Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Intel Hardware

SpeedStep On Your Desktop - Intel's Prescott-2M 151

Posted by timothy from the reality-check dept.
Kez writes "Intel's Prescott core has undergone a few changes, and the latest version - Prescott-2M - includes new features, one of which is Enhanced SpeedStep technology. Given the jokes about the heat that the Prescott gives out, Intel had to act. It was inevitable that a power (and heat) saving technology such as SpeedStep would find its way into desktop PCs. HEXUS.net has an article looking at the new Prescott-2M based Pentium 4 660 and Extreme Edition 3.74Ghz CPUs, examining their new features and performance."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

SpeedStep On Your Desktop - Intel's Prescott-2M More

SpeedStep On Your Desktop - Intel's Prescott-2M

Comments Filter:

  • So, I can (Score:4, Funny)

    by Gr8Apes ( 679165 ) on Monday February 21, 2005 @10:54AM (#11735745)
    only fry one egg at a time whilr doing anything other than staring at the login screen?

  • Dupe (Score:5, Informative)

    by siliconeyes ( 154170 ) on Monday February 21, 2005 @10:54AM (#11735746)
    Slashdot

    Dupes on your desktop [slashdot.org]

    • What's worse, the first-posted article can be seen in "Related Links" on the right. If they only looked at the screen.

      Stupid stoners... Do they actually get paid for randomly clicking buttons in their browsers?

      It's time to get rid of the weakest link and automatically carry Google-News-Science & Tech stories...
    • Hey, it's timothy who posted this. What do you expect? :)
    • And you know what the funniest thing is about this dupe??? The Prophetic AC that posted in the original thread:

      I think you misunderstand the way stories work on Slashdot. The first one is free. Intel has to pay for the duplicate story six hours from now. /comments.pl?sid=140056&cid=11727849

      He was a few hours off, but still... Are slashdot editors posting informative comments as ACs now? And more importantly, why was the story delayed? Didn't Intel pay-up right away, or were the editors just d

  • Natural Gas Prices are Rising (Score:5, Funny)

    by bigtallmofo ( 695287 ) on Monday February 21, 2005 @10:54AM (#11735749)
    I look forward to heating my house with my new Intel processor!

  • It's not inevitable... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 21, 2005 @10:57AM (#11735772)
    ...why should it be? AMD used to have heat issues, and they managed to find a way around them. To me, this almost seems like cheating on Intel's part. And what are they going to use as the excuse to "step down" a processor I paid to have run at a certain speed? With a laptop, they have the "save battery" excuse, which is a valid one (but still over-ridable by the user) - what's the desktop equivalent? The fact that they can't cool their processors is definitely not a good "excuse".

    • uh ? perhaps saving energy [slashdot.org]?
      Let me guess... your SUV always runs at full throttle ?
      • Even when idle, Prescott's static power usage can be as high as 35W... that was for the 1M version though. Since the new one has nearly double as many transistors thanks to the 2MB cache, static power must have increased to over 40W.

        My next desktop PC will probably be a Pentium-M or equivalent unless the desktop variants acquire P4-ish power budgets. I'm glad AMD drew the line at 100W but I would personally prefer rolling back under 40W.

        Of course, with multicore and other extra on-chip hardware, static (a

        • Re:It's not inevitable... (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          90nm AMD64 appears to use under 40W even at 3500+ rating, at full load. This has been confirmed on many sites.
          • Better yet, Athlon64's (with a supporting motherboard) even on the desktop can automatically run slower when there's no load so when you don't *need* the speed, it doesn't *run* at full speed. Hmm, looking on my task bar now my CPU usage bar isn't even visible - boy this /. stuff is hard work for me but my CPU doesn't even seem to notice! :D

            Intel, as has recently become the norm, is just playing catchup with AMD. Nothing new here folks, move along smartly now. :)
    • 1. Intel Speedstep is available in any P4 if not disabled by the motherboard. I have it configured and running on all P4/Linux 2.6 systems I manage so that they can survive fan failures (improves fan life as well). What's news here?

      2. Having good thermals when operating at full throttle is still not an excuse to have bad power management. My house server is an AMD running between 0.01 and 0.05 loadaverage 95%+ of the time. It is it running at under 36C, but I would still prefer it to be able to downclock s

      • Re:It's not inevitable... (Score:5, Informative)

        by hattig ( 47930 ) on Monday February 21, 2005 @11:35AM (#11736058) Journal
        Athlon 64s all have PowerNow technology and have been able to do this from the start to cut power consumption drastically.

        Considering that all the sites are now talking about Intel finally catching up by having a similar feature enabled by default, I'd say that it wasn't available before now.

        Anyway, power consumption tests on these new Intel processors on other reviews (Tech Report [techreport.com]) show that this technology is only useful when you aren't doing any work at all on the processor, when you do stuff, the Intel 6xx processor jumps to 50W-70W higher than an Athlon64 90nm under the same load. So if you are folding or SETIing or whatever, 24 hours a day, and your electricity is 10 cents a unit, you are talking up to $62 more a year in electricity bills.

        If you keep a system for three years, a P4 will cost $180 more to run than an A64, and that is certainly something that should be factored into the purchase price for people who like their systems to keep on doing stuff. If you leave it idle overnight, then the cost difference will be a lot less of course, or if your overnight electricity is a lot cheaper then folding at night only is a good choice.

        • Re:It's not inevitable... (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          The article here http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2353&p=4 shows it to be even worse than at Tech Report. There's nearly a 100W difference under load, and idle is 30W more.

          Also confirms that desktop P4 speedstep is new: "But both the Enhanced Halt State and TM2 were introduced in the 5xxJ CPUs, what's new to the 6xx series is the Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST)"
      • It is? I have a first generation Prescott 2.8E socket 478, and a Gigabyte motherboard. It's been running at 50C lately...how would I go about turning this on?
        • No, not all P4s.

          All P4-Ms have it (but not all Mobile P4s - just the Pentium 4-Ms). P4 600 series chips have it. Non-numbered, 500, and 700 series chips don't have it.
      • I am not being really fair as linux could not clock manage at that time

        With the right motherboard, Linux (or Windows for that matter) doesn't have to do anything. I'm using a MSI Neo motherboard with an Athlon64 in a desktop system. The CPU is throttled based on load automatically on the motherboard silicon. The OS doesn't even need to know.

    • actually, that's a very good question and a class action lawsuit waiting to happen ... gotta get me one hehehehehe
    • Nonsense, if you're not using the processor you don't want or need it running at full whack. The AMD winchester cores show the benefit of this - 3W at idle, think of the planet, or your electricity bill (compared to Athlon's at 34W idle..).

      Still not good enough, ok, what about silent cooling - my PC starts to get noisy when it cranks up, if it didn't require so much cooling it could stay a lot quieter for a lot longer.

      That's still not a good enough reason for you I guess, but if you owned a datacentre, wi
    • HMM...let's think...maybe that you aren't using all of your CPU all of the time. If you do clock scaling right it doesn't affect performance at all. This is the same as saying you should run your car at whatever RPM it gets max horsepower at because "that's what you paid for." And the excuse...let's think...power? My P4 systems used to throw breakers in my house. I had to WIRE UP A WHOLE CIRCUIT for each 2 of 8 computers in my house to prevent breaker trips/fires/etc. So yeah I'd say this is a good id
    • Regardless of the heat issue, I think speedstep technology in the desktop is a good idea. Why should my computer consume the same amount of power when I am only using 10% of the processor? Why does it need to be on full power when my screen saver is going? From an energy standpoint I am interested in this technology.

    • With a laptop, they have the "save battery" excuse, which is a valid one (but still over-ridable by the user) - what's the desktop equivalent?

      I live in India and power cuts are a daily problem where I live in (southern) India. Therefore, a good lot of us people here are forced to keep battery powered backup power sources so that our computers don't just go off when the power goes off. I wouldn't mind if I could run my computer a bit longer on batteries by scaling down my CPU frequency when I don't need s

  • My Yet-to-be-never-sent letter to Intel (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Monday February 21, 2005 @10:57AM (#11735777) Homepage Journal
    Dear Intel,

    Thanks for taking such a GREAT APPROACH to your heat problems. I can't WAIT to use one of these new processors in my desktop, only to watch my whole computer DROP IN SPEED as I am an hour into Doom 3. I don't know that I can speak for everyone, but the whole design efficiency thing is overrated anyway. I simply can't live without the noise of a jet engine in my case. Keep cranking up those Mhz and I will continue to have my cpu throttled everytime I do something useful.

    You're the best,
    Sarcastic Consumer
    • it's also a function of the duopoly with M$ to thrash our systems ... a properly functional OS wouldn't abuse a systems resources thusly, and would actually be capable of taking a load that you the user throw at it, instead of buckling and demanding your 30 pieces of silver to upgrade to the latest CPU/OS combo ...
    • While I recognize the tone of your comment was meant to be funny, I don't understand the many comments that seem to suggest this type of power management will cause a drop in performance. From my understanding, Intel's Pentium M processor has been using this technology for some time and often performs better than a similarly clocked Pentium 4. Most people simply don't use the full capabilities of their processor most of the time. An architecture that takes advantage of this in order to comsume less energ
      • SpeedStep clocks DOWN your CPU (half speed) when it detects that it is too hot. The issue here isn't standard performance.

        • Re:My Yet-to-be-never-sent letter to Intel (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          No, that is what Thermal Throttling does. On the new processors it drops the processor down to 2.8GHz, not half speed, so it is a little better in that regard if the cooling solution used isn't adequate.

          SpeedStep has always been Intel's answer to AMD's better on paper PowerNow! system, known as Cool'n'Quiet on the desktop. AMD's Cool'n'Quiet clocks down to 1GHz, whereas Intel's merely clocks down to 2.8GHz again, so whether the savings are the same or not is questionable.

      • I have a Pentium-M laptop and I will explain how SpeedStep works in practice.

        SpeedStep itself allows the CPU to change frequency (and voltage along with it) to save power. For example, my 1.7 GHz Pentium-M can run at 600, 800, 1000, 1200, 1400, 1500, or 1700 MHz. This is usually controlled by turning up the speed when the CPU usage is high and turning it down when the usage is low. Thus, if you are playing Doom, it will run as fast as it needs to to keep up. These "performance" states are described as "P-states" in the ACPI spec (they run from P0 [full speed] to P7 [slowest speed] on my computer)

        There is a second, older type of throttling. that is just called throttling, and described as "T-states" in the ACPI spec. On older Pentium III's, there are two states, T0 (on all the time) and T1 (off half the time). On my Pentium-M, it goes from T0 (on all the time) to T7 (on 1/8 of the time) in 1/8 time increments. This throttling is much less efficient (it has to start and stop the CPU constantly, and still runs the clock at 1.7 GHz when it's on) but is used for a different purpose, as you will see.

        ACPI "thermal zones" are objects that consist of a temperature, and "trip points" (temperatures) that trigger "active" and "passive" cooling. Active cooling is set at a lower temperature, and is linked to a fan object that the OS should turn on. Passive cooling is set at a higher temperature, and is linked to the processor object. When the temperature passes the "passive" threshold, the CPU is throttled using T-states.

        I actually have a bunch of data about CPU speed (P-state) and throttling (T-state) versus temperature and power usage, and I can tell you that both types of throttling save battery power and run cooler. However, P-states are much more efficient. If you take a 1.7 GHz processor and run it at P0 and T7 (1.7 GHz on 1/8 of the time = about 215 MHz) it runs almost 20 degrees hotter and uses up about 5 Watts (the lowest usage I recorded was about 12.5 Watts, so that's a large fraction) more than running at P7 and T0 (600 MHz on all the time). It's also 1/3 the speed. So basically, P-states are much more efficient, but T-states are what is tied to cooling, probably because they existed first.

        The unfortunate problem here is that P-states are much more efficient, but traditionally P-states are tied to usage and T-states are tied to temperature. It is often suggested to use T-states once you are in the bottom P-state (i.e. go 1700*8/8, 1500*8/8, ... 800*8/8, 600*8/8, 600*7/8 ... 600*2/8, 600*1/8) but frankly that doesn't save much power, and does hurt the responsiveness of the computer. (It needs a certain minimum speed to be able to speed itself back up in time to not look laggy...)

        The best thing to do if your processor thermal-throttles itself is to 1. cool it better (perhaps attach an air conditioner to the side of the case?), 2. turn down the speed--voluntary throttling may sound like a waste, but it keeps the temp down better than letting the OS throttle it, and it gives better performance, or 3. get a Pentium-M.

        I haven't actually been able to compare my Pentium-M to a Pentium 4, since I avoid those like the plague (1.5 hours battery life? how about 5?), but I can say that subjectively, it's quite snappy (thanks to 2 MB L2 cache and Linux's good disk caching) and doesn't show its slower clock except in raw processing work. (If anyone wants me to time a kernel build, email me and I'll do it, you pick the version and .config...)

        • How EIST REALLY works (P-M OCers have found this out):

          EIST is simply on the fly multiplier and voltage adjustment. Voltage adjustment requires mobo support, but multi adjustment is via an MSR register, and doesn't need mobo support.

          The P-M (well, 400MHz ones, anyway) has unlocked multipliers between 6x and (processor speed divided by 100 - a 2000MHz chip will have up to 20x multiplers). While your description of SpeedStep is accurate, it works by adjusting the multiplier. The multiplier CAN be adjusted in
        • or 3. get a Pentium-M.

          or an Athlon64. :)

          [ducks and runs for cover]

          • ...or an Athlon64, yeah... how cool do those run anyway?

            I know they also have Athlon64-M processors... are those any good?

            • how cool do those run anyway?

              Somebody elsewhere posted a link to a comparison showing Athlon64's temperatures were somewhat lower or comparable, but for desktop systems, once you get a system that automatically adjusts its CPU speed based on load, the "average" temperature becomes meaningless, and concerns over overheating virtually disappear, because the processor spends a large amount of time throttled down anyway. It'll run full tilt for only as long as you play that 3D intensive game, or for as long

      • Pentium-M performance relative to Pentium-4 has nothing to do with power-saving features. It has everything to do with the modified P6 core (same core the Pentium-3 uses), better branch prediction, and much higher instructions-per-clock. These all tie together to let the Pentium-M do more work in fewer cycles than the Pentium-4, which leads to better performance at slower speeds.

  • Work with current Motherboards? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    These look like some nice enhancements to the current Prescott core, especially the 64-bit part. My question is whether or not these will work with current motherboards, such as my Abit AG8 with a 915P chipset. If so, that would offer a nice upgrade path.

  • Awesome! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tibor the Hun ( 143056 ) on Monday February 21, 2005 @10:59AM (#11735789)
    Now my CPU can slow down if I'm working it too hard.
    This has got to be the best idea since hoola-hoops!

  • Perfect for cooking rice... (Score:5, Funny)

    by dnaboy ( 569188 ) on Monday February 21, 2005 @11:00AM (#11735802)
    Run some serious number crunching to get a good rolling boil, then drop the cycle speed for that perfect simmering temperature.

    No more mucking around trying to get that gas stove to just the right temperature!

    • Hey you just summarized the article and all of Intel's mission statement in 2 sentences. Not bad at all.

    • Hey, we've got a great OSS mod project idea. We have one that you can operate a coffee maker, a blender, a beer machine -- now we can have the Stove project. It can use abusive math calculations to heat the chip up and lesser calculations to cool it down. You just take off the heatsink and replace it with a hot pad. A college students dream; cook dinner with out having to leave the computer or go down to the cafeteria.

  • If I want a slower processor, I'll just (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    not bother to upgrade.

    I mean the whole idea of a faster CPU is to get more work done. So, why buy one and then let it idle most of the time?
    • I get your point. However, if I'm just putzing around on Slashdot, do I REALLY need a 3.6GHz monster? I can get away with a 300MHz Celeron if that's all I'm doing at the moment, so why not clock my 3.6GHz chip down to save power?

      Disclaimer: I would NEVER buy one of these chips. EVER. A64 or P-M for me, thanks.

  • Parallel (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Docrates ( 148350 ) on Monday February 21, 2005 @11:04AM (#11735830) Homepage
    Hey, if our brains do a nice enough job using lots of parallel instruction "dumb" processors, why are we so obssessed with ultra fast only-a-few-instructions-at-a-time single processors? I think the whole approach of the cell architechture is the right way to move forward.

    Please spare me the "the brain can't multiply 100000*1234555 fast enough" argument. We can have the best of both worlds: complex single "cells" (unlike brain cells) repeated many many times for parallelism.

    • Re:Parallel (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Yartrebo ( 690383 )
      Why does one company make a big press release (any maybe a few patent applications) and now it's called 'cell technology'. Call it node technology if you want that terminology. At least that isn't trademarked.

      It's just parallel processing with a few minor twists. Consoles since the day of the NES and SNES have worked similarly, though without quite as many chips.

      Call it by what it is: parallel processing.
    • spare me the "the brain can't multiply 100000*1234555 fast enough" argument

      well pardon me sir but your argument is less than valid.

    • Re:Parallel (Score:2, Informative)

      by TerranFury ( 726743 )
      Simple: Most algorithms are not easily split into independant parallel threads. If they could be, then previous (smaller) attempts to integrate vector processing (like MMX and SSE) would have had larger impacts than they did. Plus, many of the obvious vector operations have in fact been offloaded - to the GPU.

    • Re:Parallel (Score:3, Informative)

      by RollingThunder ( 88952 )
      Simply put, it's because effective parallel code isn't simple to produce.
    • This is an old, deep problem in computation. Just because our brains are so good at what they can do, doesn't mean we understand them well enough to go and implement it in hardware. The entire field of computational neuroscience exists just to figure out how a bunch of slow, noisy, messy computational units like neurons represent meaningful information. It's not fully understood. Rate codes, population codes, temporal codes, frequency codes (aka oscillatory synchrony)--there is a rich and ongoing debate o
    • The Cell is not a magic talisman to make all your computing woes go away. It's designed to be very good at some jobs, and okay-ish at other jobs.

      It'll play games better than anything else, and you can bet that Pixar will be buying them, but for stuff like dynamic web content or compiling it'll be slower than other CPUs we use today. Indeed, it'll be worse at most of the jobs that desktop computers do today, and it'll be harder to program for.

    • >> Hey, if our brains do a nice enough job using lots of parallel instruction "dumb" processors, why are we so obssessed with ultra fast only-a-few-instructions-at-a-time single processors?

      Because it's extremely difficult to do parallel programming.

      The entire world has been trained to think about programming in a linear single thread way. This will change because hardware people can no longer make single threads faster w/o sacrificing tremendous amounts of power. Programming just became that much

  • another article (Score:5, Informative)

    by bersl2 ( 689221 ) on Monday February 21, 2005 @11:04AM (#11735831) Journal
    Anandtech has another article [anandtech.com] up, but it emphasizes the increase in L2 cache and the effect this has on performance.

  • SUX-2000 (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 21, 2005 @11:06AM (#11735845)
    Intel was wise in renaming the throttleable version.
    The original P4 is the SUV of CPU's.

    • Re:SUX-2000 (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Shut up hippy!!! If we wanted your opinion about how to run the world we'd ask for it, but look around... no one's askin' stupid bitch!!!

      I work for a Fortune 500 company writing a databse product and the one thing I require is a lot of CPU power for what I do. When it comes to making money, the rest of the world can rot for all I care because I've got a job to do: namely get myself filthy rich. When some bleeding heart whiny pinko commies come into the IT sector, all they want to do is turn our powerhou

  • Might I recommend SpeedswitchXP (Score:5, Informative)

    by Stonent1 ( 594886 ) <stonentNO@SPAMstonent.pointclark.net> on Monday February 21, 2005 @11:10AM (#11735869) Journal
    This is a free program that lets you control speedstep in XP (something you could do with windows 2000). I have my laptop set for full performance when on AC and Max Battery when unplugged.

  • A Much Better Article Here... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Hack Jandy ( 781503 ) on Monday February 21, 2005 @11:17AM (#11735938) Homepage
    Can I interest you in an article from someone who knows WTF they are talking about?

    AnandTech [anandtech.com]

    I don't know what the Hexus kid was on - but I feel safe trusting my reviews to people who have trouble writing big words!

    From Page 2 [hexus.net]: Being LGA775 CPUs, the new processors all look the same. Being press samples that I get the privilege of testing, they're also unmarked with any meaningful information bar the slightly exciting Intel Confidential. So I draw on them. Not quite the Mona Lisa in miniature, mind you, rather an idea of what it is. Any retail example you purchase will be umblemished with my scriblings.
    • I'd guess that its mostly a problem with the English language, rather than technology knowledge. Here's another better written article http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050220-4632 .html [arstechnica.com]
    • this isn't a derect reply, but it kindof is... I have had a few intel-run laptops over the years... I was completely leary of the "speed-step" from the get go, but consider it this way: if your computer can get opperation X done in Y amount of time while consuming Z amount of power (where Y is measured in milliseconds) is it worth upping Z by an order of magnitude to increase Y? the point is that, for the most part, stepping down won't even be noticable. If you think otherwise you should consider how much y
  • See this [slashdot.org] posting.

  • Tech progress through geek humor (Score:4, Funny)

    by xtermin8 ( 719661 ) on Monday February 21, 2005 @11:25AM (#11735986)
    "Given the jokes about the heat that the Prescott gives out, Intel had to act" Geek Jokes are such an important driving factor in improving technology- jokes and Slashdot posts, of course! ;-l
    • Yes, and it's also a well known fact that the Prescott was originally developed as a response to the old Slashdot "hot grits"-troll. Even the name Prescott is a rot-random-number obfuscation of the name Portman -- complete with speling error (the extra t at the end) to satisfy the most demanding troll.

      Oh, imagine a beow%&"$%ü@ [no carrier]
  • Is it anything like AMD's Cool N' Quiet? Which is great. My Athlon 64 3400+ Clawhammer is currently.. 95~ degreesat 1.0ghz and when I launch a game or something that needs the speed, it clocks back up to 2.2ghz.
  • It's just unfortunate that while the advantage of having a stepping processor on the desktop will cut down on the heat in my building's rooms, it will also cut down on the processing power at the same time.

    Honestly, most people won't ever notice the difference since what they'll use it for is word processing and spreadsheets. They don't need the gawdoffal (tm) power these computers have now. In fact, the only thing driving the continual 3-4 year upgrade cycle is poorly written code and programs so huge
  • Who's worried about their CPU heat at idle or whilst word processing? It's the heavy processing that needs full porcessing power that manefests heat problems.
  • Imagine if every PC currently in use had such a CPU, that could reduce clock speed (and thus power consumption) when load was low. The power savings globally would have to be massive (assuming everyone wasn't running SETI@home).

    Dan East

  • ok... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by JeremyALogan ( 622913 )
    I have to admit that I am kindof torn about this. I have an older Athlon chip that use to get QUITE hot (more recent heatsinks solved this). However, one of the things I use to prefer about Intel chips is that they'd stop working before they'd fry themselves. This may not seem important, but it is to me... I had an Athlon 1800XP that burnt out itself and the motherboard within 2 seconds of startup because the heatsink/fan were underrated for the job (despite it's claims to the contrary). Now I'm a little mo
    • What you described is exactly why AMD moved to specifying wattages for entire families of processors (e.g., the 89W rating for the 130nm Athlon 64s). It meant you couldn't get a heatsink for such a system that wouldn't work on all processors.

      What happened to you sounds like a poor thermal interface though, even a naff heatsink would have absorbed enough heat for the processor to run for a while if it had been properly applied. Enough time for the motherboard to do the "omg processor is too hot" warning ala
    • there is no way a proc and board fried "in 2 seconds" b/c the sink was underrated for it. Its because you didnt install it properly and it wasnt making contact.
    • IIRC, they won't throttle automatically. I think they just shut off. But that's enough to prevent damage.

  • 2nd Opinion (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Another Intel 600 series Pentium 4 review [hardwareanalysis.com] from Hardware Analysis [hardwareanalysis.com].

  • bugger them ! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Alberic ( 777137 )
    Soon to be released by the Geek Buggers Consortium:
    A deamon that automagically sends support@intel.com a standard mail when CPU is 100% at low speed.
    This mail looks as follows:

    "Dear support team,
    If you received this mail, it's because of a malfuction in your Prescott CPU #22354432, which reached a idle state of 0% during 68 ms while still being in low frequency mode. It had a temperature of 56C

    feel free to ignore this mail as you ignored the 122563 previously sent by this deamon, and just as you ignor

  • AMD's version called PowerNow is similar to Speedstep but I hate it. My laptop (Compaq R3000) There is no supported AMD app that allows me to set the CPU (AMD Athlon XP 2800+) to full. It always stays at 700MHz even if I try to crank it up. I have it dual booting XP and Gentoo. Even doing an emerge world doesn't see it go up. Doing a google on it seems to show others are having the same problem with the AMD64s as well.

    The only way I was able to adjust it was a third party tool that adjusted the clock multi
    • You know you have to use the matching kernel module to get cpufreq to work with your processor?

      I use it for approximately 2 years now on an AMD CPU laptop (Athlon XP 1600+) and I don't believe your newer CPU isn't supported while mine has all the features you claim yours hasn't.
    • Somewhat ironically, I have the opposite problem.

      This laptop, due to it being one of the worst heat laptops known to man, needs to be locked to the slowest speed for me to have a chance of using it without it overheating and shutting down just browsing the web. (No exaggeration; I've watched it overhead and shut down in Windows just idling.) Fortunately in Linux I can do this. (I've finally figured out how to mostly manage this thing, and running Linux only is a big part of it.)

      In Windows, I can't, and as
      • To lock down (or increase) the cpu frequency in XP, I got clockgen at cpuid.com. You can adjust the voltage and frequency in there plus you can create shortcuts using command line options that will change accordingly.
        I go into cpu0 and the folder is empty. I suspect I have something wrong in the kernel but I have enabled Athlon/Duron powernow as well as cpufreq in the kernel and nothing seems to be working.

        However I suspect that since the laptop chipset is NForce3 I may want to do the AMD Athlon64 Powernow
        • Regretably, as my machine is a Duron, I doubt I can go much further to help. I don't have one of the Athlon 64 machines, I merely lust for them.

          I would just suggest slapping every PowerNow option to "Yes" in the kernel and double-checking that you are rebooting to the correct one (no offense intended, I screw this up all the time). If that doesn't work, I'm out of ideas, as that Worked For Me.

          Although, come to think of it, you might also try a kernel version or two back; compiling a kernel on your XP-M 2.
  • there's nothing new about Jokes on Intel's power consumption. I remember back in 1994, a cartoon on PCMagazine, which portraited a chef. The title: "Cooking with the 586".

    I still wonder why it took Intel 10 years to realize there was a problem.

  • IBM water cooled 'mainframes' make a comeback (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gelfling ( 6534 ) on Monday February 21, 2005 @12:25PM (#11736520) Homepage Journal
    Remember in the early 90's when many of you were still in grade school and the TCM based mainframes with their 400psi water chiller pumps were beginning to make way for the CMOS era? And we heard that a 10 CMOS CEC could easily replace a 2-3 TCM CEC because even though each one was rather slow and low powered they could gang them together and heat would not be a problem? We all chucked our TCM mainframes, got rid of all the chiller machinery with hacksaws and went on our merry ways.

    Well it looks like the prognostication for a Brave New World was a little premature. It looks like we'll start to see the return of complex and expensive water chillers yet. Not the homemade black tee shirt and Krispy Kreme version but real, large, complicated chiller pipes that are built right into the CPU chip.
  • From TFA: ... that rides the same 266MHz bus (1066MHz affective)...

    Sounds like a lot of affective vibrations while riding.

    CC.
  • How about reducing the frikkin' power dissipation? Not to Pentium-M levels, but to Athlon 64 levels at least. People used to joke about Athlons, and now look at them, AMD fixed the issues without running them at 300MHz (that's the speed of Pentium-M processor in my notebook as I write this).
  • Intel has apparently not posted SPEC numbers for these processors, and in fact seems to avoid publishing official SPEC numbers for non-Xeon processors. By contrast, AMD does post SPEC numbers for the FX-55, and the Opteron 252 results were available the day the chip was announced. The comparison between the latest Opterons and Xeons is none too flattering for Xeon although the 2MB cache should help the SPEC FP numbers quite a bit. The problem for Intel is that P4 still consumes gobs of power and produces a

  • From reading the articles mentioned by previous posters it seems pretty clear that the best desktop cpu's are the AMD64 90nm CPU's. Assuming you care about power/noise/heat, this is.

    The articles I'm referring to are:

    From AnandTech
    http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/sh owdoc.aspx? i=2353&p=4

    From the Tech Report
    http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2005q1/p entium4- 600/index.x?pg=16

  • 600 more effecient even without SpeedStep (Score:3, Informative)

    by edxwelch ( 600979 ) on Monday February 21, 2005 @02:59PM (#11737848)
    Actually what's more interesting than the SpeedStep thing, is the fact that the 600 series uses 25W less power than the 500 series on full load [techreport.com]( that's something when you consider that there is 1M more memory on the new chip).
    Up til now Intel's 90nm process was a huge failure because of the heating problems and forced Intel to abandon their plans to hike speeds above 3.8GHz
  • I bet these processors will be used in the Media Center PC's where noise and heat are a big issue, and performance is not. Nobody wants a constant hum coming from their av rack.
  • Do any current, on sale Intel Motherboards support this chip?
  • Is there any way to throttle down a P4 without speedstep? I've got a 3.2ghz P4 which requires a screaming fan to keep cool despite the processor claiming it is using 1% capacity. If I'm just browsing the web is there any program out there that can slow down a regular P4 chip?

Slashdot Top Deals

Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated. -- R. Drabek

Close