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Intel Releasing 700Mhz P3s
NoWhere Man writes "Intel plans to release Coppermine, its 700Mhz+ series of Pentium III chips, on Monday. The new chip will, not only be available for desktop machines, but notebooks aswell; thanks to a new design which makes them cooler. This release will allow Intel to say, once again, that it offers the fastest chip on the market. "
Hrm, this story was posted prematurely. There
are only a few benchmarks that compare a CuMine
700+ against an Athlon 700, with the Athlon
coming out 6% faster in some obscure business
test so far (see http://www.jc-news.com/pc/).
You will go nuts if you try to follow all the
lastest developments early in this CuMine vs.
Athlon game. My advice: don't. Wait for some
conclusive benchmarks.
Pro Intel:
* good compatibility with CPUs
* availability
* good o/c ability
Con Intel:
* multiplier locked
* core maxed out earlier @.22u than AMD's
* price/performance usually only average
Pro AMD:
* excellent CPU core, fast FPU
* EV6 better than GTL+
* excellent o/c ability, multiplier not locked
Con AMD:
* availability
* bad bad chipset and mobo situation
* bugs in chipset, slower than need be,
high current probs w/ TNT2U etc.
* s/w compatibility problems with chipset
* did I mention chipsets already?
Enough to drive everybody but the die-hard
hardware freak nuts...
WAIT and RELAX.
Urg. Sorry, but I'm just gonna repost the comment I made about a week ago when some other wierdo spouted the same ignorant blather.
Oh wait: it wasn't just any wierdo. Believe it or not, it was you, Millennium. Perhaps you could read what people respond to your comments. After all, saying something incorrect once just makes you look uninformed; saying the same thing after you've been publicly corrected makes you look willfully stupid...
--begin repost--
They're already at price/performance parity, more or less. The G4 is roughly triple the speed of a P3, and this is using Intel's own benchmarks, mind you. We're not talking Bytemarks here, boys and girls, we're talking benchmarks no one dares discredit.
Oh lord. Another one falls for the Apple FUD.
No, we're not talking Bytemarks here; this one, if you can believe it, is even worse. You see, at least Bytemarks is a benchmark. It's about 10 years old and has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the performance of a modern CPU, but at least when they came up with it, someone was trying to get an idea of how fast a chip would run.
These 6 tests are not benchmarks, in any normal sense of the word. Benchmarks measure how long it takes for a computer to perform a real-world task. These tests (Apple's got 'em posted here; scroll to the bottom) measure the speed of individual ops.
That's right: the G4 performs 6 specific operations an average of 3 times faster than a P3. We're talking things with names like "1024 dim. DotProd" and "256 Pt. Complex FFT". The G4 can take a dot product 3.68 times faster than a P3. Oh wait--not even that; a dot product in a specific dimension. Whoopdee. A 128-bit unit can do operations on very large numbers faster than a 32-bit one. Wow. This is like posting the fact that a 64-bit CPU can add two 64-bit numbers faster than a 32-bit one. Who would have thought.
And yes, these benchmarks were "published on Intel's own website." Of course they were. In the technical specs on the SSE core. Deep in the technical specs on the SSE core. Where information that is completely useless to anyone not planning on optimizing a compiler belongs.
Essentially, this benchmark is as misleading as quoting MFLOPS (oh yeah: Apple stooped to that one too...). Except that usually when you quote MFLOPS you at least generally need to average over the entire set of floating point ops. Not here folks. They picked out their favorite 6.
Oh wait--here's another difference: when you quote MFLOPS, you actually need to, uh, benchmark the thing. These numbers are all theoretical--just compare the number of clock cycles it takes to do an operation, and multiply by MHz. Now, it turns out they'd probably be even more in the G4's favor in practice--if I remember correctly, the AltiVec unit has a much better designed pipeline than the P3's SSE unit. But still, these numbers are absolutely, completely, worthless.
I don't have the URL offhand, but I've seen the Intel page they copied these tests from, and there were literally hundreds for them to choose from.
The point is, you can always find an operation that is carried out in less clock cycles on one particular archicture as compared to another. Always. Now it turns out that, in this case, the AltiVec apparently really is vastly superior for the sorts of things it does when compared to Intel's SSE or AMD's 3DNow. (Of course, it also takes up half the chip. Any guesses as to why they can't fab any 500's??)
However, the fact is that except for very specific applications (SETI@home in particular, and some signal processing stuff, IIRC), it doesn't make all too much of a difference. A 700 MHz Athlon will smoke a G4 450 or 500 or whatever on your basic integer stuff, and a 600 MHz P3'll be right up there with it. For the stuff that can be done with AltiVec, the G4'll certainly come out ahead, but for general floating point work, again, they're about equal. It goes without saying that, at this point, nothing crunches graphics like a year-old PC with an NVIDIA GeForce in it (except maybe something from sgi)--which, of course, is about the only thing the average user needs good float performance for anyways.
In the end, the G4 is just a decent chip with a neat vector processor that's proving hard to fab. Is it damn fast? Yes. Is your new G4 450 going to touch the Coppermine P3 733 that's shipping by the time yours actually ships? Nope. Is it "two or three years ahead of its time" like Stevie says? No way.
-Dave
P.S. And yes, you can sell them to China as well. As much as I want to like Apple these days (a simplified vertically integrated product line is a very good idea in many cases; OS X just might be incredible; and geez--did you check out the new iMac subwoofer??), the fact that every single word out of their marketing department/CEO's lips is a baldfaced lie...gives me pause.
Slightly off-topic, the new PIII Xeon are codenamed "Cascades." Is this pronounced kass-kades or kass-kad-ees or something entirely different?