What 1.7Ghz Is Like 172
Beanie writes: "Today Intel announced their 1.7GHz Pentium 4. It's crazy to think about the fact that just one year ago we were breaking the 1GHz barrier and now we're almost up to 2GHz. AnandTech has a review of the Pentium 4 1.7GHz and they compare it to the recently released AMD Athlon 1.33GHz." And Otis_INF writes "Tweakers.net had the oppertunity to run some benchmarks on a system with an Intel Foster CPU on board, placed on an early i860 based board. The complete sneak preview (in english) is here. It smokes the P4 in some benchmarks."
Re:The real news here... (Score:1)
AMD will survive.
Re:however (Score:1)
You know Murphy's Law? It's not what most people think.
Oh, and Sturgeon said crud, not crap, although the meaning is pretty much captured.
what I find funny, though... (Score:1)
in fact, a G4/733 can't handle it. no current Mac is fast enough to handle it. so now Mac users see just how underpowered a 500MHz G4 can be.
- this is not a troll. I am typing this in OS X on a G4/400. I, however, am not someone who thinks MHz is worthless.
BS (Score:1)
Try opening OmniWeb or IE - slower than opening IE on OS 9.
Try opening a new window in the Finder or OmniWeb. Slower than opening a new window in the Finder or IE in OS 9.
Try live resizing a window in OS X to near fullscren - far slower than OS 9, or than Windows, which also does live resizing.
Try moving or deleting large amounts of files in the Finder. Slower than OS 9(although if you use the terminal it can be very fast).
I've been using OS X full-time for the past three weeks. Don't try to tell me it runs fine. Oh yeah, "handle it" - well my 5200/75LC could "handle" Quake, it was just dog slow - just like OS X. I don't consider 1FPS or less on some window resizes in column view "handling it"
umm, no (Score:1)
Stop being such an idiot.
Re:i860 (Score:1)
As if any other names for chipsets would be any better. None of the modern chipset names tell anything to me...
Okay, I'm a *NIX programmer. I've been using Linux since 1996. But if there's *one* thing that makes me cry mama, it's the kernel compiling.
"Uh, so, does my machine have i39842309843 and i49284? I don't know, do you?"
I'm not a hardware geek. "I just bought my new machine from the store." =) I know what Mostech 6510, VIC2, CIA and SID are, but all this modern hardware babble makes me puzzled. Really puzzled.
(FWIW, it wasn't that bad. I got my kernel to compile back when I got this machine and it works pretty well.)
Does anyone have "An Idiot's Guide to Latest Achievements in PC Hardware"? =)
Re:i860 (Score:2)
The i960 was out a fair number of years before the i860. The i860 was a floating point monster for it's day (and the first superscaler I ever used). Oki tried to sell a line of workstations based on it. In fact I think they sold well to NTT, but they didn't sell well in the USA. The only embedded use I know of was in SGI's Reality Engine as geometry engines.
I had two in my office for about a year.
i860 (Score:3)
Fun Error Messages when /.'ed (Score:1)
Error pages are fun.
Well done article.
Re:What 1.7Ghz Is Like (Score:1)
Other than that I could be running a 233 and I probably would never know the difference.
Yes, gamers want the fastest. But damn, if you're into it to the point where you are getting the lastest damn CPU every year, gaming is a pretty expensive hobby.
Re:1.7 GHz is a lot like a 1.2GHz Athlon (Score:2)
It's only a few high-end applications and high-end games that will use the power of the Pentium 4, and even those are very uncommon nowadays.
I think people are going to realize that when AMD goes to the Palomino Athlon core, there still will be no advantage to going to Pentium 4.
Minor nit pick (Score:1)
Re:however (Score:2)
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??? (Score:1)
So, who cares ?!?! It's still a lot of fun, and very popular.
Lasers for sale (Score:1)
Technically the P4 is a pretty good design for a processor and would in actuality be a really good processor if Intel had done some pre-release planning. Before the launch of the P4 developers should have been offered P4 reference boxes and a completed 5.0 version of their compiler at very reasonable (VERY LOW) prices. This would have given them lots of time to recompile and optimize their binaries so when the P4 came out they could offer a P4 upgrade of their applications. This would have provided a better market for the P4 when it was launched. If I'm Joe GraphicsDude working on my aging P2 450 system and Adobe sends out an email saying I can get a P4 optimized set of their graphic design apps for a low low upgrade price, I can take that to Joe PriceWaryEmployer and ask for a small investment to get me more performance and thus more output. The Intel engineers had to stick a simpler FPU on the P4 due to remain within their transistor budget so the FPU performance of the P4 is lower than that of the Athlon. However if some operations were redone to use SIMD instructions as opposed to FP instructions they could bypass the crappiness of the FPU and get similar if not better FPU performance out of the P4.
As explaied so many times to so many stupid people clock speed != performance. The fact a 1.7 GHz P4 competes with a 1.2GHz Athlong Tbird shouldn't really be a point of contention. The 2GHz P4 ought to easily best a 1.33GHz Tbird (assuming the gigaheartz to gigahertz performance ratio is kept) and the P4 can easily be clocked up to 3Ghz while the Athlon line will top out around 1.5GHz. I think the hardcore performance coming out of the P4 core won't be seen until Foster (Xeon) is released at the end of the quarter. The bigger cache with its ultra high bandwidth data channel to the processor will make it a powerhouse performing lots of the same instructions (ray tracing for example). The DP and MP versions of Foster will probably make it a killer in the graphic workstation market. One note to developers, do a better fucking job of threading your apps. The Xeon is going to have hardware support for SMT and deep pipeline of the P4 makes multiple threads work good so write your apps to make better use of threading. I know some things are really hard to thread because you can only do perform some functions once other functions have completed by please try! Anyone with more than one processor in their system can attest to how rarely a program is effectively using both processors. The new Xeons will have lots of bandwidth and a deep pipeline use it!
Re:Lasers for sale (Score:2)
Re:Sounds hot (Score:4)
Jethro
Windows NT was originally designed for the i860 (Score:2)
Windows NT Historical Timeline [uwa.edu.au]
July 1989 - The first bits of NT run for the first time on a system built by the NT team using the Intel i860 processor.
January 2, 1990 - Bill Gates brings together NT's top designers to discuss the importance of running NT on Intel's 386+ processors and to choose a new RISC processor other than the Intel i860.
Re:Noticeable bias on slashdot (Score:1)
Yep, some of use are the kind of assholes who expect a product that costs twice as much to actually be better.
> i.e. only noting the benchmarks where AMD is ahead but pretending not to see the benchmarks where Intel is ahead
It's duly noted that the P4 creams the T-bird on Q3 Arena. If I ever set up a dedicated Q3 Arena box, I'll keep that in mind. But I'll also keep that 2x price for the processor and memory in mind, so price:performance might keep me from buying a P4 even for for my dedicated Q3A box (in the unlikely event I ever build one).
> ut Intel will have much higher clock rates in the same price range, and ultimately, equivalent and/or better performance, particularly over the next 1 to 3 years, as Intel puts out CPUs with humongous clock rates
Good for them! Maybe I'll buy one in 1 to 3 years, if your prediction pans out.
More likely I'll be running a 64-bit AMD machine with several gigs of cheap open-architecture memory, though.
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Re:One Pound Heatsink (Score:1)
Problem is, it would only cook meat that you bought from the RAMSTEAK consortium.
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Re:What 1.7Ghz Is Like (Score:2)
Actually, several of the review sites are showing that the AMD beats the Intel in about half the gaming tests.
And that at about half the price, both for processor and for memory, based on what's currently listed on pricewatch.com [pricewatch.com].
I'm also curious about folding@home. Does it run through a lot of memory? The review sites left me with the impression that the P4 gets its advantage -- when it does get one -- from the bandwidth performance of its horribly expensive RDRAM.
If folding doesn't use a lot of memory, then the Athlon might actually win. (Either way, it probably wins at performance/price by a large margin.)
If you happen to have access to both kinds of machine, I'm sure lots of people here would be interested in a folding benchmark, though.
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Re:Noticeable bias on slashdot (Score:1)
Didn't they actually use the parts with defective FPUs as 486SXs? I would call it recycling. That is very common in the industry. The reason chips overclock so well is that they are mostly made for a high speed and the ones that only work at the slower speed are sold that way for less.
Buzz. You are the Weakest Link (Score:1)
And note that the Half-life stat includes CS Pete
Re:The real news here... (Score:1)
And if it isn't 0.13 micron technology, they probably will have access to other improvements. As was said before in this discussion, the desktop PC's don't _need_ more speed. It's always handy, but for most tasks the things are fast enough.
For servers more power is always useful. But then again, quality and reliability are too. I hate to think of the time a machine has to have multiple processors, just to keep it stable. For that's where we're heading, if we keep pushing
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Ehh, there is a myth about this myth.. (Score:3)
I have a G4 466 (OSX), a Dual CPU Intel 800, a Origin 3000 class server (Work of course)
I would say the only machines that don't perform in relation to the mhz rating is the SGI Origin 3000 and the Sony Viao. The SGI is clearly much much much faster than my PIII w/equiv total equiv mhz (~1600)... and the Sony Viao laptop is much slower than my Apple G4 466.
But, my Athlon 700 kicks the crap out of my Sun Blade workstation at just about everything I give it. My Dual PIII workstation absolutely blows away my G4 Workstation running OSX at just about everything I do. (Fair enough, my Dual 800 is SCSI, my G4 is not)... and funny enough, my G4 seems to be just a hair slower than my 500 mhz Sun blade workstation.
Of course there are no numbers or hard benchmarks. these are just my personal observations on equipment that my company and myself owns (it's my company)
But again, without this myth alive how would I be able to justify my 2-3x pricetag in buying commercial Risk hardware over Intel?
Anyway, thats my take..
geez.. and what a rant.
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Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
Not everyone cares (Score:1)
Actually, no, not everyone cares (at least not very much). You'll only see a negligible improvement in boot times from a faster CPU; at boot-up, the bottleneck is in the hard disk, not the CPU. As for making MP3s, in my experience the actual MP3 encoding process takes far less time than getting a nice, clean rip from the CD. Again, the bottleneck is not the CPU.
Sure, compiling and game-playing will see an improvement from a faster CPU, but I personally dont't care if a kernel takes 30 seconds less to compile, or that I can play quake at 80 fps rather than 70. I can understand that some people would care about that sort of thing, but not everyone does.
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"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
Re:Eh... (Score:1)
However, you are completely wrong that a RISC chip does less per clock cycle. Given a Pentium and a PowerPC at the same clock speed, the PowerPC will average far more instructions per clock cycle (not that you can execute an instruction in one clock cycle to begin with, a typical instruction cycle on any chip lasts several clock cycles, but we're talking the average work done per clock cycle). Why is it that the RISC chip can do more? Well, since there are far fewer instructions and they are much more basic, you can (and do) execute several instructions in parallel. Now, you can't always do this because one instruction might be a branch, and you can't necessarily know which way you will branch before you get to the branch test instruction, but in general you can execute several instructions in parallel. Of course, there are clever ways of solving the branch problem too, such as guessing which one is going to happen, and evaluating those instructions, then discarding the results if you're wrong. In any case, each clock cycle does effectively achieve more on a PowerPC chip than on an intel chip.
Now, at current clock speeds, you've got the PowerPC in the sub-GHz range and the P4 midway between 1 and 2 GHz range, your P4 is going to beat your PowerPC anyway.
As for the P3 and P4 being more RISC-like than the G4, you nearly made me spew chocolate milk out my nose. Get a good book on computer engineering and learn a bare minimum about the subject. Please, if you're going to make totally uninform\ed comments put [troll] in the subject.
Re:Eh... (Score:1)
A nice gaming rig still needs a fast processor, or all the power of the graphics card goes to waste. You can put a GeForce3 in a P2-450, but I'll bet you'd see higher framerates with that same video card paired with a top of the line CPU that can run the game and feed the card all the geometry data and such that it needs.
I do, of course, agree that these clock speed increases are largely unnecessary, at least until Doom 3 is released. Allegedly, counterstrike is the most popular online game now, and it uses a modified Quake 2 engine. Year old machines can run Quake 3 pretty well, so there's no need.
chris
Speed Difference (Score:1)
Next test, loading http://www.userfriendly.org/static.
Old i860 machines (Score:2)
Of course, these machines would've been completely unsuitable for development of NT, but they were there.
Actually, it's the i850 (Score:2)
The i860 and its successors were interesting chips. As I mentioned in a reply to a post underneath your original post, at the last company I worked for, we had old servers running an i860 as the CPU sitting next to modern servers with the much, much faster i960 chip running their network cards.
Of course, it was even funnier that my roommate at the time was still using a i386 PC with 8 Megs of RAM. Every day he worked with a network card that had much more processing horsepower and RAM than his PC! I used to tease him about that all the time.
Re:Like I need that much power right now... (Score:1)
-- Microsoft, where do you want to go today?
1.7 GHz? Ha. (Score:1)
- My 500 MHz G4 processor goes faster than it on floating-point tests. These include rendering spreadsheets in Photoshop, generating animations in Photoshop, and word-processing documents in Photoshop.
- No application currently requires a Pentium 4, nor will it ever.
- My fundamental right to overclock my computers until they explode is being violated. Intel has probably put in some clock-limiting circuitry. I want this processor to run at 2 GHz. I don't need that power, but I must run my systems as fast as possible.
- Linux is not optimized for it. Yet.
That is all.Re:1.7 GHz? Ha. (Score:1)
I have installed Windows 2000 Advanced Datacenter on my computer at home. It was highly optimized, but it was not open-source, so I had to delete it and perform a low-level format of my hard drive.
Five nines reliability? More like nine fives. Microsoft is an evil empire, and their software only runs well 55.5555555% of the time. In fact, I would have to say that I reboot the Microsoft at least 555,555,555 times. Ha ha ha. That's funny.
/. 1.7 ~= 2, reality 1.7 1.33 (Score:2)
The P4 may be a good chip one day, but it sure isn't there yet.
The 1Gz Barrier? (Score:1)
Which 'barrier' was that?
Dual 1.99GHz AMD Palomino benchmark. (Score:1)
Check out 2cpu.com [2cpu.com] for some hot benchmarks. Interesting stuff on AMD's upcoming 760MP as well.
Re:What 1.7Ghz Is Like (Score:1)
Now, I'm not an Intel jockey, and I was planning on building a 760MP AMD system later this year, but I will make my decision based on the release and limitation schedules of BOTH companies.
I don't want to get caught at the top cycle of a platform, so, I will consider how high each processor will scale before leaving me in the dust.
Re:Wow! (Score:1)
The situation is a bit more convoluted with the P4, but a 1.7Gz P4 is certainly not the same as a similar speed on a P3. We really should be dropping back to something like the Whetstone/Dhrystone benchmarks. Although they're flawed, at least they're slightly less misleading than the clock speed wars.
On the other hand, I could just take my 2MZ 6809, wrap it in a divide by 2048 clock package and proclaim the first 2Gigaherz processor at under $50. (The Marketing department would love me!).
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Re:Wow! (Score:1)
Out of curiosity, I hunted down a copy of the dhrystone benchmarks, and did some comparisons [telus.net]. megahertz to dhrystone rations go from a low of .02 for an apple 2e on drhystone 1 to a high of 2.35 for my P3/450). (Other than my own benchmarks, the latest results on the table are a couple of years old.)
In any case, the point is that dhrystone to MZ ratings vary by a factor of aabout 100 when you go across CPU families (and compilers). Even for relatively recent CPUs the ratio is still 3-1. I think that this supports my contention that clock times are a really bad way of gauging CPU performance.
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Re:The real news here... (Score:2)
Of course, I won't be running XP, but with KDE/GNOME, I can enjoy the same "benefits" (speed-wise).
Window Maker.
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Re:Eh... (Score:2)
Spyky
Re:Sounds hot (Score:1)
This more perfect crystal structure exhibits reduced phonon-phonon and phonon-electron interactions which increases certain transport properties, such as thermal conductivity. It has been demonstrated in the laboratory that isotopically pure Si-28 has 60 per cent better room temperature thermal conductivity than natural silicon with its three isotopes.
Hang on, if they have reduced electron-phonon interactions, haven't they increased the mobility and reduced the heat generated? If they have also reduced phonon-phonon interactions, doesn't that hinder the transfer of heat away from the active devices? Am I the only one that think this story almost got it right, but just missed it?
Re:i860-based board? (Score:2)
You may have missed it because it's not out yet--the i860 (codename "Colusa") is the chipset for the upcoming 1-2 proc P4 Xeon (codename "Foster"; actually, in an effort to be hugely confusing, the official name is now simply "Xeon") systems which should be released in a couple months or so. FYI, the 4+ proc chipset will be designated the i870.
And yes, it is a bit odd that Intel is recycling this rather inauspicious brand number. I suppose not many in the industry have a long memory.
(For more info on the first i860, Paul DeMone had an interesting article [realworldtech.com] at RWT comparing its ambitious but flawed design to Itanium and its potential pitfalls.)
Re:Fun Error Messages when /.'ed (Score:2)
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Coffee Warner, anyone? (Score:1)
Re:The real news here... (Score:1)
that Intel really is starting a price war with AMD.
What's important is that chip prices are
dictated by GHz, not by how fast it
really is. So if Intel releases
a 1.7 GHz chip for $400 dollars, they have
set a maximum price limit for AMD's CPUs
which run at a lower clock frequency.
AMD must then drop the price on their
1.4 GHz chips to $(400-X) since consumers
will not pay more
for a lower GHz chip. End result, Intel can
maintain a marginally higher profit margin on
their 1.7 GHz chip while AMD's profit margin is
severely eroded.
mobo manufacturing (Score:2)
Re:Eh... (Score:3)
But, you are dead on with the practical point, who cares? As it currently stands, the P4 is a complete waste of money. For the PC, nobody needs a 1.7Ghz chip. For a server, that clock speed would be handy, but only with about 1Mb of onboard cache.
The real news here... (Score:4)
Re:i860 - yeah, bad naming choice (Score:2)
Re:1.7 GHz? Ha. (Score:1)
Death, taxes, and bloatware...
Yeah... (Score:2)
The 64 bit arena is where the real fortunes will be made and lost. Hope AMD doesn't misplay their hand there.
Norman Bates, please call your mother. (Score:3)
The irrational part of my mind cries, "Look! 1.7 GHz! That's almost 2 GHz! Blazing speed! Raw, brute, merciless POWER! More!! MORE!!! I'm still not satisfied!!!"
I can hold off the irrational only so long. When that magicical hertz hits two gigs, the irrational is going to sneak up behind my rational mind with an icepick.
"Everything louder than everything else!" -- Meatloaf
Re:Another p4 iteration (Score:3)
During our tests the Pentium 4 1.7GHz always operated at 1.7GHz and did not fall victim to any clock throttling because of heat. You shouldn't worry about the Pentium 4 dropping its clock speed because of heat unless you are running the processor without a heatsink/fan installed.
The 'Foster' core was designed by HP (Score:1)
Re:Eh... I Care, and so does everyone else. (Score:1)
I care about the Mhz. With a faster CPU my computer will boot faster, compressing my MP3's from the CDs I buy will take less time, compiling my programs will take less time, and as yet another bonus I'll get better framerates in my games.
Let us not kid ourselves: Everyone wants faster computers.
Re:Wow! (Score:1)
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Re:1.7 GHz is a lot like a 1.2GHz Athlon (Score:1)
It should also be noted that the Pentium 4 scores better in 3DMark 2001, as well.
It all boils down to this: The Athlon 1.33GHz may be faster in yesterday's apps in general...but why do we need the old apps to run so damn fast? They're still /more/ than playable/runable on the Pentium 4 systems. The difference you get with the Pentium 4 is that future SSE2-coded applications will become mainstream shortly (AMD licensed it, as well) as a replacement to the x87 FPU, and performance will take off for future apps, where it is actually needed.
Re:1.7 GHz is a lot like a 1.2GHz Athlon (Score:1)
Re:"double every year and a half" (Score:2)
Actually, to be completely anal, it states the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double approximately every 18 months.
Re:The important thing about all this . . . (Score:1)
No, that's completely wrong. The computation power required for encryption grows linearly or with n*log(n) with the length of the key, while for brute-force cracking it's exponential. "strong encryption" is almost exclusively a matter of finding and using algorithms that maintain this discrepancy.
Speed doesn't matter. (Score:1)
Oh yeah, I really hates the way intel claims in their commercials their faster processors enable faster internetting. As if the processors have been the bottleneck the last years.
Re:The real news here... (Score:1)
The current P4 is a legacy CPU. It will have a different pin count by the time the leaves fall from the trees this year. Anyone who buys one now is either ignorant or works at a corporation with an IT department.
blessings,
Re:Ehh, there is a myth about this myth.. (Score:2)
Not only that, but their filesystem code can keep those buses filled with bits. Their filesystem overhead is the lowest you'll find anywhere.
It's amazing how fast a machine goes when the OS gets out of the way...
Re:however (Score:1)
Re:The classic, if much decried, Freudian struggle (Score:2)
Freudian struggle? You're more right than you could possibly realize :) The original posters quote was from Tom Lehrer's "Smut:"
More, more, I'm still not satisfied!
Stories of tortures
Used by debauchers
Lurid, licentious and vile
Make me smile.
Novels that pander
To my taste for candor
Give me a pleasure sublime.
Let's face it I love slime!
What 1.7Ghz Is Like (Score:2)
Re:Ehh, there is a myth about this myth.. (Score:1)
Yep, I agree here, my nifty O2 has a bus that can do about 1.2GB/s...Intel is just now catching up with this machine in memory bandwith(RDRAM)... The O2 is made in 1996. However, we really need to move away from bus (low-latency switching is where it is at) technology if we want to squash the bottlenecks in the pipeline.. Can anyone say XIO? Of course, I'm sure all the lucrative switching technologies like XIO have been bought by the big companies(and probably rightfully so).. Why does a PC in this age need that kind of preformance anyway?
Re:Ehh, there is a myth about this myth.. (Score:1)
Re:1.7 GHz is a lot like a 1.2GHz Athlon (Score:2)
1.7 GHz is a lot like a 1.2GHz Athlon (Score:4)
Source Magazine [sourcemagazine.com]
Target PC [targetpc.com]
Hardware Unlimited [hardware-unlimited.com]
Tech Report [tech-report.com]
Gamer's Depot [gamersdepot.com]
What's the upshot? That even with each processor's "ideal" system (DDR on the Athlon, RAMBUS on the P4)-- well, the P4 kicks ass at Quake 3: Team Arena. I mean, it's really really good at Quake 3. So good, in fact, that-- well, you won't be running anything else, I hope?
Because in almost every other app, the cheaper Athlon 1.2 equals or outperforms the P4. That even includes apps such as POVRay that did some early optimizations for the P4's extended instructions. I recommend reading the Tech Report's overview if you're interested in that; they have more details on exactly which instructions were used, and the current state of Intel's compilers for the chip.
Keep in mind, of course, that the compilers are still a bit beta-ish-- sometimes they actually make the programs run slower. But they never appeared to actually make it faster than an Athlon 1.2.
Debate what you will about future extensibility, and so on-- but unless you're going to be playing a whole lot of Quake, if you're looking for a new system you should grab one of those cheap Athlon CPU/Motherboard combos selling for $300 at Fry's.
Re:What 1.7Ghz Is Like (Score:2)
Speed isn't important... (Score:2)
Remember that company that made inexpensive chips? They thought about making a new chip with a better FPU (among other features). It didn't need to be faster than the competition, just a better quality chip. They called it the Athlon.
What's funny is that Intel thought they could compete with this better quality chip by making a faster chip, which they released to early, and had to recall.
Guess some people don't learn their lesson...
Recalled... (Score:3)
How long until the new 1.7GHz gets recalled
- 1 month
- 1 week
- 3 days
- When cowboy neal gets one
- its already recalled.
I still find it humorous that they compare the 1.7 Intel to the 1.33 AMD...
What 1.7Ghz Is Like? (Score:2)
Re:"double every year and a half" (Score:2)
True, but people have been applying it to raw speed for a couple decades now, and the law has applied equally well in that manner. (I'm feeling too lazy to look it up at the moment, but I seem to recall that the notorious "Jargon File" updated their definition of Moore's Law to reflect the alternate aplication of it.)
CPU's have been close to doubling every year and a half for quite some time now, so it should not be shocking to anybody that we have gone from 1 to 1.7 in a year. That was my point.
Re:1 Year ago? (Score:2)
Since that time, a trend has emerged of chip speeds increasing at a rate of about 2x every year and a half. Since it has held up (for far longer that Moore could have expected, and applied in ways that he didn't mean for it to be) for so long, we jokingly refer to it as a physical Law of nature, named for the guy who first said it.
Some people would cite this as an example of a "self fulfilling prophesy" (everybody agrees that "Moore's Law" is a reasonable expectation, so that's what everybody shoots for to keep up with the competition). Whether that's true or not, I'll let others speculate about. "What if" debates give me a headache.
Re:BS (Score:2)
OS X is a multitasking operating system. The old Mac OS was not. That is why the old Mac OS was able to be so fast and responsive, even on really old hard ware. Drag the mouse, and that's all your CPU was thinking about: dragging the mouse. Open an application, and you were forced to twiddle your thumbs while the application launches, but 100% of that machine was thinking about launching your application.
For years, Apple users have been screaming that they wanted preemptive multi-tasking, even though almost all Macs are used as single-client machines. Well, now you got it. Apple runs Apache web server nearly as fast as any other UNIX, but guess what, there's a price for all that power: doing several things at once takes more effort than doing one thing at a time.
Personally, I don't give a shit if IE or Omniweb takes an extra 10 seconds to launch, because now I can do other things while it is launching, instead of having my system be effectively dead to me while it loads an app from the hard drive.
But if reizing windows quickly is more important to you than having lots of background processes while you work, then boot to OS 9.1 and stay there. You won't be able to run UNIX apps, and your box won't be much good as a server, but at least you can launch your web browser quickly, which seems to be what really matters to you. I'm not just brushing you off here, I am serious. It really sounds like OS X is not for you at this stage in its development.
Re:One Pound Heatsink (Score:3)
Mmmm... burgers.
"double every year and a half" (Score:4)
Was progress at the speed of Moore's Law always crazy, or did it just become do today?
Sounds hot (Score:2)
Inconsistancies in benchmarking (Score:3)
however (Score:2)
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
Re:Noticeable bias on slashdot (Score:2)
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
Re:Noticeable bias on slashdot (Score:3)
what's the difference between a 486DX processor and 487 co-processor? the pin arrangement! that's right, intel realized it would make more money by selling a 486DX as a '487 math coprocessor' even though that by installing it, you disable your 486SX. (effectively making your '487 math coprocessor' the main processor)
what's the difference between a 486DX and a 486SX? intel intentionally fucked up the FPU on the 486SX! yeah, on the original 486SX's, there WAS an FPU, but it was disabled. thanks intel!
difference between the older celerons and their pentium 2 brothers? nothing! well, except for the fact that intel broke the l2 cache on them so they could sell value chips. the cache was THERE, you just couldn't use it. if you've ever opened a PII cartridge, you'll notice that it's a socket 370 chip on a slocket. surprise...
the pentium series bugs. F00F!
intel has driven me out of my mind. i'm an amd convert till they start fucking it up.
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
Re:1.7 GHz? Ha. (Score:2)
There is no such thing as clock limiting circuitry.
The chip derives its clock from a frequency provided by the motherboard. There is no way it can "know" how fast it is running unless there is some sort of frequency generator in the processor itself, which is fraught with many problems, and will probably never happen.
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Re:1.7 GHz? Ha. (Score:2)
Well, since you seem to know so much about it, and how I am wrong, why don't you enlighten us?
If you can offer nothing but critisism without explaining what indeed is wrong with my facts, then you are just trolling.
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The classic, if much decried, Freudian struggle... (Score:2)
Where the id says "More! Grunt! More!"
The ego says "I am satisfied. All's right with the world."
And the Superego says "Consume. Spend. Buy. Just do it!"
You know what? Mac people have had to rationalize for far too long. We've had to settle for 400Mhz!
Argh! When will someone come to quench our thirst for raw power? Motorola? IBM? Apple?
Do not bother to fight the irrational/id. The best you can do is placate it and compromise; promise it a *dual* 2Ghz system!
Geek dating! [bunnyhop.com]
Craziness (Score:2)
Yeah, it's just crazy to think that it's almost like every year to eighteen months processor power doubles. Someone should theorise a rule about it or something!
What 2.125GHz feels like (Score:2)
Re:too bad... (Score:2)
Eh... (Score:2)
And of course, RISC chips like the G3, G4, etc. do far more per clock cycle than their Intel/AMD counterparts. At this point Intel's sort of saying "LOOK HOW FAST WE CAN MAKE THAT QUARTZ JIGGLE! OH YEAH!" Who cares, look at the practical side I guess.
MHz isn't really a milestone anymore because it's not very significant anymore.
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Re:Noticeable bias on slashdot (Score:2)
That said, assuming the P4 continues to play catch-up well, I'll buy one if it offers more value for my money.
Wow! (Score:2)
You said it! And it'll be hysteria-inducing when we go from almost 2 GHz to 4 in the next eighteen to twenty-four months!
Yowza! I'll believe it when I see it!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
i860-based board? (Score:2)
--Blair
Re:"double every year and a half" (Score:3)
One Pound Heatsink (Score:4)
In a recent press conference, Intel stated: "Not only is the new Pentium 4 a technological breakthrough in terms of processing performance, but users can cook 4 hamburgers in under 10 minutes on it's new larger-sized heatsink"