Slashdot Mirror
Intel Breathes New Life Into Pentium
angry tapir writes "Intel is giving new life to its Pentium processor for servers, and has started shipping the new Pentium 350 chip for low-end servers. The dual-core processor operates at a clock speed of 1.2GHz and has 3MB of cache. Like many server chips, the Pentium 350 lacks features such as integrated graphics, which are on most of Intel's laptop and desktop processors."
A chip like this would work good for servers that are limited more by network bandwidth and disk IO than by CPU load.
... What exactly does this have to do with the older pentium architechtures?
Their chips became to powerful and you can run 4-8 vm's off a core i7. That's only 300 bucks. We don't need that much power, scale it back and sell chips that would do the same as a p4 2.4ghz that appeal to the masses. Kudos intel.
That'd be a very very low end server!
You can buy more powerful hardware, a desktop actually, with 4 cores and call it your server.
Naaa, Intel is killing the Pentium.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Until Intel brings back the Pentium brand in general.
Unless they're stupid.
I'll never understand why they killed their most visible, most recognised brand.
Because they're stupid! And stupidly dumb.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Will this one be defective and unable to do math like the pentium 60?
I assume this is for low duty servers ? In any case, Intel has made a complete mess of its processor naming conventions. They lack any form of consistency or logic.
Is to try and stop people using Atom chips on the server due to their low profit margins? Doesn't have me fooled atleast. On the subject of the Pentium brand, it's best off where they left it. I think of Pentium I think slow, old and crap. To they extent I was put off the second I read the name.
And this is also nothing new. They've been selling "Pentiums" for some time now. The Pentium G6950 is one for the last generation Core i series systems (LGA1156). The Pentium G600 and G800 series are for this generation core i series (LGA1155, Sandy Bridge). They are the same architecture as the i series chips, just more cut down.
So for example with the current LGA1155 offerings:
-- The i7-2600/2700 are the quad core, hyperthreaded chips with 8MB cache.
-- The i5s are quad core, non-HT, 6MB cache.
-- The i3s are dual core, hyperthreaded, 3MB cache. They also lack AES-NI instructions.
-- The Pentiums are dual core, non-HT, 3MB cache and have slower graphics and clockspeed. They also lack AVX instructions (and AES-NI).
-- The Celerons are even slower, and 2 or 1MB of cache, and the lowest end one is single core.
In all cases they are all Sandy Bridge. They are 32nm chips with that core architecture. The lower end ones just have less features, cache, clockspeed, and so on and thus can be made cheaper.
Basically these days "Core" is Intel's mainstream and high end brand. Everything from about $120 up is branded Core. Pentiums are their budget brand, the $60-100 range. Celerons are their extreme budget brand. $40-50 (only sold to OEMs).
I suppose. Although these days I see most serious customers by a few high end servers and use vmware. I've yet to see a single low end low power server in a datacentre in this country
... all their 32-bit x86 CPUs as Pentiums, including the recent names, such as Pentium i3 Dual Cores, etc, an come up w/ a new name for all their x64 CPUs - maybe call it Hexiums, or Sexiums, and append them w/ their current names, such as Xeon, Core2Quad, et al, so that they'd have a good branding strategy. And come up w/ low cost versions of the Itanium, since it's obviously going nowhere in servers, and they might as well get some lower cost versions of that CPU and offer systems on that loaded w/ things like FreeBSD, Debian, et al.
I want the best !!
Why do you want bulldozer then?
Because IBM rename one of their O.S.'s "i", and released the POWER7 which dominates the sever market in performance. Microsoft renames windows version 6.2 as Windows 7. IBM announces their PowerPC A2 processor which also sets record levels in performance all under 50-watts, so Apple names their processor A4. IBM announced in the late 90's the huge performance upgrade to their mainframes would be G5, so Apple decides to refer to the PowerPC 74xx's as the G series. Apple, Intel, and Microsoft are all trying to defuse the technological dominance that IBM has.
1999: 1.2 gHz
2011: 1.4 gHz
NO SALE
Because Pentiums are far too small for earth-moving work?
What happened to the Pentium 5 through 349?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
More like integrated waste of money.
So if Intel is now pushing the Pentium brand, and having suffered Intel's legal belligerence myself, I feel sorry for all those who have brand names starting with P and having less than 12 letters.
So it won't be fine for an ESXi host.
Basically these days "Core" is Intel's mainstream and high end brand. Everything from about $120 up is branded Core. Pentiums are their budget brand, the $60-100 range. Celerons are their extreme budget brand. $40-50 (only sold to OEMs).
Good grief, Intel's marketing department really needs a good slapping.
Their brand positioning used to make sense when you knew that Celeron was their budget line (though sometimes quite decent) and Pentium-XXX (later replaced by Core-XXX) the standard midrange, with Xeon for servers.
So when they brought back Pentium, I was confused until (as you say) realising that it was meant as a kind-of-lower-priced line, but not as cheap as the Celeron (*). Confused partly because they still had the Core 2 (**) then i3/i5/i7 lines as their mainstream brand which Pentium used to represent.
In other words, they brought back the Pentium name due (presumably) to some vague consumer recognition, but not for what it was used before and for some vaguely-defined semi-budget segment.
Worse, it isn't even necessary because the current "Core" line is split into i3, i5 and i7, which is an easily-understood hierarchy, and along with the "Celeron", there's absolutely no need for another damn confusing name.
*Now* they're making things even more of a cluster**** by using the Pentium name on low-end *server* (not mainstream) processors.
Please note that I'm *not* talking about the underlying architecture, which marketing doesn't necessarily follow, and which the man on the street probably doesn't care about much. I'm simply talking about incompetent marketing and positioning in that there are a mess of names that no longer represent their intended price segment and/or use clearly.
Then again, perhaps confusion is the aim of the game, as it makes it easier for sales people to bamboozle the public and upsell more expensive CPUs than they need? But I suspect not.
(*) You say that Celeron is now an ultra-cheap OEM-only thing, but I can still apparently purchase boxed versions here and here, for example.
(**) And while I'm here, "Core" and "Core 2" were absolutely stupid choices for a processor name, as "core" already had a technologically-defined use we all know well, and "Core" (the name) was thus guaranteed to confused anyone not in the field, e.g. a dual-core Core, etc. etc..... "Core 2" was even worse, as it's going to get easily confused with "dual core" and terms like "Core 2 Quad" (i.e. a four-core "Core 2"!) are just a confusing mess for Joe Public. I know of at least one alleged computer technician (i.e. someone who *could* be expected to know this) who thought that "Core 2" in itself meant that it was a dual-core processor! I'll give them a free pass on the fact that the original "Core" line didn't actually feature the "Core" architecture, as I was complaining about bad marketing, and marketing doesn't normally mention internal architectures anyway.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Actually I'm shocked nobody has tried cooking up a low cost low power server based on brazos. With OpenCL you could harness the built in Radeon GPU and at 18w for a dual core 1.6GHz part its a power sipper. You could slap 4 of them into a blade and only be using 72 watts for an 8 core with 4 Radeon GPUs you could run GP/GPU code on. Now that even Nvidia is supporting OpenCL it seems like that would be a better deal over the Pentium in TFA.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Are these not for Windows servers? Or do they expect that a desktop system will work with integrated graphics, and a Windows server will require a real graphics card?
I would expect it to be the other way around. The desktop user needs the real graphics card for his games, where as the server will do fine with integrated graphics.
Had to be done: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos&ob=av3e *Long live the Pentium*
In the mid 90's DOE built a cluster Pentium Pro's, yet they were always over heating and the electric bill was extremely prohibitive. So they scraped the entire system that was less then a year old, and brought in IBM to build the super's using POWER4's.
So if you're right, and it gets far more done per clock, then it isn't a pentium. If it IS the pentium, then the OP is right, and it's a 200MHz speed pimple.
f00f
IBM announced in the late 90's the huge performance upgrade to their mainframes would be G5, so Apple decides to refer to the PowerPC 74xx's as the G series.
Or perhaps they called the 7400 series "G4" because the PowerPC 750 was already the G3. As marketed to Mac users, the first-generation PowerPC was 601, the second was 603 and 604, and the third was 750.
The same thing that happened to Windows 4 through 94.
Somehow I doubt that integrated graphics are on "most" of their chips, unless you're talking about the volume shipped for laptops, and even then I thought the graphics were on a separate chip in most cases.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I'm writing this post from an Acer very low-end notebook that sports a "Sandybridge" Celeron CPU - it is a dual core P4600 with dual cores, HD1000 integrated graphics, etc. and the entire laptop was $229 at Bestbuy - it can take 8 Gigs of DDR3 RAM and performs very nicely according to the Windows Experience Index (mid-5's and above on all ratings). I assume it is a Core i3 that failed some test, but it works just fine for me.
I've also got a small Wolfdale E3400 "Celeron" desktops at home - a dual core Celeron that performs quite nicely, again, I assume it was a CPU that failed certification for higher-spec applications,
There is a long tradition of "binning" parts based on test results - at least as far back as the 80386sx (where a failed math coprocessor section made the chips more affordable), no problem here...
Ken
Brazos' GPU is low power but its also quite gutless. To use bitcoin mining as an example a single E-350 does 12 mhash/sec. Your 72 watt example would do 48 mhash/sec. A single Radeon 5770 would do 150 mhash/sec and use up only 110 watts (say 130 watts with a low power Sempron). Larger GPU cores are much more power efficient.
9.9999973251 It's a FLAW, Dammit, not a Bug
8.9999163362 It's Close Enough, We Say So
7.9999414610 Nearly 300 Correct Opcodes
6.9999831538 You Don't Need to Know What's Inside
5.9999835137 Redefining the PC -- and Mathematics As Well
4.9999999021 We Fixed It, Really
3.9998245917 Division Considered Harmful
2.9991523619 Why Do You Think They Call It *Floating* Point?
1.9999103517 We're Looking for a Few Good Flaws
0.9999999998 The Errata Inside
The AMD GPU is far better at bitcoin mining than you suspect. A low-end 6XXX series MOBILITY Radeon hits around 80MHash/sec, ALONE.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Not the 6310 in a Brazos it won't... The fastest 6xxxM in the mining wiki is 6630M 49 Mhash/sec (probably overclocked too). At least 30 watts to pull that off.
The Intel site indicates this new chip has a TDP of only 15 watts, and supports ECC RAM. This would make it great for a home server, such as a ZFS NAS, if the price is reasonable (and assuming it isn't OEM-only).
Actually I'm shocked nobody has tried cooking up a low cost low power server based on brazos.
Brazos doesn't support ECC.
Don't argue with them. They know what they're doing. They've built their empire on confusion.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
on modern machines, it is even possible to route these serial boot message over the network (SoE - Serial over ethernet), or to have the display output to a virtual frame buffer and made available through an embed VNC server.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]