with different ISA's (Instruction Set Architectures), because they tend to be more constant than integer instructions. This is especially useful when comparing RISC and CISC processors, as RISC processors tend to execute more instructions per second but each instruction does less. But a floating-point add is likely to be the same on both machines, and for something like a linear-algebra problem, it is possible to compute the number of FP ops executed, and this will likely be the same for all machines. (It gets tricky when you start comparing machines with FP divide instructions against machines that require emulating FP divide with an inline routine that takes several FP multiplies, which is why such apps are generally not used for these comparisons.)
But this is not very useful when comparing different versions of the same ISA. And FP performance is just one component of overall system performance. A system with a slow bus is going to suck on anything that isn't lucky enough to fit in the CPU's caches.
Supercomputer users have been aware of this for years. The large US supercomputers build with thousands of multiprocessors would have impressive teraFLOPS ratings when they multiplied CPU's by peak FLOPS/CPU (what you could get if you could run every FP unit on every cycle), and get reasonably good ratings on their Top500 scores (because Linpack is relatively "friendly"), but on real apps, they'd call it a good day if they could get 10% of the peak rating.
Xerox PARC did the R&D for modern GUIs.
Absolutely they deserve credit for the pioneering aspect, but I get the impression Parc's stuff was closer to X11 than Mac.
The Lisa was Apple's first attempt to copy the Xerox PARC GUI work, and it failed.
Just so you know, Xerox got a pile of Apple stock out of the deal, which is different than what most people seem to assume. It wasn't like Xerox was oblivious to Apple being in the business of making computers.
But none of this negates the issue that computer would be a lot more primitive at this point without Apple and Next.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
No really, I don't need any faster chips. I already tried the old 533 MHz version and it fullfills all my needs. And I imagine that many other desktop users don't need much more speed either
That will only hold as long as all new software is written with low-level frameworks and languages.
In order to make software more reliable, flexible and easier to write, we author softare at progressively more abstracted levels. That abstraction comes at the cost of CPU cycles and memory.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Intel plans to give future cpus names that don't rhyme with "Titanic".
Haha!
Yeah fucking right.
I love it.
Unless you're a fucking moron who bought first run chips, yes there is.
I live in a giant bucket.
I hear they're going to start naming graphics card chipsets based on how many FPS they could conceivably render playing Duke Nukem Forever, which is fairly safe because they'll never have to make good on those numbers.
Unfortunately, the less scrupulous makers will try to rate theirs based on running Castle Wolfenstein at 640x480...
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
He is confusing the regurlar Thunderbirds and Thunderbird Durons. The performance rating is based upon Thunderbird Duron CPUs.
The 1400Mhz Thunderbird was faster than the first 1400+ XP.
On the other hand your CPU is an XP (palamino), there are no thunderbirds with XP ratings (although a lot of resalers are smoking crack).
Oh yeah? Then what was the Commodore CDTV in 1991 if not a multimedia PC?
just for the record, cuz we've above 3000 comments now yu know... :)
Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about.