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Intel

ASUS P4 Motherboard Bests Intel, Says Sharky 80

Posted by timothy from the diversity-in-the-workplace dept.
ravedaddy writes: "The Pentium 4 has been out for a few weeks now but with only Intel's own motherboard having come out upon release of the P4, the choice was limited. SE has reviewed of the first Intel 850 based motherboard from ASUS the P4T, which is actually faster than Intel's own. With features including the i850 chipset, a 400MHz FSB, four RIMM slots, ATA/100, five PCI slots and AGP Pro 4x, the ASUS P4T looks formidable. Using this new board, the authors were able to overclock the Pentium 4 1.5GHz easily up to 1.68GHz." Does it seem like the 2nd GHz mark is approaching a lot faster than the first one did?
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ASUS P4 Motherboard Bests Intel, Says Sharky More

ASUS P4 Motherboard Bests Intel, Says Sharky

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  • First Linux, now Intel. The P4's showing *everyone* up.
  • While the original was really just a predicition, Intel's marketing and engineering plans depend on doubling the performance/price of the CPU every 18-24 months ot ensure a healthy stream of upgraders and new applications. (Substitute clock speed for performance as necessary.)

    Call it Moore's Law of CPU Marketing.
    --
  • If only it were that easy. In most bioses the process of assigning specific IRQs to specific slots is extremely convoluted and way over the head of joe average.

    The average user who has a friend or company set this up for him is completely screwed if his bios loses its memory for any reason. At least with jumpers/dip switches the settings need only be set when the hardware is installed and they stay put thereafter.
    ---
    Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
  • It happens all the time. I think the latency's a bit lower going through continuity modules but it's still there.
    ---
    Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.

  • wince

    Put the pun on the ground and raise your hands in the air! Back away from the pun! This is your final warning!

  • I own a Savage4 card. One of the main reasons I bought it is because S3 chipsets don't need an IRQ...
  • The entire Intel line of processors is sadly inefficient... and capable of replacing the halogen burner on my stove. The performance of the P3 and P4 is NOT on track with Moore's law. The Megahertz are because they want people to think they're doing well... but when you reduce efficiency per clock cycle, but up the number of cycles, your taking 3 steps forward and 2 steps back. Nice try intel.
  • The StrongARM chips also don't have FPUs... not that one is really needed on a cell phone, but hey, if you are going for that much power in a cell phone, you might as well be able to play text-mode Quake...

    --
  • It's not a trick. You don't notice processor speed in terms of difference, but in terms of a factor. So if you overclock a processor by 50%, that is noticeable. If you overclock it by 10%, it is not, even if the difference in clock speed is the same in both cases.

  • Because computers most certainly haven't gained exponential speed increases over the last 10 years. If that were the case systems would be more than 32 times faster than ten years ago. What we have is a huge increase in marketed clockspeed, but I don't see a significant increase in system performance after Intel separated internal CPU clock speed from the system bus. Do you?

    --Maynard
  • Read the article. Don't jump to conclusions. It's a 100Mhz FSB that's quad pumped (like AGP4x). They bumped the FSB to 105Mhz but the RDRAM couldn't handle it so they changed it to triple pumped to make it work.
  • Because he wasn't talking about nature, he was talking about technology. And that is astounding. Prior to computers, I can't think of a single technology that has exhibited exponential growth, can you? Perhaps destructive yeild of nuclear weapons, though I don't know enough about that to say for certain. Output from power plants? Maybe, but that's probably more a factor of increased demand than increased technology, they're just building 'em bigger. Anybody got counter examples?
  • My mother is still using a 20Mhz mac to surf the internet... It's amazing. A 2Ghz chip is imminent...100 times the clockrate of my mother's lowly computer. And in another 18 months, it will be 200, 400, 800,...then the killer robots! Gotta love an exponential curve!

    Ryan Finley
  • He's right. They don't attempt to distribute a complete set of boards to all PC vendors.

    It seems to be their intent to distribute a cpu, chipset and a reference platform. Individual PC manufacturers either draw up their own boards or buy them from 3rd parties based on the reference platform. This has always been the case. I think there would be legal issues if Intel decided to own the entire PC design. It would effectively limit competition and open up the opportunity for lawsuits. Of course, IANAL.

  • Holy crap. How many times will I have to hear the morons ask that question? You know, this is the wrong forum for gaining support for whatever the hell movement you think you are trying to start there. I think the typical ./ reader would think that faster == better. We enjoy more immersive gaming, better graphics, smarter AI, better encryption, more voice capabilities, genetic analysis, geophysical analysis, hell. Just because you have no comprehension for what can be done with more advanced technology doesn't mean you are in the right.

    And quit your bitching about "fitting" a 400MHz chip in your cell phone. In a couple years, you might see a 1GHz Xscale in your phone. What.. you gonna complain that it's too fast for your phone then? You dumbasses are never happy. Too slow. Too fast. Too hot. Too cold. Too Intel. Too AMD. Just shut the hell up and enjoy the ride already.

  • The article does make reference to an Athlon on a 760 board with DDR RAM at the bottom of this section [sharkyextreme.com], and makes note of the fact that the Athlon pretty well matches performance for a better price. I don't think that the authors are biased, maybe they thought the article was encrusted with enough numbers, and trusted readers who wanted to compare to check the relevant review.
  • This [sharkyextreme.com] page shows that both Intel and AMD boards have 10-15% memory error rates. This seems pretty high to me -- is this typical? Why?
  • There have been passed reviews on Sharky Extreme, comparing an Athlon 1.2Ghz machine against the P4. In this article, they were focussing on comparing the Intel reference board's performance against that of Asus.

    If you would like to see the P4 compared against the Athlon, check this site [sharkyextreme.com].

  • It's as much a 400mhz bus as the Athlon is a 200mhz bus, and I haven't seen anyone complaining about that.
  • So far from all the reviews I've read, they all say this first generation P4 just isn't worth the buyers effort. First off, the price is enough to scare off most interested folks. Secondly, the benchmarks just haven't been all that great. The chips power comsumption/heat-displacement allows it to fight for the right to be your home heating solution.

    My questions would be, now with the new board, will it support the next batch of P4's? One's that can manage SMP? It seams like maybe Asus is jumping the gun just a hair since revised P4's can't be to far around the corner.

    Overall the P4 just doesn't add up to be anything but expensive. New chip, new board, new case, new power supply. Thats an aweful lot of new things needed just to get 400Mhz more then the leading compitition. Is it worth it yet? I say no. Things should get very interesting in the next 2 years as we should see the fast approche of the 3Gz mark with offerings from both Intel and AMD and what I think will be the beginning of he desktop server market and the slow end of the desktop pc erra.
  • So is the P4 not multiplier-locked, then? That's a strange step for intel to take. I was under the impression that they locked the multipliers so that people couldn't market celeron 566s as celeron 650s (of course that forced them to use a 100MHz bus instead of 66 and sell it as an "850 MHZ SPEED DEMON!") or whatever. So has Intel given up on this "fraud prevention" technique? If so, can it last?

    Or maybe these guys increased the 400MHz bus to 410 :)

  • Shock, disappointment, dispair...

    If Intel boss Craig Barrett says Rambus is the wrong tech partner, why is ASUS following up with a RDRAM MB? Ok, it overclocks, but why not using SDRAM or DDR SDRAM? Stunning, really... like rolling out a BMW with a VW engine.

    --

  • More pedantics. Moore's law does relate to component density, and therefore we really do not expect to see a 2GHZ chip 18 months after the 1GHZ chip. On the other hand, I do think it is reasonable to expect that technology is advancing at least in a compound fashion, so going from 1 GHZ to 2GHZ should be no more difficult that going from 1MHZ to 2 MHZ.
  • Asus will use SDRAM or DDR SDRAM as soon as VIA releases a chip for the P4. Until then, it's rambust only.
  • Of course you have to recompile apps to take advantage of SSE2. Just like you had to recompile to use SSE. Just like you had to recompile to use MMX. Just like you had to recompile to use 3dNow. You see a pattern here?

    Do you even know what SSE2 is? It's a set of instructions that use special hardware to accelerate very specific operations that are critical to some very computationally intensive algorithms. All of those extensions are the same way.

    Someone has to write libraries that use those extensions. Technically, those are what need to be written. Typically, they are written in optimized assembly-level code. Then the applications link into those libraries and call the primitives that use the specific extensions. Alternatively, the compiler will insert sequences of optimized SSE2 code into your application when you include specific macro calls in your source code.

    Apparently, Tom's hardware's and Anandtech's self-proclaimed hardware gurus don't quite understand this process. It's misleading when they compare Athlon running applications that were optimized for Athlon extensions against P4 running applications that were optimized for P3. They just don't seem to know better, and I can't really blame them for their ignorance. But they shouldn't claim to be omniscient either.

  • *stare*

    Yes! Are you telling me that systems today aren't any faster than systems five years ago?

    No, it's not an exponential increase in speed, but it is very significant. My 6-month-old laptop is the fastest machine in our research lab, and that includes PII and SPARC systems.

    --

  • Apologies for the ObAOL, "me too", but I've been using a deeply old Dell PPro180 with FreeBSD 3.x and 4.x for around a year now. And you know what? It goes like a rocket.

    Now admittedly it hasn't been too badly abused, it runs headless for a start and I suspect that helps a lot. I also do a lot of work with networks, so disk IO is neither here nor there.

    But I do munch a lot of integer numbers (the processor gets really quite hot), and suspect the memory bandwidth gets caned quite heavily. And also beat on the network cards which, incidentally, are i82559's connected via 33MHz PCI. As opposed to that horrendously old fashioned i82557's connected via 33Mhz PCI. Yay progress!

    The point is..... there is no point, this is a me too. The PPro was a fundamentally good chip. It still is, and when you bear in mind the not spectacular advances in (for example) system busses and the still earth-shattering cost of gig ethernet, it's a pretty hard business case to push anything with much more power.

    Dave :)

  • "Does it seem like the 2nd GHz mark is approaching a lot faster than the first one did?"

    It certainly did. Make sure to thank AMD for pushing ahead to 1GHz, and scaring intel into doing a half-assed job of getting there.
  • I type corrected. C O R R E C T E D
  • Not true. The effort that has been required to get to 1GHz has been enormous. Hundreds of companies and educational institutions have worked for over half a century to get this far. Remember, 1GHz is 1000x faster than the 1MHz machines that were around almost 15 years ago.

    The 2x increase in performance from 1GHz to 2GHz will be completed in less than 2 years. The industry will accomplish this by rearchitecting their chips to support higher levels of pipelining and by decreasing transistor size to increase transistor speed and lower power consumption.

  • Actually, everything about human civilization is roughly exponential. For example, farming: we were hunter/gatherers for a million years or so, then came farming and the plow. Another few thousand, and we had the beginnings of the industrial revolution, then huge tractors, etc. Today, America (for example) feeds itself with a very small percentage of the population as farmers. A second example is written language: for a long time, nothing, then the sumerians or whomever just a few thousand years ago, then the printing press five hundred years ago, then computers, now the internet, etc. One can see the same trends in medicine and the natural sciences. A lot of it comes from a sort of biological feedback where past advances accelerate the pace of new ones, making these sort of exponential curves almost a part of human nature.

    Computers are just an extension of this trend. I'm not saying that Moore wasn't being pretty original, though. His suggestion was a bold one, but then again, a lot of other engineers probably saw the writing on the wall too.
  • Russian parts, American parts, all Made in Taiwan!
  • The motherboard doesn't have much say in the matter. The motherboard has to use what the i850 chip uses, and the i850 uses rambus. If they don't like rambus, they'll have to make their own chipset.

    The motherboard is simply a bunch of wires that merely connect all the chips in your PC. It can't change their pinouts or internal functionality.

    Since you like car analogies, tell me why does a Dodge pickup with a cummins diesel engine use diesel fuel? Did you think it should burn propane instead?

  • actually legacy-free, isn't it? Or did they just remove the good ol' ISA slots while maintaining the bridge? I'd hate to have to go through life without having to solve IRQ problems...
  • Wow, one of the reasons I never liked RDRAM was the seemingly universal concept of only two memory module slots; this is just terrible for expandibility. I'm glad to see a board that can go with four, my favorite number of them.
  • four RIMM slots

    Wow! and real hair?

  • So what's the maximum size of Rimm at this moment?
  • I am impressed! 1.68 GHz is 10% faster than 1.5 GHz! Man, that rocks! Woo-hooo!

  • Moore's law and exponential growth curves (Score:3)

    by cthugha ( 185672 ) on Thursday December 14, 2000 @01:57AM (#560251)
    Does it seem like the 2nd GHz mark is approaching a lot faster than the first one did?

    Well, yes. If power doubles every 18 months, you would expect this kind of increase in growth over time. It took over a decade to get from 4.77 MHz to 100 MHz, and then look what happened.

    Apologies if this gets past the pedantry filter...

  • A quick look at DABS reveals that one can at least order 128MB sticks here in the U.K. for the princely sum of but £280.82 after V.A.T.

    The wording of your question however is almost begging for someone to reply with some rather unsavoury trollish links though isn't it?

  • Does it seem like the 2nd GHz mark is approaching a lot faster than the first one did?

    Of course, what with processor speeds increasing exponentially with time (although in this case you're looking at the rather dangerous overclocked speed, rather than the rated speed of the chip)

  • The P4T includes a few other bits to help with your Pentium 4 experience. There are two RDRAM continuity modules. All four of the RDRAM ports must be filled, and RAM has to be added in pairs. The continuity modules allow you to buy two pieces of RDRAM instead of four. Hey, there must be tradeoffs if you want 3.2GBps of memory bandwidth!

    Unless you must fill all of them of course.
  • ...but all of my IRQ problems have always come from plug&play on my PCI bus. The damned things always pick their own IRQs and god help you if they choose poorly, or decide to maul your serial ports' IRQs. They LOVE to share IRQs but believe me, contrary to popular belief not that many cards play nice with each other. If you have a geforce and a soundblaster live on the same IRQ for example, you can kiss your system stability goodbye.

    Call me old-fashioned, but I preferred it when the cards did as they were told.
    ---
    Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
  • Well, then you turn off Plug & Play and assign the IRQ's manually. The fun really starts when you're running W2K though...
  • Assuming of course you don't mind the doubled latency because the signal must pass through ALL 4 RIMMs/continuity modules. :-p
    ---
    Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
  • Yeah, that's what I heard somewhere else too. Does this only happen when you actually USE the other 2 slots, or all the time?
  • The average user who has a friend or company set this up for him is completely screwed if his bios loses its memory for any reason.

    Which is exactly the reason I'm going to miss those IRQ's. How do you think I make my living?
  • This is why i love slashdot.
  • There is a difference and this is supposed to the place where we don't fall for Intel marketing (just like it's x86 and not IA32).

    Regards,
    Tommy

  • right. moore's law is about to die, tho .. another article i should have bookmarked. Someday we'll hit that micron sized problem anyway, once you cannot reduce the thing anymore to make it faster, i guess you face a serious problem for moore's law.. unless the government finally goes public with all the alien technology they're hiding.
  • I don't remember ever considering intel boards high performance choices.
    Most motherboards reviews generally show intel boards as middle of the road performance wise.
  • Ok, I'm into more power as much as the next person, but seriously, who needs a personal desktop PC that has clockspeeds of billions of cycles per second? They should be working on how to make it smaller. If they fit a 400Mhz chip in my cell phone, I'd be much happier, than say a Tera-hz machine on my desk.

    Although a Thz machine would be pretty nifty.
  • Assuming that software does not get any better, having that much power on the desktop makes several applications possible:

    1) Extremely Realistic Real-Time Rendered fully Immersive VR. Who doesn't want that?

    2) Instantaneous Language Translation and realistic vocie synthesis. Who doesn't want a computer that talks back to them with fully customizable inflections and tone? Sexy Female/Male Computer Voice Anyone?

    These two apps alone will make for killer games.

    Actually most of the above apps become posible at around 20Ghz.

  • 1680mhz and 400mhz FSB....oooh...yummmy.....

    ...mommy can I get one of these for christmas?
    .......puleeeeeze?

    -Julius X
  • Ok, just for fun let's have a look at what's happened since Fall 1990. In the Fall of 1990 my father purchased a new computer for our family. It cost about $2k. In the 10 years that have elapsed since that time 6-2/3 cycles of 18 months have passed. 2^6-2/3 comes out to ~102 times the performance/transistor density/capacity expected of a similarly priced machine today. So let's see what 2 grand will buy us today. I'd say that after throwing in a monitor and printer this box [bestbuy.com] from Best Buy would be pretty comparable to a Packard-Bell from Best Buy in the early 90's. Let's do a little comparing:

    Part | 1990 | 2000 | Difference
    Proc | 286 12MHz | Athlon 1GHz | 83X faster clock
    Memory | 1 MB | 128MB | 128X more and faster
    HD | 42MB | 60GB | 1500X more and faster
    Modem | 2.4kbps | 56kbps | 23.3X faster
    Network | none | 100Mbps | 41kX faster than 2400 modem
    video | 320x240 256 colors | 1600x1200 2^24 colors | 25X more pixels 2^16X more colors

    Make of this what you will, some components have increased in power faster than Moore might have predicted, some slower, but there is no mistake that every single part of the computer has made huge strides in the last decade. It's true that today the processor is less likely to be the bottle neck on a system than 10 year ago, but the performance increase is huge nonetheless.
    _____________

  • Try running Win98 on your 1Ghz computer then run it on you 8088 and tell me that it runs at the same basic speed. Software is always going to use all the hardware you will let it.
  • Short answer: Yes, I do. I had an old Compaq Deskpro 386-20, which probably came out in '89 or so and would have easily cost $3000. Someone gave it to me about 5 years ago (note exponential decrease in value, unfortunate Moore's Law side-effect) and I used to try things like rendering POV-Ray images on it for fun. An image that would have taken over a day on that system, I can do on my (also outdated) K6-200 in a minute or two and on an Athlon in probably just seconds.

    Granted, these applications rely on the processor more than on bus-intensive operations, but I'd still bet that we've seen at least a 32x increase in the speed of everyday applications. We're just very used to bloated Microsoft products gobbling up the resources as soon as they're available (and not just Microsoft, of course).
  • >Ok, I'm into more power as much as the next
    >person, but seriously, who needs a personal
    >desktop PC that has clockspeeds of billions of
    >cycles per second?

    Ummm.... LOTS of people? The current application i'm developing has a build time of over an hour for a full build - thats on the fastest PIII we could buy. Faster it gets, the more productive i can be.

    As well, my last job was 3D animation and rendering. When frame render times are measured in hours. People want the fastest machine they can get, irregardless of cost. When you're already paying somebody $150k+ a year, spending 3000 for a computer thats 20% faster pays for itself in a few weeks.....

    Of course this doesn't apply to your secretary running Word.... but if you bought her a PIII you have more money than brains anyway.....

    j
  • Thanks for making the comment. I was ready too....

    Some of us really use our computers to do things besides excel and the faster they are (especially when you buy 10) makes a huge ass difference.

  • Intel can't develop it's own DDR or even normal SDRAM motherboard design for months due to a licensing agreement it signed with Rambus.

    Asus is using the Intel design for the i850 with a few tweaks, therefore it uses RDRAM.

  • Who said anything about Celeron? It could be a PII or a K6-2 or even a Cyrix(Ok I'm still laughing about this one) or maybe it was an example of speed. The example is about speed not brand.
  • How come everyone counts performance by mhzs, and/or things mhz paradigm is important to processors? Look at Alpha chips, in their time they did double for each hz, compared to x86 based cpus. Such snippets, as 2Ghz boundary coming up does not really tell me how fast I will compile my code. Really P4 as tested by Toms hardware, says that most software has to be recompiled with new optimizations for SSE2 to take advantage, of P4 so contemplating wether 2ghz boundary is coming up is useless, wether the community and business will support it and majority will be able to take advantage of perhaps ficitious perfomance marker, is the real question.Wasn't slashdot about content and when did it start to change to be website spouting advertisements/advocacy/promotion?

    May god help you all *snicker*
  • Still, 400 mega-transfers per second is fantastic. And it matches the FSB speed (in bits/second) with the speed of dual-channel Rambus. Sweet.
  • I'm all bug-eyed and pant-y tounged just waiting until a year from now when I can buy the $1999 upgrade for my current P4: P4 Overdrive Kit! Ugrade your current P4 1.4/1.5/1.7 GHz CPU to a P4 Overdrive running at 2 GHz! $1999! Anyone know where I can buy a build-it-yourself home microprocessor kit?
  • Oooohhh, good one. I see your logic there... that proves how ignorant I truly am.
  • Didn't you even read the article? I'd have pasted directly from it if I didn't think I would be accused of being a karma whore. Obviously you have to increase the bus, that's whay I said they bumped the FSB(Front Side Bus). I know a lot of people have over-clocked Rambus on 820 and 840 chipsets but I'm talking about Sharky's experience on the pair of 850 chipset motherboards in his article.

    The article [sharkyextreme.com] you supposedly read and an excerpt from it. The P4T charged Quake III up to 239.4fps- truly way too fast for anyone. The multiplier was set to 16x and the FSB only worked set up to 105MHz with a 4x multiplier for the RDRAM (420Mhz RDRAM). That was where it knocked itself out. We had to use the 3x multiplier for the RDRAM and thus it wasn't working as well as it could (wasn't quad-pumped).

    P.S. I'll just say it for you in case you needed feeding. "YHBT"

  • I don't like RDRAM. Even tho it runs at a much faster clock speed than SDRAM, the latency is not very good so it ends up being about equal in performance terms. Plus it costs much more than SDRAM, at least in the UK, anyway :)
    Besides, the Thunderbird with DDR-SDRAM is IMHO superior to the Pentium (although admittedly in gaming tests the Pentium still wins, but that doesn't matter cos I don't play games anymore), so there!
    Check out Tom's Hardware Guide [tomshardware.com] for an article and benchmarks on the first Thunderbird motherboards supporting DDR-SDRAM.
    _____________________________________
  • Oops beaten too it.
  • Well, the effort it takes to get to 1GHz is smaller than the effort to get to 2Ghz. Consider the step to 50 or even 100Mhz which I personally found very high at some point. Of course there will be some physical limitations at some point, but apparently the trend will continue for at least a few more years.

    Btw, you probably mean GHz and not MHz ;-)

    Moz.

  • Moore's law refers to transistor density ! speed (Score:3)

    by maynard ( 3337 ) on Thursday December 14, 2000 @04:06AM (#560282) Journal
    People keep pointing to Moore's Law every time Intel ups the Mhz bar, without considering that Moore was referring to transistor density on the mask and not clock speed. Anyway, in the time Moore formed his "law" there were no pipelined architectures or multiple bus speeds... everything was one clock tick per instruction fetch and one bus speed.

    I note that the change from 33Mhz to 66Mhz and 120Mhz 486 and Pentium systems were primarily the result of clock doubling and tippling, and not main bus speed advances. This has been the trend across the '90s, which is why as CPU clock speed increased performance enhancements per release cycle diminished. Yeaaaa, we're about to break the barrier with 2Ghz systems that are no more than two to three times faster than my PPRO-200. Big deal. Disk I/O is not significantly faster -- though transfer speed from disk cache is great (so what), FSB memory bus speed is a bit faster, and the main I/O and expansion bus is twice as fast (33Mhz to 66Mhz).

    This is not a significant advancement, which is why I'm still using my Dual PPRO-200 system quite happily.

    --Maynard
  • Usually the first PCI slot is physically tied to the same interrupt as the AGP slot... so you usually just have to move a few cards around...

    My best int-sharing test was under NT4 (so I assigned them all manually). Had a Matrox G200 (AGP), Adaptec 2940UW, SMC Ethernet and 3Com ethernet all on the same IRQ (11). Ran for a whole day, then I got too nervous, and put everything back...

    --

  • toms hardware used p4t a weeb or so ago! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Gees, old news, that ASUS has already been benching p4t's with TomsHardware motherboard test [tomshardware.com] of the P4. Tom has already said that the p4t whopps the Intel board bug time. As usual, ASUS come through again, and this time it's an overclockers dream!
  • Thats a gain of 180 Mhz. It just seems like a bigger jump to go from 300mhz to 480mhz than from 1.5ghz to 1.68ghz. I guess its one of those mental tricks like 48 hours seems less to me than 2 days. No idea why.

  • Hoopla? (Score:4)

    by The Iconoclast ( 24795 ) on Thursday December 14, 2000 @04:35AM (#560286)
    Is it just me or are there a whole lot of hoops you have to jump through to use a P4? A new case, a new PS, a FRIGGIN' 1 POUND heatsink, whack-ass heatsink clips, expensive as hell RIMM memory (does this mean that Intel is giving us a RIMM-job?) and in this motherboard's case, a rubber sheet and a second metal motherboard tray?

    Oy! I guess I'll take my P166 anyday. ;-)
  • I can it the chip in your cell phone... all you need to do is carry around this 5 pound battery on your belt, and you'll be all set... though a 400MHz Celery, built on a .13 process would probably be pretty efficient, power-wise...

    --
  • People keep arguing that Moore's Law only applies to transistor density, without considering that this is not a scientific law. The point is, Moore was observing that in the case of transistor density, astoundingly high exponential growth could be maintained over a long period of time.

    Regardless of the specific case Moore was observing, his "law" can be generalized to any number of different technologies. Bandwidth, RAM, storage space, and clockspeed all appear to follow similar curves, though the exact amount of time it takes each to double (six months, 18 months, 2 years, etc.) may be somewhat different, the fact is that "Moore's law" is more than simply a statement about transistor density. It is a general rule of thumb that may be adapted, in some form or another, to fit many developing computer technologies.

  • Yep, thats what Mores law dictates.

    No, that's Moore's law.

    More's law dictates that there will be an exponential number of redundant posts over time on /.

  • Hey, I'll sell you a 2Mhz machine TODAY if you want.What kind of machine are you using now btw?

    Oh, and alsatian meat is more expensive than mongrol meat.

  • what about comparison this with other systems ? (Score:3)

    by mirko ( 198274 ) on Thursday December 14, 2000 @02:33AM (#560291) Journal
    Is that just some subtile advertising for Intel or did they forget to benchmark it alongside some Athlon, Alpha, bi- or quadri CPUs boards, etc ?
    Well all that this article reads is that the newest P4 ASUS motherboard is quicker than the previous...
    Well, the opposite would seriously amaze me.
    --

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