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Intel

Intel Releasing 700Mhz P3s 229

Posted by CmdrTaco from the more-please dept.
NoWhere Man writes "Intel plans to release Coppermine, its 700Mhz+ series of Pentium III chips, on Monday. The new chip will, not only be available for desktop machines, but notebooks aswell; thanks to a new design which makes them cooler. This release will allow Intel to say, once again, that it offers the fastest chip on the market. "
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Intel Releasing 700Mhz P3s More

Intel Releasing 700Mhz P3s

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  • How many programs will require more then 1Ghz?

    I am sure gamers will want these. Ditto anyone using software like Mathematica.

    Which are two of my favorites.
  • Regardless of how much scorn you heap on the G3s Bytemark performance the fact is that in general application performance (that is, realworld programs as opposed to arbitrary benchmarking programs) the G3 is noticeably faster than a pentium of the same clock speed. How relevant to the software you use everyday is SpecInt/FP?
  • If we're going to go that route, I believe SGI's chips are faster (MIPS?). What about IBM's Power3?

    - Scott
    ------
    Scott Stevenson
  • Think about it, look back five years ago and ask yourself what companies were running their mission critical systems on. It wasnt 486es or Pentiums (not until Pentium Pro was released), comapnies ran Sun, SGI, Alpha, but not many Pentiums. Now look anywhere, your favorite flavour Pentium is probably on some server in your office (but then again maybe it isn't).

    I'm not really sure if it's Intel that deserves the credit for this shift. The fact that Intel-based machines weren't common as server had far less to do with the CPU than it did with the OS. About five years ago, you could run DOS or DOS. Now there is Linux, Solaris, BSD, NT, etc.

    - Scott
    ------
    Scott Stevenson

  • This topic deserves some intelligent conversation. I can't find any benchmarks on spec.org for PowerMacs (which is silly), but I'm going to make some educated guesses. I think these are fairly reasonable assessments, quite unlike all the "MAC SUX" stuff so far.

    o A regular integer-centric application (Word, Excel, etc.) is likely to be faster on a Pentium 700 than it is on a PowerPC 450. It's generally accepted that a 450mhz G4 is comparable to a 550mhz, possibly 600mhz Pentium.

    o An application optimized for the G4's Velocity Engine (AltiVec) is likely noticeably faster than an application optimized for a 700mhz Pentium. These would include Photoshop, Media 100, Media Cleaner Pro, and possibly SETI@Home.

    o An unoptimized (on either side) floating point-centric application may be closer to a toss up.

    o A pentium 700mhz likely runs significantly hotter and sucks down more enegry than a G4. While G4s consume a bit too much more at this point to be great for laptops, there's much better chance at them going mobile that the high-end pentiums anytime soon.

    o Quake 3 will probably be quite a bit faster on a P3 700 than a G4/450 (based on Carmack's recent observations on the topic).

    o Somebody who stares at xterms or MS Office all day probably isn't going to notice much difference one way or the other.


    I don't know enough about Athlon, so I'll stay out of that.

    - Scott


    ------
    Scott Stevenson
  • You said:



    A pentium 700mhz likely runs significantly hotter and sucks down more enegry than a G4. While G4s consume a bit too much more at this point to be great for laptops, there's much better chance at them going mobile that the high-end pentiums anytime soon.



    The Slashdot summary said:



    The new chip will, not only be available for desktop machines, but notebooks as[ ]well; thanks to a new design which makes them cooler.

    Any questions? :)



    However... can you imagine how much the P-700s will cost?!

    --

  • Sorry... messed up my formatting there...

    --

  • Our company runs mission critical sofware on G3's and a new 450MHz G4. Floating point performance is all important.

    I ran a benchmark utility that our Mac advocates promulgate here on my Athlon 600Mhz (256Meg Ram). The Athlon came out 44% faster than our fastest G3 and the same as our new G4 in floating point. It blew them both away with the other metrics (2D, 3D etc.).

    What the Mac guys could say is that the G4 only consumes 5W. Yes the Athlon's hotter... it also cost me $1400 compared to $3500 for the G4 with little to no performance advantage as far as our company is concerned.

    Commpared with the extra expense, the headaches our MIS department has to go through with compatibility issues, the isolation certain of our engineers suffer 'cause they have to use Mac's to get their job done does anyone think upper managment cares about the 5W vs. 17W issue?

    Going with a Mac was the right decision 5 years ago. Justification is much, much harder today.
  • Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2128]
    (C) Copyright 1985-1999 Microsoft Corp.

    C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>cd \

    C:\>copy con test
    ^Z
    1 file(s) copied.

    C:\>rename test .sig

    C:\>type .sig

    C:\>
    Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff

  • The new chip will, not only be available for desktop machines, but notebooks as[ ]well; thanks to a new design which makes them cooler.

    You're right, but I guess I'm still sorta in the "I'll believe it when I see it" camp. :) Also, no one said that 700mhz chips would be in laptops, just that they would be Pentium IIIs.

    I'm willing to be proven wrong.

    - Scott
    ------
    Scott Stevenson
  • Actually, this data comes off of Intel's own benchmarks, which rate the G4 at not double, but triple the speed of a P3 at equal clockrate. Though I notice Intel's removed the benchmarks from their Website; guess they decided they couldn't take the heat.
  • "
    Slightly off-topic, the new PIII Xeon are codenamed "Cascades." Is this pronounced kass-kades or kass-kad-ees or something entirely different?
    "

    Since intel code names are based on geographic features, i'd assume kass-kades, as that's how you pronounce the matching river if you're from the area.
  • is a coppermine at 700Mhz > AMD at 700Mhz?

    cuz if its the same ole P3, an AMD 650 is still gonna win methinks.

  • Re:Nice (Score:1)

    by jafac ( 1449 )
    Okay, and in the G4 vs. P III claim, Apple says that the G4 is twice as fast according to Spec (or was it three times? I wasn't paying attention - but I know they're citing Spec now).

    So after that, everybody said "well all benchmarks are bullshit, that doesn't mean anything, G4 isn't faster in real-world applications",
    (never mind all the photoshop benchmarks and stuff).

    So what's the deal Spec IS credible now?

    I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
  • all i can say is wow
  • Anyone heard of Apple's G4's?

    Asheron

  • Re:Fastest? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As you know, the P3 Xeon processors can have up to 2MB of full speed cache on-chip. The Athlon can still smoke an equally clocked P3 Xeon.

    The "new" use of full speed cache in the latest revision P3's is not going to really boost speed significantly (read: Pentium VS Pentium MMX).
  • Even though they have a shit corporate rep in some cirlces, it's always nice for more speed to be available in a single chip.

    -sw
  • I'm curious about how their "cooler design" will affect overclocking - might have to try it on a 150MHz bus and see what happens... :)
  • this sounds like a "i hate these macs, they are not windows-compatible"-rant. you would not have "compatibility issues" if you used all macs, either, so that argument is just crap.
    as for speed, i believe any time that the Athlon beats the crap out of you macs, but... what i would REALLY like to know is how linux performance compares on Athlon vs. G4. after reading a lot of insightful comments by john carmack, i am convinced that the slooow Mac-OS has a huge impact.

    i love the Mac for its usability and style, but the technology is really 80s, and it shows. points in case:
    1) the Mac virtual memory management SUCKS/is non-existent. it is a joke. super-slow. slows down all applications significantly. swaps even when there is enough physical RAM. in short: forget it.
    2) Mac File I/O is outdated and a lot slower than windows/linux File I/O. On top of that, there is NO write-back cache for the harddisk. it is all write-through! try running windows with write-through. horrible.
    3) Mac graphics "accelleration" is synchronous! this means the CPU has to wait for the graphics card on every paint to the screen! can you imagine what kind of processing power is idle in the G4 "supercomputer" while it is waiting for the gfx card. for example: on windows the CPU tells the graphics card "draw that box", then immediately continues. on the mac, the CPU says "draw that box" and then twiddles its thumbs while the gfx card dutifully paints the box...

    on more thing: in our office, the G3 is actually more than twice as fast as the PIII running SETI @ home program. try that on your athlon :-)

  • The way the wording is arranged, it makes it sound like the 700mhz chips will be laptop-ready, but I would be surprised if that was relaly the case. Never is this explicitly stated. The Wired article, in fact, never says that.

    The Register suggests that the mobile PIIIs will be 450mhz and 500mhz [theregister.co.uk], in an article that is ten days old.

    - Scott
    ------
    Scott Stevenson
  • I'm holding out for 1Ghz - until then I will resist the BBF (Bigger Better Faster) factor.

  • So.. now that AMD and Intel are both on the FM dial with these chips, how long till the Vaneck phreaking devices that can understand and translate the signal.

    would probably need some sort ot amplification device... I see lead cases in our future.. of course, would have to figure out a way to get the cooling fans to work without openening holes ;)

    BTW, this is sarcasm, but I just wonder what my pc will sound like on the radio.. will have to try that

  • You'd be correct if had a new 700 MHz processor. Notice, however, that they're only announcing processors starting at that speed, and maybe going above 700 MHz.

    I see 700MHz Athlons Now. I only hear about how the next generation will be. Besides, if Intel is only announcing chips that might go above the speed of the competition but still be slower, then they got problems.

    You don't really think that the Athlon is going to stay at 700MHz do you?

  • Hmm, if it is cooler, it can take more voltage and still run reasonably cool.

    If it can take more voltage it can almost certainly be heavly over-clocked.

    1GHz anyone?
  • Not doubting the validity of your post, just interested in whether you bought or built your machine. If built, how did you get a motherboard? If bought, which brand and do you like? Thanks.

    ----------------

    "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
  • But for gamers, the largest home market for fast processors, a real OS won't do, since it isn't Win9x.

    I don't know what the ratio is from business to home, but I'm guessing that it's tilted far in the favor of business.
    ---
  • It could be the highest rated in Mz, but what about "real" speed?, as far as I know Athlons run in 200 Mz buses, and they are better in some areas too.
  • Hmm... you do have a point.

    I guess I'm still a bit optimistic, even when it comes to Intel.

    Oh well... either way, my next box will be powered by an AMD chip. I don't need this built-in ID crap. Oh no! I won't be able to use WebOutfitter [intel.com]!

    --

  • Has anyone done any major benchmarking on the g4's? All i've ever seen are the pretty words in newsweek, never anything that i'd trust.

  • beware! (Score:3)

    by jackmott ( 71631 ) on Saturday October 23, 1999 @04:35PM (#1592584) Homepage
    this is like when you write a recursive function and forget to check for an end state and return;

    To buy a chip:

    wait for the faster one
    then a buy a chip

    and of course, to buy a chip, you recur
    wait for the faster one,
    then buy a chip

    and so on.

    eventually you run out of stack space and are forced to go back to drooling in a padded corner with an etch-a-sketch
  • While the clock speed might be faster, the chip itself is not. Hell, the K6-III even beats the P3 at the same clockspeeds, and the K7 beats the P3 even when clocked lower. Just because it's doing more cycles every second doesn't mean it's going to perform better.

    I can carry one grain of sand at a time thousands of times per second (or minute, or whatever) than someone carrying a bucket at a time, and I will lose, unless I am many orders of magnitude faster.
    ---
  • yeah!
    maybe if they port Quake3 to an alpha :)

    I mean, do I really care if my computional analysis experiments, or neural nets finish 20% faster? nah, not really.

    but if I get a another few FPS or some more polys in Quake3, its like YEEEEHA! yeah! kickASS!

    you know?

    hehehe

    what if we computed FPS/dollar for AMD/Intel and Alpha? hmm? hehe
  • the g4 is SO NOT FASTER

    god when the hell are the apple people gonna get a grip on reality?

    aarrrggg

  • NO IT DOESNT

    maybe in a loop of adding integers, which is REAL uninteresting.

    lets try, oh, floating point math or something thats actually HARD.

    and its not 3 times as fast either. my guess is you misinterpreted something.

    Even in photoshop, the apple speed messiahs most favorite program to quote, a hellah high MHZ pentium STILL RUNS IT FASTER.

  • That is a very nice explanation, and I am clearly not as familiar with electrical engineering as you are. I am sure that many are grateful that you corrected me, but my post was about over-clocking, not the nuances of what happens when "upping the regulated voltage to the chip" from an engineering point of view.

    My point, however, is that when "upping the regulated voltage to the chip" it runs hotter, whether you consider it from a chemistry, physics (Classical or modern) EE, or jackass-in-the-garage-with-a-soldering-iron point of view.

    So a chip that is cooler at its rated speed and voltage has more "headroom" for over-clocking.

    -P

    PS. I would consider my point of view (both in general and in my original post on this topic) to be the jackass-in-the-garage-with-a-soldering-iron point of view ;-)
  • The K6-3 never kept up with the P2/3 when it came to FP calculations, not even close, and I'd question that it beat the P2/3 in regular integer calculations Mhz for Mhz. It certainly wasn't as stable/overclockable as the P2/3 either.....
  • Wow, someone finally recognizes the whole MHZ game. MHZ has very little to do with speed. Lets not forget the BUS which is VERY important seeing how your information has to get to peripherals such as your HDD and video card, and other devices such as memory (but who needs memory anyway?).

    BUS not a big deal? Well maybe FPU speeds could help out, especially when doing multi-user intensive applications or running a database, like they do on that internet thing, but who uses that?

    Okay, have I covered chipset? Fine, your chipset might be faster, but mine WORKS. Does one count reboot time when using benchmarks?

    Now lets go a little deeper, remeber the G4s maxing out at 500mhz (at the press release) and hitting a gigaflop sustained? And somehow these 500mhz devils are faster than pentium III 600s? No way! Isn't possible! There is a gap of 100 mhz there, oh wait that whole core architecture/layout thing enters the game doesn't it.

    Remeber the DX4-100, now someone is saying that a (re)Pentium 100 is the same speed? There is so much to be concidered when speed is concerened, not to mention what application you are using the computer for (some of those "fastest computers in the world" couldn't run solitare if they tried, but that is vector isn't it). Last I heard, AMD has the fastest BUS, Intel has the winner on the FPU side, AMD at this point has the MHZ, and Intel has the stability on the BUS side (put aside that silly RAMBUS fiasco (heh)).

    BortBox

    That was my two cents, and it was an advance on my credit card.

  • Umm.... (Score:2)

    by Iggy ( 1156 )
    I'm gonna lay my thoughts on the line and let people who *really* know about cpu architecture let me know the truth :)


    As far as a know/can tell the CuMine is simply a bog standard p3 core (maybe with a few tweaks, but nothing major) with a 256K L2 Cache running at core speed, all running on a 133 frontside bus.


    From the benchmarks i've seen so far, (Anandtech being one of them) the new CuMine gets close to/beats Athlon at the same/simlilar clock speed for some tests. So it kinda puts Intel back into the game, although they won't be able to stop fighting yet.


    Now from what i've read Athlons can support upto 8M of L2 cache running at core speed. And they are planning on upping the EV6 bus to 266(133) in the Ultra chips i believe.

    If AMD wanna do an Intel on Intel then all they need to do is jack up the speed of the L2 cache to, or close to, core speed. I'm sure that because of the better architectire of the Athlon the core will be able to make better use of that high speed L2 cache than a p3 core can. The p3 core is really the bottleneck in intels current designs. Adding high speed cache will help, but when it comes down to it, i have a feeling that an Athlon would get more out of it due to it's better design.


    Now that all relies on AMD being able to produce memory able to run at that speed, and produce it in large quatities. This could be AMD one failing.
    Fab30 *may* change that though, we will have to wait and see.


    As for me, i'm gonna wait until the 0.18 Athlons are out and have settled down, by which time *hopefully* someone will have produced a quality SMP capable board. :))


    If anyone who knows there stuff would like to correct me on anything, please go ahead. Knowledge is power after all ;))


  • Cascade hops from that region are a wonderful thing. They're the best finishing hop I've found, and give Sierra Nevada Pale Ale that wonderful smell.

    (ok, for the purists, those aren't finishing hops, but come from the hop-back).
  • Acctually...
    The Alpha processor is probably the worlds fastest . Those 21[123]64 chips are pretty amazing. :)
    They're still king of the hill..

    (-1,offtopic)
  • I'm curious where you got the info about AMD's "buggy" chipset. I'm running an Athlon 500 using the one and only AMD 750 chipset. I had had NO s/w compatibility probs. I've found this chip/chipset to be VERY stable... more so than a PII-300 on the i440EX chipset. And as far as I've seen/heard it's pretty easy to get a hold of the CPU (yes, yes, ok the mobos are rare, but I didn't have probs finding a FIC SD11)
  • It may sound like a "i hate these macs, they are not windows-compatible" rant but it's not. I'm not in MIS and not affected by their presence.

    Using only macs here is not a viable option for us so the compatibility issue is a very real argument.

    There are always cavets and I'm not any happier with Windows than you appear to be with the Mac-OS. And SETI does run much slower on the Athlon than I had expected. However, we don't make money here by running SETI, we make it by running our own sofware which runs very, very well on an Athlon compared to the G3 & G4.

    I too would like to have our software ported to Linux and run side by side. Regrettably I don't think our Mac people will do that.
  • It is kass-kades, after the mountain range that separates western Washington and Oregon (the lush green parts) from eastern Washington and Oregon (the dry, wheat and apple-growing parts). The mountains trap the moisture coming in from the Pacific, which is why the Pacific Northwest can grow trees hundreds of feet tall.

    The mountains can be pretty rugged, and it's likely they were named the Cascades because streams cascade down them. (That's a guess, though.)

    In Washington, the Cascades used to be isolated until recently (check out North Cascades National Park [national-park.com]). But with rapid growth in the Seattle metro area, particularly the many new housing developments in the vicinity of Redmond and beyond, people are building homes closer and closer to the foothills of the Cascades. Eventually, the Cascades will be... assimilated.
  • Well, they just announced a 733 MHz processor today, so I guess I was right =)
  • It's motorola, not Apple.


    Ever heard of Microsoft's Athlon?
  • ...the G3 is noticeably faster than a pentium of the same clock speed.


    No arguments from me. Anytime you can get more orthogonal registers you get a faster CPU per cycle. Now look at the max clock rates for the two chips. G3 = 450 Mhz, G4 = 450 Mhz, P3 = 733 Mhz. Given that the speed difference at the same clock rate is not more than 50% for general purpose computing, it should be obvious that the P3 733 is going to be beating out the G3/G4 processors in their *max* configurations. That's the point I make.

    -sw
  • 'cause marketing hasn't figured out a real name yet. No conspiracy there. Except on AMD's "SledgeHammer".
  • I don't believe that AMD produces their own cache chips. The limiting factor on AMDs external cache speed is price, I think. Intel produces some, but not all of their own cache chips.

  • They seem to max out at 766MHz... (Score:3)

    by William Tanksley ( 1752 ) on Saturday October 23, 1999 @04:51PM (#1592614)
    There have been reports about these before; it seems Intel had released some of the chips without as many NDAs as before, and people had been benchmarking and overclocking them :-).

    The higest speed they released was 766; this doesn't mean that the official release won't have higher speeds, of course. And someone overclocked one a little, nothing really impressive.

    The Athlon 700 matched a P766 on a 820motherboard in most tests. Of course, the 820mobo is really nice, with 4xAGP and such -- but it's _completely_ unavailable. So expecting a P766 to match an A700 on available mobos is unrealistic.

    And, of course, AMD supports 'overclockers' officially, so you can buy K7-900 systems with warrenty intact. I found another place which sells overclocked A750 for the cost of an A600 elsewhere with a lifetime warantee -- and no cooling aside from the ubiquitous fans (they take the cartrige apart and mount a heat sink directly on the chip).

    -Billy
  • What if you're running computation heavy applications? Applications (and I don't mean programs) that today run on dual or quad or oct or whatever computers will be able to run on fewer, faster chips.
    ---
  • don't hold your breath - the memory runs at the same speed - you're going to need DRAMS that reliably go that fast too

  • Oxford explains it (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 23, 1999 @04:52PM (#1592617)
    Hrm, this story was posted prematurely. There
    are only a few benchmarks that compare a CuMine
    700+ against an Athlon 700, with the Athlon
    coming out 6% faster in some obscure business
    test so far (see http://www.jc-news.com/pc/).

    You will go nuts if you try to follow all the
    lastest developments early in this CuMine vs.
    Athlon game. My advice: don't. Wait for some
    conclusive benchmarks.

    Pro Intel:
    * good compatibility with CPUs
    * availability
    * good o/c ability
    Con Intel:
    * multiplier locked
    * core maxed out earlier @.22u than AMD's
    * price/performance usually only average

    Pro AMD:
    * excellent CPU core, fast FPU
    * EV6 better than GTL+
    * excellent o/c ability, multiplier not locked
    Con AMD:
    * availability
    * bad bad chipset and mobo situation
    * bugs in chipset, slower than need be,
    high current probs w/ TNT2U etc.
    * s/w compatibility problems with chipset
    * did I mention chipsets already?

    Enough to drive everybody but the die-hard
    hardware freak nuts...

    WAIT and RELAX.
  • Since intel code names are based on geographic features, i'd assume kass-kades, as that's how you pronounce the matching river if you're from the area.

    I'm from Oregon, and have never heard of the Cascade river... just the Cascade mountains. At least not that I can remember. Am I just having a bad mental day? The only major rivers in oregon are the willamette (despite living in oregon up to age 17, I still have trouble spelling that freakin' river's name!) and the columbia. Unless, of course, that 6 pack of dew I just drank fried my brain, which really isn't that unlikely.
  • >How many programs will require more then 1Ghz?

    Quake IV. Photoshop 7.x. The next Sim City. Whatever version of Windows comes after Win2K. Faster processors, cheaper ram and bigger hard drives lead to larger and more complex programs, requiring even faster processors, allowing for even more complex programs--empire feeds on itself. Ten years from now as we race towards Terrahertz processors and quantum computing, 1Ghz will seem as pathetic to us as 1 Mhz does now.

  • Since when? Maybe very very VERY suspect boards, but I really don't think a decent board would die like that. I've never heard of something like this. Is this for real, or are you just fucking with my head?

    And as for running hot, have you used a P-II lately? :)

  • Re:Fastest? (Score:3)

    by Ferzerp ( 83619 ) on Saturday October 23, 1999 @05:01PM (#1592622)
    Everyone posting messages along these lines is forgetting something. The Athlon is faster than the regular P3, and a coppermine P3 is modified. No, it's not just cooler, the cache speed has been raised to full core speed (like a celeron). Unfortunately, the cache size has been halved (512K to 256K). The faster speed of the cache should more than compensate for the shrinkage though. Why do I think this? Well, celerons perform within 1-2% of P2's in pretty much any real world situation, and they have 1/4 of the cache running at full speed. So to compare the coppermine p3s to the athlons assuming they are the same as the regular p3s is just wrong. I'm not saying which would be faster (I can't say that for sure *yet*, and neither can you). One thing I have seen though are the benchmarks circulating on the web of these chips. They generally show a screenshot of a CPUID program and the chips being tested always report *no* cache at all. I don't think that these chips being benchmarked have the cache enables, and if they don't, well, you can't compare with those either.
  • From everything I have read about the new Coppermine chip, it appears that:
    1. The Athlon 700 is still faster.
    2. The Pentium 733 is not of much use without an i820, which is not available.
    3. 33mhz is not that much anyway, especially when you are talking about several hundreds dollars more in cost.

    On facts, you are right that they are supposedly shipping a processor with a higher clock spead than AMD. But for all considerations of cost, performance, and reality in general, this announcement means should mean little. I have almost no faith in Intel.

  • I've noticed that people tend to give cache speeds in Mhrz, which is somewhat missleading, as different caches have different numbers of cycles per issue and cycles of latency. Here's my attempt to educate people on caches.


    Pipelined internal caches have issue times at least 8 time as fast as the sort of external caches present on the K7 and pII/pIII. Internal L1 caches tend to have latencies either 2 (K6)to 3 (K7 & Pii/Piii) core cycles long. Internal L2 caches tend to have latencies from 6 to 12 (core) cycles long. External L2 caches tend to have latencies from 8 to 30 core cyles long (about 20 on both the K7 and Pii/Piii, although it will be slightly worse on the 750 mhrz k7).


    The CuMines cache should be about the same overall speed as the K7s cache. It's FPU will still be a ways behind though. The CuMine is a lot cheaper to manufacture.

  • Strange how Intel's announcents get hyped, and AMD is practically ignored even when introducing better technology. If you want clock speed, word is a 750 MHz and 800 MHz Athlon will be released next month....
  • Very informative post, thank you.
    One impression I always have is that intel chips are
    constantly underrated. Yes, the architecture is old, yes there
    are some chips like alpha and g4 which are faster under some
    circumstances.
    But theres one thing which some friends of mine, who do
    numbercrunching on clusters allways tell me, that is the
    compiler aspect.
    For instance they say the alpha looks in fact very good
    theoretically, but they also say that the compilers job
    in optimizing for the alpha is harder than for ia32.
    The real-world performance of ia32 seems to be nearer
    at the theoretical (benchmark) performance. I have seen
    some tests in magazines which tell me the same.
    And even on the intel plattform theres a huge difference
    depending on what compiler one uses, i.e. ms VC on nt was
    up to 30 % faster than gcc on linux. That was an older
    benchmark, newer ones I saw seem to indicate gcc has
    closed the gap or is even faster than ms compiler.
    IMO this numbers indicate cleary that comparing prozessor
    architecures on the basis of theoretical or artifical (benchmarks)
    aspects is a bit naive, because compiler builders also might
    want to optimize their product to handle benchmarks well, and
    that doesnt describe the real world.
  • Stop hating and ask yourself why PowerPC CPUs aren't more popular in workstations, not to mention your average desktop computer.

    Apple runs the show, and just to get access to a medium-priced PPC system (no DIY in any practicality, sorry) you're tied to the latter component of Apple's closed software/hardware platform. Need specs for those on-board chipsets? Sorry.

    You "want to see a laptop with a coopermine processor last 5-6 hours". Who doesn't. What I'd like to see is a choice of (notebooks/desktops) running G4's, a thriving chip/board market and manufacturers opening up the specs so buyers aren't held hostage. (how many bought PCI PowerMacs cause Apple said they were supposed to be compatible with the upcoming-and-still-unreleased modern OS?)

    Your ibook tickles your fancy. Great. Buy Apple if factors such as price, single-closed-source and aesthetics are to your liking. I'm fed up playing their game though, and the "x86" provides enough legs and a more acceptable combination of factors as far as my Open Source taste is concerned.

    I'd love to see IBM and Moto _really_ promoting PowerPC as the heir to the x86 ecosystem. Apple has to do more than merely change its multi-hued spots into translucent ones to regain any level of credibility. Corporations don't need any incentive to keep their wares proprietary; they need some to realize the importance of openness. You made your point with your checkbook and so did I.
  • Of course, some a more reliable than others ;)
  • maybe if they port Quake3 to an alpha :)

    Oh, god, I wish.

    I mean, do I really care if my computional analysis experiments, or neural nets finish 20% faster?

    Yeah, generally pretty true. I do a lot of development work, though, and spending 4-6 minutes for every build is not my idea of a fun way to spend time. Course I'm doing it on a POS P-II 350, so that really shouldn't be a suprise.

    what if we computed FPS/dollar for AMD/Intel and Alpha? hmm? hehe

    Well, yeah, a fast Alpha is mad $$$. But for speed, it's where it's at. [flamebait]And anyway, the intel architechture is crap[end flamebait].
  • Celerons within 1-2% of P2?? No freaking way.. I do run a lot of various numerical code, some of it stresses CPU, some Memory or IO.. Celeron is nowhere close in most cases. And Athlon does smoke PIII - talking about cache - compare Athlon's L1 to PIII: it does not need on-core L2 that much.
    I will bet when I have a chance to run all my stuff on new pentiums (soon) it will not beat my last Athlon score....
  • and acording to NASA's Goldin, it's "faster, better, cheaper", although I doubt that a Pentium III will go to space in the near future ;-)

  • hmm... (Score:1)

    by rbf ( 2305 )
    How about Alpha? A 700MHz 21264 is defiantly faster!

    rbf who is typing this on an Alpha running Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 with Linux 2.2.13.


    LONG LIVE ALPHA!!!
  • As long as we're playing conspiricy games, go look for any info from apple on www.spec.org. Apple/Motorola isn't represented past the 604e. Do you wonder why Apple wouldn't be touting their "supercomputers" on as close to an objective platform as we have for these things? The rule to automatically ignore all marketing claims is especially true with apple. They make nice machines (especially laptops), but their marketing department gets the award for most out of control almost-lies.

  • Re:not the fastest (Score:5)

    by ToLu the Happy Furby ( 63586 ) on Saturday October 23, 1999 @05:14PM (#1592641)
    Urg. Sorry, but I'm just gonna repost the comment I made about a week ago when some other wierdo spouted the same ignorant blather.

    Oh wait: it wasn't just any wierdo. Believe it or not, it was you, Millennium [slashdot.org]. Perhaps you could read what people respond to your comments. After all, saying something incorrect once just makes you look uninformed; saying the same thing after you've been publicly corrected makes you look willfully stupid...

    --begin repost--

    They're already at price/performance parity, more or less. The G4 is roughly triple the speed of a P3, and this is using Intel's own benchmarks, mind you. We're not talking Bytemarks here, boys and girls, we're talking benchmarks no one dares discredit.

    Oh lord. Another one falls for the Apple FUD.

    No, we're not talking Bytemarks here; this one, if you can believe it, is even worse. You see, at least Bytemarks is a benchmark. It's about 10 years old and has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the performance of a modern CPU, but at least when they came up with it, someone was trying to get an idea of how fast a chip would run.

    These 6 tests are not benchmarks, in any normal sense of the word. Benchmarks measure how long it takes for a computer to perform a real-world task. These tests (Apple's got 'em posted here [apple.com]; scroll to the bottom) measure the speed of individual ops.

    That's right: the G4 performs 6 specific operations an average of 3 times faster than a P3. We're talking things with names like "1024 dim. DotProd" and "256 Pt. Complex FFT". The G4 can take a dot product 3.68 times faster than a P3. Oh wait--not even that; a dot product in a specific dimension. Whoopdee. A 128-bit unit can do operations on very large numbers faster than a 32-bit one. Wow. This is like posting the fact that a 64-bit CPU can add two 64-bit numbers faster than a 32-bit one. Who would have thought.

    And yes, these benchmarks were "published on Intel's own website." Of course they were. In the technical specs on the SSE core. Deep in the technical specs on the SSE core. Where information that is completely useless to anyone not planning on optimizing a compiler belongs.

    Essentially, this benchmark is as misleading as quoting MFLOPS (oh yeah: Apple stooped to that one too...). Except that usually when you quote MFLOPS you at least generally need to average over the entire set of floating point ops. Not here folks. They picked out their favorite 6.

    Oh wait--here's another difference: when you quote MFLOPS, you actually need to, uh, benchmark the thing. These numbers are all theoretical--just compare the number of clock cycles it takes to do an operation, and multiply by MHz. Now, it turns out they'd probably be even more in the G4's favor in practice--if I remember correctly, the AltiVec unit has a much better designed pipeline than the P3's SSE unit. But still, these numbers are absolutely, completely, worthless.

    I don't have the URL offhand, but I've seen the Intel page they copied these tests from, and there were literally hundreds for them to choose from.

    The point is, you can always find an operation that is carried out in less clock cycles on one particular archicture as compared to another. Always. Now it turns out that, in this case, the AltiVec apparently really is vastly superior for the sorts of things it does when compared to Intel's SSE or AMD's 3DNow. (Of course, it also takes up half the chip. Any guesses as to why they can't fab any 500's??)

    However, the fact is that except for very specific applications (SETI@home in particular, and some signal processing stuff, IIRC), it doesn't make all too much of a difference. A 700 MHz Athlon will smoke a G4 450 or 500 or whatever on your basic integer stuff, and a 600 MHz P3'll be right up there with it. For the stuff that can be done with AltiVec, the G4'll certainly come out ahead, but for general floating point work, again, they're about equal. It goes without saying that, at this point, nothing crunches graphics like a year-old PC with an NVIDIA GeForce in it (except maybe something from sgi)--which, of course, is about the only thing the average user needs good float performance for anyways.

    In the end, the G4 is just a decent chip with a neat vector processor that's proving hard to fab. Is it damn fast? Yes. Is your new G4 450 going to touch the Coppermine P3 733 that's shipping by the time yours actually ships? Nope. Is it "two or three years ahead of its time" like Stevie says? No way.

    -Dave

    P.S. And yes, you can sell them to China as well. As much as I want to like Apple these days (a simplified vertically integrated product line is a very good idea in many cases; OS X just might be incredible; and geez--did you check out the new iMac subwoofer??), the fact that every single word out of their marketing department/CEO's lips is a baldfaced lie...gives me pause.
  • You are correct about the statement that a higher frequency means higher current onsumption (the eternal problem of handhelds and laptops: how to have better performance but less consumption) but I argue that upping the voltage would really solve the voltage-drop problem. A real solution would be to decrease the internal impendance of the power source. If you studied electrical engineering, you would remember Tevenin's theorem, which would remind you that a power source can be represented as a serial connection (ok, I don't know all this stuff in english language) of an ideal voltage generator, and an impendance (called "internal" impendance of the voltage source). In practical life, a better power source would be equivalent to an ideal voltage generator with a smaller impendance. It's technically very simple to have better power sourcces, you effectively have to inrease the power of the high frequency MOSFETs of the switching-mode power generator and/or the output linear circuitry of the on-board voltage regulator. I believe the guys at kryotech have modified the motherboard accordingly.


  • *News Flash* INTEL FUNDS THE SPACE PROGRAM

    Washington(AP): In a move that suprised people everywhere, Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) has made an agreement with the National Air and Space Administration to fund the next 5 years of space programs. The agreement, valued somewhere between $500,000,000 and $750,000,000 calls for renovations to the space shuttles and the space program itself. Each of the Space Shuttle's control computers will be refitted with Intel Pentium III Xeon processors. In order to pay for this, NASA has let Intel paint "Intel Inside: Pentium III Xeon" in large letters on the Space Shuttles. Additionally, a new design of a sattelite, being co-designed by Intel and Nasa at Kennedy Space Center, will help to illuminate the night sky during new moons. Instead of a moon, there will be a square banner that reads "Planet Earth: Intel Inside".

    At the time of press, neither NASA nor Intel could be reached for comment.

  • I have no real reason to upgrade right now. My P3 450 does everything I ask of it right now.

    Maybe in 12-18 months I'll upgrade again. Be it Intel or AMD. Whichever one gives me the best performance for my money.


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • Code names serve a number of purposes:
    1) Buildup that team feeling among the developers
    2) Allow the lab to refer to their work without
    having to commit the company to releasing it.
    (In some circles 1/2 of the projects to
    upgrade some product never make it. The
    marketing folks aren't too happy answering
    the questions like "Why did you skip Windows
    99 to go to Windows 2000?".)
    3) To confuse the enemy. Word about what people
    are working on always leaks out. Best to use
    some form of code name that's not too
    descriptive about what it really is.

    Good luck.

  • Re:beware! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I guess I should have explained better. You guys missed my point.

    What I meant to say is that you should time your purchases to coincide with the point in the product life cycle where you get the best performance (as compared to the current state of the art) for the money. CPU performance growth mostly happens in spurts that are driven by new architectures or new manufacturing processes. Prices at the highest performance level fluctuate on a cycle defined by those spurts. The best time to buy is usually between 3 months after release and the middle of the cycle. If you buy earlier, you could end up paying 50%-100% more. If you wait until the end of the cycle, you'll be further behind in the performance race without saving much money.

  • Intel being as bad as MS (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The best way to help AMD would be to go out and get an athlon. Intel are being heavy-handed, microsofty, and nasty with the companies that planned support for Athlon motherboards - however, those companies are much more likely to tell intel to p*ss off if they see the demand for Athlons there...
  • Although I've never heard of a river or mountain range specifically named the Cascades, I have heard the term before. As I understand it, a cascade is basically a rapid in the river. Cascades are therefore "whitewater" areas in the river. I've always heard it pronounced kass-kades.

    Resonance Cascade Failure, anyone?
  • I will happily load half a dozen 2 GHz processors, 24x7. Right now have to use a farm of SPARC's..
    Numerical simulations will eat up everything you throw at them and then more...

    And yeah - games...
  • While I am interested in Intel catching up in the Mhz field, I'm more interested in the fact that we will soon see 7th Generation x86 processors hit the laptop market.

    I'm curious how soon AMD will release laptop versions of the Athlon, seeing how AMD based laptops have been significantly cheeper in the past.

    ...
  • The chip is now built at 0.18 microns, but that doesn't make it any faster. All that this is is a higher clock speed. The Athlon will be faster than this.
  • Bring it on! The more mhz the better. Now I need to find an older Mac for BeOS PPC and a P200 for a gateway.....
  • Why do companies use code names for projects? It's not like it's a secret to anybody. Can anyone answer that?

    --
    grappler
  • I thought those were cataracts?
  • When are people going to stop being stupid and quit assumeing that the MAC is the only computer that uses the Power PC chip. Am I the only person that knows what a RS/6000 is????
  • They're that too.
  • Ever notice how your sound programs tend to crash when your tracks go over 1 hour? That's because certain positioning operations are wrapping around all 32 bits. New processors produce gigabytes of video in seconds. In two minutes you can exceed the 2 gig limit and produce enough audio to wrap around a 32 bit word several times over.

    32 bit wrapping is going to get more and more painful until higher clockspeeds lose all meaning. 700Mhz is way beyond the limit for a 32 bit processor for which 2 gig file limits and chronic 32 bit wraparounds started defeating the processor's usefulness at 500Mhz. We're getting to where more clock cycles are being used to check for bytewraps than process data.

  • Fastest? (Score:1)

    by Axe ( 11122 )
    It is the same MHZ as Athlon (not counting KryoTech 900 Mhz liquid cooled Athlons), and Athlon beats it in all benchmarks...
  • I'd like to put a generator in my computer, working off the heat of the P3, to alleviate some of the power consumption. Maybe if I attached a whistle, I could hear when my load is high.

    (Note: the above paragraph contains many mechanical and scientific inaccuracies. For example, no computer really needs that much power.)

  • Don't jump to buy yet (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you are considering a Coppermine PIII, first wait for AMD to release their .18u Athlons, and then a little longer until the initial round of price cuts is over. I think you'll find the Athlon a much better deal at that point. It's never wise to buy a CPU early in its production run. Usually, clock speeds increase pretty quick and prices fall pretty quick during the first couple months on the market.
  • "This release will allow Intel to say, once again, that it offers the fastest chip on the market."

    Fastest chips, my ass. Alpha, anyone? If you need raw computational power, Intel is not the way to go, IMO. Unless its in a 8-32 node cluster, which is pretty nice. :)

  • My 486/25 has better preformance than a K6-2 or 3
    Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
  • From what we have seen in the past, Athlon CPUs leave Pentium III CPUs in dust. They give Intel something to cry about. Pair a Pentium III 700 and an Athlon 650, and I think you will find that the Athlon is, if not as fast, faster than the competition.
    Nuff Said.
  • "fastest chip on the market"? hardly. some how, i SERIOUSLY doubt it has better fpu preformance than the highest clock rate 264 alpha, and a 450mhz g4 is probably faster as well.
  • Analysts said the launch of the new processors is important because it allows Intel to again say that it has the fastest PC chips.

    Um... No it does not, It mearly means that intel Chips can at least run as fast as AMDs The program speed will still be less however, since Athlons are still faster clock/clock then p6 cores.

    I'd be willing to bet that these 'analysts' actualy work for intel, Its sad that wired news would print things like that as fact. It really makes you wonder...
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • line of processors is arguably one of the most successful computing architectures ever. Many people bitch (especially here) that its dying and that PPC and IA-64 and blah blah blah will overrun it. Coppermines and Athlons both are an example of how strong the x86 architecture is right now. Think about it, look back five years ago and ask yourself what companies were running their mission critical systems on. It wasnt 486es or Pentiums (not until Pentium Pro was released), comapnies ran Sun, SGI, Alpha, but not many Pentiums. Now look anywhere, your favorite flavour Pentium is probably on some server in your office (but then again maybe it isn't). The x86 line in many ways has allowed smaller companies to have fast servers and workstations and gives them a more competitive edge in the marketplace of the web. Not everyone can afford Big Iron but they can put up some cash for a comparitively cheap Pentium based system which suits their needs. Pentium will eventually die out and I'll be ok with that, I don't worship Intel or anyone else but I think they do deserve some credit on what they've done in the past ten years.

  • Re:New Intel 700MHz. (Score:3)

    by HouseParty ( 31181 ) on Saturday October 23, 1999 @05:37PM (#1592704) Homepage
    Go read the documentation on the L2 caches. The Coppermine's L2 cache will run at 1/1, ie 700 Mhz. The Athalon doesn't scale 1/1 up to those speeds. At 700Mhz the Athalon's L2 cache is only running at 700/2=350 Mhz. (moving on up it will move to 1/3, and 1/4) So real-world peformance the coppermine will start catching up quick.
  • Looky what I found...

    cascade
    Pronunciation: (")kas-'kAd
    Function: noun
    Etymology: French, from Italian cascata, from cascare to fall, from (assumed) Vulgar Latin casicare, from Latin casus fall

    1 : a steep usually small fall of water; especially : one of a series
    2 a : something arranged or occurring in a series or in a succession of stages so that each stage derives from or acts upon the product of the preceding [blood clotting involves a biochemical cascade]
    2 b : a fall of material (as lace) that hangs in a zigzag line
    3 : something falling or rushing forth in quantity [a cascade of sound] [a cascade of events]
  • Um, no. First of all, a the voltage regulator will maintain a constant voltage to the chip regardless of current consumption ( within some bounds). Hence the name "voltage regulator." The max clock speed for a chip is derived from the time it takes to swich the state of one of its transistors. This switching time arises from the charging and discharging of the inherently capacitive traces and mosfet gates. Slapping more voltage across the chip charges these caps faster, reducing the switching time. I refer you to _Principles_of_CMOS_VLSI_Design_ by Neil H. E. Weste and Kamran Eshraghian for further details.

  • New Intel 700MHz. (Score:3)

    by mauriceh ( 3721 ) <mhilarius@gmai l . com> on Saturday October 23, 1999 @03:45PM (#1592723)
    Fastest? Not quite Bubba.
    I am typing this on a commercially released Athlon 700MHz. It has been on the market for a month.
    And, at the same clockspeeds the Athlon has already demonstrated significantly faster integer performance, and massively better floating point speeds.

    Intel will have to hit at least 800MHz to best the Athlon at Integer, and an entirely new design to get back in the floating point game.

  • You'd be correct if Intel had been announcing new 700 MHz processors. Notice, however, that they're announcing processors starting at that speed, and going above 700 MHz.

  • Important, but subtle, point (Score:4)

    by HoserHead ( 599 ) on Saturday October 23, 1999 @04:13PM (#1592756)
    Everyone mentions the Athlon being at 700 MHz, and how Intel introducing their 700 MHz Coppermines doesn't make them the fastest (in MHz). However, mentioned at the top of the article:
    [Intel] said it will unveil 15 processors [...] including the much-anticipated chip family, codenamed Coppermine, with speeds
    above 700 MHz.
    (Emphasis mine.) Now this means to me that Intel will be introducing either a) 15 new processors 700+ MHz, or b) the Coppermine processors will be 700+ MHz. I imagine b) is correct. However, until AMD brings out its 750 Athlon (and drives the price of the 500 down again, go AMD!) Intel will have the MHz (which is all that rags and marketroids care about) edge.

    Slightly off-topic, the new PIII Xeon are codenamed "Cascades." Is this pronounced kass-kades or kass-kad-ees or something entirely different?

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