Slashdot Mirror
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."
... upgrading from a 533Mhz FSB P4 system (2 Ghz cpu, not sure of chipset) and wait for this? Then (after this is obsolete) I need to buy a new board to switch over to BTX format? Ughh, no thanks Intel.
Am I missing something from the pictures there, or are these chipsets just a PCI-X + DDR2 update?
I just read the article, and it didn't talk about any major architecture changes in the P 4 -- just that Intel was integrating the latest and greatest in shiny new things into the motherboard (i.e. comes with DDR2 instead of DDR, PCI Express instead of PCI, etc.). Are these upgrades actually going to do anything revolutionary to the Pentium chips? Or do we have to wait until the Pentium 5 because all the changes they made are about compatability to the new technologies used?
true. I usually max out my motherboard, but last time i bought one last year, i did not. I even stepped down in my server to reduce heat.
I am playing plenty of games now without the need for increased cpu power.
I think intel/AMD will have to put out some crappy compilers or otherwise pay programmers to write more CPU intensive code. Otherwise, I'm fine where I am(AMD XP2100+), and I got room to grow if I want to upgrade without trashing my MB.
I'm very happy that CPUs rarely die, though I can't say the same for motherboards...
If your looking for revolutionary (or at least seriously evolutionary) advancements in chip design and architecture you might want to take a look at some new chips from a smaller company by the name of AMD. AMD's new Opteron and Athlon chips sport their new AMD64 bit instruction set as well as integrated memory controllers, Hypertransport interconnects and a NUMA style architecture.
Not quite true. There are a lot of other people who can make good use of a fast processor (or two) and gobs of memory. For example, I'm a software developer who uses multiple VMware virtual machines for testing. Faster compiling would be very nice too.
Things like CAD or video editing are also very CPU intensive. So no, gamers are definitely not the only ones who benefit from upgrades.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Digital photo enthusiasts, developers, HTPC (Home Theater PC) buffs, digital video editing enthusiasts, and 3D graphics modelers disagree with you.
What is RAID 0+1 on 2 drives? Isn't that just a RAID 1 or a RAID 0 array? That doesn't make any sense. Yes, you could partition the drives into halves, THEN do a raid 10 or raid 0+1, but that defeats the purpose of reliability across multiple devices. If you have a hardware failure, you could lose both partitions.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
For so many purposes, you're exactly right.
Even graphical fields that used to crave for the latest & greatest are blase about the new machines. The print shop I worked at in 1992 would ALWAYS have new machines in, as any extra power was put to use in layout, photoshop, illustrator, whatever.
The last time I went back for a christmas party, they're still using from Quadras to G3s. Admittedly most of their work is prepress, but they're still growing, still succesful, but just don't need the cutting edge tech just to keep on top of things.
The designers who create the work may be a different story, they're working so much in the editing stage that it makes a difference to have a machine to cut down on the repetitive tasks, or those that may need several versions done. All the same, one part of an industry that used to crave power power power is now happy with older machines.
That being said, there's always NEW industries appearing, that can do things with today's computing power that weren't possible even 5 years ago
From A problem with cinematic rendering on a VPU Where do the frames go? some other applications might benefit from it (examples given in the article). Although the author does point out that for AGP it is more of a drivers problem than hardware.
According to at least one tester. The higher latency overwhelms the bandwidth advantage. Given that AMD already had a big latency advantage with their 64-bit chips and the higher cost of DDR2, I don't see the big deal. Pushing DDR2 isn't as bad as pushing RDRAM, but...
RAID? That's nice, just about every high-end AMD board has a SATA RAID controller from Promise, Silicon Image, etc.
The audio is kinda neat, if there are Linux drivers. I doubt it's as good as a proper card but you can't argue with the price.
Anyone who buys Intel's "Extreme" integrated graphics to play current games is in for an extreme disappointment.
Wireless? (Cough!)...
On balance, all this hype over a chipset translates into Intel shouting "Pay no attention to our inferior CPUs!"...
It's exactly as you say.
You have two drives, split each in half, and make two arrays with it, RAID 0 and RAID 1. Now, one of your disks dies. The RAID 1 part still works, because you have a disk left. The RAID 0 is dead, but hopefully you didn't use it for anything important anyway.
This way you can both have high speed and reliability with just two drives.
you should have a look at via epia motherboards with integrated CPU, NIC, sound, graphics,... in small dimensions (17 x 17 cm), and consuming small amount of power. I think that the next revolution is low consuming and power adaptive CPUs just like transmeta efficeon, those are really cool! I have a laptop with a transmeta 5600: no heat, no nose (no fan inside!) and an incredible autonomy.
Graphic artists who started on computers are impatient, but those who originally did physical pasteup can wait. They're used to waiting for the wax machine to heat up, they're used to standing in the Lucygraf and tracing shit by hand, they're used to refilling their rapidograph pens with india ink. It all depends on what you're actually doing with the system, of course, she's not working on huge color images in photoshop, most of her work is two or three color stuff.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It looks like Intel is coming out with some compelling technology that addresses the major weaknesses and limitations of current motherboard and peripheral technologies. AMD has grabbed (and will retain for some time) a lead in pure processor performance, but overall system performance (as perceived by the user) and the overall user experience is built on more than just how fast the CPU is.
So, my question to those who follow this industry closer than I do is how will AMD position itself for success? Will motherboard manufacturers come out with AMD-compatible boards that sport PCI-Express and the other (non-CPU) new features that are talked about in this article? Or does AMD have another plan?
In my post, which you obviously didn't read, I point that two types of applications where even the fastest PC CPUs today are lacking in performance are physical systems simulations and AI. Let's see why.
Imagine a typical simulation, for example in a 1000x1000x1000 box. You have one billion points for which you want to calculate the evolution of some physical measure, let's say air pressure. For each iteration of your software, you need to do one billion mathematical operations, usually sums and multiplications. Of course, you'll want to display the results, you want to have some kind of user interface, etc. But all this is of little significance, compared to the task of doing some billions of floating point calculations.
So, my point was this: if you *really* need that CPU, you need to do lots of floating point operations per second. Yes, before you mention it, I know there are other types of software. But for anything other than doing floating point operations, the current PCs are ample for any personal software I can think of.
In the end, it's the mathematical calculations that slow down a CPU, not the logic in the software. CPU developers, at Intel or AMD, go to great lengths to optimize things like function calls, loops, tests, stack operations, etc, but it's not necessary. With the current CPU speeds, logic optimization needs not be taken any further. It's the floating point operations that get most of the processing effort. And those have been optimized to the last level. Pentium, or AMD, or PPC CPUs, they all can do an addition AND a multiplication in a vector of four floating point numbers in one CPU cycle. The only way to improve that would be to increas the size of that vector, but that would increase chip size (and cost) and power dissipation.
AMD may say what they want, but CPU speed IS the main factor in performance. Because, in the AMD formula above, the "work per clock cycle" is the same for each manufacturer. I mean for those programs where the CPU is really not fast enough, those programs which you start running now and come back in a couple of hours or in a couple of days. If I get a 10% improvement in a program that runs for two days, I gain 4 hours and 48 minutes in each run. Much better than getting 10 microseconds less for each spell checking.
A few years ago THG put out a call for reviewers in southern california ... I responded, they offered me a "job" reviewing based on my qualifications and I believe, a writing sample. So when it came to compensation, the representative said, "we don't pay our reviewers." "Ohhh freebies then!?" "no, we may give you a t-shirt though, and you will have to pick up the hardware." "You can't have it shipped to me?" "no."
At that point I politely declined the "job" and stopped reading/respecting THG. Basically the deal was, I did all the work, they kept all the money. So when you're reading THG, keep in mind that the reviewers are asshats who are willing to put up with a lot of abuse. I might have even done it still to beef up my publications list, but when they couldn't SHIP crap to me (was still about a 400 mile round trip), I would have to pick it up. What a joke!
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
bandwidth isn't the issue. heck even COST is the issue. a lot of us are tired of legacy ports that are literally 10 years old littering the back of our computer when they could be put towards much more useful and modern ports like usb2, firewire 400, and firewire 800. apple dropped ps2 back in 1998, along with the floppy drive, back in 1998. think about that for a moment.
- tristan