Tuesday, February 28

Geek

4.2!

Eight years late, but finally here: A mainstream microprocessor that runs at more than 4GHz.

At its launch in November 2000, the Pentium 4 ran at 1.5GHz, but it did less per cycle than the Pentium III or Athlon, and wasn't all that great.  Particularly since Intel initially tied it to the overpriced and underwhelming Rambus memory.

In 2001 Intel reached 2GHz, in 2002 2.8GHz, and by 2004 3.8Ghz.

And there they got stuck.  Unable to increase clock speeds, they went back to the drawing board, abandoning the Pentium 4 for the Pentium III-derived Pentium M, Core, Core 2, and now the i3/i5/i7 family.

And eight years later, neither Intel nor AMD had reached the 4GHz barrier at stock speeds (not overclocked or turbo mode).  My new systems can reach 4.2GHz in turbo mode, but standard speed is only 3.6GHz.

IBM will happily sell you a 5GHz server if you have the money, but for mainstream systems, the AMD FX-4170 has the fastest clocks around.

Unfortunately for AMD, a slower clocked Intel i5 2500 will run faster for most applications, but I've been waiting a long time for this, so let me enjoy it for a little while.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:46 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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