Intel yesterday formally began selling its Pentium 4 6xx series, rolling out four versions of the 90nm, 2MB L2 cache chip. The chip giant also added its latest P4 Extreme Edition to its official price list. The P4 630 (I got one of these), 640, 650 and 660 are clocked at 3, 3.2, 3.4 and 3.6GHz, respectively. All four chips support an 800MHz frontside bus. They also bring Intel’s AMD64-like 64-bit addressing technology, EM64T, to the mainstream desktop, along with the latest version of the company’s SpeedStep power management system, to minimise energy consumption. The anti-virus ‘execute disable’ bit is also supported.
Intel ships 64-bit, 2MB L2 Pentium 4s
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Hot, slow, expensive, and lacking an on-die memory controller. There is currently absolutely no reason to buy Intel. And don’t give me that “it’s more stable” bullshit.
It seems I’ve been living under the rock recently… What socket type will that be?
Why couldn’t they call it something other than pentium 4? It’s different enough that they should have called it pentium 5.
They didn’t change to p5 when they brought out Prescott because they wanted to avoid the problems when they moved from p3 to p4 – people expected performance to increase per clock cycle, but of course it didn’t.
I guess they don’t want to get people too enthused now, being as this product line is essentially a dead end.
Everytime I hear of x86_64 they say that it’s only 64bit addressing. Isn’t it supposed to be a fully featured 64bit CPU (I was thought in my school that “bittness” of the accumulator register says what type of CPU we deal with)? As far as I know AMD64 has 8 general purpose registers that are 64bit, does this make it a “full 64bit” processor or only one that is able to address 64bit memory space?
Does this actually support 64-bit addressing? Even AMD64 CPUs only support 48-bit addressing (40-bit physical), so if these support a full 64-bits, there may be reason for some (rare?) people to prefer them over AMD…
# grep address /proc/cpuinfo
address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
AMD multicores with higher clockspeeds and some architectural tweaks…I am waiting for those…oh yeah!
glad to see intel is getting back in the game. now how about a niec dual core Itanium next generation chip for my desktop
amd64 has _16_ 64-bit registers, double that of ordinary i386 architecture. although the instruction decoder in cpu does register renames it certainly helps to have more addressable registers from a compiler viewpoint – and this leads to a slight performance increase.
those registers can be used for arithmetics, for data addressing, thus making the amd64 truly a 64bit cpu.
I don’t think any modern 64-bit CPU has full 64-bit hardware addressing into memory. They just provide enough bits to access enough terabytes of RAM to satisfy the current generation of computers. I think the CPUs are 64-bit from any software point of view, just that the hardware isn’t up to really consuming 64-bits worth of RAM (that’s a lot of RAM!).
All Intel has is their brand, right now. Opteron is a superior chip by nearly every measurement, including power consumption, bandwidth, and most benchmarks. The only reason I can think to buy a 64-bit chip from Intel is if my only choice was to buy from Dell. Suprise, there are many choices beyond Dell.
Intel’s current AMD64 chips were designed behind the scenes as a hedge for Itanic, and it shows that they weren’t given Intel’s full resources.
Space heaters from Intel, now in 64-bit flavor!
Now that Intel has a non-Itanic 64 bit chip, Microsoft will quit dragging it’s feet and release XP64. Not that it matters, none of us need more that 1gb of ram, much less 8gb.
I just got one for my system. It seems to outperform the 560 chip and runs very cool. It seems to have a nice speed steping system plus 2 mb cache makes it function quick.
My .02
heh, can never have to much ram, 4 gigs on this machine
>Now that Intel has a non-Itanic 64 bit chip, Microsoft
>will quit dragging it’s feet and release XP64. Not that
>it matters, none of us need more that 1gb of ram, much
>less 8gb.
For servers, that’s not true. For almost everything else, spot on.
>I just got one for my system. It seems to outperform the
>560 chip and runs very cool. It seems to have a nice
>speed steping system plus 2 mb cache makes it function
>quick.
For the difference in price, it had damned well better. But one wonders how it compares to AMD’s five month old FX-55 in terms of performance, price, reliability, power usage, availability, throughput, features… that’s what matters, now isn’t it?
My guess: it’s not so favourable.
I got 512MB and don’t ever use swap. I don’t keep log files or anyhing, but for desktop usage right now with folding@home I have 169MB free and 0 swap usage. This is FreeBSD btw.
I think the FX 55 will smoke the Intel. At least in 32 bit apps. On 64 bit I think performance would be closer. Intel has a very significant advantage on media encoding apps…I could be mistaken but I read somewhere it was cause of the compiler or something not quite sure.
Does anyone know whether GCC supports parameters-in-registers function calling on AMD64, instead of on the stack? If that is the case, I think the performance increase will be more than “slight”.
The anti-virus ‘execute disable’ bit is also supported.
what does this mean ? How would you disable executing of something in processor level ??
Anandtech has a good article on the new intel CPU’s and yes they are not too impressive. You still get a huge performance boost from the memory controller being on die with the AMD64 processors. I am a long time intel fan i have bought intel for the past 10 years at least. Recently i purchased an AMD64 based machine an i have to say they have come a long way with compatiblity and frankly the 1.8GHZ CPU smokes my 2.4GHZ HT P4 . It BSOD’s every once in a while but that becasue of the MOBO manufaturer trying to cram 20 devices on 15 irq’s and crappy BIOS implementation. My next gaming machine will be an AMD64 machine with 64-bit Windows i think.
Well well well, there they go again…. I am glad taht in Japan there is a monopoly court case against Intel going on!!!
they have CONTROLLED the market for the past 12 years (x86)
the P4 when it came out was a dead processor, then with optimisation it became an Athlon competitor.
Now that Intel has all the marketing dollars at work for the Centrino brand name everything else seem like a half assed attempt at the desktop market…
the only 2 things to come out of Intel are the P3 and the Pentium M (essentially the same thing)
AMD has made many advancements to the x86 market…
“AMD has made many advancements to the x86 market.”
agreed includng
3D now, which was superseeded by SSE and SSE2
on-die memory controller, DDR is still dominant
adoption of HT
cool n’ quiet
x86-64
UMA
dual core
one question i have is why AMD only added 16 registers, rather, than say, 32 or 64, as some of the registers are rename registers.
intel emt64 has no IOMMU, so it does not handle large amounts of RAM (>4GB) as effectively as amd64.