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Looking Forward to Intel's Grantsdale and Alderwood
VL writes "Over the next several days, you'll be hearing a lot about Intel's significant upgrade to the Pentium 4 platform. Soon enough, that brand new Canterwood board you have will be yesterday's news as two new words will be on the lips of all enthusiasts... Grantsdale and Alderwood."
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.html?i=2088
Very weak, Athlon FX 53 thrashes a 3.6GHz Prescott on i925 in gaming, and simply beats it in a lot of other areas.
Take with a THG Pinch Of Salt
9 /s ocket_775-15.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/2004061
(yes, that is page 15 to start the chipset talk, there's plenty of stuff before that of course, but this is a chipset story)
...BIOS support for USB keyboards and mice has been standard for quite a while now. I've used a USB keyboard on my PC to make changes in BIOS for quite some time.
We're talking about motherboard chipsets here, not CPUs. While looking at CPU architecture, clock speeds, etc. etc. to get a gist of how a PC will perform, it's still important to remember that speed of a PC is about the sum of its parts.
So think of these changes as an incremental speed increase across the Intel platform. Sure, they're a heck of a lot more boring than seat-of-pants GHz updates, but I welcome decent integration of a whole new set of bus technologies (SATA and PCI Express) which we've heard a lot of, but not seen much action on. Remember that PCI has been around for 10 years or so now and is getting a little long in the tooth stuck at a 33MHz bus speed.
In any case, it'll be interesting to see how these architecture updates are carried across to the Intel mobile platform.
Why not just overclock it a little to get some more life out of it :P? The northwoods can all do it decently
If you have to ask, you'll never know.
1) The fastest possible CPU, in *true* GHz, not in AMD's inflated "+" bogoghz.
No problem. AMD already publishes the true clock speeds of all their CPU's. The "3400+" or whatever you've seen is a model name, not a measurement of clock speed but rather of performance. AMD explains it here. Your post suggest that you are unaware of the fact that other things than clock speed have a significant impact on the performance of a CPU.
Next you'll be complaining that car makers name their cars cryptic things like "320Ci", "XC90" or "GT40" instead of naming each car according to its BHP rating.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
Many are power/ground.
Instead of pumping power in one place and distributing it around on-chip, the motherboard can do the same just as well, and on a scale that doesn't build heat.
I think it's IBM's Power5 that's planned to have over 2000 pins. More than half are power & ground.
The ECC logic is broken on the current stepping of the Alderwood chipset.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
PCI Express isn't as big a jump as it sounds like. The new Dell Poweredges have the ServerWorks GE bus architecture, which uses five separate PCI busses of various widths and speeds. This puts very few items on any given PCI bus, and PCI Express is just going to mandate one device on any given connection. I'm sure other manufacturers use similar technology.
You're wrong here too, the AMD Athlon out performs the P4 in float point processing. If your number crunching is based on float point variables you would see a difference between the AMD and an Intel processor. Intel depends on it's higher clock speed to back up for the fact that it uses more clock cycles to process float points.
No it absolutely, positively is not. Any AMD Athalon chip executes more instructions per clock cycle than a Pentium 4. A Pentium M executes more instructions per cycle than a Pentium 4. This is why an AMD chip can be (in the case of Opteron, significantly) faster than an Intel P4 running real programs while limping along at 60% of the P4's clock speed.
I think you need some education on basic computer architecture, my firend. If you read this, you'll understand why a massively super-scalar ("wide") CPU like the Opteron is faster than a deeply pipelined CPU like the P4 on a clock-per-clock basis.
So if an AMD chip running at 2.0 GHz can perform say ~2.4 floating point additions per clock cycle on average, it will be faster (for an FP-ADD heavy application) than a 3.0 GHz P4 which only performs ~1.2 floating point additions per clock cycle.