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created 7 Dec 2000

The Pentium 4

For some time now, the Mac community has been in a state over the lack of clock-speed improvements in the G4. "We know that's not important, and that the G4 is faster than the Pentium III, but it looks bad, and besides, what happens when the Pentium 4 comes out and is running at 1.4GHz or faster?"

Well, Intel finally released the Pentium 4, and so far, the results have been disappointing to say the least. Simply put, unless you are running Quake III or have the 2 pieces of software that have been rewritten for the Pentium 4's SIMD extensions, you will see almost no improvement over a Pentium III. This is great news for AMD, as the Athlon is easily beating the Pentium 4 at similar clock speeds.

But this is even better news for Apple and Motorola. If you read the reviews, the reasons for the failure of the Pentium 4 to offer any real reason to upgrade can be laid squarely at Intel's "clock speed is all" philosophy. There aren't any real improvements in the Pentium 4 in any area other than allowing for faster clock speeds except for some improvements in the SIMD units.

SIMD is Intel's take on Altivec, although looking at the implementation, Motorola's experience as a DSP maker helped them create a much better implementation. But as with Altivec, unless you recode for the SIMD units, you aren't going to see an improvement there.

What Intel did do is double the pipeline size and added some execution caching steps and other clock speed - related improvements. This is all neat, but it relies on much faster clock speeds, and RAMBUS to work. But in almost any test, even when the Pentium 4 does beat the Pentium III, or the Athlon, if you compare results at the same clock speeds, it's by 5 percent or less in many of the tests. This is not the amazing performance boost that the Pentium 4 is supposed to have. But now we hear Intel saying, "Well, when we get the Pentium 4 to 2GHz, then you'll see the performance increase". Well I would hope that doubling the clock speed gives you something.

But what do you pay for when you put clock speed over everything else? Remember, engineering is a balancing act. For every gain, there is a cost. The trick is, having enough gain to outweigh the costs. Has Intel done this? Well, in many real-world ways, no.

First of all, the Pentium 4 has different power requirements, which require new power supplies. This is annoying more than anything else, and in my world not even a blip, as it's not worth my time to upgrade machines. I end up saving money by buying new machines over trying to do CPU upgrades. But for a home user, it's another expense to consider. Secondly, the Pentium 4 dissipates a lot of power. As in 55 watts of power. To compare, the latest version of the G4 from Motorola only dissipates 6 watts max, and even the previous model G4 dissipates 8 watts max. This is a huge difference. The results of this are that the heat sinks are big enough that Intel is now specifying motherboard attachments for them, so they don't damage the chips, which has happened with some of the bigger heat sinks on the Athlons. This means new motherboards, and new cases for most. So the upgrade path to a Pentium 4 is essentially a new computer.

But here's another issue with the heat output of the X86 architecture: Noise. Most Pentium IIIs and Athlons are generating, (due to the number of fans needed to keep those beasts cool), something like 55 to 60 decibels, (dB) of noise. This is similar to heavy traffic noise levels. Now multiply that times the number of computers in an area with cubicles. This is not minor, some of these boxes sound like DC-3s taking off. In contrast the Cube, or the iMac, or even a G4 Tower are much quieter, almost silent. Even the fan on the G4 Tower's power supply is very quiet compared to the three or so fans in a Pentium III box. A constant ~60dB noise level for eight hours a day, every day is not a good way to work, and with the Pentium 4, it's not going to get any better. (This would make an interesting ad campaign. "The Cube, because it won't make you deaf".

The upshot of this, is that for the first time, rigid focus on clock speed is burning Intel. Will the chip flop? Hardly, Intel is too pervasive for that. But it is finally making people say, "Why do I need this?" They are tired of spending money every six months for low-level speed gains that just don't show up in daily use. I type all my articles in BBEdit on a 400MHz G3 PowerBook. I've done a couple on a G4 at work. Other than a slightly faster speed when opening BBEdit, I'm not working any faster at 500MHz than I am at 400MHz. I just am not going to ever type fast enough to bog down a modern processor.

Does Motorola need to get the G4 running faster? Certainly, Mac users as a group hammer their machines harder than typical Wintel users. But I for one am more impressed with faster done correctly, and as part of an overall improvement, rather than a goal unto itself. There is much more to a computer than clock speed, and this truth has finally caught up with Intel. Hopefully, some of the naysayers are watching.