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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."
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?
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
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
The "Storage Matrix" is an interesting improvement. It can essentially chop up your HD into several smaller pieces for you to do a mixure of RAID.
For example: You have two 120GB HD. You use the first half of it in a RAID 1 for the system drive and all your important data. Then on the same two HDs, you use the second half for RAID 0 for the performance boost, say video data.
My quick glance at the article didn't mention this, although their 915/925 chipset pictures did show this.
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!"...