Pentium M to become THE CPU

  • Thread starter Thread starter Nathan Bates
  • Start date Start date
And you can heat your house in the winter.
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LOL! I *WISH* I could heat my tiny 1-bedroom apartment with the power
of even a dual-core Athlon64 X2!
The P-M is really low power
compared to Opteron, and of course P4 is in a class by itself for heat.
The SMP and FP issues are supposedly being addressed soon, as will
EMT64, current advantage is power. AMD realized this and recently
offered a mobil chip to be more competitive, so I guess AMD saw the need.
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They saw the need and solved it in a rather easy way, they used the
same sort of low-power manufacturing techniques that Intel used in the
Pentium-M and got a Turion. The main reason why the Pentium-M has
much lower power consumption than the Athlon64 has VERY little to do
with differences in the actual cores of the chips, it's mainly due to
the target market and trade-offs in manufacturing.

Sacrifice top speed and yields and you can get a chip with lower power
consumption. Tweak the knob the other way and you can get higher
yields but at the expense of higher power consumption, fine for your
Sempron/Celeron line. A slightly different tweak gives you maximum
clock speeds for your Athlon64 FX and Pentium Extreme Edition chips.
I don't think the P-M is going to make everything else go away, but at
the moment the play is in low power, no matter what the O.P. thinks.
Click to expand...

Aside from laptops, the play is NOT in low power, it is in performance
per watt and per $. If low-power was all that mattered than Transmeta
and VIA might have managed more than 1% market share between them.

The Pentium-M is a decent base to build on, but it's not going to
dominate the desktop world in it's current form. Of course, the
Athlon64 is also a rather good base to build on, and while it similar
might struggle to dominate the laptop world with just process tweaks,
it's sitting rather pretty in the desktop world.
 
Alex Johnson wrote:

....
I find that hard to believe since the leakage alone on the Pentium 4 is
somewhere over 20W (details and sources elude me at the moment).
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The Pentium4 is a power pig with (if you're talking about Prescott) a
30+ stage pipeline (as contrasted with IIRC 12 - 14 stages in Athlon64,
which IIRC is comparable to Banias/Dothan's). I suspect the Athlon64
referred to is a low-voltage model, 2 GHz is getting close to the bottom
of its clock range these days, and the use of SOI should cut its leakage
even more compared with the Intel products.

So what's so hard to believe?

- bill
 
Bill Todd wrote:

....

I suspect the Athlon64
referred to is a low-voltage model,
Click to expand...

Whoops - if it's a vanilla 3800+ I guess not (unless *all* 3800+s are:
they were introduced after the original faster models so they could be,
but I haven't heard any suggestion that they are). But the other
comments stand.

- bill
 
Bill said:
Bill Todd wrote:

...

I suspect the Athlon64

Whoops - if it's a vanilla 3800+ I guess not (unless *all* 3800+s are:
they were introduced after the original faster models so they could be,
but I haven't heard any suggestion that they are). But the other
comments stand.
Click to expand...

I think it is a vanilla chip, not a low-voltage model.

I have a friend with an brand-new Athlon X2-4400+ system that has
a metered ThermalTake PSU. It has 3 GB of RAM and a temporary
Matrox G550 PCI video card. At Idle and full-tilt is eats 39 W
and 159W respectively. At boot-time with the hard drives all
spinning up it peaks at 193W. If you assume that half of that
39W idle power is used by CPU, that is still only 20 W for a chip
that has twice as much L2 per core as the X2-3800+.

It will be interesting to see the new power consumption numbers
change when his PCI-E video card arrives.
 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it is intended to fit into a standard
(socket 939) motherboard¹? So if there is a demand for quiet PCs (in
addition to laptops), the market should be ready.
Click to expand...

IIRC, Turion fits into a standard s754 board (must have BIOS and
voltages to support it). May be also a good upgrade path for 754
board owners, though on expensive side (naturally, mobile parts were
always more expensive than their desktop brethren).

NNN
 
Bill Todd said:
I suspect the Athlon64 referred to is a low-voltage model, 2 GHz is
getting close to the bottom of its clock range these days, and the
use of SOI should cut its leakage even more compared with the Intel
products.
Click to expand...

Turion64 comes in (peak) 25W and 35W, I would think idling on 50% of
max is rather high? BTW, are low-voltage dual core parts even
available?

-k
 
[email protected] said:
IIRC, Turion fits into a standard s754 board (must have BIOS and
voltages to support it).
Click to expand...

Right - I just found a web store selling them.
[..] on expensive side (naturally, mobile parts were
always more expensive than their desktop brethren).
Click to expand...

The price is not too bad, actually. Certainly cheaper than
Pentium M, both motherboard and chip.

-k
 
Ketil said:
Turion64 comes in (peak) 25W and 35W, I would think idling on 50% of
max is rather high?
Click to expand...

Supposedly AMD uses a process tweaked somewhat differently for its
mobile parts, so the two may not be directly comparable.

BTW, are low-voltage dual core parts even
available?
Click to expand...

Beats me - though IIRC they haven't been out as long as the single-core
parts were before LV versions appeared there (then again, having
followed that road already it shouldn't take as long to retrace it).

- bill
 
In comp.sys.intel Oliver S. said:
So for high-performance-applications you would have to nail a thread to a
certain CPU and use an API that would give you memory-pages that
physically map to the memory attached to the CPU. But I'm not aware of any
OS that supports this processor-affine allocations.
Click to expand...

Both Windows and Linux support tying a thread or process to a given CPU;
it's hard to imagine a SMP-capable OS that doesn't. Linux has some support
for efficient memory allocation on NUMA systems, although it's a good deal
more limited than what you suggest.
 
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