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.

Comments

Nobody ever got fired buying

[fembots]

I think AnandTech summed it up nicely "So there you have it folks - the 1066MHz FSB does absolutely nothing for performance, [...], But with the move to the 1066MHz FSB we have a platform launch that, in the spirit of the 925X and 915 launches, does virtually nothing for performance."

However the real question is, how many decision-makers are reading these review/benchmarks, or do they just buy Intel because it's Intel, or that's what xx-business weekly says?

Re:Nobody ever got fired buying

[Wesley Felter]

The Extremely Expensive Edition CPUs aren't targeted at PHBs -- they're targeted at gamers. The PHBs are still buying 915 chipsets like Intel told them.

Re:Nobody ever got fired buying

[Silverlancer]

Interestingly enough many, including myself, were expecting quite a leap with 1066mhz FSB, especially considering the huge leap from 533 to 800. However, it seems as if the P4's bottleneck now isn't bandwidth at all, but latency, like the Athlons always have been. In other words, DDR2 (more bandwidth, crappy timings) is going to do shit all for the P4.

Re:Nobody ever got fired buying

[ewe2]

...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.

Re:Nobody ever got fired buying

[cbreaker]

Most businesses go with Intel because they have always done so, and it's what most vendors like HP, Dell, and IBM push.

They might have some Opterons in their line-up, and they might be faster boxes, but when it comes to a production environment most bosses would rather go with what they've been buying and what has been working. Even if it's more expensive and doesn't run as fast.

It takes an IT manager that's well educated in the current state of technology, as well as the technical people under him or her, to stray from the straight line they've been running down for so long. I'll always be one of the guys that tries to get people to consider alternatives but I think most people know how that goes most of the time.

Re:Nobody ever got fired buying

[mnmn]

Many people and companies buy Intel because its Intel. Friends who are building computers for themselves asked me to browse motherboard combos, but it should be Intel. Asked why, they couldnt really answer beside "theyre well known".

I remember when the K5, K6 and the K6-2 had issues with certain motherboards, and running Windows95 was a pain, to an extent that you had to swap the CPU with an Intel or Cyrix. That reputation had a lasting legacy on AMD. Later the Athlon came which was awesome for the price/performance ratio but too many people used cheap fans on the 80W+ CPUs which overheated frequently. AMD makes great CPUs and I'd definitely buy AthlonXPs or 64s or Semprons over Intels unless I had a reason to do so. But its hard to argue when non-objective reasons are at play during the decisionmaking.

Re:Nobody ever got fired buying

[Afrosheen]

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.

Re:Nobody ever got fired buying

[cbreaker]

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..

Re:Nobody ever got fired buying

[Afrosheen]

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.

Re:Nobody ever got fired buying

[MojoStan]

"Interestingly enough many, including myself, were expecting quite a leap with 1066mhz FSB, especially considering the huge leap from 533 to 800."

You may have forgotten the memory bandwidth. That leap from 533MHz FSB to 800MHz FSB was accompanied by a huge leap in memory bandwidth from single-channel DDR266/333 (845PE chipset) to dual-channel DDR400 (865/875 chipsets). There were no memory bandwidth increases to go along with today's leap to 1066MHz FSB.

Also, the Anandtech article notes that Pentium 4 Extreme Edition doesn't use its FSB as much as the non-Extreme because the P4EE has a large 2MB on-die 8-way associative L3 cache. I think the Prescott-based 3.6GHz P4 (with its smaller cache and longer pipeline) would see some improvement if its FSB increased to 1066MHz.

Re:Nobody ever got fired buying

[cbreaker]

Really?

I'll have to read up on it. I haven't observed any more issues with AMD64 users over anyone else - it's seemed like a fairly smooth transition so far.

People will always have trouble using their computers, but they might be talking a little louder since they're running AMD64, and thus everything wrong with their machines MUST be caused by that.

I liked the previous version ...

[Anonymous Coward]

where I clicked it and it said "move along, nothing to see here"

Seemed more accurate.

But is it 64bit?

[CrashPanic]

Great clock speed and all but is it 64bit?

Re:But is it 64bit?

[gl4ss]

no.

and the speed improvement from 800mhz fsb? almost zero.

soo.. what's the point? exxxxtreme.

Re:But is it 64bit?

[Kenja]

"Great clock speed and all but is it 64bit?"

Why do you care? What feature of a 64bit CPU do you need or want?

I wonder if it includes...

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel Extreme Graphics! W00t!

improvement

[Coneasfast]

anandtech shows a 1% increase in speed over 800mhz fsb in most cases, is this really something to get excited about? will this difference open up in the future?

If I wanted the fastest...

[Realistic_Dragon]

...I'd be twice the sucker I actually am.

Thank god for the ponces and their fast stuff obsession making things cheap for me :)

Price / performance

[FiReaNGeL]

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...

Re:Price / performance

[sowdog81]

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 somethin

I don't see this as true. To the people that read reviews it might seem obvious that AMD is currently in the especially for gaming benchmarks, but people will still buy intel because
1.they heard amd runs really hot
2.Wtf is amd?
3.Intel has way higher mhz and a bigger fsb it can't be wrong.

So i don't think intel is just relying on Dell sales.

Re:Price / performance

[PitaBred]

You do realize that a) you can disable all the 'bunch of crap' on the motherboard in the BIOS, and it won't take up any resources and b) much of the 'bunch of crap' on recent motherboards is actually rather good hardware? I used to be a snob like you, but then I realized that the onboard stuff really isn't always dog poo. There's a reason it's on there.

Re:Price / performance

[fbg111]

Well, they each have their strengths and weaknesses. AMD chips on the other hand are on average cooler, which big datacenters like. And with their new packaging, they're a little more durable now too.

Another, older review of 925XE

[DrMrLordX]

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?

Re:Another, older review of 925XE

[MightyPez]

Because Tom's hardware is notoriously biased towards Intel. Photochopped P4 cores, funky timings on AMD rigs, and of course; editorials like this from staff writers which say the following:

There is nothing finer than raising the hackles of delusional AMD lovers. However, today I do so with a heavy heart. This is no time to take aim at the pompous, self-righteous head-in-the-sand-ostriches of the alternative chip lifestyle. One must embrace them, hug them and wipe away their tears.

Re:Another, older review of 925XE

[DrMrLordX]

I've heard this complaint many times, but I'm beginning to think that Tom's Hardware may simply feature insane reviewers and article authors. The results in the benchmark suite to which I linked are a bit odd(in particular are the rather stunning Doom III results which are wildly different than the ones features not long ago in Anandtech's Doom III CPU shootout), but what is most noteworthy is that the author is not at all enthusiastic about the 3.46 ghz P4EE in his conclusion. If he truly was biased towards Intel, or if everyone at Tom's was thusly biased, you'd think he'd try to spin the benchmark results as a major victory for the EE.

Ouch

[heli0]

http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjgyLDY=

I think Intel knows that they are not going to get a lot of kind press today.

I think Intel has put this launch where they think it can do the least amount of damage by actually being noticed.

Intel's new Pentium 4 3.46 Extreme Edition processor touting its 1066MHz FSB and supporting 925XE chipset bring nothing new to the table in terms of real-world performance.

"Is this a paper launch?" Quite frankly, I don't know, and I don't see any real reason to care.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2261&p=17

So there you have it folks - the 1066MHz FSB does absolutely nothing for performance.

We can only wonder what Intel is thinking, releasing an entirely new chipset just four months after they released the original. Either the 1066MHz FSB is going to make its way to CPUs faster than we have anticipated, or Intel has just introduced the world's first useless FSB improvement for the next 9 months.

But given that Intel isn't planning on ramping clock speed up too high anytime soon, we'd say that the 1066MHz FSB is best left for late next year, when more useful implementations of it will appear.

Re:Ouch

[crazy_monkey]

Remember when DDR first came out?

then...
Dolts said: "DOUBLE the bandwidth, yo!"
Reviews said: %5 real world increase of performance.
Dolts went out and bought, bought, bought.

now...
Dolts said: "Broken the 1GHz FSB, yo!"
Reviews said: %1 real world increase of performance.
Dolts go out and buy, buy, buy

Will they ever beat intel

[kff322]

no matter how fast the clock speed the pipline is sooooo long for P4 chips causing a sever preformance degradement. This is why G5 and AMD chips are faster at lower clock speeds because of there shorter pipline. Intels high clock speeds just look good

Re:Will they ever beat intel

[evn]

If only it were that simple! Cache sizes, prediction facilities, execution units, register count, etc. all play a significant part in CPU performance and to reduce this to an argument about who's pipeline is bigger ignores many of the important issues.

Pipeline length has some impact on performance and until recently Intel has been able to perform well by jacking up the clock speed. Sure it ate tons of power, and heated your room but it didn't really matter provided Intel's chips could perform as well as the AMD, IBM, Motorola, etc. competition. Think of a trip to the drag strip: if my 5.7L corvette runs the quarter mile in 12.5 seconds and your 1.6L civic does it in 13 seconds I still win the race. In a race to be the fastest you can't lean out the window and yell "You won, but I was almost as quick and I did it with 75% less motor!": you'll look like a fool. The performance crown is about being the fastest. period.

For the last 9 months or so Intels small-block Corvettes have not only been losing the races, they're getting beaten by Subarus that produce more power, get twice the gas mileage, and cost less.

You might want to read some of the ARS Technica articles that cover CPU design and illustrate some of the differences between the various architectures:

• Pentium 4 and the G4e
• The future of Prescot
• An Architectural overview of the worlds most famous desktop processor
• An introduction to pipelining

Re:Will they ever beat intel

[Epistax]

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.

Catching up

[thedogcow]

Intel is slowing catching up. But the fact is that my DP 2.5GHz G5 is at 1.25GHz Frontside bus - per processor.

Re:Catching up

[leperkuhn]

Magic Bus
And to get at that data, the PowerPC G5 features an industry-leading 1.25GHz frontside bus for each processor, offering a staggering 20GBps throughput on dual 2.5GHz PowerPC G5 systems. That’s a huge leap over the Power Mac G4, with a bus speed of 167MHz. That means you won’t have a bottleneck getting information to the chip for processing. Each G5 model features a bus that runs at half the speed of the processor. So you’ll get dual 900MHz frontside busses on a dual 1.8GHz Power Mac G5, dual 1GHz frontside busses on a dual 2.0GHz Power Mac G5 and dual 1.25GHz frontside busses on a dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5.

http://www.apple.com/g5processor/

Hey, slow down!

[dsanfte]

Do you guys think we could, like, halt the march of progress for a year or two? 1066FSB already?

You know, some of us over here have Athlon XPs with 333FSBs, and we're crying our eyes out. Please, think of us. Sometime? Maybe?

Fuck.

Re:Hey, slow down!

[cortana]

I'd be willing to bet that the 1066 MHz that the FSB runs at are actually "bullshit marketing MHz" rather than an actual measurement of the speed at which the chips cycle.

Remember when the number your RAM was sold at actually indicated its speed? PC100 was 100 MHz, etc. It was simple. That 333 MHz FSB you sport is really only 166 MHz, but with two transfers per clock cycle. Of course, PC166 DDR isn't sexy enough, so the marketers randomly inflate the number to PC2700. :)

I recon that Intel are smearing the the same bullshit over their specifications: 1066 MBMhz == 266 MHz "QDR" (oh sorry, Quad Data Rate isn't sexy enough, we can call it QUAD PUMPED!! YEAH!)

I'd search for more reliable info, but I've given up trying to find any decent information about hardware on Google these days; it's all comparison shopping sites, as far as the eye can see.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. After we kill all the lawyers, everyone in advertising will be next to go.

price/performance

[Sensible Clod]

AMD still have the lead when it comes to performance

And even more so when it comes to VALUE. Intel just seems to have a problem making the P4 fast but not expensive. I suspect they just need to toss it and come up with a completely new design. Like Pentium M, only better.

Just my sqrt(4) cents.

Not really...

[cbreaker]

Athlons have always been fairly LOW latency chips, and the memory used (fast DDR memory) is low latency too.

The P4's on the other hand have used Rambus memory for awhile, although that's not really the case anymore. But when they did, they always excelled at memory THROUGHPUT because Rambus runs at high frequencies. Rambus memory however is fairly latent - it's the trade-off.

DDR2 RAM won't be "fast" until we see it in much higher speeds - DDR2-800 most likely. Of course, it will always have more latency then DDR because it uses four banks of DRAM instead of two.. I'm sure you can research all this via google if you're interested in learning more.

Re:Not really...

[Silverlancer]

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.

WRONG! RTFA!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The bottleneck is not the bus. If you RTFA (Oh you didn't? How unsurprising!), there is almost ZERO improvement in performance.

Think of the drivers

[poptones]

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?

Re:Think of the drivers

[ip_fired]

Well, on the flipside, I have an AMD 3000 and an MSI nForce 2 Ultra board and I haven't had a single problem that you mentioned. It works wonderfully in Windows and Linux (Linux finally got support for the on-board ethernet a little while ago with the forcedeth driver).

I've only tested it on a few linux distros though (RH9, FC1, FC2, Suse 8.2, 9.1, Ubuntu 4.10). The ethernet didn't work with 8.2 or RH9.

I have never experienced the sound problems you refer to. In fact, I think it sounds better than my roommate's expensive soundblaster card.

Dear god...

[Tyler Eaves]

The FSB on that thing is clocked faster than my CPU....

Re:Dear god...

[DrMrLordX]

Are you sure? Remember, this is a P4 FSB we're talking about here. It's "quad-pumped". The 1066 mhz rating is the effective speed. The actual frequency at which the FSB operates is 1/4 that, or 266 mhz. However, if you're using a Pentium or one of the early Klamath Pentium 2s, your CPU still might be clocked lower than the FSB of the 925XE platform.

Re:queue amd zealots in 3,2,1!

[aarmenaa]

It's hard to call someone an AMD fanboy when they're just doing it right. Intel has had quite bit of trouble with Pentium 4 for some time now. If you rememer when Prescott came out, you'll notice that most press noted it's longer pipeline and increased latencies. I'm not an AMD fanboy, but I don't seem Intel putting out chips that compete, espicially in the price range. And, where in the world are the 64 bit instructions?! I'm really starting to thing someone at Intel has gone off thier rocker. BTW, AnandTech was the first result on Google with a Prescott article : http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=1956&p=2

What??!!?

[JamesTheBard]

C'mon. This has gotta be useful for all the bachelors out there. Nothing like surfing the net at home while warming the house at the same time. You know that Intel is just waiting for the right time to unleash the hot-plate add on so I don't even have to leave my computer to cook the vast stores of Top Ramen.

But what about Digital Content Creation?

[Mechcommander]

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.

Re:64 vs. 32

[Sivar]

I noticed that the summary points out how the AMD64 is faster. Well, what were you expecting, its 64bit vs. 32bit.

If you want a fair comparison then compare the AMD 32bit processors against Intel 32bit processors.

And compare AMD64s against Intel's 64 bit chips.

Someone needs a gentle tap with a cluestick.

1) Being 64-bit does not necessarily improve performance and, in fact, can degrade performance when used on the VAST majority of applications that primarily use integer numbers of less than 4.3 billion (2^32 unsigned). Take a look at Solaris/SPARC64 for an example.

2) Even in applications that can make use of 64-bit integers, the AMD64 specification defines an "integer" as 32-bits. Software has to expressly use a "long" (or similar) to make use of the other half of the register size, and because on 95% of computers out there (read: vanilla x86 systems) a "long" is the same thing as an "int", this is done rarely at best.

3) Even if all software in the universe could get a staggering performance boost from 64-bit registers AND were instantly tuned to use them, it wouldn't matter because all of the software used to compare the Athlon64 to the Pentium IV is 32-bit software running on a 32-bit operating system, except in the occasional tests that are designed specifically to test the benefit of the Athlon64's 64-bit mode.

4) Even if every one of the professional review sites were manned by biased or clueless authors (generally true of Tom's Hardware and GamePC (and any review website run by your average l33t w4r3z d00d or non-technical game enthusiast), though the former appears to be improving), the 10% average gain when compiling software to use the 64-bit extentions of the Athlon64 is nowhere near the actual performance gain, in 32-bit software, that the Athlon64 has over the Pentium IV in most games and a number of other applications.

5) Even if the performance gain of 64-bit mode was greater by far than it is now, the bulk of the performance improvement in most software is from a: the integrated memory controller (which is also used in 32-bit mode), and b: the fact that the number of general-purpose registers has doubled from 8 to 16, greatly reducing the amount of register variable swapping needed. Again, most apps simply do not care if they can fit huge numbers in a register, because they do not need them.

So as you can see, your assertion is flawed.

Intel starting to go off their rocker?

[TheLink]

No. They went off their rocker more than 3 years ago when they designed the P4 and went for GHz for marketing reasons and not engineering reasons. That said the P4 actually served them well for a number of years, but they didn't get off at the right station...

I remember Intel talking about 5-10GHz CPUs. They were probably taking a bet that the process and material engineers would save them.

I'm sure they realized they lost the bet when the Opterons/Athlon64s started spreading their wings and actually flying, but when you have multi-billion dollar fabs, commitments to partners, it takes a while to turn the ship.

If you observe, they've canned a lot of stuff and changed their product milestones/announcements.

They just can't tell Dell, forget the next bunch of P4s, we're going to go Pentium-M NOW (even though we haven't got it fully buzzword compliant)!

Any idiot can realize the Prescott was bad news ONCE it was testing. But by then it's just too late.

AMD has a window of opportunity till at least early 2006. As long as they don't screw up! They better use overwhelming force if they want to win. It's not an easy battle. Intel is no pushover.

I mean - what's there to prevent Intel doing the same stuff as AMD? e.g. Pentium-M with memory controller on CPU?

Meanwhile I'm really curious about the new Intel SMP server chips. What are the power consumption and cooling requirements like?

That's great and all....

[KuNgFo0]

But does it make the internet go faster?!?!

Extra registers and more linearly addressible RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

• Eight additional GPRs (R8-R15)
• Eight additional XMM SIMD registers (XMM8-XMM15)
• The ability to address more than 4 GiB of RAM linearly.

When used properly, the above can give quite a hell of a performance boost over a 32-bit x86 solution.

intel blew it on multiple fronts.

[bani]

they sunk billions into itanic, thus wasting valuable company resources (engineers, fabs, marketing, etc) that could have been better put to use on their mainstream chips.

then they blew it by designing p4 to purely target a mhz goal, expecting that advances in materials and fabs would easily let them scale to 10ghz.

basically, intel was overconfident and then refused to abandon a ship (itanic) when it was obvious it was in trouble, instead desperately trying to save face and keep it afloat.

while they were busy mending their doomed ship, the popularity of amd64 completely caught them off guard. now amd is eating their core markets for lunch.

in the meantime, intel's itanic partners are beginning to abandon ship. this has to be really alarming to intel.

intel is trying to go too many directions at once, all of them wrong.

amd took the safer bet (amd64) while intel was pooh-poohing and ridiculing them over it. that decision has now come back to haunt intel.

Free clue

[Moraelin]

The AMD 64 is covered by a heat spreader, just like the P4. In a nutshell, short of using a sledgehammer to install the heatsink, it's pretty damn impossible to crack the chip even if you wanted to.

This is starting to get off topic, but...

[Ammishdave]

This just goes to show that people are more likely to go with the option they know, as opposed to the best ones. This is true with hardware, software (how many computers run Windows?), clothes, music, etc. Mod me Offtopic, Flamebait, Troll if you feel it is necessary.

You're joking, right?

[cbreaker]

I've handled hundreds of AMD chips, and I've never had one single DOA broken one, ever. The only broken AMD CPU I have owned was an Athlon 900Mhz chip, because I fucked up and busted the chip by putting too much pressure while installing the heat-sink.

I should mention that AMD not only replaced the thing for free, they sent me a 950Mhz chip, and sent it overnight delivery, no charge.

Since then, I have been a lot more careful installing heat sinks. The Pentium 3 "flip chips" were *EXACTLY* the same as the Athlons, and you could break them just as easily.

I call bullshit on you for that FUD. And not to mention, the Athlon 64's all have a heat spreader on them now, so your point is moot.

AMD Processors have always treated me very well. I never have problems with them, and they always run how I expect them to run, plus some. Intel makes good CPU's too, and I use them as well.

I'm not sure why you weren't fired after snapping the 10th CPU? Or the 100th?

Re:You're joking, right?

[cbreaker]

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.

if only it were still so

[Moraelin]

AMD chips used to cost very little, yes, but nowadays they're pretty much on par with Intel.

E.g, since we're talking about the P4EE, a fair comparison would be the Athlon FX. A quick look at an online shop here (www.alternate.de) says:

Athlon 64 FX-55 ... 899 Euro
Athlon 64 FX-53 ... 849 Euro

Not exactly a budget chip either, eh?

But let's look at something more mainstream:

Athlon 64 3000+ (socket 754, 2 GHz) ... 174 Euro
Athlon 64 3000+ (socket 939, 1.8 GHz) ... 184 Euro

Pentium 4 3000 GHz (Northwood) ... 189 Euro
Pentium 4 3000 GHz (Prescott) ... 184 Euro

So it looks to me like they're very much on par, as price goes.

Now this isn't a scientific study or anything, and I didn't even try to find the lowest price or anything. I just stopped at the first online shop that came to mind.

Re:if only it were still so

[Pleione]

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.

Re:32 bit Vs. 64 bit?

[six]

they tested 32 bit apps on a 32 bit OS, the 64 bit capabilities of the athlons were not used

YES!

[pyro jackelope]

Slightly faster...to the MAX!