Oh, I thought of more to say. Even if Linux increases its consumer market share by 100 and gets on par with MacOS, nobody said MacOS was a factor either. When it gets to 10% of PCs shipped running Linux, then its a factor. Until then, its a fringe element important only to those whose specialties need it. (ie. the server market.)
Okay, sorry, 96% of software is binary only. And its not growing exponentially in the consumer market, only in the server market. At current growth rates, in 10 years, 4.01% of consumer desktops will use Linux. (Actually, probably less because the rate of growth for Windows is increasing too.) Also, it is not yet significant in the planning of most companies. Even Dell doesn't offer them on their desktop machines. A total of 5 or 10 major games have been ported compared to the THOUSANDS of games released each year. (I mention games because gamers tend to be the first ones to buy new CPUs. Even server people tend to wait 'till the lines are established. Gamers are THE force in the high-end computing market.) Yep, Linux is a MAJOR factor in chip maker's planning.
You're kidding right? Actually, I've never actually though of it that way, I always thought that it was a kindergarten type word along the lines of "insey weinsee." Either way, I don't care. Respect for other races is something you do, not what words you use. Regardless of its associations with the deragation of blacks, "niggling" (as well as it's cousin "niggardly") are full-fledged english words, and it is silly to discourage its usage because it sounds a certian way or is related to a certian slur. I am probably one of the most obsessive equal-rights persons you'll meet, but to me, niggling over word usage only exacerbates the problem; it doesn't make it better.
Re:AMD could release Sledgehammer now if they want
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Intel Reacts to AMD
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· Score: 2
A) Intel never has problems with yield. B) Essentially (given the fact that they have 14 fabs or so) they ARE omnipotant. C) RDRAM could be a problem, but Intel seems to have gotten that figured out, and besides, they could always use SDRAM. Intel HAS introduced products at all levels before. The Pentium MMX was an example, and Pentium II was another example. (Well, high end to lower midrange anyway.) Like the PPro and its cache problems, the RDRAM thing was simply a snafau. I mean AMD almost did with the K6. If the performance of the design had been higher, (and AMD had Intel's manufacturing capacity) then AMD would have made the introduction at all levels.
I have seen two sets of leaked P4 benchmarks, >>>>> I have a feeling the benchmarks aren't valid. They are probably testing mainstream software, which P4 at its current 800MHz clock won't do to well. If they tested 3D applications, I suspect they would have gotten very different results. P4 is meant to blow away Athlon in matrix crunching (read on, more below about that), and beat it in clockspeed (so that its performance doesn't suck in regular apps). (No, I'm not an Intel-insider (ohh, I HAD to do that;) that's what I've inferred by look at the situation.)
and both were dismal, other than predictably impressive memory bandwidth (with dual channel Rambus memory). Never mind the benchmarks, there is at least one MAJOR reason to question P4's performance - the pipeline length. P4 has a pipeline around 20 steps to allow it to reach very high clock speeds, but this brings with it two major penalties:
- branch mispredict pipe flush (lose 20 instructions!!!) - instruction latency; waiting for instruction arguments takes a lot of clock cycles >>>>>>>> Ah but look at the upside. When doing matrix crunching (which is what I suspect P4 is built to do) the pipelines can easily be kept full. Matrix multiplies are extremely regular pieces of code, and thus A) Doesn't have branches, B) Is easy to parallize, C) Doesn't introduce bubbles into the pipeline. If the hyper pipelined design allows P4 to run at much higher clocks than Athlon, then the performance on normal apps would be about the same, while performance on 3D would kill. (Especially since SSE2 has twice the throughput of 3DNow!)
Comparing P4's double pumped ALU to Athlon, you should remember that Athlon has 3 Integer units, and 3 Floating point units (PIII has 2 of each). On certain benchmarks, Athlon just beats PIII silly because of this: >>>>>>> Athlon has 3 of each, PPro and up has 3 integer, 2 FPU. However, the Athlon's 3 FPU design is a little crippled, since every clock you can only do 2 FPU operations while the 3'rd one can only do a store instruction.
When Athlon is paired with DDR memory and is able to keep it's multiple instruction decoders (it can issue 3 instructions per clock cycle) fed, then it is going to scream, never mind the advantages that Mustang will bring such as it's 400MHz FSB.
A final point for you to ponder: if P4 is clock-for-clock faster than PIII (I don't believe it), then why doesn't Intel launch it at 1.2 or 1.3GHz (vs fastest PIII 1.1GHz). A process doesn't yield such a narrow (1.4-5 or 1.3-5) speed band, so Intel must be throwing away the lower binsplits! Why?..... >>>>>>>> Read above comment about how the PIIIs FPU is lower power in non-regular code.
Every indication that I can see points to P4 having been designed for very high clock speeds at the expense of instructions-per-clock performance. AMD Mustang will launch at 1.3GHz and will be in volume before P4. Mustang achieves it's speed more through better process technology (AMD licenced Motorola's HiP6L copper interconnect process, and is well on their way to dual damascene and 0.13 micron), than through Intel pipeline-achieved GHZ marketing stunts. >>>> Maybe, or maybe Intel sees that the future is 3D, and has designed a processor to accomodate it.
A) Photoshop got SSE support before the PIII hit retail. I think they'll get SSE2. B) Intel is lying when they say that P4 is strictly a high end part. They said the same thing about Pentium and Pentium II, and it took nowhere NEAR 4 years for them to trickle down. C) The die shrink is happening BEFORE Willamette comes out. It is being applied to the PIII, and thus will be fully debugged by the time P4 arrives. Take a company that has only a few RISC processors under its belt, then have them design a processer that has a design that has never been tried before. It's a wonder the thing even powers up.
The FPU isn't sup par, its just different. I think that Intel has a very big 3D bias on the next chip. The 20 stage FPU pipes are hard to keep filled, and thus affect performance on regular FPU code. However, games mainly use the FPU for geometry processing, and that task is VERY regular, and thus it is really easy to keep the pipeline filled. Additionally, that task is easily parallelized, and that's where SSE2 (which can multiply 4 floats per cycle on each of 2 FPUs) come in.
I have no bias either way, I go where the performance is. Yea, I know, a disloyal little bastard ain't I? Secondly, I don't really think those benchmarks are valid in this case. These industry standard benchmarks test the CPU in a wide range of settings. In these cases, the 20-stage pipeline hurts performance because it is much harder to keep a pipeline like that full. Thus, a 1.5GHz P4 probably won't benchmark that much faster on diverse stuff like SPEC or Winstone. However, I'm not running Winstone, am I? I run games and 3D renderers. The math for that kind of thing is A) Very easy to parallelize. Thus, the P4's 128 bit dual FPU design will be kept quite busy, and B) Has little data dependency. When crunching a stream of a few million matracies, there are no branches in sight. You can multiply out the whole matrix before you actually get a few dependencies during the adding stage. However, even those dependencies are very regular and easy to optimize. 70+% of processing power used in a games is used for graphics, the bulk of that for geometry processing. Just the kind of thing P4 will excel at. When doing 3D rendering (especially preview) it is ALL graphics. Again, very good for 3D rendering. So what happens is, that in the end, the P4 is about equal to Athlon in regular apps, and extremely fast in 3D and other types of regular data. To me, that's a BIG advantage. To sum it up, these are the advantages disatvantages of the P4.
Advantages: -It's ALUs run at 3GHz -SSE2 can crunch 4 32 bit numbers in each of 2 FPU pipes Disadvantages: -20 stage pipelines impact performance on many apps. Net Result: A proc built for 3D. High core speed keeps it competitive with Athlon, and special architecture makes it a 3D screamer. What's not to love?
Now if those benchmarks were a test of Quake 3 framerate, then, I'm wrong, you're right. However I suspect it was a general benchmark like SPEC or Winstone, in which case those results are irrelevant.
Clue: Very few people run open source. The fact that OSS people can optimize Athlon won't change the computing landscape on iota. 99% of software is in binary-only form, and that is what most people run. As for moving 3D to video cards, it is a specialization vs. generalization thing. Currently, the geometry accelerators in graphics cards simply offload the work, they cannot feed the razterizer by themselves. Also, they only really help games. If you put these functions on the CPU, then it will accelerate other things to. For example, a GeForce might accelerate the real-time preview of a 3D rendering app, but a faster CPU will accelerate final rendering time as well. A GPU does didly for Photoshop, while a fast CPU helps a lot. Putting this acceleration on the CPU makes a lot of sense. The reason why 3D accelerators exist at all, is because razterization is a very complex process and thus hard to do well on a CPU. However, geometry acceleration is simply the crunching of matricies, and thus can easily be put onto the CPU. Couple that with the fact that the CPU will always run at a much higher clock speed, and you've got a good arguement for not moving geometry acceleration to the graphics card.
One niggly little complaint. PPro wasn't expensive so much beacuse of bad yields, but two different reasons. 1) It illustrated Intel's trickle down business model, where the absolute high end is absurdly priced. 2) They had to produce their own SRAM, and had bad yields on the SRAM. However because of the design, bad SRAM meant that the whole CPU had to be discarded. (They weren't tested until they were fully assembled.)
Remember, Intel did this with Pentium as well. They slashed prices and kept Pentium alive for a long time to allow the PII to trickle down. In fact, this move seems to suggest that Intel is QUITE satisfied with P4's performance. If they were worried about competing with Athlon, they would have launched P4 at all levels immediatly. However, they're comfortable in the idea that P4 is really next-gen (kind of like PII or the original Pentium was) and that even with AMDs competition, they can afford to let it trickle down.
Re:Why you should wait for the new chip...
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Intel Reacts to AMD
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· Score: 2
It depends. I don't think P4 is JUST a 30% diff in performance. It is much closer to the performance difference between a Pentium and a PII or a 486 and a Pentium. If it were just oh, Intel is releasing a 1.5 GHz PIII, I would reccomend buying a 1.3GHz or whatever and saving the cash. However, historically these new architectures have been a major leap. All the people who bought a 450MHz PII instead of a PIII are happy with the money they saved. However, those who bought a Pentium after the PII came out are kicking themselves because the PII was REALLY worth the upgrade.
Arguably, they do, and it's called the Athlon. The Williamette isn't out yet, and its specs are a not necessarily impressive (e.g. only a dual-pipelined FPU, compared to the three FPU pipelines of the Athlon). Of course, it could turn out to be an excellent preformer, but unless it's substantially better than the Athlon, AMD need not worry so much. >>>>>>>>> The Williamette is a LOT faster than an Athlon. First, it take full advantage of SSE (which is 128bit) to be able to multiply 4 floats in one operation. That twice what Athlon can do. Second, the Athlon's 3 pipelines aren't what they seem. In pracice, one of the pipelines is always limited to simply doing a store operation every cycle. (ie. you can do two floating point multiplys and 1 store every cycle compared to two floating multiplies and no store on the PIII.) Additionally, it runs the ALUs at 3 GHz. It will definately be an excellent performer, because even if it meets half the projected performance, it will rock.
If Williamette is slower or equal than the Athlon clock for clock, then AMD has no problem (obviously). If it's a bit faster, there's still no problem, since AMD is used to selling its chips a lower price and still making a profit. That's what it's doing right now. If Williamette is far better than the Athlon, then AMD has a problem. >>>>>> Willamette is faster per clock for SIMD, slightly slower for regular FP, but the clock ticks twice as often.
Even then, AMD's Sledgehammer is a wildcard. Although it's a 64-bit chip, it is supposed to have good 32-bit compatibility (unlike the Itanium, for example). I wouldn't count on it to save AMD in the 32-bit market, but even if Williamette kicks ass, AMD may have an ace up its sleeve. >>>>>>>>> Sledgehammer IS AMD's next chip. It will HAVE to save it in the 32 bit market. It is simply a 64 bit x86 chip, not a new architecture like Merced. As such, it has a similar place to the Athlon as the Athlon did to the K6. Also, it will have a MUCH faster FPU because it will go RISC style and ditch the stack-based FPU present in x86 chips.
Lets see.. I run Photoshop on the lower power 1Gig Athlon. Then I go run it on a 1.3Gig willamette... Am I going to SEE that much of a difference? >>>>>>> Depends on what you do. Certain filters nearly double in speed with SSE. (Photoshop doesn't support 3DNow!) Additonally, the ALUs in Willamete run at 3GHz. Yea, its safe to say you'll see a pretty big increase in speed.
I mean im all for more power and more bandwidth, But I mean were not even coming CLOSE to doing 10times the speeds now or nothing. A move from a p60 to a k7-1000 thats an event. A move from a k7-1000 to a willamette Is that such a big deal? Really? Gee quake runs at 150fps not 130fps now.....? Point? I paid for the willamette with my firstborn and now my photo shop filters run 10% faster! Well pat yourself on the back there. >>>>>>>> How about this. Moving from a 1GHz Athlon to a 1.5 GHz Willamette will grant you 300% more performance (theoretically) Even if you get a third of that, you've still got double the speed. Instead of saying Quake will run faster, you can say that upcoming, graphically intensive games (Black and White, Halo) will go from 20-30fps (barely playable) to 40-50fps (comfortably playable.) Or instead of taking 13 hours for your 3D animation to render, it'll take 7 hours. PS> Have you SEEN Halo! Its un-friggin-believable.
Hmmn.. I just dont see how that argument is relevant. Granted I STILL want speeds to increase I just dont think that its going to be such a ground shaking change... The numbers the big ones are no longer so exciting. Oh yay I got a 2gighz chip.. Its just lost some of its excitement and or use becuase now you run into people with systems that do everything they want and have enough computing power to do so in the near future (Given Software doesnt get to much slower.....) >>>>>> I don't have enough computing power! Where's the 1 million polygons per frame games. Why do I have to wait hours to render an animation rather than a few minutes. Why does it take several minutes to preview a Premiere movie? Unless of course you're running Word, in which case it doesn't matter. Additionally, people have been using your arguements for ever. The Pentium was only 60% or so faster than a 486, but was that worth it? Most people say yes.
Even still, the P4 is going to kick ass where it counts. What need 3 GHz of processor? Games, and 3D. Games and 3D are what is driving the performance market, and since 3D ops are so easy to SIMD (I know that's not an appropriate usage of the word) the double pumped ALU's will probably result in 90% more performance. As for Athlon-optimized code, why bother? Are companies actually going to release Athlon optimized binaries? It hasn't happened yet, and probably won't happen, especiaily with such a small performance increase. Additionally, why should Intel give away their bus design? They produce all their own chipsets, and thus have no desire to help out the competition. AMD doesn't really want to produce their own chipsets, so they have to release the design to allow others to make support chips.
Like I said, AMD hasn't had problems since the K6 days. (At least I THINK I said that.) Also, the K6 problems are mainly due to the trouble AMD had switching from.35 micron to.25 micron. However, in the current situation, (AMD pushing up to 1.5 GHz) they aren't changing the manufacturing process, so there's no risk of reduced quality. Also, AMD did a great job switching over (the very complex I might add) Athlon to the.18 micron process, and I think that they'll have a fairly easy time with.13 micron. In fact, they'll have an easier time than Intel, because Intel not only has to change the gate size, but has to introduce the copper technology. Since AMD is already cranking out copper chips from its Dresden fab, they won't have that problem. And I suggest you don't hold AMDs problems with the K6 against them. Even many of those problems were not with the K6, but the crappy supporting chipsets. Right now, VIA and AMD seem to have gotten a handle on these things, and for the last year or so, the Athlons have been 100% stable. (Aside from some power issues with the GeForce.)
That wasn't a manufacturing bug, it was a bug in the design of the processor. This current speeding up of the plans concern the movement of the current PIII to a.13 micron process. Often, the hasty adoption of a new manufacturing process results in quality problems like what happened with AMD with the K6 when they switched to.25 micron. Intel, however, rarely has problems with their manufacturing. Also the FDIV bug was 5 or 6 years ago. That classifys are "rarely."
Just some points that come to mind due to this story.
A) AMD is in serious trouble. It still has the sheer clock speed advantage, but doesn't have a next-gen architecture to compete with Willamete. Now if Willamete is delayed long enough, maybe they will be able to get their 64 bit Sledgehammer chip out in time, but that seems doubtfull. The reason they should be so scared of Willamete is that it is truely a new architecture. Remember the transition from 486 to Pentium, and how the 60MHz Pentiums beat even 100 MHz 486s? Well, this promises to be just as big. Not only does this signal the arrival of ultra-high bandwidth memory to the mainstream (RDRAM on high-end, DDR-SDRAM on lower end) but the Willamete architecture boasts a number of improvemnts. Most importantly, the ALU's are clocked at twice the core speed, so you have your integer and FPU units running at 3+ GHz. This promises to be an even bigger jump than the switch from 1 integer unit in the 486 to 2 in the Pentium. Additionally it introduces new instructions, and it seems that the new instruction set idea is genuinely working, since SSE actually DOES help out a lot in apps like Photoshop and 3D renderers. AMD should be afraid, very afraid. (Buyer Tip: Don't buy a new computer before the Willamete comes out. I have a friend who purchased a Pentium 233 just before the PII came out, and I remember laughing at him for quite awhile.)
B) Preemptive strike against those saying that new CPUs are useless. Go run 3D Studio on you Pentium-60 and then come back begging for forgiveness. The truth is that the bandwidth problem is just not that important for many applications. Additionally, bandwidth is getting a major shot in the arm with the coming of dual-channel RDRAM, and DDR-SDRAM. (Buyer Tip: Get DDR-SDRAM if you're going anywhere near 3D. Latency is KING!)
C) Buyers beware. If AMD can't match the Willamette in sheer performace, we may again revert to a situation like the PPro era when Intel's power proc was really expensive, and with no competition on the high end, they had no incentive to lower prices.
Quality doesn't seem to be suffering here. Both the Athlons and PIIIs have been 100% stable, especially since most manufacturers cool their high power systems very well. Of course, the Athlon has been plauged by power constraints, but in general, those are the fault of cheap components. For example, the problems with the GeForce had nothing to do with the Athlon or its infrastructure, but crappy motherboards that didn't meet power specifications. You spend the extra ducats and buy a good motherboard, or suffer with poor quality just like with every other cheap product in the world. As for speeding up the manufacturing process, Intel has hardly every had problems with bad microprocessor cores, and its recent problems have everything to do with RDRAM rather than anything else. As for AMD, it to hasn't had manufacturing troubles since the K6 days, and its new 1.5 GHz chips will be based on the same.18micron copper process that has been flowing smoothly for some months now.
They interface is gay, very very gay. It is much more powerful than "Gnome Office" but the interface sucks. Why put up with crappy software like this. What kind of braindead UI idea is it to give the OFFICE SUITE a freaking START BUTTON! The first thing I hope the OSS StarOffice results in is the purging of the horrid UI.
But a worse world for Microsoft, no? If you had $40 billion+ dollars staked on every body using Word because of the huge number of existing word users, then I'm pretty sure you too would to everything (including proriotary file formats) to preserve your lead. (And if you don't you're pretty stupid!) Nothing works by having your competitors make it easier for you. That just leads to crappy software (the whole concept behind capitalism.) So go and write that word converter, make a superior product that thrashes Office in every way and is compatible to boot, bleed a little!
My point exactly. SGI is using the ZX10 line to fill its high-end NT workstation position. Also, look for Linux support for the Wildcat to come soon. (Yea, I've got SGI ALL figured out;)
Still, this approach is sort of hackish. A central registry would not be simpler and more elegant, but more powerful. Say, for example, an application says "I need libjpeg, version 2.3" He requests this to the central registry. The library server looks at the request, and analayzes the currently registered libraries. libjpeg is not installed, but because the author of each library is required to list all the libraries and versions his library is compatible with, the server knows that he can use the functions in libgraphic.so.3 to fufill the applications request. PS> Some programs DO load libraries explicitly by name. For example, Quake loads the OpenGL library explicitly, and gets pointers to each function as needed.
A) It works, why "fix" it? B) Even a novice can learn a computer in a week or two given a teacher. It takes at least a year of full immersion for a person to even grasp the basics of a foreign language. C) They are taking the power is mutually exclusive with simplicty track. That's not necessarily true. There are some UI choices that are very powerful, but exceedingly simple. I'd like to point to BeOS's Cortex, and application that manages media nodes on BeOS. (The BeOS uses a system where media data is passed between a series of nodes. For example, a microphone might be represented as a data producing node, a set of filters as both a data recieving and producing node, and the speakers as a data recieving node.) It has a graphical system that shows a graphical diagram of the connections between the nodes. It is both very powerful and efficient (connections can be quickly routed through any type of filter) and simple and easy to learn. A good UI is not one that has an overriding "good UI" method. It is one that is full of ideas like this implemented consistantly through the whole thing. Also, if the UI isn't 100% efficient, it really doesn't matter. What's matters is that it is relativly consistant and DOESN'T change often. For example, people put up with the relative inefficiency of French and English simply because they know. Analogously, consistancy is of the utmost importance. Despite the inconsistancies in English, the langauge is pretty coherent. Major concepts don't change on you from one word to another. That same consistancy is why the Windows and MacOS interfaces are so popular, not becuase they are well designed. On the other hand, the current state of Linux GUIs is like the language at my house. It is mix of English and Bengali, and though it is more efficient then either, people really wouldn't be able to learn it because of the lack of consistancy. (Unless of course they only speak a few phrases constantly, kind of like what most Linux users do in terms of software usage.)
I'd like to see you defend that. Software is something I make. It is not an idea (now that would be silly, I'll charge $50 for the idea of a fast, free, lightweight open source OS) but an actual product. What should be able to be sold? Work should be able to be sold. Just as a service is work (the expenditure of engergy for a given length of time) software is work (the expenditure of energy required to code it for the coding time.) Further, it can be though of as a service (I'm programming your computer for you.) Ideology holds dear the ability to make statements without any reasoning. However, given some reasoning, you can say that software is just like a service and can be charged for. If you wish, you can also think of it this way. Sex is kind of like software. Even though you can get it for free, in all accounts it is a service and can be charged for. More importantly, it involves the expenditure of energy for a given length of time, and can thus be considered "work" and very few people argue that you shouldn't be able to charge for work. Of course, just like sex, there are those who insist on giving away software for free, but you cannot say those who charge for it are morally wrong because they aren't giving it away free.
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Oh, I thought of more to say. Even if Linux increases its consumer market share by 100 and gets on par with MacOS, nobody said MacOS was a factor either. When it gets to 10% of PCs shipped running Linux, then its a factor. Until then, its a fringe element important only to those whose specialties need it. (ie. the server market.)
Okay, sorry, 96% of software is binary only. And its not growing exponentially in the consumer market, only in the server market. At current growth rates, in 10 years, 4.01% of consumer desktops will use Linux. (Actually, probably less because the rate of growth for Windows is increasing too.) Also, it is not yet significant in the planning of most companies. Even Dell doesn't offer them on their desktop machines. A total of 5 or 10 major games have been ported compared to the THOUSANDS of games released each year. (I mention games because gamers tend to be the first ones to buy new CPUs. Even server people tend to wait 'till the lines are established. Gamers are THE force in the high-end computing market.) Yep, Linux is a MAJOR factor in chip maker's planning.
You're kidding right? Actually, I've never actually though of it that way, I always thought that it was a kindergarten type word along the lines of "insey weinsee." Either way, I don't care. Respect for other races is something you do, not what words you use. Regardless of its associations with the deragation of blacks, "niggling" (as well as it's cousin "niggardly") are full-fledged english words, and it is silly to discourage its usage because it sounds a certian way or is related to a certian slur. I am probably one of the most obsessive equal-rights persons you'll meet, but to me, niggling over word usage only exacerbates the problem; it doesn't make it better.
A) Intel never has problems with yield.
B) Essentially (given the fact that they have 14 fabs or so) they ARE omnipotant.
C) RDRAM could be a problem, but Intel seems to have gotten that figured out, and besides, they could always use SDRAM.
Intel HAS introduced products at all levels before. The Pentium MMX was an example, and Pentium II was another example. (Well, high end to lower midrange anyway.) Like the PPro and its cache problems, the RDRAM thing was simply a snafau. I mean AMD almost did with the K6. If the performance of the design had been higher, (and AMD had Intel's manufacturing capacity) then AMD would have made the introduction at all levels.
I have seen two sets of leaked P4 benchmarks, ;) that's what I've inferred by look at the situation.)
>>>>>
I have a feeling the benchmarks aren't valid. They are probably testing mainstream software, which P4 at its current 800MHz clock won't do to well. If they tested 3D applications, I suspect they would have gotten very different results. P4 is meant to blow away Athlon in matrix crunching (read on, more below about that), and beat it in clockspeed (so that its performance doesn't suck in regular apps). (No, I'm not an Intel-insider (ohh, I HAD to do that
and both were dismal, other than predictably
impressive memory bandwidth (with dual channel Rambus memory). Never mind the benchmarks,
there is at least one MAJOR reason to question P4's performance - the pipeline length. P4 has a
pipeline around 20 steps to allow it to reach very high clock speeds, but this brings with it two
major penalties:
- branch mispredict pipe flush (lose 20 instructions!!!)
- instruction latency; waiting for instruction arguments takes a lot of clock cycles
>>>>>>>>
Ah but look at the upside. When doing matrix crunching (which is what I suspect P4 is built to do) the pipelines can easily be kept full. Matrix multiplies are extremely regular pieces of code, and thus
A) Doesn't have branches,
B) Is easy to parallize,
C) Doesn't introduce bubbles into the pipeline.
If the hyper pipelined design allows P4 to run at much higher clocks than Athlon, then the performance on normal apps would be about the same, while performance on 3D would kill. (Especially since SSE2 has twice the throughput of 3DNow!)
Comparing P4's double pumped ALU to Athlon, you should remember that Athlon has 3 Integer
units, and 3 Floating point units (PIII has 2 of each). On certain benchmarks, Athlon just beats PIII
silly because of this:
>>>>>>>
Athlon has 3 of each, PPro and up has 3 integer, 2 FPU. However, the Athlon's 3 FPU design is a little crippled, since every clock you can only do 2 FPU operations while the 3'rd one can only do a store instruction.
When Athlon is paired with DDR memory and is able to keep it's multiple instruction decoders (it
can issue 3 instructions per clock cycle) fed, then it is going to scream, never mind the advantages
that Mustang will bring such as it's 400MHz FSB.
A final point for you to ponder: if P4 is clock-for-clock faster than PIII (I don't believe it), then why
doesn't Intel launch it at 1.2 or 1.3GHz (vs fastest PIII 1.1GHz). A process doesn't yield such a
narrow (1.4-5 or 1.3-5) speed band, so Intel must be throwing away the lower binsplits! Why?.....
>>>>>>>>
Read above comment about how the PIIIs FPU is lower power in non-regular code.
Every indication that I can see points to P4 having been designed for very high clock speeds at the
expense of instructions-per-clock performance. AMD Mustang will launch at 1.3GHz and will be in
volume before P4. Mustang achieves it's speed more through better process technology (AMD
licenced Motorola's HiP6L copper interconnect process, and is well on their way to dual damascene
and 0.13 micron), than through Intel pipeline-achieved GHZ marketing stunts.
>>>>
Maybe, or maybe Intel sees that the future is 3D, and has designed a processor to accomodate it.
A) Photoshop got SSE support before the PIII hit retail. I think they'll get SSE2.
B) Intel is lying when they say that P4 is strictly a high end part. They said the same thing about Pentium and Pentium II, and it took nowhere NEAR 4 years for them to trickle down.
C) The die shrink is happening BEFORE Willamette comes out. It is being applied to the PIII, and thus will be fully debugged by the time P4 arrives.
Take a company that has only a few RISC processors under its belt, then have them design a processer that has a design that has never been tried before. It's a wonder the thing even powers up.
The FPU isn't sup par, its just different. I think that Intel has a very big 3D bias on the next chip. The 20 stage FPU pipes are hard to keep filled, and thus affect performance on regular FPU code. However, games mainly use the FPU for geometry processing, and that task is VERY regular, and thus it is really easy to keep the pipeline filled. Additionally, that task is easily parallelized, and that's where SSE2 (which can multiply 4 floats per cycle on each of 2 FPUs) come in.
I have no bias either way, I go where the performance is. Yea, I know, a disloyal little bastard ain't I? Secondly, I don't really think those benchmarks are valid in this case. These industry standard benchmarks test the CPU in a wide range of settings. In these cases, the 20-stage pipeline hurts performance because it is much harder to keep a pipeline like that full. Thus, a 1.5GHz P4 probably won't benchmark that much faster on diverse stuff like SPEC or Winstone. However, I'm not running Winstone, am I? I run games and 3D renderers. The math for that kind of thing is
A) Very easy to parallelize. Thus, the P4's 128 bit dual FPU design will be kept quite busy, and
B) Has little data dependency. When crunching a stream of a few million matracies, there are no branches in sight. You can multiply out the whole matrix before you actually get a few dependencies during the adding stage. However, even those dependencies are very regular and easy to optimize. 70+% of processing power used in a games is used for graphics, the bulk of that for geometry processing. Just the kind of thing P4 will excel at. When doing 3D rendering (especially preview) it is ALL graphics. Again, very good for 3D rendering. So what happens is, that in the end, the P4 is about equal to Athlon in regular apps, and extremely fast in 3D and other types of regular data. To me, that's a BIG advantage. To sum it up, these are the advantages disatvantages of the P4.
Advantages:
-It's ALUs run at 3GHz
-SSE2 can crunch 4 32 bit numbers in each of 2 FPU pipes
Disadvantages:
-20 stage pipelines impact performance on many apps.
Net Result: A proc built for 3D. High core speed keeps it competitive with Athlon, and special architecture makes it a 3D screamer. What's not to love?
Now if those benchmarks were a test of Quake 3 framerate, then, I'm wrong, you're right. However I suspect it was a general benchmark like SPEC or Winstone, in which case those results are irrelevant.
Clue: Very few people run open source. The fact that OSS people can optimize Athlon won't change the computing landscape on iota. 99% of software is in binary-only form, and that is what most people run.
As for moving 3D to video cards, it is a specialization vs. generalization thing. Currently, the geometry accelerators in graphics cards simply offload the work, they cannot feed the razterizer by themselves. Also, they only really help games. If you put these functions on the CPU, then it will accelerate other things to. For example, a GeForce might accelerate the real-time preview of a 3D rendering app, but a faster CPU will accelerate final rendering time as well. A GPU does didly for Photoshop, while a fast CPU helps a lot. Putting this acceleration on the CPU makes a lot of sense. The reason why 3D accelerators exist at all, is because razterization is a very complex process and thus hard to do well on a CPU. However, geometry acceleration is simply the crunching of matricies, and thus can easily be put onto the CPU. Couple that with the fact that the CPU will always run at a much higher clock speed, and you've got a good arguement for not moving geometry acceleration to the graphics card.
One niggly little complaint. PPro wasn't expensive so much beacuse of bad yields, but two different reasons.
1) It illustrated Intel's trickle down business model, where the absolute high end is absurdly priced.
2) They had to produce their own SRAM, and had bad yields on the SRAM. However because of the design, bad SRAM meant that the whole CPU had to be discarded. (They weren't tested until they were fully assembled.)
Remember, Intel did this with Pentium as well. They slashed prices and kept Pentium alive for a long time to allow the PII to trickle down. In fact, this move seems to suggest that Intel is QUITE satisfied with P4's performance. If they were worried about competing with Athlon, they would have launched P4 at all levels immediatly. However, they're comfortable in the idea that P4 is really next-gen (kind of like PII or the original Pentium was) and that even with AMDs competition, they can afford to let it trickle down.
It depends. I don't think P4 is JUST a 30% diff in performance. It is much closer to the performance difference between a Pentium and a PII or a 486 and a Pentium. If it were just oh, Intel is releasing a 1.5 GHz PIII, I would reccomend buying a 1.3GHz or whatever and saving the cash. However, historically these new architectures have been a major leap. All the people who bought a 450MHz PII instead of a PIII are happy with the money they saved. However, those who bought a Pentium after the PII came out are kicking themselves because the PII was REALLY worth the upgrade.
Arguably, they do, and it's called the Athlon. The Williamette isn't out yet, and its specs are a not necessarily impressive (e.g. only a dual-pipelined FPU,
compared to the three FPU pipelines of the Athlon). Of course, it could turn out to be an excellent preformer, but unless it's substantially better than the
Athlon, AMD need not worry so much.
>>>>>>>>>
The Williamette is a LOT faster than an Athlon. First, it take full advantage of SSE (which is 128bit) to be able to multiply 4 floats in one operation. That twice what Athlon can do. Second, the Athlon's 3 pipelines aren't what they seem. In pracice, one of the pipelines is always limited to simply doing a store operation every cycle. (ie. you can do two floating point multiplys and 1 store every cycle compared to two floating multiplies and no store on the PIII.) Additionally, it runs the ALUs at 3 GHz. It will definately be an excellent performer, because even if it meets half the projected performance, it will rock.
If Williamette is slower or equal than the Athlon clock for clock, then AMD has no problem (obviously). If it's a bit faster, there's still no problem, since
AMD is used to selling its chips a lower price and still making a profit. That's what it's doing right now. If Williamette is far better than the Athlon, then
AMD has a problem.
>>>>>>
Willamette is faster per clock for SIMD, slightly slower for regular FP, but the clock ticks twice as often.
Even then, AMD's Sledgehammer is a wildcard. Although it's a 64-bit chip, it is supposed to have good 32-bit compatibility (unlike the Itanium, for
example). I wouldn't count on it to save AMD in the 32-bit market, but even if Williamette kicks ass, AMD may have an ace up its sleeve.
>>>>>>>>>
Sledgehammer IS AMD's next chip. It will HAVE to save it in the 32 bit market. It is simply a 64 bit x86 chip, not a new architecture like Merced. As such, it has a similar place to the Athlon as the Athlon did to the K6. Also, it will have a MUCH faster FPU because it will go RISC style and ditch the stack-based FPU present in x86 chips.
Lets see.. I run Photoshop on the lower power 1Gig Athlon. Then I go run it on a 1.3Gig
willamette... Am I going to SEE that much of a difference?
>>>>>>>
Depends on what you do. Certain filters nearly double in speed with SSE. (Photoshop doesn't support 3DNow!) Additonally, the ALUs in Willamete run at 3GHz. Yea, its safe to say you'll see a pretty big increase in speed.
I mean im all for more power and more
bandwidth, But I mean were not even coming CLOSE to doing 10times the speeds now or nothing.
A move from a p60 to a k7-1000 thats an event. A move from a k7-1000 to a willamette Is that such a
big deal? Really? Gee quake runs at 150fps not 130fps now.....? Point? I paid for the willamette with
my firstborn and now my photo shop filters run 10% faster! Well pat yourself on the back there.
>>>>>>>>
How about this. Moving from a 1GHz Athlon to a 1.5 GHz Willamette will grant you 300% more performance (theoretically) Even if you get a third of that, you've still got double the speed. Instead of saying Quake will run faster, you can say that upcoming, graphically intensive games (Black and White, Halo) will go from 20-30fps (barely playable) to 40-50fps (comfortably playable.) Or instead of taking 13 hours for your 3D animation to render, it'll take 7 hours.
PS> Have you SEEN Halo! Its un-friggin-believable.
Hmmn.. I just dont see how that argument is relevant. Granted I STILL want speeds to increase I
just dont think that its going to be such a ground shaking change... The numbers the big ones are no
longer so exciting. Oh yay I got a 2gighz chip.. Its just lost some of its excitement and or use
becuase now you run into people with systems that do everything they want and have enough
computing power to do so in the near future (Given Software doesnt get to much slower.....)
>>>>>>
I don't have enough computing power! Where's the 1 million polygons per frame games. Why do I have to wait hours to render an animation rather than a few minutes. Why does it take several minutes to preview a Premiere movie? Unless of course you're running Word, in which case it doesn't matter. Additionally, people have been using your arguements for ever. The Pentium was only 60% or so faster than a 486, but was that worth it? Most people say yes.
Even still, the P4 is going to kick ass where it counts. What need 3 GHz of processor? Games, and 3D. Games and 3D are what is driving the performance market, and since 3D ops are so easy to SIMD (I know that's not an appropriate usage of the word) the double pumped ALU's will probably result in 90% more performance. As for Athlon-optimized code, why bother? Are companies actually going to release Athlon optimized binaries? It hasn't happened yet, and probably won't happen, especiaily with such a small performance increase. Additionally, why should Intel give away their bus design? They produce all their own chipsets, and thus have no desire to help out the competition. AMD doesn't really want to produce their own chipsets, so they have to release the design to allow others to make support chips.
Like I said, AMD hasn't had problems since the K6 days. (At least I THINK I said that.) Also, the K6 problems are mainly due to the trouble AMD had switching from .35 micron to .25 micron. However, in the current situation, (AMD pushing up to 1.5 GHz) they aren't changing the manufacturing process, so there's no risk of reduced quality. Also, AMD did a great job switching over (the very complex I might add) Athlon to the .18 micron process, and I think that they'll have a fairly easy time with .13 micron. In fact, they'll have an easier time than Intel, because Intel not only has to change the gate size, but has to introduce the copper technology. Since AMD is already cranking out copper chips from its Dresden fab, they won't have that problem. And I suggest you don't hold AMDs problems with the K6 against them. Even many of those problems were not with the K6, but the crappy supporting chipsets. Right now, VIA and AMD seem to have gotten a handle on these things, and for the last year or so, the Athlons have been 100% stable. (Aside from some power issues with the GeForce.)
That wasn't a manufacturing bug, it was a bug in the design of the processor. This current speeding up of the plans concern the movement of the current PIII to a .13 micron process. Often, the hasty adoption of a new manufacturing process results in quality problems like what happened with AMD with the K6 when they switched to .25 micron. Intel, however, rarely has problems with their manufacturing. Also the FDIV bug was 5 or 6 years ago. That classifys are "rarely."
Just some points that come to mind due to this story.
A) AMD is in serious trouble. It still has the sheer clock speed advantage, but doesn't have a next-gen architecture to compete with Willamete. Now if Willamete is delayed long enough, maybe they will be able to get their 64 bit Sledgehammer chip out in time, but that seems doubtfull. The reason they should be so scared of Willamete is that it is truely a new architecture. Remember the transition from 486 to Pentium, and how the 60MHz Pentiums beat even 100 MHz 486s? Well, this promises to be just as big. Not only does this signal the arrival of ultra-high bandwidth memory to the mainstream (RDRAM on high-end, DDR-SDRAM on lower end) but the Willamete architecture boasts a number of improvemnts. Most importantly, the ALU's are clocked at twice the core speed, so you have your integer and FPU units running at 3+ GHz. This promises to be an even bigger jump than the switch from 1 integer unit in the 486 to 2 in the Pentium. Additionally it introduces new instructions, and it seems that the new instruction set idea is genuinely working, since SSE actually DOES help out a lot in apps like Photoshop and 3D renderers. AMD should be afraid, very afraid. (Buyer Tip: Don't buy a new computer before the Willamete comes out. I have a friend who purchased a Pentium 233 just before the PII came out, and I remember laughing at him for quite awhile.)
B) Preemptive strike against those saying that new CPUs are useless. Go run 3D Studio on you Pentium-60 and then come back begging for forgiveness. The truth is that the bandwidth problem is just not that important for many applications. Additionally, bandwidth is getting a major shot in the arm with the coming of dual-channel RDRAM, and DDR-SDRAM. (Buyer Tip: Get DDR-SDRAM if you're going anywhere near 3D. Latency is KING!)
C) Buyers beware. If AMD can't match the Willamette in sheer performace, we may again revert to a situation like the PPro era when Intel's power proc was really expensive, and with no competition on the high end, they had no incentive to lower prices.
Quality doesn't seem to be suffering here. Both the Athlons and PIIIs have been 100% stable, especially since most manufacturers cool their high power systems very well. Of course, the Athlon has been plauged by power constraints, but in general, those are the fault of cheap components. For example, the problems with the GeForce had nothing to do with the Athlon or its infrastructure, but crappy motherboards that didn't meet power specifications. You spend the extra ducats and buy a good motherboard, or suffer with poor quality just like with every other cheap product in the world. As for speeding up the manufacturing process, Intel has hardly every had problems with bad microprocessor cores, and its recent problems have everything to do with RDRAM rather than anything else. As for AMD, it to hasn't had manufacturing troubles since the K6 days, and its new 1.5 GHz chips will be based on the same .18micron copper process that has been flowing smoothly for some months now.
They interface is gay, very very gay. It is much more powerful than "Gnome Office" but the interface sucks. Why put up with crappy software like this. What kind of braindead UI idea is it to give the OFFICE SUITE a freaking START BUTTON! The first thing I hope the OSS StarOffice results in is the purging of the horrid UI.
But a worse world for Microsoft, no? If you had $40 billion+ dollars staked on every body using Word because of the huge number of existing word users, then I'm pretty sure you too would to everything (including proriotary file formats) to preserve your lead. (And if you don't you're pretty stupid!) Nothing works by having your competitors make it easier for you. That just leads to crappy software (the whole concept behind capitalism.) So go and write that word converter, make a superior product that thrashes Office in every way and is compatible to boot, bleed a little!
My point exactly. SGI is using the ZX10 line to fill its high-end NT workstation position. Also, look for Linux support for the Wildcat to come soon. (Yea, I've got SGI ALL figured out ;)
Still, this approach is sort of hackish. A central registry would not be simpler and more elegant, but more powerful. Say, for example, an application says "I need libjpeg, version 2.3" He requests this to the central registry. The library server looks at the request, and analayzes the currently registered libraries. libjpeg is not installed, but because the author of each library is required to list all the libraries and versions his library is compatible with, the server knows that he can use the functions in libgraphic.so.3 to fufill the applications request.
PS> Some programs DO load libraries explicitly by name. For example, Quake loads the OpenGL library explicitly, and gets pointers to each function as needed.
A) It works, why "fix" it?
B) Even a novice can learn a computer in a week or two given a teacher. It takes at least a year of full immersion for a person to even grasp the basics of a foreign language.
C) They are taking the power is mutually exclusive with simplicty track. That's not necessarily true. There are some UI choices that are very powerful, but exceedingly simple. I'd like to point to BeOS's Cortex, and application that manages media nodes on BeOS. (The BeOS uses a system where media data is passed between a series of nodes. For example, a microphone might be represented as a data producing node, a set of filters as both a data recieving and producing node, and the speakers as a data recieving node.) It has a graphical system that shows a graphical diagram of the connections between the nodes. It is both very powerful and efficient (connections can be quickly routed through any type of filter) and simple and easy to learn. A good UI is not one that has an overriding "good UI" method. It is one that is full of ideas like this implemented consistantly through the whole thing. Also, if the UI isn't 100% efficient, it really doesn't matter. What's matters is that it is relativly consistant and DOESN'T change often. For example, people put up with the relative inefficiency of French and English simply because they know. Analogously, consistancy is of the utmost importance. Despite the inconsistancies in English, the langauge is pretty coherent. Major concepts don't change on you from one word to another. That same consistancy is why the Windows and MacOS interfaces are so popular, not becuase they are well designed. On the other hand, the current state of Linux GUIs is like the language at my house. It is mix of English and Bengali, and though it is more efficient then either, people really wouldn't be able to learn it because of the lack of consistancy. (Unless of course they only speak a few phrases constantly, kind of like what most Linux users do in terms of software usage.)
I'd like to see you defend that. Software is something I make. It is not an idea (now that would be silly, I'll charge $50 for the idea of a fast, free, lightweight open source OS) but an actual product. What should be able to be sold? Work should be able to be sold. Just as a service is work (the expenditure of engergy for a given length of time) software is work (the expenditure of energy required to code it for the coding time.) Further, it can be though of as a service (I'm programming your computer for you.) Ideology holds dear the ability to make statements without any reasoning. However, given some reasoning, you can say that software is just like a service and can be charged for. If you wish, you can also think of it this way. Sex is kind of like software. Even though you can get it for free, in all accounts it is a service and can be charged for. More importantly, it involves the expenditure of energy for a given length of time, and can thus be considered "work" and very few people argue that you shouldn't be able to charge for work. Of course, just like sex, there are those who insist on giving away software for free, but you cannot say those who charge for it are morally wrong because they aren't giving it away free.