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Petition Intel Not to Disable SMP Celerons
McKing writes "Cpu Review has a petition online to let Intel know that technical users do not want the SMP ability of the Celeron CPU's to be disabled. Several sites have stated that Intel will disable the AN15 pin on Socket 370 motherboards to discourage Socket 370 SMP systems. "
Atacom.com sells OC'd celery chips that they've burned in and tested. Haven't bought from them myself, I just saw it on their site.
Ugh... .18 abilities. The MHZ race is where this battle will be fought.
K7s(Athlons) will not need 200mhz ram, they currently use pc100 ram...
And K7 MB's should be pretty cheap by the time coppermines come out...
However, you are right to question AMD's
Keep in mind that the k7 should still be faster then coppermines per MHZ, but less they are to the p2/p3's. The K7 is still a superior architecture, just the memory subsystem in the coppermines will be catching up, the rest of the core is still slower..
Learn first, post second...
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
as for the celerons; they were designed to be a "stripped down" version of p2 (and with the new one, p3). thus the celeron shouldn't support things like smp. and imho, shouldn't support the simd extensions. by all means, use the .18 fab because it allows higher clock speeds and lower heat, but adding features that should only belong to the QUOTE High Performance /QUOTE processors.
IBM invented "functional pricing" in the 50s. At that time they had two similar models of printers that differed in the number of pages per minute printed. The faster model printed twice as many and leased for twice as much per month. If you wanted to upgrade from the slower to that faster model, IBM would send out a tech to do a "field upgrade". In this case, the field upgrade consisted of replacing one of the wheels in the drive train with one half as large and replacing the plate with the model number. They tried to do the same thing with Lexmark laser printers some years ago. The only thing different between the high performance and low performance models of one printer was that one had a ROM that wasted half of the processor's cycles in idle loops.
when a monopolist can protect their margins and price structure with type of predatory pricing, it's usually called "unfair competition". In the case of the Celeron, the chip is functionally capable of SMP operations. Intel only disables it to protect the higher prices on the "High Performance" line.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Where did you hear this?
FWIW, I believe I heard this on NPR... Someone was talking about approachable technologies, or something. I forget the gist of it, other than the fact that car companies for some reason didn't like the home mechanic. As I recall, it was more about the fact that technologies are supposed to be further out of the control of everyday people.
The guy could have been full of it. He made it sound like every technology today was beyond the grasp of anyone except the professional, although he did allow that maybe computers might be an exception. He seemed unaware of Linux, homebrew computers (both of the 70's build-it-chip-by-chip variety, and of the overclockers buy-a-board-and-tweak variety) etc.
I guess I chould check NPR's web site. I think it was a month or two ago.
1)Coppermine = Xeon with 1/2 the cache. K7 is faster than a Xeon already - how will coppermine beat it?
Xeons are not based on the coppermine core. There are PIII's based on them, Intel is saying that they will start making coppermine based Celerons in the future. See zdnn.com for the story.
So car companies should make it so you can't put
a radio or air conditioner in their car if you buy the model that comes without them...
hmm, ok. =)
Just because you disagree doesn't make it offtopic or flamebait.
Two things. First Coppermine dispite its name doesn't use copper interconnects. Intel isn't scheduled to use copper interconnects until the first proc they design for .13 (Deerfield if memory servers) sometime in 2001. Second Ars Technica has an article that covers why it would be difficult for intel to disable SMP. Basically the SMP pin has to have voltage to work, so not only does intel have to cut the pin, they then have to run 1.5V power to it inside the chip casing or on-die.
You can even hack the firmware in the fuel system, if you really want to. It's strongly discouraged, of course. There've been numerous articles about people who put "hot chips" into their cars to boost performance.
Better plug the stock module back in when it comes time to pass the emissions test, of course. . .
I sat next to a guy on a plane who taught at the GM Institute. From what he said, I think there is more true to the above than you think. He said he spent almost a year working with a PAC on the new ODB-II legislation. The reason he claimed GM wanted it is because a large percentage of the 3% holdback GM paid to dealers (to help cover the costs of selling a new car) went to keeping their repair shop operating. Requiring most repairs, by law, to be serviced at a GM dealer would keep the repair shop from eating into the profit from new car sales. Maybe, GM wanted to cut the holdback percentage?
Also, I remember reading in an interview with Volkswagon of America's President in the late 70's, that for years, VW's biggest problem was that the Beetle was so simple, almost any home mechanic could keep it runing. They weren't selling new Beetles, because people weren't getting rid of their old ones. He claimed that the fuel injected Rabbits were their savior. The fuel injected Rabbitts had much more horsepower and got better gas millage so that helped new sales. Also, they would never run more than 200K without having a mechanic replace the system. It help sales upfront (more HP) and it helped sales later (when the cars had to be junked rather than fixed). I can remember hating him after reading that interview. My local VW club had more than a dozen 300K+ Beetles, but not a single 200K+ Rabbit or Scirocco. Hmmm.
Interesting proposition, though. He's probably right about some of it - that technology is getting more and more "black box" to the end consumer. "I just push these buttons, and my burrito comes out of this box heated up!" Probably not a very good thing in the long run - it takes control and choice away from the person using the technology and leaves them at the mercy of the company developing the technology.
For what it's worth, the "professionals" who work on cars today are mostly just parts replacers, who swap out parts based on error codes the car gives them. They're not the same breed of mechanic as 30 years ago, when the guy who worked on your car actually knew how it worked...
...from fried cpu's to loosing money in...
I think you mean losing, as in a loss of money. Loosing would be like "loosening" as in to make not tight. I see this error alot, perhaps it is the product of the American education system?
wont let me login or email password to me either
The more value Intel's customers see in building SMP Celeron's the more Intel should disable it. Don't let Intel know how much we value our SMP systems... Please
Actually, I just picked up a k6 2-450 for $59.75 last friday - I couldn't hold out any longer ;)
I realize that price discrimination doesn't happen when there is enough competition. Ideally, there would be more competition in this market, and that would drive down the prices further and spark more advancements as the various producers compete for marketshare.
But that's not how it is today. We've got Intel, AMD, and maybe a couple other smaller companies. That's not going to change in the immediate future, so for now we can just consider what would work best given the current market.
Option 1: Intel leaves SMP enabled the Celeron. This creates a relatively narrow difference between the "low-end" Celeron chips and the "high-end" PIII/Xeon. Many buyers (primarily companies) realize that an SMP Celeron setup is sufficient for their needs. Sales of Celeron go up. Sales of PIII/Xeon go down. In order to maintain maximum profitability, Intel must make price of Celeron relatively higher. (The price may still go down as costs decrease, but it would be higher than it would be with less demand.)
Option 2: Intel makes SMP an important difference between Celeron and PIII/Xeon by disabling it in Celeron. Celeron is now aimed at the low-end market (where it was originally intended for). It is no longer competing with Intel's high-end chips, and therefore can be priced lower without hurting profits. Less demand for the chip (since it is aimed at a smaller portion of the market) will also help keep prices down.
Either way, competition is still the major force keeping the prices down. The more competition, the better. But with the low number of competitors, it is better to have multiple differentiated products at different price levels than essentially one product at one price.
What is the cost over a celeron of the Athlon, i bet its a lot more expensive to dual the AMD, which is unfortunate, since the Athlon looks so kewl.
I just started looking into SMP so spare the flames. I'm sure I haven't heard of _every_ mobo mfgr.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
Yeah and you KNOW this when you buy it.... no fraud.
Do you Gentoo!?
Sounds like you've bought a lot of Intel's marketing BS. Intel doesn't want to sell quality and all that idealistic crap - they want to make money out of us. Don't try and make them out to be some valiant company doing things for our benefit: this is business and Intel are just as nasty as the next company (e.g. Microsoft).
How do people frying their CPUs screw things up for everyone else? It seems to me that if people have money to throw around, let them, however foolish this may seem to you. Besides, it gives the chip manufacturers more money - if that matters to you.
Anyway, who said anything about over-clocking? It sounds like you have a "chip" on your shoulder about something irrelevant. Also, an Abit board, or any other board, is typically cheaper or better value than its Intel equivalent - competition is good. I have an AOpen board... with an Intel chipset!
Two Pentium II CPUs will set you back considerably more than two celeries. I bought my motherboard and a celeron for less than the cost of a P2 at the same speed.
Why the hell am I going to waste my money buying an overclocked 300A when I can just get the 466 to begin with
Its two celerons at 450...at 1.8 * 450 = 810Mhz
thats why
what? that is so the bullshit from a
guy whose parents buy him everything
and doesn't have to look around for
cash to uppgrade his systems.
And even if you do buy your own stuff,
get a life - realise there is more to
life than just the pooter, and use your
money elsewhere !!
Everyone is dumping any division that has anything to do with the Alpha. Its days are numbered.
AMD can't live long without becoming profitable, and Intel is going to do everything they can see AMD die.
Cyrix was sold.
Transmeta or Intel are the only hope.
Why wouldnt you use the celeron as a server platform? Personally, i think a dual celeron makes an excellent server! Look at price/performance, you just cant beat that with a PIII or Xeon chip.. Just because a chip is inexpensive, doesnt mean it is not a viable solution for a 'powerful server'...
:)
Its so sad nowdays... people get quad xeons just to share word documents...
Perfect server: Dual Celeron - 128 meg dimm - Linux - cheap case - 3com 3c905b - (2) 20 gig ide drives, mirrored..... cheap and VERY functional
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
I love my Abit BP6 (dual socket 370) board with 2 Celeron's! I've already found the "hackable cpu" it's called the "Celeron." Why would I want a "more capable smp system" when I already have a dual Celeron that is more than capable for my needs?
The cache isn't faster, but it's got one less level, so although it thrashes more often, its thrashes are much lower-latency. Depending on the code, this can be anywhere between much faster and much slower.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
I read somewhere (bxboards, I think) that the 400 is more oc'able than the 466 (and besides, it's cheaper ;) )
:)
FWIW, I have a dual celeron 400 box at home and I can run seti@home on one processor, sift through a dataset in 16 hours, 40 minutes, and simultaneously run anything (or several things) on the other processor (and my box isn't even oc'ed)
good luck with your new dual box and enjoy the sheer power it will give you
Who am I?
Why am here?
Where is the chocolate?
What is your Slash Rating?
Laugh. Intel has done everything they can to be the monopoly CPU supplier. (like prevent Athlon systems from shipping byllying motherboard suppliers)
There is always one of you Beowolf people on these things!
Personnaly, AMD seems to getting much better then Intel. I had already swore not to get an Intel b/c of that electronic serial # shit. AMD is better, just buy AMDs. $83 for a k6-2 450? Not bad at all...sure beats intel's price. andy
Ha ha ha, that's awesome, you're doing (and planning to do) EXACTLY same things I am. Except I have a shitty-looking case. I can't wait for the Athlon. I just wish ABIT was making an Athlon motherboard, I like ABIT. :( I'd love to vote for AMD with my dollars, but the Athlon is a little rich for my Free Market Points(tm). I've already gone the single-Celeron 300a + BH6 jammed up to some ungodly speed, which was far less (including the snazzy new case I got) altogether than a comparably fast PII CPU by itself. However, this is a tide-me-over until sometime next year. I'm waiting 'til AMD does the process shrink, after which we will be able to buy >600MHz chips with fat (2Mb -> 6Mb!!) L2 cache and the new motherboards that have >2-way SMP and support for NUMA. Of course, this is all rumor-mill...
Let's be realistic folks. We've seen how Intel operates. There's a bunch of ex-Intel employee web sites that tell tales of how they recruit kids out of college and work em to death. They've bullied various companies to not make, sell, other x86 CPUs, chipsets, etc.
They've got money, they'll do what will get them more, such as making you pay many hundreds of dollars per CPU to have an SMP system. Many people here like/run Linux, and there's bunches of other architectures to do it on. Alphas aren't all that much more expensive. Athlons will be around enough to buy, perhaps with some SMP boards, early next spring. There's all those Mac ports (do G3/4's do SMP?). Aside from an old Asus T2P4 motherboard, I've lived a long time now without Intel. I can compile kernels in six minutes, play a variety of games, etc. They'll go where the money is, and what you pay for your Celerons doesn't bring in all that much, so they'll only allow P2's and up to do SMP.
The point is, move on already.
First the crap with the 486DX/SX/487 being the exact same chip, then some other stuff,and now this. Intel is just like microsoft, except their stuff works most of the time. Their processors are bloat, their business tactics are, at times, very dishonorable. I'm running a dual celeron 300a system at 450MHz. And it works great because it's a fast core that's sold cheap to compete with AMD. I spent a lot of money on a dual slot motherboard, and I'm sure intel got a nice chunk of that. A lot of the people who work at intel are really nice, but if you go high up enough, some of those people are complete dicks. I hope the athlon makes them a little more humble.
What amazes me is that people recommend www.computernerd.com in this thread.
Hmm, they sell a Celeron 300A bundle with the ABit BP6 motherboard overclocked to 450 for $365.
The Abit BP6 motherboard is $130
A pair of Celeron 466 chips is $200
Hmm... Why the hell am I going to waste my money buying an overclocked 300A when I can just get the 466 to begin with.
This is the kind of fraud that Intel is trying to prevent. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other companies out there selling dual-CPU machines with Celerons and pretending they are PII.
[Somewhat OT, sorry. But I had to get this off my chest.]
Two reasons: Production costs and Federal mandate.
"Production costs" because you can build a car cheaper if you use microelectronics (fuel injection) over a complicated mechanical device with all sorts of finely-machined parts (a carburetor). "Federal mandate" because you must satisfy emissions restrictions imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, and warrant that your vehicle will continue to pass smog tests for a very long time.
The two issues are intertwined, of course. You can get a car to run cleaner cheaper if you use EFI.
The whole conspiriacy theory about complicated cars smacks of neo-Luddism to me.
Ask your doctor if getting up off your ass is right for you! -- Bill Maher
Apparently...
The pin that controls SMP operations cannot just be cut. (Remember that this is basically a PPro/PII die, and they never planned to make a SMP disabled version). If the pin is cut, then the processor is deactivated from the SMP cluster (in the case of the uniprocessor situation, this reduces the CPU count from 1 to 0 -- which isn't very useful :-).
In short, intel has to do some redesigning of the die, or add an extra bit to the package to supply an erroneous signal, so that SMP celerons would just get confused (and hence not work). I think that Intel's main aim however, is to get rid of dual S370 boards (which can't even be upgraded to PIII's)
In short, it could go either way
John
John_Chalisque
is just doing this to get people buying dual motherboards to use PII and PIII chips instead of Celerons. They also are thinking ahead, when the Coppermine comes out it's going to use the Socket 370 chipset which is also what the Celeron uses. There will most likely be dual 370 motherboaords for use with the Coppermine but Intel wants you to buy a Coppermine from them rather than just use older Celerons or having Dell make dual Celeron systems rather than dual PIII or Xeon systems. I'm a little mad about them dropping Slot 1 but I understand it's for performance reasons which is a good thing.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I don't have enough money to go SMP, and I don't use Intel processors anyway.
My next x86 chip will be an Athlon. Maybe if I have the money I might get 2 of them... but seeing that I just got laid off, not likely.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Actually, General Motors doesnt even that actively discourage it.
No actually those systems do make sense for people who want to try SMP, but don't have $1200 to shell out for p3s, or $6000+ for xeons. And where would you recommend we spend our money? Maybe we do, and maybe we don't...
I doubt that was intentional, and is probably offset a bit by the longer warranties new cars have nowadays.
Nope that was the whole point. That and Patent restrictions on OEM parts are the only way to get post-sale revenue.
All I can say to you is that you have TOTALLY missed the point! The whole celeron "fad" is about fund stricken people trying to get some performance for nothing. You said they can buy a SUN or ALPHA.. sure ill just go down the corner store and buy a Ultra SPARC 30... Im sure if the could afford to they WOULD. As for AMD they have NO SMP processors (YET). I say fuck intel and go the Athlon
The value that they add (manager speak) is removing the risk of buying celery chips for overclocking.
When you buy a chip, you are garanteed that it will work at the rated speed. Anything above that is a crap shoot. If you really want a 450Mhz cpu and you buy a 300A, there is a good chance you will get a chip that won't do it. If you get a bad chip, then you didn't get as much value as you might have. This company pretests the chips for you. You know that you are getting a 450 cpu. In essence, the company is taking the risk for you.
It is really no different than intell selling the same chip for different ammounts of money with different #s written on the box.
They've always done this. Remember the 486SX/DX? No one really needed the 387 FPU, and when Intel put the FPU into the 486 chip it raised the cost somewhat. Then came cheap alternatives, and BLAMMO! "lets take a fully functioning chip, disable the FPU, and sell it cheap to undercut competitors, even though it still costs the same to make!" sounds a lot like "lets take a fully functioning Celeron, disable the SMP pin from the core to teh package, and force people who want SMP systems to get dual PIII's!"
If only "common" sense was actually that common...
From that, it follows that there is less customization that the car owner can do - it's much easier to adjust a carburettor butterfly than to reprogram a fuel-injector control system...
:-(
Reprogramming a fuel injector system doesn't have to be hard. You can buy a injection computer with little potmeters you can turn, or a rs-232 connection to your laptop pc. A good pc program or a manual on those pots and it is no worse than adjusting old-fashioned carburettor and timing.
The car industry don't put units like that in normal cars though. The usual injection computers is about as adjustable as a carburettor with the lid welded shut.
Perfect server: Dual Celeron - 128 meg dimm - Linux - cheap case - 3com 3c905b - (2) 20 gig ide drives, mirrored..... cheap and VERY functional
Wow. You just described the machine I am building, except that I use scsi drives.
Intel's Dirty Secret is a PC Computing magazine article title in the new September1999 issue, page14. The article points out that Intel messed up while trying to beat Cyrix and AMD on the low end, Intel ended up beating itself! According to the article, the price/preformance of a Celeron chip is 1.5 times the power per dollar as a PII and 3.5 times the power per dollar as a PIII. I'm not a hacker, just a computer user. I'd be interested in slashdot comments on this article.
an enigma wrapped around a paradox driven by a paradigm shift
Obviously, a simple petition isn't going to work. There has to be some *benefit* for Intel in order for them to allow people to keep getting free SMP. "Give us free SMP or we won't be your best friend anymore" doesn't mean much.
I can never go back to single processor!
FP!
Corndog
as somebody over at ars technica pointed out, they can't disable that pin without redesigning the whole ppga setup, and retooling a bit. far too expensive to stop a few thousand people from 'cheating' them out of $1000 or so each. so don't worry about it.
Paul Robinson
why oh why did slashdot log me out? why oh why won't it send me my password?
doesn't matter anyway... other system are out there, more capable smp systems exist. And well. If you want to hack your machine, then you will just have to find a hackable cpu.. Otherwise just use something thats supported or get yourself an athlon.
Intel probably doesn't care much about overclockers and others who will run dual (or quad... or...) Celerons. They are out to protect their lucrative server market. The possibility of cut-rate dual Celeron servers would probably scare them enough to disable the Celeron's SMP ability.
It's kind of sad. I heard the same thing happened in the car industry. All through the 50's, 60's, and 70's people would tinker and tune their cars, fiddles with the carburators, etc. Meanwhile, the car industry strived to make "tinker-proof" cars, since they saw the home mechanic as some sort of threat (not sure why).
Now, we have the same thing going on in PC's (well, there were always PC tinkerers... now, though, it's gone big time). People tinker with clock speed, improve cooling, and push their systems. Meanwhile, Intel tries it's best to throw up roadblocks.
It's a shame, really. Intel has little to fear from overclockers and people who will use Celerons in SMP systems. I doubt that there are businesses out there that would trust overclocked hardware, or hardware not offically rated for SMP use in their mission-critical servers. It would be nice if they just relaxed and let people do what they want with their products. Or, perhaps, they are just making offical noises so that if you smoke your new PIII while trying to overclock it, you won't have them to run crying to. It seems they haven't done as much as they could to prevent Celeron overclocking.
Personally, I'm ramping up to purchase that dual celeron board and a pair of Celeron 466's.
Let's see how well these things do in a Beowolf cluster, running Linux.
It's also worth bearing in mind that sometimes the Celeron can be faster than an equivalent MHz PIII (I think it's something to do with having a faster cache speed). Check out this article over at Ars Technica. Disabling Celeron SMP would effectively reduce the chances of Intel having the fastest x86 based system even more (especially now that AMD have managed to overtake Intel FPU performance).
--
I can't think of a better way to let Intel know exactly *how* much money they are losing, and stand to lose by not disabling it.
"Uuuh boss.. I've got this petition here.. all these people want us to let them cost us $XYZ"
I personally don't own a celeron processor, nor do I plan to buy one. However, I respect the people who choose the celeron over the Pentium II or III, as well as their reasoning. I don't think it should be a problem to allow users to run Celeron-based SMP systems. (Intel would be hurting their own market. They think that if they disable it on the celeron, they're forced to buy a PII or PIII, when in reality, they could just opt for an AMD based system.)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I don't know why they would want to change the whole ppga setup... we should all be grateful for the 300a, although it would be nice to know Intel is listening...
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Intel is even now redesigning the Celeron line to take advantage of the new die size (.18?) and copper technology. I saw a story about how they are redesigning the leads from the chip to "shorten the electrical signal path" and so on. Since they are already futzing with those parts of the chip, it'll be simple for them to not connect the pin that allows SMP.
Which probably also means that this petition is moot, one way or the other. The 600 Mhz copper-based Celerons are supposedly due in a month or two. The deed is done.
SMP is probably safe in the older chips, though. It would cost them to break the current production runs to disable SMP. THey probably aren't going to go that far out of their way to disable it, but they probably will snip it, if they can do so during the regular course of chip production.
The initial posting on this here slashdot says disabling the motherboards. Shouldn't it say disabling the chips themselve.. Intel doesn't make all the Mobo's out there.....
That darn Slashdot is so cool... Hey did you pay the phone *(#(Q%$#$ NO CARRIER
The only reason why I'd buy intel is if I were getting a dual proc heavily over clocked celeron based system. They tried to kill over clocking and now they are trying to kill SMP? Go AMD! I hope cyrix can keep going as well (all my chips are cyrix.) I get the feeling intel wants to make money more than they want to make good products -- and if they wanted to they could make a chip that is much better than Athlon, but they might mean lower profits for them.
Let Intel run its business they way it wants. Go out and buy new SMP Atheron (sp?) or PPC machines instead the day they hit the street. Free markets work.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
We need to support the K7 (and it's announced cheaper companion).
I can see a market of people who would buy a dual celeron system instead of opting for one of the expensive high-end chips of any manufacturer. I myself, if I had a few dollars to spend would either buy a dual celeron, or not buy anything. It doesn't make much sense to disable something that allows users to add a second Intel chip. People would buy 2 instead of one, so how much money would intel really loose? If instead the person would go and buy a single faster chip, what makes them not go and buy an AMD?
Intel has been seen to behave like M$ in doing things inimical to their customers' best interests, and when my suppliers start behaving like that, I change suppliers.
There is no skin off Intel's a$$ when people start using SMP Celerons, because none of those folks is foolish enough to buy Xeon processors. I hope.
Hello, AMD and Alpha; later much, Intel.
Computernerd.com isn't pretending that their Celerons are PII's, so what fraud is involved? As far as 300/450A's vs. 466's, if you really can clock a 466 to 700 MHz, then yes, it will beat the 300/450, but unless you can do that, the 450 will win anything that goes significantly out of cache (just about everything except a synthetic computation kernel). Why? Because Celerons are overclocked by boosting the FSB frequency from 66 MHz to something else (100 for the 300/450, for example). This reduces the memory bottleneck substantially.
Remember, the people building SMP systems out of Celerons are generally hackers trying to build the maximum computer on a shoestring. This enables Intel to sell them two processors instead of one, which undoubtedly offsets the other considerations. I'm considering building a dual-Celeron system myself. However, if they disable SMP, I'll just build a single Celeron machine. They certainly won't be getting any extra revenue from me by killing SMP!
Geeky modern art T-shirts
AMD? I'm sorry, but I can't go out Right Now and get a dual AMD computer. One of AMD's biggest f*ckups on the K6-2&3 line was the inability to SMP.
While Athlon should SMP nicely, I hear that the current chipset that AMD is using only allows Dual, and nothing above. Besides which, I know I'm not seeing any Athlons in stores for a while *sigh*
If you don't like Intel, go fork your money over to AMD or the "Crix Chips" people. Intel's stupidity should have its own lesson.
...i guess, if a cpu maker would rather sell ix(piii/xeon) rather than 2x(celeron).
shows how small their margin is on the celery, or how phat the margin is on the piii/xeon.
i just hope:
1) amd's copper plant in germany can remain profitable after the big price challenge intel smacked them with;
2) someone (anyone?) comes out with a decently priced, commercially available ATX mobo for the alpha using std. pc accessories;
3) someone (anyone?) comes out with a decently priced, commercially available ATX mobo for the ppc using std. pc accessories.
BTW, does anyone know of/have a link to the 64 bit roadmap of the K7 and/or PPC? merced could do both chips real damage...imho
Although it doesn't seem to have flown in the x86 world, AMD and Cyrix (and others) created an OpenPIC standard for SMP. Do some searching for it, just not on their websites. :)
If Intel shafts us many of us will go to AMD if not there already. Does Intel think we are stupid? Why do they do such foolish things? The people who are into dual processors are most likely knowlegeable about computer architecture issues. They are most likely not newbies who randomly pick processors because of name. I assure you if Intel does this, the sale of AMD processors will increase.
If you are interested in finding the prices of hardware go to www.pricewatch.com. Going rate for Celeron 466 is around $100.
I have heard of this - where can I find more info?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The fraud is that they are selling $260 worth of parts to you for $360 and all they have done is configured a couple of jumpers on the motherboard to overclock it. It's pretty simple math.
>So why spend the time and money you wasted on an >Abit board when you could get a full powered Dual >CPU PII board and 2 CPU's for the same cost. Do you have any idea what you are talking about?! An Abit BP6 board costs around $140. The cheapest dual slot-1 board I've seen is about $200. A Celeron 466 is around $125. A Pentium II 450 is $250. On most benchmarks the Cel. 466@66MHz bus is about the same as the P-II 450@100MHz bus. Do the math, 140+125*2=$390, 200+250*2=$700. Why should I throw away $310? Either you work for intel or you just don't understand math. I honestly don't care about voiding my warranty. Your assumption that I like Celerons because they are overclockable is only partially true, they are simply more bang for the buck even at their rated speeds and operating celerons in dual cpu systems may void the warranty but it is impossible to damage the chips if you understand what is going on.
So my Honda can never ever have a turbocharger bolted on. So my TV can never ever connect to a bigger audio system. So my Playstation can't use a large memory card. So if I fly somewhere with my family I have to upgrade everyone to first class. Do you fucking get it? If buy something I want to use it the way I want - shit even AT&T got the message years ago when they stopped forcing customers to buy phones from them and limiting how many they could connect. It's within Intel's parvue to withhold support from SMP Celerons but to forbid it, to prevent it? Who fucking handed them a flaming sword?
Tell you what - I'll sell you my pontoon boat but you can never ever add a second outboard. If you want more power you have to put in a racing I/O.
... Are they talking about severing the pin on the CHIP or on the MOTHERBOARD?
I ask, because of this:
Several sites have stated that Intel will disable the AN15 pin on Socket 370 motherboards to discourage Socket 370 SMP systems
should s/motherboards/CPUs/g ?
Either way, I gots mine...
UH-huh - you guys obviously haven't read up lately on how AMD has fixed the benchmarks of the Athalon processor suites with their own tweaks to make them perform better - go figure. Anyways, Intel this, Alpha that, AMD whatever....It doesn't matter - use what you wanna use and what works for YOU - all this bitching and moaning about Intel isn't gonna get ANYONE anyplace fast - you're all a bunch of whiners who are jealous you're not making the money that Intel/MS make. I'm all for Linux - I think it's a great development of the computer industry. I also think that once Linux developers get their heads out of their asses and make Linux more user friendly for the average user, it'll takeoff like wildfire. However, Linux has been around quite some time - even with X-Windows - and Linux still isn't as user-friendly as it needs to be for the average non-geek user to use. And how long has it been around? I rest my case. Now, stop all this crappy bickering, saying Intel sucks, etc, remember, without Intel, Cyrix, AMD, Alpha, etc would NEVER have come around, and we wouldn't have a LOT of the technology we have today. Buy what works for you and quit bitching about the rest... J-
I currently run Celeron 370's, and the population is rising rapidly.
If the folk at Intel decide to demonstrate their forward-looking approach to CPU design by crippling future Celerons, I will have nothing more to do with them. End of story.
If that's the degree of interest they show in catering for the low-end SMP market, they'll get exactly the same amount of interest back.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
OBTW, I suspect car manufacturers made it a lot harder to work on cars because they don't want the car to last that long. If you know anyone with a vintage mustang, you know the car will run basically forever because he can tweak this'n that and keep it in generally good shape. These days you're lucky if a car lives 1 year past warranty.
Yep, the 300a was cool. So is the 366! PCnut will even burn/test them at 550, tell you the voltage and fix the heat sink. Dual 550, mmmm... (No I don't work at PCnut, I'm a customer that doesn't know of anyone else who will OC/test for you.)
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/3q99/dual-celeron-retro -1.html
_ will_not_die_soon.html
and
http://www.hardocp.com/articles/intel_stuff/smp
i've read the first one, but not the second one. both were a pain to find. enjoy.
Paul Robinson
--This is EXACTLY what I've been talking about in all those AMD-Athlon discussions. Intel will continue to do these kinds of product crippling if we let them be the market leader. For gods sake.. they are outright shoving it in your face: They are admitting that they can produce a low-cost, high performance SMP platform, and they are INTENTIONALLY disabling it, just so they are guaranteed to milk the outlandish profits from PIII-Xeon. What next? Are they going to disable AGP on Celerys too? That way, they can force gamers who want to use high-end video to buy PIII's as well!!! MUHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHH!!! I'm sick of it. Screw intel, buy AMD.
I heard that the pin they would have to disable is actually required for operating the chip in addition to SMP. They would have to run another trace along the chip to substitute for the pin's required functionality which would require a completely seperate manufacturing process. It was cheaper just to advertize no SMP support. Maybe the Coppermine Celerons have an architecture that allows SMP to be disabled but they've already ended socket 370 for that purpose.
I seriously doubt many people are goign to be trying to use Celerons (even dual) as their servers. why not go out and get a single PIII or better yet, a Xeon...i work with Alphas and Intels, and we see that usually, 2 Xeons do the work of 1 alpha chip.. so i'm sure that the celeron would require at least a dual SMP setup to compete with a Xeon...why bother??? if intel thinks that people will use SMP celeron servers, they must be smokin somethin wacky...
:-)
as far as cars go, the carburators of 50-70 gave way to much better technology (fuel injection). i don't think this was done to spite the home mechanics, but to improve perfomance, fuel effiency, reduce pollution, etc...it's just better...so i'm not sure how well this analogy holds.
--carburators suck...so do celerons
I used to be with it Then they changed what it was Now what I'm with isn't it and what's it seems weird and scary to
Cars are NOT tinker proof. Even with computers, EFI, etc, etc, you can tune the car quite a bit. You can change fuel pressure in the fuelrail (more fuel going through the injectors), you can tweak the intake piping to modify flow and increase the air intake, you can still tweak the ignition advance (I upped my advance and gained some low end torque but now have to run 92+ octane fuel to fight detonation during the summer with the AC on). You can also work on the exhaust. These things don't even require much in the way of tools or disassembly (if you get into that part, you can really build HP). The main reason people think cars are tinker-proof is because nowadays, you actually have to understand how the car operates, but there is still plenty of tweakable elements. Chris mtnbkr@mindspring.com
I personally doubt that intel cares about the overclocking/tweaking community. The reason for multiplier locks were f**king remarkers, not overclockers. If dell/compaq/ibm stat selling dual celeron servers based on abit bp6 mobos maybe then intel would care, but for tweakers who make up 1%(?) of all their customers they would never change the design of a chip. Intel should be happy that people are buying 2 of their cpus. I'm not an intel basher at all, i'm using a 300a @ 464 right now, but I doubt that overclockers cause them to lose very much at all. --Celery464(innercircle13@yahoo.com)
(or was this macro? damn, maybe I should have studied more too...)
Price discrimination isn't the result of a happy, healthy, ideal marketplace. It's something that monopolies can do to turn most of that annoying "consumer surplus" straight into profit for themselves. In an ideal market, with lots of producers, anyone who tried to pull a stunt like this would simply be undercut and beaten down by their competitors who didn't disable cheap SMP chips.
We'll see how soon Athlon SMP motherboards come out. It's not quite in the Celeron price range, but between a bus designed for point to point SMP, and a cheap set of K7-500s with that sweet, sweet FPU, dual PII systems just aren't going to cut it.
The only petition that intel will hear is the sound of cash flowing to AMD and others. SMP users can already opt for an AMD system, or Compaq alpha, or MIPS, or Power PC, or Sun...
I repeat, this petition and "I respect the people who choose the celeron..." sort of stuff is just so much masturbation and other forms of self gratification for whiners who simply have to do *something* no matter how meaningless it is just to feel good about themselves.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
I ordered it on Friday from www.computernerd.com. Ok, so maby Intel should be mad at me for getting them gaurunteed overclocked to a total of 1012Mhz... I can GAURUNTEE I'll by 2 550 Celeron SIMDs if they became available and had SMP support. I figger that's going to run me about $300-400. I also know I can't afford or want a dual PIII box. I'm building a workstation for Quakeing/Mapping, thusly I don't need the extra expense of SCSI. It is hard to find a good dual slot-1 mobo that has other decent features and that is inexpensive. (like the Abit BP6).
* ikilledkenny@execpc.com * * Because I can. *
1)Coppermine = Xeon with 1/2 the cache. K7 is faster than a Xeon already - how will coppermine beat it? 2)The 200mhz bus is between the CPU and chipset. The K7 boards out now take PC100 or PC133. Have you priced RDRAM memory? 3)AMD's .18 is in pre-production now, while Coppermine has been delayed again and again... it was due 2 months ago! intel will get .18 no more than a couple of months ahead of AMD 4) Coppermine uses the Pentium Pro core, which is already choking at .25 (anyone o/cing their P600 much?) and will probably choke aroung 950mhz on .18
I'm not a big Intel fan, and I hope that they do continue to allow SMP on the Celeron. However, it would seem perfectly reasonable for them not to, and could actually (possibly) be a good thing.
It's been a few years since my economics courses, but most of it is common sense anyway. A business can maximize their profit by selling everything at the highest cost a consumer is willing to pay. Of course, this cost is different for each consumer, making this goal very hard to achieve. The airlines have come about the closest. Everybody else generally has to aim for finding the price that will attract a sufficient number of consumers with a significant enough profit margin.
One way to help increase the number of consumers willing to buy your product without lowering profit margins too far is to offer multiple similar products with different feature levels. For example, when buying a car, there are usually a few variations on the same model (e.g. Honda Accord DX, LX, EX) at different prices. This allows the company to sell their product at three different prices, hoping that the additional features of the more expensive variations will encourage people to buy them, while the cheaper versions will attract those consumers who do not want to spend a lot of money on their car, and are willing to sacrifice some features.
Intel is doing the same thing. They have several chips, all with the basic function of executing x86 instructions. They know that some people are willing to spend several hundred dollars for a chip that will execute the instructions, while other people are only willing to spend less than $100. If they sold all of their chips at the sub-$100 price, they couldn't afford to develop or include some of the features of the more advanced chips. But if they sold all of their chips at the several hundred dollar range, they would lose a lot of business from customers who are not willing to spend that much.
Thus, Intel offers several chips with different features. Now their goal is to balance price with features to get as many customers buying their chips for as much as possible. The introduction of the Celeron was aimed to help do this, by providing a good performing processor for a relatively low cost. Intel's competitors were having a significant impact in this area of the customer base. However, Intel did not want the introduction of the Celeron to impact sales in the server market, where they had little competition.
Well, the Celeron turned out to be a bit too powerful. Intel found that a lot of people were content with the Celeron for higher-end machines, at a much cheaper price (and therefore, less money for Intel). Disabling SMP is a way that Intel can continue to offer this cheaper processor while providing incentive for customers to use the more expensive PII/PIII/Xeon chips for their server machines.
This is not entirely bad for the consumer. It (potentially) allows Intel to keep the Celeron cheaper in order to compete without drawing business away from their other chips. And it may even (potentially) allow Intel to keep the higher-end chips cheaper because of increased demand for those processors. Whether these potential savings become real probably depends a lot on AMD, since competition will be the major driving force in keeping prices low.
Anyway, that's my 2 cents. I don't care a whole lot, since my next machine will probably be an AMD.