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pinto32

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 19, 2003
361
0
PA
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/173750_intelchips18.html


Looks like for all the complaints about Motorola, things could have gotten a lot worse over here in Macville......

"Last week, after the company said that it was making a fundamental break with its traditional chip-design approach, some analysts and former Intel designers said that Intel was coming to terms with escalating heat problems so severe they threatened to cause its chips to fracture at extreme temperatures."
 

Sol

macrumors 68000
Jan 14, 2003
1,564
6
Australia
Room for improvement yet.

Less emphasis on new processors will force computer makers to improve on component speed and performance. Hard drives seem to get bigger every year but not faster so they have a lot of room to grow. RAM could grow in capacity and displays could become sharper.

As for Intel's strategy to "go 200 miles per hour until we hit a brick wall", it sounds like a stupid way to kill themselves. The dual-core processor will not do anything to avoid the wall so they still have to find an alternative to x86.
 

crenz

macrumors 6502a
Jul 3, 2003
619
27
Shanghai, China
Well, the 3rd generation Itanium looks to perform really well, even better than the Power architecture. Also, the Pentium-M still has some momentum left. So there's no need to declare the death of Intel yet.
 

johnnyjibbs

macrumors 68030
Sep 18, 2003
2,964
122
London, UK
Well, Intel managed to cause the "megaherzt myth" and now they're suffering because of it! When we got our 1999 PC, it was a Pentium III 500MHz. About 4 months later, they had hit 1GHz and then were soon at P4 2GHz. Yet the Pentium 4 has been stuck at around 3/3.2/3.4 GHz for at least 2 years now. Meanwhile, the average consumer is expecting 6GHz chips by now :D

After owning my PowerBook for 7 months I'm not nearly so worried now about only having a 1GHz processor!
 

Koodauw

macrumors 68040
Nov 17, 2003
3,951
190
Madison
Well, I doubt this will spell the end of intel, but it would be nice to see some upgraded componets. Faster HD's, faster FSB, etc. I would appreciate that more than jacked up processor speeds.
 

Mav451

macrumors 68000
Jul 1, 2003
1,657
1
Maryland
*Faster HDs, more RELIABLE HDs*

This should be the most important thing. Other than SCSI's, most HD's are not as failure-proof as we'd like to think. After 4-5 years, you run into a chance that your HD may fail--I mean, we have come so far in computer technology (64bit/32bit CPUs in the G5 and Athlon 64) and yet, physical/hardware data storage reliability, as a whole has remained largely unaddressed!

While solid state is ludicrously expensive, it is the only solution with NO moving parts--which means no areas that can suffer fatigue (that over time will fail).
 

szark

macrumors 68030
May 14, 2002
2,886
0
Arid-Zone-A
Mav451 said:
While solid state is ludicrously expensive, it is the only solution with NO moving parts--which means no areas that can suffer fatigue (that over time will fail).

Electronic components can most definitely suffer fatigue and failure. Much less frequently than moving parts, of course, but failure would still be an issue.
 

Mav451

macrumors 68000
Jul 1, 2003
1,657
1
Maryland
szark said:
Electronic components can most definitely suffer fatigue and failure. Much less frequently than moving parts, of course, but failure would still be an issue.

Ahh, well I'll be alot happier with at least mechanical failure out of the way.
 

JFreak

macrumors 68040
Jul 11, 2003
3,151
9
Tampere, Finland
solid state is also moving parts - it's just that the moving parts are so much smaller.

i'd say the storage with no parts would be some kind of optical crystal we have so far seen in some scifi movies; however, that could be possible in the near future, and that's what we should be looking for.

flash memory is quite fragile when used extensively, so it cannot replace hard drives in terms of reliability in long term. sure, it can take more abuse than hard drives, but flash memory begins to die at some point and that's far more severe a damage than gradual appearance of bad sectors in hard drive technology.

if only we had optical storage without a need of spinning the storage - it would be far more reliable to just move the ray of light.
 

wdlove

macrumors P6
Oct 20, 2002
16,568
0
pinto32 said:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/173750_intelchips18.html


Looks like for all the complaints about Motorola, things could have gotten a lot worse over here in Macville......

"Last week, after the company said that it was making a fundamental break with its traditional chip-design approach, some analysts and former Intel designers said that Intel was coming to terms with escalating heat problems so severe they threatened to cause its chips to fracture at extreme temperatures."

Is this escalating heat problem something that new cooling designs would help to alleviate?
 

quagmire

macrumors 604
Apr 19, 2004
6,870
2,292
MacFan26 said:
Fracturing chips. That's not cool! Hopefully Apple won't be going Intel anytime soon as rumors have said.


That rumor almost came true. We all know that Apple wasn't going to moto for the G5. So Apple was struggling to find a processor producer. They were affraid that they would have to go to intel. That would mean totally reformatting the mac platform and we would probably be stilling using the G4's mainly and the G5 would be still under development. But, IBM came and saved us with their version of the Powerpc.
 

windowsblowsass

macrumors 6502a
Jan 25, 2004
782
438
pa
Macmaniac said:
Somewhere in Silicon Valley a Windows user is saying, "DOH!!!"
Next thing you know Microsoft starts porting Longhorn onto PPC;) Available in 2300 :p
Ah Intel finally getting what it deserves, a nice big brick wall, now lets hope IBM can snap out of it.
actually this isnt that far off xbox2 is powerpc and nt ran on ppc so ms could very well hgave support
 

MrMacMan

macrumors 604
Jul 4, 2001
7,002
11
1 Block away from NYC.
wdlove said:
Is this escalating heat problem something that new cooling designs would help to alleviate?

Current 'new' devices are warter cooling (partially allieviates the problem)

More futuristic ones are liquid nitrogen... but thats is yeearrs off... haha.
 

tigerkachel

macrumors newbie
Oct 29, 2001
9
0
Speed

All these discussions about pentium and power pc... I just notived that a friend of mine who just bought a new dell notebook used my powerbook and told me afterwords that it is faster than his notebook and wht kind of intel chip I had in it, doohhh??
 

BornAgainMac

macrumors 604
Feb 4, 2004
7,275
5,212
Florida Resident
My Fastest PC

My fastest PC was a PIII 450 Mhz machine. I have a laptop at PIII 1Ghz but it felt a little bit slower due to the speed of the hard drive. It has the same amount of memory (512).

Because I felt like my PIII was fast, I thought even the slowest machine on the market for a few hundred dollars would blow me away. Recently I saw a computer in a store for about $450 including monitor. It was a Celeron 2.7 Ghz or something. The monitor was difficult to view without getting a headache. And the speed felt slow just navigating in Windows. I know it only had 128 MB of Ram with XP Home and the video card was one of those built-in motherboard kind but I was expecting to be blow away with the speed.

At work I noticed the P4 machines running at 2 Ghz feel like the same speed as my PIII as far as booting, installing software, loading programs, etc. I use to encode AVI files to MPEG-1 files with my PC and I wonder if the speed was that much better with the P4. It's difficult to gauge performance from the 'feel' compared to real world benchmarks.
 

wrldwzrd89

macrumors G5
Jun 6, 2003
12,110
77
Solon, OH
pinto32 said:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/173750_intelchips18.html


Looks like for all the complaints about Motorola, things could have gotten a lot worse over here in Macville......

"Last week, after the company said that it was making a fundamental break with its traditional chip-design approach, some analysts and former Intel designers said that Intel was coming to terms with escalating heat problems so severe they threatened to cause its chips to fracture at extreme temperatures."
Intel's biggest problem at this point is the engineering philosophy of the Pentium 4. That chip is so poorly designed that a die shrink to 90nm produced barely any power use reduction. IBM's got the right idea with the PPC970fx (half the power use of the PPC970); sadly, the yields aren't very good yet. The Pentium M is MUCH better in both power consumption and clock-for-clock efficiency - Intel should have seen it coming earlier. Oh well - I guess IBM has the advantage (over Intel) for the time being.
 
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