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Intel

2Ghz P4 Shown Off 144

Posted by Hemos from the flaunt-it-girlfriend! dept.
mduell writes "Intel showed off their newest, fastest chip ever. The Pentium 4, running at 2 Ghz uses 400MHz Rambus Direct RAM(ugh). They also demo'd an Itanium server cluster running Linux with failover protection (what does this have to do with the chip?). Additionally, a 1Ghz P3-Xeon and a new 500Mhz mobile P3 that uses just 850 milliwatts when running most applications (5.5W max) were shown."
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2Ghz P4 Shown Off More

2Ghz P4 Shown Off

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  • Don't forget - having faster chips released will bring down the prices of the 'low' end processors and enable Joe public to afford what was very recently a high end machine.

    Most people won't afford a 2GHz machine, but the pricing implications mean that a previously out of reach 933 / 1 GHz migh be that bit more affordable.
  • True. I went from 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM on the spindle speed. (I hadn't thought about that until you mentioned it.) (Actually the old 4GB I had in there was about 4 years old. I don't even know what the speed on it was/is. I have an old Maxtor 540 if anyone wants it for historical purposes. :))

    *ponder* I don't know though. Above and beyond faster speed I feel like ATA/66 is making a diff. Probably a psychological effect. ;)

    -- Talonius
  • What I'd like to see is a processor that can double benchmark scores and not CPU clock rates. Does Intel seriously think the public is stupid enough to buy something just because it runs at a faster speed?

    What we need is better architecture (the kind that is not designed only to allow for faster clock rates but for efficient processing), NO RDRAM, faster bus speeds (the memory bandwidth is becoming a serious problem)

    This seems to be marketing hype on Intel's side as usual. I think the K-6 to Athlon was a better jump than the p3 to p4. So far, AMD seems to be heading in the right direction. Wonder if they'll pull the carpet from under Intel's feet this time as well.

    Maybe it's time we stopped pushing the single processor market and went the cheap-multiprocessor way.

  • But how many instructions does the PIII execute at 2GHz? Answer: Zero, because they can't make it run that fast!

    Comparing instructions-per-clock is exactly as pointless as comparing MHz. What matters is how many instructions it can execute per second (or better, how fast it executes your favourite program).

    Since the longer pipeline has enabled them to double the clock speed, it seems like a good tradeoff. It may not be the only workable approach, but it's pretty obvious that the PIII architecture has been pushed as far as it'll go.
    --

  • Yeah, just hook the clock up to a cavity magnetron and enjoy the microwaveable goodness.


    --Fesh
    "Citizens have rights. Consumers only have wallets." - gilroy

  • They used an 800MHz PIII because there seems to be a shortage of Pentium III processors shipping at speeds greater than 800MHz. Funny, even Intel can't get the chips they've been "shipping" for months.
  • I am so sick of waiting for a dual-AMD mobo. It has literally been two years now since I heard the rumours about "oooh, there will be a dual K6-3 mobo by spring". Why, pray tell, does the friggin' CELERON have a dual CPU board, (Abit BP-6) but the Athlon and Duron and K6-2/3 are singular? Supposedly the Athlon has parallel logic built in. I know I'd be buying more AMD chips if they had good dual processor support.
  • And on the production end, faster processors will allow you to "paint" with all kinds of real-time funky effects. Right now, even with 800+ Mhz, this isn't feasible.

  • Hmmm... (Score:1)

    by BJH ( 11355 )
    "We need to collectively work to decrease the overall power of the platform."

    I think Microsoft is already doing enough work in that direction as it is, thank you very much...

  • Why doesn't annyone recon this.

    Only gamers need such power..but..there havent been worthwile new game concepts since the intro of q2 multiplayer , all q2 engine based games perform ok on current 800mhz cpu's wuth decent 3d accelerator.

  • Still no 1 GHz desktop... (Score:3)

    by tomreagan ( 24487 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @01:59AM (#833941)
    If you read the article, you will notice that while they are shipping Xeon chips at 1 GHz now, they are still unsure as to a time frame on 1 GHz P-IIIs. And this despite the recent "announcement" of 1.13 GHz p-III's. How can you "announce" and "release" a product when you can't even buy the previous generation yet?

    Despite quantity shipments of 1 GHz Athlons and Thunderbirds, there is no real way to get a 1 GHz P-III. That makes all of this just another set of smoke and mirrors - Intel takes a few high quality pre-production chips and cranks them up for a demo. Then they ship a very limited quantity of 1 GHz server chips - of course, server chips are better cooled and maintained, are much more expensive, and are ordered in much lower quantities.

    So Intel has still failed to answer the real question at hand - can they actually ship a 1 GHz chip for the desktop? Can they capitalize on their market entrenchment, product quality, and technical expertise (all of which are vast, no matter your position) Or have they put too much junk in the trunk, spent too much time optimizing an overloaded, antiquated core, and lost too much technical drive to overcome the AMD challenge? Because right now, these "announcements" and "demos" sound like the last gasp of a dying dinosaur and not sound development from the once-undisputed king of the PC chip world.
  • I cannot believe how funny that comment is.
  • They need faster ships

    that's funny because ships rhymes with chips....and intel makes chips.
  • hell, you'll need a P3 to do a freaking word processing these days...

    You haven't used Office 2000 on Windows ME yet have you?

  • ...little will run on my 233MMX libretto (think Linux is exempt? ever tried running GNOME on one of these?)

    Well, I've tried on a Toshiba SS3000, which is basically a 233MHz Libretto in a B5 case, and it runs fine for me.

  • I believe that Intel can pull of decent volumes of P4's. Because of the new architecture, they won't have the same very low yield problems at high clock rates that the 6th generation had... remember, that core was designed to run at 150-200 mhz initially. This one is designed to run at 1.5-2 ghz initially, with the ability to bump it up significantly beyond that a major design consideration. It probably won't beat a P3 or Athlon at the same clock speed, but if they can keep a huge lead in clock speed over the competition (which at this point looks like a credible strategy), they may be able to have the faster chip anyway.

  • 2Ghz?? (Score:1)

    by jjeff ( 80578 )
    Damn the speed increase just shot up there..
    how long ago was it since 1ghz was first released??

    if this keeps up im just gonna wait for a 4ghz processor..
  • Well i guess i'm going to have to wait to upgrade again ...

  • Re:Why (Score:2)

    by pod ( 1103 )
    Every time a new faster cpu comes out we have to put up with the inevitable (and inevitably moderated up) comments to the effect 'why? who needs this?'

    Well, let me answer that for you: 'why not?' and 'you do.'

    Progress and innovation (remember that word everyone?) is not made by producing more of the same crap but by always pushing boundaries. A chip of that speed almost certainly means new tech, and those, while initially expensive, will filter down to the common masses to we can all enjoy it.

    So stop whining already!

  • Well, due to the pressure they've been under, we may just be getting glimpses of things further up the development pipeline than we used to. After all, didn't they have working copies of the Pentium Pro while they were still marketing P100's as hot shit?


    --Fesh
    "Citizens have rights. Consumers only have wallets." - gilroy

  • 2Ghz for embedded devices (Score:4)

    by rtscts ( 156396 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @01:08AM (#833951)
    now toasters and ovens can have Web access, and don't even need the old inefficient heating elements...
  • How long will it take for M$ to bloat Windows so that you need one of these to run it?
  • I don't need a 2Ghz chip for anything I can think of. Why are people going to shell out large amounts of cash for these?

  • Re:Usefulness of the Demo (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As with most of the recent AMD apologies, surely the most important question is "when is SMP going to actually be avaiable in the market."

    Without a decent answer to that, all the AMD hype seems more like an attempt to create FUD to work against Intel than genuine advancements in the field.

    -------

    No, I'm not an Intel partisan. I just enjoy pointing out fscking hypocrites when I see them.
  • So let me get this straight... Intel are so confident of their new chips they feel having fallover protection is needed!? You gotta smile really. Chris H

  • Re:Why (Score:2)

    by jafac ( 1449 )
    I need a 2ghz chip waiting for menus to pop up on my NT box.
    I need a 2ghz chip waiting for NT to boot.
    I need a 2ghz chip waiting for the contents of "My Computer" to display-out.

    Some folks say that the CPU spins most cycles waiting for the user. Why is it that I still do a fuck of a lot of waiting on my 600MHz PIII?

    if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
  • I dont think its a troll. Hes not talking about the users requirements, hes talking about the o.s! :)
  • Man, that's a cool idea!
    (Oh no... I'm cracking puns again... s-s-somebody s-stop me!)


  • What we have here is a chip that should have been 1.5 Ghz, that was overclocked to run at 2 Ghz. What we have here is also a chip that won't get onto your desk or mine for another 6 - 12 months, and by the time we can get it, I don't think the chip can be overclocked anymore.

    In other words, Intel is showing us a chip that they won't sell to us, period.

  • Man, you really deserve your name! ;-)
  • Oops, I failed to add the last sentence:

    You already do.

  • Re:Why (Score:1)

    by BJH ( 11355 )
    FYI, several shops in Akihabara (in Tokyo) were running sales on AMD chips last week because of their recent price reductions. You could pick up a 1GHz classic Athlon (not a Thunderbird) plus a motherboard for around 40000 yen (that's about $US370). They didn't last long...

  • I personally enjoy a little pearl of Emily tossed into the mix. Lighten up.
  • They need faster ships

    ...so we can have faster chips...

    Hey - whaddya know - it rhymes!

    (The mad poet strikes again! bwuahahahaha!)
  • Expect world temperature to sharply increase by next year.

    Would that be because of all those hot chips, or all the bot-air being generated by their companies?
    (or possibly a combination of these factors... could they be influencing each other perhaps? - the hotter their chips run, the more hot air comes from their PR departments...?>
  • yeah-
    Motorola, where the fuck are you?

    if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
  • I have about 200 to 230 fonts, and use most of the Adobe line of products. (Specs: Athlon 700, 256MB, FIC board [don't flame, it's the only damned Athlon board I could find local after my Asus went overboard!], ATA/66 drives, Win 2000) I just upgraded to the ATA/66 drives; WOW! Do they make a difference!

    A recent experiment I tried with Illustrator 7 (yeah, it's old, but Adobe sent it to me free when it came out and I'm not a hardcore graphics-design geek) on a Duron system I built for somebody indicated that ATA-66 didn't make much difference one way or another. The load time for the default Illustrator 7 install on this box (650-MHz Duron, FIC AZ11, 128MB PC133 SDRAM, WD 20GB 7200rpm HD, ATI Xpert 2000) was about seven seconds, regardless of whether ATA-66 was enabled. I remember it taking more than a minute to load the same install on a 300-MHz K6-2 with 64 megs of RAM and a 5GB hard drive, and a test yesterday on a 400-MHz PII with 192 megs of RAM and a 13GB 5400-rpm HD came up with a load time of about 15 seconds.

    I doubt that ATA-66 is making the difference in your system. Having lots of memory helps, as well as speeding up the rate at which you can pull data off the platters in the hard drives. Faster spindle speeds (7200+) help here. RAID ought to help as well, as you can spread accesses across several drives. ATA-66, at this point, seems to be mostly a waste.

    _/_
    / v \
    (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
    \_^_/

  • That the consumer and beginner stock market buff will probably take this as a sign that Intel is whooping ass on AMD and buy into their stock. As much as I hate to admit it I find that most anybody I argue with about this topic will inevitable state that "Well Intel released this before AMD" and claim that is why Intel is better.

    To which I simply reply "dumbass!!!". But what I truly mean with this is that this will probably drive Intel's stock price up simply because of the people I described above being stupid enough to buy into it.

    Yhcrana

  • Speak for yourself ;) my nice little g3 keeps plugging along quite happily. I remember when I switched in the g3 daughtercard (Sonnet aftermarket part) for the 604e I'd been using (Daystar modified Apple processor card- slick!). The 604e had a huge big heatsink on it, that took up most of the card and looked very imposing (no fan, haha ;) ) Imagine my surprise when the g3, easily twice as fast as the 604e in normal use, turned out to have a dainty little purple anodized aluminum heatsink on the chip- just a bit bigger than the actual chip itself, which is about the size of a postage stamp. My whole computer was happier- running cooler with less strain on the power supply. That made me happy too :)

    Ya know, these things run Linux too. Think about it ;) *g*

  • Right you are on that. Thanks for the link.

    I still question the CPU and Intel because of the way the rest of the article reads. I mean, it's a 1.5GHz chip and they compare it to a 800MHz one by saying it captured more frames of video? ( What is that about? ) Built for the Internet?
    I don't think AMD has anything to worry about here.

    IMHO

    Locutus

  • Video capture is so passe. Anyone with a 300MHz processor and a good hard drive could do it with no dropped frames; the real determining factor in video capture is the same as high-speed CD recording: the ability to keep up a high system transfer rate for a specific amount of time.

    How about something more strenuous, like a BSP compile job under Q3Radiant using -vis -light -extra -threads? I have the perfect level for that; it takes up almost all 8192 units (that's about 1/5 of a mile in real world standards), and right now, without a lightmap, it's 400K. It would take a hell of a long time to compile this baby, hehe.

  • If I want I can order a Athlon 1 GHz today, but getting anything faster than a P3 800 is a real big problem.

    It's time for Intel to get things sorted out, and start real mass production of the faster chips, since AMD is really winning at the moment (not that I regret that :-)
  • Remember that the P4 is for uni-processor machines, its bus isn't meant to have more than one P4 on it. That means you can't pair them up, if you want an ultra fast system wait for the dual and quad AMD Thunderbird/Duron mobo's come out.
  • Actually despite being the original poster of that comment I hadn't actually noticed that there was any humour in the chips/ships thing.

    Oh well, i'll be Mr not-so-quick Today :)

  • Re:The real question is... (Score:3)

    by decaym ( 12155 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @02:42AM (#833975) Homepage
    It's likely that your performance isn't being constrained so much by processor and memory as by disk access speed. You would probably see the same time loading Adobe on a P-III 450 w/ 128MB RAM.

    Disk has become the biggest remaining bottleneck in most computers. The only way I've found to get around this is to use RAID controllers and stripe data across several disks to do parallel reads and writes. Believe it or not, Promise has an ATA-RAID controller than can bind up to four IDE disks together for about $100. Use something like this, and you could cut your load time down by half or better.

  • Big deal my c64 can still kick its ass.
  • In response to number 2 on your list, There are many uses for this.
    From video streamimg to 3d modeling to CAD to model predictions(weather, global temp... etc)
    Personally I have been getting into video streaming, and this is the first time I've even considered upgrading my 450. It is very intensive. So I understand most apps won't 'need' this, and shouldn't need this, but there are markets for these outrages speeds.
    I have friends that render stuff for there jobs, and the render time on a 700 is about 4-6 hours.
    being able to shave a couple of hours off that would be a boon to there productivity.
    as to yout number 1 point, I agree with yopu totally. I would be suprised if they where available dec of 2001
  • I agree completely.

    The point is that companies will lie to you. Always. They are whores of their shareholders or investors.

    And surely Transmeta practises in spindoctoring, too.
  • Well, no chip that comes off the line is untested...

    What I want? I want make it very clear that this thing is a demonstration of a handpicked chip.

    Room temperature? I read something different.

    The "mere existence of the 1.4GHZ P4"?
    Hopefully this "existence" will be somewhat more real than the existence of the 1GHZ P3s.

    Anyway. I dont really see what your problem is.
  • ...they compared the 2000 MHz P4 with an 800 MHz P3...
  • Okay, here is the deal. If Intel can pull of the manufacturing of this thing, the 2GHz chip will not be far off. Meanwhile, I doubt it is possible for the .18 micron Athlon to be pushed up to 2GHz.

    But then we have AMD introducing their Mustang in Q4. While on paper the Mustang appears to compete with the Xeon, AMD is going to market it against the p4. Also, AMD appears to be moving to .13 micron faster than Intel. This is all speculation, but so is the release of the p4 at 2 ghz. I wouldn't count on it before summer of 2001.

    However, give it something really regular like 3D, and it totally blows the Athlon away.

    That depends on the graphic card industry, and how well the p4 actually competes with Nvidia's chips, etc.

    Intel has the clock-speed advantage in terms of marketing.

    True. The press has picked up on this 2ghz demo as if the thing was an announced product!


    blessings,

  • I had a similar experience with Word Perfect. Eventually I figured out that Word Perfect was really just a subtle and sophisticated video game that secretaries could play while at work.

  • Re:The problem with the P4 (Score:5)

    by tgross ( 103159 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @02:45AM (#833983)
    Ok i don't like Intel very much, but this is a bit uninformed. Perhaps you should read up on the specs of the Pentium 4 over here at AnandTech [anandtech.com].

    If a 20 Stage Pipeline was a good move is to be seen. But the design takes the long latencies coming with a pipeline stall into account and tries to battle it at every front. This are better Branch-Prediction, ALUs working at double CPU core frequency and the Trace-Cache. since this is the first chip implementing a Trace-Cache i'm very interrested how this new cache model will influence performance.

    To see how the new chip perform we will have to wait for neutral benchmarks. Perhaps it will not beat the Athlon clock by clock, but it will start with 1.5 GHz und will scale well beyond 2 Ghz this will make it the performance leader for some time.

    About the floating point performance. IMHO Intel stopped beating the old x86 stack based FPU model to death and is walking along the way of SSE2. With a good optimizing compiler this will be pretty competitive. We can only hope Intel helps to get gcc to a point where it can optimize for the SSE Instructions as well as the Intel compilers.

    thomas

  • L1: The 1GHz Xeon chip offers 256KB of Level 2 cache and a 133MHz bus, he said.
    L2: Wow so it's got twice the cache, a little over twice the clockspeed and a slighly higher bus speed than my OC'd celeron300 that I bought for pennies over a year ago.

    The Xeon is a different animal. The cache is bound closer to the procesoor core to move data in and out even faster. However, most of my work only uses the 2MB cache version of the processor. That is where the performance really goes up, and the cost goes up even more.

    One of my greatest personal accomplishments a couple of years ago was getting Linux to boot on a quad Xeon 400. Now there was a DES cracking monster.

  • Because it gets 398.21 BogoGIPS!

  • Looks like buying the StrongARM team is paying off (Score:3)

    by tjwhaynes ( 114792 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @03:02AM (#833986)

    I wondered how long it would take the Intel engineers to work their way through the DEC purchases they made and start using that technology in other areas. Given that a 200MHz StrongARM processor maxes out power consumption way below 1W (I have a feeling the figure is around 700mW) the power consumption of the Pentium processors looks pretty silly. Still there is no easy way to go from a streamlined low power consumption RISC design like the StrongARM and plunk all that technology into the Pentium line which requires a whole lot more transistors.

    What I do take issue with is this 850mW figure for a 500MHz PIII. Intel's low power consumption tricks up till now have involved idling the processor when there isn't much happening, and I strongly suspect that this 850mW figure has a lot of idling in its measurement time frame. That figure of 5.5W max looks far more likely to really reflect the power consumption of the low power PIII. That is not to say that having a processor having various power consumption modes is a bad thing - the Amulet project has a more interesting take on this one (variable asynchronous clock speeds) - but I do wish that Intel would be more 'honest' with its figures. As for the rest of the announcements, I just request that you don't hold your breath waiting for these to appear on the shelves.

    Cheers,

    Toby Haynes

  • What's your disk subsystem like?

    I have about 200 to 230 fonts, and use most of the Adobe line of products. (Specs: Athlon 700, 256MB, FIC board [don't flame, it's the only damned Athlon board I could find local after my Asus went overboard!], ATA/66 drives, Win 2000) I just upgraded to the ATA/66 drives; WOW! Do they make a difference!

    The other thing I did to dramatically increase my working speed was make my second (6GB) drive as a swap drive only. ;) This helped speed up work whenever the drive was accessed.

    -- Talonius

  • As I sit here on my P3/550 with 512MB RAM running Win2K and Office2K - it's a PIG
  • i like your site, minus the colors.

    other than that, good info.

    peace, fishface.
  • Folks,

    From what we know about the Intel Pentium 4, it appears that the CPU is not optimized for something like Windows 95/98/ME, let alone desktop versions of Linux! It's better-suited for things that use large data sets, things such as large image files, large CAD/CAM drawings, and large databases, something more in the Windows 2000 or Linux server edition category.

    I think people who will use Windows 98 SE, Windows ME and Linux desktop distributions will be far better off using the Celeron, Pentium III, Athlon and Duron CPU's.

    It'll be interesting to see what the "Mustang" variant of the Athlon with its larger on-die L2 cache will do; if it is just a standard "Thunderbird" CPU but with a bigger L2 on-die cache it could become a great CPU for server machines (and will probably have the same pricing as the Pentium 4).
  • Perhaps it will not beat the Athlon clock by clock, but it will start with 1.5 GHz und will scale well beyond 2 Ghz this will make it the performance leader for some time.

    Huh. By the time it ships AMD will be shipping K7's at the same clock speed, but with much better throughput. And sledgehammer is coming sooner than you think.
    --

  • Re:Warning: High Hype Factor (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Just as Transmeta's power figures are spin doctored too, or are you saying that Transmeta's too holy to lie? No... let's just wait til both companies are shipping actual products so we can see some reviews before saying who's lying and what not.

  • Food (Score:3)

    by daviod ( 142932 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @04:51AM (#833993)
    So now I'll be able to cook and eat my dinner without moving from the desk. Just hope it doesn't cook my nuts too.
  • And when are they gonna increase bus speed? A 2GHz cpu is going to be spending all of its time idle on a a 100 or 133MHz bus ...
  • I've seen several posts here slamming the P4's 133 MHz bus. It should be noted that the P4 uses a quad-pumped connection to the north bridge of the chipset, so a 133MHz connection would actually deliver 533 Mbps per pin, for an overall yield of around 4.26 GB/s - not too shabby. Now, if they can just get rid of the rambus...
  • I thought IBM had scrapped that line and was taking the plant down?
  • The FSB is 100Mhz quad pumped, or atleast thats what all the article say, the FSB is 400Mhz equivalent, not 533.

    Assumption first blinds a man, then sends him running

  • Promise has an ATA-RAID controller than can bind up to four IDE disks together for about $100. Use something like this, and you could cut your load time down by half or better.

    Or get a KT7 mobo.
  • There are already Classic Athlons(you know the slot kind) running at 1.5ghz! It had to be liquid cooled, but it stayed below 0C. Goto Bunny's workshop [big.or.jp]for details.

    I think I need to try this with my .25 micron K7^H^HClassic Athlon, but I'm only going for 1.33Ghz so maybe, hehehehe ;p

    'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

  • "Those are also the people who were most threatened when Windows 3.0 came out, and they were no longer the Prima Donna.

    What a pity that computers become ever more easy to use. "

    Computers know are more difficult to used than ever. And also your local "guru" is not only the prima donna, he gets more money than you.

    Now you have dll's, disk to defrag, hundred's of virus, the normal "blue screen of death of microsoft", etc.

    And bill is getting reach taking the your money..
    what a sucker...

    OverLord

    What a sucker....
  • Thats a 100Mhz Double Data Rate bus, that means that 100Mhz acts like 200Mhz, the P4 bus is a Quad Data Rate Bus, that means that its 100Mhz acts like 400Mhz. So all this DDR and QDR talk means that the Athlon bus is not 1/4 the speed but 1/2 the speed IN THEORY remember that RDRAM is faster than SDRAM IN THEORY doesn't mean that it pans out that way in real life.

    Programmers are busy writing the next best idiot proof software. The universe, in the meantine, is busy making the next best idiot. The universe is winning.

  • I remember watching the first press conference from Transmeta (where Linus and Dave Taylor played Quake) and the "benchmarks" they were spouting. The Slashdot response was pretty evenly divided between "I want one tomorrow" and "what was up with those bullshit benchmarks?".

    -B
  • I disagree. Some of the tools I use as a software engineer could certainly benefit from that kind of power.
  • If I understood correctly from posts (I couldn't read it, netscape keeps requiring kill -9 when it gets there.) It uses a real fast core, and the same 133MHz bus. This would us a HUGE multiplier.

    RDRAM, is not the only one for the P4 (see the earlier discussion on P4s). SDRAM still lives in Intel products. RDRAM may have a little performance gain over SDRAM, but is it worth the cost? Judgeing from Intel's inclusion of SDRAM, I would say no.

    32-bit. My 486 from 1989 or so is 32-bit. Why??? 64-bit Alphas have been around since 486s. When is IA-64 really comming out?

    Massive MHz (or in this case GHz), but how does it compare with a P3 or Athlon in perfomance per MHz? or for that matter, an Alpha.

    Low watts. Great, but does it have the reduced clock speed when not plugged in to a wall outlet.

    P3s Athlons, etc. have been RISC, but they translate the instructions in hardware, requiring lots of extra transistors, and making them run hotter.

    When is this "due" out. I am guessing that it is only a test processor, and not a final (release) processor. So when is it due out, and will it be like the 800MHz+ P3's avalability or IA-64's, due in 1999, release.

    As I couldn't see the whole article, feel free to correct me.
  • I like announcements like this. It means that faster processors are on the way, which will drop the price of the current crop. Within 6 mos I hope to see the price of P3@800 become low enough so that I can afford to replace the two P2@450 CPUs in this machine without breaking the bank. Perhaps there will be a BIOS update for my motherboard by then that will allow me to go a little faster. I'm gettting rather tired of sitting around waiting for MSVC6 and SQL Server to do their thing (although parallel builds would be nice under Winders).
  • Yeah I appreciate the Xeon is more than a souped up celeron, but it's also less than a scaled down ultrasparc.

    I was more taking the piss of the way that these marketing people latch onto numbers like those and tout them as key sales points when in fact they are meaningless.

    This new xeon after all has half the cache of a pentium ii....?
  • Okay, here is the deal. If Intel can pull of the manufacturing of this thing, the 2GHz chip will not be far off. Meanwhile, I doubt it is possible for the .18 micron Athlon to be pushed up to 2GHz. If Intel can maintain this huge clock speed they've got two major advantages.
    1) Their parts perform about as well as a much lower clocked Athlon for most tasks. However, give it something really regular like 3D, and it totally blows the Athlon away. Intel has gotten wise to the fact that nobody really uses consumer chips for anything other than 3D. Even the most bloated of Office apps don't demand much more than a 500MHz chip. However, get into anything 3D or media related (stuff that is pretty regular, but very compute intensive) then procs 1GHz+ are required. By performing about the same for most tasks, and totally blowing Athlon away in media, Intel hopes to get back their market share. This also explains why Intel is targetting this chip only at consumers (no SMP, the rumblings about using SDRAM) because the chip really wouldn't be ideal in a server situation.
    B) Intel has the clock-speed advantage in terms of marketing. Like it or not, a huge number of people by their CPU for the clock-speed. In the market, a 1.4GHz Athlon vs. a 2GHz P4 at the same price will be a no-brainer for most people.
  • Hello? Were you reading? This thing has a 400MHz dual channel RDRAM bus. That's 3.2GB/sec, which is about 4 times faster than the Athlon bus. (which runs 100MHz SDRAM)
  • The NVIDIA Vanta chips are probably best here. You can get a 8MB version for about $40 on pricewatch, or a 16MB version for about $50. Around $55-60 you can get a Matrox G200.

  • Where's the 1Ghz??? (Score:3)

    by Alternity ( 16492 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @03:48AM (#834017)
    I find it quite ironic to show a 2Ghz CPU when you can't even supply our 1Ghz. Has anyone seen a 1Ghz CPU from Intel somewhere lately? They seem to have all vanished from the price lists.

    2Ghz is just hype, one more attempt to show people they are ahead in the clock speed race which nobody still follows except them.

  • Actually, you can't outright say a 1.4GHz Athlon is faster than a 2GHz P4. While it may be true for business apps, I think that the P4 will really kick for 3D.

  • Usefulness of the Demo (Score:4)

    by dricher ( 83910 ) <duncan_richerNO@SPAMmckinsey.com> on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @01:20AM (#834024) Homepage
    As with most of the recent Intel announcements, surely the most important question is "when are speeds like this going to be available in quantity?"

    Without a decent answer to that, all of these announcements look more like an attempt to create FUD to work against AMD than like genuine advancements in the field.
  • Graphics, my man, graphics... 3dsMax with a pair of these...pardon me while I wipe up the drool...

  • Hype hype hype (Score:5)

    by grahamsz ( 150076 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @01:22AM (#834028) Homepage Journal
    Why do things like this even get posted to /. This article is just filled with inflated marketing hype.

    The 1GHz Xeon chip offers 256KB of Level 2 cache and a 133MHz bus, he said.
    Wow so it's got twice the cache, a little over twice the clockspeed and a slighly higher bus speed than my OC'd celeron300 that I bought for pennies over a year ago.

    The future is ... peer-to-peer networking
    Obligatory napster reference (dont flame me I do know what they really mean)

    A 1.5GHz Pentium 4 system was then tested against an 800MHz Pentium III system in video capture. The 1.5GHz Pentium 4 was able to capture more frames of video than the 800MHz Pentium III
    Wow good test. Curious how they dont mention any figures or how the difference in bus speed might affect the video capture performance. I HIGHLY doubt that the 1.5ghz machine was over twice as fast.

    "Pentium 4 will be the fastest desktop processor in the world"
    When it ships maybe, but when it actually hits the streets AMD should already be there. Intel seems to ship things an awful long time before you can actually buy them. They need faster ships
  • I'm not sure if this is a troll of not, so I'll bite and just pray that it isn't.

    For those of us in the graphic design and A/V fields, every meg of RAM and every little (or in this case, giant) speed boost counts.

    I'm running on a p600 o/c'ed to 733 with 384 megs of RAM. It takes Adobe Illustrator 9 a full 3 minutes to load with my vast font archive and don't even get me started on how it crawls when I open one of my 150 meg image projects.

    All this running on top of Windows 2000.

    Man, I just realised just how funny that is. Seriously, either these software start spitting out better code (ya right, like THAT's gonna fit into their business model) or give me more UMPH.

    UMPH is good. This P4 is no different.

    Rami
    --

  • Load fonts from network. It is not CPU what kills you, not hard disk access. It is hard disk seek latency. Been there, seen that, fixed that.

    Your bill for today is half of the 2GHz Pentium 4 price when it really comes out. Cash, checks and bank trasnfers accepted

  • Not to imply Intel had rigged this one, but a single demo of a single P4@2GHz doesn't mean we'll that chip at that speed for sale any time soon.

    One easy way in which Intel could have boosted performance numbers: Fab a P4 at 0.13 microns.

    0.13 micron fabbing in quantity won't be around for a while, but IBM will, for a price, give you small runs on their X-ray lithography rig at 0.12 and below (as of years ago; it may be even finer now).

    Intel may also have an experimental 0.13 fab line for fine-tuning processes before launch. 0.13 should be available in quantity around Christmas or so if I'm getting Moore's law right.

    With either of these approaches, Intel would have to do custom tweaking of design parameters for the target process, but it might be worth the effort if it provides a 2 GHz demo chip.

    Or, their uber-pipelined chip really _may_ run that fast in an aggressive cooling rig. See elsewhere for the short/long pipeline debate.

  • Sorry people but Intel is pulling a fast one here. What they have done is allow some part of the CPU's core to run at 2x the rest of the chip. If they were to do this to the PIII and find one which would run at 1GHz, then couldn't they say they had a 2GHz CPU?

    Everything I've read on the chip disagrees with this. True, the ALUs on a P4 are running at 2x clock, but Intel hasn't yet made the mistake of marketing the part based on ALU speed. So, in the 2GHz demo, the ALUs were actually running at 4GHz.

    The AnandTech Editorial [anandtech.com] posted here a few days ago covers this.

  • For information on trace caches, have a look at Sanjay Patel's page [uiuc.edu] and Jim Smith's page [wisc.edu].

    For a more pessimistic view, check out this journal paper [jilp.org].

    --

  • I didnt.. i said I *would* if its true.. its all speculation / vaporware :-D
  • {Intel announcement template}

    Today DD/MM/YY (date of last announcement plus one month) we announce the introduction of the Pentium X(increment the last number by one)that runs at XXXXGhz(increase Ghz 15%). This processor is the most advanced one that exists! It be available to the general public at an affordable cost in 36 to 48 months (maybe). At that time we will have released the Pentium XX that runs at XXThz (terra), which will be the most advanced processor ever built.

    {/announcement}

  • Any sufficiently advanced technology... (Score:4)

    by gizmoNaut ( 197527 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @01:32AM (#834051)
    is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.

    Not to imply Intel had rigged this one, but a single demo of a single P4@2GHz doesn't mean we'll that chip at that speed for sale any time soon.

  • Warning: High Hype Factor (Score:3)

    by FutileRedemption ( 30482 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @01:34AM (#834052)
    The 2GHz part was a handpicked chip, cooled like hell, and is far from being available.

    The 850 mW number is measured "the Intel way", and therefore some considerable spindoctoring is involved.

    Of course one can buy into the Intel marketing, but I prefer to spare my enthusiasm until I see that stuff for real, in volume, and tested by independent and reliable publications.
  • AMD was first with the 1GHz processor. Intel retaliates with a 2GHz. I'm betting that AMD will announce a 3GHz next week.

    Expect world temperature to sharply increase by next year.
  • From the article: A 1.5GHz Pentium 4 system was then tested against an 800MHz Pentium III system in video capture.
    Even Intel marketing can't get a 1GHz PIII for a demo. Yet AMD has been shipping 1GHz chips in volume for a while now.
  • Yes, you're right I should have looked more closely at the specs.

    I've been hearing things about the P4 for some time now, the 20 stage pipeline being one of them. I wasn't aware that they were doing significant things to compensate for the problems such a long pipleine introduces.

    The other thing I heard is that its floating point performance is really bad. Now it may run some new style SSE2 floating point instructions at a decent clip, but how is that not a mere attempt at locking developers into using only those (patented I'm sure) instructions? Carrot and stick.

    Not that I'm an intel hater. If intel makes the better chip then that is the chip I'm going to buy. Same goes for AMD or any other vendor. But based on their corporate culture and behaviour, I wouldn't be suprised if this chip is either a dog, or broken in some way designed to "lock in" users or developers. It wouldn't be the first time.

    Lee
  • I'll agree with ya there. Audio/Video/Sound editing is CPU/memory intensive. However, trying to coax Windows 2K/NT 4.0 or Win98 into doing these tasks is like herding cats. They simply weren't designed to cope with multiple streams of multimedia. In fact, BeOS does far more with far less hardware investment, for example. Too bad there aren't many apps for it.

    Honestly, I can't believe how successful Adobe is these days. Their coding bloat is on par with the worst from Microsoft, their programs are buggy and tend to crash frequently (on my Win systems at least, and according to numerous other posters on Adobe BBS's), and they price gauge their customers like there is no tomorrow.

    Of course, I don't run them on Macs, so I know I'll get flamed for this comment. Maybe the 2Ghz chips will run Adobe apps acceptably on Windows; but I think anybody who wants to use Adobe products should get a G4. For me, though, I've just switched to Macromedia for my graphic works; they are far better Windows coders in my opinion.

  • You do realize that the failover in question is not a part of the chip itself, but is a software solution, correct? It's Mission Critical Linux's Convolo Cluster [mclx.com], I believe.

    I think that they did it to show off cool stuff running on their chip, not necessarily because they didn't trust the reliability of their chips.

    And, BTW, if you weren't speaking seriously, please disregard this entire post.

    ---------

  • The problem with the P4 (Score:5)

    by leereyno ( 32197 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @01:50AM (#834073) Homepage Journal
    While this chip will run a 2Ghz, just how many instructions is it executing during each of those clock cycles?

    With a 20 stage pipeline... not as many as a P3 or Athlon.

    Intel designed this chip for very high clock rates with the assumption that Mhz ratings sell chips and systems because joe public is too stupid to know what IPC means. Sadly they may be right. Long gone are the days when the average computer shopper even knew how to use his or her system, let alone what went on under the hood.

    Also, have you heard about how abysmal the floating point performance on it is supposed to be?

    Hello Cyrix!

    Lee

  • The internal core is faster

    The Bus is the same

    The Ram is Rambus

    The HD is still not really faster

    The chip is STILL 32 bit. (Even my game console does better)

    The intel pentium chip is a 78 firebird that is falling apart .. but keeps getting attention. I hope that the IA64 or new AMD chip will finally get us out of this 32bit and bus bottleneck rutt.

    Damn Pentium chips.. but we keep buying the stupid things. I don't think they are ever going to get the message that the current CISC/32bit archetecture is old and dead. *sigh*




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