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Intel Hardware

Intel's P4 3GHz w/ 800MHz Bus & Canterwood Chips 355

Posted by Hemos from the faster-and-faster-it-goes dept.
OldGrayDave writes "Intel steps out today with their new Pentium 4 3GHz chip that runs on an 800MHz System Bus. They've also released "Canterwood", the chipset chipset for the P4 that supports Dual Channel DDR400 memory, native Serial ATA 150, RAID 0, AGP8X, USB2.0 and a host of other bells and whistles. Check out this showcase and performance analysis at HotHardware, to see what all the buzz is about. Intel distances themselves again from the Athlon." Or, you can read more at Hardavenue, mbreview, Tom's Hardware, hardware unlimited, or The Tech Report. I dunno...hardware gets faster, bus gets faster. Tide goes in, tide goes out.
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Intel's P4 3GHz w/ 800MHz Bus & Canterwood Chips More

Intel's P4 3GHz w/ 800MHz Bus & Canterwood Chips

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  • What value are these new processors? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The Briguy ( 612887 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @08:50AM (#5727078) Journal
    I have to wonder what the point is with some of these new faster processors. At this point, almost no applications can really take advantage of the fastest chips available. My sister uses a 500 MHZ machine at home, and as far as I can tell she has no real issues with its speed. I have to wonder if Intel is just shooting itself in the leg, spending needlessly large amounts on R&D to produce chips that no one actually needs. PS - FP?

    • Re:What value are these new processors? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I have two 2.8 GHz/333MHz P4s overclocked to 3.06 GHz/358 MHz.

      First one is for compressing DivX, doing distributed protein folding and for occasional game of Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six or Operation Flashpoint.

      On the second, headless machine I prototype my first principles calculations so that I can use all my supercomputer CPU time on actual production runs and not on debugging.

    • Re:What value are these new processors? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bmongar ( 230600 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @08:55AM (#5727103)
      I think as long as they can convince people that a new computer is needed, software doesn't really have to need the power.

      Plus new computers always seem much faster, because when people get them they don't have all that spyware and trojans running on it yet to slow them down.
    • "I have to wonder if Intel is just shooting itself in the leg, spending needlessly large amounts on R&D to produce chips that no one actually needs."

      That isn't the case for all the gamers out there. Each CPU cycle you have that makes your machine faster than the other 12yr olds means more frags fer j00.
      • it isn't just 'frags fer j00', or fps running your favourite first-person shooter.
        As the CPU ability increases, the quality of the graphics increases too. Compare the old Wing Commander series (you know, the one that persuaded people to upgrade to a 486) with the latest version Freelancer..

        It won't be that long before we have game that have realistic-looking characters, and people will want to play it, even if it is on a console rather than your PC. Games developers will always want to put in more features
        • There are some problems that seem to be able to soak up as much processor power as we can throw at them and still want more. Cryptography is a big drain on CPU, and as the CPU power goes up, so will the size of keys, and so will the power demands of cryptography. Simulations for various things seem mired in complexity; the more clock cycles you can spare for fluid dynamics calculations for that new space shuttle replacement that they've been thinking about, the better. Simulating protein folding [stanford.edu] takes a lot

    • Re:What value are these new processors? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by orpheus2000 ( 166384 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @08:59AM (#5727127) Journal
      *Sigh*, this argument comes up every time there's a new processor out.

      There may be no pressing mainstream need for these processor's insane speeds now, but there are two things:

      1) Niche markets which will utilize the higher speeds (video editing, photo editing, music production, scientific computing) and
      2) the Future. Software will always find a way to use that extra power. We call it "bloat" normally, but then we usually forget about that and accept it as the norm and shun everyone who's running less than 2Ghz.

      Better now? Move along
    • This comment has been made every time a new processor comes out, and the usual reply is that there are plenty of applications that still require more CPU performance (which there certainly are), and sooner or later there will be one which is sufficiently compelling that Joe Sixpack will upgrade.

      Alternatively, one could try a reply based on business models. Intel is an R&D-driven company. They don't want to be the next Zilog [zilog.com]. If they don't continually introduce new products, that's what they will become, and it's really hard work competing in a low-margin commodity business.

      • While CPU power is moving ahead, it always feels like internet bandwidth is lagging behind (anyone else's ISP lowered their up/down caps recently?). A good use for those extra cycles might be advanced compression algorithms to squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of our limited-bandwidth internet connections.

        Consider that the Linux kernel mirrors just deprecated gzip in favor of bzip2, which provides significantly better compression, at the cost of more CPU power to encode and decode.

        Or better video c

      • This comment has been made every time a new processor comes out, and the usual reply is that there are plenty of applications that still require more CPU performance (which there certainly are), and sooner or later there will be one which is sufficiently compelling that Joe Sixpack will upgrade

        However, what really happens is that the major box manufacturers need to keep their price points between $1500 and $2500 - if the prices for the "basic machine" (as actually sold - not as advertised in the Sunday p

    • My 900mhz machine is too slow for my average computer useage, not even including gaming.

      Multitasking is a mother...let's say im running my C++ compiler, photoshop, about 4 internet explorers, msn/icq, email client, irc client, etc etc etc.

      I leave my computer on 24/7 and do not like to reboot either which only hurts the situation.

      If I wasn't a damn student I would run out and grab one of these nice new mobo's (apparently intel is owning amd now...), but I must wait!

    • Re:What value are these new processors? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Morgahastu ( 522162 ) <bshel ... fave bands name> on Monday April 14, 2003 @09:05AM (#5727161) Journal
      Why would there be an app that would require a processor that doesn't exist? Someone has to create that processor before apps expect people to have it.

      The average consumer doesn't need anything about 1 ghz but people (and professionals) who want to play cutting edge games, do some 3d modeling, video editing will love this.
      • Yeh, video encoding takes a while. Trouble is the codecs get more advanced and the filesizes fall resulting in more CPU power needed to encode :)

        Anyway, I always tend to stay back from the cutting edge as the heat generated is too vast to be cooled silently. When the cutting edge chips become the average ones the cores have gone through a few changes so run cooler.
      • Why would there be an app that would require a processor that doesn't exist?

        I don't know, ask Sun...they're the ones who invented Java. It's still waiting for the first batch of 10GHz CPUs to roll off the production line to be useful (drum roll/splash)

    • Re:What value are these new processors? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Lao-Tzu ( 12740 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @09:05AM (#5727166) Homepage

      Someday, I'll be able to write a highly graphical game like Doom 3 in a beautiful language like Python. :)

      Really, I think that higher powered computers allow programmers to write software more easily. When you need a piece of software, and an in-house programmer can write it in a few hours rather than a few weeks, but only if you have a 3 GHz machine to run it on... that's muchly worth while. It's possible.

    • That really depends on what kind of work you do. At home where all I do is code and surf the internet, my current P3-700 is chugging along nice and fine.

      However I have another rig I use for video encoding, usually mastering old VHS and V8 tapes to DivX or DVD and in that setup I need all the speed I can get.

    • I work as a microbiologist, and I occasionally do bioinformatics work. I can tell you that the real driving force behind most new biology is the microchip. I am very thankful that intel is putting that much money into R&D otherwise my data mining software might take 10 hours to run rather than 10 minutes.
    • The value of these new processors can only be seen after the next few releases... the prices tend to drop, and thus making it more affordable.

      The speed increments nowadays are much less steep than it was in the mid 90s.

      So now is actually the time to purchase that 2.5GHz processor that you were drooling over about six months ago.
      • Maybe on the processor end, but (finally!) bus bandwidth is increasing like anything. We're already up to nearly 5GB/sec sustained bandwidth (from the benchmarks for this sucker)! That's almost as much as the GeForce4Go 440 in my laptop! These recent changes are a whole lot m ore interesting than 100MHz jumps in CPU speed.
      • The speed increments nowadays are much less steep than it was in the mid 90s.

        Not really. Granted, the speed increases were greater, but they came less often. The path from 100 to 200 Mhz Pentium took about as long as the path from 1.5 Ghz to 3.0 Ghz (which, by the way, has been out, sans the 800Mhz bus for a while).
    • There's plenty of value in a faster processor. At work, I simulate contaminant transport in ground water. Some of the simulations that we run can easily take hours, days or even weeks.

      If I can finish a simulation 20% quicker by buying a new CPU, I can save my clients and myself piles of money.
    • The newest edition of the T2 DVD will include an HD transfer of the movie that can be run with WMP9. I tried to run a sample HD clip ("Step Into Liquid") on my computer (Athlon XP 1600 w/ 512 MB RAM)--I got a nice slide show of still frames. It ran a little better on my laptop. MS's website recommends 2.4 GHz minimum, and I can see why. T2 will be higher rez than that clip, so I'd expect you'd need something even faster.

      HDTV can also benefit, as new tuners like the Fusion HDTV card are inexpensive but
    • Sigh. This happens every time hardware advances, and every time, I have to post to refute this shit. People have been saying "do we need more hardware speed?" since the 386 came out. Back when the Pentium Pro was king of the hill, a guy in PC Magazine (Dvorak I think) refuted this idea. And people are still doing it! No, computers are not fast enough. I do things every day that need lots of power.

      1) Compiling. On my 2GHz P4 with 640MB of RAM, it took GCC well over 4 hours to compile kdebindings-3.1 A compi
    • Everytime there's an article about a new faster piece of tech on Slashdot lately there are a dozen comments that get modded up right away about 'Why do we need faster computers anyway?'.

      Look, if 640K is good enough for you guys, fine, but let's stop the whining. The rest of us like to do things like compile code and compress video.

    • Whine, whine (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @11:01AM (#5728026)
      "But my 8088 scrolls text just fine! Why would anyone want something more powerful?"

      Because there is neat new shit that takes more power. Receant example: HD multimedia. The Windows Media 9 HD demos kill a P4 1.6 and really take at least a P4 2.4 to play well. Means that if you have a 2.4, which is pretty good these days, that is about ALL your system can do, not much room for bacground tasks.

      Or how about speech recognition? There are some nifty new technologies in speech recognition the integrate it better with text parsing for far more accurate recoginition. One problem: they take loads more power than normal speech recog, which takes a bit itself. Given that ideally this should happen in the background as a normal part of the OS, more power become critical.

      Or how about better game AI? I am so sick of 3d bots that get "good" by becomming aimbots or RTS AI that attacks you in teh same predictable way every time. I want smarter AI. Well, to do that it is going to take more processing power. Teh smarter the AI, the more CPU time it needs. all this while still doing all the other calcuilations a game needs (like physics and game logic).

      We are not even close to expending the need for more computer power. As power grows, we'll simply find new and creative way to use it that were not before possable.

      After all, my 8088 scrolled text like a champ, but I much prefer my P4.
    • There are always uses for faster processors. The first that comes to mind is video compression. Spin up gordion knot, and let me know how fast your 500 Mhz compresses a DVD. Probably.... 6 hours-ish? That's probably pretty close.

      My 1500 Mhz 1800+ will do it in about 2.

      But, then, some people want it done in 10 minutes. Even 3.0 Ghz on 800Mhz bus won't do that.

      Things that take orders of minutes, not microseconds, will benifit. Video compression, Audio compression, brute force password cracking, video
    • One word: Games.

      Many hardcore gamers want games that look as lifelike as possible. Although we've certainly come a long way since Wolfenstein 3D, there is still a long way to go. I remember the first time I played Unreal, I nearly fell out of my chair when I took a look at the scenes outside. I'm sure video cards will be resonsible for most of the graphics, but high end CPU's will certainly play a necessary role.

    • I have to wonder what the point is with some of these new faster processors. At this point, almost no applications can really take advantage of the fastest chips available.

      Good thing you said "almost," as I'm guessing you don't do much video compression or editing. I've cranked out probably hundreds of SVCDs (mostly of TV shows) over the past couple of years, and I just got a DVD burner last week. MPEG-2 encoding eats up all the processor time you can throw at it...I built a dual Athlon MP 2200, and w

    • Having seemingly-ludicrous amounts of CPU power available allows all kinds of tasks that you might not think of.

      I'm a bit of a special case -- I'm a solar physicist, and a fair amount of my work consists of analysing image and spectral data from solar telescopes. My dual Athlon machine with 4GB of RAM is nothing special these days -- but allows me to do incredible analysis tasks interactively. Machine vision, huge wave-propagation studies, numerical magnetohydrodynamic modeling -- there are a huge numbe

  • Evolution (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ghazban ( 28784 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @08:56AM (#5727109) Homepage
    This isn't real news. Sure this is a push of momentary technology that sells a few units at the full cost, and gradually makes it into the mainstream computers which are used for their peak performance. I will propose that the only people that really benefit from the current advances in computer technology (in the realm of speed) are those who work for the benefit of science or those companies who need to scale to a natural increase of peak hits.

    This pre-occupation with the peak of consumer computer technology is holding back the very people who could learn to advance the very-needed algorithms which drive scientific computing.

    • This pre-occupation with the peak of consumer computer technology is holding back the very people who could learn to advance the very-needed algorithms which drive scientific computing.

      So you mean that we should give all scientific programmers a C64 and they will magically invent an algorithm so that e.g. protein folding simulation is practical on said platform? Nice theory, dude.
      • No. I do see that an evolution of theoretical algorithms isn't much different to that of the progress of computer performance, however advances in important algorithm's performance do not seem to be as relevant as basic increases in cpu performance. This could be due to the fact that they will run Ut2003 with better performance without patches but the argument remains the same.

  • Milestone (Score:5, Informative)

    by vslee ( 567907 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @08:58AM (#5727124)
    This is actually a notable improvement, as an 800 mhz FSB will allow enough bandwidth for dual channel DDR 400 RAM to work properly, unlike the nForce2 boards which have to push dual channel 333/400 through a FSB half as fast.

    • FSB + Dual Channel DDR (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ihatewinXP ( 638000 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @09:07AM (#5727175)
      Native serial ATA and a host of other goodies... As a curent mac G4 user color me VERY impressed, the last few iterations of the G4 boards have honestly been shit, meanwhile first AMD and now Intel are really moving ahead in overall throughput. Honeslty these days a new processor really isnt that big of a deal. As was stated earlier and often: "My P3 800 does 99% of what I need" but Serial ATA and dual channel DDR really improve overall system speed. I will be interested to see benchmark comparisons between AMD/Apple/older Intel with this new chipset.
      Im not deluded enough to think that the Power970 + new motherboard due later in the year will put Apple back in the performance lead, but heres to hoping that the competition (which is good for everyone) will be on more equal ground.
      • I will be interested to see benchmark comparisons between AMD/Apple/older Intel with this new chipset.
        Im not deluded enough to think that the Power970 + new motherboard due later in the year will put Apple back in the performance lead, but heres to hoping that the competition (which is good for everyone) will be on more equal ground.

        Well, it will be on equal ground.
        You'll see the apples being smoked at media encoding, 3d games, general low level benchmarks, server benchmarks and everything else you can im
    • Yes, and have you saw the benchmarks on the dual channel ddr400?

      Wow.

      That is some impressive RAM, I do not know how they can engineer it so damn well. I learned at school how some of the first RAM improvements were made, and by the time we got to pc133 it was getting incredibly tough to know how/why it worked.

      Now, I just have to get me one of those new mobos and slap in some new ram!
    • Compile time on a big LaTeX document seems to be directly proportional to processor speed, and (based on casual, anecdotal observation) RAM seems to have little impact.

      That said, you have to be writing a pretty fscking long book to really need a 3ghz chip...

  • huzzahh... nah.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by WegianWarrior ( 649800 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @08:59AM (#5727126) Journal

    Intel does it again.. another chip that is faster than I need, and certainly costs more than I can afford (I'm still using my trusty old P3 450MHz for 'powertasks' and an old P2 233MHz as a fileserver / printerserver / firewall / P2P client). However, I was interested in one qoute from the article:
    With the D875PBZ, Intel is no longer picking memory clock speeds and timings for you, nor are they even holding you to the stock speed of your processor.
    Overclockers galore? I'm convinced that we'll see a rush of people in that particular subculture who'll rush to the shops once this chip 'n chipset is avilable, to try to squuese the last little Hz out of it... possible canabalizing the fridge in the prosses to keep it cool. Nothing wrong with that, but...

    Are overclockers the new "powerusers"? Are the glorious days when the gamer reigned supreme as the hardwaregeek gone?

    On a brighter note, this may mean that the P4 2,4GHz system I've been wanting for a couple of months get more affordable

    • On a brighter note, this may mean that the P4 2,4GHz system I've been wanting for a couple of months get more affordable

      It also has the side-effect of making AMD's 64 bit processor look a little less desirable as well.

    • Re:huzzahh... nah.. (Score:5, Funny)

      by worst_name_ever ( 633374 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @09:03AM (#5727155)
      Are overclockers the new "powerusers"? Are the glorious days when the gamer reigned supreme as the hardwaregeek gone?

      Uh... what do you think the overclockers are doing with their newly-overclocked machines? Downloading recipes and gardening tips?

    • Two things:

      1) Intel does it again.. another chip that is faster than I need, and certainly costs more than I can afford

      For most of us, Intel's latest releases are the future of technology. The more money you have, the closer to the future you can get. Naturally there's a very long re-seller list on E-bay, where you can buy used processors. You could almost formulate the cost of these processors using the date it was manufactured, like this:

      1/(Current Date - Manufacture Date + 1) * $450 = cost

      2) Wit
  • I dunno...hardware gets faster, bus gets faster. Tide goes in, tide goes out.

    ah slashdot, let ye profundity run far and wide.

  • Now We Can Test Serial ATA (Score:4, Informative)

    by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Monday April 14, 2003 @09:10AM (#5727191) Homepage
    Now we can test serial ATA to see how good it REALLY is. Before now it's always been an add-in, either a card or built onto the motherboard. Now that it's built into the chipset it's not at the mercy of the PCI bus, where it has to deal with your soundcard, your tv tuner, that firewire card you bought, and everything else. This will also bring about more SATA drives now that it's going to be on so many motherboards (I know many have them now, but this is an Intel chipset. This will push everyone to do it if they're not already).

    That said, I'm disapointed that you only get 2 SATA channels. Remember, with SATA it's only one device per channel, unlike parallel ATA.

    • Re:Now We Can Test Serial ATA (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Zathrus ( 232140 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @10:04AM (#5727527) Homepage
      Now we can test serial ATA to see how good it REALLY is

      And we'll continue to see that... shocker... it doesn't make a bit of difference.

      The limitation is not on the interface (parallel vs serial ATA), or on the bus (PCI vs insert_chipset_bus_here), but on the drives. There are no drives available that come anywhere close to saturating ATA/100 or ATA/133, so SATA/150 isn't going to help much. Ok, yeah, it'll help for the microsecond that you're reading from cache instead of from the drive itself, but that time period is so absurdly short it's not even statistical noise.

      The advantages to SATA aren't in the bus speed arena... the improved cabling, hot swapping, and simplicity of hookup is what it's all about. I would've killed for SATA this weekend after spending an hour fiddling with 3 IDE drives and a CD-RW to get their master/slave jumpers correct (turned out that one was only happy with the master drive as cable select and the slave CD-ROM as slave -- anything else wouldn't be detected. Joy!).

      As far as the number of channels go - 2 may be ok for now, but it's going to be deeply inadequate in the future. I'd hope that systems start appearing with 4 channels in 6 months, and 8 within a couple years. By which time standard ATA connectors may be gone entirely. (For more realistic estimates, change 6 mos to 1 year and 2 years to 5 years).
    • >> Remember, with SATA it's only one device per channel, unlike parallel ATA.

      AFAIR, you can design SATA to have more than one device per channel.
      (albeit the devices would then share the bandwidth from that channel).

      It is only the current design strategies that are forcing the one device limit.

      I think that when SATA-2 starts to get more notice (higher bandwidth and
      better switching between devices), then there will be more encouragement
      to place multiple devices on a single channel.
    • Current SATA stuff isn't going to give you a good idea of what SATA can deliver. Most of the really nice stuff is a few months from hitting the shelves.

  • Just out of curiosity why is there only 2 SATA controllers on all these new motherboards? No room? Too expensive? No need? Whats the point in having SATA RAID with only 2 devices? I'm looking at building a new UBER-Fileserver for my home and want to use SATA but I want at least 4 maybe 8 HD's in the thing.

  • I want cheap SMP, not more MHz (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @09:20AM (#5727246)
    No matter how many MHz you have, broken Java code, lame screen redraws in your browser, compiles set to use "make -j4" and countless other programming adventures can pin the CPU at 100%. I want good, cheap, 2 or 4 way SMP on my desktop. I don't want one app to wait for another, and I don't want to have to wait for any of them. I switched to a dual Celeron board some years ago, and there's really no going back once you've gone duallie.
    • there's really no going back once you've gone duallie.

      I concur. Right now I have four main boxes in operation (not counting laptops), three of them are dual proc (the fourth is a firewall). Since around 1998, my primary workstation has always been dual proc.

      The lack of a reasonably priced DP option has been my primary impediment in upgrading to P4 (two of my boxes are PIII-1GHz, one is PII-350MHz, my uni-proc firewall is Cel-500MHz). I'd love to have a DP P4-3GHz for my primary station, I just don't

    • Re:I want cheap SMP, not more MHz (Score:5, Interesting)

      by whig ( 6869 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @10:18AM (#5727652) Homepage Journal
      I think the "make -j4" example is a good example of using all your SMP processors for maximum performance, but not really why I prefer a dual system to a single processor. Frankly, one P4 3GHz is still gonna significantly outperform a dual 1.5GHz Xeon system even for this operation..

      I have a dual Celeron 533 MHz at home, and while it's by no means a speed demon, I still prefer it to a single processor system of even 3GHz class.

      The reason: No matter how processor intensive a background task I may be running, my computer continues to be smooth and usable. And if it's a long-running task, this is especially important. While it might be nice to be able to run the background job in an hour instead of six, if I cannot use my computer for that hour, I'm actually significantly more inconvenienced.

      Yes, I could have two systems and a KVM, instead. But really, SMP is so much less cumbersome. And Intel's Hyperthreading does not provide this benefit, so the next system I'm hoping to get will be a dual Opteron.
      • Interesting what you say about background tasks etc. I have the KVM and multiple machines myself, but it sounds like SMP would be a way to get more lifespan out of misc. older CPUs and such ... find a used SMP motherboard, fill it with appropriate CPUs, and you've got a cheap and useful upgrade.

        (I'm of the "build it from parts in the closet" school of computing, if you can't tell :)

      • The reason: No matter how processor intensive a background task I may be running, my computer continues to be smooth and usable. And if it's a long-running task, this is especially important. While it might be nice to be able to run the background job in an hour instead of six, if I cannot use my computer for that hour, I'm actually significantly more inconvenienced.

        To add to the list of inconveniences: Shitty programs that for whatever reason, take 100% regardless of their usage (in windows). I mean, lots

    • I want good, cheap, 2 or 4 way SMP on my desktop

      I have some nice 4-way Pentium Pro systems I can sell you...
    • I don't want one app to wait for another, and I don't want to have to wait for any of them.

      Stop using Windows then. More advanced operating systems have no problem at all, sharing the CPU.

      The hard drive is another story, however.
  • There's another good review of this in the latest issue of Maximum PC [maximumpc.com].

  • Macintosh Processor Speeds (Score:5, Interesting)

    by masq ( 316580 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @09:31AM (#5727310) Homepage Journal
    This isn't meant as a troll, but I'm sure many of the more... sensitive ... Mac users will take it as such anyway.

    This speed boost is great for the x86 world. Speed keeps getting better. Intel and AMD keep competing and leapfrogging each other to greater heights. My sorrow is that Apple's offerings really are *years behind* right now. I know, I know, speed doesn't matter when Macs are slower, but when Macs had the speed advantage, the Mac users claimed speed was all-important and there was no problem attacking the PC users based on their sorry speed. Mac users, like everyone else in the world it seems, aren't objective - if the PowerBook is thinner, they claim size (ahem) is important. When the PC world shows us the Superthin Vaio, we say that Size doesn't matter, it's how you use it (ahem again). And that's the problem; that's why Apple doesn't feel the need to force speed increases out of Moto and IBM to keep up with the Joneses - Mac users are so damn faithful, that they don't apply any market pressure to Apple to force them to compete! Instead, the "Mac Faithful" DEFEND Apple's weaknesses, allowing Apple to slack off in the processor department.

    Next time a MacZealot defends Apple's 1 Ghz processors on a slow bus, tell him that he's NOT helping Apple. The way to help Apple is to absolutely demand faster processors, and threaten to switch to x86 if they don't deliver. If we give Apple a "Get out of Jail Free card" with regards to processor speed, we'll NEVER be competitive with Intel.

    And yes, I've heard the RUMORS about the IBM chips. They'll still be far behind this, RISC or not.
    • I have a dual processor 450 MHz G4 that runs on a "slow bus". It is more than fast enough for the average user. So it doesn't run at 3 Ghz. Do I care? No. Am I going to write a letter to Apple, complaining that they are losing the dicksize war? No.

      The computer runs my applications without noticable delay, is "user friendly", doesn't crash, and requires minimal maintenance. I'm happy with it.

      • Well shucks. If you do nothing with your computer, why do you assume nobody else does either? I, for one, would like to get a Mac. I have no ties to stupid Windows software, and could switch on a whim. I could even run Linux on it :) But a Mac is too slow for the work I do, and too expensive for the poor performance you get. I'm sure there are a lot of other people in my position (in relation to Apple's small market share), and Apple is losing a lot of potential users by not being competitive in the speed d
      • I have a Mac too. Like yours, mine is fast enough for the average user.

        So it doesn't run at 3GHz? Do *I* care? No.

        Do people buying Apple's new line of servers care? I'm sure they certainly do, and will in the future.

        Although we might not have a personal use for faster Apple's, if Apple wants to stay competitive in the server market, they will probably need to bump up the speed a bit.

    • Don't waste you breath. I've been telling this to MacZealots for ages... They have too much invested in the platform (monetarilly, emotionally, and knowledge-wise to be objective about it).

    • And yes, I've heard the RUMORS about the IBM chips. They'll still be far behind this, RISC or not.

      I agree that Apple needs to get on the ball with speed, but there are a few uniprocessor RISC systems at 1GHz that can slap around a 2.5 to 3.0GHz equivalent x86 systems. I don't think Apple's systems can do this but rather the workstations from Risc vendors which easily make Apple look cheap.
  • I'm still hoping I can get my 3GHz G5 (TBA tomorrow). ;)

  • 3 GHz Chip Delayed (Score:5, Informative)

    by lorax ( 2988 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @09:41AM (#5727376)
    News.com just updated their article on the chip [com.com] to state that "a possible problem with the 3GHz Pentium 4, discovered at the last minute, forced the company to delay the chip late on Sunday."

  • 400MHz FSB on Athlons is trivial (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Brian Stretch ( 5304 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @10:13AM (#5727607)
    I've reclocked my Athlon 1700+ (TBred core) to 8x202MHz (404MHz DDR) on my ASUS nForce2 chipset board, using a single Corsair PC3200C2 DIMM (yes, two DIMMs would be better, but they were too expensive at the time). It's just a matter of selecting the right BIOS settings. I left the voltage levels at their defaults. MemTest86 [memtest86.com] verifies that the memory is stable at that speed. Red Hat Linux runs until I need to reboot for the usual kernel/glibc upgrades. I went this this approach because I wanted to optimize the performence/power consumption balance, what with the machine running 24x7 and all.

    Of course, tweaking speeds like this is not guaranteed to work, yadda yadda, but it generally does if you built your system right.

    If you want serious firepower, build a dual Athlon box, which should cost no more than the uniprocessor P4 being reviewed. time make reports a bit over 9 minutes when building Wine with MAKEFLAGS=-j2 on my dual 2400+ (not overclocked). Nice, especially when you forget the --with-nptl switch the first time around (d'oh!).

    Of course, next week, the Opterons ship, starting with Opteron DP 240's and 242's. It's unclear whether there will be cheap workstation motherboards available right away or just the seriously nice (and expensive) Newisys-designed 1U rackmount servers. It appears that AMD is going to use the Opterons to slap the high-end P4's around, saving the Athlon 64 until they want a low-to-midrange 64-bit desktop platform. I'm surprised the various hardware site reviewers haven't picked up on this.
  • ... every article I've seen to help you speed up your PC begins with the directive to "increase your memory" before all else (and at all levels memory is the bottleneck). Is it really cheaper to come out with a whole new CPU than to make sure you have squeezed maximum performance out of the last batch? Why not increase onboard cache size so you could swap out the old 1 Ghz with a new 1 Ghz that would have better performance but wouldn't need a chipset/mobo upgrade?

  • Tom's Hardware article (Score:4, Interesting)

    by panurge ( 573432 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @10:28AM (#5727754)
    I read the article (pause for shock)
    All that stuff about huge speed increases and sackloads of extra memory bandwidth, reduced clock cycles, RAID...but when you eventually get to the performance testing it seems very little faster than top end current boards. Perhaps if you have a daily compute-intensive job that is slowly growing and currently takes 23hours, you would get excited, but as a developer I guess I might gain a few minutes off my build times (and that's staring into space thinking time anyway.)

    I'm not knocking progress: the lower voltage and the ability to use a 4-layer board, plus the serial ATA on-board support look nice, but the number of people with more money than sense needed to get a fast R&D payback isn't that high at the moment.

    Or is this a cunning plan to make money through selling compute farms to rogue states that have just decided they need WMDs really fast?

  • Chipset (Score:4, Informative)

    by devnullkac ( 223246 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @11:00AM (#5728017) Homepage
    They've also released "Canterwood", the
    chipset chipset for the P4...

    I wonder... How many chips could a chipset set if a chipset could set chips?

  • In this heise-article [heise.de] from 15 minutes ago, Intel has withdrawn the release of the new CPU. A google-crappy translation can be found here [google.com].

  • Too general purpose for where we need speed. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Junks Jerzey ( 54586 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @12:44PM (#5728889)
    I see the usual replies claiming that 1GHz is more than fast enough and the usual critical replies citing video editing and speed recognition. Now while I can agree that more speed is often good, are these really examples where it makes a lot of sense to buy hot, expensive, and power hungry general purpose CPUs to handle special purpose tasks? 3D graphics didn't wait for processors to hit 20GHz, but a 300MHz graphics processor can outrun any general purpose CPU. Video editing is another good example. Why is it so slow? Because it involves compressing lots of data. A team of graduate students could create an FPGA that runs rings around a P4 for video compression (by, say, a factor of 20). Speech recognition is the same way.

    In short, paying $1000+ for a processor that's 9% faster and uses 15% more power is not a good solution for "I need more power for video editing," especially when you should be able to get 20x-50x performance increases for 10% of the cost.

  • 81.8 watts (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bromoseltzer ( 23292 ) on Monday April 14, 2003 @12:46PM (#5728915) Homepage Journal
    According to Intel, the 3 GHz P4 dissipates 81.8 watts. While that keeps you warm over a long winter night, it's a lot of power to run all the time. I guess it's about $72 a year for energy. You have to put up with noisy fans, dust bunnies in your box, and all that.

    I'd like to see speed/power specs advertised, and not just for laptops.

    -mse

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