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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?
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.
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.
How does a dedicated server appeal to the masses?
it was a 59.97, actually...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
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.
Hmmm... processors do do more work per clock nowadays as compared to 12 years ago. And, they do it at waaaaaaaay less power and cost. Think about your huge many-fanned nearly 1kW rig from the turn of the millennium vs. the cramped space of a 1U slot pulling maybe 100W. This ain't your father's Pentium.
Program Intellivision!
HP Microservers sold like hotcakes, and were based around AMD's Athlon II Neo N36L processor - which is 64bit, dual core, 25W TDP, VT-x etc. No doubt Intel want part of this pie
I thought that was the video sweep on color NTSC sets.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
What happened to the Pentium 5 through 349?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
A mate had a bugged P90 that he got cheap. For 99.9% of users, there was no issue. It certainly made for a cheap machine that kicked arse at quake, back when he got it for about the price of a 486.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
It's pretty obvious that the low TDP means it's meant for something fanless/low-noise like MacMini servers. Though the MacMini already runs a laptop i5 chip for the same reason.
I hope, but have little faith in Intel when it comes to putting out cooler chips with lower TDP. When they have 100W+ TDP, you can only stuff 4 of them in a 15A rack. When they're 15W, that comes up to 24 ,machines or even blade systems.
But I think it might actually be an attempt to beat Calxeda before it sells any servers. http://www.calxeda.com/products/energycore/ecx1000 1.5Watts per chip (5Watts at maximum power.) The point to notice is the Pentium VTd feature is missing, which means it's not meant for VM's
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.
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.
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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.
Had to be done: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos&ob=av3e *Long live the Pentium*
Hmm.. thought i saw someone else comment that it has VT instructions. If not, then too bad.
Still, point remains I guess. Even if its pushed at low end physical servers - CPU these days just isn't required. Even less so if you aren't virtualising multiple servers onto one machine. Just retired a couple of blades last year that were pentium III 1.3ghz single cores. They were still running around 90-99% idle most of the time (web server for internal app + db server to go with it).
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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.
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.
I thought NTSC framerate was 23.976? Such an odd number simply because the field refresh rate (originally 60.0Hz) had to be reduced by a factor of exactly 1000/1001 (to give a FiR of 59.94Hz which with a bit of math and timecode drops (1 frame every 1000 count, on average) gives the aforementioned standard NTSC colour framerate) to overcome some constraint or other of the transition between monochrome and colour signal. I think, and stand to be corrected, that the colour signal was vulnerable to interference between horizontal, sound and colour frequencies and how they interacted with line frequencies.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
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.
It's a Pentium in as much as they named it "Pentium," much like a Ford Taurus of today is just as much a Ford Taurus as one they made 20 years ago, even though they have no parts in common. It's a Taurus because Ford named it that.
The Intel Atom probably has more in common with the original P54C than the Pentium Pro did.
Program Intellivision!
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).
It's pretty obvious that the low TDP means it's meant for something fanless/low-noise like MacMini servers. Though the MacMini already runs a laptop i5 chip for the same reason.
Actually, you can BTO a dual-core i7 on the higher-end (server-intended) Mac mini. But yes, they do normally run an i5 in the 'minis.
Hmm.. thought i saw someone else comment that it has VT instructions. If not, then too bad.
Still, point remains I guess. Even if its pushed at low end physical servers - CPU these days just isn't required. Even less so if you aren't virtualising multiple servers onto one machine. Just retired a couple of blades last year that were pentium III 1.3ghz single cores. They were still running around 90-99% idle most of the time (web server for internal app + db server to go with it).
Yep. I've never understood what the big need is for massive CPU when most of the heavy lifting in a file-server is handled through DMA transfers. Hell, all a file server does (for the most part) is lookup files in a directory (which I believe is a CPU-saving indexed file architecture in most, if not all, modern filesystems), then setup a DMA controller with source and destination addresses, and then stand back until a "Transfer Complete" interrupt is raised. Even if the DMA controller has to be setup for each block (likely), that means that the next block location and maybe the destination address and block length has to be stuffed. Whoop-de-doo.
My gut says that a file server will run out of I/O (both internal and external) and disk bandwidth LONG before the CPU is maxed-out.
I remember setting up an old 350MHz G3-based iMac with a (paltry) 512MB of RAM up as a streaming video server about 5 years ago. I was amazed to find that serving 10 simultaneous (but different) streams only took about 2% of that slow-ass CPU with a slow-ass bus (100MHz) and moderately-slow HD. I understand we aren't talking about 1000 simultaneous connections; but we're also not talking about 2.7GHz, multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs, with 1GHz frontside busses and 16GB of RAM, either.
I hope, but have little faith in Intel when it comes to putting out cooler chips with lower TDP.
Ever since they came to their senses and shitcanned NetBurst, Intel has beaten AMD in performance per watt on both desktops and servers.
But I think it might actually be an attempt to beat Calxeda before it sells any servers. http://www.calxeda.com/products/energycore/ecx1000 1.5Watts per chip (5Watts at maximum power.) The point to notice is the Pentium VTd feature is missing, which means it's not meant for VM's
I think this may be a preemptive strike against all the talk of ARM servers from various companies. Calxeda is just one of many places which are planning something like this. A cheap, low-power x86 that supports server features like ECC will dissuade many users from switching to ARM servers if and when they materialize.
Actually I'm shocked nobody has tried cooking up a low cost low power server based on brazos.
Brazos doesn't support ECC.
This ain't your father's Pentium.
That made me feel really, really old.
Given how they're targeting them (servers), I'd think calling them "Pentium Pro" would be more apropos.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.
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