Ever since the Athlon was introduced, AMD and Intel have been fighting for the
top spot in speed. They have battled back and forth, from 600MHz, to
700MHz, 900MHz, and now finally, 1GHz (1000MHz.) Months after the GHz
point was reached in the x86 market, we’re still hardly seeing any actual 1GHz
Retail, or OEM CPUs from Intel that do not come in a system from Gateway or
Dell. AMD’s 1GHz CPU is on the market, but scarce, at best. In the
past months, we’ve been dying to hear of even a 1.1GHz CPU, but only hear of
improvements to processing cores. Did Intel and AMD race to 1GHz too
fast? The answer is an obvious yes. Speed Increases between the two
companies were bi-weekly before the 1GHz mark, and now they are non-existent.
Looking at the tech sheet for any 1GHz CPU will say the same thing. Both
CPUs from each company is actually an overclocked version of a slower CPU.
To prove the fact, I’ll go back into the hay-day of overclocking…the days of
the 300a. The Celeron 300a was a CPU that ran on the 66MHz bus, with a
clock multiplier locked at 4.5. It was found out that by simply raising
the Front Side Bus from 66Mhz to 100Mhz, the CPU would easily do 450MHz. Unfortunately,
some CPUs weren’t very stable. Some overclockers used a technique of raising
the core voltage of the chips in order for the signals to be more clear between
the transistors inside the CPU core. This fixed most stability
problems. How does this prove that the 1GHz chips are actually overclocked
slower versions? Look at the core voltage. The slower AMD Athlons
have a core voltage of 1.6V, while the 1GHz version has a 1.8V core. By
raising the core voltage, the CPU runs hotter, and requires massive means of
keeping it cool. Like everyone, I’d like to see faster CPUs. But,
I’d rather see stable, cool running CPUs. Before I even think of running a
high speed CPU, I’d like to see voltages the same as the slower CPUs, like the
days of the Pentium II.
Intel taking a page from the Cyrix Mission Manual.
Remember the Cyrix MediaGX? It had almost everything integrated onto the
CPU, including the North Bridge of the Chipset, the memory controller, and such
other things. Intel is doing the same thing! The Timna will
Integrate the memory controller, and graphics controller onto the CPU itself,
resulting in a very low cost CPU. It’s going to be put into Sub $600 value
PCs, mainly intended for Internet use alone. Because of the lack of AGP
slot support, and the low grade integrated 3D, Gaming performance will be that
of a Cyrix MI CPU and a 1MB ISA (not quite, but you get the point.) I
can’t wait to see more of this chip…I can already see it in a lot of homes as
the second computer, right behind their “Free” Celeron 266 for signing
up for 6 years of MSN…
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