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Intel

Coming Soon From Intel 153

Posted by CmdrTaco from the run-on-fans dept.
wadetemp writes: "CNET has a story with details on the release of Intel's newest chips. Supposedly 1.4Ghz P4 will be out in time for the holidays, with numerous other models at some random date in the near or far future." And just when I finally got a P3!
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Coming Soon From Intel More

Coming Soon From Intel

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  • Re:Summary: (Score:5)

    by Tower ( 37395 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @04:08AM (#862862)
    That was my thought when I read it.

    "New, from Intel. The [something] will be coming out in X months and will be way faster than [competitor's chip]. Not to mention the other versions of [something] that will be [superlative] and really [synonym for kick-ass]. We really will ship it when we say. No, it's not just another turn of the x86 crank, it's really new architecture [sweat]. Please, just leave us alone, we haven't had competition for 15 years, and now this is starting to wear on us. Yes, it's the [oldchip +1], but really, it's all sorts of new and different. No our coppermines don't actually use copper, but we really thought we were going to... don't be mad... Dave? What are you doing, Dave?....... Daisy... Daisy...."

    --
  • That's not the point.
    We all know that, chips get faster.

    The point is: when, how much faster and
    how much it will cost, by whom (Intel, AMD ?)
    etc, etc..

    Just my 2 cent.
  • Not always...
    With RAM being cheap and cache on chip, disk speed will only give certain gains.
    The work that I do (software rendering) is as much or more CPU bound than it is I/O bound and it is all over the network from a new RAID system.

    Boosts in CPU speed is big news. Compare 42 dual 600's vs 42 dual 1,400's... the difference is worth being excited about.

    Also... space efficency. More power in a chip, the less boxes (in theory... we all know projects expand to use what you have) needed.

  • Intel CPUs would cost as much if they didn't sell as many as they do. If the Alpha had the marketshare that the Pentium does, it would be much more reasonably priced.

    True, but if Compaq and Compaq resellers don't make the start (to drop the prices), don't expect the people to follow.

    I'm sure Compaq's marketing would love it if everybody started buing Alphas with their prices staying that high, but that simply will not happen.

    It's as plain as that.

    Trian

    PS. I love the Alpha platform and I'd definitely buy one and scrap my Intel box, but I don't have the few extra thousands $$$ it takes...

  • > Incidentally, what did it take to o/c the 366 to 550?

    2 Things: Cooling, and Power.

    1. A heatsink. I mean a REAL heatsink: www.3dfxcool.com/alpha7ho.htm [3dfxcool.com]
    Don't let the website name fool you, they sell cpu coolers (along with video card fans)

    2. The 2nd cpu needed a little extra juice. Had to bump the voltage up to 2.10v. Also, in the BIOS, turn Error Speed Hold off (forgeting the exact name, but should be close enough), and also select Custom MHz: FrontSideBus speed: 100 Mhz.

    I've been running the dual system since last Nov. I've had NT4 and NT5 crash about once every 2 months, due to a "IRQ not handled exception." Never did track this one down.

    You might want to check the overclockers database to see if the week your cpu was made, can be overclocked: Overclockers Database [sba.com]
    Main site is here:www.overclockers.com [overclockers.com]

    Also, make sure you upgrade the Abit BP6 Bios.
    www.bp6.com [bp6.com]

    I think my next upgrade will be dual 1 GHz P3's. I want my system to be 100% rock solid (allthough I am EXTREMELY HAPPY with the c366 @ 550 ;-)

    Cheers
  • The Pentium 4 is coming soon, but it is only the first of a number of products coming from Intel in the next 16 months.

    Translation: RSN (an acronym for the big lie of the 80's)

    The company is preparing to launch its Pentium 4 early in the fourth quarter and will follow the release with a number of processors for different product segments, according to sources. The chip will run at 1.4 GHz, Intel has said.

    At the best it will be out and will not have bugs. A the worst it's a bluff attempt to encourage buyers to put off that purchase of a Ghz AMD for the holidays. Considering the problems observed noted on Tom's Hardware Page [tomshardware.com] with a PIII attempting to run 1.13 Ghz, this seems excessively optimistic. IMHO Tom Pabst jumped the gun a bit to trample Intel, shoot first and call Intel PR later, I'm cynical enough to consider this a ploy to prop up Intel reputation, if not 4th quarter stock value.

    Toward the end of the third quarter in 2001, the company will come out with Northwood, an improved version of the Pentium 4, according to Bert McComas, an analyst at InQuest Market

    Improved: With the Bugs worked out?

    Before that, in the middle of 2001, Intel will come out with Tualatin, a version of the Pentium III made on the 0.13-micron process, more advanced than the current 0.18-micron process, McComas said. The micron measurements refer to the size of certain features on the chip. By shrinking the features, a manufacturer can make the chip smaller as well as boost its performance.

    Along with being faster, Tualatin will also contain a larger secondary cache, a bank of memory close to the processor that boosts performance, according to one source. Tualatin Pentium IIIs will contain 512KB of integrated cache, compared to 256KB of integrated cache on current Pentium IIIs.

    Maybe Titilation would be a better name. Why continue to develop the PIII and Celeron with the PIV out? Shouldn't one of these (PIII | Celeron) be dumped?

    Tualatin will also come with a 200-MHz system bus.

    This [via.com.tw] actually sounds more exciting.

    The Pentium 4 and its successors come at a pivotal time for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker. The company has not been able to meet demand for many of its processors since last November. The chronic shortages, combined with the success Advanced Micro Devices has enjoyed with Athlon, have allowed AMD to capture a substantial position in the consumer market.

    The most telling, "RSN, RSN!!"

    The Pentium 4 is expected to give Intel the advantage over AMD in performance, according to analysts.

    Analysts who haven't read about the AMD 64bit CPU.

    Northwood will be made on the 0.13-micron process. The shift to this more advanced manufacturing process will allow Intel to boost the clock speed.

    Just 0.13 microns thicker than vapor. Wow!

    Overall, Rambus will occupy only a niche, he said. "It's a pretty clear admission that Intel is not going to make more of Rambus than the market is willing to make of it," he said.

    Rambus would make a good name for a clown...

    Intel could not be reached for comment and typically does not comment on product code names or unreleased products.

    But their happy to comment on vapor.

    Intel executives have said that Pentium 4 will be ready for the holiday buying season in 2000.

    Read: Gift buying season.

    Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000
  • > But Win2K screamed on those duals,

    NT4 was DEFINATELY much more snappy on a dual system. Win2K still seems a little sluggish, BUT ONLY when opening a new window, it seems fine otherwise. I think it's the ram, or lack of it. Both, at work (single cpu) and at home (dual cpu's) only have 128 megs of RAM. I'm thinking another 128 megs would help. (Here I thought NT was a memory pig, then along comes Diablo 2 ;-)

    > How much would the P3-800s run for nowadays anyway?
    Checking www.mwave.com [mwave.com], the P3s-800 are ~ $320. I have bought stuff from there before and enjoy the quality of service, even though they aren't _the_ cheapest, they do have good prices.

    > In fact I'm planning on playing around with a 1394 hard drive adapter one of these days.
    Isn't 1394 firewire ?

    I probably should upgrade my outdated scsi-2 up to scsi-160. I need a screaming fast drive for reading / writing. Any recommendations I should look into? (I have a budget max of $500 for a new hard drive plus controller.)

    Cheers
  • We all know this is just a figment of your imagination, put there by the Intel PR dept.

    I mean, look at the availability of the 1Ghz PIII, can you even get one today? Even PIII's as low as 900 Mhz are hard to get. Then there's the supposed 1.14Ghz (which sucked), what happened to that one? And now they try and convince us that a chip almost 300 Mhz than their previous and on a new platform (supposedly), will be not only stable and fast but available anytime in the near future? Put down the crack pipe Intel.
  • It's funny - every time Intel has been on the verge of releasing a brand new redesigned architecture (Pentium, PPro and now P4) there are many people who say "why don't we get it over with and put x86 out of its misery?".

    Then the new chip comes out and a detailed look is done and the benchmarks and reviews start to say things like "it's just as fast as this RISC chip clocked twice as fast" etc etc. The x86 nay-sayers should wait until the new chip is out and have a look. They have survived the "CISC is dead! Long live RISC" and produced superior chips.

    The x86 chips play to two kinds of buyers: the "I want best bang-for-the-buck" and "I like the software/OS that i have, I just want it to run a little faster". The first group is happy with x86 'cause they are inexpensive for the performance they provide (master of the obvious am I ;) The second group, which is business and people that actually - I mean really depend on their computers. If they are depending on x86, they don't want it to change too much.

  • Although I just commented [slashdot.org] in the discussion about the 1GHz via chip that I sometimes wish new chips didn't come so quickly, I read this article and thought, "Cool! Faster chips!" because I want the price of the 850MHz PIII to drop rapidly so I can upgrade my 450 :) I guess the moral of this lesson is that you can't make a geek happy, you can only hope to distract him for a while with new shiny objects. :)
  • And what about the 4004 and the 8008? Intel produced these as well, before all of the ones on your list.
    I don't have enough figures about these. Do you ?

    And the 80186 was used quite a bit, there were Research Machines (UK Education Computer) that had it, and quite a lot of ol' hard disk controllers used to use it.
    Does it mean these were superiorly powerful ?
    Like all the Intel chips, these have been (relatively ) widely used. This is a question of marketing, not of performances.
    IMHO a very good Intel proc was the i860, the one that powered the NeXTdimension card so that it could perform complex operations in color using Display PostScript in real time (I made the tests of zooming details captured in real time from a handycam using this device.).
    Now, the most advanced processor that Intel provides is the StrongARM. It is also the simplest but it is still far away the ARM10.
    --
  • Advertising bonanza!


    For the budget segment, the company will come out with Timna, an inexpensive version of Celeron containing a built-in graphics chip and a memory controller.


    This is perfect cross-media tie-in advertising chance for the South Park boys - they can have their wheelchair bound character pop-up in all the commercials shouting TIMNA!


    =tkk

  • Isn't that the point of Gateway's whole YourWare thing? From what I understand, it works almost like a lease sort of deal...no major up-front cost, just monthly payments. Ans after a year or two, you can trade up to a newer system. Or something like that.

    I prefer my "filter down" upgrade approach where every few months I replace some part in my main system and schlop the old bits into another box on the apartment network. Once a year or so I go for a new mobo/proc. Keeps me current enough.

  • Actually, it can work in your favour. Because the latest CPU is seen as the next 'gotta have', the previous iteration of the CPU always tumbles in price.

  • remember UF ? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Sniper ( 113827 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @04:17AM (#862876)
    does anyone else remember the userfreindly sunday strib featuring the purple-suited intel engineer with a white pen adding a third "I" to a pentium II to make the pentium III ?

  • Does it really matter (Score:4)

    by linuxci ( 3530 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @04:17AM (#862877)
    All processor upgrades seem to give you very little performance gain compared to what you expect them to give you because the CPU is not the major performance bottleneck of the machine. The biggest offender is the hard disk drive which explains why things run so slow when you have to rely on virtual memory. The amount of idle time my distributed.net [distributed.net] client gets on a 266MHz machine when in normal use is amazing, you may need faster machines to play games on but for normal use (at least in Linux) it still performs well. So should I buy one? Perhaps if I want better distributed.net stats but that's about it. We need something more than increased clock speed to make it worthh upgrading.
  • I submitted this article [zdnet.com] about this machine [xtrem.com] earlier, but it was promptly swatted down.

    Is there anybody out there doing something similar with Intel-based machines?
  • Here the article says:

    For the budget segment, the company will come out with Timna, an inexpensive version of Celeron containing a built-in graphics chip and a memory controller. In the following quarter, the company will release a version of Timna for mobile computers, sources said.

    But doesn't say *when* the sucker will be out - just that it will be mobile the following quarter.
  • Intel CPUs would cost as much if they didn't sell as many as they do. If the Alpha had the marketshare that the Pentium does, it would be much more reasonably priced.

  • there are finally one or two folks offering the 1 ghz processor on pricewatch (at $1100+). this is almost 6 months after the announced the product. even if this processor is worth anything (and given their approach to the instruction set, the compiler support necessary to obtain full optimization of instruction scheduling is problematic), i figure its going to be a looooooong while before any of these see the light of day. intel is having to fight amd off amd bigtime has to play its fud card early and often. folks are beginning to catch on though, so its value is becoming less and less. somehow, i think you will see "hammers" in things before you see this hunk of silicon vaporchip.
  • The question brought to mind by your obvious attempt at humor is this:

    When these "super-speed" 1.4 Ghz monsters 'come-to-market' (as they say) will they be as 'real' as the 1 Ghz monsters are now?

    I have yet to hear of anyone other than some reviewer getting a 1 Ghz chip from Intel. However, I do know a few people that managed to snag a 1 Ghz AMD chip. So, which really matters, who 'comes to market' first, or which chip you can actually *BUY* first? Just a question.
  • > is get a dual-Celeron board with two 500s or 600s for Win2K.

    Been there done that. (Abit BP6 w/ 2x Cel 366 o/c to 550)

    Instead, get a dual P3-800 with minimum 128 megs of ram. (Or get a dual mobo w/ 1 cpu now, and wait for the price of the 800's to come down in a few months)
  • So its OK to support a processor monopoly, but supporting an operating system monoply is bad? Sounds pretty hypocritical. Well, it would if it wasn't for the fact that you are owned for VA Linux.
  • As much as I love Intel (kinda a love-hate thing), and you guys. And I am typing this on a PIII.

    X86 Architecture is played out and breathed its last a long time ago.

    How about they quit just raising the bus speeds, and give us some new technology.

  • Supposedly 1.4Ghz P4 will be out in time for the holidays

    Those puppies will run hot enough that Intel had better get them out before the Spring thaw...

  • > because I want the price of the 850MHz PIII to drop rapidly so I can upgrade my 450 :)

    Hear, hear.

    I'm waiting for the 1 GHz's to drop so I can upgrade my dual 550s.

    "Once you taste a SMP machine, you will cringe when you go back to uniprocessor land" :-)
  • Actually they are going to cut them on Monday the 14th. I really cant wait to buy a GHz T-Bird, but I'm still waiting for a good DDR MoBo, so by the time they come out a GHz should be cheaper.
  • It used to be the chip gods fought over who could get the biggest and baddest into the market first, now we see two stories about how they are, in-the-not-too-distant-if-we-are-lucky-future, GOING to MAYBE demolish the competition. This is getting sad. Maybe someone could increase the clue levels over at Intel, Via, AMD et. al. about vaporware & hype?

    -={(Astynax)}=-
  • Don't you consider MMX, SSE,and SSE2 to be gimicks for marketing than actually useful? I'm sure some programs can take advantage of these things, but do we really need them? Why don't the chip designers put some effort into actually improving the chip rather than attaching shiny things to it?

    Rambus would make a good name for a clown...

  • Yawn (Score:1)

    by uradu ( 10768 )
    The time when I would still get excited about a new CPU has long gone. I'll admit, I'm not a hard-core gamer, nor do I run 3DMax or any other cycle-guzzling hog. However, I do some occasional video editing with my Canon ZR1 MiniDV and a Pyro card, and my Celeron 366->460 with 200MB suits me perfectly. I never find myself twiddling my thumbs or cursing the machine like in days gone by. One thing I might do one of these days, just for coolness or kicks, is get a dual-Celeron board with two 500s or 600s for Win2K.

    Other than that, there will have to be a very significant shift in CPU capabilities for me to get excited again. In fact, it might have to be more than just a new CPU, though frankly I don't know what at the moment. Maybe finally DSL in this shithole? Anyone else feeling that pragmatic about CPUs lately?

    Uwe Wolfgang Radu

  • Re:Does it really matter (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We need a stable, fast, memory based storage
    medium. That would speed things up considerably,
    because then "hard disk access" would be 100%
    electronic; we would then not be relying upon
    the mechanics presently in hard drives that can
    get hung or damaged. The reason why hard drives
    fail is not because of the electronics, its more
    because of the mechanis in todays hard drives.

  • Always trailing edge (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I am always trailing edge. There's a price curve, and if you stay below it your cost is always less than half that of the 'latest-greatest.'

    It goes way back for me. My first PC was a clone 8088 motherboard, 4.77 MHz, no turbo, thankyou, that I bought at a swapmeet and shoehorned into a 'Leading Edge' case that it wasn't even intended for. (the expansion cards were spaced differently, so I had to go in with a hacksaw to the case). At the time everyone was buying shiny new 'Turbo' XT clones for what to me seemed like huge amounts of money. I upgraded to the XT clone long after they had been out, as I held onto my BigBoard machine (Xerox 820 clone) running CP/M-80 with two 8" floppy drives. Later on, my first hard drive was a 5 MB full-height Shugart drive that I picked up at a surplus store for $29 (at the time everyone was spending $2-300 on Seagate 20 MB ST-225s).

    Now my newest machine is a Pentium 3 450 that I bought after the faster ones were out. I don't feel left out or way behind the curve. It just doesn't make sense to me to pay top dollar for what will be an average machine in a few months.

  • Not really for consumers? (Score:3)

    by evanbd ( 210358 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @04:23AM (#862894)
    OK, I know intel is pushing this (somewhat) as for gaming and such, but does it really matter? Right now it seems to me the graphics card is the limiting factor. If you look at Q3A/UT benchmarks, and decide that you wish to run your game at say 60FPS, then a 1GHz processor only does marginally better than a 700MHz processor. Granted, it goes significantly better at 640x480, at 150FPS, but who really cares? When you get to the resolution where frame rates drop to 60FPS, its b/c of the graphics card not the CPU. The fact that it can drive 150FPS in ANY resolution means that the chip is not the bottleneck.

    That's not to say there aren't uses, like any kind of simulation or software rendering, but not for the mass market. *maybe* high quality speech recog will benefit, but currently I think this is only useful for commercial apps. Of course, that doesn't stop me from running a 900MHz Duron (as soon as it gets here...)

    ---

  • Or is Intel still doing their little just-closer-to-maximum-speed thing with their chips? I'd be willing to bet I could overclock a 1 ghz way past 1.4 with no problem.

  • Wow (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Intel plans on making faster chips. Hrmm. I never would have guessed.
  • Alpha and POWER/PowerPC should be more than sufficient to get everyone off of x86. Both run better in the FPU department than the x86, and the PowerPC line is great in the power consumption areas. Alpha and POWER offer 640bit solutions, for those that actually need it. The better that we can get at making common code (Linux, portable C/C++/Java) the more choices we have, and the less dependant we are on sticking to x86.

    Damn I wish my Alpha still worked.

    --
  • Personally, I like the idea of new chips coming out all the time. Every time Intel releases a new chip, the prices on the chips below it go down. 1.4's coming? Go checkout what 866s or 933s will be selling for in a couple of months.

    Still, it's kind of interesting how Intel is releasing their chips now. Used to be you'd get a 100Mhz increase. Now, it seems they're aiming for 200Mhz, just to make the numbers look bigger in Ghz notation.

  • Re:Played Out (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Again, someone is supposed to chime in with a comment about how 'with Open Source, everything is portable' ignoring the fact that nobody cares about portability except when meaning that they can run the $6,000 worth of old Apps they carry along every time they do an upgrade. And they're binaries.

    We've got to just stop chiming in all the time as if Open Source is any kind of priority for the typical computer user. It isn't. It won't be, unless you can magically spit out the source for the five years worth of apps that people know and like.

    Whatever.
  • 2ns disk! Is that per transfer, or setup time? I'd love to see 2ns latency from main memory first.

    You could always go with a solid state hard drive, but most of the time you'd be better off just getting more system RAM.

    --
  • Why stick with Intel? You can get a GHz T-Bird for ~$660. Then you could get some extra memory for that bad boy too. after you overclock it to 1.1Ghz of course. :)

    I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.

  • Disk speed is a problem for a lot of average apps, but there are solutions:

    New motherboards from ABit (and probably other companies) have built in RAID 0/1 for ATA100. If you put two nice fast 7200 RPM ATA100 drives on those, you get a major boost in hard drive performance for very little extra cost. Better than SCSI for many applications (but not servers).

    And with RAM so cheap, you can always just add another 128 MB DIMM and get extra caching. Just about every operating system, even Microsoft's, does a pretty good job of using extra memory to speed up disk access these days.

    &lt daydream &gt
    My next machine will be the dual theme:

    dual Athelons, (when the motherboards come out), dual video cards (one wicked-fast AGP 3d, one cheaper PCI), dual monitors, dual ATA100 hard drives in a striped RAID config, and dual data rate SDRAM -- dual 256 MB DIMMs = 512MB, hopefully interleaved.

    &lt /daydream &gt

    (sigh).


    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
  • 20 stage pipelines are not a good solution. I betthe BPU itself is about half the size of the whole processor. Forget 98%. The BPU better be 99.999% right at prededication of the williamette will have scky performance.

    Check out this article at MDR. [mdronline.com]
    --
  • Yeah, but where are they gonna get original pentium chips so that they can add the "v"? I can see it now...... "Intel will allow you to trade up your old Pentium-class computers in exchange for a brand-spanking new Pentium IV. Only $1099!" Yeah..right......
  • Supposedly 1.4GHz P4 will be out in time for the holidays...

    Yeah, right. "In time for the holidays" in retail means "in the warehouses by September". Intel isn't even shipping 1.0GHz PIII in high volume yet. If you go to Compaq and select a top-of-the-line desktop, they try to sell you a 1GHz AMD Athlon. [compaq.com] Dell tries to sell you an 800MHz PIII. [dell.com] Intel is struggling to catch up. That's OK. But instead of pumping 1GHz machines that work out the door in volume at a reasonable price, they're announcing new vaporware machines to confuse customers. That's not OK. IBM used to get into antitrust trouble for that sort of thing.

  • You may not have too much longer to wait for the 1 GHz PIII, as Intel is apparently due to start shipping [theregister.co.uk] significant quantities on the 14th. To celebrate, AMD has brought forward [theregister.co.uk] its next big price cuts to the same day, dropping the wholesale price of its 1 GHz part to $470. The Simpsons' Itchy and Scratchy spring irresitably to mind. See what I mean about morbid pleasure?
  • Should we have some sort of standard or IEEE roadmap for planning new processor technology for the next 3 years or something? Course maybe I am just silly. But, it would be nice if I knew that my processor was going to last more than a year. Just a stray thought.

  • tell me when Intel can get me a GHz for less than $2000.

    Like, If intel can make stable Ghz proc's

  • If I could, I'd moderate this way up.
  • Oh yeah, or I could just run Linux like I do on my PIII. Especially since most of the apps that I actually use work on it. But then, I must be on crack to want to use anything but Win2k, right?

  • FROM - desborough not IN desborough

    you twat
  • ...why doesn't someone just set up /. to AUTOMATICALLY link to every CNet story? It seems that so many of their stories get referred to here, it'd just save all of us a lot of effort. ...or MAYBE we could all just check news.com regularly! Sheesh.
  • hehe :) good point. for reference, read Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com] and his article on the *new* pentium 3 1133. it's hilarious. he's so bitter at intel...
  • Also, it's ironic that you bring up "style vs safety". Surplus power allows you to run useful daemons that improve safety and reliability of your system, from background disk checking to virus scanning. And apps designed for a faster "average" platform can build in more layers of checks and safeguards without having to weigh them against performance costs.

    Of course we all know this never happens. The platform is simply more tolerant to hideously slow code, and it seems like few people emphasize stability over a large set of features (bloat) these days.
  • he has the processor -> he got a paper cut. ergo, the processor exists only on paper.

    And it wasn't funny, so you're both right :)
  • ..when it comes to the price/performance ratio. I got a Slot A 700Mhz Tbird and I'm running it at 977Mhz. An equivelant P3 would cost at least 200 to 250 dollars more (comparing a p3-933 and a k7-950 TBird). Not only that, AMD is really aggressive with prices now. $470 for a gig chip? Compared to a $1,199 premium for an Intel P3 @ 1 gig. Which makes more sense?

    Here's the link for slashed AMD prices
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/cont ent/1/12489.html [theregister.co.uk]

    And Sharky's Weekly CPU prices
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/cont ent/1/12489.html [sharkyextreme.com]

  • Yeah, I set up two machines with the BP6 and 500s for two friends, which they got on my recommendation--though I haven't followed my own preaching and stayed with an Epox and 366/460. But Win2K screamed on those duals, quantitatively they seemed the fastest machines I ever played with. I'm sure a PIII will benchmark faster, but I doubt they will FEEL much faster.

    > Instead, get a dual P3-800 with minimum 128 megs of ram.

    :-> Well, I think I'll stick with the BP6/Celeron combination for the price. I mean, under $300 for mobo+CPUs is hard to beat. How much would the P3-800s run for nowadays anyway?

    Frankly, as I already said, the fascination of computers for me has shifted from the hardware itself to other things, such as communications infrastructure (i.e. Internet), media integration (MP3 music server) and such. The only hardware that has excited me lately is the final breakthrough of USB and 1394. I know USB gets a lot of flack because of crappy implementations, but I consider it a very exciting technology compared to what it replaces. And 1394 is simply its bigger brother. In fact I'm planning on playing around with a 1394 hard drive adapter one of these days. Would be cool to have 10 or 20 IDE drives hanging off one system, all hot swappable.

    Uwe Wolfgang Radu
  • I wonder how many John Q. Public's realize that 90% of the time, their processor is sitting there saying, "Gimme sumthin to do, gimme sumthin to do!" Consumers are so brainwashed into thinking faster is better. I think Intel should have a slogan like "Show me the money!"
  • > Abit BP6 w/ 2x Cel 366 o/c to 550

    Incidentally, what did it take to o/c the 366 to 550? I cranked mine up to 460 no sweat, but it wouldn't boot beyond that. Did you increase the voltage on it? I never fooled with that, since I simply wasn't that desperate for extra power.

    Uwe Wolfgang Radu

  • Leaked Intel Email (Score:3)

    by DarkMan ( 32280 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @04:34AM (#862920) Journal

    -- Begin included email--
    From: XXXXXXXX@intel.com
    To: XXXXX@intel.com
    Subject: New marketing plan

    Ok guys, looks like we've been getting some criticism about the new 1.4 GHz chips. Here's the new marketing stratagy for those.

    "The new 1.4 GHz Pentium fron Intel is a milestone in computer chip technology. Beign so revolutionary, it requires a case and motherboard pgrade, to a new style called MacroATX. An example of this case can bee seen here [planetquake.com]. Note the stylish design, and improved form factor. Cooling is handled by the ultradisctrete cooling network in the case specifications.

    - Improved performance [0]
    - Fewer devices required [1]
    - Next generation technology [2]
    - Complient with all currnet standards [3]

    There. That aught to do it.

    [0] Of our shares.
    [1] The 1.4 GHz pentium will replace the toaster, waffle iron, and desktop fan. All in one box. Value, huh?
    [2] Yep, definitly technology dating from 1980, the generation of the NeXT.
    [3] All the buzzwords: Client-server, Internet, Intranet, .NET, Linux, Windows, HTTP, HTML, WAP, HTCPCP [4], mobile office etc.
    [4] See RFC 2324.

    -- End included email --

    PS: Spoof.
  • How to bathe a cat

    I know of someone who simply takes the cat with him when he showers... Really!
  • Funny, none of our Access 97 databases worked under Access 2K until I went and redid a bunch of stuff in all of them... And that's the same product, and only a slightly different platform, that my company paid out the ass for. Strangely, all of my perl scripts and databases survive the move across many unix boxen.


  • *sigh*

    he has the processor -> he got a paper cut. ergo, the processor exists only on paper.


    --
  • Not forgetting the most important question, which chips perform better on distributed.net (some perform really well because they have highly optimised cores!).

    Ah well stay behind the cutting edge and you can find yourself some really good cpu's that are good enough for normal use.

  • Facts (Score:2)

    by mirko ( 198274 )
    Intel successively made the following (reads like a new dance) :
    1. 8086 (16bit) - technological advance
    2. 8088 (8bit) - technological step backward
    3. 80186 that nobody remembers - technological "sur place"
    4. 286 - technological advance
    5. 386 DX - technological advance
    6. 386 SX - technological step backward
    7. 486 DX - technological advance
    8. 486 DX - technological step backward
    9. Pentium 60-66-90 - aborted technological advance
      (its bugs make me think of a publicly available prototype)
    10. Pentium 75-100-133 - small technological advance
    11. Pentium Pro - technological advance
    12. Pentium II - technological step backward
      (It was intended to be 16bit OS -aka Win9x- compatible which the PPro wasn't ;
      What made the PII look faster than the PPro was SDRAM, period.)
    13. MMX - small technological advance
    14. PIII - technological step backward
    15. PIV - technological step backward
    16. IA64 - technological advance
    OK, now, you might ask yourselves why I consider some step as a technological advance or not ?
    Look at the Power/Frequency figures. The drops they encountered were even so obvious between the PPro and the PII that Intel just changed its iComp index meanwhile, hence the iComp 2 (R)(TM) and soon the iCompIII (R)(TM).
    Now because of complexity, the only way they have to make a CPU quicker is to increase its clock frequency. But, we have to be honest. Their efficiency slowly diminish as there are more and more units intervening in their processings.
    Today, Intel promises a 1.4GHz chip which performances could be reached at home by overclocking some liquid-nitrogen-cooled older Pentium.
    Even when I try to believe they are sincere and they technically trust their products' advance, their are still these details like the *quite* recent announcement of the VIA chip, faster AMDs, Faster G4, etc.
    Come on Intel. Years ago, you really happened to introduce new, twice-as-fast-as-the-previous chips on the market. Now, you just wait for somebody around you to announce a product to announce something supposedly (a little) faster that takes time to reach the market because of produciton problems.
    I suggest we just publish actual products availability announces on /.
    --
  • True, the way the prices tumble. I have had *very* unfortunate experiences where I lost a lot of money in these times.(486 one month b4 Pentium, etc)
    But What about that "true essence of technology" bit?
    These techies want more money, so they cant wait to get down to release their new product, which is just one or 2 instructions added to the previous. That's what infuriates me.

    "If at first you dont succeed, Reboot" - iotaspace.net [iotaspace.net]
  • The article states that this is a tweaked PIII core with more L2 Cache, its .13 micron so that they can run an outdated core faster, good idea but does that really require a new number? why can't it be called PIII Pro or something else equally as dumb. Why does moving to .13 micron warrent a new number? why not just do what they did before? and some letters to the end of it, like PIII 600EB, we could have PIII 1400X.

    There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann

  • Or, at least not the way I expected...
  • When I first saw Tualatin I read it as Too-Late-ium.
  • The reason the 1.13's are so unstable and difficult to produce is because they are trying to squeeze that last little extra bit of tartar-control MHz from the ancient tube of P6-brand toothpaste in a stupid attempt to regain their image as maker of the 'fastest' chips (but instead gaining an image as maker of the most faulty chips).

    The Wilamette is a brand new core (like Athlon was a year ago), and is designed from the beginning to run at high speeds. It's been running at 1.4GHz for some time now. 2GHz is not a pipe dream at all, any more than 1GHz was for the Athlon (which was introduced at half that speed).

  • Hey just be luckie they gave a date. they claimed d2 would be out "next quarter" for like 2 years.

  • so, from !!! to !V (?)... that takes an eraser, too.

    --
  • oh, I thought it was:
    [1]... toaster, waffle iron, and space heater.

    --
  • Great site... can't even view it. All in flash (damn Scraper on AIX!)

    --
  • I agree. I've seen the AMD-loving ruskies firsthand, they recite their AMD-loving rusky warchant: K-6 2! 3d-Now! Ath-ell-lon! Ram-buss-Ram! CD-ROM! G-N-U! This is a magnum bullet to the forehead of the entire AMD-loving rusky population. They finally see that not only do Intel chips have the legendary stability, they're just plain faster, too. AMD has been a prime target of my upcoming manifesto, "The Whoring of the Digital World" ever since its conception. The Athlon incompatibilities have forced programmers to add shoddy code to their masterpieces, and perhaps soon, RedHat, VA and SCO will have to make Athlon kernels for their distributions.
  • No but kryotech do supercooling for AMD machines. 1.5GHz Kryocooled Athlon is promised from them around october, with 1.2 due soon (actually i think AMD will beat them to a market with a non cool chip). Kryotech makes the "rengade" cooling system which overclockers can use to home brew super cooled Intel machines. But Intel doesn't give Kryotech any enough help or early access to the Intel tech so they don't do Intel based systems.
  • Well, the Alpha would have a much bigger market penetration if it wasn't so damn expensive. Do you really want to spend $3000 just for the CPU and motherboard? I know I don't have that money. I suspect that an awful lot of people are in that situation.

    Otherwise, aside from that and the occasional lack of 64bit cleanness, the Alpha is a nice platform.

    You also don't have the time to even look. As an example, go to Microway [microway.com] and look at their Alpha workstations. A 533MHz 21164 w/NT4 or RH6.2 for $1,995. I'm pretty sure I've even seen lower prices on Alphas, shop [alpha-processor.com] around.

    Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000
  • I heard that the next price break (after this one) is supposed to be September 20th. The 1000 should be under $500.

    I usually try not to pay more than $150 for processors. The 800 Thunderbird should be in my range at the end of September. The DDR motherboards should be out by then, too.

    The big decision will be - do I get a motherboard the supports SDR, so I can salvage my RAM, or do I get a DDR motherboard and new RAM. (I can always put the old RAM in my K6-3) Maybe someone will make a motherboard that supports both. Hmmm....
  • How can you sa that things are "step backwards" when the products were not meant to be forward, like the 386SX, which was not intended to be better than the 386DX, clearly, but intended for other purposes, like making cheaper machines...

    Not all new cpu releases are for improving speed, some are for improving availability, often linked to price...

    Actually, the 386SX is not an improvement over the 386DX, but the 286 it was meant to replace. With things like v86 mode and other nice technological advances that you don't seem to care about, because they don't match your timeline.

  • Yeah, you're probably right. But for the most part, what else can you do with slow code but throw metal at it? Even if everything I ran was open source (it isn't) and I was a master programmer (I'm not), I still run too many too large apps to go in and optimize all of them. I need a chip that tolerates hideously slow code, even more than everything I've already mentioned. Thanks!

  • Cheap shot.

    Processor monopoly?

    Ever hear of AMD?

    Where's the corresponding competition in OS-land for M$ Windoze?

    t_t_b

    ps: never fail to run your agenda, even when it's bullshit.


    --
    I think not; therefore I ain't®

  • haha

    fag0t = you

  • Re:Does it really matter (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It exists. It's way too expensive. Nobody buys it.

    Harddrives aren't put in every PC because they're good. They're put in every PC because they're dirt cheap.

    Unless you can magically make electronic components for a price comparable to the platters of a drive it just won't happen.

    If it bothers you that much btw, then just buy two identical drives and hang them of a RAID controller in RAID-0. It'll speed up drastically. And after all, that was all you wanted.
    But again, it's expensive. (But I'm planning on doing it anyway, but then in RAID-1, to get redundancy)
  • If it bothers you that much btw, then just buy two identical drives and hang them of a RAID controller in RAID-0. It'll speed up drastically. And after all, that was all you wanted. But again, it's expensive. (But I'm planning on doing it anyway, but then in RAID-1, to get redundancy)

    RAID 0 or 1 isn't even all that expensive. You can find an ASUS PCI RAID controller board online for $45. (I used the bottomdollar price engine.) Furthermore, ASUS and ABIT, among others, are starting to incorporate RAID levels 0, 1 and 0+1 into the controllers on the motherboard. I've seen the new RAID capable motherboards out there with VIA's KT133 chipset for under $200.

  • Re:I GOT ONE!!! (Score:3)

    by Nagash ( 6945 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @04:57AM (#862946)
    It would be like going to the unveiling and choking on the smoke.

    This kind of post reminds of a Dennis Miller quote: "There's a reason 'Wheel of Fortune' is on right after 'Jeopardy': Once you've been forced to choke down the foul tasting tequila shot of your own abject ignorance, it's always nice to be able to bite into the refreshing lime wedge of other people's incredible fucking stupidity."

    Woz
  • To be fair, at the moment the P4 is primarily being aimed at use in large servers, and not at the average home user.

    Basically, every PC which you can buy nowadays is ludicrously overpowered for "anyone who uses only the wordprocessors". Most of the people I know in this category tend not to upgrade their PC's until they actually notice their software running too slowly (or their kids nag them about not being able to play Quake3 :) Everyone I know who does fall into the "I bought an 800Mhz P3 2 months ago, but now there are 1Ghz ones out so I'll have to buy one of them" category are people who do know enough to know better, know it isn't worth it, but do it anyway.

    The "average" person/family looking to buy a new PC tends to think along the lines of "I want a PC and can spend about $1500 on it". For this person the consequence of these frequent increases in processor speeds probably means that they'll get an 800Mhz machine for their $1500 rather than a 500Mhz one. Overall I don't really see this as a bad thing.

    P
  • I think Intel was just pissed that AMD is going to cut their prices in a few weeks.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/cont ent/1/12489.html [theregister.co.uk]

  • I don't get this "overpowered" argument. First of all, take the issue of "just word processing". If current processing is sufficient for document display, why is the speed of browser rendering engines such a big issue? Add a few graphics and charts to your document and scroll -- you'll see what I mean.

    And not just MS Word -- Wordperfect & Lotus aren't any better. A Windows problem? "You should do your DTP w/ crappy X fonts instead!" Please. And Mac isn't much different, either.

    Also, it's ironic that you bring up "style vs safety". Surplus power allows you to run useful daemons that improve safety and reliability of your system, from background disk checking to virus scanning. And apps designed for a faster "average" platform can build in more layers of checks and safeguards without having to weigh them against performance costs.

    There is also the frequent argument about more power enabling new apps, such as voice commands and the like. That's a given. But extra cycles also enable workarounds to other current bottlenecks, like with heavy compression.

    If your current processor meets your needs, don't get a new one. But I've found a way to max out every upgrade so far. I just don't get this (very common) resentment of constantly falling prices and constantly increasing capabilities. To me, it's magic.

    As far as this incrementalism goes, I think you're looking at it the wrong way. Sure, there's no usually reason to upgrade from 1GHz to 1.4. But for someone running at 733 and starting to feel a bit pinched, 1.4 might start to sound interesting. Especially when it falls to 1/2 price after they release the 1.8.

    Sorry, I've turned bitter.

  • Summary: (Score:4)

    by maeglin ( 23145 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @03:52AM (#862962)
    Maybe I'm just too tired to be reading these sorts of things.. perhaps I feel like pissing people off with my worthless commentary, but either way I think this can all be summarized as:

    Intel announces plans for faster chips in the next 6 months, even faster next year.

  • but out to public? (Score:5)

    by matticus ( 93537 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @03:54AM (#862965) Homepage
    yeah, the 1.4GHz will be out, but to Dell and Compaq. Curse me if i ever buy from them... we've had enough of Intel "releasing" processors to two-three vendors, and we're tired of it. just got my AMD Athlon 1GHz last night. tell me when Intel can get me a GHz for less than $2000...
  • I don't think the moderator caught what I was saying...
    People will continue to use the X86 arch because the cost of software migration is huge. Think of all the apps that are on your office machine and the servers.
    Most of these are licensed and in some cases are platform specific.
    For Intel to move to the next arch, it has to be backwards compatible, which tends to slow it down (or at least make it slower than a native chip at this speed).
    Extending the life of the X86 is a double edged sword. It is delaying the transfer cost but it is possibly slowing down the potential of the desktop.
    I for one would love to have the next arch out and running, but I would hate to have two machines... one for all of my legacy software and one for all of my new stuff.

  • Whither Itanium? (Score:4)

    by gbnewby ( 74175 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @05:17AM (#862978) Homepage
    The real message (by omission from the C|Net article) is that Intel has no clue when their 64 bit chip will be ready.

    The other real message (again by omission) is that Intel won't or can't tell you their forthcoming chips' interface plans. Are we talking Slot 1? Slot 2? PGA? Flip chip (ugh!).

    So, if you want to buy a computer now that you can upgrade when the P4s and beyond come out, good fscking luck guessing which interface, which memory type, which bus speed, etc. The main thing we're getting out of Intel's "diversification" in CPU interfaces, cache, bus speed and memory types is screwed out of the ability to just upgrade the CPU when a new one comes out. Instead, we're mostly stuck needing at least a new mobo to go with it, and (while we're at it), why not just get a whole new system?

  • Moore's Second Law (Score:5)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @06:09AM (#862986)
    The delay in shipping Intel's next processor will double every six months.

    --
  • It's nothing but downright robbery. In the old days you had a 386, and a major leap to the 486. Now every other day they release a processor only *Marginally* Better than the one before. and Spend huge amounts on marketing and ads, and you have people switching to the newer one. I mean 1GHz, 1.2 or 1.4; how much difference is it going to make to anyone who uses only the wordprocessors? Some thing similar to the Cars in the 70's and 80's, where the Big Three spent a lot of money in Style than in Safety. Hope people come to their senses and act sensibly. "What looks like a good thing, might just be a Beta Version." [More stuff at iotaspace.net]
  • From what I've read about the 1.13 GHz Pentium-III (for example in the article [tomshardware.com] and update [tomshardware.com] at Tom's Hardware Guide [tomshardware.com]), I seriously doubt that Intel is the position of being able to ship a stable 1.4 GHz CPU within a year, not to think about 2 GHz ...

  • Re:Played Out (Score:4)

    by DarkMan ( 32280 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @03:58AM (#862991) Journal
    Not really.

    There is a difference between the x86 architecture (actual silicon), and the x86 ISA (more like an API).

    The actually technology behind x86 processors has moved one, and updated. Transmeta is, prehaps, the most extreme example of this, but all modern processors use microcode to 'emulate' x86 (Or, at least, the least commonly used instructions).

    So, what has happened is that the 'good' instructions have got faster, but the old cruft, whilst it still works, is slow. Like, I could probably write out some Z80 machine code, and expect it to work on a PIII. But not to maximum efficency.

    This is the curse of bakwards compatability.

    Ars Technica have a review of this here [arstechnica.com].

    A new architecture could probably do many things better. But would it be sufficently better to make the cost of getting _everything_ rewritten?

    Market forces suggest not. (See the Alpha - newer architecture, but not exactly everywhere).

  • Microprocessor Design was quoted as saying that MHz for MHz, the Pentium IV will lose badly to the Athlon, especially when AMD matches Intel's 0.13um feature sizes. Why?

    The Pentium IV is still the aged-old Pentium Pro core. Intel keeps pushing back the release of a new core design, simply slapping on instructions or widening the path internal datapaths, but doing nothing about the inefficiencies nor the stalling 10-12 stage pipelines in their design.

    "Williamette" was supposed to change that and bring 17-20 stage pipelines that are much more scalable, like the Athlon's 18 stage design. Unforunately Intel is having design issues with the Williamette and holding off on Williamette's completion means Intel can get to market faster. Hence, this is what they have been doing to keep up with AMD.

    Without "Willamette", AMD will still continue to beat Intel MHz for MHz on even Pentium optimized code with a reverse engineered AGP spec. Kinda makes you wonder if the odds were even if AMD wouldn't dominate Intel?

    Now image that "Pentium optimized" FPU code still runs slower on a Pentium IV 1.4GHz than a 1.1GHz Thunderbird. Would I continue to make my code and compilers "Pentium optimized"? Imagine a world where code and compilers came "Athlon optimized"? I think you'd see the Athlon really slam Pentium.

    -- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

  • I GOT ONE!!! (Score:3)

    by mr.ska ( 208224 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @04:04AM (#863011) Homepage Journal
    YES! Believe it or not, I got my hands on a pre-production prototype of the P4, at the full 1.4 GHz!

    ...but it gave me a nasty papercut. Owch.

  • Hmm... we could stop using the X86 Arch...
    Like we could all use DEC Alpha's... those are prety darn fast.

    Wait... the apps aren't ported... and those that are cost money for new licenses? Whoa... maybe not such a good idea.

    We are going to be stuck on the X86 as long as it is cheaper to make them run faster than it is for all of corperate america to make the binary switch to the new platform.

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