>==>That's pure Bullshit
>They have used cooling to show where we will be for production
>parts within an intermediate time frame.
Which just confirms what I said: "...they've used a special cooling systems to enable the processor to run faster (700MHz) than it ever would under real-world conditions..."
>A chip equivalent to the chip that they showed last year with
>a active cooling will be shipping as a production part without
>special cooling by the end of this year. A chip equivalent to
>the chip that they showed at CeBit with special cooling will
>almost certainly ship as a production part not requiring special
>cooling in 1999 or 2000.
Right again, sort of:
From ZD Net:
--Meanwhile, at the CeBIT trade fair in Germany, the chip
giant demoed a PC with Pentium II running at 700 MHz.
Intel expects the 700 MHz chips to hit the market in the
next few years.--
On the other hand, the PowerPC G4, with 2 to 4 multiprocessors and a huge shared L1 cache on the chip went "silicon" last December ('97). 700+ MHz versions are expected this year... not 3 years from now. Expect a LOT of interest in the G4 should the chip's price point be 1/4 of Merced as expected.
Of course, if IBM and Apple are to be believed, the 700 MHz Pentium II would still be far short of meeting the performance of even the fully functional 400 MHz PowerPC chip demoed last Tuesday at Seybold.
From TechWeb News:
--Someone finally did it, and of course it would be Steve
Jobs. Only he would have the nerve to do a side by side
comparison of a G3 PowerMac and a Pentium II-based PC.
What's worse, he compared a 233-MHz G3 to a 333-MHz
Pentium II. Not much of a comparison, though. Even at a
mere 233 MHz, the G3 outperformed the Pentium system.
This has got to sour those PC people who have been trying
to ignore, downplay, and even hunt down Macs. PowerMacs
have always been a little bit faster, depending on which
models were being tested. But now there's a huge
performance gap to be dealt with.--
It's also worth noting that IBM showed a 1000 MHz. PowerPC demo some time ago - a strong indication that they're serious about integrating their best technologies and research on the capabilities of the basic PowerPC chip design.
Most of Intel's fab is still in .35 micron. Intel's strength is in manufacturing large quantities of processors cheaply... and not necessarily coming up with the best design or utilizing the latest technology. Take "Celeron"... please.
From C-Net News.com
--"There is absolutely zero reception for the (Celeron)
chip among vendors," said Ashok Kumar, semiconductor
analyst with Piper Jaffray. "Only NEC-Packard Bell and
Sony have signed on."
--You could say it's kind of a 'kludge' project," said
Linley Gwennap, editor-in-chief of The Microprocessor
Report. "A (Celeron) will have lower performance than an
equivalent Pentium II running at the same clock speed."--
(Intel is an investor in C-Net)
>Do you want to know where we are going, or would you rather
>remain in the dark ?
I wouldn't discuss ambient lighting conditions if I were you.
Ian Bruce
New York, NY |
