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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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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...
You don't believe Intel's FUD but happily believe and spread AMDs FUD? Good job :rolleyes:
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.
Yes, but now we'll run into trouble because Intel's Performance Rating will be artificially larger than AMD's - I can't imagine Intel giving any CPU a lower PR than its MHz figure!
"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.
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."
How is that any worse than it already is? You already need benchmarks to see which processor is best for your application. It's not like naming processors after how many GHz they run at is any better.
It's important that numbers be sane, but when a ~2gig AMD chip can run with Intel chips clocked at a much higher speed, something needs to be done to let the public know in a non-technical fashion.
I don't think anyone can blame AMD for the switch and I think perhaps a standard benchmark/rating system might be in order.
Probably not realistic, but it would be nice.
Cheers
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
The difference is that as of now, we at least have one platform (Intel) accurately stating clock speed. AMD generally keeps their performance ratings close to Intel's however they have stretched the meaning of their 'XXXX+' definitions where Intel simply could not.
If BOTH of them start these arbitrary rating systems, we won't even have THAT small bit of stability. Intel could easily release a '6000+' processor tomorrow with no regard to clock speed. AMD would have to follow suit, and on it goes.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
No, I don't blame AMD (except for the questionable ratings of a few of their later Athlon XP's), HOWEVER, without a stable GHz metric to build off of, things are bound to get messy.
Marketing of both companies are going to have a field day.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
They would just game the benchmark. What you'd get were CPUs that were very good at benchmarks, and not so hot at other stuff.
At least with Mhz it was harder to fake it, but Intel managed to increase clock speed without actually getting much more performance, so they even managed to play that system.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
"Name chips based on the SpecIntBase score and be done with it!"
The problem is that AMD and Intel custom design their chips to perform better at different tasks/instructions. Then there is the problem of compilers. Was the SpecIntBase compiled with AMD and/or Intel specific instructions? Which versions? Is SSE2 faster on Intel than AMD? Was 3DNow substituted for a few SSE instructions in the benchmark? Did the newest version of Lightwave 3D take any of this into account? This type of thing can make a HUGE difference in performance.
I don't think there's a simple way through this at all other than common program benchmarking and even then there will be a lot of misleading (and often wrong) results.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
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.
A 4GHz Itanium, Pentium M, Alpha, UltraSPARC, or any other of the lower clock speed processors would be much beyond a 5000+ Pentium rating. The article said that the Pentium M, which is a great processor, is having trouble in the marketplace because people are used to the Hz rating. This will become more of an issue with multiprocessor systems and multicore processors or even with technologies like hyperthreading.
This has been done for years with cars. There are horsepower measurements displayed on car ads all the time. Of course there are many other performance measures like 0-60 times, torque, braking, etc. But those are usually only reported in enthusiest magazines (read: car geek stuff, like we are computer geeks).
I think this is going to be welcome by average consumers, but us geeks are still going to read Tom's Hardware and other media that are full of benchmarks and other performance measures.
Except, of course, that this isn't true either. True, mhz means something, but it's not even a good indicator within a processor line.
A 1000mhz processor will only be twice as fast as a 500mhz processor if the ram and the peripherals are ALSO twice as fast. Otherwise, it depends entirely in the workload whether the processor is faster. If your computer is basically just loading data from disk, copying it from one place to another with a simple transform, and sending it to the network or something similar, the 1000mhz processor may not be faster at all with the same ram! In fact, it could even be slower, if to get the right multiplier for the CPU, the front side bus speed was actually reduced (that does happen quite often) and hence the ram runs slower!
On the other hand, if your computer simply runs a tiny program (a few k) that fits entirely in the L1 cache, and almost never talks to main ram or the peripherals, then it may in fact run twice as fast when you double the clock speed.
In reality, real programs are somewhere in between, so to figure out whether it's worth it to get a faster processor or eg. buy more ram instead, or faster ram, or a 15krpm SCSI disk, or whatnot, you have to figure out what your computer is going to be doing and estimate accordingly. Or even better, test the actual machine out to see how fast it is before you buy a lot of them.
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.
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.
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)
so what? like i have any idea, from name alone, which is better, an ati radeon 9800 or a nvidia 5900?
. . . 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.
Nope, even with Intel the MHz is irrelevant.
A 2g Celeron performs as fast a a 2g P4, right?
I think this train left the station a long time ago.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
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.