Comments Locked

27 Comments

Back to Article

  • theteamaqua - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    what socket is the pentium D 900 series going to be? b/c i have the nForce4 SLI with LGA 775 and i would hate to change another mobo
  • Thatguy97 - Tuesday, June 16, 2015 - link

    lol
  • Anemone - Monday, September 12, 2005 - link

    I believe by now it's rather apparent to most folks that all things P4 in the way of new releases are bandaids. Even Yonah, for all its "new completely revised architecture" is pretty much the same thing, a bandaid until Conroe/Merom.

    There are a number of insider reports indicating that there is very little chance Merom/Conroe will be out by Q3 2006. Q4 is going to be more likely, and after watching Dothan and now Yonah slip their predicted schedules, it's not unreasonable to think this could be true. That would fit as well with Pressler and Yonah seemingly so close to an entire product revision, Merom/Conroe. They need to keep the hype and the products flowing till they can make Merom/Conroe a reality.

    Do remember something else. The part of the reason the P3 was cancelled and the P4 introduced was because the P3 was failing to keep up with the Athlon clockspeeds. In several comparisons of the P-M (who's performance is only really boosted by cache) and the A64, you'll find that at about equal clockspeed and half the cache (A64 1m/P-M 2m), you'll find about equal performance. When overclocked, the P-M seems to do very well, but again, you'll find it about equals the A64 at that higher speed. Now a lot of folks seem to be believing that the P-M and its reincarnation, Merom/Conroe, are going to hit speeds high enough to compete with the A64, even while lengthening the pipeline somewhat. I'm pretty positive that's what Intel's engineers were told to deliver as well. But there is a good bet that may not exactly play out as Intel would have you believe.

    Why, you ask? Well have a look at Yonah's speed. Even though there will be a single core version, they aren't going to release the chip at higher speeds. The likely fact here is that Intel knows perfectly well that what is propping up the P-M's performance is really the cache, and that getting the actual cpu to perform at higher speeds (over long term not just a 2 hour overclocked benching session) is not happening on current chips. Remember the tidbit about how Intel solved the "power issue" at 45nm? You can bet that Intel believes the real combination that will work is Merom/Conroe in a 4mb 45nm version, and they are actually probably trying to see how fast they can get that process online and mass producing chips. So if you see a 65nm Merom/Conroe with a 2mb cache, it will again, be a bandaid until they get the real thing out. So really this whole race takes you to Q1/Q2 of 2007, but they want you to be lead there carefully while never dropping enthusiasm for "the next big thing". Now if your real "golden product" isn't going to be out till Q1/Q2 of 07, you understand far better why you can still introduce a "new" product in Q1 of 06, that is based on the last of the old tech.

    The only thing you need to read between the lines is that the timing you think your getting on the new chips you are most interested in, Merom/Conroe, isn't nearly as soon as is being advertised.

    $.02
  • michaelpatrick33 - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    Intel's lead in the performance/watt claim seems to mask lower performance against todays X2's which isn't good. From the claims made by Intel the current dualcore Opterons are already faster than the fastest Sassaman's (spelling, lol) but will obviously use more wattage. With low power dualcore Opterons already out at 55watt I just don't see Intel's stuff as very exciting from a performance standpoint. Marketing dictates fastest performance per watt but reality defined means the same as what we have now or a little faster but uses less power so we can use dualcores in notebooks etc. I will be curious to see what 4megs of L2 cache will do on a low pipeline processor.
  • Shintai - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    You mix a few things up.

    Low power opterons uses a max of 55W yes. What does low power Xeon use?, What does low power Yonah use? What does low power verions of Meron/Conroe/Woodcrest use?

    Currently AMD leads the performance/watt on servers (cept blades) and desktops (Cept for the geeks running Pentium M as desktop :) Intel leads in mobile over AMD.

    But intels performance/watt forecast is based on yonah/meron/conroe/woodcrest.

    For the 4MB L2 cache question on a low pipeline CPU. Simply compare Banias to Dothan and you got the answer.

    What Intel and AMD seem´s to finally wake up to is, that a PC user don´t want a huge megaheatsink, lots of fans spinning at 12000rpm and a 800W PSU for their future PC.
    Now we just need nVidia and ATi to wakeup aswell :)
  • Furen - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    Not quite. L2, like all other things, gives you diminishing returns. The L2 in dothan makes up for its weak FSB and memory interface. Conroe will have a much faster FSB than the initial 400MHz FSB Dothans and its memory bandwith will be significantly better as well.
  • sprockkets - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    No 1066 FSB support til '06, did I read that right, yet the latest chipsets support it, why?

    Intel says they will lead with good performance/watt, and probably will, but it is not as if AMD's chips ran hot to begin with haha.
  • Shintai - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    Increasing FSB increases heat generated by the CPU. Aswell as making it more complicated and more expensive to make a motherboard. The answer is the industry ain´t ready to make 1066 FSB cheap enough yet.
  • sprockkets - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    But if the chipset's support it wouldn't the motherboard as well support it? Look at the 945G chipsets, and all the MB at newegg with it, they support the 1066FSB, yet no processor can use it without overclocking.
  • ksherman - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    any chance we could get a little more information on what VT actually does? I have heard of a lot of things that will use VT, but I dont quite get what it does
  • Shintai - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    VT is basicly virtualization of the hardware. Think of Virtual PC or VMware at a hardware level. 2 Windows XP or Windows XP and Linux running on the same machine without one being dependant of the other. Dad is doing some work on the same PC the son plays on.

    Both AMD and Intel won´t ramp up speeds with 65nm. They both look for cheaper dualcores, lower power and to some extent multicores. What people will have to learn is ramping of speed in terms of Ghz ain´t really that easy. Laws of physics apply here, so even tho you can sell a 6GHz P4 or a 4Ghz AMD64 it doesn´t help if it stops working or random crashes after 2 years due to degraded materials inside the core.
    And what would such a CPU use of power! 150W? Add another 150 or even 300W for GFX if you got SLI/Crossfire. Then we need a PhysX chip etc. Can you say central heatingsystem for your home :x

    But again..I´m a fan of low power and ecological aware production ;)

    Windows Vista is currently scheduled for december 7 2006. And thats RTM only. However this can easily slip 3-6months, aswell as adding 1-2 months before its avalible in retail and OEM. But remember Windows Vista ain´t 64bit only versions. There is 32bit versions aswell. Servers is also avalible in both flavours, except for the small business server.

    But again..corporations don´t care much. Alot will still use windows 2000 when Vista comes. And only about 10-20% will even move to Vista in 2007.

    Conroe and Meron is scheduled for Q3 2006. Woodcrest is scheduled for Q4. AMD should also have 4core Opterons out in Q4. And maybe X4? too :D
  • Furen - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    I wouldnt say VT is virtualization on hardware, per se, but rather it provides tools for virtualization software to work with less of a CPU overhead. The main benefit is, of course, ring -1 execution. This is because the virtualization software will not have to intercept (and process) every OS instruction to keep it from messing up the system, but rather will have another layer from which it can create a ring 0 of sorts for each OS.
  • Shintai - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    I can forecast alot of exploits on all platforms, VT will be a mess like Wifi was/is.

    Average Joe doesn´t use VT, but mr. Evil viruswriter does and now Mr. Average Joe got 2 OS running. Tho he only knows that 1 is running.

    I wonder what the next step is..firewall and antivirus wont fix it.
  • Furen - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    I was wondering what the minimum multiplier will be on the 65nm netburst chips. It seems Intel did away with the 14x multiplier limitation on the Prescott so I'd expect EIST to be much more useful this time around. Sucks that Intel (and AMD, to some extent) doesnt plan on ramping clockspeeds at all (Yonah will be released at 2.16GHz max)... talk about reversals.
  • Shintai - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    Yonah will ramp to 2.33Ghz tho. But remember it´s a mobile chip.
    You basicly get dualcores and alittle more for the same power you had single core with Pentium M. Sure a 3.5Ghz Yonah would WTFPWN, but it would do that to the battery aswell.
  • Furen - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    Yeah, what I meant is that they are completely neglecting the single-core performance. Even these past two years have brought a steady (albeit slow) increase in clock speed. The next two years look rather gloomy in that regard. The Pentium 4 scaled back to 3.2 when it went dual-core and it, most likely, wont go over 3.46 before being killed off. Yonah will basically give us one speed bump before being killed off as well. And who knows how well Conroe performs in single-thread apps and at what clocks it comes out. AMD will probably clock its K9 (dual-core k8) up to 3GHz if its 65nm shrink works out ok, but I dont think we can expect this speed grade to happen any time soon.
  • Furen - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    Bah, I meant single-thread performance, not single core.
  • Shintai - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    We do know, since intel have shown working conroe that it will be about 25% faster than Pentium-M at the same clock. it will also contain a 16 stage pipeline, Dothan got 14 or 15, Prescoot got 31.

    So if we mix it up with intels new lowpower tactics. I say something like a 2.6-3.0Ghz Conroe (desktop) that performs like a 4.5Ghz P4 while using a max of 45W. So Conroe/Meron/Woodcrest should be something equal to a 3-3.2Ghz AMD64 that should be easy to reach in Q3/06

    But it´s very clear..it´s more cores before speedsteps right now and the next 1-2 years and maybe more.
  • IntelUser2000 - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    quote:

    We do know, since intel have shown working conroe that it will be about 25% faster than Pentium-M at the same clock. it will also contain a 16 stage pipeline, Dothan got 14 or 15, Prescoot got 31.

    So if we mix it up with intels new lowpower tactics. I say something like a 2.6-3.0Ghz Conroe (desktop) that performs like a 4.5Ghz P4 while using a max of 45W. So Conroe/Meron/Woodcrest should be something equal to a 3-3.2Ghz AMD64 that should be easy to reach in Q3/06

    But it´s very clear..it´s more cores before speedsteps right now and the next 1-2 years and maybe more.


    Umm did you see the article from Anandtech about IDF AT ALL?!? Merom/Conroe/Woodcrest is 14 stage pipeline, for Pentium M, in reality we DON'T KNOW. Some people say 12, some say 13, some say up to 16-17. Some say P6 cores are 12 stage pipeline, but according to Anandtech's Pentium 4 Willamette article, there is a pic from Intel that says P6 is 10 stages.

    2.6-3.0GHz Conroe that performs like 4.5GHz P4?? Pentium M already performs like 4.5Ghz P4 at 3.0GHz.
  • Furen - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    Conroe could theoretically be 25% faster than the Pentium M but good luck keeping the 4 issue execution core fed. AMD had to integrate the memory controller in order to keep its 3 issue cpu fed... not to mention that the instruction level parallelism of x86 code leave a bit to be desired. I dont doubt that Intel's cpu could be fantastic but they have been downplaying single-thread performance a bit too much for my taste, which makes me wonder whether or not they can actually deliver the 25% improvement they claim. Just adding cores is not necessarily going to lead to performance benefits since, even when multithreaded applications go mainstream, not all operations are inherently parallelable (most sounding word ever, huh?).
  • Furen - Saturday, September 10, 2005 - link

    haha, misspell. In the last parenthersis "most" should be "worst"
  • Furen - Saturday, September 10, 2005 - link

    ok, I give up
  • Griswold - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    At 3.5GHz you need watercooling, damn right it would wtfpwn the battery. :D
  • shabby - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    Still at 3ghz? Pfft!
  • Anemone - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    Not going to touch those as Conroe is the real next generation. Intel just needs something to keep people interested, but frankly X2's are simply vastly (night and day) better chips in most applications. I'm only waiting on the X2's for DDR2 simply so I can reuse the DDR2 I have now.

    It should be noted that all the rumours I've read indicate that Conroe and Merom are going to be LATE H2 2006, quite possibly Oct or later. That's really the only reason Yonah and Presler exist, because having nothing new till that time would be bad. Meanwhile AMD is likely to bring dual core notebook chips that at least match Yonah, and offer 64 bit. Do bear in mind that, standing in Feb 2006 when you might make such a purchase decision, you'll be about 9 months away from a ground up 64 bit OS and the likely launch of the full 64 bit revolution. Don't know how many Yonah's I'd be investing in at that time myself, which could be a big reason for the VIIV media system. Media systems might be able to adequately sidestep any need for 64bit and thus give Intel a place to sell Yonah's that might not sell so well to informed buyers. Yonah will perform well, there is no doubt. And AMD has failed to really get major vendor support for mobile A64 chips so far. So the game is far from clear. What machines are available come Jan/Feb 06 will be big in determining this race.

    Personally Q4 05 onward, if its not 64 bit I wouldn't touch it.

    $.02
  • DOSGuy - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    There are two instances of the term "vitalization technology" in this article. That should be "virtualization technology".
  • KristopherKubicki - Friday, September 9, 2005 - link

    Spell check strikes back :( Fixed.

    Kristopher

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now