At the bottom of each page, there's a number that seems to indicate the time they believe their server spent serving the page. Usually is says something like "2 ms" or "3 ms"...
This time i've got "23331 ms" for the main page.
If you look at the graf of distribution of hits from last time there were two maximums (possibly because of the time of posting). I would guess that today hits distribution has only one maximum and peaks much higher (though the total number of hits - distribution integral - might not be substantialy higher). That's killing them.
I am *really* looking forward to their next article about server scalability.:)
I would say that frequency headroom shouldn't be judged by these early shipments. AMD has a history of "slow" starts - historicaly due to lesser (financial) commitment to process switches.
Over at Van's Hardware there seam to be some suggestions, that these early Thouroughbreds are optimized for low power dissipation (ie for mobile).
I think people sense that Intel went the wrong way. Even Intel can't fight physics.
Energy dissipation of processor is in vast majority due to tranistor switching.
So if you switch tranistor N times more frequently you generate N times more heat. In case at hand P4 has to switch it's transistors roughly 2 times more often than the Hammer for the same amount of work to be done.
Why is this important, who cares about power usage ?
The problem is that too much heat on a very small spot can rise temperature (localy) to the point it damages that part of processor. This is why both athlon and P4 are in the end thermicly bound.
Thought it might seam that going to smaller technology helps it really makes matters worse. Just think of it, now you have transistors that generate heat closer together, so cooling becomes even bigger problem. Yes you can lower the voltage (till the noise gets too big), but it turns out that this effect is not enough. (Meaning is you have a CPU core thermicaly bounded at 180 nm it will be stay thermicaly bounded at smaller technology)
So I think P4 extreme frequencies will prove quite a problem for Intel in the long run... Asuming that AMD and Intel will have comparable technology P4 woun't be able to keep up with Hammer.
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It also runs linux and it's not huge by any meassure....
At the bottom of each page, there's a number that seems to indicate the time they believe their server spent serving the page. Usually is says something like "2 ms" or "3 ms"...
:)
This time i've got "23331 ms" for the main page.
If you look at the graf of distribution of hits from last time there were two maximums (possibly because of the time of posting). I would guess that today hits distribution has only one maximum and peaks much higher (though the total number of hits - distribution integral - might not be substantialy higher). That's killing them.
I am *really* looking forward to their next article about server scalability.
That's in little more than an hour time.
I would say that frequency headroom shouldn't be judged by these early shipments. AMD has a history of "slow" starts - historicaly due to lesser (financial) commitment to process switches.
Over at Van's Hardware there seam to be some suggestions, that these early Thouroughbreds are optimized for low power dissipation (ie for mobile).
I think people sense that Intel went the wrong way. Even Intel can't fight physics.
Energy dissipation of processor is in vast majority due to tranistor switching. So if you switch tranistor N times more frequently you generate N times more heat. In case at hand P4 has to switch it's transistors roughly 2 times more often than the Hammer for the same amount of work to be done.
Why is this important, who cares about power usage ?
The problem is that too much heat on a very small spot can rise temperature (localy) to the point it damages that part of processor. This is why both athlon and P4 are in the end thermicly bound.
Thought it might seam that going to smaller technology helps it really makes matters worse. Just think of it, now you have transistors that generate heat closer together, so cooling becomes even bigger problem. Yes you can lower the voltage (till the noise gets too big), but it turns out that this effect is not enough. (Meaning is you have a CPU core thermicaly bounded at 180 nm it will be stay thermicaly bounded at smaller technology)
So I think P4 extreme frequencies will prove quite a problem for Intel in the long run... Asuming that AMD and Intel will have comparable technology P4 woun't be able to keep up with Hammer.