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PC slowdown? Not with Intel's Pentium 4 on board
PC makers may have fallen on hard times. But with the quiet debut of Intel's new speed demon of a chip, get ready for the sector to ramp up in a flash. Here's what that processing power makes possible.
By Mark Anderson
It must be a sign of the changing times.
Five years ago, the Intel (INTC, news, msgs) announcement and release of a new generation of processors would have been headline news everywhere; after all, various flavors of this new chip layout will drive computing for the next 5-10 years. But these days, at a time when every piece of good news is used by short-sellers as a reason to dump a stock, no one wants to stand out, even when the achievement will drive markets for years.
So, after a couple of delays, we have this very modest rollout.
What is it?
On the surface, Intel immediately reclaims the speed record at 1.4 and 1.5GHz, with much more to come. The ultimate speed of the new design is claimed at 10GHz, but my experience is that whatever Intel claims, its real performance is beyond.
We get moved from a 133MHz bus to a 400MHz bus (with 3.2 GBps transfer speed), which will go far to advance realtime rich media use on PCs. The chip is 50% more gated, i.e., has 42 million transistors; but also is made in a format twice as large. In chipland, this means at least a 4x increase in the chances of making mistakes, which could mean a decrease in productivity, all else being equal, of 75%. Of course, these are not the real numbers, but for Intel's recent history of production snafus, this is not encouraging.
What else do we get? A math engine that runs at two times the clock speed, with a connected Rapid Execution Cache. An overview engine that sees three times the potential operations, and so increases the efficiency of what gets done when. Specialized SIMD extension 2 arithmetic and floating point that should aid, in conjunction with 144 new instructions, rich media operations.
Who cares? Does it matter?
You will find many media outlets giving out a big yawn about a new processor (from anyone), because either a) the writer is too inexperienced to understand the power of a new generation of chips, and/or, b) nothing is exciting anymore, and there is, specifically in this case, no obvious new application that needs this power.
Boy, is that wrong.
Let's ask what we need local power to do. How about this list:
Matching fat pipes to processing power, allowing the computer to generate images and data displays in real time. As pipe bandwidth explodes, PC processing needs to keep pace;
Until they do keep pace, PCs have an even bigger job: for midsize pipes, PC processors need to have enough speed and bus bandwidth to do realtime compression and decompression to compensate for the pipes' failings. Either way, the future is in realtime audio and video delivered to and played on your desktop;
Multi-tasking in realtime. Having had the experience of running several chip-demanding jobs at once, I can tell you what happens: only one works at a time, because we are still using a von Neumann serial computing design paradigm. As communication becomes a key part of the PC, and as we introduce streaming via fat pipes, this will simply not work anymore, which leads to:
The communications PC. As this becomes the new central task of the PC, the need for realtime multitasking and multiprocessing grows. We are clearly in a transitional mode here, waiting for multiple processors (thank you, Steve Jobs) on normal machines. How long will it be?
Voice recognition. Even if you dedicated a server's worth of processing power to this task, it still would not work properly unless run on a server farm; instead of a server. At a time when voice-driven applications are trying to break out every place on the Net, anyone who thinks that PCs are overpowered is, well, underequipped.
Peer-to-peer and Grid systems. I like this point the best. In a system wherein all linked systems are supposed to be democratically linked, and working in tandem, who runs the show? Who gets the hidden advantage? The master or the slave? Why, Your Machine, of course.
And, oh yeah, games. Games suck cycles without remorse. And games are becoming an ever-more important reason to own computers. You may know that, unlike five years ago, most advanced gamers are in the (male) 25-35 years category. Interesting, eh? And what is the difference between a game and a great interactive movie? None, except in execution.
Thanks, Intel. We'll use all of those cycles, and then some.
Get ready for new PC sales to ramp. |
