Ok I just wanted to rant a bit about Intel and the fact that it seems to have gone schizophrenic. First I must give credit to some excellent articles that I used to jog my memory a bit, Part I and II. arstechnica is just great for really in depth technical articles.
Anyway so things have been pretty settled in the land of Intel for a while. By that I mean that there have been steady and incremental speed increases and not gigantic changes in the overall PC. In mid 1997 the Pentium II came out and brought with it AGP and the ATX standard. The RAM at that point was still SDRAM. The Pentium II was basically a newer Pentium Pro with some tweaks to speed up 16-bit code. It also took the L2 Cache out of the processor package but still on the processor itself, this lowered its speed however.
In early 1999 the Pentium III came out. It basically picked up where the PII left off. Just added some new multimedia functions and bumped up the speed. The one major change was integrating the L2 cache back into processor and returning it to full speed. At this point Intel had one of its hiccups and tried to force RDRAM down the throats of everyone. Luckily, it failed fairly rapidly and everyone went back to the course of speeding up SDRAM. All along though the other major components in the computer kept chugging along.
In mid 2001 Intel unveiled the Pentium 4 processor. At first it was barely faster in raw MHz a quite a bit slower in real usage. Intel had made a dramatic shift in the way the processor worked, this was supposedly to allow the processor to scale to higher MHz faster and easier. This it did do, but all the while being slower clock for clock than its competitors such as AMD and the former P3. As the P4 progressed its external clock speed went from 400 MHz to 533 and then to 800. In order to keep up the memory changed from standard SDRAM to DDR and now DDR2.
In mid 2003 Intel released the P4 with Hyper-Threading. This allowed the chip to act like 2 processors at most times. This was actually a good increase in performance and even revitalized it for a while.
Other changes have now started occurring on the PC front as well. USB was released and came into its own. At this point the legacy ports of Parallel, Serial and PS/2 are all dead. I say good riddance, however it makes a great deal of legacy products useless on newer machines. SerialATA was released, which in time will totally replace how HD, CD/DVD and other storage are attached to computers. Most recently PCI Express (not to be confused with the apparently short lived server standard of PCI-X) has started showing up on motherboards. This is the replacement initially for AGP and eventually for PCI itself. Again this is a good thing, however it kills off many legacy products. Lastly, there is now a new motherboard standard called BTX. Along with the new motherboards it will bring new Power Supply and Case standards.
The last gasp of the P4 was recently released, named the Prescott-2M core. This processor is most likely going to be the last of the now dead P4 line. It has introduced EM64T instructions, which are Intel's emulation of AMD's x86-64 instruction set. It also has doubled the L2 cache to 2 MB. Essentially this chip is barely if at all faster than the previous generation of P4 which has been said for a while. In the summer of 2003 the 3.2 GHz P4 was released, today we have the newest P4 running at 3.6 GHz with almost an identical clock for clock speed. In almost 2 year we have barely gotten a 15% speed improvement.
There is hope on the horizon however. In early 2003 a new mobile processor was introduced called the Pentium M. Many will know as part of the Intel Centrino package that also includes wireless and core chipsets. This chip currently is nothing short of amazing. Take a look at this page of a review of the latest P4. Look for the lines on Pentium M and Pentium M 2.4. The 2.4 line is a slightly overclocked version to simulate a soon to be released chip. You will notice the PM is totally destroying other Intel chips that are more than 50% faster in GHz.
This amazing chip is basically a Pentium III with a few of the good parts of the P4 thrown in. Those being the Hyper Transport bus to allow for faster external clock speeds and the MMX and SSE instruction sets. Currently the PM is hampered by slower RAM and lower end chipsets since it was designed for laptops where those aspects allow for less heat and longer battery life. Intel is slowly ramping up the speed and features on this processor, and I assume at this point that is the heir apparent to the desktop throne once the P4 is put to rest. Intel has been very quiet about this processor and comparing it to the P4, also it is currently priced a bit high.
Now the purpose of this rant, directed at Intel. Stop all development of the P4, just sell what you have now. You have already scrapped anything beyond 3.8 GHz, why waste any more time. Give me a Pentium M with 2 MB of cache, a 800 MHz bus, EM64T (x86-64) at a normal price. If you could throw in Hyper-Threading, dual cores or heck both great. If not down the line is fine. Give me a chip set that has PCI Express, SATA and all the other goodies in a desktop board. Package it up all nice on a BTX platform and let us all move forward.
There was a nice stable run of 6-7 years now lets get the next evolution of PCs. We can all see it coming, just stop dragging your feet.
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