While I certainly believe that a company/individual who develops something worth patenting (not patents from obvious stuff) like this deserve to be able to make money, there has to be a line drawn.
But then, the corpratist mentality has no concept of morality (IE, remember the/. interview with the Pinkerton people who were doing commercial "geek profiling" for schools on the premise that people like US need to be identified because we may be the next Columbine murderers?).
There needs to be some kind of control on patents such as these that makes it manatory for the patentholders to be reasonable and expeditious with licensing. How this can be done, I don't know.
But then, if the patentholders had a brain among them, they might understand that releasing a product cheaply that may save a million lives is better marketing for your company than any slick sleazy annoying Madison Avenue firm can do for you, at ANY cost!
" And ethical salespeople (oxymoron) Wait a sec... I work at CompUSA... that makes me unethical?
"
This was meant as a joke, sorry. I used to be a salesperson, and it seemed everyone else selling PC's around me weren't ethical. One reason I got OUT of sales, and deleted my sales experience from my resume so no prospective employers would try to get me into sales instead of technical (despite my certifications and 7+ years experience).
If I were still a salesperson, I'd tell the customer the advantages of the Athlon, Duron, vs the Celeron/P4. Getting the customer the best deal is in the SALESPERSON's best interest because those people come back. All of Intel's marketing probably won't matter if salespeople all had the technical knowledge to explain the facts to customers.
This version of the P4 is a turkey, it requires a totally new case spec, and uses a motherboard that will be onsolete in 6 months. Dead end. It reminds me a lot of the origianl P60/P66, that used the larger socket and were 5 volts. People who got those were screwed because they couldn't upgrade to the new 3.3 volt socket 7 Pentiums.
That's another tidbit ethical salespeople would tell customers.
"Give the P4 time, it's not worth it to buy it right now. But as code becomes SSE2-optimized and the like, the Pentium 4 will strut it's stuff, EXACTLY as the Pentium Pro behaved when it was first released."
True, the Pentium Pro didn't impress many when it came out, and reincarnated as the Pentium II, it did beat the AMD K6.
"This is like benchmarking an Athlon on 16-bit code on a performance-per-clock basis as a Pentium. The Pentium would waste the Athlon in 16-bit code, because the Athlon is simply not meant to run with 16-bit code very well (ala using x87 FPU on the P4. The P4 wants to use SSE2, which is superior.)"
This is open to opinion. AMD's Athlon/Duron is much more important in the marketplace today than the K6 was when the Pentium Pro was released. There will be no rush to SSE2 until there are a lot of P4's out there on desktops. It isn't worth it to the software companies (even Microsoft) do waste the effort. Simple point of fact is that most all CURRENT apps run better on a 1.2 GHz Athlon than they will on anything less than a 2 GHz P4.
BTW, AMD is going to also support SSE2, I believe they have licensed it. I know it will be in the `Hammer 64-bit chip, but I'd bet it will end up in future Athlons.
Actually, it's to Intel's advantage that AMD use SSE2, as it will make it an industry standard. Intel right now isn't in a position to dictate industry standards, it lost this ability when they went to proprietary motherboards (Slot 1), then really lost it with RAMBUS. Slot 1 and RAMBUS did to Intel what Micro Channel did to IBM.
"The FPU in the P4 is there for x86 compatability. Intel is betting that software developers will use some of the P4's 144 new instructions to accomplish floating point operations. The new instructions, if used properly, could realize significant speed increases."
Yes, but won't it take YEARS, if ever, for this "advantage" to actually benefit the majority of apps that will be run on a P4?
Who is going to rush out to support SSE2 instructions for a chip that isn't likely to sell very well?
Also, to use SSE2 and the P4 to it's potential, you have to upgrade EVER SINGLE APP on your PC. How likely is that to happen? Even assuming they are available, which they aren't?
Intel made a HUGE mistake in putting a wussy FPU on this chip. If the P4 even had the P3's FPU it would have been even with the Athlon.
Intel loves open source because Linux was the first adopter of IA-64 (Itanium). Just as Linux will be the first OS for the AMD `Hammer 64-bit CPU.
I don't think Intel loves Microsoft any more than anyone else does. Their partnership is kind of uneasy and strained as the MS-IBM partnership was in the early `90's.
Microsoft screws over hardware companies they partner with, ultimately. History shows this.
"Now, the chips might have seemed faster than their predecessors, but I'm betting you only bought them after a lot of code had been re-compiled. The Pentium Pro was slower, clock-for-clock, then the Pentium. It ran 16-bit code REALLY slowly, compared to Pentiums(which is why PPros never really entered the home-PC market)."
You do have a point here. My observations are just that, obervations in the field on shit I've worked with, built, etc.
"Anyways, it all depends, there are a lot of factors. But the P4 is most definetly, without a doubt, not the first Intel architecture that is "slower" than the one it replaces."
Possibly, but the P4 is definately the first new generation core that is so DRAMATICALLY slower than the previous generation.
So is the so called Itanium (I prefer the Register's "Itanic"). It will be drastically slower than the AMD Hammer (Sladgehammer) 64-bit chip when running X86 code.
Tom really liked the I815 chipset. Let's face it, the I820 and I840 chipsets were crap. There is a bug with the 820 that prevents you from using more than 2 RIMMS or else face data corruption.
The I815 with PC133 SDRAM outperformed BOTH the I820 and I840 in benchmarks posted on Intel's own website...
The I850, the cipset of the P4, is a modified 820/840 chipset, so that alone doesn't give you much reason for optimism. But then, the first P2 (FX/LX) chipsets also sucked, until the great BX chipset was released.
I think the Q3 Arena advantage is largely related to usung RAMBUS with the P4 (the first and only chip actually DESIGNED for it).
The P4 can use RAMBUS more efficiently than the P3 can. So, RAMBUS's warts are less apparent.
However, when the Athlon gets DDR, I'd bet this advantage in the Q3 benchmark disappears. DDR has much lower latency than does RAMBUS, and I'm sure Q3 will love all that memory bandwidth coupled wiht low latency.
"Actually, the AMD is risc, internally. It has an emulator for x86 in microcode. I dont think anyone programs it in its native instruction set, though
Is that possible?"
I suppose it could be. Every AMD since the original K62 is actually RISC that has X86 emulation. The original K62-233 was a damn good chip, I built many PC's based on it. In fact, that was the last time AMD actually made a chip faster than Intel's best (200 Mhz P1-MMX at the time).
Marketing is evil, and I suppose those who belive it deserves to buy inferior product (marketing Darwinism):)
Not all Mhz is created equal. I wouldn't want a 766 Mhz Celeron, for example, instead of my 700 Mhz Duron.
The super fast power users that will buy the P4 are going to be the people like we/.ers who KNOW what we are buying. And I don't think we will buy this generation P4.
Where Intel is using Mhz to market to the sheep masses is the Celeron vs Duron. They are keeping the Celeron on pace with the Duron's clock speeds, but as we all know, ANY Duron kills any Celeron.
And ethical salespeople (oxymoron) will point out to their customers that the Duron is better. Unless they are from Dell, the only PC company in the world with a "suicide pact" with Intel.
Actually, until this revision, Tom's was one of very FEW sites that actually had done a positive P4 review... Tom wanted to like the P4, but it turns out he can't.
"I care about how Intel treats its employees, and you should too when you consider your options when shopping. Do you really want to financially support a company that practices poor ethics? That is exactly what you do when you buy one of their processors."
If ethics were your basis for every purchasing decision, then you'd buy almost nothing made by ANY corporation. I know Intel does some awful things, but I honestly can't say AMD is any better (plead ignorance).
ANY fortune 500 corp has gotten there by busting heads.
My philosophy is this: buy the best product that is the best value. Today that is the AMD Athlon/Duron. Tomorrow it may be Intel.
I don't hate RAMBUS because they are a vile company that employs 100 laywers per 1 Engineer, I hate them because they are a vile company that is pushing an inferior product, and failing that will sue to collect money it didn't earn from products it didn't make, on patents it shouldn't own.
And yes, I do care about how companies treat employees. I'm an IT person (7 years as a technician). I will protest to support my fellow IT people. Tell me who's screwing whom over, and I'll back you 100%. But my PC has to have a CPU, and that means buying it from AMD or Intel, regardless of whether I like them or not.
"-You are stuck with RAMBUS and the buggy Intel RAMBUS chipsets.
So far, Intel's RAMBUS chipset are only buggy when you use SDRAM with them."
Have you forgotten the i820 bug that prevents you from using more than 2 RIMMS because it causes data corruption? Intel has been cursed in their chipset designs since they adopted RAMBUS. I'm glad my Duron uses a VIA chipset, they seem to be higher quality than Intel these days. 2 years ago I'd have never bought anything but Intel/with Intel chipset.
"after all, hasn't every Intel chip since the 8088 out performed the prevtious generation at the same clock?
Quite the opposite - in most cases, Intel's newest CPU architecture doesn't perform as well as what it replaces - at least for a while, until the compilers have been modified."
I don't personally have any experience with the 80186, but I can testify from personal observation:
80286- WAY faster than the 8088/8086 at the same clock
80386- Faster than the 286 at the same clock. 386-16 was faster than the fastest 286 (20 Mhz).
80486- The 486-25 was faster than the 386-25 I used to use.
Pentium. The 486 had to push 133 Mhz to equal the early Pentiums, even though they (P60/P66) were flawed chips in many ways.
Pentium Pro. I've seen Pentium Pro 200 servers and was impressed. Nice chip, too bad the design didn't ramp to higher speeds.
Pentium II My first P2 system (266) blew the doors off my P1-233 system.
Pentium III. Here's where you may have a point, My P3 (450) was no faster than my last P2 (450).
Pentium IV: The first Intel chip ever to be slower clock for clock than the previous generation.
I think Dr. Tom is biased against BAD HARDWARE, not necessarily Intel. You should have read him some time ago, he was always endorsing the P3/Celeron, until AMD just simply came out with a better product.
And any objective reviewer would have to conclude, that unless you need SMP, AMD's top processor is better than Intel's top processor. And Intel's top processor IS NOT the P4, it's the 1 GHz P3...
I hadn't owned an AMD based machine (since my original `286, circa 1990) until I recently replaced my P3 with a Duron 700. And I'm very happy with it and plan to replace my Duron with a 1-1.2 GHz Thunderbird Athlon. Not a P4.
Keep in mind, these benchmarks are RAMBUS based P4's going up against PC133 SDRAM Athlons... And the Athlons win. When the DDR based Athlon system is available, the gap will WIDEN.
The P4 does not use the 686 core, but a completely new core. And from what I'm seeing so far, other than the deeper pipeline (20 stage) which enables much higher clock speeds, the "Williamette" core is inferior to the 686 core in absolute clock-for-clock speed and more importantly, the FPU.
Raw MHz and the new SSE2 (MMX 3?) instructions are all this thing is offering right now.
Yup, same thing here. Used a P3 700 at work, and my Duron 700 at home seems just as fast. Probably isn't, exactly, but the benchmarks would be damn close. And the little Duron 700 costs about $80 these days. Can't beat it.
The P4, even if it was a bit faster than a 1.2 GHz Athlon wouldn't be worth it for the price difference. But apparently it isn't as fast.
Now maybe the P4 when later revised will be better, but what reason is there to buy it?
-It's slower clock for clock than a P3 or an Athlon... In fact, a 1.2 GHz Athlon is probably a bit faster than the 1.4 GHz P4.
-It's many times more expensive than a comparable Athlon system.
-It's FPU performance is not at all up to the Athlon.
-You are stuck with RAMBUS and the buggy Intel RAMBUS chipsets.
The P4 just simply isn't worth what Intel is charging for it. And really I can't understand what the big deal about it is... It seems to me that it's a FAILED design, after all, hasn't every Intel chip since the 8088 out performed the prevtious generation at the same clock?
The only thing the P4 has going for it is that it's a new core, and probably can end up at higher clock rates than the Thunderbird Athlon core. But the P4 is like a school bus racing against a Porsche, it's got to have a much bigger engine running at a much higher RPM to equal the speed.
Plus, the P4 can't do SMP yet, and likely won't be able to before the Thunderbird Athlon (and the upcoming new core) can.
Intel will market the higher Mhz, but hopefully people will see thru it. After all, would you rather have a 1 GHz Celeron, or a 900 Mhz Athlon? The P4, like the Celeron, would have to run considerably FASTER than 900 Mhz to equal a 900 Mhz Athlon.
I've requested this time and again of all telemarketers. It won't work. The only system that will ever protect people is an "opt in", not an "opt out". It won't work because you have to individually "opt out" with each and every company that might telemarket.
But the telemarketers know that NO ONE will ever "opt in" so they sent their lobbyist drones to Congress.
I'm happy with simply denying them access my never leaving my line free for them to call. I have a pager, ICQ, e-mail, etc, and anyone who needs to get ahold of me can.
True, I don't hold lawyers in any higer regard than marketers. Usually such suits only end up enriching the lawyers, who NEVER follow thru with prosecution to trial, but get bought off with a nice fat settlement that mostly benefits them.
What we need is a concluded TRIAL that sets a precedent that nonconsensual usage tracking by marketers is illegal wiretapping.
Advertisers can rely on any "other" methods they wish, so long as they are legal.
I think a wise advertiser should realize that pissing off your potential customers with annoying ads and privacy invasions isn't the best way to sell something.
That's why the twin evils of modern marketing: telemarketing and SPAM are highly inefficient. Telemarketing and SPAM require the marketer to annnoy hundreds, if not thousands of persons per sale. Not only is the return rate horrible, I think these companies are pissing off many people who will sooner cut off their arm than buy one of their products.
I have NEVER bought a product a SPAMMER or telemarketer has ever tried to sell me, and I never will. My phone line is constantly on the internet anyway, which (to the telemarketers chagrin) prevents them from reaching me. People whom I want to be able to contact me know how to contact me.
MCI and AT&T so pissed me off with their constant harassment I flatly told both companies I'd sooner use tin cans and string rather than their phone services.
Not only are users being tracked without knowledge, they are being hacked. Something is being placed on their system to do something that the user has not agreed to allow it to do.
If it were "opt-in" (IE, the banner popped up a window that explained what the cookie was going to be used for and how it worked, and asked the user to agree or not), then it would be fine.
Cookies have many very positive uses. Exploiting them for uses other than they were intended is wrong, and possibly illegal. Marketers are not allowed to wiretap your phone or put bugs in your home. Why should it be any less illegal for them to do this to your computer?
Marketers are evil. Their perfect world is one where you are chained into a chair with your eyes glued open so that you cannot avoid by any possible means hearing their pitch.
That's why they blast commercials at you at well above program volume, and want to bug your computer. I don't particularly want my FAMILY knowing my browsing habits, much less some corporate marketer.
If a corporation bugged my telephone for marketing reasons, to find out who I called, that would be illegal wouldn't it? Then why isn't bugging my computer to track my browser? Done WITHOUT consent?
I think it's about time. What Doubleclick and others are doing is breaking and entering and illegal wiretapping. Tracking where you go on the `net without your consent can be construed as both.
SPAM and such cookie tracking has to be an opt-in system, not an opt-out. Of course, there are a million evil marketing weenies screaming simultaneously when that is said too loudly. I do not at all object to reasonable advertising, banner ads, etc. But when marketers start to place files on my own PC without my permission to trace my browsing, that's crossing a thick line.
Something needs to be done to put the marketers in their place, and if it involves setting lose the dogs of war (the lawyers) so be it.
I'm sick and tired of search engines, classifieds, etc that have been so SPAMMED that they are useless. About time someone devised a way to make their own SPAM databases just as useless.
SPAM does not work as a marketing tool. You can't sell things to people you piss off.
Most of them are written by lawyers, and as we all know, lawyers as a profession are single handedly responsible for destroying Western Civilization.
Wouldn't it be nice if we as citizens (not the "consumer" sheep the marketing arms of the corps want us to be) were to refuse to EVER agree to licenses, agreements, etc, that were too complex to understand in under 2 minutes of reading?
Any legal document that needs a LAWYER to understand is abusive and exists only to screw you.
Everyone who buys goods and services votes with their wallets for the companies/products that succeed (or fail by what we don't buy). If we were to ever USE this power in an orgainized way, companies wouldn't be able to get away with crap like that.
Any ISP that sells you web hosting, then places restrictions on what file formats you can host is abusive.
If it's the bandwith they are afraid of you using, then that's their problem, they should either increase the price or limit the bandwith. Not whine about you wanting to use (unlimited bandwidth) what they SOLD you with their slick marketing. Reminds me of the first flat-rate unlimited ISP's that started bitching when people took their marketing literally.
Stay away from ANY ISP that restricts what you can put on your website (other than illegal material, that is only reasonable).
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While I certainly believe that a company/individual who develops something worth patenting (not patents from obvious stuff) like this deserve to be able to make money, there has to be a line drawn.
/. interview with the Pinkerton people who were doing commercial "geek profiling" for schools on the premise that people like US need to be identified because we may be the next Columbine murderers?).
But then, the corpratist mentality has no concept of morality (IE, remember the
There needs to be some kind of control on patents such as these that makes it manatory for the patentholders to be reasonable and expeditious with licensing. How this can be done, I don't know.
But then, if the patentholders had a brain among them, they might understand that releasing a product cheaply that may save a million lives is better marketing for your company than any slick sleazy annoying Madison Avenue firm can do for you, at ANY cost!
" And ethical salespeople (oxymoron) Wait a sec... I work at CompUSA... that makes me unethical?
"
This was meant as a joke, sorry. I used to be a salesperson, and it seemed everyone else selling PC's around me weren't ethical. One reason I got OUT of sales, and deleted my sales experience from my resume so no prospective employers would try to get me into sales instead of technical (despite my certifications and 7+ years experience).
If I were still a salesperson, I'd tell the customer the advantages of the Athlon, Duron, vs the Celeron/P4. Getting the customer the best deal is in the SALESPERSON's best interest because those people come back. All of Intel's marketing probably won't matter if salespeople all had the technical knowledge to explain the facts to customers.
This version of the P4 is a turkey, it requires a totally new case spec, and uses a motherboard that will be onsolete in 6 months. Dead end. It reminds me a lot of the origianl P60/P66, that used the larger socket and were 5 volts. People who got those were screwed because they couldn't upgrade to the new 3.3 volt socket 7 Pentiums.
That's another tidbit ethical salespeople would tell customers.
"Give the P4 time, it's not worth it to buy it right now. But as code becomes SSE2-optimized and the like, the Pentium 4 will strut it's stuff, EXACTLY as the Pentium Pro behaved when it was first released."
True, the Pentium Pro didn't impress many when it came out, and reincarnated as the Pentium II, it did beat the AMD K6.
"This is like benchmarking an Athlon on 16-bit code on a performance-per-clock basis as a Pentium. The Pentium would waste the Athlon in 16-bit code, because the Athlon is simply not meant to run with 16-bit code very well (ala using x87 FPU on the P4. The P4 wants to use SSE2, which is superior.)"
This is open to opinion. AMD's Athlon/Duron is much more important in the marketplace today than the K6 was when the Pentium Pro was released. There will be no rush to SSE2 until there are a lot of P4's out there on desktops. It isn't worth it to the software companies (even Microsoft) do waste the effort. Simple point of fact is that most all CURRENT apps run better on a 1.2 GHz Athlon than they will on anything less than a 2 GHz P4.
BTW, AMD is going to also support SSE2, I believe they have licensed it. I know it will be in the `Hammer 64-bit chip, but I'd bet it will end up in future Athlons.
Actually, it's to Intel's advantage that AMD use SSE2, as it will make it an industry standard. Intel right now isn't in a position to dictate industry standards, it lost this ability when they went to proprietary motherboards (Slot 1), then really lost it with RAMBUS. Slot 1 and RAMBUS did to Intel what Micro Channel did to IBM.
"The FPU in the P4 is there for x86 compatability. Intel is betting that software developers will use some of the P4's 144 new instructions to accomplish floating point operations. The new instructions, if used properly, could realize significant speed increases."
Yes, but won't it take YEARS, if ever, for this "advantage" to actually benefit the majority of apps that will be run on a P4?
Who is going to rush out to support SSE2 instructions for a chip that isn't likely to sell very well?
Also, to use SSE2 and the P4 to it's potential, you have to upgrade EVER SINGLE APP on your PC. How likely is that to happen? Even assuming they are available, which they aren't?
Intel made a HUGE mistake in putting a wussy FPU on this chip. If the P4 even had the P3's FPU it would have been even with the Athlon.
Intel loves open source because Linux was the first adopter of IA-64 (Itanium). Just as Linux will be the first OS for the AMD `Hammer 64-bit CPU.
I don't think Intel loves Microsoft any more than anyone else does. Their partnership is kind of uneasy and strained as the MS-IBM partnership was in the early `90's.
Microsoft screws over hardware companies they partner with, ultimately. History shows this.
"Now, the chips might have seemed faster than their predecessors, but I'm betting you only bought them after a lot of code had been re-compiled. The Pentium Pro was slower, clock-for-clock, then the Pentium. It ran 16-bit code REALLY slowly, compared to Pentiums(which is why PPros never really entered the home-PC market)."
You do have a point here. My observations are just that, obervations in the field on shit I've worked with, built, etc.
"Anyways, it all depends, there are a lot of factors. But the P4 is most definetly, without a doubt, not the first Intel architecture that is "slower" than the one it replaces."
Possibly, but the P4 is definately the first new generation core that is so DRAMATICALLY slower than the previous generation.
So is the so called Itanium (I prefer the Register's "Itanic"). It will be drastically slower than the AMD Hammer (Sladgehammer) 64-bit chip when running X86 code.
Tom really liked the I815 chipset. Let's face it, the I820 and I840 chipsets were crap. There is a bug with the 820 that prevents you from using more than 2 RIMMS or else face data corruption.
The I815 with PC133 SDRAM outperformed BOTH the I820 and I840 in benchmarks posted on Intel's own website...
The I850, the cipset of the P4, is a modified 820/840 chipset, so that alone doesn't give you much reason for optimism. But then, the first P2 (FX/LX) chipsets also sucked, until the great BX chipset was released.
I think the Q3 Arena advantage is largely related to usung RAMBUS with the P4 (the first and only chip actually DESIGNED for it).
The P4 can use RAMBUS more efficiently than the P3 can. So, RAMBUS's warts are less apparent.
However, when the Athlon gets DDR, I'd bet this advantage in the Q3 benchmark disappears. DDR has much lower latency than does RAMBUS, and I'm sure Q3 will love all that memory bandwidth coupled wiht low latency.
"Actually, the AMD is risc, internally. It has an emulator for x86 in microcode. I dont think anyone programs it in its native instruction set, though
Is that possible?"
I suppose it could be. Every AMD since the original K62 is actually RISC that has X86 emulation. The original K62-233 was a damn good chip, I built many PC's based on it. In fact, that was the last time AMD actually made a chip faster than Intel's best (200 Mhz P1-MMX at the time).
Marketing is evil, and I suppose those who belive it deserves to buy inferior product (marketing Darwinism) :)
/.ers who KNOW what we are buying. And I don't think we will buy this generation P4.
Not all Mhz is created equal. I wouldn't want a 766 Mhz Celeron, for example, instead of my 700 Mhz Duron.
The super fast power users that will buy the P4 are going to be the people like we
Where Intel is using Mhz to market to the sheep masses is the Celeron vs Duron. They are keeping the Celeron on pace with the Duron's clock speeds, but as we all know, ANY Duron kills any Celeron.
And ethical salespeople (oxymoron) will point out to their customers that the Duron is better. Unless they are from Dell, the only PC company in the world with a "suicide pact" with Intel.
Actually, until this revision, Tom's was one of very FEW sites that actually had done a positive P4 review... Tom wanted to like the P4, but it turns out he can't.
"I care about how Intel treats its employees, and you should too when you consider your options when shopping. Do you really want to financially support a company that practices poor ethics? That is exactly what you do when you buy one of their processors."
If ethics were your basis for every purchasing decision, then you'd buy almost nothing made by ANY corporation. I know Intel does some awful things, but I honestly can't say AMD is any better (plead ignorance).
ANY fortune 500 corp has gotten there by busting heads.
My philosophy is this: buy the best product that is the best value. Today that is the AMD Athlon/Duron. Tomorrow it may be Intel.
I don't hate RAMBUS because they are a vile company that employs 100 laywers per 1 Engineer, I hate them because they are a vile company that is pushing an inferior product, and failing that will sue to collect money it didn't earn from products it didn't make, on patents it shouldn't own.
And yes, I do care about how companies treat employees. I'm an IT person (7 years as a technician). I will protest to support my fellow IT people. Tell me who's screwing whom over, and I'll back you 100%. But my PC has to have a CPU, and that means buying it from AMD or Intel, regardless of whether I like them or not.
"-You are stuck with RAMBUS and the buggy Intel RAMBUS chipsets.
So far, Intel's RAMBUS chipset are only buggy when you use SDRAM with them."
Have you forgotten the i820 bug that prevents you from using more than 2 RIMMS because it causes data corruption? Intel has been cursed in their chipset designs since they adopted RAMBUS. I'm glad my Duron uses a VIA chipset, they seem to be higher quality than Intel these days. 2 years ago I'd have never bought anything but Intel/with Intel chipset.
"after all, hasn't every Intel chip since the 8088 out performed the prevtious generation at the same clock?
Quite the opposite - in most cases, Intel's newest CPU architecture doesn't perform as well as what it replaces - at least for a while, until the compilers have been modified."
I don't personally have any experience with the 80186, but I can testify from personal observation:
80286- WAY faster than the 8088/8086 at the same clock
80386- Faster than the 286 at the same clock. 386-16 was faster than the fastest 286 (20 Mhz).
80486- The 486-25 was faster than the 386-25 I used to use.
Pentium. The 486 had to push 133 Mhz to equal the early Pentiums, even though they (P60/P66) were flawed chips in many ways.
Pentium Pro. I've seen Pentium Pro 200 servers and was impressed. Nice chip, too bad the design didn't ramp to higher speeds.
Pentium II My first P2 system (266) blew the doors off my P1-233 system.
Pentium III. Here's where you may have a point, My P3 (450) was no faster than my last P2 (450).
Pentium IV: The first Intel chip ever to be slower clock for clock than the previous generation.
I think Dr. Tom is biased against BAD HARDWARE, not necessarily Intel. You should have read him some time ago, he was always endorsing the P3/Celeron, until AMD just simply came out with a better product.
And any objective reviewer would have to conclude, that unless you need SMP, AMD's top processor is better than Intel's top processor. And Intel's top processor IS NOT the P4, it's the 1 GHz P3...
I hadn't owned an AMD based machine (since my original `286, circa 1990) until I recently replaced my P3 with a Duron 700. And I'm very happy with it and plan to replace my Duron with a 1-1.2 GHz Thunderbird Athlon. Not a P4.
Keep in mind, these benchmarks are RAMBUS based P4's going up against PC133 SDRAM Athlons... And the Athlons win. When the DDR based Athlon system is available, the gap will WIDEN.
The P4 does not use the 686 core, but a completely new core. And from what I'm seeing so far, other than the deeper pipeline (20 stage) which enables much higher clock speeds, the "Williamette" core is inferior to the 686 core in absolute clock-for-clock speed and more importantly, the FPU.
Raw MHz and the new SSE2 (MMX 3?) instructions are all this thing is offering right now.
Yup, same thing here. Used a P3 700 at work, and my Duron 700 at home seems just as fast. Probably isn't, exactly, but the benchmarks would be damn close. And the little Duron 700 costs about $80 these days. Can't beat it.
The P4, even if it was a bit faster than a 1.2 GHz Athlon wouldn't be worth it for the price difference. But apparently it isn't as fast.
Now maybe the P4 when later revised will be better, but what reason is there to buy it?
-It's slower clock for clock than a P3 or an Athlon... In fact, a 1.2 GHz Athlon is probably a bit faster than the 1.4 GHz P4.
-It's many times more expensive than a comparable Athlon system.
-It's FPU performance is not at all up to the Athlon.
-You are stuck with RAMBUS and the buggy Intel RAMBUS chipsets.
The P4 just simply isn't worth what Intel is charging for it. And really I can't understand what the big deal about it is... It seems to me that it's a FAILED design, after all, hasn't every Intel chip since the 8088 out performed the prevtious generation at the same clock?
The only thing the P4 has going for it is that it's a new core, and probably can end up at higher clock rates than the Thunderbird Athlon core. But the P4 is like a school bus racing against a Porsche, it's got to have a much bigger engine running at a much higher RPM to equal the speed.
Plus, the P4 can't do SMP yet, and likely won't be able to before the Thunderbird Athlon (and the upcoming new core) can.
Intel will market the higher Mhz, but hopefully people will see thru it. After all, would you rather have a 1 GHz Celeron, or a 900 Mhz Athlon? The P4, like the Celeron, would have to run considerably FASTER than 900 Mhz to equal a 900 Mhz Athlon.
I've requested this time and again of all telemarketers. It won't work. The only system that will ever protect people is an "opt in", not an "opt out". It won't work because you have to individually "opt out" with each and every company that might telemarket.
But the telemarketers know that NO ONE will ever "opt in" so they sent their lobbyist drones to Congress.
I'm happy with simply denying them access my never leaving my line free for them to call. I have a pager, ICQ, e-mail, etc, and anyone who needs to get ahold of me can.
True, I don't hold lawyers in any higer regard than marketers. Usually such suits only end up enriching the lawyers, who NEVER follow thru with prosecution to trial, but get bought off with a nice fat settlement that mostly benefits them.
What we need is a concluded TRIAL that sets a precedent that nonconsensual usage tracking by marketers is illegal wiretapping.
Advertisers can rely on any "other" methods they wish, so long as they are legal.
I think a wise advertiser should realize that pissing off your potential customers with annoying ads and privacy invasions isn't the best way to sell something.
That's why the twin evils of modern marketing: telemarketing and SPAM are highly inefficient. Telemarketing and SPAM require the marketer to annnoy hundreds, if not thousands of persons per sale. Not only is the return rate horrible, I think these companies are pissing off many people who will sooner cut off their arm than buy one of their products.
I have NEVER bought a product a SPAMMER or telemarketer has ever tried to sell me, and I never will. My phone line is constantly on the internet anyway, which (to the telemarketers chagrin) prevents them from reaching me. People whom I want to be able to contact me know how to contact me.
MCI and AT&T so pissed me off with their constant harassment I flatly told both companies I'd sooner use tin cans and string rather than their phone services.
Not only are users being tracked without knowledge, they are being hacked. Something is being placed on their system to do something that the user has not agreed to allow it to do.
If it were "opt-in" (IE, the banner popped up a window that explained what the cookie was going to be used for and how it worked, and asked the user to agree or not), then it would be fine.
Cookies have many very positive uses. Exploiting them for uses other than they were intended is wrong, and possibly illegal. Marketers are not allowed to wiretap your phone or put bugs in your home. Why should it be any less illegal for them to do this to your computer?
Marketers are evil. Their perfect world is one where you are chained into a chair with your eyes glued open so that you cannot avoid by any possible means hearing their pitch.
That's why they blast commercials at you at well above program volume, and want to bug your computer. I don't particularly want my FAMILY knowing my browsing habits, much less some corporate marketer.
If a corporation bugged my telephone for marketing reasons, to find out who I called, that would be illegal wouldn't it? Then why isn't bugging my computer to track my browser? Done WITHOUT consent?
I think it's about time. What Doubleclick and others are doing is breaking and entering and illegal wiretapping. Tracking where you go on the `net without your consent can be construed as both.
SPAM and such cookie tracking has to be an opt-in system, not an opt-out. Of course, there are a million evil marketing weenies screaming simultaneously when that is said too loudly. I do not at all object to reasonable advertising, banner ads, etc. But when marketers start to place files on my own PC without my permission to trace my browsing, that's crossing a thick line.
Something needs to be done to put the marketers in their place, and if it involves setting lose the dogs of war (the lawyers) so be it.
I'm sick and tired of search engines, classifieds, etc that have been so SPAMMED that they are useless. About time someone devised a way to make their own SPAM databases just as useless.
SPAM does not work as a marketing tool. You can't sell things to people you piss off.
Most of them are written by lawyers, and as we all know, lawyers as a profession are single handedly responsible for destroying Western Civilization.
Wouldn't it be nice if we as citizens (not the "consumer" sheep the marketing arms of the corps want us to be) were to refuse to EVER agree to licenses, agreements, etc, that were too complex to understand in under 2 minutes of reading?
Any legal document that needs a LAWYER to understand is abusive and exists only to screw you.
Everyone who buys goods and services votes with their wallets for the companies/products that succeed (or fail by what we don't buy). If we were to ever USE this power in an orgainized way, companies wouldn't be able to get away with crap like that.
Any ISP that sells you web hosting, then places restrictions on what file formats you can host is abusive.
If it's the bandwith they are afraid of you using, then that's their problem, they should either increase the price or limit the bandwith. Not whine about you wanting to use (unlimited bandwidth) what they SOLD you with their slick marketing. Reminds me of the first flat-rate unlimited ISP's that started bitching when people took their marketing literally.
Stay away from ANY ISP that restricts what you can put on your website (other than illegal material, that is only reasonable).