Pentium 4 Delayed 127
An anonymous reader noted that CNet has a story saying how the
Pentium 4 will be impossible to get for manufacturers wanting to ship them over the holidays.
Apparently the system makers aren't that happy... but considering what Intel was charging for the things, I can't imagine who would buy one.
Re:Wierd targets (Score:1)
Sanchi
Re:Who cares? (Score:3)
dual boards, which makes buying a faster CPU
still cheaper that 2 slower ones.
This is no longer the case. You can get dual boards for under $150 US which certainly is cheaper than buying the highest rated processer at any give time.
2-P3 700's + mobo = 400 + 150 = 550
1-P3 1000 + mobo = 600 + 50 = 650
I would also expect the dual 700 config to yeild much better performance for the casual user than the 1000. Now if you argument is that its better to just get the 700 and the regular mobo then yeah, that would be alot cheaper, about half the price, but we're talking about getting more perfomance not less.
Re:Vapour(Hard)ware ? (Score:1)
Anyone seen a 1GHz P!!! system yet? I havn't but I have seen actual 1GHz AMD boxes.
And, remember the 1.13 GHz that Intel released and revoked just to beat AMD (who has released a 1.1GHz).
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
Sanchi
playing catch up (Score:2)
intel is playing catch up in a market that has been around for too long anyways. the x96 isa, as I am sure most of you already know, has been on life support for a number of years now. Yet, the family doesn't want to pull the plug just yet--it may start breathing again any time soon. Look at the PPC chip. Sure, motorola is having some problems bumping it up to current standards but it is still one hell of a chip. It compares favourably to even the best of the x86 chips out there and generates less than a 10th of the heat. AMD *WAS* on the right track when they first introduced the Athlon. At the core it is a risc-esque chip with hardware translation. Too bad the risc-like core is not accessable. Imagine a chip that could do both? Now that I have read the specs on the Sledghammer I am no longer holding my breath though. A risc-like core that maintains compatability to the old 16 and 32 bit code will adding 64 bit code - all to be translated back into AMD's core code.
It's dead. Let ot go with what is left of it's dignity before you pilleage it all.
Re:P4 (Score:2)
Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
-John
Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
Intel are certianly the kings of the demo, but AMD is slowly moving up through the royal court in actual production and yield.
It sucks (Score:3)
And when you consider that you can get 2 chips and create a dual processor system that can run as fast or faster, you have to wonder why people would want to buy it anyways.
When they broke the 1Ghz barrier I knew a few people who were already enjoying that speed with a couple of dual 500s running GNOME (Granted you don't get the full 1000Mhz experience, but its pretty close).
I am still waiting to see a Dual Athlon motherboard, strap on a couple of T-birds, and let those pengiuns fly!
Re:Some applications need the fastest cpu (Score:1)
Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
1. Rendering
2. Games"
You forgot one:
3. CEO's
Re:Some applications need the fastest cpu (Score:2)
Best of luck with getting an upgrade. I've worked for a few places where you got upgrades when money was available (budgeted), unfortunately, even though Moore's Law has been known and repeated for years, too many companies still don't get it. Execs are usually the first to get the speedy new box, so they can wave their new and improved phallus in front of other execs. It's beyond me how this improves the company bottom line, but I'm sure it makes sense from where they have their heads wedged. With Dilbert-like logic, a few minutes of the engineers time isn't justified by the expense for a new workstation, but, by golly, they need that new design ASAP
Perhaps the shortage is due to a shortage of aluminum for those massive heatsinks.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
All these Windows users have a point (Score:2)
1. 8088 for word processing and email clients.
2. 80486 for the underlying Windowing system.
3. Pentium IV for all the online shopping.
4. Pentium VI for the fully skined talking paperclip of your choice. Insert list of babes here.
Anything less and response will get chunky.
Pentium 4... (Score:1)
Well (Score:1)
Intel $ux0Rz, AMD Ru1z
There. How's that?
If it's multithreaded or multiprocess, SMP works. (Score:2)
Re:Bang goes my PIII upgrade (Score:1)
Does anyone remember that debacle? Intel planned to release both their PII and the LX chipset simulataneously, but (suprise) ran into chipset delays. The PII was released about three months before the LX chipset. So Intel took the aging FX chipset from the Pentium Pro, and slapped it on their Pentium II motherboard (PD440FX). No AGP slot, No DIMMS (uses 72-pin SIMMS instead). A pentium II 233 cost about $650, and the motherboard was about $270. Three months later they were completely obseleted by the LX chipset for the PII. Even worse, to upgrade motherboards from FX to LX, you would have to buy all new RAM and videocards. Sucks hard!
That is still my main computer, but all my l33t friends laugh because I don't have any AGP mojo.
Intel madness (Score:1)
For all you people out there who don't want to go through the pain of overclocking your processor, Intel will sell you one that is over clocked before you buy it!
Just set it to the speed on the box and watch your computer burst into flames.
They should just skip to the Pentium 5 (Score:1)
Axel
Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
What's taken so long? Athlon and friends use the Alpha EV6 bus. There have been multiprocessor Alpha boards for ages!
Re:Who cares? (Score:3)
P3 600, 256 megs RAM, NT 4.0 sp6a, Word 2000.
Click on word doc on desktop (other apps open, Outlook, Netscape-6 windows, Palm Desktop, Task Manager).
Word launches in 2 seconds, BUT word doc takes 15-seconds to open and render! Close window; Word takes a FULL 35 SECONDS to close, during which time the window is completely unresponsive to ANY commands. Will not move, resize, or minimize.
MS software is a peice of poo, to be sure, but I really need a 2 GHz P4 NOW!
Soylent Green is people!
Re:History.... (Score:2)
We need a web site, that works like fuckedcompany.com that tracks all product announcements from major industry players, and charts how well they do or do not stay on schedule, - a betting pool could even be done around this.
To make things precise, statements like "It will ship in the 3rd quarter of 2001" will be interpreted as the LAST SECOND of the last minute of the last business-day of that quarter. Especially if that preceeds a 3-day weekend, where you KNOW the QA dept will be putting in heavy overtime.
This way, there would be a PUBLIC place where all businesses could establish their reputation, and their mistakes will not be forgotten. In this manner, vapor will be actually discouraged, and there will then be negative incentives to BS product release schedules and roadmaps - and perhaps some reality will be injected into the picture. Schedules should be set by engineers. Not Marketeers.
Soylent Green is people!
Re:Of course you realize... (Score:1)
Number of good points I did not realize. First, I did not know about Intel was RISC inside as well. Point also about the Altivec instructs. But, one does have to admit that something should be changing and soon. Being that I am a mostly portably user, I have been looking fondly at the PPC's and their next to nill power usage. Sure, we have transmeta coming, but that is just a good idea so far, not something I would buy. There is alot of inefficiencies in the current crop of x86 chips.
Oh, and I am not some computer archiect grad. I just like to pretend that I is one ;)
P4 (Score:3)
Some applications need the fastest cpu (Score:1)
I'm working on a project with a FPGA chip. It takes my 800 MHz machine about 1.5 minutes to compile the chip's design, using the Xilin x Foundation Software [xilinx.com], for a relatively small design without much synthesis! Even a tiny change to just one gate and I've got to wait 1.5 minutes. It was about 5 minutes before I upgraded the CPU to 800 MHz. My chip is a 10k gate (supposed capacity). It's hard to imagine how anybody can compile designs for the really large devices [xilinx.com]. I suppose they use more high-level simulation and don't do as much in-circuit download. Whatever they do, I'd image that companies paying top dollar for engineers to sit in front of slow software will be among the first in line for faster cpus!
There are lots of other high-end applications like this. The low-cost PC is the bulk of the market, without a doubt, but it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see high-end applications that really need more CPU horsepower. If I'm still doing a lot of FPGA work when the chips are actually available (at $1000 to $1500), I might even upgrade my own home machine!
Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
Mmmmm, BeOS [be.com]
Marketing (Score:3)
Not so (Score:1)
Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
Plus, SoftImage (at least) requires a separate lisence for each processor. Yes, that's absurd. (I don't use Softimage, but know someone who does).
Prices (Score:1)
Since then, I have been using AMD, Cyrix, and Intel processors. Lately, I have two Intel boxes, mainly because I found Dual CPU boards for fairly low prices.
Now checking out prices, I think my next purchase will definiatly have to be AMD. I just checked the pricewatch.com site:
AMD - ATHLON - 1GhZ - $444
AMD - THUNDERBIRD - 1GhZ - $442
INTEL - Pentium III - 1GhZ - $719
This seems a bit odd to me, why would I want to pay a tariff of about 61% on a chip that has been rated poorly by many reviewers?
My other option, if I am going to buy at the Top-of-the-Line, is to buy an AMD 1.1 GhZ for about $60 less than Intel's 1GhZ processor.
The only advantage to buying Intel is Dual-CPU support. Though if I am not running a server, there's not much point in that.
--
you are not what you own
Re:Who cares? (Score:3)
Another point to make on this issue is that really high-end CPUs get used for one of 2 things in the real world:
(I'll ignore things like SETI@HOME / Distributed.net here 'cos noone buys a machine for that, right?....Right?)
SMP is a fine solution for rendering; I can't speak as to whether common packages out there can exploit SMP though.
However, very few if any games can exploit SMP. I'm ignoring the subclass of multiprocessing which is used in gaming: specialisation of processing to dedicated hardware (aka 3d acceleration). Partly this is because of the platform (most games are written for that non-SMP OS Windows 9x), and partly it's because SMP has such poor penetration to the consumer market (mostly because of the first reason!).
So, completely ignoring the very valid question of whether SMP is a suitable model for pushing forward the field of general purpose multiprocessing anyway, the answer to why SMP isn't really a good solution in this case (and hence why Intel/AMD et al can still make news, profits and push out megawatts of combined waste heat) is that the overwhelming majority of systems into which their high-end CPUs are placed couldn't make use of any other solution for their intended use.
Re:Go with an alternative (Score:2)
Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
Re:Bang goes my PIII upgrade (Score:1)
And where can I get such a system? (Score:1)
Re:Some applications need the fastest cpu (Score:1)
Yeah, that's the answer, for a closed-source single threaded application, that is a compiler for a FPGA chip whose silicon-level details are a close gaurded proprietary secret! You'd have to no only reverse-engineer the software but the chips as well, and the EULA won't allow it.
Even if the code were open source (or available with a restrictive license), and even if there was some straightforward way to make it multithreaded (has anyone even figured out how to truely utilize multiple CPUs in a C compiler, and make -j doesn't count).... even if you had a reasonable chance of hacking on the code to mulitthread it, if the goal is to save time, buying a faster CPU is probably the best move.
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
SMP does help for a lot of things. I have a dual PII 350, and while a 350MHz CPU is nothing to write home about, their combined power means that I can play any game that's currently available for Linux (I've tested most of Loki's stuff on this box). I could probably play just about any game available for Windows, but I don't own a copy thereof, so it's a moot point.
My SMP machine is much more responsive than any comparably-equipped single processor machine I've seen. It almost never becomes sluggish; indeed, one CPU frequently becomes saturated, bringing the load to an even 1.0, but the other CPU is still there to respond to input.
You're right that SMP has less market penetration, mainly due to Win98's (or whatever 2-letter code they're up to now) lack of support for multiple processors. This has kept it out of the low-end market. I think this may be a self-fulfilling prophecy as well: there's no incentive to add SMP support to the Win95 series, since there's a very small base of SMP users, and that base isn't likely to grow until there's support in the OS.
-John
Re:Damn... (Score:1)
Use an Athlon. They are quite adequate to the task.
Kaa
Re:In other news... (Score:1)
Oh please. Everyone knows that
Re:Who cares? (Score:3)
I know a lot of people probably have an MP3 player and other applications in their system tray. Maybe they're "not on the screen," but they're still competing for resources.
--
Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
Umm, yeah. A little more than a year ago, I only had a Celeron 366.
When the Athlon came out, I had to get one so I could support AMD "even if nobody else would".
The Athlon wasn't very stable, and I couldn't go back to a 366 after that, so I upgraded the 366 to a 450 and delegated the Athlon to a life of Windows 98 and games, which it ably handles.
The 366 started looking really sad just sitting there without a motherboard, case, hard drive, CD-ROM, or floppy, so how could you NOT cobble together some parts and make the thing run BIND, squid, and Apache?
So here I am with systems that perform within a few percentage poins of each other. I have a Celeron 366@458, a PII 450@510, and an unstable Athlon 500 that would be faster, cheaper, and more reliable if replaced, rather than OC'd. They all run SETI@home, but I SWEAR it wasn't meant like that...
--
Re:Bang goes my PIII upgrade (Score:1)
Check out websites like sharkyextreme.com, tomshardware.com etc. They usually have unbiased info (execpt toms, he hates intel)
Sanchi
Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
This will make a difference for doing things like
browsing the web (one process per window) which will improve tremendously with badly behaved flash and java applets.
playing quakelike games - one processor for the game physics - one for the bots and the networking
video - one for the video - the other for the sound and the rest of your PC
cd writing - on an SMP machine you can burn CD's under load even in Windows. Lots of people complain that their computers lock up whilst burning CD's
Photoshop
This covers a fair number of things - this will make a difference for many 'normal' users, they will just discover that their PC doesn't appear to slow down when working hard.
Re:P4 (Score:1)
Re:Vapour(Hard)ware ? (Score:2)
With the rumored failure of the Itanium-McKinley, AMD looks positioned very well with their Hammer.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
Not suprised (Score:1)
They're just too damned expensive.
-Julius X
Re:Damn... (Score:2)
I actually fire mine up at work sometimes when the room gets a bit of a chill. With headphones on, you can hardly hear the disk...
Re:How "pricy" is pricy (Score:1)
Re:It's the bus speed I care about... (Score:1)
DAMN! (Score:2)
Maybe I'll Just Suffer
Damn... (Score:5)
Re:Itanium, McKinley (Score:3)
The IA-64 does not execute IA-32 via software emulation. They do have IA-32 instruction decoders on the die.
The main issue is that IA-32 vs. IA-64 is modal, and so you can't mix the 64-bit and 32-bit code with a very fine granularity. From what I understand, it the mode-switch was meant to be thrown with about the same granularity as a context switch.
Sledgehammer, on the other hand, sounds like it's trying to be a straight extension on IA-32, and so would layer over IA-32 much like IA-32 layered over the 80286, which layered over the 8086... This would allow 32-bit and 64-bit code to mingle within an application. (Just look at Windows 9x for an example of a deployed system that operates in this manner, and why Sledgehammer might hit where Itanium misses.)
And one last thing: Itanium is the collective name for the IA-64 platform, whether it's Merced or McKinley, just as Pentium has become the name for the current set of IA-32 chips. Merced might get cancelled, leaving McKinley as the first Itanium chip to ship. Wouldn't surprise me in the least.
--Joe--
I am still boycotting Intel (Score:1)
Who cares? (Score:5)
Not meaning to come across as flamebait, but it seems to me that the future for people wanting a high end system is better served if they start exploring SMP options rather than the increasingly flaky vapourware that Intel keeps pushing out. Sure, AMD are pushing ahead with some better quality chips, but why pay all that money for a high end chip when you can get two cheaper ones for the same price?
With Linux finally having some decent SMP support and Windows already possessing it (at least in the latest versions) it makes far more sense IMHO to go down this route if its performace you're looking for. Even with all the latest advances in processor technology, there's still only so much a single processor can do at once.
P4 blah...... (Score:1)
- Micro$oft
hell... (Score:1)
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
Gee doesn't this sound familiar (Score:2)
Re:Who cares? (Score:3)
Right now thier main worry is keeping production up to speed to keep intel out of the top slot.
However most current users of SMP are high end server manufacturers, and most enterprises prefer to use the tried and tested intel xeons in their systems.
It would have been foolish of amd to focus their efforts on smp when their chip didn't have the respect it does now.
The good thing is that the EV6 Bus lends itself a lot better to multiprocessoring than intel's architecture. We may yet see a 32 cpu AMD system.... sweet
Intel on the other hand just cant do that until they get their itanium chips rolled out (late 98 I seem to recall
The future looks bright for amd so long as they escape any major cockups.
Re:CueCat (Score:1)
Any attempt to use the bathroom will be met with legal action.
NecroPuppy
---
Godot called. He said he'd be late.
Vapour(Hard)ware ? (Score:2)
Are Hardware manufacturer using the same methods ? Vapour P4 to avoid people buying AMD processors ?
Re:Itanium, McKinley (Score:1)
And that's the #1 reason why the Itanium is a Sick Little Monkey.
blessings,
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
It's a pretty safe assumption that all the games that come out over the next year using the Q3A engine, like "American McGee's Alice" will support dual CPUs as well.
I've never had the pleasure of trying it myself, but according to John Carmack and reviewers, dual processors doesn't boost the maximum frame rate too much, but it does really help remove the drops in frame rate that one normally gets in highly complex scenes - like when 5 player models are on screen plus a bunch of explosions, curved surfaces, with gibs and rockets flying everywhere.
I think that Intel's continuing problems getting high-end CPU's out the door will make dual CPU machines ever more attractive for power users who run Linux or W2K. The price/performance comparasion is amazing - two PIII 700's cost $400, but a single PII 933 is at least $460. Dual CPU motherboards are not much more expensive, either.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
Re:Who cares? (Score:4)
Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
just where are you planning to get said p3-1000? last i heard they were about as easy to find as an FSU fan who wasn't cocky.
A bit more on architecture. (Score:1)
Actually, that's precisely what "RISC" means, which is why it's a bad term. You are correct that the instructions are "simpler" in the sense that operations are *only* allowed on values already in registers, and memory references are confined to simple "load" and "store" instructions. Thus, memory access and computation are seperated, simplifying the internal implementation. The move to a load / store architecture is atleast as important as the focus on having a small, highly orthoganol instruction set. I guess we call it "RISC" as opposed to "load/store architecture" because it's sounds cooler.
> Also RISC processor are more register based than memory based; in other words operations happen on registers on the CPU and the result go back into registers on the CPU.
You are being a bit loose with your description. *All* modern processors pull their arguments into registers from memory, then operate, and then move them back out. In the CISC world that sequence could all be represented by a single op code, but internally it still executes those tasks in that order.
When papers started coming out on RISC, a lot of designers realized that their machines were already load / store architectures *internally*. Whenever a Cray got an opcode to add two different memory addresses, it would internally break that into four seperate micro-ops. Two to load the operands from memory into registers, one to execute the ALU operation, and one to store the result back to memory. So, at the microcode level, the machine actually operated as a load/store architecture, it's just that the ISA (instruction set) (which was inherited from the earlier PDP machines) was conventional CISC style.
With the rise of decent compilers and the fall in RAM prices (which made increased executable size less of a sin), it made sense to have the instruction set itself be based on load / store, thus moving all that decode logic that used to be in hardware out to the compiler. Bam: less hardware. Lean and mean.
Unfortunately, the x86 world never did move that logic out into the compiler which means they have massive decode units on their front ends to this day. Incidentally, Intel's IA-64 is a VLIW-style architecture which can be seen as the next step in hardware removal. In a VLIW system (or EPIC, as Intel calls it), instructions are issued in "packages" that are guaranteed to be independent. Thus, the processor knows that they can all be dispatched simultaneously without even checking. In present superscalar architectures, multiple instructions can be dispatched in parallel, but the CPU has to have a lot of logic to check and ensure that instructions are independent before they can be dispatched. You see, VLIW moves the independence-checking logic out into the compiler much as RISC moved instruction-decode logic out into the compiler.
Those poor compiler writers. Oh well, I guess it keeps them in business
--Lenny
AMD Stock (Score:2)
-- "Microsoft can never die! They make the best damn joysticks around!"
Wierd targets (Score:1)
It's not even as if the share price is going down because their going to make a loss this quarter. It's going down because the expected profit is LESS HIGH than expected.
All in all, it's not that serious, some people are just a little unhappy that there have been delays. It's the armagedon that the article implies!
dnnrly
Re:Go with an alternative (Score:1)
No.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
In other news... (Score:3)
Industry analysts were stunned for several hours while the small manufacturer's share price rose sharply.
Details later revealed this company to be in the business of potato chip manufacture. They had just released their quick-double-dip-chip, widely accepted as the major driving force in the development of the cutting-edge rip-n-quick-n-dip-n-lick-n-chip technology.
Re:Itanium, McKinley (Score:2)
AMD's Sledgehammer will run IA-32 applications FASTER than any current IA-32 processors, and therefore seems to be a true upgrade. I'd regard Itanium as a downgrade unless the OS and applications I wanted to run had all been recompiled/rewritten to run native.
It's the bus speed I care about... (Score:3)
As for production work, be young have fun & buy Alpha. Four out of five SQL administrators whom have tried Alpha recommend it to their pat... er, users.
How "pricy" is pricy (Score:1)
Re:Bang goes my PIII upgrade (Score:1)
If you have a LX you can run a PII 333 or any Celery up to 600(its the max i think). Even if you had a BX, you can only go up to 700 mhz (ONLY i love it)
If you are going to go after the 1ghz PIII, you are going to have to buy a new motherboard anyways. You might as well buy a High quality abit or asus KT133. But why not wait 3 months and get the AMD 760 DDR chipset. But hey, the SMP + DDR chipsets are coming out in January. Get one of those!!!
dual 1.5ghz corvette (palmetto) w/ 133 ddr goodness. Drool!
Sanchi
Not anywhere near 2 times faster (Score:1)
Remember that Intel pitched a P!!!-750 against a P4-1.5GHz in their initial demo...
You must type a lot a quite quickly (Score:1)
Re:hell... (Score:2)
Yep, it's Dan Quayle [quoteland.com].
Re:You must type a lot a quite quickly (Score:1)
Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
All I want for Christmas... (Score:1)
Gee, if I could only have a Pentium 4, then I could wish you "Merry Christmas."
It seems so long since I could say, "Faster Faster Faster Faster Faster." Gosh, oh gee, how happy I'd be if I could have a P4.
All I want for Christmas is a Pentium 4, a Pentium 4, a Pentium 4.
Gee, if I could only have a Pentium 4, then I could wish you "Merry Christmas."
Now if there's an EMBED tag...
---
dd if=/dev/random of=~/.ssh/authorized_keys bs=1 count=1024
The system makers are unhappy? Bah! (Score:1)
Considers this:
the P4 is going to cost MUCHO DINERO when it will be released, so who will buy this at the beginning?
Answer: mostly companies which needs CPU power (CAD,etc).
And you know what?
Companies don't buy PC for Christmas!
I think that it is more a case of journalistic exageration than a real problem..
So when does Hemos repost this story? (Score:2)
Re:Of course you realize... (Score:1)
This allows simplier op code dispatch logic and simpler functional units.
As you stated all of the major CISC CPUs have a more RISC like core that is fed by a decoder that splits legicy CISC instructions into more RISC like ops (or more likely microops).
Re:You must type a lot a quite quickly (Score:1)
--
Re:CueCat (Score:1)
That is possibly the funnies .signature I've ever seen on SlashDot.
Hm... NecroPuppy.. You a Skinny Puppy fan by any chance? :)
--
Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
Mmm.... (Score:2)
They're obviously still working out the bugs in the Cool Ranch flavoring.
Go with an alternative (Score:2)
Let's make'em happy, shall we? (Score:2)
Nobody with a rational thought in their puny heads would buy these 1.138745 GHz CPUs and Pentium-4's (5-4). Not in business, not in the home. You pay ALOT for something that'll be half the price (for the home market) next year. Not to mention how many bugs and fixes you'll get pushed on. Strangely as it seems, the most buggy shit seems to be most expensive and also the least decreasing in price over time. We live in funny times..
Oh, THEY're happy. They're happy they get media attention. WE're stupid to let us bother with such nonsense.
- Steeltoe
Re:Vapour(Hard)ware ? (Score:3)
But is it working? I noticed a 1G Athlon system on the shelf at Best Buy yesterday. And the price wasn't unreasonable, considering what people normally pay for PCs.
--
Re:Who cares? (Score:4)
True most people will only have one active window at a time... you cant have any more on windows. But look at the amount of crap running in the background. My flatmates twin celeron feels VERY responsive because even when one app is hogging a cpu it's got one free to service all the routine crap.
Word itself has been threaded for donkeys years, and any multithreaded app should automatically become an SMP version when there is more than one cpu. Also given the state of windows programming i'm starting to find the strong benifits in multithreading shit just from a coding point of view.... debugging is a whole other matter though.
Additionally as SMP becomes more accepted we will soon see more and more supporting it, since most software developers out there have some deep resentment cauasing them to want to strike down intel and micro$oft.
The other point is that word itself SHOULD NOT be able to occupy a whole p3 700 cpu for any length of time anyway... it's just an abuse of resources and we all know that microsoft wouldn't stand for it.
Bear in mind that AMD hope to have dual cpu duron and athalon mobos out in the next 4 months, and have 4 and 8 way ath boards out by the end of next year.
That should shake things up a bit, particualrly if you could run 8 $100 duron 1.5ghz (sounds about right for the end of next year) for little more than intels latest and greatest 2.6ghz p4.
History.... (Score:2)
Did anyone really expect this to come out on time. Kinda makes me think or Merce...err Itanium.
Some people are predicting th death of chipzilla... I don't see that. Just quite a few people moving away for a while. Which is good for the whole industry.
On a completely different rant...What is with all these damn companies and their vaporware? Seriuosly. Yopy, Itanium, SMP Athlons, various linux based webpads, a cell phone that works with a palm, a decent affordable mp3 player... It's rediculous. I read about this terribly cool stuff everyday but there is no possible way to get it. Ack!
Re:Itanium, McKinley (Score:2)
But, that's exactly what Sledgehammer is going to get you. No "64-bit" OSes (except for maybe Linux), but instead a bunch of small incremental "Accelerated for Sledgehammer" drivers and video games. And like, the 640K barrier before it, it's no real solution to the upcoming 4GB barrier ("ought to be enough for anyone", right?), which is the main reason you want a 64-bit chip to begin with.
My guess is that Intel learned their lesson from the not-yet-complete IA-32 transition, and wanted to put in small disincentives that would hurry the transition to IA-64. That and marketing Itanium OS support like hell to all major providers, including Sun, IBM, and DEC (although they all reconsidered and said no), as well as funding Linux development.
Of course you realize... (Score:3)
In practice even chips like the PowerPC aren't really RISC processors in the classical sense -- they implement too many instructions. (Altivec, anyone?) They merely hold onto the Load / Store memory model and the general feeling that instructions should be short and sweet. But they are far more complex than the RISC designs that academics came up with.
A lot of students will take an undergrad computer architecture class and come away with a RISC chip on their shoulder. Plus, it's fashionable to hate Intel, and to rag on x86. So you hear a lot of "RISC rules, dude!". However, it's all a little silly. Internally, modern x86's have benefitted from all the advances of RISC design. All we are left with is the external interface from the old days. But how much does that really matter? Virtually no one writes inline ASM these days. If your only interface to the processer is through a C compiler, then you're never dealing with the ISA anyway.
The story of x86's life: not lovely, but quite functional.
just a few thoughts...
--Lenny
Itanium, McKinley (Score:2)
I agree that AMD's Hammer looks better positioned though (mostly due to being IA-32 compatible vs IA-64,s software emulation).
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
I disabled this feature on my laptop because it took about 45 minutes off my battery life when using Word. A thread that can consumed 50% of my battery in an hour most certainly can benefit from another CPU.
-josh
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
Threading is evil and almost always more trouble than it's worth. You can usually (not always) get better results out of intelligent event handling or seperate processes than you can get out of threading a single process.
It's a quick fix solution with nasty side effects.
Carpe Diem, AMD (Score:2)
Re:Wierd targets (Score:2)
Considering the scary flaws, licensing terms, and privacy violations endemic in recent products, I think Halloween is an altogether appropriate time to buy computer stuff. I'm going to put one on my porch to scare off the trick-r-treaters.
--