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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!
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.
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.]
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..."
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.
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.
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."
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.
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...
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.
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
Well, when Intel starts dishing out their performance rating, they're gonna have to call their new P4 5.0GHz a P4 3000+ :)
I always referred to AMD's numbers as being in GiggleHertz. I propose this term be used for the Intel chips as well.
"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."
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 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.
*foom* That is the sound of a cycling reference flying over the heads of the average /.'er.
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.
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 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.
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
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)
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.
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
Is that so? Care to back that up with a link?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
The transition to PPC that the parent post is talking about has nothing to do with G5, or G-anything, and it happened about 10 years ago or so..... He's refering to Apple's switch from the Motorola 68K CPU's to the IBM/Motorola PowerPC chips which happened IIRC in the early 90's. At that point having more than one processor in a desktop or even small server machine was little more than a pipedream, and scalability of number of processors meant nothing to ~95% of the computing world.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
. . . 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.
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.
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
Should they? No.
Will they? Inevitably, yes. It sells more product.
Horse Power in cars is one example, but I think a better is home stereo systems. Things have been getting better lately because the industry has started to regulate itself, but it's still not uncommon to see 2000 WATTS in huge letters on a boombox that may be able to pump out 50. The worst example of this I've seen are a pair of $15 computers speakers labelled 1000W. They just take the largest Voltage they can pump through the speakers, and the largest Current that it can handle, multiply them together, and write this number on the box. Nevermind the fact that the max voltage and max current either a) can't actually happen at the same time (as in the 1000W) or b) can only be sustained for milli- or micro-seconds in a laboratory enviroment, while playing a perfect sine wave.
But just as these stereo systems have the bullshit P.M.P.O. ratings, there is always, somewhere on the box, a true RMS value as well. Likewise, even though an AMD processor is labelled 2400+ it still says that it's 2.0Ghz @ 266 DDR. Engine manuals state not only horsepower, but torque, maximum RPM, etc, etc... This is for those of us in the know who use these real, informative values to decide what to buy.
As to your example, yes the P4 8000 -does- mean something. It means the CPU is running at 4Ghz (/2). The point is that these bullshit P.R. numbers will always translate to, or be accompanied by, real values.. and if they're not, vote with your wallet, and don't buy from that manufacturer.
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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.
The cost of software is a rather small part of the cost for a TPC score. Even on the "cheap" systems (the cheapest system on that top-10 lists costs $32,772, and most cost about $50,000), hard disks are the dominant cost factor.
Perhaps an interesting flip-side to this argument is to look at the list of fastest systems overall.
Linux fanboys will be happy to know that their OS powers the most powerful system in this test (albeit through the use of a cluster while a known-weakness of the TPC-C test is that clusters can produce somewhat unrealisticly good results), while MS only appears in 3 of the top-10 systems. IBM's AIX is the most common operating system (4 systems) while Oracle is the most common database (also 4 entries). Linux fanboys may actually have good reason to show off this first-place result though, because with a system cost of $6.5M, HP almost certainly wasn't using the free OS for any sort of price advantage. Rather it may offer a performance advantage over Microsoft or even HP's own HP-UX.
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.
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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.
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...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...)
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Wow, at this rate intel is going to lift AMD's entire playbook. AMD must be doing something right.
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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.