They are no longer using visible wavelengths to etch the silicon. But they're not using infrared, but ultraviolet (or higher frequency). It's all about the wavelength.
What year was that PopSci magazine published? sounds pretty outdated to me.
Of course, that much money (just the money they're paying to take care of uncertain licenses) could probably also buy CD burners and enough blanks to create no-license-hassles copies of Linux or Free / Open / NetBSD for every computer the city owns.
Yeah, and who will pay for the retraining of all the employees to use the new systems? Linux may be good for computer savvy ppl like the readers of Slashdot, but expecting everyone to use it is just unreasonable. Heck, how many average users can use DOS? and linux/unix is much more sophisticated. And why do you want more Linux users anyway? The more users, the lower the average IQ...
Intel claimed that the Willamette (sp?) core would greatly increase the speed per clock cycle
Increasing IPC is a direct tradeoff to increasing clock rate (or the ability to scale the clock rate up.) You may be able to increase both to a certain extent through tricks here and there, but at the end, one of it will have to give in to the other. Intel's strategy (and pretty much most CPU designers) is to increase clock rate, because that is easier to do than increasing IPC. Increasing clock rate is pretty much a brute force strategy to increase performance, and increasing IPC actually need some brains. Intel managed to only squeeze out a little more out of the P4 by using the trace cache and some other stuff like double pumping their ALUs. No other processor in existence at this day have a trace cache. Before the P4, the trace cache was purely only a concept on paper. Also, I think they were smart to optimize for the SSE2 and not for x87 FPU instructions. Why? x87 instructions is legacy code, and is slow by nature. Why not design a separate floating point instruction set that is not "hacked on". Remember that the x87 is pretty much a hack on top of the 386 (integrated on the 486), and is pretty slow compare to how floating point is done in RISC processors like the Alpha or Sparc. With the SSE, Intel is planning to become more on par with those RISC processors (though it will never be as good IMHO). The Athlon may execute x87 instructions well, but let me assure you, it is still not as fast as it could be. And getting rid of x87 is a much better idea, but I doubt that will happen since everyone wants backward compatibility. I guess this is something we all have to live with for the rest of x86's life and our lives.
AMD ended up beating out Intel when they introduced the Thunderbird core revision
I wouldn't say they beat out Intel. AMD still only have 20% of the market share. Anyway you look at it, Intel is still the winner. I'm not being biased, but being objective. AMD may have a better processor, but at the end, Intel still sold more processors. This may be attributed more to their marketing prowess and ppl's brand name loyalty rather than any great engineering feats. But still that statement you made is wrong... The Athlon didn't win... it lost in fact. If it had won, AMD would have more than 50% market share. Of course, AMD did reach the goals they set, so it's a win from their and their supporter's perspective.
I wonder who's gonna read this since this thread/topic is already pretty old.
Lets assume that the Pentium 4 (and its derivatives) will scale just like the P6 core - Pentium Pro/II/III.
Lets also assume that the fab process technology will improve just like it did during the lifetime of the P6 core.
And lets assume Moore's law is actually true -- it's a universal constant;)
The P6 core started at 150Mhz and it reached 1 Ghz. The Pentium 4 started at 1.4Ghz, so based on the above assumptions, it will reach at least 9.33 Ghz, and 10Ghz is not too far from there.
This may or may not be reasonable, you decide. But it's just interesting to think about...
How about if I run some legacy 286 benchmarks on any of the newer processors, and do a instruction per clock analysis? Then compare it with the 286 processor... I bet you'll get some very interesting results. You want compatibility don't you? this is the ultimate compatibility test...
Eventually, newly released code will contain the newer instructions. And eventually, people will upgrade their software if they think the increase in performance is worth it. Basically, this technology will be adopted eventually, no matter what any reviewers said. Remember when the Pentium Pro was released and ppl were complaining that it ran 16-bit code slower then the regular Pentium? Its happening again, this time its SSE2 vs. non-SSE2 and whatnot. I see myself owning a P4 this time next year when they crank it up to 2Ghz and beyond... AMD will need to eventually come up with a new microarchitecture because the fact is the Athlon does not scale as well as the Pentium IV.
...if anything, something as CPU intensive as MPEG compression will probably improve significantly better than linearly with CPU power)
Nothing can improve *more* than linearly with clock speed (which I assume when you say "CPU power"). Linear increase is the upperbound. Often the increase is lower due to memory (and other) bottlenecks.
the Athlon gets 9.28 frames per GHz, whereas the P4 gets 9.35 frames per GHz. ...
but it shows the basic idea here -- that most of the P4's advantage is due to its speed in MHz, not the architecture
The P4 is faster (but not by much), normalized, as you said yourself, so why is the advantage due to its speed in Mhz? You defeated your own argument.
The original purpose behind the P4 is to be able to crank up the clock speed. Looks like they have reached their goal and even increase the IPC by just a little. So it looks like this will be a win for Intel. When the Athlon reached its max clock speed, and the P4 continues to crank up its speed all the way up to 10Ghz, you'll see.
Starving people only thinks about food, not infrastructure shminfrastructure BS.
Until the people get fed, no one can think clearly about the future.
Starvation is a problem at the present moment, if I am starving, I would be more worried about surviving the day instead of thinking about what's gonna happen a year or 10 years from now.
Call me nearsighted, but this is a fact.
Yes, receiving gifts never developed any country, but why don't the US, who is supposed to be the leader of this world do something instead of sitting around on their asses going to G7 or G8 whatever summit and never get anything done.
As for the growing middle/upperclass you talked about, how many percent of the people of Africa are middle/upperclass? Less than 1%? They are not who we're talking about are we? middle/upperclass people can have anything they want anywhere they live in the world, be it free linux or $1000 per copy linux. We should be addressing the other poor 99%.
It is difficult to compare this to operating systems. Not all OSes are designed for the same purposes. Although both Windows and Linux can equally accomplish most tasks, they certainly were not designed for the same purposes. Windows was designed as a consumer product, Linux was designed as a cheap Unix for desktops. Obviously Windows would be superior when it comes to usability, user friendliness, etc (to a consumer). Linux would be superior for a developer/computer scientist/researcher. They are just not designed for the same market. Give me one good reason for a non-programmer to use Linux, it is very hard to come up with one. There are many benchmarks to measure an OS, and you cannot just simply declare one is superior to the other.
In contrast, all 3D video cards are designed pretty much for the same sole purpuse - to play games. The faster they are and the more features they have, the better. That is the only benchmark.
some 64MB GeForce 2 GTS cards are selling for less than $300. So certainly, the RAM alone does not cost the manufacturer $300. The main reason prices are so high is the lack of competition. If nVidia ups the ante and voluntarily lower the prices, people will flock to their cards. The can certainly still make profit, in fact, they could make more profit from the volume.
I am impressed. nVidia has been leading the market since last year when they released the GeForce 256. And even today, the GeForce 256 is still among the fastest you can find on the market, still neck and neck with the Voodoo 5 5500.
nVidia should be commended for continually pushing the 3D graphics technology higher and higher. Most companies would do the opposite in this situation. For example, for a long time Intel has been releasing processors in 33mhz increments, and these releases were far in between. 3Dfx deserves to suffer, they were far ahead of everyone else when they released the Voodoo2 card. What have they been doing since then? None of their products since then were innovative.
With this release, nVidia is at lease 1 1/2 product generations ahead of its competition. Even if the product's technology is not far ahead, at least it more than makes up for it with clock frequencies. It would take 3Dfx to go through another cycle to come up with something that matches the GeForce 2 GTS's speed, and a lot of innovation to match the Ultra. Now, let's lower those prices, and BLOW out the competitions! Price these suckers at $150 per card, and all other graphics card companies will go out of business.
I hope nVidia will learn from 3Dfx, and not sit back and relax after this release. Keep releasing new products every 6 months, and no one will be able to catch up to you.
I agree with you. I find Americans the most closed minded group of people on the surface of this planet. Perhaps its because of their arrogance, but if it wasn't the continuous inflow of immigrants, this country would most likely be dead last in the world, and would probably be infested with rednecks.
What the original poster meant was everyone sounds the same when singing the same song in the same language. Obviously it would sound different in different languages.
But it would be a harder to pick out a Japanese singing in English or vice versa.
Sledgehammer is supposed to be backwards compatible with all the previous x86 platforms. That means even if no one ports anything, it should be able to run all existing x86 software just fine. Obviously if one is to take advantage of the 64-bit processing power, it would be useful to have a 64-bit operating system. Isn't this very similar to pre-windows 95 days where the operating system (Win 3.xx) is 16-bit while the processors, i.e. Pentium Classics and 80486s, were 32-bit processors?
If that is true, the transition from 32-bit CPU to 64-bit CPU would be very smooth for the average consumers. However, how many of us really need 64-bit memory addressing or even 64-bit arithmetic operations? If any transition is to occur in the general consumer market, the Sledgehammer would have to outperform the Willamette (either in performance/cost or clock for clock) in order to win the market. Most people will still be running 32-bit applications for the next year or two. The performance (and cost!) winner between the Willamette and the Sledgehammer would determine which company will ultimately come out on top.
Not necessarily. End users would care as well. The IA-64 architecture is not compatible with x86 while the x86-64 offers full support of x86 legacy software. You must admit that Intel's success is largely based on their support of legacy code. It could very well be a different ball game had Intel decided to totally abandon x86 when they were developing the Pentium chip. The install base of x86 systems in '94 is not nearly as large as the install base today but it still made Intel successful. Given today's x86 install base, it would be extremely foolish for Intel to totally abandon x86. For this reason, Intel has decided to offer some "emulation" of x86 on their Itanium chip, aka Merced. And I assume their McKinley (Itanium II?) chip would as well. There are already enough players in the server/high end market, i.e. IBM, HP, Sun, Compaq/DEC, etc. Why should anyone choose a completely new platform over the established platforms of the above mentioned companies? Obviously, offering x86 compatibility would be a plus.
The IA-64's VLSI architecture does not natively support x86. It is true that Intel will most likely add more hardware just to support x86, but I just don't think it is as efficient as x86-64 (in running x86). Performance is obviously important. I really question Itanium's performance running x86. Given that IA-64 and x86-64 are both a new architecture, it would not really matter which one I chose for my 64-bit applications. But if I also need to run legacy x86 software, since the majority of the software out there is in this ISA, I would choose x86-64. Porting and recompiling is very expensive, therefore x86-64 would be a much cheaper solution.
Intel's superior offering
Intel's IA-64 may very well be a superior product since it is a clean design, and was designed from scratch compared to Sledge Hammer's "64-bit hack". But as unfortunate as it maybe, for the reason stated above and in this post, superiority has nothing to do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
And if those aren't enough, you can always run SETI or distributed.net clients =)
They are no longer using visible wavelengths to etch the silicon. But they're not using infrared, but ultraviolet (or higher frequency). It's all about the wavelength.
What year was that PopSci magazine published? sounds pretty outdated to me.
Low power, low heat, low cost... decent performance... sounds like a good cpu for laptops. I wouldn't mind having a laptop with one of these in it...
Nope. I'm running Linux on my Intel box and Windows on my AMD box. Mwahahahahaa.
Mortal Kombat?
Of course, that much money (just the money they're paying to take care of uncertain licenses) could probably also buy CD burners and enough blanks to create no-license-hassles copies of Linux or Free / Open / NetBSD for every computer the city owns.
Yeah, and who will pay for the retraining of all the employees to use the new systems? Linux may be good for computer savvy ppl like the readers of Slashdot, but expecting everyone to use it is just unreasonable. Heck, how many average users can use DOS? and linux/unix is much more sophisticated. And why do you want more Linux users anyway? The more users, the lower the average IQ...
Intel claimed that the Willamette (sp?) core would greatly increase the speed per clock cycle
Increasing IPC is a direct tradeoff to increasing clock rate (or the ability to scale the clock rate up.) You may be able to increase both to a certain extent through tricks here and there, but at the end, one of it will have to give in to the other. Intel's strategy (and pretty much most CPU designers) is to increase clock rate, because that is easier to do than increasing IPC. Increasing clock rate is pretty much a brute force strategy to increase performance, and increasing IPC actually need some brains. Intel managed to only squeeze out a little more out of the P4 by using the trace cache and some other stuff like double pumping their ALUs. No other processor in existence at this day have a trace cache. Before the P4, the trace cache was purely only a concept on paper. Also, I think they were smart to optimize for the SSE2 and not for x87 FPU instructions. Why? x87 instructions is legacy code, and is slow by nature. Why not design a separate floating point instruction set that is not "hacked on". Remember that the x87 is pretty much a hack on top of the 386 (integrated on the 486), and is pretty slow compare to how floating point is done in RISC processors like the Alpha or Sparc. With the SSE, Intel is planning to become more on par with those RISC processors (though it will never be as good IMHO). The Athlon may execute x87 instructions well, but let me assure you, it is still not as fast as it could be. And getting rid of x87 is a much better idea, but I doubt that will happen since everyone wants backward compatibility. I guess this is something we all have to live with for the rest of x86's life and our lives.
AMD ended up beating out Intel when they introduced the Thunderbird core revision
I wouldn't say they beat out Intel. AMD still only have 20% of the market share. Anyway you look at it, Intel is still the winner. I'm not being biased, but being objective. AMD may have a better processor, but at the end, Intel still sold more processors. This may be attributed more to their marketing prowess and ppl's brand name loyalty rather than any great engineering feats. But still that statement you made is wrong... The Athlon didn't win... it lost in fact. If it had won, AMD would have more than 50% market share. Of course, AMD did reach the goals they set, so it's a win from their and their supporter's perspective.
I wonder who's gonna read this since this thread/topic is already pretty old.
Well, lets make a few assumptions.
;)
Lets assume that the Pentium 4 (and its derivatives) will scale just like the P6 core - Pentium Pro/II/III.
Lets also assume that the fab process technology will improve just like it did during the lifetime of the P6 core.
And lets assume Moore's law is actually true -- it's a universal constant
The P6 core started at 150Mhz and it reached 1 Ghz. The Pentium 4 started at 1.4Ghz, so based on the above assumptions, it will reach at least 9.33 Ghz, and 10Ghz is not too far from there.
This may or may not be reasonable, you decide. But it's just interesting to think about...
How about if I run some legacy 286 benchmarks on any of the newer processors, and do a instruction per clock analysis? Then compare it with the 286 processor... I bet you'll get some very interesting results. You want compatibility don't you? this is the ultimate compatibility test...
Eventually, newly released code will contain the newer instructions. And eventually, people will upgrade their software if they think the increase in performance is worth it. Basically, this technology will be adopted eventually, no matter what any reviewers said. Remember when the Pentium Pro was released and ppl were complaining that it ran 16-bit code slower then the regular Pentium? Its happening again, this time its SSE2 vs. non-SSE2 and whatnot. I see myself owning a P4 this time next year when they crank it up to 2Ghz and beyond... AMD will need to eventually come up with a new microarchitecture because the fact is the Athlon does not scale as well as the Pentium IV.
...if anything, something as CPU intensive as MPEG compression will probably improve significantly better than linearly with CPU power)
...
Nothing can improve *more* than linearly with clock speed (which I assume when you say "CPU power"). Linear increase is the upperbound. Often the increase is lower due to memory (and other) bottlenecks.
the Athlon gets 9.28 frames per GHz, whereas the P4 gets 9.35 frames per GHz.
but it shows the basic idea here -- that most of the P4's advantage is due to its speed in MHz, not the architecture
The P4 is faster (but not by much), normalized, as you said yourself, so why is the advantage due to its speed in Mhz? You defeated your own argument.
The original purpose behind the P4 is to be able to crank up the clock speed. Looks like they have reached their goal and even increase the IPC by just a little. So it looks like this will be a win for Intel. When the Athlon reached its max clock speed, and the P4 continues to crank up its speed all the way up to 10Ghz, you'll see.
Its so easy for an american to go out and get a job paying 60k these days.
I'm an undergrad, and I still have another semester to go, and already have several $60k+ offers (in fact, $67k) waiting for me.
So his statement is true. It *was* easy. I got the offer from my first ever on-site interview.
If every state does this, then there is no point at all in having a electoral system. Might as well just have direct votes.
Starving people only thinks about food, not infrastructure shminfrastructure BS.
Until the people get fed, no one can think clearly about the future.
Starvation is a problem at the present moment, if I am starving, I would be more worried about surviving the day instead of thinking about what's gonna happen a year or 10 years from now.
Call me nearsighted, but this is a fact.
Yes, receiving gifts never developed any country, but why don't the US, who is supposed to be the leader of this world do something instead of sitting around on their asses going to G7 or G8 whatever summit and never get anything done.
As for the growing middle/upperclass you talked about, how many percent of the people of Africa are middle/upperclass? Less than 1%? They are not who we're talking about are we? middle/upperclass people can have anything they want anywhere they live in the world, be it free linux or $1000 per copy linux. We should be addressing the other poor 99%.
Maybe they aren't getting enough food to even care about linux or computers.
Why don't we give them food first, yes Linux is free, but they can't eat it.
It is difficult to compare this to operating systems. Not all OSes are designed for the same purposes. Although both Windows and Linux can equally accomplish most tasks, they certainly were not designed for the same purposes. Windows was designed as a consumer product, Linux was designed as a cheap Unix for desktops. Obviously Windows would be superior when it comes to usability, user friendliness, etc (to a consumer). Linux would be superior for a developer/computer scientist/researcher. They are just not designed for the same market. Give me one good reason for a non-programmer to use Linux, it is very hard to come up with one. There are many benchmarks to measure an OS, and you cannot just simply declare one is superior to the other.
In contrast, all 3D video cards are designed pretty much for the same sole purpuse - to play games. The faster they are and the more features they have, the better. That is the only benchmark.
some 64MB GeForce 2 GTS cards are selling for less than $300. So certainly, the RAM alone does not cost the manufacturer $300. The main reason prices are so high is the lack of competition. If nVidia ups the ante and voluntarily lower the prices, people will flock to their cards. The can certainly still make profit, in fact, they could make more profit from the volume.
But at $150, it's not necessarily below cost...
It certainly doesn't cost $150 to produce a card.
There's nothing bad about having a 100% market share with a superior and popular product...
I remember someone said that in a post on another topic...
I am impressed. nVidia has been leading the market since last year when they released the GeForce 256. And even today, the GeForce 256 is still among the fastest you can find on the market, still neck and neck with the Voodoo 5 5500.
nVidia should be commended for continually pushing the 3D graphics technology higher and higher. Most companies would do the opposite in this situation. For example, for a long time Intel has been releasing processors in 33mhz increments, and these releases were far in between. 3Dfx deserves to suffer, they were far ahead of everyone else when they released the Voodoo2 card. What have they been doing since then? None of their products since then were innovative.
With this release, nVidia is at lease 1 1/2 product generations ahead of its competition. Even if the product's technology is not far ahead, at least it more than makes up for it with clock frequencies. It would take 3Dfx to go through another cycle to come up with something that matches the GeForce 2 GTS's speed, and a lot of innovation to match the Ultra. Now, let's lower those prices, and BLOW out the competitions! Price these suckers at $150 per card, and all other graphics card companies will go out of business.
I hope nVidia will learn from 3Dfx, and not sit back and relax after this release. Keep releasing new products every 6 months, and no one will be able to catch up to you.
I agree with you. I find Americans the most closed minded group of people on the surface of this planet. Perhaps its because of their arrogance, but if it wasn't the continuous inflow of immigrants, this country would most likely be dead last in the world, and would probably be infested with rednecks.
What the original poster meant was everyone sounds the same when singing the same song in the same language. Obviously it would sound different in different languages.
But it would be a harder to pick out a Japanese singing in English or vice versa.
The German version of Barbie Girl also sounds different from the English version :)
Sledgehammer is supposed to be backwards compatible with all the previous x86 platforms. That means even if no one ports anything, it should be able to run all existing x86 software just fine. Obviously if one is to take advantage of the 64-bit processing power, it would be useful to have a 64-bit operating system. Isn't this very similar to pre-windows 95 days where the operating system (Win 3.xx) is 16-bit while the processors, i.e. Pentium Classics and 80486s, were 32-bit processors?
If that is true, the transition from 32-bit CPU to 64-bit CPU would be very smooth for the average consumers. However, how many of us really need 64-bit memory addressing or even 64-bit arithmetic operations? If any transition is to occur in the general consumer market, the Sledgehammer would have to outperform the Willamette (either in performance/cost or clock for clock) in order to win the market. Most people will still be running 32-bit applications for the next year or two. The performance (and cost!) winner between the Willamette and the Sledgehammer would determine which company will ultimately come out on top.
Just my $0.02.
Why do we want AOL-caliber people to use Linux? Keep Linux l33t! :)
Seriously, if you can get Linux running properly on your system, you don't need something like AOL to help you get connected to the net.
the only people who really care are developers
Not necessarily. End users would care as well. The IA-64 architecture is not compatible with x86 while the x86-64 offers full support of x86 legacy software. You must admit that Intel's success is largely based on their support of legacy code. It could very well be a different ball game had Intel decided to totally abandon x86 when they were developing the Pentium chip. The install base of x86 systems in '94 is not nearly as large as the install base today but it still made Intel successful. Given today's x86 install base, it would be extremely foolish for Intel to totally abandon x86. For this reason, Intel has decided to offer some "emulation" of x86 on their Itanium chip, aka Merced. And I assume their McKinley (Itanium II?) chip would as well. There are already enough players in the server/high end market, i.e. IBM, HP, Sun, Compaq/DEC, etc. Why should anyone choose a completely new platform over the established platforms of the above mentioned companies? Obviously, offering x86 compatibility would be a plus.
The IA-64's VLSI architecture does not natively support x86. It is true that Intel will most likely add more hardware just to support x86, but I just don't think it is as efficient as x86-64 (in running x86). Performance is obviously important. I really question Itanium's performance running x86. Given that IA-64 and x86-64 are both a new architecture, it would not really matter which one I chose for my 64-bit applications. But if I also need to run legacy x86 software, since the majority of the software out there is in this ISA, I would choose x86-64. Porting and recompiling is very expensive, therefore x86-64 would be a much cheaper solution.
Intel's superior offering
Intel's IA-64 may very well be a superior product since it is a clean design, and was designed from scratch compared to Sledge Hammer's "64-bit hack". But as unfortunate as it maybe, for the reason stated above and in this post, superiority has nothing to do with it.