PC1066 RDRAM vs. DDR SDRAM 183
Brad wrote into send us his "Comparison of PC1066 RDRAM vs DDR SDRAM. Quote - RDRAM is considerably more expensive that DDR SDRAM, and up until now the 100MHz PC800 specification didn't do well in comparison. Just recently 133MHz PC1066 was launched, and is now officially supported by the new Intel P4 and the Intel 850E core logic chipset, but this time promises to bring memory performance to the next level."
Sure, it's faster... (Score:1, Informative)
Bzzzt! (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.theinquirer.net/24050203.htm [theinquirer.net]
That said, PC1066 has been tested before (can't find the article at Ace's Hardware), and the bandwidth of DRDRAM appears to compensate quite nicely for the P4's generally lousy architecture, as does its increased cache size (now 512k L2).
Great benches but.... (Score:3, Informative)
Also I believe there were some initial benches (better ones) on http://www.tomshardware.com
J
Bandwidth is nice. Latency is evil... (Score:4, Informative)
Let's discuss CPU cooling & SMP (Score:4, Informative)
Basically, CPU cooling has been hitting us for a good while.
From an article [theregister.co.uk] about a bigass Beowulf cluster running Transmeta processors, you have Wu-chun Feng of the Los Alamos Labs stating
Oh my. So - what else can we do to stop this trend? Relatively slow multi-processor machines. If we keep working on multi-threading our applications, we might be able to make a computer with 8 1ghz efficient chips outperform an 8ghz Moore-compatible Intel hype-chip-based system. Really. Multi-processor machines have traditionally been too expensive for the desktop. The software people have not spent a lot of time making sure that the regular end-user applications scale well across several processors.Take something like a web browser. Given a bit of wizardry (obviously, we need to consider concurrency and critical sections), you could have separate images downloaded and processed by separate processors. Your flash ad would run on another processor.
Frankly, I'm wondering what's stopping us from using this approach to increasing performance? Is this like the fact that OEMs equip the low-end PCs with too little RAM so that Joe Shmoe will buy a new one as quickly as possible, since he does not know that spending 100 bucks on more RAM will make his computer last another year or two?
And, really, as long as the focus is on the gigahertz, do the chip makers really concentrate on making their designs as efficient as possible?
Re:Hype (Score:2, Informative)
The article is about PC1066, a new kind of memory. The memory specific benchmarks do show quite a big performance increase!! (see the last three graphs on this page [tweakers.com.au] of the article)
The fact that the other graphs show little or no performance difference I think is quite likely due to the fact that the tests employed have different kinds of bottlenecks due to system limitations -- limitations other than memory bandwidth.
You might get similar results if you tested a new sound card (for example) that had faster hardware acceleration -- sure, the Quake III benchmark would only show a small difference, but another test that made more significant usage of the sound card (a test in Cubase for example) would show a greater performance increase. (Umm, I know it's not a great example, but I'm hope you get what I mean!).
Re:Evaluate the Pentium IV design at 6 GHz. (Score:2, Informative)
Demo: 5 GHz P4 runs cool with no fan (Score:3, Informative)
No, the P4 has an architecture that was designed for the computers of the future. It's like a small dog with very big paws. It will be impressive when it grows up.
The heat dissipation comes from using the P4 architecture with the larger design rules. As the die sizes shrink, the heat dissipation will go down, and the wisdom behind other elements of the design will become more apparent.
Notice that we are already seeing this effect. The 2.4 GHz P4 performs very well.
Intel is demonstrating a 5 GHz P4 that runs cool with no fan. See, for example, Intel to demo fanless, cool 5 GHz chip [theinquirer.net]. Quote: "Intel has now formally released details of the 3MB cache on chip which it claims will deliver 1.5 to two times [the] performance over the current designs." [My emphasis.]
The utter sadness of Intel's marketing is demonstrated by the fact that this information is being brought to you by a guy [me] whose only connection with the information is that he sells computers to business customers and that he happens to live in the same city as Intel's design team. The guy happened to meet two Intel engineers at parties. If Intel had good marketing, you would already know these things.
The moral of the Intel marketing story is: Don't try to run a high-tech company with low-tech employees in marketing. If I were running Intel's marketing, your little brother and maybe even your mom would be asking you about Intel's great new achievements.
Re:Dumb question, I'm sure (Score:3, Informative)
In the beginning there was PC100 SDRAM. Well, actually, that was mid-nineties, but that's about when most Slashkiddies were born, so moving on. Obviously everything is just a marketing label, but this one meant 100 MHz. With SDRAM, each Hz gives you 64 bits, so the bandwidth is 6400 megabits per second.
Thus PC133 and PC166 are 8500 and 10700 Mb/s.
DDR is the same tech as SDRAM, except that it uses a trick to transfer data twice per clock cycle, so you get 128 bits per Hz. Thus PC100 DDR-SDRAM would be 12800 Mb/s. But Marketing decided that was unfair, so they labeled DDR based on twice the clock speed, so we have PC266 and PC333, which of course run at 133 and 166 MHz and give you 17000 and 21000 Mb/s.
RDRAM is based on a new tech that gives you only 16 bits per clock cycle instead of 64 for SDRAM and 128 for DDR-SDRAM. The difference is that you can clock it way up. So there was PC600, PC700 and PC800 RDRAM, again based on MHz, so that gave you 9600, 11200, and 12800 Mb/s bandwidth. Basically you divide the number in four to compare with SDRAM speeds, since you only get 1/4 as many bits per cycle. Actually I believe modern Rambus controllers double this by interleaving two sticks, so now you divide by 2 - PC800 has four times the bandwidth of PC100, but requires a matched pair of sticks.
Then the DDR people decided to start talking direct bandwidth, rather than megahertz. But unlike me, they mean megabytes, rather than megabits, per second. PC1600 is DDR-SDRAM at 100 MHz, since DDR gives you 128 bits or 16 bytes per cycle. PC2100 is DDR at 133 MHz, formerly known as PC266. PC2700 is DDR at 166 MHz, and PC3200 is DDR at 200 MHz.
With interleaving, Rambus gives you 32 bits or 4 bytes per cycle. PC800 has the same bandwidth as PC3200 DDR, and the relatively new PC1066 has more - 4266 megabytes per second.
Bandwidth is a good baseline for comparison, but RDRAM has a higher latency than SDRAM or DDR-SDRAM. That's why DDR, with its lower maximum bandwidth, is still speed-competitive with RDRAM (for a lot less money).
Re:Sure, it's faster... (Score:1, Informative)
One you got some bad boards/Cheap boards.
I don't knoe of any Motherboards that need a 400watt Power Supply except for dual Athlons on the first Tyan board. As far as not running linux. But most boards will need a 300watt Power Supply. the P4s are just as bad with Power Supplys. Sounds Blaster Lives have had problem the fist time thay came out and I have no clue whay you had to buy and etherpro, RealTech/netgear/linksys have always work great for me.
I think a lot of problems is just inexperiance with new processers.
MSI boards are nice, I build with them and abit. Shuttle and Soyo are comeing along. Oh and Asus is great as always.
I have never had that many problems with AMD's. I build 20-30 a month. The only problems I have had are boards that don't shutdown the system when the cpu over heats, and cracking the die, but the overheating problem is because of a bad fan ofr forgeting a heatsink and creacking the die is just human error. a heat spreader would be nice but then I could not play with the bridges.
Re:RDRAM and Quality DDR cost about the same (Score:2, Informative)
Perhaps, but you're probably comparing single-stick to single-stick. With RDRAM you have to buy a matched pair. So the right comparison is 2x128 PC800 ($80) versus 1x256 PC2400 ($51).
Or go on up to 512MB. 2x256 PC800: $148. 1x512 PC2400: $114.
So RDRAM costs an additional 57% for 256MB, or 30% for 512MB. Nice that it's no longer double the cost, but to me that is still a significant markup. Anyone know approximately how much of that is due to
(b) manufacturing cost after accounting for (a), or
(c) patent licenses?
Re:Demo: 5 GHz P4 runs cool with no fan (Score:2, Informative)
As others have pointed out, the 5GHz chip was NOT a P4 at all, but just a stripped down portion of the P4. The whole processor is only expected to reduce power consumption by something like 23% in the integer unit, ie it'll do VERY little for the overall power consumption of the chip. A 5GHz P4 on
Also, that's a great quote, but if I can add another quote from the same article:
"This processor, note, is a 32-bit chip - it's a different presentation from the McKinley that we detailed above."
The 3MB cache is for the McKinley (aka "Itanium 2"), it has NOTHING to do with the 32-bit integer core mentioned above, and it certainly has nothing to do with the P4!