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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."
You know, it's just struck me as being somewhat odd that Intel is naming it's chips Pentium 2, 3 and 4. Does anyone have any ideas why they stopped going from 486, 586 to 686 etc. I seem to remember the Pentium being associated with the 586s, and this name has stuck.
Yup.. $1000 for a processor. Wowzers!
Low end AMD or P4 processors are dirt cheap now and do everything you could want unless you're running weather simulations or something.
Ever notice how Apple was doing really poorly when they were providing dozens of different system configurations on a fairly large handful of Mac platforms, and were suffering because of it?
The problem was that the consumers simply didn't understand which computer most favorably matched their criteria.
I see the same thing here with Intel's lineup. What is what? Why is this M? Why is that Centrino? WTF does "Extreme" mean in relation to a CPU?
It wasn't until Steve Jobs was able to cut through the bullshit and bring the Mac lineup back to 2 basic consumer platforms that Apple was able to enjoy the benefits of the Apple brand. Until Steve came back, it was just another PC outfit. Now, with Jobs at the helm, and through his seemingly infinite ability to grasp consumer wants and needs, Apple is enjoying a resurgence in popularity and relevance.
Without someone with a grand vision like Steve Jobs, Intel is going to continue suffering through doldrums trying to guide the market with its "alphabet soup" (which you so very astutely coined) without actually listening to the consumers.
I talked to some of the few people who were testing these. Apparently it couldn't keep linux running for more than 4 minutes. Lets hope Intel was able to fix that "issue"
You know the odd thing? 468s are so old now that they're probably more expensive than, say, Pentium 2s just because there aren't as many around any more. Same with RAM -- if you look at Best Buy ads SIMMs are more expensive than DIMMs.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Now it's time for game makers to get with the game [dum dum TISHHHH]. I'm tired of seeing 32 bits of my AMD 64 wasted every time I game, and now that every major player has 64 bit processors succeeding 32 bit, they need to get with the program and stop wasting bits.
The Peanut Gallery, Ubergeek, Biblically Sober
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Will this be backwards compatible or support 32bit software.
Its nice to be important but its more important to be nice
Wow its about freaking time! Consumer 64bit computing here we come! On a side note, who bets that these chips will be as defective as the first 386's (double sigma anyone?)
> I'm thinking we need some sort of ISO standard for clock speed
I know!
We could call it "Hertz" (abbreviated as Hz), as a measurement of frequency where one Hertz means one cycle per second.
When used in relation to CPUs it could be prefixed with the SI multipliers G or M for Giga and Mega, and be used to refer to the speed of the internal clock by which the CPU synchronises its instructions. It however will say nothing about how many instructions happen in a cycle, or what those instructions actually do.
So I'm guessing you don't want a standard for clock speed, you want a standard for performance.
But regardless, if you make your entire purchasing decision off the numbers on the box (no matter what they mean) then you deserve whatever you get.
Advanced users are users too!
I'd mod ya down if I werent replying, but not because you're pro intel, just because your logic is flawed.
Its called marketing, you do whatever you can thats legal to get people to buy your product.
If a dumbass consumer things 4000+ is 4000MHz, especially when there is a asterik saying that the processor actually runs at 2.4GHz, then they're probably the ones who dont understand the 9/10ths of a cent at the end of all gas prices. Intel made processors all about MHZ and thats what AMD has to compete on. The processor ratings are somewhat accurate (varies depending on benchmark).
And FWIW, a 4000+ does outperform a P4-2.8GHz.
The Doormat
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That means nothing. If the heatsinking is good enough, you can get it below 0C. The real useful number is power dissipation: the lower it is, the less heatsinking you'll need to get the core down to reasonable temperatures.
I bet this CPUs will consume as much (and more) than regular P4. Which is bad, unless your house lacks central heating.
between that and having to move to the Pentium M line
Don't you mean having to move back to the P3 line? As far as I'm concerned, the Pentium Ms are a glaring example of how stupid the whole P4 experiment was. They applied their shrunken process and advancements in material technology to the P3, retrofit a few of the things they picked up along the way on the P4s and called it a Pentium M. And look how its performance compares with the P4s!
Imagine what the performance of these Pentium Ms would have been if Intel hadn't wasted all that time on the P4s in the first place.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
It's funny to me, how one can "tell the difference" between a 32bit and 64bit system, of the same frequency, and all else the same... My guess is the 64bit system would actually be slower, all else being equal. It's more stuff to move around!
Personally, I think it's all psychological. Deep down in your subconcious, you're willing your machine to be that much faster, because, well, you paid more for it!
Let's be realistic, the only pracitcal performance gain you're ever going to see from a 64 bit program, is if it does 64 bit math... And the best chance for people to encounter this (at least for non-sciencey types who don't need big numbers or double percision floats) is in a 64 bit file system, in the event, say that WinFS is 64 bit. Aside from that it's wasted on most people.
Wait, what does "ia64" have to do with "64bit amd chips" other than that those are two entirely different architectures? I don't understand this post.
In theory of course.
In practice, you can get up to 1GFLOPS on a pretty simple machine, just put all your resources on doing flops asap. Ignore branches in your design, just make it run as many floating point instructions in a row as quickly as possible.
In real situations however, both FLOPS and MIPS say very little. There's a damn good reason it's commonly transscribed as "Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed"
Once more we play our deadly game (of semantics!)...
1) When you say "heatsink", you're just talking about a type of radiator. Usually, we restrict the term "heatsink" to a local radiator, an object in direct contact with the CPU core (or whatever your heat source is), as opposed to a remote radiator that uses fluid exchange to transfer heat from the core to the radiator.
2) ANY cooling system, be it passive/active, air/water, local/remote, is going to incorporate a radiator somewhere. Even with phase change systems or Peltiers, you eventually have to dump heat passively. Meaning that any cooling system will have a radiator of some kind.
SO: If you refer to a cooling setup as a just a heatsink, when it incorporates some kind of phase-change or other active cooling method, you're being ambiguous and misleading with your language. The real distinction is that active cooling systems can chill the CPU to an arbitrarily low temperature approaching the limit of 0K, whereas passive cooling systems can only chill the CPU to an arbitrarily low temperature approaching the limit of the ambient temperature of the radiator's environment.
I think it's best not to confuse the issue by referring to active cooling systems as "heatsink" setups, because they HAVE to have a radiator of some kind. It's like calling a submarine a "boat"--while technically correct, the term doesn't describe the subject in a way that adequetely distinguishes its important characteristics.