P4 3.2GHz Reviews

Nathan writes "The Intel 3.2GHz Pentium4 has passed its NDA with reviews coming out over the net, including this one at MBReview, This one at HardAvenue, This one at TweakTown and this review at HotHW." Yay. Benchmarks. Wowee-zowee.

Mock!

[Anonymous Coward]

"I also reserve the right to mock you for paying $300 for an extra 200MHz." -- Scott Wasson, TechReport.

Re:Mock!

[Surak]

Of course there are those that will, and they do not necessarily deserve to be mocked. Certain applications still require a lot of horsepower, and some people can use all they can get.

Of course, this is becoming rarer and rarer, but it still exists.

Re:Mock!

[mattdm]

These days, those people are probably buying multiple systems in a cluster, in which case it makes sense to save $200/node and buy a lot more nodes.

There's still some problems which can't be easily split that way -- but then, people who have those probably aren't crunching them on PC hardware.

Re:Mock!

[Surak]

Not every CPU intensive application can be done on a cluster. It depends on if the work can be distributed or not. Not every problem can be broken down into discrete little chunks that can be done on separate nodes in a cluster. It doesn't always work out that way.

Re:Mock!

[djocyko]

That's funny, because just this morning, I got an extra 300Mhz for free (I turned my clock up from 100 to 133Mhz...)

And, no, that's not called overclocking. It's called not underclocking ;-)

(Interesting thing: my old harddrive would not be recognized with the clock up at full speed. Well, that one crashed - yay IBM! - and with the new one, I just remembered I could get an extra 300Mhz this morning =)

Re:Mock!

[Cereal Box]

If the multiplier is ~10x you'd go from 1GHz to 1.33GHz with a 33MHz bus increase.

Purchasing Cycles

[Detritus]

There are many organizations that do not have a budget or process for replacing obsolete/outdated equipment. Like rain in the desert, money for new equipment comes in infrequent deluges. When money is available, you buy the top-of-the-line computer. You may be using it for the next ten years.

Re:Purchasing Cycles

[fruey]

When money is available, you buy the top-of-the-line computer. You may be using it for the next ten years.

That is short sighted. Paying an extra $300 just for a little more speed, in the long run, just means that the budget to upgrade is higher than it could have been, so it will happen more infrequently, without other external economic influences of course.

Re:Purchasing Cycles

[the gnat]

when money is available, you buy the top-of-the-line computer. You may be using it for the next ten years.

This is the rationale I hear for buying expensive hardware from Sun or SGI (and I agree, for the most part). I've never heard it used to justify buying Intel's latest offering - PCs are retired quicker than any other platform. If you really need to make a crappy PC workstation last for ten years, you're better off buying a cheaper box, like a 2.4Ghz P4 (which isn't slow by any means), and use all the money you save to purchase spare boxes or parts. You'll definitely need them if you want to keep the system going for ten years.

I know from experience that there are few things more annoying than trying to squeeze the last bit of life out of PCs that have been obsolete and off warranty for two years. . . sometimes, when the moon is out, I can still hear those IBM Pentium 90s calling my name.

Re:Purchasing Cycles

[op00to]

Normally, budgets are for very specific things -- money for complete systems can not be used to buy spare parts. Unless you're going to buy extra computers (and want to waste the time explaining why), it's better to just spend all the money you get on the best crap you can get.

Re:Mock!

[akruppa]

"I also reserve the right to mock you for paying $300 for an extra 200MHz." -- Scott Wasson, TechReport.

This remark is a little ignorant. If cpu time is the only resource your application needs, and it happens to be parallelizable, then you buy whatever gives you the most cpu throughput per buck.

If your application needs other resources as well, such as lots of memory and disk space, then the cpu cost accounts only for a small part of the total processing cost, but may still be the bottleneck for the j

Re:isn't it more than that,

[damiam]

The 3Ghz version has that too, I believe.

Stuff that matters.

[DeadScreenSky]

Yay. Benchmarks. Wowee-zowee.

If it isn't important, if it doesn't matter, then don't post it.

Re:Stuff that matters.

[sczimme]

If it isn't important [to you], if it doesn't matter [to you], then don't read it.

See? Easy-peasy.

Re:Stuff that matters.

[DeadScreenSky]

I agree, and in fact I have no interest in the latest Intel processor (had some bad experiences with Intel in the past). But I was referring to the editor's little aside. If he didn't find it important, he shouldn't have posted it!

Re:Stuff that matters.

[sczimme]

Fair enough. However, I believe the aside was directed toward the general [lack of] value of benchmarks, and not really at the article itself. Benchmarks are usually awful gauges of real-world performance, so I can see his point. OTOH, they can give fanboys additional bragging room because their processors are .06% faster than their friends' processors. :-)

And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

$760 for it... A bit much for that "little extra," isn't it? You could build a fairly powerful AMD (or even Celeron) machine with that money... twice.

Re:And yet...

[Angry White Guy]

Hell, I'm not going to pay the extra money, but someone will. Let the CAD shops and rich kids pay for the R&D costs on this chip, and maybe I'll buy it when it's down to it's actual price.

*doesn't click link*

[Alpha_Nerd]

Let me guess... It's a few percent faster than the 3.0ghz, and costs more.

Do I win a prize??

Re:*doesn't click link*

[Junks Jerzey]

Let me guess... It's a few percent faster than the 3.0ghz, and costs more.

You forgot: Uses more power, generates more heat.

Who is Intel trying to impress?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Intel trying to get laid by the best of the PC market by showing how fast it can swing by?

What happened to the days when CPU's would take their time, and get the jobs done the right way.

It's not like it can make your PC scream any faster or louder, or can it?

Meh

[ickoonite]

Whilst I would extend my sincerest thanks to dear Intel for yet more predictable inching up of the top speed for x86, I would like to point out that a far more interesting processor revolution is to take place today at 17:00 UTC, in the form of the PowerPC 970.

64bit for the consumer and the world's most beautiful OS or a meagre increase for a 32bit chip with Microsoft Windows. I know what I'll pick...

iqu

Re:Meh

[MuckSavage]

You wouldn't think they'd just let apple go and introduce something that might possible kick their ass, without trying to steal some thunder, do you? ;)

Re:Meh

[IamTheRealMike]

64bit vs 32bit isn't really relevant for "consumers" (i wish there was another word for that). Very little really benefits from 64bit at the moment.

Still, that's not to say you can't do interesting things with it. Imagine an OS in which every object is conceivable mapped into the address space at once, with the hard disk simply backing it mmap style. It'd require a totally new OS design to make it work, but I think you could do some cool stuff with such a beast. No more file IO!

Re:Meh

[Photon Ghoul]

"consumers" (i wish there was another word for that)

"people"

Re:Meh

[Surlyboi]

Then, shouldn't you amend your .sig to "Guns don't
kill consumers, consumers kill consumers"?

Re:Meh

[IamTheRealMike]

I prefer "the public", but yeah, in future I'll try harder to avoid the word consumer.

Re:Meh

[IamTheRealMike]

64 bit has very little to do with speed, it's mostly related to how much memory is addressable by the CPU. In a 32bit machine, the maximum address space is 4gig, which is a bit limiting for some things (bear in mind that's not necessarily physical ram, but RAM+Swap+mmapped files etc).

The potential for huge performance increases in games (I'm thinking Doom III of course) is massive.

How does that work? Doom III is not 64bit software, so would have to be run in 32bit mode anyway.

Re:Meh

[ickoonite]

Doom III isn't actually out yet, so let's give it time shall we? When its in the shops and there is no 64bit version available, then you can make the above claim.

As regards the 32bit vs 64bit issue, I think you only need to look at some of the performance figures to see that the PPC chips give some serious competition to Intel. 64bit chips process twice as much information as 32bit chips - this is more than just a memory-addressing thing.

As you will see, clock-for-clock, they can blow x86 out of the wat

Re:Meh

[IamTheRealMike]

Why would iD make Doom III 64 bit? They have nothing to gain from it whatsoever. There are virtually no 64 bit machines out there today, and even if there were there would not be any real performance improvement to do so. Not to mention that they'd have to audit the code for 64 bit cleanness, which is a PITA.

As regards the 32bit vs 64bit issue, I think you only need to look at some of the performance figures to see that the PPC chips give some serious competition to Intel.

This is entirely offtopic, bu

Re:Meh

[IamTheRealMike]

There are limits, even for Doom III. I'd bet a couple of beers that it won't be realistically able to use more than 4gig of RAM.

Someone somewhere else on this thread sarcastically suggested that I was simply assuming 64bit to be twice the speed of 32bit.

Well, at one point you said "64 bit processors can process twice as much data as 32 bit processors", or words to that affect. Which is a pretty meaningless statement without a time reference.

However, 64bit quite clearly is the future, and whether x86 or PPC is your architecture, it's where we're going.

Sure. Eventually. In much the same way that ipv6 is the future.

surely the ability to fetch 64bits of data at a time rather than just 32bits is going to speed things up?

I'm pretty sure that the rate CPUs read from memory is actually limited by things like memory bandwidth and speed. I think most CPUs already fetch memory speculatively in chunks of 128bits or more, so I doubt that'd make much difference.

You also have to remember that the size of the pointer type doubles. That can actually decrease efficiency - as pointed out in the article linked to in a sibling post, a lot of computation involves linked list traversal. The increased pointer size would cause greater amounts of data to need to be processed.

It is quite clear from your posting history that you do not like Macs

Well this is the interesting thing. I don't have much against Macs themselves, other than a general dislike of proprietary platforms (but the same is true of Windows or Solaris for instance). It's more the attitude of some (unfortunately the most vocal) Mac users that annoys me. A lot of, well, to be frank inaccurate things are said about Apple and their products, and it's a big turnoff.

It's especially annoying when people work themselves into a frenzy then treat a corporation and its product almost like a religion. So that's where a lot of my "anti-Mac" viewpoint comes from, not in fact the technology or even the company themselves (though apple have done their fair share of shady things) - just the blind loyalty of its users.

Re:Meh

[Waffle Iron]

64bit chips process twice as much information as 32bit chips - this is more than just a memory-addressing thing.

Other than high-resolution timestamps, nobody uses 64-bit integers for anything. In the real world, 64-bit quantities are used for floating point numbers and address pointers. The X86 architecture has had 80-bit floating point for 20 years now. In fact, it has had 128-bit wide multimedia processing logic for the last 7 years.

64 bits is just a memory addressing thing. However, unless the worki

Re:Meh

[hbackert]

x86ers would like it very much if 64bit wasn't relevant for the consumer, because they're not going to get it for a little while yet, but in truth, it really is huge. The potential for huge performance increases in games (I'm thinking Doom III of course) is massive.

Care to elaborate why Doom III or actually any current non-server-programs will benefit from 64bit?

I've seen simulations of molecules which can suck up all the memory you throw at them (and all the CPU time). You can use lots of memory when d

Re:Meh

[Andy_R]

However, the current rumour is that Apple's new high end machine will have dual 970s.

Yes, FASTER?

Re:Meh

[IamTheRealMike]

"Muggles" is too innocent really. I like it all the same. Must buy the book soon!

Re:Meh

[AKnightCowboy]

64bit for the consumer and the world's most beautiful OS or a meagre increase for a 32bit chip with Microsoft Windows. I know what I'll pick...

And the other 95% of computer users will pick the cheaper 32-bit Intel chip running Windows. What's your point? You're willing to pay an enormous premium for very little gain? The average consumer isn't going to see a difference between a 32-bit CPU and a 64-bit CPU other than one is going to be more expensive and perhaps run a bit faster. In 6 months the 32-b

Re:Meh

[ickoonite]

Now this is really pure FUD, I'm afraid, but it does make me laugh.

Yeah, it's true that the masses will probably stick to what is cheaper. It's what they're always gonna do, and that's fine, because most people just want Office and maybe the occasional game. Apple will never really penetrate that market.

But this is Slashdot. We demand more from our machines here. We want high speed UNIX boxen and game stations that we can frag at 150 fps on, and if we're lucky, both at the same time.

The bit about binary compatibility shows that you know nothing about Macs. The PPC 970 _is_ backwards compatible with all the old software - everything will run! And the best thing is, as has always been the case with Macs, backwards compatibility is unrivalled. Macs of today still feature Motorola 68k emulation so that they can run software written for those chips, for OS 9 and for OS X.

Windows XP (the equivalent of OS X in terms of consumer accessibility and reliability), on the other hand, has terrible backwards compatibility, and I find that many, many, many old DOS or even Windows programs will not run...

I rest my case.

iqu

Re:Meh

[kinnell]

most people just want Office and maybe the occasional game. Apple will never really penetrate that market

I thought Office and the occaisional game were available for OSX.

Re:Meh

[IamTheRealMike]

Macs of today still feature Motorola 68k emulation so that they can run software written for those chips, for OS 9 and for OS X...... Windows XP (the equivalent of OS X in terms of consumer accessibility and reliability), on the other hand, has terrible backwards compatibility

Well, iirc Classic mode is basically running the complete OS 9 in a VM. But by this logic, Windows is perfectly backwards compatable because you can run any previous version inside VMware.

So, to measure how backwards compatable an OS is, running complete old versions inside a VM is to me cheating. You should test how well old apps run in the same environment as modern apps. By this measure, Windows scores pretty well.

Re:Meh

[ickoonite]

To be fair, I don't know the precise details of Classic mode. I would assume that it is some kind of VM. But even if it is, it is one almost seamlessly integrated into the operating system and it is supplied with it. It also runs at a fairly decent speed.

Now, for this darling operating system of yours - Microsoft Windows. We have VMware, at a cost of $299, and Bochs at a cost of nothing but the speed of a slug. In addition, I would point out that my experience of running DOS games on VMware (aside from th

Re:Meh

[MuckSavage]

You're willing to pay an enormous premium for very little gain?

You obviously haven't seen the specs on the 970 yet.

Heck, if I remember correctly they've done it twice so far going from Motorola 68k chips to PowerPC and then from OS 9 to OS X.

No. you don't remember correctly. The move from 68k to powerpc was pretty smooth, and very few were left in the dust. And the move from OS 9 to X hasn't been perfect, but apple has retained great compatibility, and the carbon api made it possible for developers

Re:Meh

[stubear]

I have. [arstechnica.com] Read the line about integer performance and you'll see why Apple will still be playing catchup with Intel and AMD. Most people are going to be doing integer and not floating point calculations when they are running their systems. Those that do benefit from floating point are likely not "Switch" candidates anyway. Either way, it's difficult at best to just drop one system and replace it for another when it comes to FP calculations as you not only need to purchase new hardware, you have to purchase new software and even with Adobe allowing crossgrade licensing, it's going to be a big hit to the wallet.

Re:Meh

[macthulhu]

As the kind of Mac user that will break a bottle on the edge of the bar and come after you for badmouthing my OS, nobody is more excited about the rumored release of the 970s than I am... But, I can't help taking a "wait and see" approach today. There are a number of reasons that the "leak" from last week looked sort of fishy. So, I think it may be a few hours premature to use the word "revolution". Believe me, I hope you are right. In any event, Intel should really come up with something more than faster c

Predictable?

[brucmack]

Of course it's predictable, it's been on their roadmap [anandtech.com] for some time :)

Heck, you'll be able to "predict" the next few releases as well!

AMD?

[Wiz]

What about the AMD Athlon64/Opteron? Soon Windows will have a 64-bit consumer version, and Linux already does have.

And you get x86 compatability too. I'll leave it upto the reader if that is a good/bad thing! :-)

*From inside intel*

[OmniVector]

The pentium 4 architecture (heck the x86) is getting long in the tooth. I foresee intel's next market move :)

Intel Employee #1: We can't make our design any better! Intel Employee #2: Surely you jest. Intel Employee #1: No, but I have an idea. Intel Employee #2: What? I'm clueless! Intel Employee #1: Lets up the clock speed! Intel Employee #2: Touche!

(note this is not meant to be a flame, just a little humor)

German Reviews

[Anonymous Coward]

Find some German Reviews at www.hardtecs4u.com [hardtecs4u.com], www.computerbase.de [computerbase.de], www.hartware.de [hartware.de] und www.hardware-mag.de [hardware-mag.de].

Looks, as there is no chance for an AMD 3200+ Systeme to win a round. Hope it will change with the athlon 64 ;)

Buying other items with small performance increase

[del_ctrl_alt]

I have been thinking what other products (cars, appliances, electronics) that boast such small performance increases for such greater expense?

Picture this....

Salesman: and this toaster makes toast .5 seconds faster

Me: great, how much?

Salesman: its double the price of the standard model

Me: Hmmmm

Re:Buying other items with small performance incre

[onion2k]

If you run a toast shop, and you're making 5000 slices of toast a day...

Re:Buying other items with small performance incre

[del_ctrl_alt]

yes of course, but the toast shop making that volume of toast would not be buying toasters built for home use. They would have a toaster farm probably running 'open toast' insted of winToast

Re:Buying other items with small performance incre

[JanneM]

If you need that kind of toast-making performance, you're luch more likely to either build a toaster-farm with dozens (or maybe even hundreds) of inexpensive run-of-the mill toasters, or splurge for a big, heavy-duty continuous-feed made-to-order beltway toaster.

Sort of like getting either a cluster of cheap middle-performing x86 boxes, or a big-iron type machine from Sun or IBM, come to think about it.

I mean, how many apps really critically need that 2% parformance increase, but do not benefit from a dual or quad-cpu machine, a cluster, or a big non-x86 Unix machine?

Re:Buying other items with small performance incre

[Pulzar]

I mean, how many apps really critically need that 2% parformance increase, but do not benefit from a dual or quad-cpu machine, a cluster, or a big non-x86 Unix machine?

A quad-cpu machine with the new CPU will still be faster than a quad-cpu machine with the old CPUs.

When you run thousands of jobs on a hundred dual-cpu machines overnight, 10% increase in speed is significant! It means hundreds more completed jobs per night.

When the fastest available is too slow, then any increase in speed is quite welcom

Re:Buying other items with small performance incre

[the uNF cola]

Mod parent off topic. We're talkin' about toast now..not cpu's. :)

obligatory Red Dwarf quote

[Tumbleweed]

"What's the use of having an artifically-intelligent toaster IF NOBODY EVER WANTS ANY TOAST?!"

Where's the Pentium 5?

[Zog The Undeniable]

I'm getting bored of "P4"...at least "Pentium 5" would be etymologically correct again!

(Yes, fellow pedants, I am aware that "Pentium" was used for the chip following the 486, as Intel couldn't copyright a number and stop their competitors using the term "586".)

Seriously though, how long have successive generations of Pentium technology lasted? Is it just me, or was the PIII the primary product line for longer than the PII, and when will the P4 break the PIII's record?

Boring?

[grub]

Yay. Benchmarks. Wowee-zowee.

If it's that boring, why include it on the main page as a story?

My Review

[SamBeckett]

Compared to the older pentiums the new pentium IV performs all the same instructions in exactly the same way. You may sense a small speed increase; however you are not likely to notice it (unless you are upgrading from a 486DX2-66).

Integer performance has increased by (New Speed-OldSpeed)/OldSpeed * (OldBenchmark Score) - OldBenchMarkScore, as has floating point. However, the electricity bill also rose by the same percentage.

Pros: No one ever got fired for buying Intel!
Cons: It costs more than a used car!

Re:My Review

[Squarewav]

very few people will upgrade from a 3ghz to a 3.2ghz, many people will upgrade a 2ghz to a 3 or 3.2, and will notice a speed increase depending on what they do, I do a lot of video encoding and would love to upgrade from my 2 ghz to save 30 min when I do a vcd (too bad I don't have any f'ing money).

Everyone complains when they up the clock speed up by .2 like intel is forcing them to upgrade by that much, its not about that, its about getting people to upgrade older computers who want to have the latest a

Re:My Review

[override11]

In my personal experience, a dual 1.5 or dual 2.0 ghz proccessor is less expensive to put together and faster than a single processor. I would never spend like 600 bucks on a top of the line P4 when I can get dual 2000 Athalon MP's for 150 a piece. :)

Does anyone really care anymore?

[Carrot007]

Come on beyond a few people this sort of speed really isn't necessary is it!

For most people when processors hit 750 mhz that was enough for them. And then MS released XP but that only raised the stakes a slight bit. 1.2 ghz is enough for 90% of people out there!

Yet some people still crave speed, I have an aunt who does nowt more than send a few emails a month and play minesweeper and (much to my annoyance as I may use it for maybe 5% of my tasks) she has a faster cpu than me!

On a side note, what's happeneing with AMD these days? they seem to really be losing it at the high end, it terms of both value and performance. there 3200 seems only about as good as a p4 2800 of so.

Still they still are the better choice at the same end of the pricing scale below the curve of insanity!

Personally I'd much prefer some nice advances in some other area, cpu's are dull these days and I doubt 64 bit will convince me otherwise.

Re:Does anyone really care anymore?

[IamTheRealMike]

1.2 ghz is enough for 90% of people out there!

Sure. Until the next release of (insert favourite OS here) is out. At which point it'll have more eyecandy, be working harder in the background and users will be pushing it harder without even realising it.

Trivial example - I like antialiased text. It sucks CPU power. Well seeing as I couldn't actually buy a CPU slower than a gigahertz when I last looked around, that's not such a big deal anymore.

And anyway there's a lot of times when you want speed just

Just like my modem

[oliverthered]

14.4 was just fine for me, I didn't bother with a 56k modem for at least a couple of years.

now I have a 2 meg ADSL connection and it could do to be a bit faster sometimes.

Re:Does anyone really care anymore?

[Fishstick]

>Well seeing as I couldn't actually buy a CPU slower than a gigahertz when I last looked around

How 'bout it.

I was helping my sister out this weekend. She had a machine I had built for her a while ago using a PII-450 that she was using as a print server (she's a Mac user, but has a designjet and she wanted a server on her home network to run some remote proofing software).

Anyway, she had me come over because she "needed up upgrade" the machine. She was trying to install some new printing software tha

Re:Does anyone really care anymore?

[Lumpy]

The fun part is is you really needed that extra speed a SMP motherboard with a pair of low cost Athalon MP processors will kick this pentium4's butt all over the place.

hell for the price of that chip I can build a SMP system that would make it look silly... even with the less than 50% increase in speed the SMP system gives per processor.

if you want pure speed and power... SMP is the way to go...

Re:Does anyone really care anymore?

[ShortedOut]

You'll care when Joe Blow down the street has Quake 5 and he's running around fragging everyone and their momma with his 512MB video card and 6.7Ghz processor.

It works like this.
#1. Uber game comes out.
#2. Your hardware sucks, you buy a new comp.
#3. Next Uber game comes out.
#4. Your hardware sucks, you buy a new comp.
etc....
Unfortunately, Computer game technology hasn't been pushing the limits of hardware lately.
(Maybe it's because the Gaming companies got smart and realized that the more platforms that ca

Re:Does anyone really care anymore?

[octothorpe]

I'm running a PIII-450 here at work running RH9 and can't think of a single task that would need faster processor. At home as a Gentoo user I could use some more power to compile the seemingly weekly KDE updates but at work my three year-old desktop works just fine. Why would I need a 3GHz processor just to run windowmaker, mozilla, vim, vncviewer and xmms?

Re:Does anyone really care anymore?

[Atzanteol]

Why would I need a 3GHz processor just to run windowmaker, mozilla, vim, vncviewer and xmms?

I missed the part of the article that said you needed to buy the new chip. Perhaps you could point it out to me?

I Care. Now stop asking, dammit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there are people who care about this. Like me, for example. Or anyone else who uses a computer for real work. An extra 10% or so means 10% more work done in a given time period. That's an extra compile cycle or two, a few more frames rendered overnight, a couple more database queries each night to get marketing off the DBA's back, etc.

While not earth-shattering news this is still good news for people who use computers for more than an excuse not to interact with live humans.

Yet every single time th

Other reviews

[markhagan]

Extreme Overclocking [extremeoverclocking.com]: they actually overclocked the engineering sample. ha! kind of a pricy risk if you ask me. More reviews here [hothardware.com], here [tech-report.com] and here [hardcoreware.net].

Nothing fancy, move along

[zensonic]

1. Up the MHZ by 6.67%
   
2. Benchmarks gets (*suprise*) ~5-6% faster
   
3. ....
   
4. profit.
   

Nothing newsworthy in that really.

So what's the real news?

[Martin Kallisti]

I find it irrelevant whether the speed of an existing type of processor has increased by less than ten percent, although looking at the price compared to the 200MHz lower clocked variant, maybe this would fit under "It's funny, laugh".

However, this processor does seems very suitable for overclocking (4GHz, yikes!). Did anyone manage to come close to that with the 3GHz model, or has Intel increased the therapeutical window of their processors slightly? ;)

Re:So what's the real news?

[Glonoinha]

No, what is really funny is that four years from now we will be buying these chips for $12 to use as keychains, jewelry, or paperweights.

Given a $200 difference between the 3.06 and the 3.2, something tells me that sticking in $200 more RAM, a better video card, or upgrading the hard drives to a SATA RAID 0 setup would give way better ROI (better performance gains) than the theoretical 4.5% gain the CPU would give. For even better than that, use the $200 to upgrade the monitor from a 19 inch CRT to an 18

Powerbook

[Anonymous Coward]

My Ti Powerbook G4 running at 800MHz runs just fine and it gets 6 hours of battery life. When are PC users going to realize that you don't need any more performance than that? Power savings is more important these days.

performance

[TheDredd]

real world perfomance doesn't seem to make a lot of difference, for what you have to pay extra and who is will to cough up that extra $$$ to see UT 2003 jump from 223 to 242 fps, you can't even see the difference with your naked eye!

Where are the real benchmarks

[luckybob83]

Something is missing, oh yea, the Intel vs AMD benchmarks, WTF, how can you compare your own CPU's to each other, I wanna see how they hold up to AMD

Brief benchmark rant

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I have a small rant concerning benchmarks. I'm in the sciences and often look at graphs of data. I am getting SO TIRED of benchmark results being posted with y-axes that go from 2500 to 2600 showing the relative "improvement" of newer, faster cpu's when they ought to be scaled from 0 to X "mips", "flops" or whatevers so that you can see at a glance that the changes are or are not significant.

Better yet are plots showing how much they have "improved" relative to simple clock speed increases (if at all!) and normalized "mips/dollar" for cost evaluation....

Re:Brief benchmark rant

[pmz]

I am getting SO TIRED of benchmark results being posted with y-axes that go from 2500 to 2600 showing the relative "improvement" of newer, faster cpu's when they ought to be scaled from 0 to X "mips", "flops" or whatevers so that you can see at a glance that the changes are or are not significant.

Somewhere an Intel marketing-droid dies from a laughter-buffer overflow. ;)

Other sources

[corvi42]

For those who care, there is also a comparison of AMD 3200+ to P4 3.2 GHz at tomshardware: here [tomshardware.com]

One example of 64bit gaming benefits

[fegu]

Modern chess engines represent the board as several 64bit bitboards, one for the white queen, one for the black queen, one for the white pawns etc.

This as opposed to the good old days with a 64 byte array containing 1 for the white queen, 2 for the white pawns etc.

Bitboards really benefit from 64bit registers and 64bit (integer) arithmetic.

Re:One example of 64bit gaming benefits

[norwoodites]

Yes and that is why one of the spec tests is a chess games, forgot which one though.

babelfish translation of this /. post

[Multiple Sanchez]

Posted by Hemos on 8:42 23 June 2003
from the cut-and-paste dept.
Nathan writes "Someone else [mbreview.com] asked us to redirect traffic to their site. We [hardavenue.com] told them [hothardware.com] of course. [tweaktown.com]"

Processor design needs to change.

[alchemist68]

Processor design needs to change. Just to put things to rest, I'm a Macintosh zealot. Intel keeps pushing the clock rates higher, which places more demand on power requirements (the chip itself and cooling), hence most windows users (secretaries, cublicle workers) in an business office environment never need to have space heaters under their desks to keep their legs warm in the winter time. The PowerPC RISC processors are going in the right direction, but let's take a look at the graphics card processor chips. These chips run at lower clock rates, use less electricity, and move MASSIVE amounts data and calculate a metric ass-load of computations. Processors need wide (128-bit or more) and shallow pipelines to get *the best* performance. Looking at the graphs from the article (yawn), well, they look pretty linear. Ramping up the clock rates with a 800 megahurts FSB (PPC 970 has 1GHz FSB) is eventually going to lead to a starved processor (i.e. Motorola PowerPC G4). Well, enough ranting. Intel marketing (girls dancing, chip technicians in space suits doing the disco) prevails.

Re:Processor design needs to change.

[cenobita]

If you're claiming that Mac's have superior GPU's on their graphics cards, then why are they using ATI Radeon 9700's...a company, I might add, that Apple dropped, only to get bit in the ass and return to, once they popped out a fantastic series of cards for PC's?

Look, there's a simple underlying reason that we need/want higher clock rates, fsb's, etc. Games, 3D animation, multi-track audio, and any number of other things *require* some serious processing power. It's that bloody simple. If you want to te

Re:Processor design needs to change.

[TeknoHog]

I agree that x86 is not the best way of computing. However, there are many factors that contribute to power consumption.

• There are current leaks in transistors that account for a lot of wasted power, but can be solved by new manufacturing techniques. IIRC Intel has already developed some of these. Nanotubes and other fancy tech will probably be even better.
• Wide and shallow pipelines probably need lots of transistors as well. Graphics processors are much more parallelized than CPUs, look (listen?) how much cooling they need. On the other hand look what VIA has done with x86 processors, they can be passively cooled.
• MHz is only one factor in power consumption, just like it is only one factor in performance. And I'm looking forward for some clockless designs.

No Tom's?

[MasTRE]

While those reviews are more than adequate, I am surprised that Tom's Hardware review is not mentioned. While I would not mention it blindly just because THG was one of the first sites to offer in-depth reviews, after reading it I gained more insight than from the other "here are the benchmarks, mam" sites. Here's the synopsis:

"Intel launches the last P4, with 3.2 GHz for FSB800 and Dual DDR400. Its rival AMD fights back with the Athlon XP 3200+ and Dual DDR400. With the Pentium 5 and Athlon 64 waiting in the wings, it's a historic duel." [tomshardware.com]

FutureMark's lost reputation

[Fjord]

I agree that this article wasn't that interesting, but I did find the following passing interesting

Next up, weâ(TM)ll be taking a look at FutureMark's 3DMark2001SE. With the recent debacle surrounding NVIDIA and FutureMark, I have chosen to exclude 3DMark2003 from our benchmarking suite for those of you wondering why you arenâ(TM)t seeing any results for it. (from here [mbreview.com])

We've all read how NVIDIA fiddled with the results and how FutureMark became complacent with it. Now here's the result.

You don't need that fast of a computer?

[angle_slam]

There will be dozens of people saying that they're sub 1 GHz processor is "fast enough". Why bother saying that. Some people want faster computers. Simple as that. It's their money, let them spend it. Personally, I haven't upgraded in 3 years and I could use more speed to process digital video.

Feh to the naysayers

[nightsweat]

OK, it's not a revolutionary development, but if people actually listened to the naysayers who appear each time a new chip came out, we'd be back at 640K of RAM on 16Mhz CPU's.

Re:Feh to the naysayers

[mcpkaaos]

...nice try, Bill.

--

Re:Overclocked

[IamTheRealMike]

Well you can't compare a CPU against a computer. A more interesting comparison would be the new IBM chips against these ones. Still, CPU benchmarks of that type are interesting in an academic fashion only, they can always be contested (for not using the right optimizations etc).

I dunno why people focus so much on CPU benchmarks. Why can't I have a faster BIOS? I want a machine that passes control to the OS bootloader in under a second. Instead, if anything, it takes longer and longer with every machine I try - a second or two staring at the NVidia copyright notice, a few more seconds staring at the bios, quick memory check, autodetect devices. Some system info, some beeps, some whirrs, some clicks, then finally the OS starts loading. Of course that takes ages as well.

If we are capable of making such insanely fast pieces of electronics, why the hell is the rest so slow?

Re:Overclocked

[MuckSavage]

Because the general sheep public don't understand or care about that stuff. They just see the ever widening "GHZ" label and buy away every time intel releases a new chip.

Re:Overclocked

[Junks Jerzey]

Because the general sheep public don't understand or care about that stuff. They just see the ever widening "GHZ" label and buy away every time intel releases a new chip.

It's not the "general sheep public" that does that; it's the hardware fanboy types who build giant cooling systems and drool over benchmarks posted to hardware fanboy sites (like Tom's). The "general sheep public" no longer cares about upgrading.

Re:Overclocked

[TheViffer]

You bring up some very good points. The CPU's are not the bottleneck these days. Its the architecture.

How about a true speed performance by making "real" solid state drives affordable? (real meaning on CF or USB drives) It would increase speed, lower temperatures, and best of all, quiet down things.

Hopefully with SATA we may see more of a push for solid state drives rather then just making the drives spin faster and putting more cache onto them.

Granted, this is not Intels cup of tea, but they could rea

Re:Overclocked

[d^2b]

Want a faster BIOS? Perhaps you want LinuxBIOS [linuxbios.org] From the link

It does a minimal amount of hardware initialization before jumping to the kernel start and lets Linux do the rest. As a result, it is much faster (current record 3 seconds)

And yes, apparently it boots Windows 2000 too.

Re:Overclocked

[MrZeebo]

Well, I seem to remember Microsoft pushing something I think was called "QuickBIOS" that pursued this idea. One good thing about Windows XP is that it certainly does boot up faster than most operating systems I've seen, so Microsoft wanted to get that long BIOS delay out of the picture. I'm not sure whatever happened to that, or if it only allowed you to boot Windows. But at any rate, Microsoft, of all people, is thinking of you ;-)

Re:Athlon still better.

[56ksucks]

I have to agree. They're comparing a 2.2GHz AMD chip with a 3.2Ghz P4 and the AMD chip is holding it's own against a CPU that is an entire 1GHz faster in terms of clock speed. If they would A.) Compared the AMD chip with a 2.2 GHz P4 or B.) Compared the 3.2GHz P4 to a 3.2GHz Athlon, if one existed, then AMD would be far ahead. Which is why we recognise the Athlon as the supperior CPU.

Re:Athlon still better.

[gilesjuk]

The same way that old PPC chips are faster. The performance per clock cycle is a lot higher, of course if you can't clock them high enough this doesn't really help.

Look at the price performance ratio though, you can build a whole AMD based PC for the cost of high end P4 processors.

Re:Athlon still better.

[Xenius]

Oh, I agree completely. AMD's chips are twice as efficient as intel. Isn't the XP's pipeline about half that of the P4? And yes Intel is obviously more expensive. With the big name comes a big price to boot. I dunno where the post I replied to is, but it was just another unintelligent post giving AMD fans a bad name. P4's price/performance ratio sucks compared to AMD's. Hands down.

Re:Editor on crack?

[awtbfb]

or the expanded dictionary entry:

1. Exhibiting a lack of wisdom or good sense; foolish. Otherwise known as "Slashdot effect"

2. Steve Ballmer on stage.

3. Al Gore attempting humor.

Antonym: Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.

Re:Great news

[Xenius]

Sorry man, next price cuts aren't scheduled until October or therabouts. 3.0 will be staying at or very, very close to what it is now. That's why I went ahead and ordered mine friday ;)