P4 Issues....any comments?

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Originally posted by Captain Iglo:
is the part about the P4's integrated power management true? limited to 54 watts? (with standard cooling and room temp 20°, better cooling pays off i presume) i am not exactly sure people won't notice that their 'highend' P4 1.7GHz is just as fast as the a 1.5...

Intel is going to have a problem: angry customers without an upgrade option who paid big bux for a comparably slow rig, Willamette is a rip-off and if they continue to abuse their brand name and peddle snake-oil, they'll be out of business by 2002.

[This message has been edited by Captain Iglo (edited April 15, 2001).]

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Peddling snake oil? Out of business by 2002? I'm sorry for your ignorance, but a company that posted 6.7 BILLION dollars in revenue for FIRST QUARTER 2001, and is spending 4.2 BILLION on R&D in 2001 does not have such a grim outlook that you propose. They have the cash, and the smarts to put out a good product, it is people like you who need to pull the blinds up and look at the real world. lol


Also- I've been watching the forum for a while, just recently started posting. I like the way Arcadian avoids the flame! It's refreshing. I could care less each way what someone roots for, but senseless, unsubstatiated comments like the one I just replied to are irritating to say the least.


[This message has been edited by jen4950 (edited May 06, 2001).]

Really interesting string here... I have to admit that i flame the other cpu's all the time, but i'm constantly switching between intel and AMD. Whoever produces the lesser cpu gets flamed.

IMHO the athlon is the better cpu. either way you look at it. Price or performance.

I was reading that the latency with sdram can skip up to 4 cycles when it switches to read and write or vis versa, but on average the rdram has much less latency then the sdram. Is that not true? tell me if its not.

As for this whole cpu throttling. Dont most athlon mainboards have some kind of cpu throttling, regardless if the cpu has any kind of throttling built in or not. I know my motherboard does (a7m266). The P4 has it built in, so it throttles it down to 50%, that would still fry the cpu if you didnt have the heat sink properly put on. I've personally NEVER fried an athlon. I've built so many, that i've lost count.

I know a lot of people have had problems with cracking or burning up an athlon cpu. but most of these cases are people to used to posting their systems without fans on the cpu. and as for the cracking... thats more the user's fault. Its like saying a brand of car sucks because the clutch went out in the first week. stop putting it in reverse on the freeway?

Not saying the p4 is a bad cpu, just an inferior to the current alternative. When it comes to this whole bandwidth use argument. Todays applications dont use/dont need that much bandwidth. they really dont even need as much as the DDR athlons provide.. yet. someone said a while back they dont use 75% of the bandwidth. the figure isnt that high i'm sure, but applications and hardware dont need that much bandwidth. Its not really the bottle neck with current configs. maybe when we start seeing higher then 2 ghz cpu's....

And for the statement that the Tbirds didnt have an acceptable cooling attachment to the cpu (still using the socket 7 style) Every athlon motherboard i've used (mostly asus) has 4 holes around the cpu. There's quite a few cooling options that use these holes with screws. This solution at least doesnt require you to get a new case form factor for your new system.

just my 2 bits... dont take this as a flame. Just my opinion based on the facts I know.




[This message has been edited by Mr.Squish (edited May 09, 2001).]

The p4 is too expensive, and in some ways, intel shot themselves in the foot with RDRAM, but as more software supports the new instructions in the future, it will definately be worth it. The Athlon T-Bird is faster in business apps, but the p4 is better in games. I read in Maximum PC that intel is going to change the socket design and pin count for the p4 soon. Anyone have comments on this?

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P III 1000
512 megs SDRAM @139mhz
Asus CUSL2
2 36bg scsi160 in Raid 0
GeForce2 Ultra
SB Live Platinum 5.1
TDK VeloCD 16x
Sony GDM F-500
Win2k / mandrake

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Originally posted by Mr.Squish:
Really interesting string here... I have to admit that i flame the other cpu's all the time, but i'm constantly switching between intel and AMD. Whoever produces the lesser cpu gets flamed.

IMHO the athlon is the better cpu. either way you look at it. Price or performance.

I was reading that the latency with sdram can skip up to 4 cycles when it switches to read and write or vis versa, but on average the rdram has much less latency then the sdram. Is that not true? tell me if its not.

As for this whole cpu throttling. Dont most athlon mainboards have some kind of cpu throttling, regardless if the cpu has any kind of throttling built in or not. I know my motherboard does (a7m266). The P4 has it built in, so it throttles it down to 50%, that would still fry the cpu if you didnt have the heat sink properly put on. I've personally NEVER fried an athlon. I've built so many, that i've lost count.

I know a lot of people have had problems with cracking or burning up an athlon cpu. but most of these cases are people to used to posting their systems without fans on the cpu. and as for the cracking... thats more the user's fault. Its like saying a brand of car sucks because the clutch went out in the first week. stop putting it in reverse on the freeway?

Not saying the p4 is a bad cpu, just an inferior to the current alternative. When it comes to this whole bandwidth use argument. Todays applications dont use/dont need that much bandwidth. they really dont even need as much as the DDR athlons provide.. yet. someone said a while back they dont use 75% of the bandwidth. the figure isnt that high i'm sure, but applications and hardware dont need that much bandwidth. Its not really the bottle neck with current configs. maybe when we start seeing higher then 2 ghz cpu's....

And for the statement that the Tbirds didnt have an acceptable cooling attachment to the cpu (still using the socket 7 style) Every athlon motherboard i've used (mostly asus) has 4 holes around the cpu. There's quite a few cooling options that use these holes with screws. This solution at least doesnt require you to get a new case form factor for your new system.

just my 2 bits... dont take this as a flame. Just my opinion based on the facts I know.


[This message has been edited by Mr.Squish (edited May 09, 2001).]

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The Athlon is definitely better at legacy code, however the P4 is a much more advanced design and should outperform the Athlon on most "new" software. This is already being seen in new games and 3D benchmarks (which are usually the first to take advantage of new techniques) and the trend will almost certainly continue.

Three years from now you can expect a 1.7 GHz P4 to be faster then a 1.5 GHz Athlon for almost all performance sensitive applications. If you don't plan to keep your processor more then a year or so then the Athlon really is faster. If you plan on keeping it longer the P4 will likely be faster in the long run.

RDRAM has a lot of advantages, but there are some tasks that will almost always run better on SDRAM. The problem is that these tend to be things like MS office that aren’t really all that sensitive to performance to begin with. I predict that when we get DDR for the P4 it will surpass the Athlon in sysmark (a benchmark the Athlon currently dominates) but in most cases gaming performance will suffer.




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Life is complex. It has real and imaginary parts.

hehe, true true. I'll admit to that last post. But anyone that reads/posts in the "highly technical pc forum" prolly isnt gonna be keeping the same cpu for 1 year, let a lone 3 years.

Regarding the advantages of RDRAM over DDR, could you share your knowledge? Thanks.

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Originally posted by Moridin:
The Athlon is definitely better at legacy code, however the P4 is a much more advanced design and should outperform the Athlon on most "new" software. This is already being seen in new games and 3D benchmarks (which are usually the first to take advantage of new techniques) and the trend will almost certainly continue.

Three years from now you can expect a 1.7 GHz P4 to be faster then a 1.5 GHz Athlon for almost all performance sensitive applications. If you don't plan to keep your processor more then a year or so then the Athlon really is faster. If you plan on keeping it longer the P4 will likely be faster in the long run.

RDRAM has a lot of advantages, but there are some tasks that will almost always run better on SDRAM. The problem is that these tend to be things like MS office that aren’t really all that sensitive to performance to begin with. I predict that when we get DDR for the P4 it will surpass the Athlon in sysmark (a benchmark the Athlon currently dominates) but in most cases gaming performance will suffer.

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Quote:

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Originally posted by Mr.Squish:
hehe, true true. I'll admit to that last post. But anyone that reads/posts in the "highly technical pc forum" prolly isnt gonna be keeping the same cpu for 1 year, let a lone 3 years.

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I surmise most folks here keep their CPU for more than a year. That isn't to say that they don't purchase another CPU every year. My stable of CPUs date from from 1978 through 1999. If a box still does its intended job, why throw it away? Sure, I'll buy a couple of Foster's as soon as they are released - supposedly this month.

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Live life as if money was of no concern.

Life is good. :cool:

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Originally posted by Conrad Song:
Regarding the advantages of RDRAM over DDR, could you share your knowledge? Thanks.

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I meant that in fairly generic terms. It has higher per pin bandwidth, more open pages (potentially), It makes more efficient use of bandwidth, It has additional power saving features (most of which aren’t used in PC memory). The type of thing you are probably already familiar with.

In the long run it's the bandwidth that really counts. Latency will still be higher then DDR or SDR in many cases, but the same was true of EDO Vs SDRAM. Here, higher latency, higher bandwidth SDRAM won out even though it had slightly higher latency.

Ultimately, I do not think it is practical to deal with main memory latency as a hardware problem. As CPU's become faster, the apparent latency in clock cycles seen by the CPU increases. There doesn’t seem to be any way memory latency can keep up with processor clock speeds.

On the other hand if we place the responsibility of dealing with latency on the application, then the hardware designer is left with the much simpler task of increasing bandwidth.

As the disparity between memory speed and processor speed grows this is really the only way to take advantage of these faster processors. In this context the generally higher latency of RDRAM isn't a big problem, while its greater bandwidth is a big benefit.


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Life is complex. It has real and imaginary parts.