Will Intel ever slow down their Mhz race a bit?
First I have to blame AMD for starting the Mhz war. Being the first one to break the Ghz barrier. And then made Intel going crazy on catching up. And now Intel win back the Mhz/Ghz war from AMD by quite a siginificant margin.
But on the other hand. Motorola/Apple become a sorrow victim.
Question is. Will Intel slow down a bit after the intro of 2.2Ghz P4. So the 'perceive' performace gap between P4/K7/G4 will not be getting widened so rapidly like now??????
ps. If I am going for PC I will still go for AMD instead of that sickening Intel
[ 01-07-2002: Message edited by: Leonis ]</p>
But on the other hand. Motorola/Apple become a sorrow victim.
Question is. Will Intel slow down a bit after the intro of 2.2Ghz P4. So the 'perceive' performace gap between P4/K7/G4 will not be getting widened so rapidly like now??????
ps. If I am going for PC I will still go for AMD instead of that sickening Intel
[ 01-07-2002: Message edited by: Leonis ]</p>
Comments
<strong>First I have to blame AMD for starting the Mhz war. Being the first one to break the Ghz barrier. And then made Intel going crazy on catching up. And now Intel win back the Mhz/Ghz war from AMD by quite a siginificant margin.
But on the other hand. Motorola/Apple become a sorrow victim.
Question is. Will Intel slow down a bit after the intro of 2.2Ghz P4. So the 'perceive' performace gap between P4/K7/G4 will not be getting widened so rapidly like now??????
ps. If I am going for PC I will still go for AMD instead of that sickening Intel
[ 01-07-2002: Message edited by: Leonis ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
At the rate it's going, the G4/5 will be like Jonathan's M3 in my Dodge Caravan's rear view mirror. ....a small dot....
The best feature of the Northwood is its fantastic overclocking?people can clock a 2GHz Northwood at 2.5GHz...with little temperature increase on the stock HSF.
A lot of the scalability is credited to the .13µ process on which the Northwood is based. AMD is moving from their .18µ process soon, so we should be seeing faster, .13µ Athlons by April or so.
<strong>The best feature of the Northwood is its fantastic overclocking?people can clock a 2GHz Northwood at 2.5GHz...with little temperature increase on the stock HSF.
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And with a liquid cooling setup people are already overclocking these to over 3GHz with ease!!!
Incredible.
And next quarter they are introducing it with a 533MHz system bus! at speeds around 2.5GHz...
Power Mac G4 has ~1.1GB/sec memory bandwidth. Pentium 4 has 3.2GB/sec now and soon 4.3GB/sec.
Hopefully Apple's G5 will include either HyperTransport or RapidIO. This will let them ratchet up their memory speeds massively. Right now they are stuck at about 860 mb/sec (realized), whereas HT can deliver 12 gb/sec and RapidIO about 10 gb/sec. Then the bottleneck is truly memory, which can be addressed seperately from the bus bandwidth. Lets hope Epson is right, eh?
And, how DARE those companies try to make good products to show up their competitors! I "blame" them too... assholes..
What's even more important is, even though Intel hasn't officially announced them yet, Dell is already selling 2.2 Ghz Prestonia Xeons. For those of you who haven't been following, Xeon is the name Intel uses for their SMP capable workstation version of the Pentium 4, and Prestonia is the codename for the 512K/ 13 micron version of Xeon. That's not all though, the new Xeons also come with hyperthreading enabled, which can give them up to a 30 % performance boost over regular Northwood P4s according to recent benchmarks.
In store for quarter to are Xeons up to 2.5 Ghz with 533 Mhz front side bus and 1066 Mhz RDRAM.
So no, I don't think Intel is slowing down the Mhz race. In fact, not only is the P4 getting faster in Mhz it's also performing much better at the same Mhz, thanks to more cache and hyperthreading, and more improvements to the bus speed and memory subsystem.
The slower Intel advances, the more time they have to get a new platform up to speed to take over the course of the P4. Same goes for AMD.
One day, they'll find themselves having shoot themselves in the foot with the MHz race, it's already starting.
G-News
<strong>
The best feature of the Northwood is its fantastic overclocking?people can clock a 2GHz Northwood at 2.5GHz...with little temperature increase on the stock HSF.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
This is a 25% increase, not incredible. I run my G3 350 at 450, with no change to the heatsink, a 29% increase, and it will run faster, the external L2 cache won't though.
Michael
<strong>I have this feeling that Apple is watching AMD's Quantispeed very carefully... and being good friends, if it works unlike the old PR rating disaster... then Apple may licence it.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Apple and AMD are good friends? What makes you say this?
[quote]First I have to blame AMD for starting the Mhz war. Being the first one to break the Ghz barrier. And then made Intel going crazy on catching up. And now Intel win back the Mhz/Ghz war from AMD by quite a siginificant margin.<hr></blockquote>
The war is for performance not clockspeed. In terms of overall performance neither company is really ahead of Moore's Law curve, the curve that all processor manufacturers (save Moto) have followed for the past 25 years. Clockspeed/Performance will roughly double every 18-24 months, always has, and will continue to.
[quote]you never know, maybe intel will bust out iwth a chip that scales immensly AND has the performance of a g4, if that happens apple(and AMD for that) are dead, although I doubt that it would be intel to design such a chip, I'd sooner see it in AMD, whats RDRAM? is that like rambus? if so 1066 mhz! thats inane!(and insane) <hr></blockquote>
Yes RDRAM is Rambus, and 1066MHz is better but not fantastic. Their current ram runs at 800MHz and yet performs equivalent to 266MHz DDR memory in most real world applications. If Intel does release a chip that scales immensly and has better performance odds are that their competition like AMD will also have a new design on the burner.
[quote]This is a 25% increase, not incredible. I run my G3 350 at 450, with no change to the heatsink, a 29% increase, and it will run faster, the external L2 cache won't though.
<hr></blockquote>
Which would you rather have, 25% of $2000 or 29% of $350? Yeah that's what I thought. Statistics can be presented to say almost anything you want, but a 2500MHz P4 is much more impressive than a 450MHz G3.
Nonetheless, the performance is great. The Northwoods get over 300fps in Q3... :eek:
<strong>
Nonetheless, the performance is great. The Northwoods get over 300fps in Q3... :eek: </strong><hr></blockquote>
Excuse me for being naive, but doesn't the video card have more effect on fps than the CPU. That 300fps figure sounds like more a bunch of baloney.
Besides, the Intel could be 20GHz for all I care, it still only runs Windows.
<strong>
Excuse me for being naive, but doesn't the video card have more effect on fps than the CPU. That 300fps figure sounds like more a bunch of baloney.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
At low resolutions the CPU dominates the ability of a game like Quake to display FPS. At high resolutions framerate is determined by the video card. That 300FPS is actually quite real.
<strong>
At low resolutions the CPU dominates the ability of a game like Quake to display FPS. At high resolutions framerate is determined by the video card. That 300FPS is actually quite real.</strong><hr></blockquote>
FPS that high are ridiculous. The human eye can't even tell the difference.
<strong>
The war is for performance not clockspeed. In terms of overall performance neither company is really ahead of Moore's Law curve, the curve that all processor manufacturers (save Moto) have followed for the past 25 years. Clockspeed/Performance will roughly double every 18-24 months, always has, and will continue to.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
"all processor manufacturers" should really be "AMD and Intel" here, no? I mean, it's not that only Motorola can't keep up the pace, I can't see anyone keeping up with those two at all (VIA, Transmeta, Sun, ...), nobody save for Intel and AMD is shipping any CPUs that are significantly above 1GHz, or am I missing something here?
Bye,
RazzFazz
G-News
<strong>Nonetheless, the performance is great. The Northwoods get over 300fps in Q3... :eek: </strong><hr></blockquote>
Already when the first P4 came out (1.5GHz?). I read a review where they tweaked q3 to ABOVE 400 fps... Try that with current PMs
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<sigh> Some people just don't get it.
The human eye can detect differences up to around 70 fps or so. That's why you can tell the difference between a monitor with a 60 Hz refresh, and one with 85 Hz refresh. One gives a headache, the other doesn't, because it's faster than the human eye can detect.
Now, about FPS, those FPS measurements are averages. Depending on the amount of action on screen, the FPS may be much higher, or much lower. Unfortunatly, when the action is greatest is when a gamer needs the display to be smoothest, so they can aim, shoot, and run accurately. But this is when the fps drop to the lowest amount.
For example, on my PMG4, OS X quake 3 v1.31b3 gives me about 62 fps average, using demo4. But demo4 is not a very challenging demo, because there aren't many wide open spaces. So on some maps, even with NO action at all, the average frame rate drops to around 25-35, at which point the game becomes unplayable, because with action the rate drops to 10 fps or even lower.
But even on a map similar to demo4, where the average fps is still around 60, there are times when so much action is taking place that the fps drop to around 20. This drop gives gameplay a "choppy" feel, and player control becomes difficult.
I can change the game settings to get greater fps at the expense of less beautiful graphics, and almost every map is playable.
Hopefully I've illustrated the need for gaming computers to get insane average framerates, up around 300 fps, one could have all the eye candy on, and even with lots of action, gameplay would be silky smooth.
Of course, the other reason to have such high framerates would be that the computer would last longer. If you can get 300 fps average in Quake 3, then in Doom 3, you'll probably still get good performance. However, I think most people who buy such intense gaming rigs are the sort that don't keep the same hardware for more than a year at most...there is phallic element to all of that fps stuff as well.
Anyways, 60 fps average is fine for me, but I only play Quake occasionally. For someone who played it every day, they would need more power.
So Apple needs to get their butts in gear so they don't loose more sales to people who want to be able to play games. Apple will never get the hardcore gamers without a revolution, but they should at least make sure that they keep the Mac users who use their computers for work but also like to play games sometimes (the "casual" gamers).
<strong>
"all processor manufacturers" should really be "AMD and Intel" here, no? I mean, it's not that only Motorola can't keep up the pace, I can't see anyone keeping up with those two at all (VIA, Transmeta, Sun, ...), nobody save for Intel and AMD is shipping any CPUs that are significantly above 1GHz, or am I missing something here?
Bye,
RazzFazz</strong><hr></blockquote>
Notice I said clockspeed/performance. Sun, IBM, and others have been able to scale their performance quite well in the past and will continue to in the future.
[quote]True, but then again Moore's Law is in fact by no means a law, just a rule, extracted out of an observation by a guy called Moore, who worked for Intel and had looked at the past evolution of THEIR CPU speeds and transistor counts. More's law will be broken sooner rather than later. Our current chip tech isn't the last word, we'll see Quantum chips, Asynchronous designs and such, where Moore's law will no longer be applicable without radical changes.<hr></blockquote>
Actually the clockspeed/performance bit is a corollary to Moore's original law that transistor density would double every 18-24 months. But there is something to be said for a trendline that the entire industry has follwed for basically the entirety of its existance. Perhaps in the future the technologies you mention will take on a greater role, but silicon technology will be with us for some years to come yet. People have been harkening the demise of silicon based circuits for nearly as long as the industry has existed.