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Intel Scraps Plan For 4 Ghz P4 Chip
bizpile writes "It was reported earlier that Intel would be delaying the release of their 4Ghz Pentium 4 chips, but it now appears that they will be cancelling them altogether. The announcement came Thursday and Intel says they are going to rely on approaches besides faster clock speed to improve the performance of chips. Engineers are working to add additional cores to a single chip and improving the efficiency in how the chips interact with the rest of the system. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said, "Those are the sort of things where you get more capability out of a processor by designing specific silicon solutions as opposed to just keep turning the clock faster." In the meantime, Intel is planning on releasing a 3.8 Ghz chip with 2mb of cache."
Mhz do not always = performance!
Good job. Now I might be able to get a decent bus speed.
Wasn't that the entire reason behind AMD's use of the P-ratings? That performance was measured in more than just MHz.
Hell, Intel has spend DECADES convincing the public that MHZ is king and now they are (once again) following AMD's lead.
HA!
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
32bit is sooooo 1998
I knew this would catch up with them. I'm glad Intel is off the MHz thing. This doesn't mean the general populace will be more informed when buying a processor, but at least they might be looking at other features that may matter more (i.e. shared video memory, backside cache, etc.). Maybe.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
Actually, Moore says that chip complexity will double along with relative performance, not clock speed. If Intel goes ahead with dual cores, and maybe quad cores later, then Moore's law is safe...for now
Does anyone really care about clock speed anymore? Yes, I know some applications need all the muscle they can get, such as video manipulation and scientific computing. However, it seems the interest in clock speed has waned considerably since the 1 GHz mark was hit. Basically, unless you are doing high end gaming or one of the aforementioned activities, increasing clock speed does very little for you. Consequently, it seems to me that the inevitable increases don't garner the same excitement they once did--going from 133 to 166 MHz was a big deal. Going from 3.0 to 3.8 GHz isn't nearly as useful, though the percentages are the same.
What this means is that Intel will probably be releasing a multi-core HT product in the same market window that the 4MHz part occupied.
Isn't this a full quarter in advance of what we expected? Won't this put their release in the same window as AMDs multi-core release?
You can't increase clock speed indefinitely. There's a fundamental limit we're brushing up against here, and it's called 0.8c.
Electrons on copper travel 3cm per nanosecond. At four Gigahertz, each clock cycle, the electrons can only travel a theoretical maximum of 0.75cm. I don't even think that covers the diameter of a single core these days.
You can't turn up the clock much faster than it's already going without getting into nanotechnology. The only viable solution is to optimize chip efficiency through other means, and add more cores to the chip working in parallel.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
It just kills ppl when they see my Pentium Pro box keeping up with XP on a P4, for desktop stuff.
C|N>K
They've been doing this for a long time; basically all this says is that they're attempting to change the focus of their marketting from clock speed to other measures. I predict that consumers won't like it, and they'll go back to cranking up the marketting-clock-speeds ASAP.
Have you read my blog lately?
But what about Moore's law? Is nothing sacred?
Sometimes less is Moore.
Well actually, if they do dual core chips, Moore's law will still be true. It's the doubling of *silicon* not the doubling of speed that is the core of Moore's law.
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
I mean come on. We all know their engineers knew that MHz != better cpu. It just took them this long to finally convince their PR department to give up on the multi-billion dollar investment they have made in making "consumers" know that MHz == better cpu.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
No, Intel switched to processor numbers when they realized that we realized that MHz don't tell the full story.
"Moore's law will still be true. It's the doubling of *silicon* not the doubling of speed "
more precice: doubling of Silicon's capibility or doing the same at half the size (die space) IIRC.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Considering the fact that my 3 year old PC died, I replaced the 1.4GHz Athlon (T-bird) with the Socket 754 Sempron 3100+.
Same RAM, same disk, same video, but a new motherboard.
I *feel* like I'm getting more than a 28% speed boost from it, so it's clearly not just the clock speed that's doing it. Making a chip run faster never was the right idea, and I'm glad to see that they're walking away from that.
Now, if we can just get a core like the Pentium M, but for desktops, then maybe we'll see some real competition.
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
ummm ...
no
If they wanted to get a cue from Apple, Intel would have switched us all to Open Firmware. They are very much taking a cue from AMD (specifically the original Alpha team that AMD hired for their snazzy new CPUs).
What would would a slashdot story be without the "Apple is the panacea for everything" post ? heh
Sunny Dubey
Multi-cores (i.e. parallel processing) is clearly the correct approach. The only fly in the ointment is a few software packages that charge on a per cpu basis, and count each core separately.
Ouch!
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This sounds like a score for the good guys, with Intel finally realizing what others (like AMD) have realized alot earlier.
But...
Lets see what is actually going to happen. There are plenty of previous examples of Intel changing direction, and it is not always for obvious reasons. Remember slot1 and slot2, that Intel praised as a superior way to interface cpu's to motherboards as opposed to sockets, and when all came down to it, it was nothing but a stunt to try and make life harder for competitors.
Could this be a forced move by Intel, because they aren't capable of increasing the clockspeed and keeping cpus stable?
...of Microsoft realizing it had missed the boat with the Internet back in the '90s. Let's hope the paraniod play fair.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Those benchmarks doesn't mention the complexity, nor do they specify the number of transistors on the CPUs, so I don't see how you can draw your conclusion.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Intel says they are going to rely on approaches besides faster clock speed to improve the performance of chips
Strange, I thought the point of the big numbers was to sell more chips, not to make them faster. Wasn't part of the reason that Intel made the P4 pipeline as long as it is so that they could keep cranking the MHz up for a long, long time so they'd have lots of generations of P4 processors to sell? Because I don't think you really need that long a pipeline for purely performance reasons.
I wonder if AMDs inroads into the 64 bit market have Intel getting a bit scared about the future?
Intel continued to use the MHz race because the public was on board, and simply because they were able to maintain a demonstrable lead in the race due to their process technology lead. They preserved their enormous market share and high margins by spending decades convincing the public that MHz was the key.
It will be difficult for them to apply as much inertia into another simple metric that the public will understand and by whose measure they will be able to remain the clear leader. They need to come up with another marketing story that pushes yet another metric that is again closely tied to their process superiority. I don't know what this is, but I'm sure they have a new story that we will see when they do their multi-core HT rollout.
AMD did not exactly "win" simply because they gave up the MHz war so soon. Yes, they were the first, but they didn't have much of a choice since they knew they could not scale to 65nm process geometry like Intel could. They had to alter their architecture earlier. Intel did not, and it worked in their favor for more years.
It is obvious from the past that Intel's marketing story will never resemble AMD's. They are not "following AMDs lead" unless by that you mean they were able to scale clock speed for a longer time than AMD was.
Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said, "Those are the sort of things where you get more capability out of a processor by designing specific silicon solutions as opposed to just keep turning the clock faster." In the meantime, Intel is planning on releasing a 3.8 Ghz chip with 2mb of cache."
So to sum up:
1) We've realized it's dumb to just keep increasing the clock speed.
2) Buy our new Pentium 4! It's going to have a higher clock speed!
~Philly
I recall some earlier discussions about how Intel was finally starting to wise up and design processors that are efficient, rather than just raise the clock speed.
The first incarnation of this is the Banias, also known as the Pentium M. It's basically a P3 pipeline, but with P4 branch prediction (and some other technologies). The P4 has to have very advanced branch prediction in order to even HOPE to get reasonably efficient use of its pipeline. Applying this to the P3's shorter pipeline results in a much higher IPC.
In other words, something philosophically like the Athlon.
Since then, I haven't heard anything about it. And then there's this article. Is there any relationship?
I just want a desktop Pentium M system, without having to browse some Japanese-only Hitachi site.
I don't want more power, I want a fast enough machine that runs silently.
I guess it's my fault for waiting for Intel to provide this instead of just buying a Mac.
For 3D Rendering all you need to do *is* just turn up the clock speed. It doesn't matter how fast the memory bus is... or even how much cache is on a chip beyond a certain mimimal level.
You can build super cheap (except for processors) computers to use in a renderfarm.. (I use Lightwave 3D, Modo, and SoftImage XSI)... and hard drive speed / graphics card speed / Memory speed / Cache on die, Do nothing to speed up a render once you hit that "Render" button. Sure... SSE extensions and the like do speed it up if the code is optimized... but there isn't really a way to optimize the code with this new direction Intel is going.
I am Jack's HTTP Server
Remember intel has done other things to increase speed other than just MHz increase. Such as: 1) Increase Front Side Bus (in the p4's case 400 -> 533 and now 800MHz) 2) Increase Cache (256 -> 512 -> 1024 -> 2048kb) 3) SSE 1, 2 and 3 4) HyperThreading
But the droids blinkered by intel FUD put their fingers in their ears sang "lalalalala" and barked "NO - faster clock speed is a FASTER CHIP!!!"
Now, suddenly: oOooooo - cycles per second isn't as important!
Oh well. It will certainly be very interesting to see what Intel does over the next few years.
Here's an interesting question, related to this topic:
Assuming they go multicore (like IBM and Power[x] chips) what are the limits involved there? What would logically stop the development of multicore chips from increasing their number of cores?
And: What next?
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Am I the only one who's dissapointed with the announcement of multi-core chips? Certainly, they'll net performance gains in the short-term, but the process has to cieling at some point. And then what? The companies are only doing this to keep down the amount of money they have to spend on researching new process technologies (such as carbon) while keeping their share prices high. Why are we praising them for it?
More precise still: The number of transistors giving the lowest cost per transistor doubles every (N) months.
If Intel's primary motivation behind going from the Nortwood core to the hotter & less efficient Prescott core (longer pipelines result in a Presocott chip with double the cache of an equally clocked Nortwood actually being slower) was that the Pressy would allow them to scale to higher clockspeeds than the Northwood would allow does this make the Prescott a failure?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
You're kind of missing the point.
:) ]
What you're not getting here is that it is INTEL that has been behind the clock speed myth. They have spent untold millions (billions??) teaching people that the speed of a computer is best measured by the clock speed of its CPU. For the last decade, that and "Intel Inside" have been their ENTIRE marketing message. The consumers believe that clockspeed matters because Intel is the one that told them so.
Now, for a long time, this has worked really well for them. They pretty much destroyed Cyrix this way, and AMD has been struggling for many years. Cyrix came up with their PR-ratings to try to be competitive, but their chips weren't very good and didn't deliver on their promise, and they sank into obscurity. AMD did the exact same thing with their + ratings, but they were so conservative about them at first that people accepted them. (this gave them some weasel room later, as they have gotten very nearly deceptive with the ratings on some of their CPU lines, particularly the Sempron.) They had to do this because Intel had taught everyone that it was megahertz that counted: AMD couldn't deliver that, just performance. Basically, they got lucky. Had consumers not accepted those ratings as accurate, AMD would probably be gone now. Apple was in the same boat, as well. With a less rabid fan base, they'd be gone too.
Around the time of Rambus, the marketers took over Intel. They realized that the megahertz message was working fabulously well. It appears that they decreed that all future engineering efforts in the Pentium line would be oriented around cranking up the clockspeed. The engineers delivered what they were told to, a chip that could be scaled a very long way, by going to a hyperpipelined approach. I believe their first P4 was clocked somewhere around 1.2ghz, and it was HORRIBLY slow because of the pipelining; a 1ghz P3 absolutely destroyed the P4. In other words, the P4 was a big step BACKWARDS from the P3 in nearly every way.
But then they started to crank the megahertz, expecting to leap way out in front of AMD and, once again, dominate everything. (Nevermind that it wasn't until the P4 hit about 2.4ghz and got an 800mhz bus that it started to actually get good.) RAM speeds in particular had to do a lot of catching up. A hyperpipelined approach suffers terribly from a mispredicted branch. The CPU stalls completely until the pipeline can be refilled, which kills performance. You need the fastest possible RAM to refill the pipeline as quickly as possible. (and this, btw, is why AMD isn't as desperately dependent on fast memory; its pipeline is about half as long as the P4's, and thus it doesn't choke as badly if it guesses wrong about a branch.) [and thanks to Ars Technica for the knowledge to write this last paragraph
So all of a sudden, over the last year or so, Intel suddenly ran into a brick wall. Their entire chip design culture is clockspeed, not performance, and abruptly they can't crank clockspeed anymore. This is a BIG DEAL, because they're going to have to tear apart and rework EVERYTHING internally. This blunder is going to cost them billions, and if AMD keeps executing as well as they have recently, they could lose a great deal of marketshare. They are already losing mindshare, since AMD got to specify the instruction set for 64-bit X86.
Intel is in TROUBLE. The focus of their entire company, their raison d'etre, no longer exists. They forgot they were actually about performance. Many of their existing projects will have to be scrapped, and they'll have to reorient most of the company in very short order, while still maintaining morale.
If anything can save them, it's the Pentium-M, which is an extraordinary piece of technology out of their Israeli branch. In many respects, the M is the direction Intel should have gone five years ago.
Can they make up for this vast blunder? It's a good question, but I wouldn't count them out just yet. If the engineers
Intel released their Q3 results late Tuesday. In their conference call they were evasive about a suprising drop in their tax rate and also about the amount of their inventory writeoff. Intel claimed their inventory was down $43 million to $3.2 billion with an unspecified writeoff amount. Investors were happy to see inventory did not go up again and the stock went up Wednesday. In several different articles people are working out the mystery of the writeoff amount. Normally Intel's "cost of sales" is a steady number. Any writeoff will add to this number. So you can estimate the writeoff just by seeing how much this increased. With this calculation, it seems Intel had a writeoff of $472 million.
Maybe they realized they weren't going to be able to reliably cool the netburst architecture at those speeds so they're going to have to switch to the lower-clocked, possibly multicore Pentium-M arch.
They'd be FORCED to use a numbering scheme because any conspicuous lowering of the MHz would cause Joe Shmoe to say "What the hell?"
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Yes the MHz == performance thing promulgated by ...)
...).
Intel was BS (and BS that seemed to flow so
deep that they would engineer in superlong
pipelines etc
And yes, the computer architectures that can now
flourish with the Mhz race slowing down will
be exciting (In years past many such research
projects died because by the time they were done
the march of Moores law had resulted in a faster
conventional architecture).
BUT: There is all kinds of exciting ideas that
were being made possible by faster and faster
processors (including immersive VR words,
new kinds of programming, new UI models, image
recognition
If this is genuinely a community of computing
enthusiasts should we also not be sad if this
is slowing down.
- Mudchicken
Okay, this means it's time for the CPU performance increases to take a back seat. Maybe now the rest of the computer can have some time to catch up better with the CPU. I am talking about bus and memory bandwidth. This is one hurdle that needs to be overcome.
Low latency and high bandwidth up the wazoo is one aspect that supercomputers for example have over standard pc components, besides massive parallelism of course.
It would be cool to see intel start making inroads from R&D on the memory front. I'm not talking about on-die cache, that is a given. The questions to be answered are how to get the main memory up to snuff with the rest of the system.
If the current state of the art in CPU power stagnated from here until 5 or more years from now, it really wouldn't be an issue if the same efforts during that time were put into lower latencies across the whole sytem architecture itself.
So what am I saying? The CPU has had enough innovation in it's current form. It's time to focus on other lagging components. Pci-x is a step in the right direction, but it is nothing without main memory advances and other mainboard bus architectural improvements.
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
I don't know if I'd agree exactly with this comment. While a 3.8 GHz P4 does not perform as highly as a 3.8GHz Athlon chip would, an AMD chip can not physically run at these speeds. The pipeline would not support it.
The slashdot crowd is quick to attack Intel because they're the big guys, but the NetBurst architecture is an extremely powerful and (gasp!) good architecture. While the engineers designing it designed a processor for maximum pipelinability (over 30 stages now) this is not really a bad thing. Pipelining a processor is a good thing in general. Its main claim to usage is that it allows a processor to run at a higher clock speed. That is what pipelining was created for; to break down the time into smaller slices so more can occur in parallell. This process works great when each stage is of approximately equal length, and I have enough faith in the Intel engineers that no single stage was much longer then the next longest stage.
Back to the point though the pipeline does have downsides. A processor with 20 stages will lose ~ twice as many cycles on a branch missprediction (and more on a cache miss, but that number varies further) when compared to a 10 stage processor. However assuming that by using 20 stages we cut the cycle length by even 50% the additional stages were worthwhile. Cache misses are not a "common" event and branch prediction is in the 95+% range now, so the stalls added there are not as large as you'd think.
What the pentium 4 has done was manifest these to a larger scale. Unfortunately the engineers desiging the processor did not realize the massive leakage currents that are seen with processors at the speeds Intel is using. From a computer architect's standpoint they build upon past assumptions, and more stages in a pipe generally help out, so thats what they did. While the end result is not as impressive as they were hoping the end result is not a poor product.
Now what has the NetBurst architecture offered to the consumers? Well one of the main offerings its had is building an SMT processor (hyperthreading in marketing speak). SMT is more then mere marketing hype. It was not an afterthought thrown onto the P4 due to less then stellar performance as people have hinted at. SMT was originally designed for the Alpha ev8 chip that was scrapped. Intel however bought the alpha design team and used the SMT technology (albeit to a lesser extent then some would hope for) in the NetBurst architecture.
What else has NetBurst added? The trace cache is a wonderful feature as well. This removes the x86 decode logic from the runtime pipeline for most instructions.
So where can Intel go from here? My hope isn't so much in the multicore logic that some talk about. While multicore is interesting, I personally would rather see a wider P4 core (more execution units) and have them extend their implementation of SMT to allow for more concurrent threads of execution. a 4 or 8 way SMT processor could show some real results.
And for those of you who are going to question what I'm saying... No I don't work for Intel. And no my desktop processor is not an Intel processor either (I run an athlon 1600 for my workstation). However in my lab I am working on algorithms designed specifically around SMT processors (as well as cache aware/prefetching enabled applications). Intel's processors happen to enable quite a bit of optimization if done properly.
While I never agreed with Intel playing the MHz game, or their ridiculous prices, I would not say that the engineers were completely against the super-pipelining of the NetBurst architecture. While they may have questioned the reasons behind it, the real world performance gain does exist do to it.
Philip Garcia
It seems to me that there has got to be maximum rate at which we can push the clock.
I have a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4. How far can light travel in one clock cycle at that speed?
186000 miles / 3.2 billion is about 3.7 inches isn't it?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
"...emulation, which is all about the MHz and basically non-parallelizable."
First, emulation IS "parallelizable". There is usually a decision: emulate, or translate, and if translating, how much optimization to apply. On a single processor machine, this is critical. It may take a great deal of time to translate; less time to emulate. If something is run once (or rarely), it doesn't make sense to translate. We can't afford the overhead.
On an MP (multi processor, or multi-core), we can emulate, and schedule translations. The translations don't have an immediate impact on run-time, but allow a future speed-up (assuming enough memory).
Secondly, it is very difficult (typically), to model things like exceptions. The choice is to (1) be accurate, but slow, or (2) to be sloppy, potentially breaking some code. On an MP platform, multiple methods can be executed. If an exception doesn't happen, the results from the slower methods can be simply discarded.
MP can also be exploited to allow ILP increases by speculative execution. Assuming fast inter-processor communication.
I find that a dual-CPU machine is a "sweet spot" for most of my needs. The GUI, etc. typically exeuctes on one CPU, and my actual application on the other. The system is then MUCH more responsive under "load". I would imagine that "MAME" would allow X to draw on one processor, while it utilized other processsors for the emulation. [or maybe not, I don't MAME as I have no interest in arade games].
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Is this the response to what the industry has been saying for many years about the x86 / performance limitations. Couple intels egotistical approach to the market.
This has been seen with the Opterons onchip memory management etc etc. There is always room to grow sideways which results in an upwards growth.
Only 2 millibytes of it. People writing articles here at /. should know how Mega is spelled.
There's nothing exaggerated there. The P4 was a step backwards from the P3 in every respect other than the ability to push it to high clock speeds. The speed comparisons he makes seem roughly correct; for some applications it would have been worse.
Intel realized their 4Ghz chip needed more sheilding and cooling then a nuclear reactor.
It had the 'interesting branch prediction' because it NEEDED it. That deep pipeline sucked. A missed branch was a catastrophe, so you can BET they spent a lot of transistors there.
My primary focus at that time was on servers; for pretty much any application you could name, a P3 just spanked a P4 for a long time. Intel even shipped a few 1.4ghz P3s with double-sized cache, but then stopped when folks realized that this chip significantly outperformed much "faster" P4s. Yes, there were some desktop apps that really benefited from the P4, like video encoding, but as general-purpose chips, the P4 was inferior for a long time. The double-cache, high clock speed P3, which was an EXCELLENT solution for many problems, interfered with the marketing message, and was killed.
Every prior generation of chip was a substantial step forward, particularly up to the Pentium. Every chip through the Pentium II roughly doubled the performance of the fastest chip of the previous generation. The P3 was a significant improvement, but was more like a 50% bump. The P4, on the other hand, was a step BACKWARDS; the fastest P4s were slower than the fastest P3s when it shipped, and remained so for quite some time. It wasn't until the front speed bus got to 533mhz and the main clockspeed got to about 2.2 gigahertz that the P4 finally, truly started to win on raw speed... and on value (price/performance), it took longer still. And I'm totally ignoring heat and power, which can be big issues in some circumstances.
It's no mistake that the Pentium M is so darn fast for its clockspeed; it is, essentially, the old P3 architecture with a number of enhancements for low power usage. And it is electrically compatible with the P4. All a motherboard would have to do, in order to support it as a desktop CPU, is provide a different socket. I have no idea why you can't buy desktop boards for the Pentium M, it would be trivial to do. I assume it is, once again, interference with the marketing message.
Had Intel not focused so much on clock speed to the exclusion of all else, they could just start selling Pentium-Ms instead: they're ideally suited for multi-core. But they didn't, and now they have two very large problems at once, both technical and marketing. They have to revamp their engineering approach and re-educate their customers simultaneously, undoing 10+ years of momentum in both areas, without destroying their existing business. Not easy.
It's silly for people to think that clock speed doesn't matter, why else would people go through the trouble of overclocking their systems?
Yes, obviously if you increase the clock speed of a particular chip that chip will run faster. Duh. If you push the accelerator of a car further to the floor, the car goes faster. Your point? My Honda still gets better mileage than your Suburban.
You can't use megahertz to compare different chips, such as PPC vs. P4. It's a bullshit metric, and that's why it's worthless.
Intel should just bite the bullet and spend some more R&D on alternative active cooling solutions like liquid.
For fuck's sake, why don't you just go down to the beach and club a seal? Intel should be working on making their chips more energy efficient, not ignoring the massive amounts of waste heat and spending development money on idiot liquid cooled solutions. I mean COME ON. Liquid cooling is for things like GIANT PULSE LASERS and other exotic equipment that must be kept extremely cool. The fact that people are using it on microprocessors means that there is something fundamentally very, VERY wrong.
Liquid cooling isn't cool. Not only is it stupid, it indicates your lack of regard for the environment.
Perhaps doing some work increasing the L1 cache sizes would be beneficial.
This is essentially the only thing you've said that makes sense.