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Intel

But what of the P3? 30

Posted by CmdrTaco from the heir-to-the-empire dept.
Pointer writes "It seems that John Spooner, of PC Magazine, thinks that the Pentium III isn't going to cut it with the IT pros--here's why. " Give ya a hint- its green.
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But what of the P3? More

But what of the P3?

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  • Intel probably won't be interested, since they are concerned with keeping competitors away. But IDT and Cyrix would gain from economies of scale, and a saving in R&D. Unless they plan to just stay with Super7, in which case they won't have to spend any money on developing a new platform, but they'd still lose on economy of scale, if the K7 lives up to the hype and sells as well as AMD is hoping.
  • > "You don't need this kind of additional
    > capability [increased graphics processing]
    > unless you're playing games," said Kimball
    > Brown, an analyst at Dataquest Inc., in San
    > Jose. "To me, it comes down to clock speed, and
    > that's why people would want it."

    This is why you should never hire MIS graduates to be your IT managers. After all, clock speed means zilch when compared to a real measure of speed like MIPS.

    The article does make some decent points about the problems with modern PCs. I think SGI's probably gone further in the last few months than Intel has in the last ten years to correct these problems -- the way the Visual PCs handle things internally is awfully impressive.

    Dear SGI: I'm sorry I accused you of becoming Just Another Wintel OEM.

    ----

  • Posted by Assmodeus:

    seems we pulled our nicks from the same piece of literature, only i modified mine a bit to make it original... oh well.... another worthless tidbit...
  • If not for AMD, Intel would be selling us slower CPUs at higher prices. Every purchases of an AMD CPU helps to keep Intel honest and the CPU market competitive.

    Support the Rebel Alliance, buy AMD CPUs!

    Aren't you glad you use AMD?
    Dont you wish everyone did?

  • Who cares ?

    When P3 will ship, Intel will stop making P2s, and people than want to stick with Intel will have to go for P3.

    (That's exactly what happened with Pentium -> P2. Many people would buy plain Pentium if they still were manufactured...)

  • Ummm.. What? Where?
  • This is why you should never hire MIS graduates to be your IT managers. After all, clock speed means zilch when compared to a real measure of speed like MIPS.


    Measuring processor speed in MIPS still doesn't tell you much about real performance, i.e. how fast can your applications run. Every benchmark is an artificial test, and measures of MIPS are among the most artificial.


  • >, they'll be as worthless as MMX (well MMX is
    >nice for my distributed.net client, but that's it)


    You wish :)..
    http://www.distributed.net/FAQ/rc5-6 4-faq.html [distributed.net]


    How come a Pentium with MMX isn't any faster than a Pentium without MMX?
    This has a similar answer as the FPU question above. In short there seems to be no way to apply any of the MMX instructions to our advantage. Right now none of the Bovine clients attempt to make use of MMX and we believe any use of the MMX instruction set will result in slower clients rather than faster ones. However, like the FPU question, there has been some recent discussions that suggest that this may not necessarily be the case (MMX instructions are also pipelined separately from integer instructions). If anyone can develop an RC5-64 core that takes advantage of the Pentium's MMX instruction set for an overall client speed boost we would be very interested in hearing from them! To aid in your efforts the x86 core code has been made available and can be downloaded from http://altern.com/rguyom/.
  • Give me an AMD K6-2 or a Celeron, that's what I've been building our new systems with at work, for the average business user who runs MS Word, Eudora, and surfs the web, those processors are more than fast enough, and there is no reason to spend an extra 400 dollars for Katmai New Instructions, they'll be as worthless as MMX (well MMX is nice for my distributed.net client, but that's it) for mainstream business users, only really useful for 3D Gaming in my opinion. I was all-AMD until the Celeron's debuted, I'm not into the politics, just the price/performance ratio.
  • IF you want to play games, buy AMD.


    Check out Tom's Hardware Page for comparisons of the performance of K6-2 processors and Intel processors on popular games. The K6-2 is slower at floating point than Intel chips, and that's exactly the wrong thing to be slower at for a game machine.


    Disappointing, since AMD is much better at designing chips than Intel, but still true.

  • I can say that the AMD processors perform much better than anything Intel has made. For apps, who cares about speed? When you're online or typing in a WP, disk access is usually your greatest bottleneck. But IF you want to play games, buy AMD. If you get a newer K6-2 (with an MX core), there's even a program that will remap your L1 cache to improve your graphics speed by up to 70%!! (My system is a straight 300Mhz K6-II with a 4MB RIVA 128, but the 3D bench goes head-to-head with a 400A Celeron/16MB TNT)... I'm just holding out on the k6-3.

    Asmodean

  • Duh. (Score:1)

    by Gumber ( 17306 )
    Even with hard disks going for well under $100/GB, this PC week article is a waste of space.

    The PIII may not offer much that people will use right now but it will be adopted because it is the future of the mid-range x86 line. To the extent that people want high end desktops, this chip will be bought simply because intel will offer no alternative.

    More interesting, from my point of view, is a news.com article that observes that AMD systems are dominating in the retail channels.
  • Water's wet. What else is new.
    Assuming AMD and Cyrix remain the price will drop the PII cost a fortune when it first came out.

    By next year you will have a PIII or equiv on your desktop. This is because you can never have a PC that is fast enough - I remember 40MB hard drives and the 32MB limit. As long as Windows swells, Intel will build faster chips and those of us who use Linux will benefit. This maybe the only upside to Windows; fast cheap chips.
  • unlike Cyrix for instance... I'm still bitter about a Cyrix 166+ I used to have, unstable buggy mofo. I taught it good tho, I gave it to my parents, thus banishing it to an eternal life of WINDOWS! Hehe, yeah but seriously, buy AMD if you can, Intel is waaay too expensive. Definitely not worth the extra cash. A Celeron might be ok, but unless you need the better quake3 performance, go AMD. I've got a k62-350 on a FIC motherboard, but I think I'd wait for the k6-3 or k-7. The k-7 will apparently use DEC Alpha style motherboards. Besides Intel wants to kill overclocking, we can't have that can we???

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