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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.'"
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.
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.
Hmm, it seems that the way to fix it is to just remove the leading subdomain from the slashdot url. For example "it.", "games.", or "apple."
It seems to work in reverse too. So you can replace the "it." in this thread with "apple." to display it in the Apple colour scheme. (If you really, really wanted to)
It should be extremely easy to have an "Only use the default Slashdot colours" option in the user preferences. HINT HINT
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
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.
When was the last time you saw Intel or AMD delaying a product by months, and causing problems for suppliers?
I read somewhere that Intel was going to be delaying release of their 4Ghz chips. I forget where.
When was the last time you saw Intel or AMD delaying a product by months, and causing problems for suppliers?
Prescott?
Or if I wanted to be really mean I could mention Itanium. That was, what, 5 years late?
AMD tends to be very conservative with its timetables, but even they have experienced problems.
As for IBM, they've run into a wall at 90nm. But so has everyone else. Expect to see lots of announcements of dual-core (and multi-core) chips, and larger caches, but no great increases in clockspeed in the next few years.