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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."
All this new technology, and mobos still have parallel and serial ports.
Get with the times!
-Apple
If history shows anything, it's that people who aren't gamers just don't really care too much about upgrading any more. Intel is going to have to raise its prices as sales due to upgrades slow dramatically. I'm still running mostly Pentium 2's in my business... I think. I don't even know or care. For what we do here, just about any computer that was made in the last 10 years is just fine. When it's time to get a new machine, we always just buy the cheapest oen we can find.
Parallel and serial ports are nice to have, especially if you want to build some of your own hardware. And considering how insanely cheap a uart is, why not?
95% of the population has no use for legacy ports any more. In the future if people really, truly need legacy ports (i.e. no alternatives exist) they'll be willing to pay extra.
As for the USB keyboard/mouse issue. I'm able to boot into and use Open Firmware using my Bluetooth keyboard on my Mac. Maybe it's time to modernize.
That is just like saying "Hey, that new MoBo has PCI instead of ISA, WHAT IS THE BIG DEAL?"
PCIe is the future of PC internal AND external interconnects.
Just when that EFI firmware thing would make a serial console possible.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Just take everything out of your box, and throw away your alim, memory, graphic card, motherboard, and so, what's left? The good old floppy drive, and the case! That is a little bit hard to swallow! Moreover, Intel cannot change all the current technology on its own: now, AMD is a serious alternative, and, thanks to the Itanium (1 & 2) saga on the server market, we all know that Intel's choice have to be debatted, moreover Athlon 64 FX are very impressive, and allow you to keep your hardware! I don't know why this article deals with PCI-X and audio chipset, it is not a CPU feature, but depends on a motherboard's chipsets... Definitely, my next computer will remain AMD powered!
Looking at benchmark tests for these new mobos from Intel, one realizes how little advantage there is in all these new standards. There is nothing to be gained in extra performance if your current system is enough for your applications. And for those programs where more performance is needed, the overall system must be carefully balanced in order to give any appreciable improvement. The question to be answered is where is the bottleneck. If our eyes aren't capable of seeing more than 30 frames/second, as Hollywood has been demonstrating for the last century, then what's the use in a 100 fps graphics card? Why not swap fps for more triangles in a scene? Why not swap better graphics for better AI in games?
My own ideal system would have:
1) The fastest possible CPU, in *true* GHz, not in AMD's inflated "+" bogoghz.
2) Enough cache for at least 8192 single-precision floating point numbers.
3) At least 1 Gbyte RAM.
That's all. Those are the main points where current systems are underpowered. I mean, of course, for some applications. For text editing, the 4.77 MHz CPU in the first IBM-PC was ample. Looking at applications where performance in PCs still lags behind, I think simulation of physical systems is where most improvement is needed right now. Not just for "serious" applications, but also for games. It'd be nice to have a game with realistic simulations, like turbulence (think of surfing) for instance. What's the point in a 100 fps system if there's no way to simulate a wave breaking at the beach?
Another field where more progress is needed is artificial intelligence, but that's one point where software is less developed. One could simulate turbulence in a fluid rather well on a desktop, if only the hardware was fast enough, but no one is really sure on how to simulate the intelligence of a self-conscious being. But, anyhow, faster hardware wouldn't hurt either. If enough developers had systems with the same hardware capability as a human brain, I guess the needed software would be developed, sooner or later.
I'm with you, Captain. I still have a number of PII-450 servers (Proliant 1600), some of them dualies, that are as reliable as the sunrise and not coming anywhere close to bogging down on CPU utilization. And they're doing lots of work for us, too. I went recently to eBay and picked up some new power supplies and case fans for these units. I found those, and some hot-swap drives, too, at prices so low it was almost embarassing. I have a feeling these babies are going to keep producing for us for a long time. Recently, an NT4 Proliant became a RHEL 3.0 webserver. We gave it a new PS, a new case fan, and a full load of memory, and it's just cranking away for us. Gotta love it.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
But could we at least make the product announcement more informative and less generic. I mean what use is it to say that Acme Unlimited is going to release Alderiumusian and Saphiriamius later today and all you Anaracrium whatzits are going to get you laughed at on the golf course. So if you want some action, upgrade today.
We are a tech board. We want to know what the upgrades are. What makes it cool. We are not reading Marie Claire in which the most important thing is that some pop singer has a new fragrance, or Fortune, in which the most important things is that some analyst was bribed to recommend a stock. I mean really, this post used a couple column inches and relayed nearly zero information except for a link.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
There is no significant advantage with today's memory bus speeds between DDR and DDR2. Tomorrow, on the other hand...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Very weak, Athlon FX 53 thrashes a 3.6GHz Prescott on i925 in gaming, and simply beats it in a lot of other areas.
..except in the area of stability where AMD's third party chipsets are a liability.
Its not that Intel will go away anytime soon, but AMD appears to be ahead, certainly with 64bit (amd64) processors and perhaps even with its 32bit offerings. Intel seems to play down the 64-bit processors, perhaps because Microsoft won't have a true 64-bit OS for many years to come.
In the Unix world, we've had 64-bit OS's for many years running on SPARC, alpha and now amd64. My "64-bit future" started over ten years ago! There is certainly a 32-bit market created largely by M$, but M$ and 32-bit systems are past their prime. If I was Intel, I'd push the 64-bit hardware no matter how loud M$ cries foul.
It certainly seems, IMO, that AMD sees Unix as the future and produces far more compatible products. The Taiwanese motherbord makers should realise this too and stop fooling themselves. I'd gladly pay double for a mobo with quality features and less non-sence. Asus already seems to be doing this. The new (fairly low-cost 32-bit) A7V600 is a good example. It didn't take long to get all features, and more, useful or otherwise, to work under FreeBSD. (Even works well with 1.5GB RAM @ 400MHz while a maximum of 1GB is supported, presumably for Windows.) The Gigabyte GA7N-400 was an expensive disaster; Windows this and Windows that. I looks like it could work well with Linux, 400MHz RAM and a athlonXP-3200+.
I use computers for mathematical and logical pursuits. A "power user" in otherwords. I'm not impressed with gaming and 'cheap' polygon rendering. It takes a computing power of a true sort to produce holograms, stronger crypto, and related calculation intensive results. I do use a dual-Xenon, but its been a chore to tame. It was given to me with Win-XP installed! Linux-2.6.x seems very promising and FreeBSD-5.x might even be better? While all this is high-end equipment, its worth noting that Linux on a athlon-1200 is much faster (upto 10x) than Win-XP on the dual-Xenon! If people could only realise what they already have.
In closing, I don't see allot of merrit in using the latest Intel systems. The amd64 (Opteron/Athlon64-FX) will be the fastest thing on the affordable market for some time to come.
When VESA came out, I had to get rid of my ISA video card. When PCI came out I had to get rid of my VESA card. When AGP came out I had to get rid of my PCI card. When PCI-E comes out I have to get rid of my AGP card. So? Why is the PCI-E move any worse than the move to AGP?
Don't get me started on the different types of memory which I've had over the years. But, I wouldn't sit around arguing that I was screwed over by the move to DDR, for example.
PCI-E paves the way for much higher network bandwidth, more bandwidth for graphics cards, etc. PCI-E will scale to at least 10 GigE, if not beyond. Some of this means more in the server room than on the desktop, but it's nice to see the bar significantly raised across the board.
I recall reading somewhere that some motherboards would probably ship with AGP slots as well (AGP->PCI-E bridge?). Legacy PCI slots will also be available on many/most boards. You don't have to buy the board which supports DDR2, so you should be able to use your existing DDR memory. So, you need a new motherboard, CPU and case and can then grow into the rest of the new technology which is offered on the board.
I doubt you'll hold the same opinion several years from now. I think you'll look back and see that this was a good move, just as moving to PCI was a good thing, moving to AGP was a good thing...
Nowadays new technologies emerge so fast that you just have to buy now or never. There isn't even such a thing as "the best" these days when it comes to computers. Stuff you buy today will be old tomorrow.
This is only half the story. I feel the change from IA32 to AMD64 instruction sets is equally significant. It's a shame Intel won't just bring out the entire platform at once, since many people buying their 32-bit desktops with these new support chips over the next few months may very well feel their systems were quickly obsoleted when the new instruction set ships.
And while it's only my opinion (lawyers take note), I feel Microsoft is colluding with Intel by not releasing Windows64 until Intel can be fully caught up with AMD's lead. They had good versions of Win64 running many months before the first Opteron hit the market last September, and it's still not released!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I have been holding off on buying a new computer for almost a year now. Waiting for a few key items to fall into place. My current rig is a Athlon 1.4ghz, 512ddr, 40gb c:, 200gb d:, Geforce 4Ti. This has worked well for me for almost 3 years now. I really see no need to upgrade except to run games at higher resolution.
My wish list is:
DDR2
Gigabit Ethernet
3.0 Ghz Intel (I dig hyper theading)
SATA2
SATA2 can do Command Queueing to speed up data retrival. This is a big thing for me as I see this new rig will last me till 2008. When I do upgrade my hard drive in a year or so I can get a 10,000rpm SATA2 drive.
Does anyone know any details is 915 or 925 will have SATA2?