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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."

20 of 388 comments (clear)

  1. Power dissipation? by vectorian798 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Anyone know how much heat these put out?

    1. Re:Power dissipation? by Profane+MuthaFucka · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The Library of Congress holds about 18 terabytes of information. Printed out, that would be 80 characters/line 54 lines per page single spaced, single sided, or 4320 bytes per page, a stack of 4166666666.66 pages, rounded to 4,166,666,667 pages.

      Paper when burned has an energy density of 4,725,382.41 calories per kilogram. 500 sheets of paper (US letter) weighs 9.07 kilograms, so the weight of the printed out library of congress would be 75,583,333.3 kilograms.

      Thus as an energy unit, the library of congress would represent a value of 3.57160154E14 calories.

      Yep, that's about how much the new chip will need to run for about an hour.

      --
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  2. Well, better late than never by CarlinWithers · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It would be interesting to see how much business Intel theoretically lost to AMD as a result of their failed first 64-bit attempt and subsequent delay.

    1. Re:Well, better late than never by WasterDave · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I imagine none - or some number close to it. However, they've certainly lost appreciable business due to the A64 kicking the P4's arse at the high end, and appreciable revenue due to downward price pressure from the A64 somewhere in the midrange.

      What's more interesting is how for the first time Intel are playing catch up on their own platform. Retrofitting EM64T or whatever it's called has got to be costing them in terms of taking the initiative on new technologies - and between that and having to move to the Pentium M line for future processors their forward movement has basically dropped to nil.

      OTOH they may well be rescued by the dual core thing - it does, after all, have a much bigger bang/buck than 64 bit ever did. Interesting times ahead...

      Dave

      --
      I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
  3. Re:A little late? by Thornkin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What is the difference between these P4 em64t machines and the ones I've been able to buy before this?

  4. Socket 478 by Dalroth · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Question... do any of these processors come in the socket 478 form factor, or is intel forcing us to upgrade our motherboards yet again? If I have to buy a new mother board, I might as well go AMD this time around!!

    Bryan

  5. Re:CPU alphabet soup and the demise of Apple by skogs · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I definitely agree with your assumptions. While I don't know enough about the apple business history, I can definitely agree with the idea that intel is losing relevancy and marketability.

    For years intel has owned the market mostly because of its slick sales and marketing department. Their commercials are wonderful, and make people honestly feel they are purchasing something super cool, super powerful, and super relevant - all while completely ignoring the nerdy specs. Why would anybody want to know Why something is strong/fast/meaningful?

    These folks have managed to sell themselves to most people out there, but eventually they are going to have to put up numbers. Like car commercials...what size engine does it have? How many horsepower? How many seats? 4 wheel drive? All these things are pretty important and in the end sell cars. Specs sell chips too, but only the 'nerdy' are deemed able to understand these things so intel leaves that information out.

    Now their advertising and chip naming is becoming on the level of nerdy. Who the F$@! knows what the Celeron D, P4, P4EE, P4-64, Centrino, Pentium -M, Pentium dual core, Pentium[next new thing to sell chips]? Honestly if they just put a few specs out there to differentiate chips it would make life a little easier.

    What is a P4?

    Which of the dozen incarnations of compatible chips do you mean? Prescott, etc...

    What is hyperthreading?

    What is a dual core?

    Why does my 333Mhz RAM beat the S%@# out of my uber-expensive 800Mhz RAMBUS?

    Why this? Why that?

    Why can't people understand what they are purchasing now? Simplify people. Simplify. Or lose more market share to the ACTUAL superior product that AMD manufactures.

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  6. Re:AMD is the worst. by mhesseltine · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Amen. This x000+ crap has got to stop. I'm thinking we need some sort of ISO standard for clock speed, something we can compare PowerPCs, AMDs, Intels, and the like together without having to pull out a calculator and Google for benchmark tests. However it wont happen due to some stupid reason or other.

    If you can get all the manufacturers to agree, comparing systems based on FLOPS would be effective, because it would remove the irrelevant clock speed argument, and thus allow you to compare how much work can be done in a time frame by the processor.

    Unfortunately, I doubt you'd get the manufacturers to agree to it, since it would make too much sense and allow an easy and unbiased comparison between their products.

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  7. Failed 64-Intel Attempt by Visaris · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think your right. I have seen benchmarks on the AMDzone forums which show that while AMD gets a speed boost (on average) from 64-bit mode, Intel takes a performance hit (again, on average) when in 64-bit mode.

    Intel is just trying to be compatible with AMD64. They won't have a serious product for another quarter or two (or three).

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  8. There's plenty of uses by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Our antenna design group is eyeing the 64-bit products with intrest. Their simulations always use up all the memory in their systems. Well right now, only option for 64-bit with their software is Sun hardware. That's really expensive and it doesn't tend to perform as well (the chips are more server oriented, less vector math). So they are quite interested in a 64-bit Intel or AMD system with 64-bit Windows. If they could get like 8+GB of RAM, they'd be interested. $1000 for a chip is fine, that's downright cheap compared to the Sun solutions.

  9. Ever wonder if there will be a Pentium-5? by sl3xd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Just a question...

    So many versions of the Pentium4.

    So many cores. So many variations. So many significant architectural differences.

    Seriously... when it it enough to be the Pentium5? I seriously doubt there is as much difference between the Pentium-3 and the IV (original P4) as there is between ANY other P4 cpu and this one.

    Seriously... what's the deal?

    Other than the 5-for-$5 jokes (Pentium 5 being a rather redundant name, after all...)

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    1. Re:Ever wonder if there will be a Pentium-5? by TeknoHog · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Intel already has an x86 line newer and better than P4. It's called Pentium M.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  10. those numbers mean nothing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    65C? Under what conditions? What heat sink? Where is it measured?

    Most important is the power dissapation figure. That shows how much energy has to be dumped by the cooling solution.

  11. For the general market, Athlon64 is a better buy by cyberjessy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    All of this is for Joe Sixpack. Not gamers and enthusiasts.

    If you want to go 64-bit, pick up an Athlon64 2800 for about $100, or Athlon64 3000 for abt $130. AMD motherboards also work out cheaper, since they have been around for a year and a half.

    The 64-bit market is just opening up, expect the pentium prices to come down significantly soon. By 2006, most processors will ship with 64-bit capability. There are not many 64-bit native applications available now. Games are still 32 bit. Windows XP 64 bit is just coming out next month. And Linux still does not support Joe.

    If you are price concious, NEVER buy anything quite recent. Save the money, and buy dual-core 64-bit processors a couple of years from now.

    --
    Life is just a conviction.
  12. Re:ExTREmE! by Fjornir · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I would guess that if someone took a poll of slashdot readers and the general population they would find a statistically significant correlation between reading slashdot and participation in such "thrill-seeker" activities such as rock-climbing and skydiving.

    --
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  13. Re:Keep buying, suckers! by Lisandro · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Touche. Those old microprocessors are still very useful; older ones like the Z80 or 6502 even more than newer x86 ones. Zilog is still very much alive and selling countless variants of the Z80 core.

  14. Timing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    They've been on the market longer than that. We've carried them at Dell in our high end for the past 3-4 weeks.

  15. Guess what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Retail 64-bit windows is coming out very soon.
    Those bastards at Micro$oft waited for Intel to catch on with AMD.
    It wouldn't be Wintel without that.

  16. Re:Should I tell Dell to hold off? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    err , linux already does run on 64bit processors. Suse linux has supported this for over 1 year now. I cant speak for the applications in KDE, but the Distro definitly comes with a 64bit kernel on the other side of the DVD.Since Intel seem to have quietly reverse engineered and copied the AMD Instruction set , I don't see why It should not work with 64 bit Linux.More here : http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1561875 ,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532

  17. Re:Should I tell Dell to hold off? by Chris+Burke · · Score: 2, Interesting

    At least Gentoo apparently. That's how linuxhardware was able to get benchmarks of various linux software on 64-bit AMD and Intel, and compare the speeds of 64 vs 32 bit binaries on both. Presumeably other AMD64 distros shouldn't have a problem.

    EMT64 is basically identical to AMD64, by design since they went off of pre-release documentation for AMD64 in order to be compatible (ha! what a historic reversal of roles!). The only differences that exist between EMT64 and AMD64 are almost certainly due to errors/changes in the documentation that Intel used. These differences don't seem to stop OSes for AMD64 from running.

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