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2.2 GHz Xeon
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"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
Speed is very nice, but.... (Score:3, Interesting)
All this speed is encouraging programmers to be lazy and not use good code that works fast, but rather rely on the hardware being fast.
Just a bit of a rant...
Spurred by AMD and IBM? (Score:3, Interesting)
Since 1991, IBM and Motorola have collaborated on the PowerPC architecture for personal computers, workstations, servers and embedded processor product lines, yet have developed and marketed separate implementations. Driven by the tremendous success of PowerPC microprocessors in the embedded marketplace, the companies announced in September 1997 the start of a joint effort to further enhance the PowerPC architecture to ensure greater consistency in their future embedded products. The Book E project and the new architecture it defines is the result of that effort.
With the chips being 64bit and fully capable of supporting multiple cores, it could give IBM servers and workstations a boost. The chip architecture wars are about to start to hit another exciting stretch, as long research programs begin to produce results for Intel, AMD, and AIM. 2002 should be a big year.
Re:For pc-emulation (Score:2, Interesting)
That's not enough to run Pong... (Score:2, Interesting)
There was a discussion about this on the MAME discussion board (www.mame.net) saying that it would probably require 5Ghz machines to run a simulation of the circuits using the schematics of the game. Pong is an analog game, it's got no microprocessor nor ROM. So emulating it is mighty difficult!
Dual XEON vs. Dual Athlon - Misinformed! (Score:1, Interesting)
First off Hyper-Threading (Hmm, I guess that's really two words).
It IS true that AMD's chips have a slightly faster ALU / FPU, but that's because they have a shorter execution pipe. Once Intel starts pushing the clock speed of the P4 core up to something reasonable, the loss in instructions per clock cycle will not matter since the clock speed will be doubled. Problem with this is, morons will always be comparing an AMD CPU that runs at a much lower clockspeed with a higher clockspeed Intel chip and deduct that AMD CPUs are better. NOT TRUE! They're completely different architectures, the P4 is pretty much a 786 as far as I'm concerned.
As for AMDs "MP" line... DON'T BUY them! If you seriously need an SMP server / workstation and your budget only allows an x86 processor, you'll want to go with Intel. Why, you ask? Simple, they're reliable to 9 decimal places. This is especially noticable with the way ALL of Intel's cores handle heat distribution.
No matter how hard you try, you can't get an Intel P4 to malfunction due to operating heat and although you can stop a P3, you'd be hard pressed to permanently damage the core.
There's also the issue of complex ALU / FPU operations... The P4 core can actually use SSE2 at run-time even if the code is written using plain ol' x86. And a lot of MMX instruction calls can simply be replaced with a coresponding SSE2 instruction call with NO other changes to the code.
Another thing that makes it better is the MUCH higher memory bandwidth. DDR is just plain sad compared to the througput you can get using SSE2 and RAMBUS in concert. You can actually exceede the rated bandwidth limit for RAMBUS using both of them together (I've done it).
And finally, all Intel cores are capable of being updated / modified at boot time using microcode... This means if Intel locates a CPU bug / bottleneck / other issue, they can essentially correct it everytime you reboot. This has its limitations, but it's a far cry from AMD's solution (they have none!).
Anyway, do what you want with this...
In the end Intel has the better x86 cores, and theres always IA64 if you really have a need for a multi-processor x86 compatible server or workstation.