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.'"

Comments

Branding

[mauthbaux]

Honestly, I think that the only thing that as far as cost and performance ratios go, AMD has the upper hand. People who keep up with the industry are (I assume) fairly well aware of this fact.

From what I can tell, intel's only remaining advantages are in niche markets (not consumer desktops), and the fact that most people buying consumer-level desktops haven't even heard of AMD. I doubt that AMD will be able to overthrow intel's brand-recognition supremacy, but intel will be facing some tough decisions if they do...

Re:Of course it failed; it was a useless gimmick

[rsmith-mac]

It may have been a failed gimmick performance wise, but it puts AMD in an odd situation. AMD had the Athlon FX line positioned against the P4EE's, while the high-end A64's went against the normal P4's(the 3800+ is priced similar to the 3.6ghz P4, etc), and now the P4EE line isn't there. AMD is going to need to do some repositioning of the FX line, otherwise it will fall in between the consumer A64, and the workstation/server Opteron 1xx line.

No surprise

[slayer99]

Hyperthreading is a neat hack, nothing more. It seems designed exclusively to fool non-techies into thinking that they have a 2 or 4 way system when in fact they have half the number of actual processors, and additional really crippled ones.

That combined with the price means my last purchase was a pair of dual opteron workstations.

Sadly some techies are fooled just as well

[Anonymous Coward]

We've got some people where I work who come from a proprietary unix background and therefore don't really know anything about PC's and PC hardware. I've had to explain hyperthreading to a couple of them on more than one occassion. They just can't get past the fact that "top" says there are 4 cpus and refuse to believe me when I say there are only two. These same people are also hold on to the illusion that their proprietary Sparc and SGI workstations are somehow architecturally superior to a standard PC. That was certainly true ten or fifteen years ago, but not today. Nowadays you're paying a lot more money for a lot less performance when you buy a Sun or SGI system. The only reason to buy one of those is if you have software that won't run on a standard system, and even then you're often better off switching to some other software package, especially in the long run.

Re:Sadly some techies are fooled just as well

[demon]

While SPARC and MIPS64 and other architectures now have Intel CPUs giving them a run for their money CPU-performance-wise, those systems still kick pretty much any Intel- or AMD-based system's ass in I/O bandwidth. AMD systems have a definite advantage over Intel, however, due to their licensing of the HyperTransport bus design from Alpha Processor Inc., or whoever the current holders are of the Alpha processor design - it really does kick a lot of ass. However systems like the SPARCs were designed with the ability to handle high I/O load in mind, and commmodity systems still aren't quite so much so.

Re:They're just up to par again

[jrockway]

Some moron in a class I taught (on building computers) had a P4EE. Of course, he was the computer expert, so he and his brilliant friends ignored my instructions and fried his entire computer (let's build it with it on!!!)

Hmm because of that class I ALMOST had an extra 1700+... but some girl picked the thing up (and it was winter... in a carpeted room) and static shocked the thing ("ohh shiny processor! let's touch it!")

*sigh*