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Intel Discontinues Extreme Edition P4
bizpile writes "X-bit Labs reports that Intel is stopping production of its Extreme Edition Pentium 4s. The company said in its statement sent to clients, 'Market demand for the Intel Pentium 4 processor Extreme Edition supporting Hyper-Threading technology 3.20GHz with 800MHz processor system bus in mPGA478 packaging has shifted to higher performance Intel processors.'"
Why would I need a 2 meg l3 cache on a gaming processor that only increases performance by 1-5%? Combine that with extrordinary cost, cooling measures, the size of the proc itself, and power consumption and failure to sell is predictable.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
You mean everyone has been heading for the less expensive, better performing AMD chips, from which you are now copying instruction sets.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Bye!
SeqBox
From the statement in the article it really sounds like someone has an excess of corporatespeak.
"Market demand for the Intel Pentium 4 processor Extreme Edition supporting Hyper-Threading technology 3.20GHz with 800MHz processor system bus in mPGA478 packaging has shifted to higher performance Intel processors.'"
translates to
"Those chips weren't selling cos they were too slow"
There's no mention whatever of the whole Extreme Edition line being stopped, in fact they recently said they would be making further new ones in the near future... This is mentioned (with new FSB and clock speeds) here and here and here, for instance - and all quite recently.
...everyone could take one look at the specs and see that it wouldn't sell well if at all. Intel isn't that stupid either. But it managed to squeeze the little extra on the performance graphs comparing the "best" AMD vs Intel processors, cost and other things be damned.
As processor speeds exceed what most people use them for (multi-GHz machine to check mail and surf web, sigh), it is all about perception. Most people would be happy with both AMD and Intel running their box. Of course the slightly more tech-savvy saw what was going on, but the average Joe doesn't know.
To him, Intel is still the strong market leader and AMD the outsider. Intel fumbled once with the Athlon being the fastest thing around, they're not making the same mistake twice. If they showed signs of weakness, it could cost them vastly more in "mainstream" P4 sales than keeping a EE line to put on charts.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
All insdustry watchers, maybe except Toms Hardware, saw the EE as a trick to get the performance crown from AMD again. At (literally) any price. I don't know if it sold; you must really want to have the ultimate performance at any price to buy one.
Now that they've released faster processors that are up to par on performance with AMD (and removed the GHz speeds from the processor names) there is no need for the extreme edition any more. So now they don't have to sell server chips to make up for bad performance on the PC front.
Most people buying consumer-level desktops don't know the difference between a CPU and a CPA.
Intel only has brand name recognition because they advertise themselves as a brand name.
I think AMD would do well to advertise themselves as a brand also. If I were them I'd completely ignore Intel in my ads. Rather than saying "We're just as good as intel," they should be saying "We're the shit and we've never even heard of Intel."
The reason that this kind of advertisement would be successful is because your average consumer doesn't know anything about computers. Ads that simply encourage consumers to feel good about AMD as a brand will therefore be more effective than ads with a more technical message. They should use the fact that consumers don't know about them to their advantage by NOT introducing themselves as an underdog or their wares as "3rd party" products. They should instead imply that they and their products are the standard, which increasingly they are.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Apparently you've been fooled as well, given your total lack of understanding of HyperThreading or simultaneous multithreading (SMT) which is the technical term. SMT/HT does NOT add any more power to the CPU, it's simply a method of using the CPU better, namely by saturating the pipelines better.
In situations with few threads/processes (Doom 3, rendering, encoding, etc) this will usually not add any performance, quite often the opposite. On the other hand, in situations with many threads/processes (or rather with many context switches) this will mean alot!
And yes, it does look like you have 2 (virtual) CPU's, just as it looks like you have 3GB memory even though most is swap. So what's the deal?
I do, a ton of it. The last 10 years of my life have been rendering animation, compressing video, and authoring CDs and DVDs. At any time I have 1-3 apps maxing the CPU(s) of my machine(s). As my primary workstation I have always had duals, but worked on singles often. Duals make Windows tolerable but are expensive. Hyperthreading brought 90% of the smoothness of duals to the average person. You can be rendering out an AfterFX composition (or anything compute bound) and the machine still feels pretty light on the load.
Now if HT CPUs were 3x the cost, yes, that would be gimmicky. But it's a feature that's become standard in CPUs and doesn't really cost you any noticeable amount more (P3 HT 3ghz is what, $200? oooo scary), and in the end gives everyone somewhere between a "little" smoother to "a hell of a lot" smoother functioning OS's. Gosh, that sucks. It's not out to "fool people", it's a nice advancement in processor technology.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
Mod parent up! Spot on.
The "creamy smoothness" of duallies that HT (partially) gives was actually never covered in the reviews about HT Pentiums. They just benchmarked the usual benches to get clear-cut figures but never touched on this somewhat elusive and subjective characteristic... Shame.
The parent obviously deserves an "Insightful" unless you mods are on crack again.
This is just a repeat of the problems that people used to have with Cyrix based systems. Companies would take a cyrix cpu, put it on a bottom-feeder motherboard, connect that to a piece of crap power supply, and then stick marginal memory on it.
The result? A system that was unstable and flaky.
The reason wasn't because the Cyrix CPU's were bad, but because they were the only primary component that wasn't crap. Now I'm not saying that Cyrix processors were great, only that the reputation they had as being flaky was undeserved. Pair them up with good quality components and the end result was just as stable as anything based off of AMD or Intel's processors.
The reason why Cyrix's CPU's were especially sensitive to the quality of the motherboard they were paired with is because they drew significantly more current than the Pentiums they were competing with. A crappy motherboard is going to have crappy power regulation. Plug in something that taxes that power system and the result is not going to be pretty.
As for the current issues that some people may be having with low-end consumer grade systems, all I can say is that from what I've seen the quality of those systems is about on par with an E-machines. I'd be shocked and amazed if there weren't just as many problems with the Intel based bottom-feeder systems that are being sold along side those Athlons.
I have two Athlon systems at home and two more at work. These are all systems that I put together myself. I've never had any problems with them, either from a compatibility standpoint or in terms of stability.
The bottom line is that, right now, AMD is the better choice just about any way you look at it. The only reason I can see someone buying or advocating Intel's wares is if they own stock in the company.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
The difference is if you run intel hyperthreading, intel says "Way to go, we'll support you!" and if you run dual xp's, amd says "Uh, we don't support that."
Kinda like running dual celerons back in the old days I suppose.
Or more to the point:
"The 3.2GHz P4EE sells for over $900 and the 3.4GHz P4EE sells for only a few dollars more. Anyone dumb enough to waste their money on such an expensive chip might as well spend the extra few dollars for the fastest and get the bragging rights".
As the original poster correctly stated it is NOT the entire line that is being discontinued, only the 3.2GHz P4EE.
FWIW AMD does the exact same thing with their Athlon64 FX line, they have already discontinued their FX-51 model and the FX-53 model will be discontinued in a couple of months when the FX-55 shows up.