New Pentium Chipsets Launched

MojoDog writes "Today Intel has officially taken the wraps off their new mainstream Pentium D 820 Processor and i945 Express series chipsets. Additionally, they also cranked up the Pentium 4 6XX sequence line-up to include the new Pentium 4 670 at 3.8GHz. The Pentium D 820 is Intel's new dual core CPU clocked at 2.8GHz, which contains two Prescott cores per die but doesn't support HyperThreading like the Pentium Extreme Edition 840. The i945 is their new mainstream PCI Express based chipset, one version of which has Integrated Graphics and both supporting these new dual core CPUs. Additionally, Intel took their Pentium 4 6XX sequence processor, based on the Prescott 2M core, for a speed bump to 3.8Ghz."

Comments

Dual core versus hyperthreading

[sunderland56]

The Pentium D 820 [...] contains two Prescott cores per die but doesn't support HyperThreading

Huh? Hyperthreading was a constrained, limited ability to run two concurrent streams of execution on one physical chip. Dual core CPUs allow unlimited execution of two streams. "Doesn't support hyperthreading" is listed here as if it was a limitation - but in fact dual core (in the benchmarks I'm running) conmpletely blows away any hyperthreaded chip. This is a far better, far more powerful, solution.

It is nice to see Intel finally catching up with AMD....

Re:Dual core versus hyperthreading

[theantipop]

The issue is that running HT on both cores in a dual core would allow four concurrent threads to be processed. There are many benchmarks of the Pentium XE (dual core, HT) which show the few applications that support multithreading give big increases in performance with Hyperthreaded dual cores.

Re:Dual core versus hyperthreading

[Erwos]

You're missing one thing: the Pentium D EE _does_ have hyper-threading on both cores (looks like a 4 CPU system to your OS). HT and dual core is not an either/or proposition - you can have both, and HT is not going to hinder performace on dual core CPUs.

-Erwos

Way to suck...

[http101]

...power. Why is Intel consistently a prime waste of power? (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050509/cual_cor e_athlon-19.html)

When wattage is spiking that high, I'd rather use the AMD processor solely because of the ever-increasing demand and cost of electricity. So not only are they cost-efficient and energy-efficient, but they're also faster and more durable. In the past 4 years, I've burned up (plugged it in, turned it on) a handful of Intel chips just because they were defective (purchased at various stores) and lost 1 AMD to a direct lightning strike.

Re:Struggling

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, except Intel is INTC, for Intel Corporation. Intel vs. AMD log scale.

-theGreater.

Re:Struggling

[PlazMan]

Uh, Intel's stock ticker is INTC, and the last six months have been pretty decent.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=INTC&t=6m

MIPS per Watt or MFLOPS per Watt

[Colin Smith]

It's the real performance limitation in data centres as we move to smaller, cheaper machines. Raw MHz horsepower is becoming irrelevant for most applications except games and certain forms of data processing.

Power supply and air conditioning are expensive. Transmeta are substantially better than AMD or Intel, which means you can install far more machines at a higher densities than you can with Intel or AMD.

Course, if you want better still then you need to move away from ix86 to ARM, MIPS, PowerPC etc.

Re:AMD best bang for buck, supports Free BIOS

[rpozz]

Your rant about freedom is fundamentally flawed considering that like Intel, AMD is also a member of the Trusted Computing Group.

https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/about/member s/

Re:It's the CPU not the chipset.

[i41Overlord]

Anand reviewed the Pentium M on the desktop and found that it couldn't compete with dedicated desktop chips. While it was energy efficient, it just didn't have the power to compete against less-energy efficient chips on the desktop.

In other words, it's great for laptops, but a bit slow for a desktop.

Re:Not upgrading yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too....

For those not in the know, Xen plus Intel's Vanderpool (or AMD's Pacifica) will allow you to get VMWare-like capabilities at near native speeds included into every Linux kernel.

http://www.answers.com/topic/xen
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel /2005-02/msg00651.html
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1055

Re:Quad-thread on Home Edition?

[kcb93x]

What home users would *buy* a dual-core HT'd system anyway? If they did, it would come from Best Buy or Dell, in which case the System Builder/OEM would install an appropriate OS.

But, as detailed here:
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/highlights/mult icore.mspx

Microsoft isn't charging per core, it's per processor, so this would count as "one processor."