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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.
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?
You want to go out any buy a new USB printer be my guest. A lot of the laser printers from the early 90s still work like new.
I also take it you don't work with microcontrollers. The JTAG Flash Emulation Tool for the MSP430 is parallel. (yes, there is a USB available). If you ever have to work with the HC12, you need that serial.
You sound like one of those "All USB" types, including USB for keyboard and mouse. Well, good luck to you when you ever have to boot up the OS for troubleshooting and the USB driver doesn't get loaded. USB is great for memory keys, cameras, external drives..things that get plugged in and out frequently but it's not for everything.
$cat
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.
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!"...
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.
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.
The ECC logic is broken on the current stepping of the Alderwood chipset.
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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...
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!
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