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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.
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.
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?
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?
In fact I can invisage a day when most motherboards have inbuilt CPUs like they have inbuilt chipsets.
Beings aspergers AND pulling chicks... I enjoy the challenge!
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.
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.
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
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.
Just when that EFI firmware thing would make a serial console possible.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
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.
Alderwood is a wood that, when burned, produces an aromatic smoke typically used for flavoring food. You can buy sacks of the stuff at Home Despot (so called because the manager of my local one is a tyrant) to put on the grill next time you barbecue.
To me, Alderwood seems an unfortunate name for a chip. I don't think it's a good marketing decision to name a chip for a wood prized for its smoking ability. That seems to evoke images of chips overheating and melting down in a puff of smoke.
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!
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!"...
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.
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.
In my experience, 99% of desktop users have no need for any form of RAID. People just end up using RAID0 because it sounds cool (and doesn't lower their capacity, which is king for a lot of n00b users), and then getting burned when one HDD dies, leaving them with no chance of recovering anything.
Playing poker with a joker and some Uno cards
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.
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.
A PC in every room, except the bathroom...
Maybe Intel is just trying to save some room for growth for after every other room in the house has a PC.
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
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.
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.
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?
The ECC logic is broken on the current stepping of the Alderwood chipset.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?