Prescott - The Last of the Mohicans?

[drucer]

Pentium 4's story is almost at an end and soon this great processor line will be discontinued. :( It's a good time to analyze it's good and it's bad.

I stumbled across a document detailing Pentium 4's NetBurst architecture and its peculiarities. Very interesting and insightful article! This makes a good bedtime reading, so if you haven't read it yet, I suggest you do. This article will teach you tons of things about processors. It's interesting to look inside of the processor.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/print/netburst-1.html

Enjoy!

[Lovechild]

Die p4.. die die die..

It was mainly designed with marketing in mind, it scaled beautifully to high GHz ratings which has become an easy way to sell CPUs - however the performance/watt and performance/MHz ratios on the P4 are horrid.

Luckily now they realised their mistake and have gone back to the brilliant P3 design (on which the Pentium-M was based).

Not that Intel are really innovating, there are so many things I'd like to see - like clockless CPUs, there have been a lot of efforts in this area even from Intel themselves - they had a clockless prototype of the Pentium chip which used nearly no power and performed really well, however for some reason it never got past the prototype stage.

And why are we still sticking to the x86 instruction set, there are far better models to rely on, and we can use software to translate untill compilers and programs are written to use the new instruction set.. the overhead would be fairly small.

One thing I'm happy to see if that Intel are going away from adding a lot of fairly pointless power consuming specialised circuits that added only minutely to performance, and they are pushing for multi core cpus - which is an excellent way to lower latency on the desktop which is what we really need - not ever increasing performance. People want their applications to start up when they click on them, they already run fast enough.

[Sirin]

32-Bit must die sometime. ;) It's time we moved on. (http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_9484,00.html) :)

[Lovechild]

32-Bit must die sometime. ;) It's time we moved on. (http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_9484,00.html) :)

Really.. what does 64 bit offer me currently that is so invaluable - to date I don't really see anything except a little bit of performance in areas that have been especially rewritten to support it. Aside native NX which most modern CPUs will have anyways, 64bit or not I don't see a clear advantage for the desktop user - our machines are already quite powerful enough for most things.

What I've been hearing people scream for is smaller, silent machines and better security. I'd like to see a crypto device in every single CPU (like the VIA C3 has btw.), lower powered dual or more core chips (since latency is far more important than outright performance).

And why are we still using harddrives.. it's silly, while solid state devices are still a way off, spinning up the drive requires power and it makes noise - not to mention the fact that harddrives are far from reliable storage devices.

By far the slowest part in a computer is the harddrive, I cannot state the immense speedup the entire system will get once we have solid state storage of sufficient capacity to replace harddrives - in the meantime, maybe adding a 512meg cache to harddrives would mediate the problem.

[mstlyevil]

You can thank AMD for the death of the P4 architecture. AMD did three things that caused Intel to rethink how they made their chips.

1. AMD created the first 64bit chip and sucessfully marketed it to the public.
2. AMD added the memory controler to the processor and eliminated the front side bus bottleneck significantly improving performance.
3. AMD Designed and built the first dual core from the ground up. Intel had to throw one together to compete and just stuck 2 P4 cores on the same die. Both the X2 and the Opteron Dual core chips have independent memory controlers for each core blowing away the P4 in overall performance at a lower clock speed and they use a lot less power and do not produce as much heat.

Right now most applications we use today do not take advantage of the extra power and memory available but new games and applications should be out in the next year that will require 64 bit computing and dual core processing. So the answer to those that think we do not need 64 bit computing is just wait a year and make that statement then.