Overclocking now is much easier no FSB to deal with limiting the overclock. Back then the Prescott did not overclock better than they do now, also many more Hz with my cheap motherboard GA Z170 HD3, i5 6600k 4.5GHz on air, that is great.
Yeah, Prescott was awful. The 31 stage pipeline meant that it had worse IPC than the Northwood chips it was replacing due to a hefty branch misprediction penalty. I suppose Intel engineers were anticipating to clock to speeds near or above 5GHz, but that never came to fruition. It gets points for hitting a stock speed of 3.8GHz on a 90nm process though.
I'm going to have to disagree. I think overclocking with the FSB was way easier than it is now.
Overclocking now is much easier no FSB to deal with limiting the overclock. Back then the Prescott did not overclock better than they do now, also many more Hz with my cheap motherboard GA Z170 HD3, i5 6600k 4.5GHz on air, that is great.
I suppose Intel engineers were anticipating to clock to speeds near or above 5GHz, but that never came to fruition. It gets points for hitting a stock speed of 3.8GHz on a 90nm process though.
I think the point is also k7 was made using external buy up. If zen is good then its the first successfull inhouse ground up design in their history...I don't think, that NexGen had the K7 in preparation. More likely, their engineers, together with AMD's original ones (29K, K5), and those acquired from DEC (Alpha), did the K7 from ground up (1995 - 1999 sounds about right).
I don't believe we'll ever see CPUs beyond 5GHz , even with overclocking. That's a physics limitation, not incompetence. No stable overclock on air has done much beyond 5GHz and that's a telling sign. Across manufacturers, ISAs, process.
That is unless you can cool a 1000W CPU. Perhaps we'll see it break the 10GHz barrier, but realistically after 5GHz the thermals/power use skyrocket.
P-M was clearly better than P-4 while using way less power. It was very competitive with AMD as well but I wouldn't say it "blew away everything". The P-M had a somewhat weaker FPU than it's competition (from AMD and Intel). It was Core 2 Duo that corrected this while completely taking the performance crown back.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/1610/7
The other problem was the price/performance ratio wasn't particularly great. Here is a list of prices of various CPU's from when AMD did their P-M Desktop experiment:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/1610/3
Dothan was a pretty solid chip, but blowing everything else away might be a bit of an overstatement. http://www.anandtech.com/show/1610
Anandtech said:But what about the bigger picture? What does our most recent look at the performance of Intel's Core Duo tell us about future Intel desktop performance? We continue to see that the Core Duo can offer, clock for clock, overall performance identical to that of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 - without the use of an on-die memory controller. "
Is that really true? I'm being honest. I don't follow cpu tech that closely especially newer post 2002 designs.I think the point is also k7 was made using external buy up. If zen is good then its the first successfull inhouse ground up design in their history...
I doubt that's true.Is that really true? I'm being honest. I don't follow cpu tech that closely especially newer post 2002 designs.
No that was K6.. K5 was a failure, K6 was NexGen.. K7 design was done at AMD (and it borrowed a lot of ideas from the Alpha) and it was led by Dirk Meyer who came from DEC. K8 (Hammer) was also done at AMD..I think the point is also k7 was made using external buy up. If zen is good then its the first successfull inhouse ground up design in their history...
The K7 and K8 CPUs certainly give Intel major headaches at the time. And reportedly Intel even sold the first Celerons at a loss to keep people from buying K6-2 processors.No that was K6.. K5 was a failure, K6 was NexGen.. K7 design was done at AMD (and it borrowed a lot of ideas from the Alpha) and it was led by Dirk Meyer who came from DEC. K8 (Hammer) was also done at AMD..
Aye those were the years.. the megahertz wars. I had a K6-2, Athlon Thunderbird, and later the first Opteron. All great products.The K7 and K8 CPUs certainly give Intel major headaches at the time. And reportedly Intel even sold the first Celerons at a loss to keep people from buying K6-2 processors.
Yeah the first system I built was an Socket A Duron later upgraded to the Thunderbird Athlon.Aye those were the years.. the megahertz wars. I had a K6-2, Athlon Thunderbird, and later the first Opteron. All great products.
Ehh. Wasnt that what i was writing?No that was K6.. K5 was a failure, K6 was NexGen.. K7 design was done at AMD (and it borrowed a lot of ideas from the Alpha) and it was led by Dirk Meyer who came from DEC. K8 (Hammer) was also done at AMD..
I'm not sure I subscribe to the idea that Intel's 90nm was such a dud. You only have to look at the Dothan Pentium M's to see what was possible.
Ehh. Wasnt that what i was writing?
Neither k6 nor k7 was internal projects only.
Dothan was a good performer - very good for the time and power envelope, actually - but its TDP was no better than the older Banias model, and there were actually a few areas such as standby power usage and overall power leakage where it was actually noticeably worse than Banias. It's just that, well, Pentium M was such a well-engineered chip that Dothan bumped up said stats from "negligible" to "very slightly less negligible."
Intel's 90nm wasn't such a failure that they couldn't produce a decent product at all, but it was almost certainly the worst of Intel's main manufacturing processes.
With K6 they purchased the design from NexGen and tweaked it to better suit their manufacturing processes and make it Socket 7 compatible, that much is true. However, K7 was almost all their own work, aside from the EV6 bus, which was originated by DEC.
In fact, in some ways K7 was actually an even more impressive achievement than the K8 family. With K8, AMD had an advantage in that Intel's main competitor was based on a much older design in the case of Gallatin, and horribly misdesigned in the case of Prescott. However, Intel didn't really make any major errors with the Pentium III's design; AMD just made a CPU that was better in virtually every department, with the only major weakness being worse cache performance.
K7 was an inhouse project. Not sure what you mean.. They didn't buy a firm with a K7 design. They designed K7 in house. What am I missing?Ehh. Wasnt that what i was writing?
Neither k6 nor k7 was internal projects only.
K5 was bad. Prior processors was copies.
K8 was an evolvement from k7.
BD that was inhouse was a failure
=
If zen is good its first time in history a successfull 100% inhouse made x86 cpu is good.
30 years...
I didnt say they bough a firm with K7 design. What a strawman.K7 was an inhouse project. Not sure what you mean.. They didn't buy a firm with a K7 design. They designed K7 in house. What am I missing?