OT-Intel P4 is out!

[Maximus]

Do you dream in GigaHertz? New Pentium 4's are available in 1.4 and 1.5 GHz w/400MHz bus speeds.

Check out this site for more info. http://www.intel.com/home/pentium4/index.htm

[Disaster@work]

Tom's Hardware gave it a scatheing review. At first they really liked it, but then after a reader pointed out a problem with their testing criteria (full FPU testing), they reversed their opinion to disappointing. Here is the link: http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001122/p4-01.html

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To download my scenarios: go to

http://www3.telus.net/pop_n_fresh/combatmiss/index.htm

[Chupacabra]

What I've heard is that the P4s have an extremely weak FPU. Hopefully Intel will realize that's not a good idea sooner rather than later.

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Grand Poobah of the fresh fire of Heh.

[Guest AbnAirCav]

Sharky Extreme has a good guide/review of the P4, with a number of benchmarks at http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/guides/pentium4/.

FWIW, while I would love to have a 400MHz bus, I agree with both of these sites that until I need to run SSE2 optimized software exceptionally fast a P4 is not a good buy.

[Lordfluffers]

Im going to stick with Athlons for now. As far as Im concerned AMD is the better chip company. Cheaper, faster, more capable and reliable. Intel is losing it. Anyway an Atlons got a superb FPU.

[ArmoredAmoeba]

One nice thing about the new P4 reviews, it makes the justification for getting an Athlon a whole lot easier. Looks like we are all getting new Athlons at work

[Maximus]

I'm planning on upgrading from a Celeron to a Duron. Yeah I know, it's a cheap, toned-down Athlon, but it's something to get started with by switching to an AMD compatible motherboard.

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--"We want information."

--"Information."

--"Information."

--"Who are you?"

--"The new Number 2."

--"Who is Number 1?"

--"You are Number 6."

--"I am not a number, I am a free man!"

--"Hahahahahahahaha."

[Tris]

There's not a single thing wrong with a Duron purchase--it's a better buy than an Athlon if you're talking bang for the buck and way way ahead of anything called Pentium in that regard. Good choice, really.

(saidthenotsohappyownerofapiii)

[Slapdragon]

AMD may be a better choice than the P4. The P4 was designed to maximise clock speed, but not amount of work done, so a slower AMD with better gates, FPU, and transfer tech will actually do more work than a faster P4.

This is shown most starkly by the comparison of the G4 and AMD. A 500mhz IBM G4 is roughly equivilant to a 1ghz AMD in working power, while processors like the Celeron would need to clock at almost 2ghz (which they don't unless you cool them to -30 degrees C, something our engineering department does) to do the same work.

[Compassion]

The real comaprason will not come until there is a compiler for SSE2 and those instructions start appearing on AMD parts.

Also, this is the Pentium 60 and 66 of the P-4 line. This is not the final form of the part and we won't see that until next year. Not making excuses for Intel, just the way it is.

It will have a place when a large amount of games come built to perform with that massive bus (this is a board about a game, that's my focus anyway) and with the SSE2 instrucitons. How well it will is going to depand on a lot of factors. It's a little early to sound it's death knell or AMD's supremacy. Now, if I had cash to burn today, I'd get an Athlon over a P-4, but like I said, I'm a gamer and an office drone. Have no use for what the P-4 will do today, but I can't help but remember that when the 486 was released, accusations of the part's unreliability and uselessness of "all that power" were heard long and loud. Many were going to stick with a 'fast' 386 part and not have to worry about all the losers upgrading to follow the pack (gawd, I'm dating myself). Same thing happened on an even bigger scale when the Pentium came out. Time will tell, though if we need those new features or not. I remember cursing KKeith Zabaloui (or whatever his name is) on c.s.i.p.g.strat for turning on the P5 flag on the first Close Combat and forcing an upgrade from me... I learned to curse him more in the following years for failng to execute on a brilliant idea time and time again...

<Disclaimer> I am an Intel employee and stockholder, so take what I say with that in mind.

[Treeburst155]

Benchmark comparisons at Anandtech.com don't look too good for the P4 against the high end Athlons.

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I wish tall pines and woods did not use the same treebase .bmp

[patboivin]

www.arstechnica.com weren't impressed either.

I am going with AMD next time, I think.

Largely in part because of the WinTel alliance. Now I have real justification for going with AMD!

[Vanir]

The P4 has a very long pipeline that enables it to achieve very fast clock speeds at the cost of efficiency. SSE2 not withstanding, a P3 running at the same clock speed should be faster than a P4. Early benchmarks seem to be confirming this.

I read a while back that Intel will continue the P3 line next year with a new chipset when they go to the .13 micron process. The P3 is expected to top out at around 1.3-1.4 Gh or so. That's the processor I want. That or an Athlon.

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You mean my Java coded Real Time Bar Fight Simulator Madmatt Mission: Beyond BiteMe ISN'T going to be published?!?

Madmatt

[IntelWeenie]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Compassion:

Also, this is the Pentium 60 and 66 of the P-4 line. This is not the final form of the part and we won't see that until next year. Not making excuses for Intel, just the way it is.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Yes, I will be waiting until Intel ramps the speed up a bit. I read several reviews and one (don't remember which one) mentioned that the P4 will be scalable to around the 10Ghz mark. The P3 is already pretty much topped out at 1Ghz (the 1.13Ghz chip flopped pretty badly).

The bad news for DIYers is that to upgrade to a P4 you need a new motherboard, processor, memory (RDRAM in pairs no less!) and power supply! The new PS is needed because of an additional 12V connector to the M/B. The really bad news is that the 1.4/1.5 P4 socket configuration will likely be dropped when they move to the .13 micron process! So if you get a P4 system now, you can't even upgrade it later on! Argh!

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Cats aren't clean, they're covered with cat spit.

[Guest AbnAirCav]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>There's not a single thing wrong with a Duron purchase--it's a better buy than an Athlon if you're talking bang for the buck and way way ahead of anything called Pentium in that regard. Good choice, really.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

There's a good one page guide of AMD processors for a "value" gaming PC at Sharky Extreme, http://www.sharkyextreme.com/theguide/value_game_pc/2.shtml, just out this past week. Their bottom line is: avoid the classic Athlon (1/2 speed cache), "Durons have good bang for the buck but the Athlon Thunderbirds are only slightly more expensive with much more performance", so they recommend a 900MHz Athlon Thunderbird.

While not needed for CM, I like the fact that the power of these chips will allow us to run CM at high resolutions, coupled with FSAA from the video card ...

[RokSS]

Why would Intel come out with a new Pentium version which has a marginal (if any) performance increase over the P3 that they've been pushing hard for the last few months? It looks like a familiar strategy of theirs to make the high end buyers think they're getting the fastest cpu no matter the cost, while giving the impression that the P3 is a great value just because it costs less.

Back in '89 I bought my first PC with an Intel 386/33 cpu. I thought it was great until I installed Red Baron. It ran so slowly, what a disappointment. Not satisfied, I shelled out the $$ and doubled my ram to 4mb (wow). RB ran only slightly better. Still not satisfied, I looked into cpu upgrades for my anemic 3 month old clunker which Intel rendered obsolete the day after I bought it. Intel cpus were in the 100s of $$ so I opted for an AMD 386/40 (about 30$) and a Cyrix math coprocessor (about 70$). Now RB, SWOTL and whatever else ran as smooth as I wanted for a couple of years.

Eventually I wanted to buy a new computer. Of course back then 99% of new PCs had Intel cpus. While researching price/performance issues I discovered that Intel's 486sx line of cpus were actually fully built 486 chips with the FPU disabled. They "retarded" the cpus, which cost no less to manufacture and sold them at a lower price. I used them at work and they sucked. I ended up rebuilding the old 386 with a new mobo and an AMD 486/dx2/80 and have been anti-Intel ever since.

Intel has used a sophisticated marketing strategy for many years to dupe millions of $$ from buyers who just see that label. I think that if it weren't for AMD, we'd be discussing the latest P2/400sx cpu bargain priced at $700 or $800 right now.

[This message has been edited by RokSS (edited 11-25-2000).]

[Tris]

Well, I have a measly PIII 450 yet I've no problem at all running the game at 1280 x 1024 32 bit. In fact, that was with my old Diamond Viper (albeit with "twinkling" trees) installed. My new GeForce2 card would easily accommodate much higher resolutions, though I can't see a good use for this better definition since my monitor is only 19" and after a while it's kinda hard to pick out the units when they're rendered at a realistic scale.

I guess my point is that for purposes of real-world play the critical component for this game is the capability of one's video card to push pixels. After that I'd look to the monitor, and finally cast an eye to the CPU with re to its compatibility with the video card. Everything works together in the end, of course, but assuming a reasonable CPU base up front this game's mostly about pushing pixels, and even more so after you glom onto a few of those luscious mods.

[This message has been edited by Tris (edited 11-25-2000).]