Slashdot Mirror
PIII - dead end technology?
S. Casey writes "It looks like Intel is beating a dead horse, and then some, at least that's my impression from this review of Intel's "PIII" and its Slot-1 competitors. The best part?
"The PIII at 560 has a 7.57% increase in 3DMarks over the 300A at 450MHz. Less than an 8% increase in speed despite a 24.4% increase in clock speed... from a processor that costs twelve and a half times as much as the 300a." The review compares 4 of Intel's "best" CPUs and pretty much demonstrates that the PIII is a waste of time. Bring on .18 micron.
"
Intel is turning into as much or more of a marketing company than MS.
Can you say Pentium98?
--
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Go get yourself a Sparc or MIPS or Alpha, even.
Anyone have any more information on the K7, other than it's going to rock?
at least the commercials are kinda nifty
--Dave
I'd prefer and AMD, they've been doing some cool stuff lately. Those alphas are pretty sweet too.
/.'ed already :-(
That we should buy Intel only for the low end, as there is where the x86 architecture's better price/performance ratio resides. If you want real kick-ass speed that's worthy of the price, look somewhere else.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
I like my ppro, it does what I need, and Linux likes it. I agree that building a faster processor does not always make a better processor. I think that what should be done by Intel is a complete rebuilding of the core in the PII, and actually having a new chip. Reworking the core dosn't need to add instructions to it, just make the logic faster, and require fewer clock cycles per instruction. Also possibly make it so there are effectively parrallel processors in the chip, like Cyrix and the 6x86. That would be an improvement.
If Intel continues to build faster, but not better processors they will stagnate and become a has been. Creativeness and ingenuity make a company great, and a product welcome. Reliability makes it perfered. If a company dose not offer both, it's going to decline.
Laugh, it's good for you!
As far as I'm concerned, every chip above the 8086 from Intel has been dead technology. Or more accurately, "I wish it was dead" technology.
Ok, the P3 indeed isn't much more as a P2 on higher clock and with KNI, so maybe it's not worth it's money, but hey, P2 was just PPro with MMX.
But those reviewers are also just a bit stupid. Hey, we installed that new DirectX6.1, with KNI optimisations, and we don't see any improvement in Quake except a bit because of clockfreq. Well, how weird, any fool should know Quake doesn't use DX for 3D.
And yeah, Unreal does, but Unreal is probably the worst written D3D game ever. (Which is also why it performs better on 3DFX, and really bad on any D3D board.) I'm 99% sure Unreal does not use any D3D geometry, makes sense, because it was horribly slow before DX6 anyway. If a game/benchmark doesn't use D3D geometry ofcourse it's not going to show any differences because of KNI.
And will KNI become important? Probably yes, especially because of hardware geometry. Games trying to take advantage of that will use D3D transforms, and if on your system they are not done by your graphics card (so on any current board, and on a whole bunch that are still to be released, like Voodoo3), you will get drastic performance increases. The actual geometry increase can be around 300%, how important that will be in the overall picture remains to be seen ofcourse, but it will be significant.
Anyway, P3 might not be worth it's money at the moment, but apart from that overall conclusion these guys are full of shit.
nix@knoware.nl
I always spell the P"3" as the Pentium "III" - except for the new instructions it brings nothing new to the table. :) is all that either.
In fact I don't even think Rambus (which Intel will push when they can actually make it work
Now, a Socket370 chip with the new instructions, 256K onboard full-speed L2, and a 200Mhz FSB with DDR SDRAM would be something new.
Sure, Pill's have been around for a while, but they are still useful? How else can you give a small dose of medicine in a relatively non-invasive manner?
OOOooooh, wait...not "Pill", "PIII"...
8^)
I really don't see any purpose in picking up a P3, like the hosts of others that have spoken before me. While the most CPU intensive tasks I do on my box are playing games (Quake), it's bandwidth that's limiting my ability to enjoy the potential of my computer. I still have my good old 200MMX, a chip equipped with a similar set of instructions that never amounted to squat.
Add to the fact that Big Brother Inside is a feature of P3......I'll wait until the 133mhz bus comes out and see if that does anything significant in terms of performance. But right now, there's no reason for me to upgrade. I'll sink my money into ADSL or cablemodem instead.
Silly Rabbit MIPS are for kids.
uh, sorry. I couldn't resist. RISC, however, is my current favorite processor. I wonder if I could use a couple of the P3's to replace my oven though.
Ah but cheap=cool. A $70 K6-2 chip contains 3D-Now! How much does a KNI-enabled chip cost? Ha, more than I can afford, that's for sure.
I'm going to the Intel LoveFest (aka P3 rollout) at the San Jose Convention Center. I'm taking suggestions for questions to ask the Intel Marketing Scabs (besides the obvious, Why would any cost-concious consumer buy one of these overpriced chips? question). Reply and I'll take 'em on down to the rollout.
(I wish my work didn't make me wear a monkey suit, so's I could wear an AMD T-shirt Instead)
is that the piii 500 easily outperforms the other processors when comparing CPUMarks (which makes sense). In fact, it appears that the piii tops the list of every single benchmark. The fact that there is only an 8% increase in 3dmarks indicates that the cpu is not the limiting factor when running that benchmark. Slashdot articles are growing more biased and misleading by the day...
excuse me, but 3D-Now! has been out far longer..
and all the game developers are happy to support it.. also, yes, the CelA has on chip cache, but the K6-3 has twice as much.. and both these chips were starting on the drawing board at least several years ago, and neither one could have likely known of the other..
in fact, 3D-Now! should be, from what i have gathered so far, a better performer..
KNI uses 50+ instructions to do what 3D-Now! does in 21.. Intel used a CISC approach, AMD a RISC..
AMD didn't waste as much valuable opcode space..
sure, game developers will support KNI - but it'll take a year for that support to reach the levels of the games that are out now or about to be that support 3D-Now!
Can you say "Abandon Ship"?
Decrease number of clockcycles per instructions? Most of them allready have 1 cycle throughput, and they do have the 2 pipes, which are pretty much 2 parallel processors.
;)
More important bottleneck in 3d apps is simply memory speed. 2meg L1 cache, that would be good
I just did a small writeup at work exposing the bullshit Intel is selling its customers. They recently started shipping 450 MHz Xeon chips with the 2 MB cache. In comparing 4-way servers from IBM and HP, I found that the price increase from a 4-way 400/1MB server to a 4-way 450 MHz/2 MB was roughly $14,000 - a 35% price increase. The improvement in performance? Well, that was only 14%. Take that number with a grain of salt because these systems (used in TPC-C) are super-tweaked/tuned for bragging rights in the server market. I bet you the P3 will show similar, marginal gains over the P2. Yet, Intel will charge a huge premium. Meanwhile, you can grab a Celeron box for half the price (not a 4-way, but you understand the point). Notice how the P3, from what I know, will only be available for 2-way systems intially....
My question is, how much horsepower do you need for a departmental file-print server?? Run Linux on an old Pentium, and you should be fine, right? Anyway, my point is that Intel scams its customers by creating a lot of confusion in the marketplace (Celery, PII, Xeon, etc.....) and trying to impress the stupid public with new clock speeds, even though the gains in performance are marginal at best......
And `Slot A' interfaces at around 300MHz (not directly to a bus). That paves the way for machines with greater bandwidth than SGI's VPC
and even Octane!
you know.. K7 has 200MHz FSB..
:)
and on module cache...
and possible L3 on the mobo..
and i doubt intel will do DDR unless forced because Rambus ain't workin, but K7 north bridges will handle it..
and i did hear that sometime end of year, the K7 will be available in socket variety..
hrmm..
"P2 was just PPro with MMX"
Bullshit. The PPro has a full-speed L2 cache. Big difference.
The DX 6.1 KNI comparison is more about Unreal and 3DMark than Quake. Nowhere did they say that they expected 6.1 DX to improve Quake performance. Can you read? The point was the the "SSE-enabled" drivers didn't do anything special. So either SSE isn't going to amount to much, or Microsoft didn't do anything worth noticing.
But the overall point, in my opinion, was the the fill rates on the cards are already eaten up. As a result, the 500, SSE or not, is not going to amount to anything.
Until Intel moves to a smaller fab proc, you can expect to see more and more deminishing returns.
I have a dual 200mhz setup (overclocked to 233) and it has plenty of juice, especially under BeOS. Everything Intel produced after the PPRO and until the Xeon was a step back in terms of technology. The PII can't touch the PPRO in terms of quality and scalability. They just decoupled the L2 cache so they could bump clock speed. Now you have the PII overdrive (which is a PPRO running at 333mhz and with MMX instructions) but it is priced at over $500 street price...Ouch! The new celerons are also pretty much equiv here but they require a different motherboard ...Ouch again. The Xeons are out of this picture so far I won't even talk about them. Point is this... Intel could easily give us PPRO users an easy and cost effective upgrade path but they are too busy trying to make money to take care of the customers who put them where they are. They are on my list big time. So now I've gone from WINTEL advocate to having MS and Intel on my list of companies not to do business with. I like my PPRO, just not the people who sold it to me. Next time I buy it will be a K7 running either BeOS or Linux.
What are you waiting to approach AMD et al. so
that slashdot.org show up in their ads
in all those looser PC magazines?
Cranking up the clock speed isn't exactly cutting edge imagination but it's cheap and it provides fast instructions (no matter the quality) that I can afford.
Sure companies make better chips but for the time being speeding up the hardware is cheaper than making it more efficient.
I'm no great Intel fan but they are just getting us the most bang for the buck.
"... but hey, P2 was just PPro with MMX. "
Not quite... the P2 was a PPro with MMX and a slower cache and inferior chipset. These last points is why you don't see a ASCII-RED super computer built with P2s. Intel didn't put the good cache back in until it made the Xeon and the latest Celerons.
This kind of crap makes me sick. In case you didn't realize it, ars-technica are the people who did the article. if you think its crap, tell them. don't bitch about it to the /. people. They don't write the articles. I read the ars article before it was posted here, and although its not the best review, it is pretty good. The PIII is worthless as far as i'm concerned right now. I would much rather go out and buy a C300a and save ~$700 .. for god sake, I can practicaly build a whole new 300a machine for the price of a pIII... If you want to go out and buy one, great! but you're wasting your money.
I'd like to check this out but the /. effect has struck again.
Of course you aren't seeing much of an improvement with current apps. Guess what? CURRENT apps aren't written to make use of the new P3 instruction set, so of course you won't see a major improvement!
:)
Once hardware vendors start releasing P3 optimized OpenGL and display drivers, we will see a teriffic performance boost from P3's. And no, I don't work for Intel, but I happen to be writing P3 optimized stuff right now, and believe me it's really something
It's time some EE firm hired a molecular biologist to incorporate macromolecules into chips.
all the new alphas (21164 and 21264) got 2 or 4 MB :)
cache, P3 only got 512 kb? Dont even talk about Celeron, its a toy cpu, crap, crippleware.
My 4 year old P90 got twice the cache size of Celeron, do you call that evolution/advancement?
www.spec.org
Actually, you can get a kick-ass system for the price of a PIII. Let's see:
Celeron 300A - $60 (pricewatch)
Abit BH6 - $94
Creative Labs Riva TNT 16meg AGP - $88
Diamond MX300 A3d Sound card - $70
Quantum Fireball 5.1GB EL Series Ultra DMA/33 eide - $125
Case - Dunno, maybe $75
that's $512. Say about $50 for shipping, and you've still got about $200 left over for extra stuff like speakers, keyboard/mouse. Granted, no monitor, but if you don't want video/sound that gives you nothing special in Linux, you can get by a lot lot lot cheaper. But this as it is is a kick-ass gaming machine.
Yep, 5 * 133 MHz frontside bus will improve QuakeII performance some. ;)
Ask them a suit-to-suit question: "Does the Pentium III support Linux?"
Aren't the Celeron 300A and 366 on similar dies?
Why does the 300A do so much better than the 366 o/c'd? I mean, everything else makes sense because the dies are different, but no that.
And please explain what is so CISC about the intel approach, and RISC about the AMD one. As far as I can tell it's both
exactly the same approach, the intel one just done a lot better and more complete.
then you really can't tell much. cisc is not pipelined, risc is. that means speeds upto 5 times faster (though few chips are even 3 times as fast). of course amd has to put an x86 overhead to actually understand the instructions -- but pipeline is what makes amd a smaller and faster chip. after all socket 7 chips are much much smaller than the terribly overweight slot 1 pII's.
my friend got his k6-2 benchmarked against my pII and his was much better performance for the different prices that we paid. he trailed on floating point a little bit, but was higher on integer instructions. mayhaps his 100MHz bus improved the rest of the benchmarks but he also paid $200 less for his box.
pipelining is the art of using the whole processor at all times, whereas intel has had a tradition of making less efficient chips that allow parts of them stand idle for most of the cpu cycle.
So when you play Unreal III in a year or maybe two,
UnrealIII in a year or two? I think you're off by a factor of ten
Alphas cost about the same as the Xeons and perform better. The only problem is in getting your software native on this speed demon.
quit living
Ask them when they will be updating the PPro core to reflect the more competative CPU industry, ala the newer AMD K7 and Alpha 21264 CPUs. Do they believe in innovation and creative design? While their PIIIs make very nice space heaters(P2 actually, but close enough, under my desk... Mmmm, toasty), will they offer the capability to toast bread to varying degrees and perhaps keep my coffee hot and fresh?
AS =)
-AS
*Pikachu*
Yeah, except for putting a media coprocessor on the chip it brings nothing new to the table.
Like it or not, this chip will define Intel's high end desktop offerings. If you buy intel, this is where you are going to find your highest clockspeeds.
Well now, let's see... we talked about MMX, 3Dnow and the new intsrtuctions in the PIII. Did we also cover Barney and Baby-Bop? These silly little registry hacks by CPU makers can't come close to the real 3D performance in the likes of Intergraph's and SGIs dedicated video processors. So what's all this fuss about? You can't do 3D with general-purpose processors. You could take the whole thing then double the clock frequency and dedidcate all the registers to 3D use and it would still be a sick little puppy compared to today's big dogs.
I've got 2 PPro systems that are just the best. One system is wasted on Win95 but my other system runs Linux and it a great machine. I really think the PPro outclassed the PII as the onboard cache running at the speed of the CPU makes a big difference. I just wish I could have gotten a couple PPro chips that had the 512K or 1MB onboard cache on them.
I remember reading a article when apple was switching
to the PPC chip that it had realized that the current
CISC chips and everything were dead and they had
to move to the PowerPC (which meant rewriting the
applications to take advantage of it) because they
realized the fact intel is now coming to. Intel
should have dropped the x86 design years ago instead
of just raise the mhz on them.
Why doesn't Intel (and AMD for that matter) go back home and stop bickering over who has the fastest 3D solution. You must have a 3D solution before you have a fast 3D solution. When Intel or AMD accelerates all current OpenGL processes, then I'll take notice. Until, then ... shut up ya face!
Your 4 yold P90 had a fraction of the bandwidth and much higher latency out of cache than a Celeron or a P III. There is more to cache performance than size.
Also, the Alpha's are a different animal. They have an on chip L2 cache. The 2 & 4 MB caches are on the motherboard (or chip carrier) and have higher latency and lower bandwidth than the cache on the celeron or the P3.
What AMD has is late, but it deserves a bit more respect than you give it.
1. They have Socket 7 chips that keep up with PIIs on cheaper motherboards, and have for some time.
2. They have a 3d api that actually has shipping code written for it. KNI may be better, but it has come later and it has no support.
3. The K6-3 is an incemental improvement, but given what they have done with an older bus-protocol and off-chip cache, I think it will be a competitive chip, when it finally comes out.
4. The K7 looks very cool and it may well be the fastest x86 chip around for a while after it ships (provided it doesn't slip much further)
the point is that one buys a cpu today to use against today's software. in two to three years the cpu market will be very different than today and the merced III and amd k9 will make the lil-ol' p-III look like a toy.
;)
besides, in three years, the 3d accel boards will offload everything anyhow
64 bit is there... we need to use it. Alphas, sparc, and MIPS have been there for a long time. I'm just pissed everyone is waiting on intel to come out with Merced when you know it is bound to have errors in it when it is released. (You disappointed me SGI) Now I'm thinking that if it was possible to have a motherboard with a Alpha and AMD K7 until the world converts over to 64 bit I wouldn't have to worry about a thing :).
If Intel continues to build faster, but not better processors they will stagnate and become a has been.
Can you say "IA 64"? I'd bet my annual salary that Intel's best minds are hard at work on their 64-bit architecture. The x86 architecture is definitely minor league at this point.
You can bet that this will rock the industry when it's released later this year. A processor faster than Intel's yet cheaper... on a faster motherboard... upgradable to the rocket of rockets... the Alpha 21264! Yeh!
The reason this difference strongly affects the overclockability is that the fundamental speed limit of the P2 line is around 450MHz. Most P2s and Celerons can do that, or around it -- some higher: up to 500 or so fairly common (20%?); 550, possible but almost none. Lower is occasionally the case as well, with some of the 300As unable to get up to 450 (maybe, 20%). I have a 300A that does 450 stably (2.1v required), but it just will not do 464. A fine demonstration of the limit.
Given that limit, the 300A is usually the champ. You raise the bus speed to 100Mhz, and it goes 450 -- 80% of them do, anyway. With the 366, the 100Mhz bus would yield 550Mhz core -- but almost none of them can actually run stable (or at all, really) at that speed. So, you can try using intermediate speed, 75Mhz or 83Mhz bus. These will most likely work, at least as far as the CPU is concerned. The problem here, especially with the 83Mhz bus, is that it yields a PCI bus at 41MHz -- too fast for many peripherals; 33Mhz is the spec they are built for. (At 100, the PCI bus gets a 1/3 multiplier, keeping it perfectly in spec.)
You can buy Intel CPU's with more cache: they're called Xeon's.
If you're not running applications that stress the cache, there is no point in paying for more of it. 99% of people running stuff on PII's aren't stressing the cache and wouldn't benefit enough from a larger cache to make it worthwhile. On-chip cache is still a fairly expensive commodity.
Of course, this is bad news for people using PII's in servers, etc where the extra cache would make a difference. But Intel would like you to buy a Xeon for that. Not fair? Well... you got a great deal on that PII precisely because of the huge economies of scale involved in producing a mass market product. If you're not happy with the performance compromises that are made in this same market, then maybe you should have thought more about your original purchase.
The 128Kb of cache that the celeron has is on-chip and runs at the same speed as the chip, thereby ensuring that it's *very* fast. The L2 cache for your P90 will be on the motherboard and run much slower than the chip.
The thing with cache is that in most cases it follows the law of diminishing returns. You get much more performance increase going from 64Kb to 128Kb than you do from 128 to 256, and from 256 to 512 etc...
The alphas are obviously aimed at server applications, where large amounts of cache are more useful than in most consumer applications, due to the huge amount of data they are required to handle. The improvement in speed that you'd get from doubling the cache on a PIII is minimal for most consumer applications. Especially when you compare it to the increased cost.
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
if you consider only the CPU, x86 processors are a lousy choice. On the low end, StrongARM and MIPS processors have a much better bang/buck ratio. On the high end, UltraSPARC and Alpha chips are somewhat better (and you can't buy Alpha performance at ANY price in the x86 line).
But you're still right, because the motherboards and BIOS-equivalents are often proprietary, and therefore expensive. I wish the guys making alternative CPU's would wise up to this. The cheap x86 peripherals are going to drown them all...
For those of you familiar with the SAT notation for analogies. Big, bloated, inefficient, and loaded down with dubious 'features'.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
I am not saying that the added $14K is a burden for a large company. The point is that you are paying 35% MORE for a measly 14% performance gain, which is barely noticeable in any computer. You still pay the same premium for a 1-way box, btw. You bring up a good argument surrounding low price/performance for the low end. However, even for 1-way boxes using these new chips, the gains are minimal. If you need a decent 1-2 way server, screw the high-end chips. Buy something cheaper and PRACTICAL. And that's what I am getting at. There is no need to buy into this endless cycle of upgrades. Sure, the Xeon was a big improvement over PPro, but the incremental upgrades, in most cases, are a waste of money, for high AND low-end boxes.
...but the k6 outsold the p2 last year. It is certainly already ahead of the p3. Those 50/5 figures might be backwards.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
I was likening it to Windows98. Small benefit, full upgrade price == Pentium 98! Get it? Get it?
Aw... nevermind.
--
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Memory Type..............Peak Bandwidth
---------------------------------------
800 Mhz Rambus___________1.6 Gbytes/sec
600 Mhz Rambus___________1.2 Gbytes/sec
PC-100 SDRAM_____________0.5 Gbytes/sec
This is the pentium processor that fits in the PC that runs the CDROM that enables you to play Monopoly with some dude in Italy.
Here at intel, trained dancers are busy putting FUN into the processor! Shake it!
--
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
...despite the label "workstation" now have PCI slots and use many commodity pieces - until you get into the "real workstations" and servers. I think Sun and hell, even SGI to a point are taking too many cues from the Wintel world. I don't care about commodity RAM. That's fine. Even IDE has it's place - but not in a Sun workstation. Then there's SGI with their new VW... That's a whole different league though, and I won't disparage SGI (they're going after the low-end NT graphics market, so their box makes total sense).
PC mag I think it was? Anyway , the article talked about Linus' super secret company , Transmeta, there are rumors that they are making a low-cost risc chip.
If Intel gets its way:
http://www.news.com/ News/Item/0,4,32406,00.html?st.ne.fd.gif.d
sure, intel rules the market. And everyone who runs intel hardware pays the price. Run MkLinux on PPC and see what you're missing. So much for compatability being an issue.
These situations aren't parallel, 'cause Intel doesn't
do the OS.
It's interesting to see how AMD and Intel have made
a big deal of these "new" SIMD instructions, which
appeared on MIPS and UltraSparc years ago.
Richard
heh, I donno, Apple made the transition to RISC pretty smoothly (albeit taking years to get full OS support for the new architecture...)
It seems that Intel is headed for a fall since they are introducing artificial pricing metrics. They are making a $75 chip the Celleron A300 that performs within 6% of the PIII that costs $850 then obviously they are not pricing chips based on true performance, but artificially created marketing niches. The Celleron 300a and their efforts to stop overclockers are proof of this as are the fact the PII-300 through 450s are actually the same chip with different clock locks. Products based on true value will eventually win out as consumers realize they are being snowed.
They wanted to call it the "Bill", but decided it was too obvious. A little whiteout and an exacto-knife, an voila! The "P!!!" !
--
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
aha! I knew I forgot something. Oh well. Close enough, eh?
It is just like talk shows - you don't have to watch them. You don't have to buy an Intel P3. Is anybody making you? Is anybody rewriting old software so that the new version is locking out non-P3 owners? No, no. Does anybody care? No. Intel can do what they like, and I couldn't care less, but at the end of the day if your so-called "stupid public" want to buy them they will. No probs here, I know what is good for me, and what works for me. Stop complaining, it isn't a compulsory purchase (unlike windoze....).
The whole issue here, I think, is an underlying bitterness that Intel, the proven market leader, is not supplying the minority demands - that is, it isn't catering specifically to the more informed section of computer users. It knows where its income is coming from, and it isn't going to do a U-turn purely because a few people don't like the way it is going.
Ya got options, bub.
-seizer, of the AMD.
prices from Pricewatch's PC proccessor price listings
PIII 500Mhz = $747
PII 450 = $469
PII 400 = $303
AMD K6-2 400Mhz = $139
AMD K6-2 450Mhz (preorder, due out this month) = $279
disregarding the fact that AMD uses super 7 (allowing for cheaper prices at equal speeds to intel brand PII motherboards),
So AMDs are less than half the cost and only slightly less powerful at equal Mhz. (not to mention the fact they're smaller and not run as hot. better design, imho).
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.
I always wondered...
Unless I'm horribly mistaken, the name name Pentium was adopted as Intel wanted to distinguish itself from the clones with a trademark, and 586 sounds and is rather generic. Before its release, the next generation chip was referred to as the P6, and it seemed fairly logical (to me at least) that Intel would keep this name or call it the Hexium or something to that effect. Instead, they chose to capitalize on the success of the Pentium trademark, and call it the Pentium Pro. Since then, we've seen the PentiumMMX, Pentium II, and now Pentium III. My question is... the differences have to me grown rather vague, so which of these actually are fundamentally different enough to constitute a new generation of processor? And does it not seem like Intel is hurting itself by reusing the name Pentium, as by now it is ~7 years old (I think), practically archaic?
I'm sick of Pentiums, when do we get something else?
Or assuming the PIII is successful, will we then get the Pentium III 2?
Little bit of confusion here, I think.
3dNow is AMD's MMX.
The K7 is supposed to contain SIMD features similar to KNI, or Altivec.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
--"In dreams begin responsibilities" - Delmore Schwartz
Rambus, to offer an analogy, is like a big-rig truck going 90mph; faster and carries more in a day than a mini-van at 55mph; but it's acceleration/deceleration is crap.
PC133 offers some solutions, especially with the ddr; read/write on rise and fall of clocks, so not only is latency reduced/minimized, throughput is simultaneously increased by 2.6 times as well.
And it will be cheaper too.
Gotta love Intel's marketing machine. Go read some articles on new tech and what competitors offer; Intel may be more reliable yes, but innovation from companies willing to take risks to outperform the incumbent is vital.
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
The Xeon is a wonderful CPU. I tested an HP Kayak PII Xeon dual, and it DESTROYED everything else I had on hand to test. The chip is expensive because it's good.
sKroz
For the buck.
I'm not talking about for CFD calculations. I'm talking about having a computer at home that I can mess with. I still can't afford an Alpha. I just spent 300 bucks upgrading to an AMD 350.
Further I'm talking about the last 5 years. The alphas could well become a reasonable processor. But 2 years ago when my lab was pricing up systems. It was 15,000 for an HP 735 or 5000 for a P-II 266 with 256 Megs of Ram. It takes us longer to generate good model than to run it even on the P-II.
The performance of this chip (at the time) was adequate. And the price was reasonable. Of course by todays standards it's a word processor.
I'd take a MIPS/Ultrasparc/Cray anyday also but there is a big difference between the price of the total package. The Alphas are within reach if you need a lot of performance. NEED. I'm not shelling out an extra $5000 unless I need it. I wouldn't buy a XEON either.
The really revolutionary thing about P-III's (the reactionary thing being the hardware ID) is that they have hardware NURBS instructions on the chip. NURBS are non-uniform rational B-splines. Intel's betting that someone will come up with a NURBS-based graphics format for the web--Adobe Illustrator, and to an extant PostScript, already use B-splines, which could be rendered with the same instructions. Then, of course, only people with P-IIIs will be able to view those graphics reasonably quickly.
As soon as I have the money I'll cough up for one, though. A lot of buck for the bang, sure, but hardware NURBS support will be a huge help for high-quality 3D imaging, and the CGI landscape will look a lot different once 3DNow! and NURBS have been incorporated into all Intel clones. I'd love to write a program using the NURBS instructions for a senior project!
P.S. Don't let Intel make you think they invented NURBS--the paper was published in the 80s.
Intel's new commercial states that the Pentium III is going to make the Internet MUCH better. Anyone have any guesses how this could be true? Surely not just a marketing tactic eh? ;-)
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
As the previous poster noted, pipelining really doesn't have anything to do with whether a chip is considered CISC or RISC.
Generally, CISC chips have lots of addressing modes and complicated instruction formats, things which a novice assembly-language program may find useful. This usually means much more complicated decode/control logic, often employing microcode, which probably has something to do with why Intels run so hot.
Whereas, RISC uses simpler instructions, which correspond as closely as possible to datapath operations, and has a few fixed instruction formats. That's why RISC machines usually have lower instruction densities, and need more memory.
But hey, memory is cheap now. RISC machines produced at mass market volume would be more economical, and simpler, for the same performance.
KNI has more problems than solutions. Take the fact that in order to use the KNI the program has to switch the cpu into that mode, something currently isn't done with mmx or 3dNow!. so what does that mean? It means that MMX can't be used at the same time. so how do you use MMx w/ KNI. Easy Intel included the MMX instruction set into the KNI instruction set. So now the KNI is duplicating funstions, not good in cpu design.
See now programmers have the choice to call MMX or KNI. But calling KNI too much will actually slow down the cpu because of the mode switch. So in the end Intel has screwed up their instruction set even more.
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
And why would these be better? Could it be that you simply thought that biological technology is en vogue, so it will be faster and more effecient? This kind of thinking is so prevalent... grrr
I'm just wondering, what are some examples of the 4-bit instructions you refer to? As far as I know, x86 only really starts with 8-bit instructions. Well, I suppose there's the kind-of-4-bit AAA, AAM, etc., which I doubt anyone uses these days.
I know, I know... the Cyrix 686 and M2 had a really crappy FPU and could heat a small room. But I read somewhere (sadly, I can't remember where) that their next generation should be interesting, with a much enhanced FPU among other things. If I recall correctly, it's supposed to fit on a socket 370(?) motherboard. Has anyone else heard this or am I dropping acid?
>OK, DOS 6.22 won't quite run, but who in their >right mind is going to put that onto a system >that is brandy spanky new?!
I would! I wanna see how insanely fast One Must Fall would run!
But if so much money rests on the transaction processing capabilities of that one machine, perhaps you should look into an AS/400 or Origin2000, instead.
Yes I call it evolution/advancement. I have a 4-year old P90 too w/ 256kB cache but that cache is running at 60MHz and goes through the same system bus used to access main memory. The 128kB of cache on a Celeron runs from 300-400MHz and is on a dedicated internal "bus" in the chip.
Speed of the cache makes a big difference in performance.
c'mon. no benchmark is going to completely save you from thinking :). you absolutely must consider the tasks you're going to be running; if your jobs mostly fit into processor cache, then, yes, even spec will be inaccurate. also of course there are variations in the abilities of processor families, which can become glaringly apparent when running long loops of the same instruction type instead of an instruction mix.
You forgot mentioning memory!
;-)
128M PC100 SDRAM will add >$150 more,
especially to a cost-sensitive person.
Hahaha!!!
:-)
If AMD K7 is as good as they claim then there's going to be a shift at the x86 throne. And then perhaps Intel will be the underdog...
That is if the mainstream understands Winstone and Qbench-marks. Maybe Intel can just call their new CPU something like PIII2000 and people will buy it anyway, thinking is a 2000Mhz, or maybe "extra Win2000 compatible"!
Go AMD! The next easter a PIII will cost 50 bucks. I loove market competition
/Patrix
It's pretty obvious that Intel is simply milking the IA-32 architecture for as long as possible while simultaneously working on IA-64. Who wouldn't extract the maximum amount of revenue possible from a development? If you know better, simply don't buy it.
-- IG, a happy Cyrix customer
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
but Intel still sucks. :)
Errr... MIPS *are* RISC chips, ain't they? Unless there is an American TV commercial reference I'm missing somewhere.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
That's pretty par for the course, but I'm not sure it's always a bad thing. Everyone's got an angle. The solution is to actually go and read the article and decide for yourself, then post about how clueless everyone is ;o). Occasionally, though, I do wish Rob would implement a system to screen submissions with a bias or accuracy filter rather than posting inaccurate comments from the submitters. I'd also like to see a /. seminar on the differences between copyright, trademarks and patents. It would be a requirement for anyone desiring to comment on a story relating to one of those topics. But it's just a dream, and there's no law against stupidity. Yet.
MKnepher
waiting for my password
Uh, have you seen an engineer playing with huge
:)
CAD modells on an overclocked celeron? or sientists running complex simulutions on overclocked CPUs?
As for chewing, my PII 505 MHz will eat your celery for breakfast, shall we compare distributed.net RC5 numbers?
Didn't you know? If you hook up your PIII to that cute little 110 acoustic coupler back there in the corner, you'd be suprised at how fast the Internet(tm) would be! :-)
{} ------ When I think of a good sig, I'll put it here
We could always ./ the P3 site...
*ahem*
http://intel.com/home/pentiumiii/
*coff*
{} ------ When I think of a good sig, I'll put it here
We should allow the technology-illiterate public to be duped by the Intel marketing machine into believing that the PIII will speed up their internet connections, and that they are the best price-performance chips on the market.
Pricing based on actual value? Get outa here! Companies should be able to slide by on market share, advertising, and backward-compatibility.
Whats the point in getting our collective nickers in a twist? Let's all relax, take some soma, and enjoy reruns of Friends! If you haven't seen it 2-3 times already its almost sorta new to you!!!
--
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Poor Intel, they have so much R&D money and such crappy technologies. IBM & Motorola are gonna kick the shit out of them w/ the G4 w/ AltiVec, and IBM is the king of R&D which will help the PPC. And the K7 is also gonna beat the P3.
The only question now is who will win betweem the G4 and K7. Anyone have any opinions? I say that if AltiVec gets developer support, the G4 will be better.
Actually, MMX and 3D-now have been supported for a while, and people have been working on KNI drivers for a little while also (the figures I've heard state a performance boost of about 25%).
Of course, as was pointed out, the graphics card will usually be better at accelerating graphics than the processor. KNI will be coming out just in time to meet graphics cards with geometry processing, which renders it useless.
MMX is very nice for accelerating 2D graphics operations. If I wanted to do, say, alpha blending of a 2D sprite in software, I'd love to use MMX for it. However, we've had graphics cards that do 2D acceleration for quite a while now. So, MMX is just used as a way to move memory around twice as quickly (it has 64-bit registers which can be loaded or unloaded in a single operation, as opposed to 32 bits per operation for EX).
3DNow is a nice solution for packing SIMD floating-point instructions into the old Intel register model. Unfortunately, this means that you can't operate on very many floating-point numbers at a given time, which makes real performance gains marginal (you have extra overhead for massaging the data into a form that can be readily fed into the new registers).
KNI is looking like a somewhat nicer solution, as Intel has the clout to introduce new registers and make software vendors support them quickly. However, it's still a bit cramped, and will shortly become useless when on-card geometry acceleration is introduced into the consumer market some time this summer.
So, while I agree that in the long term KNI won't amount to much, I think that you are incorrect about it and similar additions not being used.
Last I heard, wasn't VCR also doable on PC133?
The other thought was that Rambus had latencies slightly lower than the fastest SDRAM, with the point of the comparison that you would only use the fastest SDRAM against RDRAM or whatever Rambus call's its memory.
Rambus2 I may very well believe to be a useful technology, just as EPICs second generation of the newest IA-64 architecture will be better than current generation IA-32, PowerPC, or Dec Alpha. In the meanwhile, it is cheaper, easier and more effective to go from PC100-PC133, double the data rate by using both clock edges, using a slightly faster speed to increase the data rate to 2.667 times, and then use VCR and cacheing algorithms to further reduce latency times...
Its really an argument of Intel pushing an expensive, proprietary, royalty ridden architecture slightly before it's cost is feasible, vs a slight evolution of the current design. It's the same argument that a 1GHz Dec Alpha or a 600MHz PowerPC would more than likely outperform the newly released 700MHz Merceds, next year.
We'll see if industry standard PC133 or Intel endorsed Rambus succeeds.
BTW, there are 2 Rambus standards; 600MHz and 800MHz. The 600MHz is for manufactureres and motherboard designers that can't cut the mustard, and can only go halfway =)
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
About a 25% speed increase under real-world conditions, from what I've heard elsewhere.
This is definitely worthwhile, but it unfortunately won't mean much when graphics cards with geometry acceleration come out on the consumer market (this summer IIRC).
Yet another Intel chip. Once again, the marketing department manages to spread braindeath throughout. Again the die becomes loaded with unused crap. And the complexity only leads to bugs, less than optimal performance and higher price.
Face it, graphics instructions dont belong on the CPU. There arent any applications that use them (except perhaps some Intel-written benchmark). Even in the compile-it-yourself OSS community, who bothers to specify compilation for anything but 386? I most certainly dont feel a need to keep separate binaries for the different computers in my network. And in the ocmmercial world, who would sell a program optimized to run only on a few percent of the CPU's?
Keep the graphics processing on the graphics card, where the drivers and hardware can handle it, and lets get some faster CPU's instead of bloatware in hardware too.
"when this door opens.. the internet is going to be a lot more fun."
apparently intel at some point realized they didn't have to pay any attention to the techie people when advertising; after all, the techies would upgrade anyway. So now they're targeting the commercials at the people who dont understand computers at all, so they can say things that imply that "processor" and "internet" have something to do with each other, not to mention "fun". They can openly lie to these people, and these people wont care. they just want flashy graphics and violent 3-d games. Perhaps a bright and flashy commercial implies buying a P3 will make your computer bright and flashy as well? it's hard to say.
Of course, this commercial was created on a Macintosh, like intel's commercials have been for years.. but i wont go into that.
In fact, it seems that this whole P3 thing is, itself, a marketing scheme; pull out a new name and 80 new instructions, and everyone will think the architecture is signifigantly improved (which i assume it isn't.. it may be). In fact a new name is better than signifigantly improving the architecture; if intel tomorrow released a highly efficient chip with a very well-designed basic architecture, nobody would know this except people who read PC magazines. and these people either always upgrade, or have moved on to the AMD or something. But flashy graphics, and the Squirrel Nut Zippers, and mindless slogans which nobody will later check for accuracy like "THE INTERNET WILL BE MORE FUN!".. that's something people understand.
I wonder.. if the early communists had lived to see their methods of propaganda and disinformation come to this.. would they be impressed and proud, at how far the art had come? or horrified the art was being used for such a capitalist purpose?
..and that WAS the squirrel nut zippers in the background, wasn't it? sounded a lot like "put a lid on it".
None of this will be particularly helpful to alternate OSes such as Be or Linux. But not many people will be using those on a PPC machine anyway
Why wouldn't it be useful? Granted, it'll take a while for EGCS to support the processor (it's just now getting "official" support for the G3, and even that code's still in CVS). But once that's taken care of, Linux and BeOS will be able to use it (and if only Be would get off their butts and get support for the G4 or at least the G3, than man is that OS gonna fly...)
I might add that the specs for AltiVec are already out there; Apple even has an AltiVec emulator for developers. Theoretically it's possible to start adding in the AltiVec support now.
How about calling the followup to the Pentium the "Sextium"? Sorta logical, and makes it very marketable to young male hackers...
New Sextium with TFI (Touch and Feel Instructions)
Someone had to bring up the Celeron 300As here...
I got mine for $70, and it runs perfectly at 450 or 464, so that comes out to 6.429 MHz per $1 (if you don't mind overclocking, and lots of people don't). I'm not a huge Intel fan, and would love to be able to go out right now and purchase an UltraSparc or Alpha box, but at this time the overclocked (and extremely stable) Celeron is where my money is. I'd be willing to look at a PowerPC system, but that probably won't happen until we can purchase common motherboards for them at prices that are near the $130 that I spent for my Abit BX6.
AMD might have outsold Intel in some particular market segment (they captured a big chunk of the U.S. retail PC market, for instance). But they didn't come anywhere remotely close to the total volume of chips sold by Intel.
Well, the well known problem with the Internet is that it's no fun. Look at slashdot for example - a bunch of nerds ranting about things like 'operating systems' and 'processors'. Pe-eww. The whole Internet is getting like this. Thank god Intel has stepped up to the plate and done something about it.
I putting my order in for one of these. I need more fun in my internet. Hopefully it will help me get free porn too.
This isn't something Intel really talks about (saying CISC is dead hardly inspires consumer confidence), but the Pentium II is actually a RISC core with decoder logic that decodes x86 instructions to the internal RISC instructions. We've been learning about this in my Computer Architecture course. That's how Intel has managed to keep up the performance increases without killing themselves dealing with a really ugly CISC architecture.
This way they've taken advantage RISC's relative ease of design (CISC makes designing the chip a hell of lot harder, due to the hardware complexity) while maintaining the backwards compatibility with older software. It's this compatibility that has allowed Intel to become the 800 pound gorilla it is today. Nobody's going to want to move to your new chip if they can't run any of their apps on it.
Erm... Apple made the switch to PPC while the 680x0 line was still being cranked out by Mot. I think the line went up 68060 or 68070. Apple saw that the 68 line was going to run out of steam, so the switched before that happened.
Whats up with these AMD fans, trying to pretend the Celeron 300a doesnt exsist? *sniff* is this FUD i smell?
Everybody says chip is going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. Thats a bunch of crap.
:))
;). Remeber kids, an UltraSPARC is cheaper then a shrink, and it builds self esteme, self worth, and makes you feel like the g0d of all nerds :)
P3 aint much faster, and 400% more expensive
And if you think the k7 is the answer, think again
AMD said the k6-2 would be faster then the P2... everybody beleived it, then tom's hardware, and many others proved them wrong. Specially since 3dnow is useless unless the application/drivers support it. so what about the k7? If you ask me, we'll bitch at them both.
Also, wether its a k7 or a P3, its still cruddy old x86... it gets the job done... but its time to shoot this sick horse.
as for me, im stashin' my cash for either a DEC Alpha, a sun UltraSPARC, or a new Blue G3 (SPARC would run solaris, alpha and G3 i guess i'd run linux , since i dont like NT or MAcOS
Sure, it may cost more, but it'l save me the mental stress of having to put up with whiney Intel/AMD nutz
Posted by Nr9:
it is wrong to use SPEC- compiler dependent
Alternatively, you could do what some application developers do and detect at run-time which processor you are running on, and then either dynamicly link in libraries optimized for that processor or point function pointers at the appropriate staticly linked functions (depending on the capabilities of your OS). Unfortunately most software developers just don't care that much and generate code for the least common denominator (ie, i386).
and nothing else .
Everyone seems to think the K7 will be priced like a Celeron. The best information is that initial street prices will be >$600 for first K7's. Probably still better bang-per-buck than PIII, but it won't be all THAT much cheaper.
This may be MUCH less of an issue on platforms where we CAN recompile. But, most people are stuck w/ binaries and no way to update them, and an OS that can't be ported by the people. Knowing this, Intel can happily crank out i386 chips knowing there will be a market.
With enough good Open Source apps, the situation may begin to change.
Drool!
I think I read somewhere that Cyrix were planning to put two FPUs on their next chip to get decent performance. Anyone else heard this?
harshbutfair: you know it makes sense
www.harshbutfair.org
PPro, PII, PIII, whatever.. It's all just i686.
Put your trust in config.guess!
For sure the next processor I'm going to get is the AMD K7, it just look like an amazing chip, and it's going to be more competively priced than the the P3. Mmm... 200MHz bus...
Run, scream, get away!
Baloney. Well, conditionally baloney. Compiling gdb or gcc on my i486DX2/66 with 20MB RAM takes marginally less time than doing so on my workplace microSPARC/110MHz with 128MB. My i586/133's with 32MB totally smoke the office UltraSPARC/166's at the same (about 2x as fast).
The only advantage to using SPARC is the ability to put 16, 20, 32+ of them in a single box and see good performance scaling. Ugly as the x86 is, the only processor I've seen outrun it on a single-processor box is the Alpha.
Intel's thrown a *lot* of money into getting the best possible fab process into production, which lets them jack up the clock rate and cram in more transistors for an x86->RISC decoder, OOO scheduler, and highly functional integer pipelines (ie, the i686), and it's working pretty well.
There's a lot of bad to be said about the x86, but integer- and memory-intensive application performance isn't part of that bad. Blast it, if you must, for inelegance, floatingpoint performance, lack of decent support for multiprocessor configurations, or being the cornerstone of Microsoft's empire instead.
The fact that memory speeds have become the bottleneck in modern computers is nothing new.
This is problem Intel and Rambus have been working to address with machines that will support Rambus DRAM (RDRAM) due out in the second quarter. Those who insist on Intel-bashing should either get a life or a clue.
...everyone will think the architecture is signifigantly improved (which i assume it isn't.. it may be).
Probably *NOT*. I think the 386 was an adultration of a perfectly good RISC and it's been getting worse ever since. OK, 32-bit instructions are a necessity nowadays, but geez....
In fact a new name is better than signifigantly improving the architecture;
YOU BET! Give the guys in the bunny suits a new tune to dance to and they'll sell a whole new generation of chip$ for yuo...
if intel tomorrow released a highly efficient chip with a very well-designed basic architecture, nobody would know this except.....
geeks who read slashdot, or even care!
or have moved on to the AMD or something.
A long time ago, believe me.
....I wonder.. if the early communists had lived to see their methods of propaganda and disinformation come to this.. would they be impressed and proud, at how far the art had come?
About as proud as Richard Stallman would be to see M$ release a *nix utilities package (including C & cpp compilers) for $450!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
or horrified the art was being used for such a capitalist purpose?
I think that's a little closer to the reality of the situation....
Mikie
mikebat@inficad.com
Absolutely. For the price of upgrading to a PIII, I could instead cram 13.5GB more disk and almost half a GB of RAM into my system. For what I do, I'm mostly limited by working set size and the ability to cache the relevant files, so this is likely to give me more performance than quintupling the performance of my CPU.
I think you are a little confused. AMD chips have had MMX since the K6 I believe. Its really a minor point though, because mmx itself is and will continue to be worthless. 3DNOW! is AMD's version of KNI, except it has a user base and production code out and affordable processors...and the list goes on. It may be technologically inferior, but who is to say that will prevent it from being the more widely used/supported. All you need to do to prove that is ask how many people have Betamax VCR's. :)
Samsung: 800MHz 21164PC for $200 in 4Q99.
We'll see how well Intel holds onto its market share against the K7/cheap-Alpha double whammy.
"Who will win between the G4 and K7"??
Hopefully only the consumers. Variety is *good*. The best possible scenario would be for IBM, Motorola, AlphaProcessorInc, Intel, and AMD to each hold 20% market share. I doubt that's really a practical attainable goal, though. But any smoothing out will benefit the consumer, and right now that means shovelling marketshare away from Intel and towards anyone else.
I've never owned any Intel _chip_, let alone a processor... looks like I never will ;)
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
Actually, I don't think Intel said the PIII was best at price/performance, just at performance. You may very well pay dearly for the extra performace (versus, say, a Celeron). It all depends on whether you need that extra power or not.
:-)
And let's face it, technical merit doesn't get most people to buy things. Good advertising does (just look at the iMac commercials! those things are definitely overpriced for what you get, and are certainly not the technical best in computers. But Apple had great advertising and it paid off).
Oh yeah, and backward compatibility is a MUST. People don't want to move to your new chip if they can't run their old apps on it. That's why Merced has x86 compatibility.
And what do you define to be "true value"? From a business perspective, something's value is what you can sell it for. If you can sell the PIII for a nice fat profit, it's worth quite a bit more than a Celeron.
Just my two cents
figure if we're going this far off topic I might as well bring up a line only a true loser would remember from having to suffer through summers of boy scout camp.
Hmm... the topic was the PIII. What a waste.
It's all about AMD this year... I see their stock at least doubling by the end of 1999. Nasdaq is getting nailed now, but it will rally in another month, AMD will ride that wave up, and the popular press will cry "the King is dead, long like the King!"
People claim this vast amount of stability with the celeron 300A at 450. On the one hand, it handles great under linux (so of course I'm happy) but I find when playing games under windows, its a must that I run at the normal multiplier. I'm using an abit BH6 motherboard at a 2.05 core voltage if that makes any difference. I find it hard to chose sides as I own intel equipment, but have stock in AMD :)
"There's a madness to my method." -mthed
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Since basically all the processors that have come since the Pentium Pro (Pentium II, Celeron, Pentium III) are based on the same Pentium Pro design.
The biggest thing holding back my PPro right now is the 66MHz bus. That's the only thing that would make me want to upgrade to a K7... faster memory access.
I bet 90+% of slashdot readers are using an x86 chip (whether it be Intel, AMD, or whatever). Quit your bitchin' about how much x86 sucks. We all know x86 sucks, but we still use it. Incomprehendable
Well, in that case you would get good perfomance. It's not quite the same thing tho, the integrated graphics card would benefit from the increased bandwidth and lower latency. It would also have it's own separate driver. The MMX-whatever stuff requires that software be compiled for it (which nothing is) to actually use it, so it's basically just gathering dust while everyone happily runs their 386 optimized applications.
However, you'd probably get a much higher price than you figure; failure rates in production increase with complexity, and 32 MB memory is a lot of possible broken transistors. If only one of ten CPU's make it through testing the customer will have to pay for the nine broken ones too.
I agree completely. So why is Intel and AMD trying to sell a product to the market (MMX, KNI, 3Dnow)that is obviously so inferior to our current video card solutions?
Maybe Intel should have named their processors after elements.
;-)
They did that! Xenon. No, wait.. it's Xeon.. never mind
A fair comment considering that the processors at the heart of the Playstation and N64 are MIPS designs.
Sparc Ultra 2 :) 1/2 gig of ram:)) On my desk..
Apple started with a gigantic lead. Then they refused open source technology, wanting to build the machines, the OS, and everything inbetween. Along call Microsoft. They open sourced with Intel, IBM, Compaq and software developers. They all make money on Windows 1,2,3,4-1,000.
While the government looks at Microsoft one can only wonder how the other members of the gang get to slink away with their tales between their legs.
I'm not a programmer or hacker, just an average computer consumer and let me tell all open source, gift ecomony advocates reading this post...the consumer is sick of the Wintel, software ripoff!!!
With the digital invention of Internet, UPgrades could be delived over the net, right? Not a $100 UPgrade at that. Digitally delivered software, UPgrades and who knows what all, at an affordable price.
Now is the time for action. The computer is in enough homes that a truely new and innovative way to deliver the goods of high quality has a ready and willing market.
I hope i'm seeing that need met with Linux, etc.
The demand from the consumer will only increase.
I'm 47. Maybe it's time to learn new tricks?
an enigma wrapped around a paradox driven by a paradigm shift
Posted by johnny the homicidal maniac:
the 300a, clocked at 450 or even not over clocked, is a damn nice bang for your buck. feel free to add more L2 cache to processors, and you will experience the nicely curved Diminishing Returns graph. at some point, it just doesn't matter you have more. your p90 only has 2 ALUs, the Celeron has the pPro architecture, with 3 independant ALUs - meaning if one stalls the other continue - unlike your p90. the L2 cache is fullspeed at 300 or higher. if you haven't built one and run it, then shut the hell up. it is like people moaning about fords when they own chevys - but have never owned one. i have built two 300a boxes that just kicked ass and were cheap. i don't use them, though, i have my two pPro boxes, so i'm happy
Tom's right... it is going to be costly... but what did you expect from a chip that effectively merges x86 and Alpha architechtures? (granted it is only a first try) The entire reason for the 200 mHz front-side bus speed is the integrated Alpha technology. The cost comes not just from the chip, but the new motherboards and memory chip required to make it effective, not to mention plan to integrate anywhere from 512K to 8MB of back-side L2 cache. You will pay for features, and the K7 is merely AMD's stab at trying to grab a secure hold at the top of the performance heap.
And while the price might seem outragous for those of us with little money to spend on such costly items, keep in mind that, as far as I have heard, AMD will continue to provide the K6-x generation of chips on the socket 7 boards (I believe that the K6-3 is in fact waiting for release, with all testing done).
So, in my eye, I look at the the K6-x/K7 relationship like the PIII/PIII-Xeon relationship, except, of course, the chips are better... =)
Elder
PS - I also have used nothing but AMD chips since my last Intel 386
I still remembers 199"Intel Outside" logo (Post Script format) created by Warren Toomey (24 March 1994).
Already done. What do you think the SGI VW basically does? Memory, video, and CPUs are all one the same switched memory bus. 1.6Gbps (may be 3.2Gbps) directly from memory to video. Same for Sun machines and SGI Unix workstations.