On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, Michael Hackett wrote:
This is the part that shocks me. When did Intel take the x86 from the
biggest power hog in the industry to the low power range? Last I saw,
PPC was better by a factor of 3, and Transmeta and ARM were light years
ahead of everyone. (Granted, the last two have different architectures
and are not in the same league speedwise.)
The Pentium 4 is the end of the line for the 'Netburst' architecture, from
here on out it is Intel's design team in Israel that will be making the
next big archicture, because they designed the Pentium M, and look at
this:
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050525/pentium4-21.html
"With the help of a simple socket adapter card and a BIOS upgrade, certain
mainboards using Intel's 865/875 chipsets can be upgraded to use a Pentium
M instead of a Pentium 4. Such a system offers up-to-date performance
paired with low power requirements. Additionally, we were able to raise
the FSB from 133 to 160 MHz without any trouble at all. The result was
that our 2.13GHz Pentium M 770 ended up running at 2.56 GHz! At this clock
speed, our two year old platform was able to beat the processor
heavyweights Athlon 64 FX and Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition in all 3D
games!"
I also don't get why anyone but a very tiny minority need a laptop
faster than a G4.
I have a friend who's a professional graphics artist and is completely
hampered by his 1Ghz G4 PowerBook when it comes to working with large
Illustrator files, and has been waiting and waiting for a G5 PowerBook,
and is now going to just wait until next year.
In fact, all of the Intel laptops I looked at recently that had
reasonably battery life (>5 hours) were all in the 1-MHz range. That
would indicate that, even with Intel, you have to give up some
processing power to get long battery life.
Pentium M has very good power consumption/heat generation relative to
performance.
Oh well, I guess -- being the geek I am -- I just get frustrated when
the better technology (PPC) loses. It's funny, though, that Apple -- who
represents this position in the commercial OS area -- would be involved
this time.
Motorola was a lousy partner, and IBM, probably thanks to the PowerPC
being the heart of every next-generation console, has turned out to be a
lousy partner as well (Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are all more
important customers than Apple now). Apple needs a partner who is being
pushed by a real competitor (AMD) as well as other CPU sourcing options
(AMD).
And a last point: Seems to me that both NeXT and SGI made similar moves
and it didn't work out well for either. Big gamble. Big gamble.
NeXT was a niche player at best and their OS ran on a very limited range
of PCs and peripherals that they did not produce, and SGI never ported
IRIX to x86 (big mistake - x86 SGIs only run Win2k). This is a very
different situation, and I am cautiously optimistic.
- Nate
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