It's a relatively unknown fact that Intel is the biggest manufacturer of computers in the world. These are, of course, white-box PC's which are OEM'd to companies who brand them sell them with support. (Not to mention the motherboard and chipset/CPU business...)
The SPEC numbers for P4 have been released. The numbers are SPECint 535 and SPECfp 558 (base).
As a comparison the 833 MHz Alpha 21264 is 518/590.
AMD doesn't publish SPECint, but is 304 for SPECfp for 1.2 GHz Athlon. The 1.13 GHz P3 is 461/320. The fastest SPARC is 438/427.
Which means that P4 is the fastest processor in the world at Integer, and just a tad slower than Alpha at FP (and considerably faster than AMD or the rest of the RISC competition at both).
Those results, however, have not yet been ceritified by SPEC.
Just out of curiousity -- since you own so much stock in AMD, and love their processors how much, how do you feel about their use of SSE2 in the Hammer series of processors? They are using it, you know. They are licensing from Intel.
I don't think you understand you chips achieve low power. It has very little to do with the linewidth, and everything to do with power management.
The 1.5 GHz P4 and 1.2 GHz Athlon use very similar processes (at least, both 0.18 um). The P4 has about TRIPLE the number of transistors (which says that the P4 SHOULD consume way more power), and runs at 25% faster clock speed (which says the same thing). YET P4 USES LESS POWER THAN ATHLON (54 watts vs. 52 watts).
The explanation is the P4 has all sorts of fancy power management built in to make it consume so little power. At least, it has this in much better quantity that the Athlon does. This is an extremely important competitive advantage of P4.
Clock that Athlon to 1.5 GHz and it will a heck of a lot more than 54 Watts. I think they projected something like 80-90 Watts. But the P4 will still be at 52 Watts. Thus, the P4 has WAY more headroom for frequency increases.
You're only looking at it from an architecture perspective and not from a circuit perspective.
One thing that every P4 reviewer (even the haters) have remarked is that the P4 runs extremely cool, and is extremely overclockable.
The P4 @ 1.5 GHz runs at LESS THAN ONE THIRD of the temperature of an Athlon at the same speed (30 degrees vs. 95 degrees). This says, of course, that the P4 has dealt with the heat problem already, and thus has SIGNIFICANTLY more head room to increase speed, since it puts out so much less heat.
The Athlon is going to hit a speed bump because it puts out so much heat. You can't sell a processor which takes 95 degrees, so they won't even be able to do 1.5 GHz unless they radically modify the core (... Palomino is supposed to; we'll see).
The reason the P4 doesn't support SMP is simple... HEAT!
Some clues are in order.
The 1.5 GHz P4 puts out 30 degrees of heat. The 1.5 GHz Athlon is projected to put out 95 (!!!!) degrees of heat. Yep, that's only five degrees less that the boiling point for water.
Intel NEVER has enabled SMP on the first stepping released of a CPU (and AMD and Cyrix have never released a commercial SMP capable platform). The P4 will support SMP probably sooner than any new Intel processor ever. [Here's a clue: the ZDNET article which stated that SMP wouldn't be supported until 2H01 is out and out false].
Since the P4 costs as much as two of the 1.2GHz Athlons wouldn't it make more sense to compare the P4 to a system with the AMD 760MP chipset and two of the DDR Athlon 1.2GHz CPUs?
Where can I buy the 760MP chipset? Oohhhh yeah -- it won't be available until 2H01. Heck, the 760 chipset which all of the current benchmarks are against isn't even released yet.
1. Invention of the microprocessor. TheStreet.com called this the second most important business event of the CENTURY (only the interstate highway system outranked it). Indeed, this is the single invention which enabled the information revolution, without which none us would be here.
2. Invention of semiconductor RAM. Without Intel, memory would be made up of massive arrays of core memory. Intel showed the world that you could build memory out of chips. Again, this helped enable the PC revolution.
3. (sort of) Invention of the integrated circuit. Robert Noyce is credited as the co-inventor of the integrated circuit (with Jack Kilby), and was the first to build one out of silicon. Though he was at Fairchild at the time, he later went on to found Intel.
4. Pentium Pro processor. Possibly the most revolutionary CPU ever built, and certainly the most successful. Remember the context: everybody thought only RISC could compete in performance, and then Intel debuted this product which wallopped even the fastest RISC processors in existence, enabling hundreds of millions of users to gain top notch performance from the existing tens of thousands of applications. The core has went on to scale to everything from mobile to supercomputers.
To say that a small CPU bug, or an unwise agreement with a RAM company (!) invalidate Intel's achievements is simply laughable.
A Celeron system is MUCH cheaper than a Duron system, because an integrated chipset is available for it. AMD didn't even have an integrated chipset on their ROADMAP until a few months ago. So, Intel can afford to charge more for the CPU and still have the lower system price. This is a massive competitive advantage for Intel. Indeed, AMD's share of the sub-$1000 market has deflated from 50% to 5% in the last year.
Intel keeps constantly betting on extra SIMD instructions like SSE, but must've realized already that only a small niche of developers is actually going to support them if not directly payed to optimize their software.
a). Adding SSE2 was directly responsible for the 79% speedup of P4's SPECfp score over P3/Athlon. The instructions are superior to the X87 instructions which the other ones use. This is "innovation"
b). AMD is copying SSE2 on the Sledgehammer project.
The only "trick" AMD has is better performance with legacy X87 FP code. When those programs are rcompiled with SSE2, the P4 will be considerably faster.
Bad - The Pentium 4 is simply UNAVAILABLE. Intel can't produce enough, plus the parts for the P4 are 3 times as expensive.
Wow. That's a LOT of FUD for one sentence. The P4 hasn't even been LAUNCHED yet, but already is available from several vendors. Wait until tomorrow when it is lanuched, and when every major PC vendor will have a system with the part. What's your proof that "Intel can't produce enough"? Intel executives have said that hundreds of thousands will be available by the end of the year.
Your observation is pedestrian, and also shows your ignorance of P4 architecture.
The P4 was designed to cope with branch mispredict penalties and has the most advanced branch prediction of any processor in the market. Moreover, it has the execution trace cache which makes loops much, much cheaper than on other processors.
The main problem with P4 speed is not the long pipeline, but the following:
1. Slow shifts and multiplies. Hence, it does not do well on RC5, and other such benchmarks (Alpha, I might add, also does not)
2. Unoptimized code. Code, particularly FP code, needs to be compiled with SSE2 for top performance.
The SPEC2000 benchmarks (with optimized code) show P4 as the fastest processor in the world on integer (beating out Athlon and Alpha) and the second fastest on FP (second only to Alpha, and MUCH faster than Athlon and most other RISC processors).
It should also do well on memory benchmarks with the 400 MHz bus (vs. Athlon's 266).
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Intel makes computers? Wow, I didn't know that.
It's a relatively unknown fact that Intel is the biggest manufacturer of computers in the world. These are, of course, white-box PC's which are OEM'd to companies who brand them sell them with support. (Not to mention the motherboard and chipset/CPU business...)
Intel's Pentium recall (FDIV bug) cost $450 million. The MTH recall cost $100 million.
The SPEC numbers for P4 have been released. The numbers are SPECint 535 and SPECfp 558 (base).
As a comparison the 833 MHz Alpha 21264 is 518/590.
AMD doesn't publish SPECint, but is 304 for SPECfp for 1.2 GHz Athlon. The 1.13 GHz P3 is 461/320. The fastest SPARC is 438/427.
Which means that P4 is the fastest processor in the world at Integer, and just a tad slower than Alpha at FP (and considerably faster than AMD or the rest of the RISC competition at both).
Those results, however, have not yet been ceritified by SPEC.
You haven't seen SPECint or SPECfp have you?
Just out of curiousity -- since you own so much stock in AMD, and love their processors how much, how do you feel about their use of SSE2 in the Hammer series of processors? They are using it, you know. They are licensing from Intel.
I don't think you understand you chips achieve low power. It has very little to do with the linewidth, and everything to do with power management.
The 1.5 GHz P4 and 1.2 GHz Athlon use very similar processes (at least, both 0.18 um). The P4 has about TRIPLE the number of transistors (which says that the P4 SHOULD consume way more power), and runs at 25% faster clock speed (which says the same thing). YET P4 USES LESS POWER THAN ATHLON (54 watts vs. 52 watts).
The explanation is the P4 has all sorts of fancy power management built in to make it consume so little power. At least, it has this in much better quantity that the Athlon does. This is an extremely important competitive advantage of P4.
Clock that Athlon to 1.5 GHz and it will a heck of a lot more than 54 Watts. I think they projected something like 80-90 Watts. But the P4 will still be at 52 Watts. Thus, the P4 has WAY more headroom for frequency increases.
You're only looking at it from an architecture perspective and not from a circuit perspective.
One thing that every P4 reviewer (even the haters) have remarked is that the P4 runs extremely cool, and is extremely overclockable.
The P4 @ 1.5 GHz runs at LESS THAN ONE THIRD of the temperature of an Athlon at the same speed (30 degrees vs. 95 degrees). This says, of course, that the P4 has dealt with the heat problem already, and thus has SIGNIFICANTLY more head room to increase speed, since it puts out so much less heat.
The Athlon is going to hit a speed bump because it puts out so much heat. You can't sell a processor which takes 95 degrees, so they won't even be able to do 1.5 GHz unless they radically modify the core (... Palomino is supposed to; we'll see).
The reason the P4 doesn't support SMP is simple ... HEAT!
Some clues are in order.
The 1.5 GHz P4 puts out 30 degrees of heat. The 1.5 GHz Athlon is projected to put out 95 (!!!!) degrees of heat. Yep, that's only five degrees less that the boiling point for water.
Intel NEVER has enabled SMP on the first stepping released of a CPU (and AMD and Cyrix have never released a commercial SMP capable platform). The P4 will support SMP probably sooner than any new Intel processor ever. [Here's a clue: the ZDNET article which stated that SMP wouldn't be supported until 2H01 is out and out false].
The P4 will not come with a multi-CPU chipset anytime soon. In fact, the P4 right now and in the next few months will definitely be a no-MP tool.
This is incorrect.
Since the P4 costs as much as two of the 1.2GHz Athlons wouldn't it make more sense to compare the P4 to a system with the AMD 760MP chipset and two of the DDR Athlon 1.2GHz CPUs?
Where can I buy the 760MP chipset? Oohhhh yeah -- it won't be available until 2H01. Heck, the 760 chipset which all of the current benchmarks are against isn't even released yet.
Indeeed. We can look at this another way:
Intel's Biggest Achievements
1. Invention of the microprocessor. TheStreet.com called this the second most important business event of the CENTURY (only the interstate highway system outranked it). Indeed, this is the single invention which enabled the information revolution, without which none us would be here.
2. Invention of semiconductor RAM. Without Intel, memory would be made up of massive arrays of core memory. Intel showed the world that you could build memory out of chips. Again, this helped enable the PC revolution.
3. (sort of) Invention of the integrated circuit. Robert Noyce is credited as the co-inventor of the integrated circuit (with Jack Kilby), and was the first to build one out of silicon. Though he was at Fairchild at the time, he later went on to found Intel.
4. Pentium Pro processor. Possibly the most revolutionary CPU ever built, and certainly the most successful. Remember the context: everybody thought only RISC could compete in performance, and then Intel debuted this product which wallopped even the fastest RISC processors in existence, enabling hundreds of millions of users to gain top notch performance from the existing tens of thousands of applications. The core has went on to scale to everything from mobile to supercomputers.
To say that a small CPU bug, or an unwise agreement with a RAM company (!) invalidate Intel's achievements is simply laughable.
A Celeron system is MUCH cheaper than a Duron system, because an integrated chipset is available for it. AMD didn't even have an integrated chipset on their ROADMAP until a few months ago. So, Intel can afford to charge more for the CPU and still have the lower system price. This is a massive competitive advantage for Intel. Indeed, AMD's share of the sub-$1000 market has deflated from 50% to 5% in the last year.
Intel keeps constantly betting on extra SIMD instructions like SSE, but must've realized already that only a small niche of developers is actually going to support them if not directly payed to optimize their software.
a). Adding SSE2 was directly responsible for the 79% speedup of P4's SPECfp score over P3/Athlon. The instructions are superior to the X87 instructions which the other ones use. This is "innovation"
b). AMD is copying SSE2 on the Sledgehammer project.
Temperature of P4 @ 1.5 GHz : 30 degrees
Projected temperature of Athlon @ 1.5 GHz: 95 degrees
The Pentium Pro was the last new core from Intel. And may I remind you - the first issue of the PPro - It beat the Alpha!
Yes, but so does P4. According to SPEC, the P4 is fastest microprocessor in the world, and faster than Alpha, Athlon, etc.
Available here.
Wow. 2-3x as fast as Athlon's and P3's running DDR or SDR.
You are joking, right?
The only "trick" AMD has is better performance with legacy X87 FP code. When those programs are rcompiled with SSE2, the P4 will be considerably faster.
In the home, however, Intel is dead - but we knew that already - they're unable to compete on price
Intel has 95% of the market for sub-$1000 PC's (compared to less than 50% two years ago).
Bad - The Pentium 4 is simply UNAVAILABLE. Intel can't produce enough, plus the parts for the P4 are 3 times as expensive.
Wow. That's a LOT of FUD for one sentence. The P4 hasn't even been LAUNCHED yet, but already is available from several vendors. Wait until tomorrow when it is lanuched, and when every major PC vendor will have a system with the part. What's your proof that "Intel can't produce enough"? Intel executives have said that hundreds of thousands will be available by the end of the year.
However, the Intel parts have an unfair advantage there, being clocked at 1.4 and 1.5 GHz rather than 1.2.
You're kidding, right?
The answer is that the Pentium 4s were designed to not be SMP capable
This is incorrect.
Your observation is pedestrian, and also shows your ignorance of P4 architecture.
The P4 was designed to cope with branch mispredict penalties and has the most advanced branch prediction of any processor in the market. Moreover, it has the execution trace cache which makes loops much, much cheaper than on other processors.
The main problem with P4 speed is not the long pipeline, but the following:
1. Slow shifts and multiplies. Hence, it does not do well on RC5, and other such benchmarks (Alpha, I might add, also does not)
2. Unoptimized code. Code, particularly FP code, needs to be compiled with SSE2 for top performance.
The SPEC2000 benchmarks (with optimized code) show P4 as the fastest processor in the world on integer (beating out Athlon and Alpha) and the second fastest on FP (second only to Alpha, and MUCH faster than Athlon and most other RISC processors).
It should also do well on memory benchmarks with the 400 MHz bus (vs. Athlon's 266).