Intel Readies Earlier Rollout of 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4

Reuters | July 22, 2002

[rdb3]

Now if only I can get a reliable ISP that will work with my 1200 baud modem.

Yeah, that speed is hard to come by these days.

[Semper911]

I was promising myself a new PowerBook G4 if I complete this quarter in the black with my new business. Now I'm not so sure that this is a good idea. If Intel is pushing the 3Ghz processors, all other processors are going to drop significantly in price. So I could have a monster Dell 2Ghz laptop for far less than what the PowerBook will go for.

Whoa, partner. Processor speed is not enough of a reason to make a machine choice. The Intel chips still use 32-bit or 64-bit instruction, whereas the Mac G4 uses 128-bit. Way more things can happen at once in the Mac chip.

And as someone else already mentioned, it is all about bus speed. No machine is going to be radically faster until someone solves the bus speed problem (which is actually a heat problem.) The G4 has a bus speed of 133MHz, the same as any newish PC board out there. (and don't let Dell's little 400MHz bus trick fool you -- it is 4 separate 100Mhz buses.)

Don't let Intel play the number game with you like it does in its marketing campaigns. If you want a wintel machine, buy one -- but know what you are getting. But if you want a beauty that flies, treat yourself to the G4 Ti.

You know you want one.

[Bogey78O]

Cripes! Just reading that review scared me. Reading the corporate reply for the BTMS makes me think the guys who made it were illegal immigrants who made it in their garage.

[NapaCA]

Don't ch'ya know? The collective are quite happy being assimilated. You're wasting pixels...

[HAL9000]

Couple that with Apple's plan to port OS X to the PC, why bother with the PowerBook?

There is no "plan to port OS X to the PC". That is pure speculation and wishful thinking from Wintel users based on an offhand statement by Steve Jobs last week that was taken out of context.

[monkeyshine]

I saw some 1.6 mhz laptops for as low as $1299 3 weeks ago (and there were some "demo's" for sale too) at Fry's. The prices are tumbling fast I'm sure. You probably could already beat the powerbook for a very nice machine. I got one with built-in 802.11/x wireless networking, so I can freep in the AM on the back portch during breakfast (another way to make living without a newspaper easier).

[monkeyshine]

If it's anything like mine (Hitachi Lifebook, made in Canada) then it probably kicks.

[Lazamataz]

Anybody using anything more powerful than a 286 is a hopelessly obsessed gadgethead.

GET A HORSE!!

[Semper911]

The collective are quite happy being assimilated. You're wasting pixels...

So true, so true.

[Benrand]

I'm just sayin' that most PC's don't use a fraction of the processor power and I guess if a RAID was set up, then I could understand getting the gigabit to the desktop...it's the same question that plagues these huge fiber companies...whatcha gonna do with all the bandwidth?

[RightWhale]

Is there really that much of a speed difference in real computing time between a 3.0 Ghz Pentium IV and my current 903 Mhz Pentium III??

Yes, in the processor. In the rest of the system, no. Where is the bottleneck now? Could be the graphics card, could be the memory or bus, could be the CD or hard disk depending on what the computer is doing. If you are solving matrices, there will be an increase in speed. If you are displaying images or interactive sound, speed will be the same assuming the peripheral devices are running at maximum speed.

Just registered my Windows XP over the toll-free phone line. Microsoft did a good job, it was quick, no pauses, it even answered on the first ring.

[Dinsdale]

whereas the Mac G4 uses 128-bit

In its multimedia extensions, same as Intel and AMD. Get a clue mac head.

[rmmcdaniell]

These machines really are getting to be fast enough. Seriously. I mean, some people will need more speed... graphics, sound, video, etc... but for the average person I think we're reaching the limits of what we could possibly want.

Ah, If only bandwith could go up at the rate that processor speed increases.

[aruanan]

Also, using windows XP at home is much quicker than 98 at the office (obviously).

Is that because you don't have to restart as often to free up memory? I started saving after making any change on our machine running Windows 98 because by the time I noticed it start to slow down for this reason it was often too late. Well, manipulating huge Photoshop files brought things to crisis point pretty quickly. On the new Windows machine (AMD ATHLON XP 2000+ on a MSI K7N420PRO NFORCE 420D motherboard) we're running Windows 2000 Professional. It doesn't seem to have the same problem. Of course, having 1 GB of RAM helps. But since I've gotten my new G4 Quicksilver with 1.28 GB RAM (as well as Photoshop 7 for OSX), I haven't had any reason to go back to the PC.

[monkeyshine]

That would be nice.

[Bush2000]

right. in a word, no. the price does not justify the so-called improvement in speed.

Do you honestly expect that prices are going to stay at their initial level? Of course not! Competition from AMD is going to drive them down very fast.

[Bush2000]

Fire extinguisher not included.

I'd prefer a fire extinguisher to a walker, Macophile...

[monkeyshine]

That could be partially it. Maybe also that the old machine has a lot of stuff that opens on start up. And the drive is slower, and it has slower and less ram, slower processor, etc...

[mikegi]

There's a real advantage when you use P4-specific code for crunching bitmaps. In my first pass at writing SSE2 code, I've found at least a 2X increase over SSE (sometimes 4X). My code converts integer rgba to float rgba, does filtering, then converts back to integer. The SSE2 code is almost 9X faster than generic x86 code.

Another advantage to upgrading to a P4 cpu is that you'll also get an upgraded chipset. I built a new machine a month ago that uses a P4-2.26GHz, i845E chipset, and DDR266 RAM. The new chipset supports USB 2.0 which is much faster than USB 1.x.

One thing I don't like about my new system is that it only has a single processor. I built my old system around an el cheapo dual Celeron 400 mobo (the Abit BP6). It was smooooth. No jerkiness while multitasking.

[HAL9000]

A 3 Ghz Pentium reminds me of a Ferarri with bald tires stuck in the sand. The tires spin fast, it kicks up a lot of dust and makes a lot of noise - but there's no traction.