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Intel Hardware

Looking Forward to Intel's Grantsdale and Alderwood 168

Posted by CowboyNeal from the pci-express-and-onboard-wireless dept.
VL writes "Over the next several days, you'll be hearing a lot about Intel's significant upgrade to the Pentium 4 platform. Soon enough, that brand new Canterwood board you have will be yesterday's news as two new words will be on the lips of all enthusiasts... Grantsdale and Alderwood."
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Looking Forward to Intel's Grantsdale and Alderwood More

Looking Forward to Intel's Grantsdale and Alderwood

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  • Anandtech Review (Score:5, Informative)

    by hattig ( 47930 ) on Saturday June 19, 2004 @10:33AM (#9472177) Journal
    http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.html?i=2088

    Very weak, Athlon FX 53 thrashes a 3.6GHz Prescott on i925 in gaming, and simply beats it in a lot of other areas.
    • Take with a THG Pinch Of Salt

      http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20040619 /s ocket_775-15.html

      (yes, that is page 15 to start the chipset talk, there's plenty of stuff before that of course, but this is a chipset story)

      • Re:Toms Hardware Guide Review (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Monkelectric ( 546685 ) <[moc.cirtceleknom] [ta] [todhsals]> on Saturday June 19, 2004 @02:51PM (#9473489)
        THG is a bunch of fuckheads. You want to hear my "I almost worked for THG" story? Great! Here it is:

        A few years ago THG put out a call for reviewers in southern california ... I responded, they offered me a "job" reviewing based on my qualifications and I believe, a writing sample. So when it came to compensation, the representative said, "we don't pay our reviewers." "Ohhh freebies then!?" "no, we may give you a t-shirt though, and you will have to pick up the hardware." "You can't have it shipped to me?" "no."

        At that point I politely declined the "job" and stopped reading/respecting THG. Basically the deal was, I did all the work, they kept all the money. So when you're reading THG, keep in mind that the reviewers are asshats who are willing to put up with a lot of abuse. I might have even done it still to beef up my publications list, but when they couldn't SHIP crap to me (was still about a 400 mile round trip), I would have to pick it up. What a joke!

    • It doesn't appear to be a clear leader over the 875 chipset.

      Outside of a few game benchmarks, one MPEG encoding benchmark, there isn't much more than a percent or two of difference when comparing to an FX-53 system, hardly enough of a margin performance-wise to call it a simple beating.

      It appears that just using DDR rather than DDR2 would be the thing to do. Is DDR2 the new RAMBUS? It is more expensive but not providing any notable performance advantage?

  • So I should put off... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ... upgrading from a 533Mhz FSB P4 system (2 Ghz cpu, not sure of chipset) and wait for this? Then (after this is obsolete) I need to buy a new board to switch over to BTX format? Ughh, no thanks Intel.

  • God damn (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All this new technology, and mobos still have parallel and serial ports.
    Get with the times!

    -Apple

    • Re:God damn (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ejaw5 ( 570071 )
      You want to go out any buy a new USB printer be my guest. A lot of the laser printers from the early 90s still work like new.

      I also take it you don't work with microcontrollers. The JTAG Flash Emulation Tool for the MSP430 is parallel. (yes, there is a USB available). If you ever have to work with the HC12, you need that serial.

      You sound like one of those "All USB" types, including USB for keyboard and mouse. Well, good luck to you when you ever have to boot up the OS for troubleshooting and the USB

      • Yes, but (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 19, 2004 @10:57AM (#9472285)
        ...BIOS support for USB keyboards and mice has been standard for quite a while now. I've used a USB keyboard on my PC to make changes in BIOS for quite some time.

      • I'm talking about the home users/gamers, here. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 19, 2004 @11:01AM (#9472303)
        95% of the population has no use for legacy ports any more. In the future if people really, truly need legacy ports (i.e. no alternatives exist) they'll be willing to pay extra.

        As for the USB keyboard/mouse issue. I'm able to boot into and use Open Firmware using my Bluetooth keyboard on my Mac. Maybe it's time to modernize.
      • There only one PC in the world I know of that can boot from a external USB floppy or USB CD ROM - Datalux makes mobile computers for cop cars and such and they have a BIOS that can boot via USB.

        If this little tiny company can have a bios that allows USB booting why cant Intel? Maybe not a high priority but it sure is nice on occasion. Just set the usb device to be the first boot device and blammmo it's booted.

        • I've got and i845 chipset micron at work that boots off of USB CD-RW, found that out when I came back from lunch with a freeBSD sysinstall screen one time!

    • RS-232 is good (Score:4, Insightful)

      by crow ( 16139 ) on Saturday June 19, 2004 @10:46AM (#9472241) Homepage Journal
      Parallel and serial ports are nice to have, especially if you want to build some of your own hardware. And considering how insanely cheap a uart is, why not?

      • And I miss the ISA bus (Score:1, Insightful)

        by mangu ( 126918 )
        If you look into industrial control systems you'll find a lot of mobos wich still have ISA slots, some of them have 20 ISA slots. ISA isn't just for legacy boards. Besides allowing one to build interface boards with TTL chips alone, it's simpler to program at the device driver level. Where there's no need to go faster than 8 Mbytes/second, there's no need to replace the ISA bus.

        Looking at benchmark tests for these new mobos from Intel, one realizes how little advantage there is in all these new standards.

        • Re:And I miss the ISA bus (Score:5, Informative)

          by W2k ( 540424 ) on Saturday June 19, 2004 @11:36AM (#9472435) Journal
          1) The fastest possible CPU, in *true* GHz, not in AMD's inflated "+" bogoghz.

          No problem. AMD already publishes the true clock speeds of all their CPU's. The "3400+" or whatever you've seen is a model name, not a measurement of clock speed but rather of performance. AMD explains it here [amd.com]. Your post suggest that you are unaware of the fact that other things than clock speed have a significant impact on the performance of a CPU.

          Next you'll be complaining that car makers name their cars cryptic things like "320Ci", "XC90" or "GT40" instead of naming each car according to its BHP rating.
          • The "explanation" AMD gives in the link you cite is that "performance = work per clock cycle * clock speed". OK, so far so good. But, if you had read my post, you'd have seen that you don't need that performance in most applications. In text processing, for instance, a 2 GHz CPU is waiting for your next keystroke 99.999% of the time. What's the point in improving that?

            In my post, which you obviously didn't read, I point that two types of applications where even the fastest PC CPUs today are lacking in perf

            • Let it first be stated that I did not intend to reply to your post in its entirety, as you seem to have assumed. I merely felt the need to correct one statement which I found to be blatantly false. Now, to correct another:

              AMD may say what they want, but CPU speed IS the main factor in performance. Because, in the AMD formula above, the "work per clock cycle" is the same for each manufacturer.

              That's what Intel marketing would have you believe. But why then does an Athlon FX-53 at 2.4GHz perform better
              • why then does an Athlon FX-53 at 2.4GHz perform better than an Intel Pentium 4 at 3.6GHz, as benchmarked by Anandtech here?

                Because, as I said, current CPUs are vastly overpowered for personal software. So, the AMD 2.4GHz does 104.6 fps against 103.6 fps for the Intel 3.6 GHz? That proves only one thing: an 800 MHz CPU should be good enough to play Halo at 30 fps, which is all the human eye needs.

                I didn't see in that test any software of the type I mentioned, that uses a lot of number crunching. Why? Bec

                • Re:Please read post before replying. (Score:2, Informative)

                  by Anonymous Coward
                  You're wrong here too, the AMD Athlon out performs the P4 in float point processing. If your number crunching is based on float point variables you would see a difference between the AMD and an Intel processor. Intel depends on it's higher clock speed to back up for the fact that it uses more clock cycles to process float points.

            • Because, in the AMD formula above, the "work per clock cycle" is the same for each manufacturer.

              No it absolutely, positively is not. Any AMD Athalon chip executes more instructions per clock cycle than a Pentium 4. A Pentium M executes more instructions per cycle than a Pentium 4. This is why an AMD chip can be (in the case of Opteron, significantly) faster than an Intel P4 running real programs while limping along at 60% of the P4's clock speed.

              I think you need some education on basic computer archite

        • 1) The fastest possible CPU, in *true* GHz, not in AMD's inflated "+" bogoghz.


          The fastest possible GHz will not always give the bets real performance, as AMD, despite their "bogoghz" have demonstrated.
        • 1) The fastest possible CPU, in *true* GHz, not in AMD's inflated "+" bogoghz.

          I have mod points, but rather than simply mod you down for this silly statement, I'll reply instead.

          AMD's 'inflated "+" bogoghz' are often conservative with regards to P4 performance. They have been a necessary marketing evil, due to lots of people like you who've been brainwashed by Intel's "GHz. matters" campaign. It is extremely telling that Intel is now adopting a "model number" approach, since the clockspeeds of CPUs with

          • It seems like neither you nor the other two above actually read my post. Read it, please, it was all about this "overall" performance thing, and how the system should be well balanced for the application.

            And my conclusion was that raw clock speed IS the most important factor in performance, if you get your information from other sources than AMD or Apple. Because there are few applications that really use more than a small fraction of current PCs capabilities. And those applications, like AI and physics si

            • And my conclusion was that raw clock speed IS the most important factor in performance, if you get your information from other sources than AMD or Apple. Because there are few applications that really use more than a small fraction of current PCs capabilities. And those applications, like AI and physics simulations, do need GHz, that is, floating-point operations per second is the most important limitation in those CPU-intensive apps.

              FLOPS are not proportional to the clock frequenzy across multiple archit

            • You contradict yourself over and over again and have demonstrated a lack of understanding on how to measure performance.

              It seems, from you post, that your major concern is performance of a certain microwave antenna simulation program. Everything else should be secondary - the clockspeed, memory latency and throughput, the name on the outside of the box, etc. Now, you may have a price issue... for which then you want the best performance (which is most purchasers outside of governments). Whatever anyone sa

              • This is actually an interesting experiment in psychology. You and several others seem to have read only one sentence in my post. I have started other threads like this in the past, and the result has been similar. I never, ever, said that raw clock speed is the only factor determining performance.

                What I think should be avoided is to believe in a tricky chain of reasoning that both Apple and AMD use in their marketing: "CPU speed isn't the only factor that determines performance". True. "A faster CPU clock

                • But only if you really need that performance. When a 3d game plays at 100 fps in a 2.4GHz CPU, this only means that game players are wasting their money if they buy anything better than an 800MHz CPU, which presumably will get the 30 fps they need to play a perfect game. But for a number-crunching program that needs to do teraflops, there's no substitute for a fast CPU in a well-matched system. Apple and AMD marketroids are doing users a disservice when they claim to have a magic substitute for CPU speed.
        • ISA is also more electronics hobbyist friendly. You used to be able to buy ISA prototyping boards at Radio Shack. Its much easier to design something for 8Mhz than it is 33Mhz. It isn't important in the larger sense I'll grant but I can see that PCs are getting much more difficult for the average hobbiest to connect his custom gadgets to.
        • The fastest possible CPU, in *true* GHz, not in AMD's inflated "+" bogoghz.

          You sound like a shill for Intel.

          Or that clockrate (gigahertz numbers to those of you in Rio Linda) is only half the story. The other half is the number of instructions executed per clock. In this regard, AMD Athlons are more efficient than Intel Pentium 4 chips because each AMD chip does more per clock tick than the corresponding Intel chip. That's why AMD can do as much real work as Intel at a lower clockrate.

          And if you fe

    • Re:God damn (Score:2, Insightful)

      by NineNine ( 235196 )
      Those of us who do things with our computers other than play games actually use those parallel and serial ports.
    • All this new technology, and mobos still have parallel and serial ports.

      And I'll use them both. I still have an excellent HP LaserJet 6P printer that only understands ECP, and serial Wacom pen pad that there's no reason to discard. So what's your problem?

  • If history shows... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NineNine ( 235196 ) on Saturday June 19, 2004 @10:39AM (#9472215)
    If history shows anything, it's that people who aren't gamers just don't really care too much about upgrading any more. Intel is going to have to raise its prices as sales due to upgrades slow dramatically. I'm still running mostly Pentium 2's in my business... I think. I don't even know or care. For what we do here, just about any computer that was made in the last 10 years is just fine. When it's time to get a new machine, we always just buy the cheapest oen we can find.

    • Re:If history shows... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dnoyeb ( 547705 ) on Saturday June 19, 2004 @10:52AM (#9472262) Homepage Journal
      true. I usually max out my motherboard, but last time i bought one last year, i did not. I even stepped down in my server to reduce heat.

      I am playing plenty of games now without the need for increased cpu power.

      I think intel/AMD will have to put out some crappy compilers or otherwise pay programmers to write more CPU intensive code. Otherwise, I'm fine where I am(AMD XP2100+), and I got room to grow if I want to upgrade without trashing my MB.

      I'm very happy that CPUs rarely die, though I can't say the same for motherboards...

    • Re:If history shows... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Nasarius ( 593729 ) on Saturday June 19, 2004 @10:54AM (#9472276)
      If history shows anything, it's that people who aren't gamers just don't really care too much about upgrading any more.

      Not quite true. There are a lot of other people who can make good use of a fast processor (or two) and gobs of memory. For example, I'm a software developer who uses multiple VMware virtual machines for testing. Faster compiling would be very nice too.

      Things like CAD or video editing are also very CPU intensive. So no, gamers are definitely not the only ones who benefit from upgrades.

      • Having been in CADD for 15 years, I know 95% of what CADD/CAE is used for in manufacturing/mechanical engineering and architecture/civil engineering could be done on a 5+ year old PC or unix workstation. Sure, we can make prettier renderings and animations now for sales/marketing/impress the suits, but you don't need all that crap to actually design and build things.
    • Digital photo enthusiasts, developers, HTPC (Home Theater PC) buffs, digital video editing enthusiasts, and 3D graphics modelers disagree with you.

    • Re:If history shows... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 19, 2004 @11:03AM (#9472308)
      For so many purposes, you're exactly right.

      Even graphical fields that used to crave for the latest & greatest are blase about the new machines. The print shop I worked at in 1992 would ALWAYS have new machines in, as any extra power was put to use in layout, photoshop, illustrator, whatever.

      The last time I went back for a christmas party, they're still using from Quadras to G3s. Admittedly most of their work is prepress, but they're still growing, still succesful, but just don't need the cutting edge tech just to keep on top of things.

      The designers who create the work may be a different story, they're working so much in the editing stage that it makes a difference to have a machine to cut down on the repetitive tasks, or those that may need several versions done. All the same, one part of an industry that used to crave power power power is now happy with older machines.

      That being said, there's always NEW industries appearing, that can do things with today's computing power that weren't possible even 5 years ago
      • My mother is a graphic artist whose work has won several awards. She works in Pagemaker, Illustrator, and Photoshop, though less of the latter and more of the first two. Until just a couple years ago she was still using a Macintosh IIci with a Mac Two-Page Mono display, 200+500MB disk, a Zip 100, 40MB ram. Now she has a Beige G3.

        Graphic artists who started on computers are impatient, but those who originally did physical pasteup can wait. They're used to waiting for the wax machine to heat up, they're use

    • If history shows anything, it's that people who aren't gamers just don't really care too much about upgrading any more
      Even gamers are caring less and less about the CPU and more about the GPU. If you have a good-enough CPU, getting a better one will often make little to no difference to your performance. Various internal bandwidths (like CPU to memory), and amount of memory make a far larger difference, so you tend to get gamers upgrading their memory and GPUs long before their CPUs

    • You betcha. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by LazloToth ( 623604 )

      I'm with you, Captain. I still have a number of PII-450 servers (Proliant 1600), some of them dualies, that are as reliable as the sunrise and not coming anywhere close to bogging down on CPU utilization. And they're doing lots of work for us, too. I went recently to eBay and picked up some new power supplies and case fans for these units. I found those, and some hot-swap drives, too, at prices so low it was almost embarassing. I have a feeling these babies are going to keep producing for us for a long time
    • That isn't what history shows.

      History shows that gaming tends to drive the market towards rapidly increasing performance, and demand more frequent hardware upgrades that many other classes of applications... aside from the dominant desktop OS [microsoft.com], of course.

      Generally speaking, history shows us that those who barely do anything with their computers, such as my Grandmother and perhaps your organization, don't need to upgrade often, care about keeping pace with resource intensive applications, or stay "modern"

    • Agreed. For a lot of people, going from 256MB to 512MB is a far more cost-effective upgrade.

      Ever since my first computer, in the 486 era, I've stayed about a year or a generation behind the "leading edge" for cost reasons, although I've slipped, my current computers are more than two years old, but now I own more computers because the older ones are cheaper.

  • What's new? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by lachlan76 ( 770870 )
    Am I missing something from the pictures there, or are these chipsets just a PCI-X + DDR2 update?

    • Re:What's new? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by compwiz3688 ( 98919 ) on Saturday June 19, 2004 @11:07AM (#9472329)
      The "Storage Matrix" is an interesting improvement. It can essentially chop up your HD into several smaller pieces for you to do a mixure of RAID.

      For example: You have two 120GB HD. You use the first half of it in a RAID 1 for the system drive and all your important data. Then on the same two HDs, you use the second half for RAID 0 for the performance boost, say video data.

      My quick glance at the article didn't mention this, although their 915/925 chipset pictures did show this.
      • I missed that, but is it like doing different types of software raid on different partitions through hardware? And wouldn't having two arrays on one drive cancel out the benefits by slowing down the access time for both of them? ie. Raid 1 at half normal speed, Raid 0 gives the speed of one drive, because half of the speed is used to access the mirrored array. This would mean you would only get the speed of 1.5 drives, for the price of two. How about everyone just sits down, has some drinks, gets an ext

      • Re:What's new? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Synkronos ( 789022 )
        In my experience, 99% of desktop users have no need for any form of RAID. People just end up using RAID0 because it sounds cool (and doesn't lower their capacity, which is king for a lot of n00b users), and then getting burned when one HDD dies, leaving them with no chance of recovering anything.
    • For the very last time, everyone together now, one two three...


      PCI-X != PCI Express
    • are these chipsets just a PCI-X + DDR2 update?

      Major audio improvement over AC97 at essentially no additional cost.

      8 USB 2.0 high speed connections.

      Firewire? (The Intel manufactured boards at least are including this.)

  • Just looks like a bunch of motherboard changes... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KingOfBLASH ( 620432 ) on Saturday June 19, 2004 @10:41AM (#9472228) Journal
    I just read the article, and it didn't talk about any major architecture changes in the P 4 -- just that Intel was integrating the latest and greatest in shiny new things into the motherboard (i.e. comes with DDR2 instead of DDR, PCI Express instead of PCI, etc.). Are these upgrades actually going to do anything revolutionary to the Pentium chips? Or do we have to wait until the Pentium 5 because all the changes they made are about compatability to the new technologies used?

    • Re:Just looks like a bunch of motherboard changes. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kinema ( 630983 ) on Saturday June 19, 2004 @10:54AM (#9472273)
      If your looking for revolutionary (or at least seriously evolutionary) advancements in chip design and architecture you might want to take a look at some new chips from a smaller company by the name of AMD. AMD's new Opteron and Athlon chips sport their new AMD64 bit instruction set as well as integrated memory controllers, Hypertransport interconnects and a NUMA style architecture.

    • Re:Just looks like a bunch of motherboard changes. (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That is just like saying "Hey, that new MoBo has PCI instead of ISA, WHAT IS THE BIG DEAL?"

      PCIe is the future of PC internal AND external interconnects.
    • We're talking about motherboard chipsets here, not CPUs. While looking at CPU architecture, clock speeds, etc. etc. to get a gist of how a PC will perform, it's still important to remember that speed of a PC is about the sum of its parts.

      So think of these changes as an incremental speed increase across the Intel platform. Sure, they're a heck of a lot more boring than seat-of-pants GHz updates, but I welcome decent integration of a whole new set of bus technologies (SATA and PCI Express) which we've heard
      • PCI is not stuck at a 33MHz bus speed. There is 66MHz PCI (found in the B&W G3 Mac for example) and there is 64 bit PCI, and you can put the two together. There is also hotswap PCI, I don't know if you can do 64 bit 66MHz hotswap PCI or not.

        The reason PCI-Express is going to replace PCI is not that PCI doesn't get faster, but because as it gets faster, it gets more expensive. 66MHz PCI is probably not significantly more expensive to implement, but 64 bit probably is. Have you seen the size of that soc

      • So think of these changes as an incremental speed increase across the Intel platform. Sure, they're a heck of a lot more boring than seat-of-pants GHz updates, but I welcome decent integration of a whole new set of bus technologies (SATA and PCI Express) which we've heard a lot of, but not seen much action on. Remember that PCI has been around for 10 years or so now and is getting a little long in the tooth stuck at a 33MHz bus speed.

        PCI comes in 66MHz and 100MHz varieties, and also at widths of 32-bit

    • Someone in Intel's engineering department needs to research the active heatsink for a chipset.

      Look at the size of that thing.

  • Next CPU revolution (Score:3, Funny)

    by caston ( 711568 ) on Saturday June 19, 2004 @10:48AM (#9472252)
    I think the next revolution in CPUs is going to be based on price. Once the CPU has been designed and the R&D is payed for why not churn out the silicon for mass markets sake.

    In fact I can invisage a day when most motherboards have inbuilt CPUs like they have inbuilt chipsets.

    • you should have a look at via epia motherboards with integrated CPU, NIC, sound, graphics,... in small dimensions (17 x 17 cm), and consuming small amount of power. I think that the next revolution is low consuming and power adaptive CPUs just like transmeta efficeon, those are really cool! I have a laptop with a transmeta 5600: no heat, no nose (no fan inside!) and an incredible autonomy.
  • I am not a fanatic when it comes to processors (i.e. not a die hard fan of AMD) but Intel is a rip off with respect to price compared to AMD.

    Last few computers I bought were AMDs, I was very satisified with the cost and the preformance.

  • Alderwood? (Score:5, Funny)

    by blockhouse ( 42351 ) on Saturday June 19, 2004 @11:16AM (#9472360)
    Alderwood is a wood that, when burned, produces an aromatic smoke typically used for flavoring food. You can buy sacks of the stuff at Home Despot (so called because the manager of my local one is a tyrant) to put on the grill next time you barbecue.

    To me, Alderwood seems an unfortunate name for a chip. I don't think it's a good marketing decision to name a chip for a wood prized for its smoking ability. That seems to evoke images of chips overheating and melting down in a puff of smoke.
    • Yeah, just as "Start Me Up" (with it's attendant lyrics - who can forget 'You'd make a grown man cry') was a great theme song for Windows 95.

      Sometimes marketing gets it right.

    • Intel usually names their projects after locations in the Northwest, typically Oregon.

      A Google search turns up Alderwood State Park [oregonstateparks.org] in Oregon. I'm not sure if there is also a city of Alderwood, but I would not be surprised if there is.

      I think it's more likely named after the location in Oregon.

  • 8 GB bi-directional graphics bus! (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    From the anandtech article [anandtech.com]:

    The feature side of the equation is a lot easier to handle, as Intel has lavished all the features a techie could dream about on the new chipsets. High-Definition audio, Matrix RAID, a new bus with a bright future, and

    an 8GB per second bidirectional graphics slot are a few of those features that come to mind.

    I think this could be very cool for people doing general purpose computations on the GPU [gpgpu.org].
    From A problem with cinematic rendering on a VPU Where do the frames go? [tech-report.com] some ot

  • DDR as fast as DDR2 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Brian Stretch ( 5304 ) * on Saturday June 19, 2004 @11:20AM (#9472372)
    According to at least one tester [theinquirer.net]. The higher latency overwhelms the bandwidth advantage. Given that AMD already had a big latency advantage with their 64-bit chips and the higher cost of DDR2, I don't see the big deal. Pushing DDR2 isn't as bad as pushing RDRAM, but...

    RAID? That's nice, just about every high-end AMD board has a SATA RAID controller from Promise, Silicon Image, etc.

    The audio is kinda neat, if there are Linux drivers. I doubt it's as good as a proper card but you can't argue with the price.

    Anyone who buys Intel's "Extreme" integrated graphics to play current games is in for an extreme disappointment.

    Wireless? (Cough!)... [theinquirer.net]

    On balance, all this hype over a chipset translates into Intel shouting "Pay no attention to our inferior CPUs!"...
  • /obligatory dumb comment

  • What, no bathroom PC? (Score:3, Funny)

    by lsdino ( 24321 ) on Saturday June 19, 2004 @12:11PM (#9472632) Homepage
    A PC in every room [viperlair.com], except the bathroom...

    Maybe Intel is just trying to save some room for growth for after every other room in the house has a PC.

  • Information Nuetral (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Saturday June 19, 2004 @12:16PM (#9472662) Homepage Journal
    I am never one to complain about product announcement posts. I realize that everyone wants to hear about new stuff and just because I am not interested in that new stuff, there are probably many people who are.

    But could we at least make the product announcement more informative and less generic. I mean what use is it to say that Acme Unlimited is going to release Alderiumusian and Saphiriamius later today and all you Anaracrium whatzits are going to get you laughed at on the golf course. So if you want some action, upgrade today.

    We are a tech board. We want to know what the upgrades are. What makes it cool. We are not reading Marie Claire in which the most important thing is that some pop singer has a new fragrance, or Fortune, in which the most important things is that some analyst was bribed to recommend a stock. I mean really, this post used a couple column inches and relayed nearly zero information except for a link.

  • 32bit hype and a fatal flaw for Intel? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by billsf ( 34378 ) <billsfNO@SPAMcuba.calyx.nl> on Saturday June 19, 2004 @12:34PM (#9472761) Homepage Journal
    Its not that Intel will go away anytime soon, but AMD appears to be ahead, certainly with 64bit (amd64) processors and perhaps even with its 32bit offerings. Intel seems to play down the 64-bit processors, perhaps because Microsoft won't have a true 64-bit OS for many years to come.

    In the Unix world, we've had 64-bit OS's for many years running on SPARC, alpha and now amd64. My "64-bit future" started over ten years ago! There is certainly a 32-bit market created largely by M$, but M$ and 32-bit systems are past their prime. If I was Intel, I'd push the 64-bit hardware no matter how loud M$ cries foul.

    It certainly seems, IMO, that AMD sees Unix as the future and produces far more compatible products. The Taiwanese motherbord makers should realise this too and stop fooling themselves. I'd gladly pay double for a mobo with quality features and less non-sence. Asus already seems to be doing this. The new (fairly low-cost 32-bit) A7V600 is a good example. It didn't take long to get all features, and more, useful or otherwise, to work under FreeBSD. (Even works well with 1.5GB RAM @ 400MHz while a maximum of 1GB is supported, presumably for Windows.) The Gigabyte GA7N-400 was an expensive disaster; Windows this and Windows that. I looks like it could work well with Linux, 400MHz RAM and a athlonXP-3200+.

    I use computers for mathematical and logical pursuits. A "power user" in otherwords. I'm not impressed with gaming and 'cheap' polygon rendering. It takes a computing power of a true sort to produce holograms, stronger crypto, and related calculation intensive results. I do use a dual-Xenon, but its been a chore to tame. It was given to me with Win-XP installed! Linux-2.6.x seems very promising and FreeBSD-5.x might even be better? While all this is high-end equipment, its worth noting that Linux on a athlon-1200 is much faster (upto 10x) than Win-XP on the dual-Xenon! If people could only realise what they already have.

    In closing, I don't see allot of merrit in using the latest Intel systems. The amd64 (Opteron/Athlon64-FX) will be the fastest thing on the affordable market for some time to come.
    • Sounds like you need to look at Tyan Opteron motherboard based systems. Or, just get a Newisys based system like a Sun V20z or others like the IBM eServer 325, or various 2nd tier vendors like Pengiun Computing that all offer 1U and 2U rackmount dual Opteron servers that expressly support Linux (and may come with it pre-installed and tested).

      Depending on your algorithm and how much tweaking one can do with it, the Apple Xserve G5 or G5 desktop may also be very compelling from a price/performance standpoint

  • Where does this leave AMD? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tomster ( 5075 ) on Saturday June 19, 2004 @12:37PM (#9472781) Homepage Journal
    It looks like Intel is coming out with some compelling technology that addresses the major weaknesses and limitations of current motherboard and peripheral technologies. AMD has grabbed (and will retain for some time) a lead in pure processor performance, but overall system performance (as perceived by the user) and the overall user experience is built on more than just how fast the CPU is.

    So, my question to those who follow this industry closer than I do is how will AMD position itself for success? Will motherboard manufacturers come out with AMD-compatible boards that sport PCI-Express and the other (non-CPU) new features that are talked about in this article? Or does AMD have another plan?

  • ECC (Score:4, Informative)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Saturday June 19, 2004 @12:43PM (#9472811) Homepage
    The ECC logic is broken [anandtech.com] on the current stepping of the Alderwood chipset.
  • They Sound like the names of multi-million dollar gated communities...

  • PCI Express (Score:4, Informative)

    by Door-opening Fascist ( 534466 ) <skylar@cs.earlham.edu> on Saturday June 19, 2004 @01:18PM (#9472966) Homepage
    PCI Express isn't as big a jump as it sounds like. The new Dell Poweredges have the ServerWorks GE bus architecture, which uses five separate PCI busses of various widths and speeds. This puts very few items on any given PCI bus, and PCI Express is just going to mandate one device on any given connection. I'm sure other manufacturers use similar technology.

  • Only Half The Story (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Saturday June 19, 2004 @02:11PM (#9473270)
    Intel's significant upgrade to the Pentium 4 platform.

    This is only half the story. I feel the change from IA32 to AMD64 instruction sets is equally significant. It's a shame Intel won't just bring out the entire platform at once, since many people buying their 32-bit desktops with these new support chips over the next few months may very well feel their systems were quickly obsoleted when the new instruction set ships.

    And while it's only my opinion (lawyers take note), I feel Microsoft is colluding with Intel by not releasing Windows64 until Intel can be fully caught up with AMD's lead. They had good versions of Win64 running many months before the first Opteron hit the market last September, and it's still not released!

  • Or something akin to that? Granted I only gave the article a quick read through, but it looks like the only real difference is overall base bus speed. 20 year old IBM technology strikes again.
  • Does anyone else think that it's about time for Intel to retire the "Pentium" monicker? I, for one, find that it brings forth connotations of "overly expensive" and "marketing-inflated", and the likely desired effect is lost in today's world where AMD stuff is performance, and Intel is trailing. Granted, Intel has better low-heat and low-power chips, but most folks don't even see that as a potential feature to be considered, let alone a feature.

    On the other hand, Intel has probably spent trillions of dolla

  • What about SATA2 (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kalislashdot ( 229144 )
    I have been holding off on buying a new computer for almost a year now. Waiting for a few key items to fall into place. My current rig is a Athlon 1.4ghz, 512ddr, 40gb c:, 200gb d:, Geforce 4Ti. This has worked well for me for almost 3 years now. I really see no need to upgrade except to run games at higher resolution.

    My wish list is:
    DDR2
    Gigabit Ethernet
    3.0 Ghz Intel (I dig hyper theading)
    SATA2

    SATA2 can do Command Queueing to speed up data retrival. This is a big thing for me as I see this new rig will la

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