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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."
Hey, if our brains do a nice enough job using lots of parallel instruction "dumb" processors, why are we so obssessed with ultra fast only-a-few-instructions-at-a-time single processors? I think the whole approach of the cell architechture is the right way to move forward.
Please spare me the "the brain can't multiply 100000*1234555 fast enough" argument. We can have the best of both worlds: complex single "cells" (unlike brain cells) repeated many many times for parallelism.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Remember in the early 90's when many of you were still in grade school and the TCM based mainframes with their 400psi water chiller pumps were beginning to make way for the CMOS era? And we heard that a 10 CMOS CEC could easily replace a 2-3 TCM CEC because even though each one was rather slow and low powered they could gang them together and heat would not be a problem? We all chucked our TCM mainframes, got rid of all the chiller machinery with hacksaws and went on our merry ways.
Well it looks like the prognostication for a Brave New World was a little premature. It looks like we'll start to see the return of complex and expensive water chillers yet. Not the homemade black tee shirt and Krispy Kreme version but real, large, complicated chiller pipes that are built right into the CPU chip.