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New Xeon CPU Hot and Underpowered
Kasracer writes "Web Sites The Register and GamePC received several of the new dual-core processors from Intel, dubbed 'Paxville', and ran a battery of tests on them. What did they find? From the article: 'There's no doubt about it, Intel's dual-core Xeons are their most power hungry Xeons to date ... Even when idling, two dual-core Xeons consume nearly 400W of power at any given time, which is amazingly high, even by Intel's standards ... their new dual-core chips (while powerful in their own right) simply are bested across the board by AMD's dual-core Opteron processors. Even worse, the Opterons typically perform much better while running at slower clock speeds and only having half the amount of on-die L2 cache to utilize.'"
you could run 20 mac mini's and consume about the same amount of power, now if it were utilised what would be faster 20x 1.42GHz G4's or four 2.8GHz xeons?
I cant see how Intel is going to catch up without a redraw of the whole CPU structure and mem controller. Simply going for smaller die wont solve the performance problem. I really think Michael Dell was wrong in thinking that 65 nm is going to get Intel in par with AMD. This is really and interesting moment, will dell stick to Intel and deliver less performance than HP/Intel/Sun etc? At some stage they will have to start selling AMD and i suspect it will be a horrific moment for Dell. To date they always state that they use Intel because they are better but really how long can they put that charade up?
HTTP/1.1 400
How long till CPU power requirements become a buying factor? Like many people I leave my main PC on most of the day, and also use a laptop which a distressingly short battery life (sony vaio). These days, apart from the old game of battlefield 2, I rarely find any need tor a maxxed out CPU. I'd be much more interested in a PC that would consume noticeably less power. 400W is like having 4 brightly lit rooms all day long, its just wasteful.
For laptops its already a big issue, as anyting that can stretch out the meager battery lfie is good, but even for desktop PCs now, we should be hitting the point where people start asking how much it costs to run a new PC all day.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
What type of car you have and drive is a big ego booster here in the US. This has been happening so long and has become such a normal part of life here that people do not even think about the actual purpose and real utility of a specific vehicle. People try to rationalize such vehicle purposes and honestly believe they can justify it to themselves. It really is comical to listen to educated people ramble on about needing a 350HP 9 passenger urban assult vehicle for their four person family that may travel to the beach in the summer and the four wheel drive because their area gets some snow. That same person will then laugh at the thought of getting a less powered minivan or a station wagon and try to justify why those vehicles would not be sufficent. Even if gas mileage and internal space were equal (which they typcially are not), there is the ego buster that the neighbors might laugh at your minivan and it is not cool. I get the biggest laugh from the huge 3/4 ton diesel trucks (Ford F350/GM 3500) with dual rear tires and bed liner that have NEVER had anyhting in the bed, never towed anything, and look like the came off the showroom floor even after being in use for years around town. Yes it can pull 17000 lbs and carry another 3000 lbs but it will NEVER happen by that person.
My commuter car has a 1.3 liter 60HP engine. I can drive and maintain myself in highway traffic up to about 80mph without revving to high. During light load traffic (which does not happen often at all in my area) I do get passed by some but I am still within the average bulk of traffic flow.
Ok, since you seem to hace a serious case of clue deficit disorder, I'll feed it to you in small bite-sized chunks.
The Pentium M is actually a pretty decent chip.
Centrino is a pretty decent platform.
IBM hasn't done much regarding laptop processors in a while, intel has a vested interest in keeping that area going.
Laptops are now the majority of computer sales, unlike laptops
AMD does NOT have a decent platform to fight Centrino/Pentium M with. Their desktop CPUs are great (typing from an Athlon 64 3500+), but their Turion line sucks too much power.
So yeah, you have the big, studly, 4-core PowerMac. It's essentially a workstation machine. that, truth be told, doesn't add up to that big a part of Mac sales. iBooks and Powerbooks, however, are a different matter. Those, despite the increasingly apparent weakness of the G4, still sell like hot cakes. Simple logics would indicate that a stronger processor under the hood would sell even better. So yeah, the intel roadmap might actually look pretty decent for apple.
I'm not sure if it's the case right now, but back 5 or 6 years ago, AMD's chip development engineers were using design automation tools substantially superior to those that Intel's engineers were using, allowing AMD's engineers to be much more productive. Intel's management, of course, didn't envision a 64 bit future for the x86 architecture.
It could be worse than you think... SGI was once the king of the high end graphic workstation market. (Really cool UNIX environment running on MIPS RISC with really cool apps and kick ass 3D hardware.) At some point they got this really bad idea of switching to x86 and where are they today? No loger the graphic workstation king but not quite dead yet either.
Watching Apple I was thinking they were becoming the new SGI. They have a really cool UNIX environment running on PowerPC RISC. They have really cool apps running in this environment. I didnt want to see them go down the x86 path of certain death.
Who knows what their actual plan is. It could be they want x86 to better compete in certain (read consumer) markets. It could be they intend to keep their high end workstation products on whatever offers the most performance. Who knows...