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To: tejek who wrote (19475)	11/17/2000 4:51:58 PM
From: milo_morai	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 275872

<font color=darkred>Willy is Limp and the World Knows it! anchordesk.co.uk "...Intel's new Pentium 4 "Willamette" processor (Willy for short) will become public news: it's really ,b>not worth buying. At a clock speed of 1.5 GHz, it's barely faster than a Pentium 3 at 1 GHz. Intel, in short, has a little Willy..." "But I'm afraid this time this year, it is merely Intel's most expensive bit of silicon. And at Windows, it's a slug. And nobody was allowed to know, because the fact that the P4 is a Windows slug has been under embargo. Everybody who knew, was gagged. The chip itself is no secret -- Intel didn't mind telling everybody all the clever things about the new processor architecture -- but the corporation has strongly prohibited anybody from announcing the results of any bench tests comparing it with other processor chips. And the reason is simple enough: if you're running Windows, there's simply no point in buying one. But the smoke-screen was bound to blow away eventually, and you may think it's a mystery that Intel tried to keep it secret at all. The question you have to as yourself is: "Who didn't know about Intel's Little Willy problem?" Who was it who had to be kept in the dark? It certainly wasn't Intel's rivals. I've been talking to them; they not only know that it's slow, but they know how slow. And they know why it's slow, too. The people who didn't know, sadly, are the suckers. Not you and me, hopefully; but the people who are in Intel's pocket. That's the PC makers. I've been talking to them, asking them about why they are launching a machine which is vastly more expensive than a Pentium III, but not noticeably faster. "But it's 1.5 GHz!" they exclaimed. "Obviously it's faster! they all said. Exactly how it performs, you'll find out from a whole host of sources come Monday morning. I haven't been able to run any bench tests, but I've been able to speak to people who have, and the tests are commonly available enough that the news hasn't been entirely suppressed: and if you want it in simple terms, then it's going to be something like this: "The Pentium 4 at 1.5 GHz will run ordinary Windows at roughly the same speed as a Pentium 3 at 1 GHz." Rupert Goodwins explains the technical details of why; but from most people I've talked to amongst designers of silicon, it is clear that nobody doubts the basic fact: there is almost no conceivable reason to buy today's 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 system -- unless you are a mad games player who will replace it in six months or so with a 2GHz Pentium 4 system. Now what you have to understand is that this is really no surprise to anybody who knows about chip design. It's happened before often enough; you'll remember the original Pentium Pro launch, which was embarrassing because the P Pro was actually slower than the Pentium at Windows 95 (it was optimised for 32-bit software). And it happened with the original Celeron, which was launched without any level 2 cache, and was noticeably slower than a Pentium 2. So in a sense, it should have been expected. Intel may have put journalists under a gagging embargo; but its own chip designers have been discussing the architecture with other chip designers for months; and to those people, the problem is as obvious as it would be to you that there would be a problem with a double-decker bus with a 50 cc engine. And the problem is Rambus. Intel delayed the launch of the P4 twice because the only motherboard chipset it has is the 850 design, which uses Rambus memory. And Rambus memory is fine (if costly) up to about 250 megabytes and up to about 1,000 MHz clock speed; and after that, it simply can't be made to go any faster. The problem is cache misses. If the data you want isn't on the processor, it takes too long to retrieve it from the lower levels of memory. OUCH Milo