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Intel Delays Release of 4Ghz Chips
bizpile writes "The AP is reporting that Intel's faster version of the Pentium 4 will not be available by the end of the year as previously promised. They told PC makers this week that the 4-gigahertz chip will not ship until the first quarter of 2005. Intel spokeswoman Laura Anderson said, 'We felt by adjusting the schedule for the products, we could better meet our customers' volume requirements and their high expectations.'"
when are they plannin on keepin up with amd? lets see some high encryption with the 64bit procs
you know what? I'm drunk, and i don't care if Intel delays their chip shipments, cuz i'm only going to buy AMD chips anways!!! so delay away intel!! let's go AMD!!
"We felt by adjusting the schedule for the products, we could better meet our customers' volume requirements and their high expectations," said Intel spokeswoman Laura Anderson on Friday. She declined to elaborate on the reason for the delay.
When I first read the headline, I thought it may have done something with Intel not being confident enough for a release this year. But now, it sounds like a similar strategy compared to the new iMacs to me, where they delayed them to clear out the existing inventory.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
"We felt by adjusting the schedule for the products, we could better meet our customers' volume requirements and their high expectations."
Translation = "full of bugs that cant be fixed in time"
Intel is still paying for their decision to go with the netburst architecture IMHO.
They wanted to be able to crank the megahurtz and use that as a PR device (well, not only that but it helped them).
Of course they are also having problem with the 90nm tech (as is IBM -- I think that only AMD has been mostly clear sailing with that), but most of their problems have come from netburst and lack of competitiveness in the budget sector (Celerons get killed by much faster and cheaper AMD chips).
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
If what they say is true, then we're looking at a case of "ship crap now and get hammered" vs. "get hammered for being late."
:)
Probably shouldn't have announced it early, but the pressure was probably pretty heavy.
I mean, look at Doom3 vs. HL2. Valve announced a date early and got hashed when they couldn't meet it. ID said "when it's ready." Looks like the wait time will be close to the same, but I don't see a lot of posts from people claiming ID is lying about how close they are...
Oh... back to the topic clready? Oh, OK.
Clock speed really doesn't matter, anyway. Well, it's not as important a benchmark as Intel would have you think.
If a processor running at 4ghz can only do half the operations per clock cycle that a 2ghz processor can do, than it's no better than the 2ghz processor, and probably worse due to larger instruction pipelines, etc.
The fact that Intel has relied on this "Mhz Myth" has really killed sales of their Centrino (Pentium M) line of processors. Consumers see the (comparatively low) ghz ratings on the Centrinos (typically about 1.5ghz) and compare them to laptops with less expensive P4's (typically running between 2.5 to 3.5ghz) and wonder why anyone would pick the Centrinos.
Laura Anderson said, 'We felt by adjusting the schedule for the products, we could better meet our customers' volume requirements and their high expectations.
Suit to Geek Translation.
"We can maximize the profit we make off of our existing inventory by delaying the release of the new chips until we sell off the current stock."
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I want my fast comptah
Mod me up if you hate the color scheme. Here's a fixed link using the "old" slashdot colors:
0 9&tid=118&tid=137&tid=126
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/30/22152
'We felt by adjusting the schedule for the products, we could better meet our customers' volume requirements and their high expectations.'"
Translation:
We can't make these chips yet, certainly not in volume, so don't get your hopes up...
(From the beta release of the new Google Bullshit Translator)
We felt by adjusting the schedule,we could clear out our crappy,low performing,3.x Presshot's ,whose sales margin hasnt been very impressive.
Seriously,ship the 4.x's - Give the 3.x's to chairity.
"Comedy's a dead art form. Now tragedy, that's funny."
Amd's 2Ghz processor is available now! ;)
I wonder if this delay is due to Intel not keeping a lid on the enormous power consumption of the Prescott core at 4GHz? Heat and power is a major issue with these high end chips, and it makes one wonder if Moore's law will finally be halted due to heat issues.
Well, it looks nobody, including Intel and IBM, had any idea how difficult moving to the 90nm process would be. What about 60nm? I think Moore's Law has finally run out of steam.
Back in 2000 when Intel was first surpassed by AMD when they were beaten to 1 Ghz, they rushed an overclocked 1.13 Ghz chip to market that eventually ended up being recalled. I suspect that the reason that the 4 Ghz chip is not yet being released may, in fact, have something to do with reliability. Also it is important to remember that this chip is running on the Prescott core, which will probably use over a hundred watts of power alone. Perhaps they need more time to explore better cooling solutions (that can be delivered cheaply) before rushing a potentially unreliable product to market.
I am in favor of reliable chips (although personally being an AMD zealot myself); I think that the competition between AMD and Intel is important for innovation and fair prices.
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The x86 world's delays in ramping up speed have gotten to be so great that they're almost starting to be as bad as the Mac world's...
Sparc, x86 and PPC all seem to be kind of floundering at the moment. Does this indicate some kind of problem with the further fulfillment of Moore's law (you know, for once, Moore's law failing to apply NOW as opposed to "Moore's law will stop working in 8 months) or has this just been a bad year?
P.S. This new "IT" scheme is hideously unattractive by every single concievable method of measurement.
Moore's Law, maybe. But my Athlon puts out plenty of steam... er... heat.
The dirty-diaper brown has changed my mind though. Ehrargh! :p
My god, how hard would some 'set your own colors you whiny bast' code be to pull off?
You must have an older core then. My 2800+ runs cooler and uses less voltage than my old 2100 did, strangely enough. Smaller micron processes make a difference when it comes to heat and power consumption.
Maybe this is a good thing in the industry. Rather then Intel and AMD having to make up for the slacking off of software developers, maybe now programmers get clean up their bloated code and write more streamlined smaller code. Simple, elegant code can be more efficient on the amount of CPU cycles needed to process the program. But as long as faster CPUs keep comming out...what the hell...let's just write the next program in basic or java. Why is joe-sixpack going to care anyways?
Life is not for the lazy.
Crash Faster.
Man, I was planning to use the new Pentium 4 in my gaming rig, but ALREADY it's lagging!
Millions of people wonder how they will cope with IE and Outlook being as slow as they are on their current 3Ghz chips.
Intel is now feeling some pain. They've built a brand around having more M/Ghz - which only matter superfically.
Being a multi-function device means that a CPU does multiple functions. As with ANY multi-function device, a model of CPU will do some things better than others.
X86 chips have traditionally been processing heavy, I/O weak, since hard, on-demand processing hsa been the driver of the X86 industry. (Video games, etc)
Contrast that with the Sun Sparc line of chips, or IBM's mainframe hardware, heavily optimized for I/O throughput. The needs of a rendering farm node are not well in alignment with the needs of a high-capacity file server.
Even within being "processing" demands, there is a wide, wide range. Floating point. Integer ops. Parallel proccessing. Different, even cross-compatible chips and chip lines will behave differently, performing better at some tasks than others.
But, for years now, Intel has been busy spending millions convincing the population that you can boil performance down to a single number, M/Ghz.
The cracks are beginning to show. AMD has made a solid business with "slower" (Mhz) ships that perform better. Their own Centrino line is "slower" but performs almost as well!
Intel needs to get a clue, and develop a set of benchmarks that truly show real-world performance. AMD has done quite a good job with their "+" rating. (EG, my desktop is an Athlon 2000+)
I give it 6 months, maybe a year. It'll be hard, but even Intel isn't so stupid as to put this off too long.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
This is from Bernie Meyerson, IBM's CTO:
First POST!!Oh shit...I wasn't even close.
http://www.commaecho.com
I wonder if this delay is due to Intel not keeping a lid on the enormous power consumption of the Prescott core at 4GHz? Heat and power is a major issue with these high end chips, and it makes one wonder if Moore's law will finally be halted due to heat issues.
If coders didn't make code that bloated so much, the chips wouldn't be running so hot.
If you can get a job done in 2 minutes of 4GHz processing then it'll create a certain amount of heat. If you can get the same job done with more efficient coding in only 20 seconds of 4GHz processing, then you're down 1/6th the amount of heat than not.
And you can sleep the processor or put it into a slower mode while it's waiting and paused for nothing. The problems becoming with larger and larger programs that do not much more than anything before, just were able to be developed more quickly due to sloppier coding.
My Athlon runs nearly 10 degress colder than windows, when it's running linux. I think that says something
I think Moore's Law has finally run out of steam.
Moore's law is about the number of transistors, not about the surface area they occupy.
I think that the dual-core chips that have been announced will keep the number of transistors increasing rapidly for a while.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
How log would it take this new chip to process an infinite loop...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Does that mean that 3d Realms will in fact show us all in the end? How about Team Fortress 2?
I like their PR wording, keep up with volume... it's a nice way of saying (that just like everyone else in the industry) "We've hit a wall at 90nm that we weren't expecting, and it's minimised volume output"
Intel Board Member: "by adjusting the schedule for the products, we could better meet our customers volume requirements and their high expectations."
shareholders: *laughter for 2-3 minutes*...."You're sacked"
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Laura Anderson said, 'We felt by adjusting the schedule for the products, we could better meet our customers' volume requirements and their high expectations.'"
This is the hand
The hand that takes
Here come the chips
They're American chips
Made in Taiwan
Smoking or
Non-smoking
Grovels to laurie anderson for a lame joke
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The reality is that today's processors are extremely complex. Engineers spend about 10% of their time doing the design, which is the sexy stuff. They spend the remaining 90% of their time in verification.
Even after a company like Intel releases its processors into the market, the company usually ends up in producing a long errata list. How does a company know when to ship a chip? The answer is when the engineers have high confidence that the only remaining bugs are patch-able bugs. Both Intel and AMD have long errata lists.
The worst company in the verification department is Sun Microsystems. It had no systematic method of testing processors. Even as late as the UltraSPARC III, the engineers just randomly created adhoc scripts in Verilog. There were hundreds of these scripts. Whenever a change occurred in the Verilog, some dope would re-run the scripts. Invariably, many changes to the design would fix one problem but would "un-fix" another problem. Now, you know why Sun failed as a company: it bet on the UltraSPARC, which proved to be a huge DESIGN failure. The UltraSPARC III was 4 years late.
By contrast, the best company in the design department is IBM. It has managed to automate most of the verification. IBM engineers do design and verification in a systematic way. There is nothing ad hoc about it. IBM consistently produces microprocessors on time and under budget.
I have read rumors that soon Intel will switch their main desktop processors over to a design similar to that of Pentium-M, which is currently much more efficient per a clock than Pentium IVs. If this is true, they would definetly have to go back on their "Ghz are so important" campaign. Personally, I rather have effiecient processors than ones that are power hungry and give off lots of heat.
SIGFAULT
I have an "AMD 2200+". This doesn't mean that it has a 2200 MHz CPU, this particular AMD part number is for a 1.8 GHz CPU. So, yes, AMD could release a "4500+" CPU right now, no problem at all. This "+" strategy for part numbering is a marketing scam. The reasoning behind it is that it's possible to make a benchmark where an 1.8 GHz AMD CPU outperforms a 2.2 GHz Intel CPU. True, but the reverse also holds. One can make a benchmark where a 1.6 GHz Intel CPU outperforms an AMD 1.8 GHz. Considering the lack of SSE2 instructions in AMD CPU's, in a well designed benchmark (that is, well designed from the Intel marketing POV) a P4 1.6 GHz could possibly outperfom an AMD 3000+. So, if they wanted, Intel could name their P4 1.6 GHz the "P4 3000++".
In the end, you get what you pay for. Since any 1 GHz CPU is plenty for most applications in use today, the GHz arms-race is meaningless for most personal-use computers. Get the cheapest AMD CPU, just remember to leave some margin for whatever future software you may be considering to get (Doom3 anyone?). OTOH, if you do lots of number crunching, then it pays to get the fastest Intel CPU, but make sure your software is compiled for those SSE2 instructions.
Dang.
I need just enough coffee to tide me over 'til I need more.
If this went on long enough and if we truly are at the end of straight line scaling, the industry might become driven by the one-more-GHz per year rule (the new More Law), versus doubling every 18 months. This new law could then hold for decades as it slowly curves down towards a flat line. I don't actually predict this will be the model soon, as the old Moore's Law is more likely to adhered to, but in 24 and then 36 month time frames for as long as possible. Still, if scaling is dead (and some are saying it is) then we could see the new "More Law" adopted as IT shops and Manufactures try to plan for future purchases. Software providers wouldn't be able to count on Moore's Law bailing them out. Bad news for Longhorn if scaling is dead, it might always be perceived of as slow (if /. reports are to be believed).
We are already putting 200+ million transistors on CPUs, but most speed increases come from scaling (speed increases) and memory caching. Now is the time for the industry to go Multi-Core. How about 100 two-million-transistor cores on a chip instead, with 500 separate integer and floating cores that can be shared across cores as needed.
BTW, I do know the real Moore's Law is about the number of transistors on a chip and not speed, but the two have been synonymous in the public's mind since the 80s.
Letter To Iran
Moore's 'law' doesn't guarantee speed. It merely suggests a trend that every so often (18 months - 2 years) the amount of transistors on a chip doubles. In the past, that has meant speed because thinner wires produce less heat.
.09 wasn't going to get them anywhere. But imagine the culture at Intel where you daren't say anything to anyone about it, i.e. 'Just SHIP the thing!'
The problem isn't nearly as much to do with CPU scaling for scaling's sake - those processes continue to develop at the same or similar pace. It has much more to do with scaling for speed's sake. To Intel's horror, they've found that speed isn't scaling in a linear fashion like it used to.
It must have been a terrifying discovery for the poor engineers who discovered that
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
LOL, that killed me! I guess there aren't too many Laurie Anderson fans out there. Wish I had a mod point, NICE JOB! :)
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Moore's Law is not about speed, it's about number of transistors on a chip doubling every 18 - 24 months. Performance and clock speed are results of this 'law.'
The fact that Intel has relied on this "Mhz Myth" has really killed sales of their Centrino (Pentium M) line of processors. Consumers see the (comparatively low) ghz ratings on the Centrinos (typically about 1.5ghz) and compare them to laptops with less expensive P4's (typically running between 2.5 to 3.5ghz) and wonder why anyone would pick the Centrinos.
:). Too bad most of the rest of the laptop-buying audience is too dense to look past the bling of clock speed numbers.
This is probably very true in sales to average joe consumer, but not for the educated I.T. geek. I bought a Pentium-M 1.6GHz laptop for my dept at work after exhaustive research of all that was currently available on the market for the budget my boss gave me to work with. The 1.6 Pentium-M, even though it's raw clock speed is much lower, gives an overall "feel" of how fast this machine runs, of roughly comparable to that of a 2.4GHz/533 Northwood P4. It's a fine processor. Battery life is great with this laptop too, and it can even play UT2003/2004 at 1024x768x32 just fine
Actually, now that functionality/performance is more important than MHz alone, perhaps Moore's law will finally regain its TRUE meaning. i.e. more SIMD instructions, multiple cores, better performance at same MHz by using more transistors.
i have it from educated sources that the real limit for CMOS technology is 10nm.
Exactly. When I replaced by 1Ghz Thunderbird with an XP 2400+, my average CPU temperature went down.
i can't believe this!
I guess intel is just trying to make more money. They are trying to sell the slower chips at high prices, the 4 Ghz chips are probably gonna come out with todays price of 3.6 Ghz chips.
oh well, i just got a 3.0GHz P4, i'm not going to be buying a new computer any time soon, if anything i'm gonna be a low end laptop.
AMD already sells 3800 64bit processors!
Intel hasn't even developped a method to allow 32 bit apps to run on a 64 bit processor.
Intel is screwed, and it's screwing it's self!
I've been seeing a larger and larger number of AMD users. and i've only bought intel chips all my life, AMD looks tempting, i think next computer i might buy an AMD, unless Intel changes it's act.
plus i see more multiprocessor mobo's available for AMD than intel, i think intel only has them for their zeon processors.
AMD chips are:
faster
32 AND 64 bit
cheaper
AMD looks tempting to someone who has used intel chips their entire life.
however, i have friends who have had some real bad issues with AMD, thats why i didn't get one for my last computer.
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
For all those people that think "Intel screwed themslelves with the MHz myth", and "they should follow AMD's number scheme", they are already doing this. Read it for yourselves:
http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/
And...
For all those people that think Intel is just doing this to clear out inventory, that is also not true. How many people do you know go for the top of the line, most expensive processor anyway? How much % of the population outside of the US could even afford anything near the top of line. US sales can't be more than 40% of Intels global sales. They will be able to sell any excess inventory without a problem in Asia/India/MiddleEast.
The most likely reason for this is that yeilds are so low that the cost for the chip would be out of line with current prices. The delay will give the fabs enough time to improve their process steps and get wafer yields inline with the other processors.
stuff that isn't ready! Failed Intel launches are FAR more numerous - especially in the last 5 years. The last serious heat issues with a processor AMD had were with the K5.
.09 P4 should not have been promised/shipped. It clearly needs help.
.09 micron bought them nothing but trouble and expense. Now they have to go back and redesign everything: Strategy, architecture, marketing. Somehow they are now tasked with trying to explain why GHz don't mean anything - the exact opposite of their Netburst strategy. Good luck.
Intel now has an established history of not being able to follow AMD's lead. Up until the K7, that certainly wasn't the case - Intel totally ruled.
I think what's happening now is an example of big fish/little fish at work. AMD has learned that Intel is too big to manouver well and has been using that to their advantage.
For instance, Intel's scheme to get everyone onboard with RAMBUS failed primarily because AMD refused to accept it and offered similar performace at a cheaper price for everyone involved. The board and memory manufactures followed suit.
I give you the following examples of Intel's problems:
- The 1.13 GHz PIII. Intel released this after AMD beat them to the GHz ball and then quickly (less than a week later) recalled them. Why? Heat issues.
- The RAMBUS/DDR bridge chipset. When Intel finally realized that vendors were more interested in supporting DDR, they did a quick chipset to provide support for both. It sucked doubly and was recalled.
- Intel totally miscalculated AMD's K6/2 by releasing the cripled Celeron with NO LII cache! It totally bombed and the Celeron 300a with 128K of LII cache quickly took over.
- Then there's our present example. Netburst has been a total failure for Intel. The
Mind you, it's not that it's a bad performer. Even with an extended pipeline (to help cool things down), it's still very fast. The problem is: it's already maxxed out!
My question to you is: Do you honestly believe that AMD will be sitting still during Intel's redesign?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Fastest AMD chip is 2.4 if I recall (dunno about opterons)
The fx-53 arguably the fastest chip out there.
mhz mean shit to a solid design.
To me, I'd rather have a high-performance computer system packed in a bland beige box rather than some 'artsy fartsy' case because when it comes to my personal computing....
Performance matters....Appearances are secondary.....
I don't know about Intel/AMD CPU performance NOW but I have a little story about Intel/AMD CPU performance THEN....
I have 2 old PCs with the same amount of RAM in them. One has a 500 MHz Intel Pentium CPU and the other has an AMD 750 MHz CPU.
I could turn both of them on simultaneously and they'd both boot into their operating systems pratically simultaneously.
To this day I still wonder why that is.
Could somebody give me a detailed explanation as to why this is?
It looks like the CPU architecture of the Intel CPU is more efficient than the AMD CPU. Presumably, if the AMD CPU was run at 500 MHz, the overall chip performance would be less than the Intel CPU running at 500 MHz. Is this correct reasoning?
One other point. After doing some serious cryptographic research and programming in the past, I have insight into why the Feds treat encryption and fast computers as 'munitions'....
I wonder if the Feds will allow Intel to make these 4 GHz CPUs available to the public at large.
If they do, it is a certainty PCs containing them will find their way into the hands of 'our enemies'....
I marked you unfair for calling this Insightful. I would have allowed Funny.