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New Intel Chipset and Extreme Edition CPU Tested
Steve writes "Today sees the launch of both a new CPU and chipset from Intel. The CPU takes the form of a 3.46Ghz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, running at 1066FSB, and the chipset is the i925XE, the first Intel chipset to support this new FSB. HEXUS.net have a review of both. It looks like AMD still have the lead when it comes to performance, despite Intel's attempts to counter the Athlon 64 FX-55." Hack Jandy links to more reviews at AnandTech, HardOCP, and ExtremeTech.
Honestly, who is buying these things? At a price of 999$ US (1000 units lot) and a marginal performance increase compared to other, far less costly solutions (3500+ AMD anyone?), I just don't see a market. Is it just for the performance crown, which they didn't even get to win this time around (or should I say, in the past 2-3 years)?No word on heat, nor power consumption.
AMD all the way. Intel is alive just because of Dell (among others) and a large reserve of cash. They cost more, do less, and heat your bedroom to boot. But it has 'Intel Inside', so I guess it must count for something...
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Right here. Though, I must admit that I found some of the results to be a little wonky, along with the test bed. How'd they get a FX-51 running on a socket 939 board? Underlocked a FX-53?
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
I use an AMD box now - I have for some time. It's not even a powerhouse, it's an old XP1800. I've used this CPU on three different motherboards now, and so far I'm still looking for a reason to consider AMD when I finally replace it. I've had an S3 motherboard, a via motherboard, and TWO Nvidia motherboards. The closest I came to having decent chipset support was with the S3 and that's only because the guy who wrote the 3D drivers was able to basically con S3 out of the information he needed in order to do it (ie if you get a mainstream distro his drivers won't be in it due to potential legal issues).
The first Nvidia I bought to try out, then decided I wanted that great whajamacallit sound support so I spent weeks looking for a miniATX motherboard that had this feature. When I finally got it I discovered it has TERRIBLE sound - I mean atrocious, like the crap you would expect from a five year old emachine. Overtones, quantization noise - just horrid. And this is using THEIR drivers, which I cannot use along with THEIR 3D supporting video drivers because of random lockups the two together cause on my mandrake system.
If I get an intel system I at least get decent drivers. So here we have an intel motherboard that offers basically the same performance as the top of the line AMD, meaning "it can be done" and a lesser system (as I would buy) will also be proportionately less expensive. So for a premium of just a few bucks I can get similar performance AND I get open drivers that will work with my linux system?
Where do I sign up?
Why do you care? What feature of a 64bit CPU do you need or want?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Thats exactly what I was saying--Athlons benefit not from higher bandwidth but more so from low latency, so for example DDR2 would suck for Athlons. And what I was saying is that P4s seem to be moving towards what Athlons are--chips that benefit more from lower latency than higher bandwidth.
While I think all these benchmarks that are being used on the big sites like [H]ard|OCP, Anandtech, and Extremetech are a big part of an overall score when it comes to deciding what to buy and what not to buy; but when it comes to the people that use Photoshop, Premiere, and the other numerous digital content creation applications out there, they're pretty much left in the cold, and then buy a Mac because they know Macs perform these functions excellently. Is it possible for Adobe to make a benchmark based on Premiere or Photoshop? Anywho, this is getting off-topic.. I'd like to see if this chip outperformed the AMD competitors in this arena. Don't get me wrong, I love AMD, I'd just like to see a bit more of the story.
Long pipelines have a few bad side effects. Of those directly impacting performance: longer latency, worse branch miss penalty.
Now for the first one I will tell you: You do not care how latent (that is, laggy?) your processor is, as long as it is not extremely high. A lack of throughput is what slows down an application, not how long any individual instruction takes to go through the processor. This may change with multi-processor systems where something as fast as the processor (another processor) is active, but not in a conventional system. You want latency? Check out main memory.
Now the branch miss penalty is a bigger issue. The 20 stage P4 has a 19 cycle branch miss penalty meaning that if there's a branch and it guesses incorrectly, it will lose 19 cycles worth of work. What you need to take into account is that the P4 has one of the best branch predictors ever. The P3 is 10 stages, the P4 (pre-Prescott) is 20 stages with a 30% (this is what Intel says) better branch predictor, and of course a much faster clock. The P3 would not be able to run at the faster clock time (that's the advantage of pipelining).
The other side effects of many pipeline stages include a core size increase therefore a lower yield therefore a higher cost and longer design and redesign time, and more power consumption / heat dissipation therefore clock limited. That last one is the kicker at Intel right now. The Pentium M is Intel's rising (albeit embarrassing) star. All I know about the Pentium M's pipeline is that it is "between 10 and 20", unless Intel has said anything new.
So I don't mean to say you're wrong, just it's not so simple. There are plenty of factors playing a roll. There may be a sweet spot in number of stages which has been exceeded, although I don't think there will ever bee a stable number.
...but you'd be crazy to invest. Intel is in deep trouble unless Microsoft's next big thing convinces the Intel-lovers they need to upgrade. Microsoft is in deep trouble unless they convince the AMD-lovers they're not going to discriminate against them with said next big thing. R&D budgets are almost untenable. People are looking for ways to conserve their hardware, not madly buy more because Intel had a rollout.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Funny you should mention the point about IT managers. A friend of mine is an IT manager at a small company here and used to be a huge fan of Intel. Once he saw the performance vs. price of an Athlon system, he was intrigued. 10 workstations and 3 servers later it's an AMD shop. It's all he'll build now. Laptops are still Intel-based Dells, but every new machine built is an AMD.
We'll see what he does when he builds a serious Asterisk server. We're running Linux Mandrake on it now on an Athlon XP3000 with a gig of pc3200 and it's fast, but under load we may need more horsepower. Dual AMDs are hard to find, we may go with dual Xeons.
You won't find dual Athlons, but you can find Dual Opteron systems. If you build your own systems, the major motherboard vendors all sell multi-cpu Opteron boards. If you're looking for pre-fab, Sun makes them, and some others do too.
You'll get more bang for your buck with a 2-way Opteron then a 2-Way Xeon, that's for certian. And if you run Linux, you can run 64-bit versions of your distribution, squeezing more performance out of the thing (depending on the application, you can see 30% or more performance for compiling in 64-bit alone.) Not to mention, if you run 64-bit, you can access all your memory above 4GB without tricks.
But back to the point, your friend works at a small company, so he has the luxery of being able to make those descisions and make it work. Where I work, where we have well over 600 servers, over 8,000 workstations.. Going AMD is a very tough sell. Most larger companies are the same. Only a few manage to break the trend and do great things like move to Linux, or move from IE to Mozilla, etc. The rest follow pack.
It sucks, but that's the way it goes. Eventually, if/when enough people DO make changes to something like AMD processors, it gains more momentum, and more people switch, and more momentum is gained..
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
From what I've seen of 64-bit Linux distros thus far, they need time to mature. It's always some weirdness with the kernel or gcc or whatever that has lots of people complaining of lockups and crashing. That kind of rumor mill makes going 64-bit a tough sell. Perhaps later this year or early next year I'll start to hear good things about 64bit stuff.
Aren't the Athlon 64 line of processors a generation beyond the P4? Compare the prices of Athlon XP's to P4's and you might see a difference.
That's crap! If you yourself have had as you say 1000 AMD chips DOA, and only 1-10 Intel chips DOA, that's complete madness!
Don't you think that it would be this huge top issue with AMD chips? Why haven't I read one single article on any web sites or magazines about this apparently epidemic issue?
I mean, if you, some guy working at some computer shop for the last 7 years has seen 1000 DOA AMD chips, and there's probably at least 5,000 of these shops in the USA alone.. that's over 5 MILLION DOA chips in the last 7 years, from small shops alone?
I don't think so.
Since you posted your post, I've been curious enough to call a few shops in the area, two of which I know the guys pretty well after having visited many times. They both said they've seen the exact number of AMD DOA's as Intel - and that's next to zero.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -