SpeedStep On Your Desktop - Intel's Prescott-2M

Kez writes "Intel's Prescott core has undergone a few changes, and the latest version - Prescott-2M - includes new features, one of which is Enhanced SpeedStep technology. Given the jokes about the heat that the Prescott gives out, Intel had to act. It was inevitable that a power (and heat) saving technology such as SpeedStep would find its way into desktop PCs. HEXUS.net has an article looking at the new Prescott-2M based Pentium 4 660 and Extreme Edition 3.74Ghz CPUs, examining their new features and performance."

Comments

So, I can

[Gr8Apes]

only fry one egg at a time whilr doing anything other than staring at the login screen?

Natural Gas Prices are Rising

[bigtallmofo]

I look forward to heating my house with my new Intel processor!

Re:Natural Gas Prices are Rising

[The-Bus]

Screw that. Make sure the next Rovers are running these and we'll heat up Mars in no time.

My Yet-to-be-never-sent letter to Intel

[TheRealMindChild]

Dear Intel,

Thanks for taking such a GREAT APPROACH to your heat problems. I can't WAIT to use one of these new processors in my desktop, only to watch my whole computer DROP IN SPEED as I am an hour into Doom 3. I don't know that I can speak for everyone, but the whole design efficiency thing is overrated anyway. I simply can't live without the noise of a jet engine in my case. Keep cranking up those Mhz and I will continue to have my cpu throttled everytime I do something useful.

You're the best,
Sarcastic Consumer

Re:My Yet-to-be-never-sent letter to Intel

[Hinhule]

and demanding your 30 pieces of silver

Let me guess, World of Warcraft player?

Awesome!

[Tibor the Hun]

Now my CPU can slow down if I'm working it too hard.
This has got to be the best idea since hoola-hoops!

Perfect for cooking rice...

[dnaboy]

Run some serious number crunching to get a good rolling boil, then drop the cycle speed for that perfect simmering temperature.

No more mucking around trying to get that gas stove to just the right temperature!

Unfortunatley,

[Digital Warfare]

There's no live stream of the Article, due to interfearnce from fans in the background. Can't think where they were coming from ?

SUX-2000

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel was wise in renaming the throttleable version.
The original P4 is the SUV of CPU's.

Re:SUX-2000

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up hippy!!! If we wanted your opinion about how to run the world we'd ask for it, but look around... no one's askin' stupid bitch!!!

I work for a Fortune 500 company writing a databse product and the one thing I require is a lot of CPU power for what I do. When it comes to making money, the rest of the world can rot for all I care because I've got a job to do: namely get myself filthy rich. When some bleeding heart whiny pinko commies come into the IT sector, all they want to do is turn our powerhouse workstations into shitty econoboxes like they did to the auto industry. I'm here to tell you, NOT ON MY WATCH you fucking faggots.

It's hard work designing the NextGen database tools and it take a lot of CPU power to run Photoshop, Macromedia Flash and PowerPoint. (This is my development suite) I don't want to have to sit around waiting for some shitty little AMD girly CPU to catch up to what I'm doing and then BAM have it slow down right in the middle of a render. I want the CPU going full tilt 24/7/365. I don't care if it uses more power or not, there is a lot of money to be made in coding cool looking database interfaces and it takes a lot of CPU to render beautiful images, alpha blends, drop shadows and glows. (Our database product is shaking up the industry and turning heads with it's look and feel and ease of use. Think Myst or Riven meets Oracle with a hint of the Matrix thrown in.) You just can't expect a company like ours to be able to produce products that will run on low end crap systems like the AMD chips.

And it's only going to get more complex too. What users demand is systems that are easy to interact with, and cool looking. To do that you need a lot of CPU and GPU in your desktops and on the server end. Taking giant steps backwards in response to some chicken little 'woe-is-me' is not the smart thing to do. Sure, if we were back in like 1970 and people wanted stupid useless character based systems, you could probably handle a drop in CPU performance. But today, we need every ounce of power we can squeeze out of these machines and more! Here is the feature set that should be on the mind of every software designer:

1. Look and feel are the most important factor in software design. Make it look like special FX from a movie and the customers will want it.
2. Features are second most important. User love new features because it makes life a lot easier to have maximum flexibility. So you want to make sure that you pack a ton of new features in your product that are sexy.
3. MPEGs should be pervasive in your software. They provide a clean and seamless way of making a much more usable environment. Instead ofdealing with stupid icons, you can actually use full MPEGs in a loop to render realistic interfaces that make complex systems extremely easy to use.
4. Ease of use is important too. MPEGs go a long way to adding this to your software, but you can also benefit from having a lot of audio feedback so the user is sure they clicked on a video icon. Every interaction with a program should have associated sounds so that you are certain of every step you take.
5. Watch the latest SFX laden films for new ideas about software design. Mark my words, the future of software design is in Hollywood, not Silicon Valley. The geeks got it all wrong and now that the tools to build rich applications are even easier to use, it's easier for real people like me to develope the NextGen business tools.

So there you have it. Your asses handed to you on a plate. Geeks don't do anything important anymore. They wrote the tools to make it easy for us to write GOOD software that is usable by the average person.

They've done their job, now they can go back to being the rejects they always really were. Meanwhile, folks like me will be the architects of the future of computing. A world where data is all represented visually as charts and graphs that you can manually manipulate. Imagine... stock trades performed at hundreds of transactions per second p

Re:It's not inevitable...

[olip]

uh ? perhaps saving energy?
Let me guess... your SUV always runs at full throttle ?

Tech progress through geek humor

[xtermin8]

"Given the jokes about the heat that the Prescott gives out, Intel had to act" Geek Jokes are such an important driving factor in improving technology- jokes and Slashdot posts, of course! ;-l

bugger them !

[Alberic]

Soon to be released by the Geek Buggers Consortium:
A deamon that automagically sends support@intel.com a standard mail when CPU is 100% at low speed.
This mail looks as follows:

"Dear support team,
If you received this mail, it's because of a malfuction in your Prescott CPU #22354432, which reached a idle state of 0% during 68 ms while still being in low frequency mode. It had a temperature of 56C

feel free to ignore this mail as you ignored the 122563 previously sent by this deamon, and just as you ignored the need of a solution for CPU heat problems.

Yours sincerely,
The Intel bugger deamon."