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Intel's 64-Bit Pentium 4s Hit The Streets
ThinSkin writes "Nearly 18 months after rival AMD released its 64-bit processors, Intel quietly added its first 64-bit Pentium 4 microprocessors to the market on Sunday. Four versions of the Intel Pentium 4 6XX series were announced at speeds up to 3.6-GHz, a frequency grade lower than the existing 5XX series. Prices will range from $224 to $605. Intel also added the 3.73-GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition to its lineup, a $999 chip that is fabricated on a finer 90-nm process than its older 130-nm P4EE components. As Slashdot previously reported, the 64-bit series will likely be the major enhancement to the Pentium 4 line before the introduction of the Pentium D "Smithfield," Intel's first dual-core part, which is slated for next quarter."
The Inquirer is reporting that Intel will counter the AMD Turion 64 Mobile Processor with a Pentium M Extreme Edition. It is an alphabet soup of potential Intel Pentium M releases and you'll probably have to read it through twice or thrice to understand it all, but an interesting and inciteful read nonetheless.
There's another interesting article about the future of 64-bit as it relates to Intel here.
And of course, we can't forget our beloved Celeron.
I believe it was because they found they couldn't claim IP rights to numbers such as '486' in order to prevent other manufacturers releasing products with the same name.
According to some tech sites, it hits a maximum of 52deg Celsius under full Prime95 load. That's a lot better than the 65+ hit by the .09 micron based Pentium 4's.
Intel has done its homework on these Prescott-based EMT64 chips. They allow a reduction in voltage and die size, which results in a cheaper core too.
Sure, there is loads of programs that make use of the full 64 bits. Several vendors offer 64bit flavours of their distributions, such as Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Suse.
The performance gain is found in how the chip itself works. 64-bits breaks the 4GB memory process limits of 32-bits. In 32-bits, a single process can access 2^(32) bytes -> 4 GB of linear memory. In 64 bits, you can therocally access 2^(64) bytes. Pratically, in Windows x64, a process is limited to 16 TB of memory. Plus, there's extra registers that a program can use.
WTF does "Extreme" mean in relation to a CPU?
"EE" stands for "Extremely Expensive", "Centrino" means "doesn't suck on laptops". Other than that, I also am now completely lost as to what Intel's lineup actually is. Their marketing department are fucked.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
I was about to make the same comment; I just picked up a 630 based system last week. I'm running 32-bit XP on it at the moment, and it is very, very fast. Of course, that doesn't say a thing about the 64-bit features. Then again, this desktop is an upgrade from a 1.4 GHz P4 mobile, so maybe I'm easily wowed.
I've run SLES9 64- and 32-bit on identical hardware with EM64T equipped Xeons for file servers, and I can definitely "feel" the difference. I don't have any hard benchmarks, but the system with the 64-bit OS definitely seems more responsive under heavy load than the 32-bit configuration.
The true test will come when we get some serious analytical apps running. Beyond the ability to allocate more memory under a 64-bit OS, I expect to see moderate performance increases, though nothing earth shattering. Time will tell.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Wow, and only 10 years after Sun's UltraSPARC, 13 years after the DEC Alpha, and 14 years after the MIPS R4000
ASK before you donate. My district won't support anything older than P-III, and we aren't too keen on donated hardware as it requires custom imaging.
Make sure that your hardware is in good condition, and that the district actually needs systems.
My district, for example, already has over 500 decomissioned Pentium-II (450MHz) systems. There are only so many places that we can put computers (and so many ports on the network), so old hardware builds up as it is replaced with newer hardware. We try to reuse hardware wherever possible (computer lab systems might become lookup terminals, for instance), but eventually we have to pay to get the old systems recycled.
Note, however, that this varies dramatically by district. My district donates over 250 systems to our neighboring district every year because they don't have the budget for much new hardware. They are happy to get good-condition P-IIs, and we're happy that they aren't ending up in landfills.
The key is to know what is needed and where.
Also, don't purchase a computer to donate without first consulting the district. My district, for example, purchases only one model each year (last year it was the HP D530 small-form-factor). This simplifies management and deployment. By purchasing the same model, you can save the district a lot of time for years to come.
At my previous job, a K-12 District, we *hated* computer donations. They don't conform to a standard hard drive image, so they require special attention. They have no warranty, and the techs to work on them as they die end up costing more than a new machine would have.
Management of dissimilar hardware costs a lot.
Now, if your District isn't to that level of management, they'll probably be pleased with anything they can get. When I started there, we were ecstatic to get extra hardware. But as time wore on, we spent the majority of our time on these donations. When I left, the District had switched over to a completely Leased solution. It ends up much easier to manage from a budget perspective if there is a fixed amount spent on hardware every year in the lease.
I agree with the poster above:
Ask your District if they want them. If you go over to drop them off, they may just refuse them, and now you've packed up all those old machines for nothing.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
Pentium Pro, Pentium II and Pentium III have all been based on the same core. The PPro was ridiculously expensive to produce at the time because of the on-die cache so they moved to the P2 with separate cache chips on the board the slotted chip was on. As they got the process down, they went to the P3 which returned to the on-die cache. Orginally the P3 was slotted for compatability reasons but they went to a socketed chip for cost purposes later in production.
The P4 was a completely different architecture (NetBurst) which was intended, from the ground up, to hit high clock speeds, without concern for actual performance (granted, once they hit 800MHz FSBs, the P4 finally started showing its stuff). This was one of the biggest mass-market counterexamples to the MHz Myth, with first generation P4s (1.5-1.7GHz) getting solidly beaten by cheaper, lower-powered, lower-clocked P3s (1GHz-ish).
Granted, the P4 wasn't a complete waste - there were some very good technological advancements in it. The Pentium-M is essntially a P3ish core that has some of the enhancements from the P4 (quad-pumped bus, SSE2, awesome branch prediction) added to it but retained the P3's lower power consumption & clock-efficiency. Not to mention that a 3+GHz P4 with an 800MHz FSB is going to be an absolute monster at number crunching, given software that properly uses the SSE/SSE2 (vector math) extensions.
For the most part, however, the launch of the P4 was a disappointing event that helped AMD grab mindshare & marketshare in the CPU market, particularly with those who actually care about more than cute commericials and buying the cheapest thing Dell is pushing out the door.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Specifically, it shows two things (note, the clock throttling wasn't working on the Opteron processors mind):