The Gigahertz Race is Back On

An anonymous reader writes "When CPU manufacturers ran up against the power wall in their designs, they announced that 'the Gigahertz race is over; future products will run at slower clock speeds and gain performance through the use of multiple cores and other techniques that won't improve single-threaded application performance.' Well, it seems that the gigahertz race is back on — a CNET story talks about how AMD has boosted the speed of their new Opterons to 3GHz. Of course, the new chips also consume better than 20% more power than their last batch. 'The 2222 SE, for dual-processor systems, costs $873 in quantities of 1,000, according to the Web site, and the 8222 SE, for systems with four or eight processors costs $2,149 for quantities of 1,000. For comparison, the 2.8GHz 2220 SE and 8220 SE cost $698 and $1,514 in that quantity. AMD spokesman Phil Hughes confirmed that the company has begun shipping the new chips. The company will officially launch the products Monday, he said.'"

Comments

More Power for What?

[pipingguy]

This reminds me of the sign at the local breakfast shop (paraphrased): "Use coffee: do stupid things faster".

Yeah, this is cool, no doubt. How many users actually *use* how much power they already have? I use a lot, but it's mostly dependent on the graphics card.

Re:More Power for What?

[zaibazu]

Displaying myspace profiles. The CPU load they produce is astonishing.

Gigahertz a bad thing?

[jibjibjib]

I was kind of hoping the gigahertz race would end so Microsoft would have to stop making each version of Windows slower than the last.

Re:You'd be surprised

[cerberusss]

nowadays IDEs aren't just dumb editors with a "compile" option in the menus any more. They compile and cross-reference classes all the time as you type.

I program in C, you insensitive clod!