T.R | Title | User | Personal Name | Date | Lines |
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678.1 | 500 MHz Pentium II Demo - Real or Hype? | NPSS::NEWTON | Thomas Newton | Fri Apr 11 1997 19:34 | 9 |
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> ... expected to reach clock rates beyond 500 MHz by the year 2000 ...
> demonstrations included ... real-time 3D rendering on both a 300 MHz and
> 500 MHz Pentium II processor-based workstation
So does that mean Intel has 500 MHz Pentium IIs running in their labs?
Or did the demonstrations merely simulate the expected performance of such a
beast?
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678.2 | 300 mhz | ROM01::OLD_CIPOLLA | Bruno Cipolla | Tue Apr 22 1997 13:44 | 8 |
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+ INTEL READIES 300MHZ PENTIUM II
Intel Corp will include a 300MHz Pentium II in the announcement
early next month, Computer Reseller News Online hears - at a
price that will be as hot as the part: $1,980.
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678.3 | prices | ROM01::OLD_CIPOLLA | Bruno Cipolla | Tue Apr 22 1997 13:45 | 18 |
| + INTEL PLANS PENTIUM PRICE CUTS
Intel Corp announced Friday that all Pentium chips on the
market by the end of 1998 would include MMX instructions.
Separately, the Pentium II with MMX arrives on May 6, but
according to PC Week, the company will make its cuts on the
present its Pentium and Pentium Pro lines and Pentiums with MMX
ahead of the news. It hears that the price of the Pentium Pro
will barely move, falling to $415 from $428. The 200MHz Pro
with 256KB cache will be $515, off just $10; the 166MHz and
200MHz non-MMX parts will be cut about 30% and about 38%
respectively, so a 200MHz processor falls to about $295, a
166MHz to $195. Cuts on 166MHz and 200MHz MMX- enabled
processors are seen at 25% and 8% so the 166MHz falls to $255,
and the 200MHz at about $465. The 233MHz Pentium II are
expected to be priced at about $590, and the 266MHz at about
$725, and all prices are for orders of 1,000-up.
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678.4 | Real! | BSS::F_BLANDO | Je suis grand, beau, et fort! | Tue Apr 29 1997 21:14 | 5 |
| I was at Andy's presentation in Houston. He showed a dual processor Pentium II
300MHz workstation. He also showed a 450MHz single processor Pentium II
workstation (The Intel press release is wrong, it was 450MHz, not 500MHz).
Both were extremmly impressive and very real.
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678.5 | the juggernaut rolls on ... | TROOA::MSCHNEIDER | martin.schneider@tro.mts.dec.com | Wed Apr 30 1997 04:06 | 2 |
| Yes we should never underestimate Intel and what they are capable of
delivering.
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678.6 | ironic, isn't it? | CUJO::SAMPSON | | Wed Apr 30 1997 04:11 | 2 |
| Yes, especially with plenty of 64-bit AlphaServers
as development platforms!
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678.7 | | COMICS::CORNEJ | What's an Architect? | Wed Apr 30 1997 07:44 | 6 |
| re .6,
This would be a nice story to leak out :-)
Jc
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678.8 | | MOVIES::WIDDOWSON | Rod OpenVMS Engineering. Project Rock | Wed Apr 30 1997 09:23 | 2 |
| ...Of course their Fabs all run Vax/VMS. I always thought we should
get `VAX inside' engraved onto each Intel chip !!!...
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678.9 | | YIELD::HARRIS | | Wed Apr 30 1997 11:46 | 6 |
| > Yes we should never underestimate Intel and what they are capable of
> delivering.
Is any vendor currently delivering systems with anything better than
200Mhz Pentium Pro chips in them?
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678.10 | | SUTRA::16.36.2.107::Bats | Speeding, speeding, I'm always speeding | Wed Apr 30 1997 12:13 | 13 |
|
No.
Only 200Mhz Pentium Pro can be had.
Beginning of next month you will see the Pentium II 233MHz and
266Mhz ones. (At least from us, being PCBU)
233MHz Pentium Pro ones (with 1MB cache) should be around June
if I remember correctly.
Pjotrr
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678.11 | I have no Intel inside knowledge | CUJO::SAMPSON | | Wed Apr 30 1997 13:11 | 3 |
| I should hasten to add that I don't know what platform(s) Intel
actually uses for development. AlphaServers would be a good
(unofficial) rumor, though. Intel can certainly afford the best.
|
678.12 | rumors... | FORBIN::WILKINSON | | Wed Apr 30 1997 13:57 | 24 |
| Reports on the usenet suggested that some Pentium II inventory had
make it to Japan already and are available in retail stores.
Can anyone confirm the following:
Pentium II in the speed range 233MHz to 300MHz is 0.28u CMOS.
Above 300MHz is 0.25u CMOS.
The L2 cache accesses are double tick accesses for Pentium II
as compared to single tick accesses Pentium Pro. So, for
a given clock speed, Pentium II has half the L2 cache bandwidth
of the Pentium Pro.
Can anyone answer the following questions:
Does the Pentium II L2 cache use the same SRAM as the Pentium Pro?
Or is it commodity SRAM in a custom package? If proprietary, what is the
process technology roll out for the SRAM?
Hugh
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678.13 | on caches.... | PERFOM::LICEA_KANE | when it's comin' from the left | Wed Apr 30 1997 16:12 | 1117 |
678.14 | re: .9 by Yield::Harris | PERFOM::LICEA_KANE | when it's comin' from the left | Wed Apr 30 1997 16:26 | 26 |
| |> Yes we should never underestimate Intel and what they are capable of
|> delivering.
|
| Is any vendor currently delivering systems with anything better than
| 200Mhz Pentium Pro chips in them?
Except for a few folks playing overclocking games, no.
Yes the rumors about a 266MHz Pentium Pro last summer were greatly
exagerated.
BUT!
Intel claims that they still are following Moore's Law (which they
now define as doubling performance every 18-24 months, a subtle
change showing up in a recent visual computing white paper).
That means that a 400(+?) MHz Pentium II might be expected any
day now (for the very paranoid) or by the end of the 1997 (for
the just paranoid).
Or, to put it another way. That image in the mirror is only
12 months behind at integer performance. (But way way behind
at floating point.)
-mr. bill
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678.15 | | PCBUOA::KRATZ | | Wed Apr 30 1997 17:09 | 3 |
| You should read about DIGITAL's Celebris GL-2 (dual 266 P2) in
an upcoming (possibly next Monday's) PC Week.
K
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678.16 | NT SPEC numbers for Digital w/ Pentium II | FORBIN::WILKINSON | | Thu May 01 1997 13:30 | 3 |
| Will we be releasing NT SPEC numbers for the Celebris GL-2/1?
Hugh
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678.17 | | PCBUOA::KRATZ | | Thu May 01 1997 15:38 | 6 |
| The relabelled SBU box, PWS 266i2, may. The CSG group is currently
trying to figure out of they want to publish numbers with Intel
Reference compiler (good), or Microsoft compiler (not so good).
SPEC doesn't mean a lot to the PC/NT (desktop Celebris) market...
having long since moved on to real application benchmarks.
K
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678.18 | SPEC is composed of *real* benchmarks too | NPSS::WATERS | I need an egg-laying woolmilkpig. | Thu May 01 1997 16:38 | 6 |
| > having long since moved on to real application benchmarks.
Many people in DIGITAL and elsewhere are familiar with a majority of the
SPEC component benchmarks as real applications, used to develop our
products or run our business. I think you meant "desktop office
application", not "real application".
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678.19 | | PCBUOA::KRATZ | | Thu May 01 1997 17:13 | 5 |
| Well, even in the desktop hi-end NT market, real application benchmarks
(AutoCAD, CADbench, ProE, Photoshop,...) have pretty much supplanted
the synthetic loop-unrolled/KAPed "application" benchmarks in terms
of representing realistic system performance.
K
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678.20 | SPEC's have their place | SUBPAC::FARICELLI | | Thu May 01 1997 18:39 | 20 |
|
Oh boy, another p*ssing contest with Kratz!
OK, I'll bite. The SPEC benchmarks help measure performance across
a variety of computers/operating systems. They include, if I'm not
mistaken, SPICE 2G6 (the circuit simulator), a C compiler,
image compression, etc. We can quibble about whether these are
"applications" -- they are certainly better than things like
whetstones and that ilk that proceeded them. Until Alpha,
HP-PA, MIPS, PowerPC all get crushed by Intel, we'll still need
processor and OS independent benchmarking.
SPEC's give you an overview of a system. If you are
primarily concerned with Wintel apps, then by all means,
benchmark using those apps. Ditto for databases.
-- John Faricelli
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678.21 | | QUARK::LIONEL | Free advice is worth every cent | Thu May 01 1997 19:41 | 6 |
| I've seen some SPEC numbers from John Henning using DIGITAL Visual Fortran
which are quite good. The SPECbase numbers, in fact, were on a par with or
even better than UNIX. He hadn't run the "all out" SPECfp tests - NT doesn't
have all the post-optimization tools that UNIX does.
Steve
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678.22 | Both are useful. | TALLIS::GORTON | | Fri May 02 1997 12:28 | 48 |
|
Re: .19
Get real. SPEC has _never_ pretended to have it's benchmark programs
be representative of entire systems. EVER. Unlike the plethora of
"real application benchmarks" that you mention, SPEC very carefully
measures specific characteristics of a system. SPECint9x and SPECfp9x
measure CPU, memory, and compiler performance. The "system" benchmarks
that you talk about all have a very significant graphics component to
them, which means that poor general CPU performance can be hidden
behind a snappy graphics card. Benchmarks are intended to be methods
for customers to choose systems that are appropriate for them.
They (benchmarks) simply happen to be used as marketing tools, which
is why they are hyped a lot.
The history of SPEC is that it comes from a world where people wanted
to be able to very carefully measure specific attributes of systems
that they were evaluating for purchase. The PC marketplace is a
marketplace for the masses, with customers that often don't really
understand (for whatever reason) the performance characteristics of
what they are buying. And so the benchmarks are of the 'one app to fit
them all' variety. A complete synthesis of a lot of components boiled
down into a single measurement.
As an example, I don't particular depend upon graphics in my day-to-day
work, so a high-end graphics card would be wasted. But I can, and do
frequently use all of the computes and memory in my system. So when
my system was upgraded, it went from a Jensen to a 500Mhz PC164 with a
TGA graphics card, and a full load of memory. The applications I
typically use are compilers, and other low-level systems tools.
How many PC buyers use these "system" and "real application" benchmarks
but don't really understand how much their particular workloads are
influenced by the CPU speed, the graphics card, the memory subsystem,
or the disks? I would guess upwards of 30%.
The _really_ good thing about seeing SPEC95 performance numbers for
both a UNIX and an NT system means that for the very first time,
there is a way to have _some_ comparison (beyond clock speed) of the
compilers/OSs, and to see that the compilers for Alpha/NT don't suck.
Frankly, I think these numbers will go a long way to helping the
credibility of NT as a viable development platform for compute-hungry
users.
There is a place for SPEC, and there is a place for the "real
application benchmarks". SPEC is interesting for customers that
need to understand the computational characteristics of systems,
while BAPco, et. al. are useful for less sophisticated end-users.
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678.23 | | PCBUOA::KRATZ | | Fri May 02 1997 15:00 | 8 |
| If you want volume, you'll push application performance first
and foremost in the hi-end desktop NT market (and Alpha does
absolutely magnificent where ported; ProE, etc).
If you want to continue with what you're doing, SPEC has, and
will continue to, serve you fine.
regards,
Kratz
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678.24 | Intel doesn't bash SPEC, why does Kratz? | PERFOM::LICEA_KANE | when it's comin' from the left | Fri May 02 1997 16:54 | 30 |
| Oddly enough I suspect that Intel will publish another performance
brief next week.
Even more oddly, it will certainly contain SPEC CINT95 AND CFP95
results.
Actually, not oddly at all.
Intel categorizes CINT95 and CFP95 as COMPONENT APPLICATION BENCHMARKS.
They are indeed application benchmarks that measure a subsystem
of a computer.
And last I checked, Intel also publishes seven specific system-level
application benchmarks such as ProE.
For those seven applications, the application benchmarks are indeed
critical.
Certainly a ProE user might strongly consider the results of the
ProE benchmark. But winning the ProE benchmark probably isn't in
the mind of a Bryce 2 user when they are selecting a system to purchase.
(Winning ZD benchmarks, either application or synthetic, probably
does matter to more than a few Bryce 2 users. Same thing with
Byte benchmarks.)
-mr. bill
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678.25 | I'm pro-growth, not anti-SPEC | PCBUOA::KRATZ | | Fri May 02 1997 17:11 | 6 |
| Alpha sales are absolutely pathetic (0.1 market share) and stagnant
for the last year, Bill. You seem to have no bashfulness in blaming
sales and marketing... whaddaya say they try pushing something
different and see what happens?
Kratz
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678.26 | Pentium II - May 7, 1997 | PERFOM::LICEA_KANE | when it's comin' from the left | Wed May 07 1997 15:49 | 11 |
| The Pentium II 233, 266 and 300MHz are announced today.
233 266 300
SPECint95 9.49 10.8 11.6
SPECint_base95 9.49 10.8 11.6
SPECfp95 6.43 6.89 7.20
SPECfp_base95 5.84 6.36 6.78
price (Q1000) $636 $775 $1,981
Available now now Q3CY1997
-mr. bill
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678.27 | | RLTIME::COOK | | Wed May 07 1997 18:39 | 4 |
|
Any specification about the system this was produced in?
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678.28 | config | PCBUOA::KRATZ | | Wed May 07 1997 19:50 | 14 |
| The Pentium II Performance Brief is up on Intel's web site.
The SPEC95/Unix machine was kind of bland:
440FX
Pentium II with 512k
64Mb EDO
Matrox Millennium
IDE Quantum Fireball 1080 (curiously not that fast)
Unixware V2.0 and the Intel reference compilers.
Dell is selling pretty much the same hardware for $3899:
266, 512k, 64Mb EDO, 6.4Gb, 17", 8Mb Matrox, 16x CD,
wave table sound + Altec speakers, Iomega zip drive,
33.6k modem. Office97 small business edition, Windows95
Kratz
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678.29 | | HELIX::SONTAKKE | | Fri May 09 1997 13:37 | 5 |
| What's the timeframe on the availability of 21164PC motherboards? I
would like to see apple to apple (with the availability date, prices
and performance data) comparison.
- Vikas
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678.30 | From Electronics Weekly - 7-May-1997 | WOTVAX::16.194.64.143::16.195.0.183::bell | Martin Bell @BBP | Fri May 09 1997 14:53 | 28 |
| There is a nice article in this weeks Electronics Weekly, detailing
the "Pentium II debut".
The first half of the article compared the processors with those from
AMD and Cyrix. It says that the prices are $636 and $775 for the 233MHz
and 266MHz respectively (in 1,000 unit quantities).
However, it is the SECOND half of the article that is really interesting!
"The Pentium II fares less well when compared to Digital's recently
announced stripped down Alpha, the 21164PC. The Alpha for desktop PCs is
priced at $495 for a 533MHz part. Digital claims a SPECint95 of 14.3 and
a SPECfp95 of 17. In contrast the Pentium II manages only 10.8 and 6.9
respectively.
Intel plans to release a 300MHz workstation version of the Pentium II
in the second half of the year, priced at $1,981. This is believed to
be codenamed Deschutes, a 0.25um five layer metal shrink of Pentium II.
The current leading workstation processor, Digital's Alpha 21164, costs
under $2000 for a 400MHz part. Intel's 300MHz Pentium II has a SPECint95
of 11.6, compared to 11.7 for the Alpha. Floating point, however, is a
different story. Intel estimates 7.2 for SPECfp95, while the Alpha more
than doubles that at 15.9."
If only we got more press like this!
mb
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678.31 | present vs future comparison... | SMURF::STRANGE | Steve Strange, UNIX Filesystems | Fri May 09 1997 17:53 | 11 |
| > The current leading workstation processor, Digital's Alpha 21164, costs
> under $2000 for a 400MHz part. Intel's 300MHz Pentium II has a
> SPECint95 of 11.6, compared to 11.7 for the Alpha.
It's a bit annoying that they're making a comparison between the 21164
that has been out for a while, and the 300Mhz Pentium II which won't be
out for a few months. It would make more sense to compare with 600Mhz
21164, at the very least. But better press than we usually get (i.e.,
better than none)!
Steve
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678.32 | | PCBUOA::KRATZ | | Fri May 09 1997 19:03 | 4 |
| And the 400Mhz part was announced at $1913 ("under $2000") last
*March*... before the December price reductions. Hopefully
it's well under $1k now (or, if not, perhaps that helps explain
things...). K
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678.33 | Apples and Oranges | AWECIM::SEGAL | | Fri May 09 1997 20:54 | 3 |
| They weren't event close. I don't know how much a 400 mhz 21164 goes for, but,
I saw a note that the current price for a 500Mhz EV56 21164 is $995, so one
would hope/assume that the 400 (or 433) mhz chips are significantly cheaper.
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678.34 | But Which `DECchip 21164'? | XDELTA::HOFFMAN | Steve, OpenVMS Engineering | Mon May 12 1997 14:04 | 9 |
|
At the risk of harping on this, *which* DECchip 21164?
The `DECchip 21164', or the `DECchip 21164'?
The more recent -- often incorrectly called the 21164A -- has a
different internal code-name, EV56, and runs rather faster than
400 MHz, and has different instruction support, etc.
|
678.35 | I'd assume it's EV56 | WRKSYS::INGRAHAM | Andy | Mon May 12 1997 15:32 | 5 |
| I don't think the first `DECchip 21164' (aka EV5) runs as fast as 400 MHz.
Its upper limit had been 300 MHz, which I think was later upped to 333 MHz.
Even where EV5 and EV56 overlap (300-333 MHz), the EV56 is preferred for
new designs because of lower power (among others).
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678.36 | Missing A is really quite dumb | DECC::OUELLETTE | mudseason into blackfly season | Mon May 12 1997 15:37 | 4 |
| TurboLaser cranked the EV5 to 350 MHz (with a bit more power).
At least one of the 3rd party Alpha hardware houses clocked
EV5 at 400 MHz. And then there was the company with the
refrigerator like cold plate...
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678.37 | .35, .28, or .25? | TBLADE::GEEHAN | OpenVMS and NT; Perfect Together! | Tue May 13 1997 20:00 | 18 |
|
The Pentium II fact sheet in Intel's home page says that all three
speeds; 233, 266, & 300MHz are done with .35 micron. The info also
doesn't mention that the 300 won't be available until Q3CY97 (see reply
.30).
The speculation was that 'Klamath' 233 & 266 would be .28; and that
'Deschutes' would be a .25 shrink, 300MHz, possibly 333MHz.
Did Intel get 300MHz with .35, or is the speculation in .30 correct?
Would that make the 450MHz part the 'Deschutes' at .25? Or is the Intel
fact sheet wrong? Or maybe just creative marketing?
Thanks,
djg...
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