MarineCorps
Explosion!
stormbind said:
What exactly is so bad about raw Ghz?
Intel trips... falls flat on face!
- Thread starter stormbind
- Start date
What exactly is so bad about raw Ghz?
Well, considering dual core processors aren't coming out from either company until 2006, we'll have to wait and see. Plans can change. And lord knows which processor will handle what better. For all we know, Intel or AMD will include different instructions in their chips that will boost performance in certain areas.stormbind said:
A lot of people here are dismissing the P4 as if it's crap compared to an Athlon 64 - and in truth, we know that isn't the case. They both perform well in their respected ways. It really comes down to consumer preference in the end.
Well, raw GHz and nothing else... does absolutely nothing!MarineCorps said:
Infact, processing power has never been the bottleneck in technology. It has always been the memory. If you cranked up the CPU frequency, but kept cache & memory speeds the same - overall performance would not change much.
In an ideal world, the memory would perform calculations without a standalone CPU - combining the Logic and Storage into one unit would slash waiting time between operations.
The closest consumers have ever got to that, are big CPU caches.
AMD emphasise caches more than Intel does. I guess Intel wants to avoid memory becoming the focus of attention because it's not their area of expertise, and AMD haven't much choice because they have never really outperformed Intel in raw GHz.
We are bound by the agenda of these companies, and it looks unlikely that anyone outside accademic circles is going to be intrested in producing self-sufficient memory anytime soon
Incidentally, SGRAM is a varient of SDRAM used in some graphics cards. It can perform very simple calculations on data bits, releasing the graphics processor to do other work. This solution improves overall performance by about 10% to 20% (at the same frequencies) but is expensive and thus very rare, especially given that graphics cards have a shelf-life of only a few months. I have only once seen DDR-SGRAM!
DaEezT
Civ, Pizza, Spam, Repeat
stormbind said:
Not can't but won't! Quite a few talented overclockers out on the net got their Athlons up to some pretty nice speeds, but AMD just recognized the bottleneck you mentioned for what it was: a problem of the mainboard because it has to supply the CPU with it's slow bus (the problem itself is of course part of the general concept of how a computer and it's parts work together -> von Neumann).
So Intel chose to give their 3.4 GHz CPU's 8k L1 to run on a 200MHz bus, which brought the effectiveness of the CPU down by a lot. AMDs Athlons all have 128k L1 for 2.2GHz and I've yet to see someone clock down their P4 to 2.2GHz and outperfom the AMD on even frequency level
Intels Centrino is something of a statement by Intel that they know they screwed up their old CPUs.
The Centrino comes with 2 MB L2 cache. Which just leaves one question, why doesn a CPU with 1500 MHz need 4 times as much cache as a 3400 MHz CPU (Northwood core) and a 64 Bit Server CPU (Xenon till 3.1 GHz)
Either they overdid it this time or screw all their customers for the last few years.
And the Opterons with their built-in memory controllers are also giving Intel some sever headaches.
