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Intel

Flaw Delays Shipment Of New 'Canterwood' Pentium 4 196

Posted by timothy from the better-now-than-later dept.
bigal3du writes "Hardware-Unlimited has posted new information from Intel that they will be delaying the shipment of the new Pentium 4 3Ghz with an 800Mhz FSB. An Intel spokesman contacted Hardware-Unlimited early this morning to let the publication know that performance "anomolies" have been discovered, at the last minute, in validation testing and the processor will be temporarily delayed for shipment. Full details on Hardware-Unlimited.com Forums..." ninenet points to this PC Magazine article which explains the things that characterize the new chip and also mentions the delay.
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Flaw Delays Shipment Of New 'Canterwood' Pentium 4 More

Flaw Delays Shipment Of New 'Canterwood' Pentium 4

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  • Funny (Score:5, Funny)

    by 0x00000dcc ( 614432 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:01PM (#5730516) Journal
    we start OUT the day telling us how cool the chip is, and END the day telling us the REAL story

  • Bah (Score:4, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:03PM (#5730538) Homepage Journal

    In 1980 I had a 1.023 MHz Apple ][+ and I could type ~70 WPM. Intel is pushing 3+ GHz chips and I can still only type ~70 WPM.

    • Re:Bah (Score:5, Funny)

      by Carbonite ( 183181 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:07PM (#5730561)
      Hmmm... Perhaps these new words are a million time longer?

      • Re:Bah (Score:2, Offtopic)

        by addaon ( 41825 )
        If nothing else, they use a million times more pixels. Apple //c vs. Apple 23" Cinema. My, how we've grown.

      • Re:Bah (Score:2)

        by wik ( 10258 )
        Nope, the words went from 8-bit to 32-bit. Just a 4-fold increase.
        • Nope, the words went from 8-bit to 32-bit. Just a 4-fold increase.

          Wait a second, I thought the words were the same, and they were just using more bits to represent them.....
      • Actually, 3GHz is 3002,933 times faster than 1,023 MHz... Not 1 million times faster.
        Then again, it's new hyper threading vs. old well... Mac... Maybe it is 1 million times faster after all...
        Or maybe the words grew more complex and thus it takes more time for the human mind to proofread anything that pops out from Office autocirrection schemas...

        • Re:Bah (Score:3, Informative)

          by GreenHell ( 209242 )
          3 GHz = 3000 MHz.
          3 GHz != 3096 MHz
          Therefore
          3000 Mhz / 1.023 MHz = 2932.551

          MHz and GHz are base 10. Base 2 is for memory.

    • Re:Bah (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jason1729 ( 561790 )
      Yes, but the rest of the processing power is to compensate for the extra OS overhead, so you still get the same snappy feel as you did with the II+.

      You seem to be under the impression you need a faster processor so you can get things done faster. The real reason is so you can get things done just as fast without regressing :). It's like swimming upstream against a strong current.

      Jason
      ProfQuotes [profquotes.com]

      • Re:Bah (Score:3, Funny)

        by evilviper ( 135110 )
        And just how long have you been using Windows?

        • Re:Bah (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Jason1729 ( 561790 )
          And just how long have you been using Windows?

          Oh..Since 1993 or so. I've also been using Linux since 1995. Are you implying that Linux today is no more bloated than it was in 1995? Can I run Linux and a word processer on a 1MHz 6502 CPU? I had the SuperText word processor on my Apple; it had most of the major features a modern word processor has and it would run perfectly on that 6502 under ProDOS.

          Jason
          ProfQuotes [profquotes.com]

          • Re:Bah (Score:2, Redundant)

            by lakeland ( 218447 )
            Linux was never written to run on the 6502. As I'm sure you're aware from '95, it was written to take advantage of the amazing memory management features just introduced in the 80386. As for bloat between 2.4.20 and the first kernels, yes bloat has increased. The most obvious examples are buffers have changed default sizes to the point a 386 wouldn't be able to fit them. But the bloat isn't significant (less than an order of magnitude) -- it would be very strange for someone to say "I'm not going to upgra

    • Re:Bah (Score:5, Funny)

      by philovivero ( 321158 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:13PM (#5730630) Homepage Journal
      In 1980, I had a TRS-80 CoCo where I could hold the "page-down" key and the text would fly by as fast as I could watch it.

      Now I have a P4 2.4GHz machine, and when I hold down page-down, my whole machine grinds to a halt as my Rube Goldberg-like operating system tries to phone home to Microsoft about my text paging habits.
    • grow up. we count clicks/second nowadays or is it ticks/second? whatever it is, 3 billion is the answer. WPM? I thought, we obsoleted those ugly English units in favor of French SI units. No, wait... I guess, again we are boycotting French units and adopting English units.
    • Get a better keyboard! [typematrix.com] It'll cost less than a new computer.

      Hmm, unfortunately, their Dvorak-labeled version seems to be out of production. Well, the QUERTY version has a button to switch the keymapping. Just add some keyboard labels (for you non-touch-typists), and you are all set.
      • While the Dvorak(only)-labeled version is currently out of stock (not out of production.. they are just waiting on the factory), they do have a DUAL labeled version (ie both DVORAK and QWERTY labeled). All versions come with the ability to switch from DVORAK to QWERTY (and back), and if you have a version that only has either labeling, you can get a set of alphabet stickers with it for free that work very well.

        And I can only second that getting this keyboard will help your aching fingers. I love it ;)

        (d
      • Bah! Infidel! Use a Post Ban Dvorak [pigdog.org] like God^H^H^HIBM wants you to!

    • Re:Bah (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:31PM (#5730773)
      In 1980 I had a 1.023 MHz Apple ][+ and I could type ~70 WPM. Intel is pushing 3+ GHz chips and I can still only type ~70 WPM.

      Hmm ..

      Have you tried Mavis Beacon Typing Tutor? It may help.

      http://www.mavisbeacon.com/
    • I could type ~70 WPM.

      70 words per minute? That is fast! Are you sure you didn't mean 70 characters per minute?

    • Improve your Technique (Score:5, Funny)

      by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @04:30PM (#5731301) Homepage Journal

      Start thinking outside the box, dude.

      Start by considering an economical language, based on the powers of two, which you'll have to agree as being more suitable for computers than some 105 key piece of junk.

      For instance, start with only 8 letters, say,

      asdfjkl;
      and you should be able to improve your typing speed immensely.

      Also, pressing the space bar lots of times b e t w e e n chara c te rs will push your word count up quite a b i t, too!

      Sorry I can't provide more tips now, but I'm really busy producing some new CPU benchmark figures.

    • Re:Bah (Score:2)

      by pmz ( 462998 )
      Intel is pushing 3+ GHz chips and I can still only type ~70 WPM.

      I type a measly 35 WPM or so, and have occasionally found myself typing faster than Word will accept input. This is on 500MHz to 750MHz class computers. I'm not sure what Word is doing behind the scenes (leaky abstractions?), but it can't be pretty. It almost seems that Word typesets the whole page or document with every character typed. Ah, the dillema of WYSIWYG.

      Seriously, though, you have a good point, where the problem of data entry
  • People there are OCing their 2.4B Northwood SLRZ's to 3.6ghz/ 200mhz FSB on granite bay boards. All that is missing is Hyper Threading, but the 2.4B's only cost $160 and the boards... about $180.

  • Maybe No Glitch At All? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Acidic_Diarrhea ( 641390 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:06PM (#5730553) Homepage Journal
    This comes from The Inquirer [theinquirer.net]. A wild rumor is that there's only a small glitch and in actuality Intel just doesn't have enough stock to make the shipment. Either way, it's not good news for Intel's stock. But which is worse? Running into a problem in testing OR miscalculating how many units you need? I say the miscalculation represents more of a fundamental problem whereas a snag in testing is to be expected.

    Ah, here's the text:
    "Japanese web site PC Watch today claimed that Intel has put a stop to general shipments of the Pentium 4 3GHz and 800MHz chipset products because of a glitch discovered during testing.

    If the report is correct - and we've contact Intel for clarification - it's rather an embarrassing admission.

    The Japanese site thinks that Intel is using a small glitch as an excuse and in actual fact the problem is a severe limitation in supplies of the chipset and CPU.

    Intel's embargo on the Canterwood chipset, which uses the 800MHz front side bus expired just a few hours ago, and there are already dozens of reviews of the product all over the world wide wibble."

    • On the other hand, producing too few of a product is potentially a lot more easily corrected than fixing a glitch in the hardware.

    • Re:Maybe No Glitch At All? (Score:5, Informative)

      by mattyohe ( 517995 ) <matt.yohe @ g mail.com> on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:12PM (#5730615)
      The Inquirer like everyone else has updated their story...:

      Update It would appear that the original version of the story was correct. Intel has put the 800MHz FSB 3.0GHz P4 on hold. We received the following statement from Intel: "Due to recent analysis, and given our commitment to quality, Intel will be placing the Pentium 4 processor at 3.00 GHz with an 800MHz bus on ship hold temporarily. In the course of our final testing in our validation lab environment, we have observed an anomaly on a very small number of the 800MHz bus processors. We are working to understand and resolve the issue and we hope to ship this new processor as soon as possible."
      • They've updated it with a statement from Intel - not the most impartial judge of events, right? If they're a rumor about a company and some statement from the PR staff at the company, ten times out of ten, I am more interested in the rumor. The PR release is just fluff.

  • This is not true (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mohammed Al-Sahaf ( 665285 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:07PM (#5730569)
    This article is a fabrication. The chip was never delayed. The blood of the rival chip makers was shed on the walls of Baghdad.

    • The above post has not been modded down! (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The above post really has a +5 score!

      The dastardly agents working on behalf of the corrupt western infidels CoyboyNeal and Taco conspired to mod the mighty M.S.S. down!

      Don't mod down the Minister! [welovethei...nister.com]

  • guess they cantership it...
  • haha, i'll take any mistake processors they might have produced between this morning and now!

  • Intel: Where Quality Is Job 0.99999999567 (Score:5, Funny)

    by tuffy ( 10202 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:10PM (#5730601) Homepage Journal
    Sorry, had to say it :)

  • No Wonder (Score:4, Funny)

    by Gefiltefish11 ( 611646 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:13PM (#5730620)

    It's no surprise that they've had problems. "Canterwood" just has a bad sound to it. The working name will probably doom the product to failure. Next thing you know, we'll all be hearing about the "Canterwood" effect of hardware failure...

  • Well duh... (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:13PM (#5730628) Homepage Journal

    Flaw Delays Shipment Of New 'Canterwood' Pentium 4

    Frankly I'm suprised a CPU made of wood would work at all.
  • An Intel spokesman contacted Hardware-Unlimited early this morning to let the publication know that performance "anomolies" have been discovered

    Microsoft and Sun are commiting to buying AMD's 64 bit chip...Oh Shit!!

  • Intel distances... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "Intel distances themselves again from the Athlon." [slashdot.org]

    Or not. :)

    Sorry. Had to take a cheap shot at an Intel fanboy (OldGrayDave).

  • Uh oh (Score:4, Funny)

    by hawkbug ( 94280 ) <psx.fimble@com> on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:16PM (#5730649) Homepage
    Hopefully it's not another "math bug", where 2 x 2 = 4.1267999999!

  • Regardless of the severity of the flaw... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drgroove ( 631550 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:16PM (#5730651)
    ... its great to see Intel take the initiative on their product and prevent a chip w/ even a minor flaw from entering the marketplace. While their stock price might take a minor hit today on the news that shipment has been delayed, imagine the fiasco down the line if thousands of flawed processors were in the wild, and Intel had to do a recall? FWIW, this was the "Right Thing To Do".

    If only other prominent tech companies (*cough* *microsoft* *cough*) would take this sort of lead and ensure that only products which were found to be free of flaws entered the market, instead of releasing half-baked products and using the customer base as guinea pigs... just imagine how better off we'd all be...
    • "If only other prominent tech companies (*cough* *microsoft* *cough*) would take this sort of lead and ensure that only products which were found to be free of flaws..."

      Have you ever actually been part of the development process? In case you haven't, let me give you a little hint: the customer is always a wildcard.

      I remember Front Page ... I think it was 98 was reported to have a flaw that could wipe out your hard drive. Sounds nasty, doesn't it? Hardly. What happened was somebody was creative. When
    • Anyone with any memory at all remembers the infamous pentium bug of years back. These things happen and as they pack more transistors onto their chips we can expect the number of hardware bugs to climb as well. Many of them are never even caught because they're never seen. Intel got hit with a firestorm of bad publicity before and are just covering their a$$es. Its frankly good business.

  • too much power != good (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 2057 ( 600541 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:21PM (#5730701) Homepage Journal
    The more powerful the chips intel pushes the less effcient the coder becomes, i remember when i used to tweak my programs so they would run optimally on a slower machines, now a days its like you need 192mb and 500mhz for word processing. People need to get back to the old school days when a 486/66mhz and 4mb RAM was minumum. I can understand how games evolve and more power is needed, but it's not just games that have this high requirement these days.
    • Blah blah blah... this is the same lamentation that comes out every single time a report about a new, faster processor appears. We get it. Please, move on... all this whining about "the good ol' days" is really getting exhausting.

    • Definition of "good" development (Score:5, Insightful)

      by m11533 ( 263900 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:41PM (#5730853)
      Long ago the developer/hardware equation was changed. Originally, hardware was far more expensive than the people developing the software. That was when investing lots of energy into hand-optimizing was the proper tradeoff.

      Years ago, before 1GHz was considered a short term possibility, hardware costs had decreased and software costs had increased, to the point where it is the DEVELOPER who is the most expensive piece of the equation. Thus, we now are at the point where, with the exception of a few very specialized segments, we do whatever it takes to optimize the developer time in building software. That is not to say that developers can be careless and wasteful. But that developers should not waste time optimizing code. IFF performance is an issue, THEN one takes measurements and optimizes critical areas consuming the majority of time. Beyond that, it just isn't worth it. Today's 3GHz machines with GB of RAM only reinforce that this is the only appropriate approach to software development.
      • IFF performance is an issue, THEN one takes measurements and optimizes critical areas consuming the majority of time. Beyond that, it just isn't worth it.

        This is generally true, but you're neglecting another factor - the number of copies. The most obvious case is if you're only going to run a program once, spending one hour to make it run 30 minutes faster is silly.

        However, imagine if Microsoft charged one dollar more for every copy of Word to optimize the product. I don't have numbers, but I wouldn't

        • Believe it or not, this already happens. There are performance goals that certain features must meet, or it's considered a defect.

          If you don't believe that, sit down for a minute and think about all of the crap that must be going on in the background after/while you type a sentence... spell checker, grammar, macro checks, formatting, replacing a commonly misspelling with the correct spelling, etc.
          • There are performance goals that certain features must meet, or it's considered a defect.

            The question is on which sort of machines are these performance goals measured? If you keep measuring on "current" machines, ignoring the relation to the actual complexity of the problem, then you're really relaxing requirements more and more.

            • Well, the real question is, if 95% of your target audience uses hardware better than your target of a 500mhz PIII, is it really worth spending a lot of extra time to make it work well (not just work, but work well) on a P90?

              The perceptive performance "bar" remains the same. The bar is "it's usable on what the customer is using". What you have to do to meet that bar is what changes.
              • the real question is, if 95% of your target audience uses hardware better than your target of a 500mhz PIII, is it really worth spending a lot of extra time to make it work well (not just work, but work well) on a P90?

                First of all, don't underestimate 5%. Apple has $4B in the bank selling to 5%. Hypothetically speaking, if your software can let your P90 customer avoid one upgrade, they might be willing to pay an extra $100 for it.

                What I'm actually talking about is that while most products fall squarel

    • the fault of this lies in many things.

      the C libraries are getting insane in size.

      Microsoft demands that their visual basic is 2 times the size the last version was. (I remember being able to fit a VB app and it's libraries on a floppy! now you can't fit the minimal libraries on 10 floppies and thank god I don't get near that crap anymore) and the same problem is with C and it's libs.

      Now add the fact that for some reason our word processor needs to render HTML and 95 other file formats, be able to do ba
      • plus 900-1000 more useless crap like scripting.. Who the hell needs to script anything in a WORD PROCESSOR??

        Emacs developers do. I wrote a programming language a while back (it was complete shit), and I wrote a short simple emacs mode for editing the scripts. Scripting made this possible, and it didn't slow emacs down too much.

        I do agree that games have a good excuse for their bloat. Operating systems don't, office productivity apps don't.

        If the faster processors can run these programs with sufficient

      • Who the hell needs to script anything in a WORD PROCESSOR??

        It's to enable the "computer guy" in the office to create Word-document forms that are frustratingly inflexible to fill out, crash half the time, and end up corrupting whatever database they are imported into, all in the name of "increased efficiency".

        Microsoft's motto should be "One step forward; two steps back."
    • The more powerful the chips intel pushes the less effcient the coder becomes, i remember when i used to tweak my programs so they would run optimally on a slower machines

      Yeah, I said that too when the PII came out. Sure there is always going to be bloat in code, especially in large projects. But you are more than welcome to go to ebay and get an 8088 or an Apple II and enjoy a machine that fits your computing needs (floppy drive or tape drive your pick).

      Me, I would like to have a computer fast enough t
    • true... i think its mainly because microshaft is increasing requirements to pump the market, and then FSF things like KDE and Gnome have to do the same for end-user appeal, and to not lose ground to it.

  • Vapor vs. shipping. (Score:5, Funny)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:24PM (#5730716) Homepage Journal
    OK, so to recap the previous article and this article:

    They compare a chip that is not shipping now, cannot ship now because of bugs, but when it ships will have a memory interface twice as fast as what is shipping now on the Athlon as well as a roughly 50% higher clock speed. In many tests the Athlon (which is shipping now) still won, and where it did not win it usually was over 50% as fast as this new chip (which is not shipping yet).

    • gee, welcome to computing 101. bus speed does not scale with total performance--EVER
      architectural/pipeline differences
      north and south bridge interaction

      Anything else you want to know about how a processor can differ from another?

  • Obligatory Pentium Jokes (Score:5, Funny)

    by xcomputer_man ( 513295 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:28PM (#5730747) Homepage
    Q. How many Pentium designers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
    A. 1.99999289345, but that's close enough for non-technical people.

    Q. The Pentium conforms to IEEE standards for floating point math. If you fly in an airplane designed using a Pentium, what's the correct pronounciation of IEEE?
    A. Aiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

    Q. What's another name for the Intel Inside sticker they put on PCs?
    A. The warning label.
  • Intel is brining out a FASTER cpu while AMD is going to redo the desktop market with a 64-bit processor?
  • A 533-MHz FSB Pentium 4 will run fine on Canterwood, Intel told us this morning. No word yet on whether or not Dell, Gateway, et al will stop shipments, or how long the delay will be. Or what the problem actually is, for that matter.
  • Hasn't this always been standard Intel marketing? Tell everyone how absolutely great their new product is, and how you can't live without it, then after it's announced as a viable product, they delay citing bugs?

    Well, I guess that's better than the Pentium 60Mhz and 66Mhz bug.. Release a whole bunch of processors, just to recall them later. :)

  • What they don't want you to know... (Score:4, Funny)

    by MoeMoe ( 659154 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:36PM (#5730820)
    Customer: What is the holdup in bringing out the new chip?
    Intel Rep.: We have recently uncovered some "anomolies" within the chip itself
    Customer: Would it slow down my computer?
    Intel Rep.: No...
    Customer: Would it damage my mobo or HD?
    Intel Rep.: No...
    Customer: Then what is this "anamoly" about?
    Intel Rep.: We forgot to make it un-"OC"able OK?!?!
    Customer: Ummm wait....
    **Click!**
  • then put on a "B" version in 2x mos. so the delay kinda suxtors but better than paying top $$$ for the new chips and finding out you got teething problems.

  • Performance anomolies (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:46PM (#5730900)
    let the publication know that performance "anomolies" have been discovered,



    Yes, the new Intel chip seems to have a few issues.
    To see if your chip is affected, submit a story to Slashdot that includes the word "anomaly" or some variant thereof. If it comes out misspelled, you're fucked.

  • how this happens in the same week that they're supposed to file their 10-Q with the SEC. I'm going to have to check the stats on that in a bit.
  • - Are you telling me it's Flawed, Useless Developer?

    Um.. Ok, maybe it wasn't that funny.

  • The real reason (Score:3, Funny)

    by InsaneCreator ( 209742 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @03:56PM (#5730992)
    The chip was so fast, it identified itself as an AMD. :)

  • F00F bug (Score:1, Redundant)

    by rf0 ( 159958 )
    Well its better than aother F00F bug isn't it? Then again we won't be able to make jokes like

    How may Pentiums does it take to change a lightbulb?
    1.9884838483 :)

    Rus
  • I was salivating after reading the reviews. This feels like nerd blue balls...
  • Shipment of the fastest processor is very slow ..... Whoa
  • Stock in Pfizer, manufacturer of Viagra, took a significant jump shortly after Intel's news about holding off their new chip. Market analyists attribute the stock jump to a mass fear about difficulties in getting 'wood.

  • Anandtech [anandtech.com] also mentioned it but says For the record, we did not encounter any issues during our testing that were out of the ordinary. Our motherboard labs did encounter some issues early on and we'll be investigating to see if they could possibly be related, but without being told any symptoms or the nature of the issue it's going to be very difficult for us to figure out what's causing it. Luckily none of these CPUs should have made it into the hands of any end-users, which is a relief. Intel insists that
  • So, does anyone know exactly what the "anomoly" was?

    Maybe they forgot to include the BSOD opcode.

    -

  • kudos (Score:2)

    by dilute ( 74234 )
    kudos to intel for actually testing their chip... does anyone remember the pentium pro?
  • geesh, they shipped the XScale PXA250 with only a 100MHz FSB so it's hardly faster than the existing 206MHz SA1110. But then again, there's not too much competition in the ARM market( go TI! ;).

    It's good they atleast pulled this CPU back Inside Intel. So THAT'S what "Intel Inside" means. ;)

    LoB

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