Intel P4 vs AMD

To All,

After all that silliness let's get her back on course! Listened in on a conversation I heard from 2 "suits" on the train tonight. Specificly 2 men who I have never seen before. They were talking about CPU technology and seemed to know what they were talking about. First they were talking about AMD's fabrication techniques and the fact that they can do a "one of" on the production line without very much interference to the overall numbers of manufactured chips. I thought that was pretty interesting! They also mentioned something about "Tri-Squared." From the conversation as I heard it, they were talking about a 3 core CPU where the third core manages the remaining 2 and all the controls. Since all 3 are on the same chip/bus/clock it should make what is essentially a Dual-Core really fly. From what they were saying is the management core would essentially be a programable controller chip for the whole computer with the power of either of remaining 2 cores. No Prom or Eprom, let alone a Rom chip would be able to match that speed and power, which would almost eliminate any pipelines. The control would be in real speed. That's when they got off the train. Now that's interesting! I'm going to go out on a limb and make a guess as to the "real speed" means. Since all the cores would be on the same CPU and with memory control already on the chip, sharing a common bus and clock precisely and with about as short a pipeline as you can get. To me it would seem like the control cpu could issue instructions to the other 2 cores much faster than any controller chip could ever do. That and controlling the flow of data between the command and the execution of those instructions would be very close to real time. I believe you would call that, "efficiency Personified!"

Like I said, I don't know who these guys were. I did notice that they were dressed several notches above our resident upscale yuppies. They seemed to know what thet were talking about. If it was an act, it was a good one!

After thinking about for a couple of hours, it seems to make sense. Don't know if a word of it was true but it does seem to make sense! It certainly sparked quite a conversation between my friend Gary and I the rest of the way home. Gary's a computer nut too but he has no time. He's the controller for GL Musical Instruments and has about 10 hours a day to himself, including sleep time. He even speculated on a "Phased Array" of the 2 working cores where you could (in theory) essentially double the clock speed while remaining at it. This (he theorized) would give you "Quad Core" performance with only 3 cores! Even the speculation was interesting as Gary has degrees in Electronics and Electronic Design Engineering, so I do respect his opinion.

Fasinating,
theonejrs

 

baltekmi
I can relate to the "more time than money" situation,I'm still pondering the purchase of a pair of Raptors to help eliminate the bottleneck in my latest build so the D-805 "experiment" may have to wait.
As for brobear's case I saw one at Tiger a couple weeks ago and instantly fell in love!

 

I'm going to miss my P4 when I get a new system. I set my drinks behind the case outlet fan to keep the ice from melting. LOL The CPU runs at 31 C and the air going out the back is cooler than that. All my case fans are doing is moving the cool air around my desk. Too bad Intel lost their way and are now having to find it again. I have the feeling the D805 is a pleasant surprise for them, even if it is a little heater. Some people like to stay warm. LOL

 

brobear
ah yes the drinks! Such wonderful moments. I like my p-4 and will have it around for a long time, but my drinks go in front of the intake fans.lol The 805 will be a more experimentel thing, somthing fun to do. I am not into serious encoding so the time saved is nothing to me. I am happy coping movies with my DVD-x copy and any dvd...only takes 15 mins from copy to complete burn.

Any way i am going to save my money and hope it snows like hell next year so that i can get the vaporware INTEL quad chip(2 conroe cores)that will blow AMD away!

This ought to get the ball rolling... go Intel ra ra ar..lol

 

Baltekmi

So do I. Surprisingly it's also fairly quiet. I hear the TV in the living room more than I notice any noise from my PC. When I got it and saw all the fans, I thought it might want to act and sound like a hovercraft. Luckily that wasn't the case. With a nice warm CPU, it will send all that warm air out into the room so the CPU can get another breath of cool air. With the Northwood I ran it for a while with just the rear exhaust fan and there was no problem with the system warming up (that was when I was using the weak PSU out of the Dell while waiting for the Antec replacement). For what I have now, all the fans are overkill. The case is made more for taming the heat off a CPU like the D805. It's also set up for liquid cooling if a person wanted to go that route later. I doubt I'll ever use the option, but it's there. It's not a small case, but I appreciate the extra space. Overall, I'm glad I got it. This case will get the new build later and the current Intel platform will find a different case. As I mentioned, this case is overkill for the current system.

BTW, you can get this case with a plexiglas side so you can view the LEDs. The big fans have LEDs front and back and if I remember correctly, the Zalman has LEDs. You could add a few cables with LEDs and have a regular light show. The RAM with the LED indicators would look good as well.

 

Hey thanks for the ultra quick response. Didn't know hard drive could affect system performance that much. I guess I'll try a new type SATA since this is my first AMD.

Pretty much plug and play right?

 

Theonejrs
The "suits" were actually aliens. LOL Actually I have a legitimate point to make. What was sci-fi yesterday is todays' reality. I suspect a lot of what we think of as sci-fi and cutting edge will be our new tools and toys in the not so distant future. Reminds me of "Field of Dreams", "build it and we'll come"; only in the case of modern technology it's "dream it and we'll build it".

Thoughts like these lead us a long way from reality and into a lot of speculation. I suspect CPUs with more than 2 cores are already on both AMD's and Intel's drawing boards. It's only speculation at this point what they may develop though and how far down the road it will be before we see it.

 

vspede
Get the big Raptor.

 

theonejrshttp://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060509-6783.html
check this article out it may be related to the conversation you heard.

 

baltekmi,

Thanks for the link. It seems the information is along the same path. It's an interesting thought to use one equal core to control and manage the other 2 on a 3 core chip. Phased properly it could do the job quite nicely.

Happy Computering,
theonejrs

 

Phased is an interesting word. How are you using it here? Phased as in a cyclic event or phased as in a separate event or function? A multi purpose word used in conjunction with nonexistent technology sort of renders the meaning a bit vague. Or do I just need to take a nap? LOL

 

I was kind of curious about how a properly phased multi core CPU works myself.

I'm also curious about the three core CPU. If 1 core controlled the other two cores, wouldn't that require more CPU operations per clock cycle and in effect slow things down. I know that IBM designed a 3 core CPU that's now being used in the new Xbox 360, could that have been what your suits were talking about?

 

Sounds feasible, those guys in gaming make all the easy money. They could afford the nicer suits.

 

I had mentioned the 805 some time ago when newegg started selling it.
Guess it takes a web site to get anyone excited.
You can pair it with a 50 dollar Asus board since low price is the name of the game. That's what I'm planning on.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131567

You can use standard DDR to save money and skip the video card if your just encoding. 180 dollars for the combo.

 

brobear & sophocles,

I would guess that by phased they mean switching back and forth between the 2 cores at a very high speed and in the process being able to speed up everything. Since you could have the data split between the 2 cores, the control management core running at the same clock speed should be able to optimize that data into a more efficient stream for much better thru-put. That's what Gary was talking about, although I think if given more time to think about it he wouldn't have used the term "phased array". But I do understand what he meant. I would think that the timing would be critical to making this all work, but I think that the tecnology already exists to be able to accomplish this. whether it would be practical or not I don't know. I guess we will have to see what time brings us.

I wouldn't be too sure about the clock cycles slowing things down. Since everything would be managed by the control core, it would seem to me that the clock cycles effect on everything would improve. I don't think that you could look at something like this in a conventional manner as it seems you are right about more cycles but there remains the question of how much work would be done during them. After all, if you use twice the clock cycles and do 4 times the work, your net gain overall would be considerable over a conventional Dual-Core in spite of the excess clock cycles. I know that's over simplefied, but that's my read on it.

We can speculate all day on it but we won't know for sure until it either becomes a memory or we have a multi-core CPU that does just that. I would like to know more about the 3 core chip in the X-Box because If we can see what the purpose for 3 cores is, then we might be better able to understand where things might be going.

Happy Computering,
theonejrs

 

That's OK Donald I remember your post regarding the 805 as being over clockable because it came of of some posts that we were doing on DVD Hounds regarding l8night's recent build. For those that are think of making the purchase beware of the fact that there are two steppings for that chip the AO and BO. The BO stepping is the one you want, which is identified on the chip or box with the code "SL8ZH."




This means that you don't want to order it online because that is too hit and miss. Intel makes the number visible while it is in the box, so all that you need to do is to go to a supply place nearby and ask to see the box.

 

I read a little ways up about Intel's recent chip developemnts, and something about how AMD has a "secret weapon" in the wings, what were you guys referring to on the Intel end? Forgive my laziness, but reading five pages of this stuff makes my head hurt, but I'm learning, so it's worthwhile. Thanks.

 

Is the Zalman CNPS9500 LED a good PCU fan? How much heavier than the Intel stock fan is it?

 

It might be the best that there is, in independent tests it came close to rivaling liquid cooling. Size not weight is its greatest factor but it's usually an easy install on most Intel systems.

Yes I have one, and I also have a Zalman CNPS-7700 which is another top notch cooling system.

 

@Sophocles Thanks for the answer. One more question. Is the Zalman thermal paste in the bottle any good compaired to Artic 5?