New processors from Intel: The race goes on
By Zatni Arbi
JAKARTA (JP): Christanto Suryadarma from Intel Indonesia has a story to tell. He called someone at an oil company in Jakarta, and when the telephone operator asked him his company, Pak Chris replied briefly, "I'm from Intel". The silence that ensued made him realize what the operator must have been thinking, so he quickly explained that he was from Intel Corporation, not the other "intel" (colloquial here for intelligence authorities.)
Well, can you believe it? During this difficult time, even the operator at an oil company, who may not have had the chance to read Andy Grove's book Only the Paranoid Survive, seemed quite concerned when someone from "Intel" called his company.
Grove may have stepped down and pass the leadership baton to Craig Barret, but Intel Corporation seems to stick to his law for survival. The paranoid naturally cannot even stop to look around. All they want to do is run faster, and faster.
Like the Pentium II Processors, now at 350 and even 400 MHz.
Last week, Intel Indonesia showed off one of their latest processors to a room full of journalists. A couple of demo applications were run, and the one which I really liked showed a 360-degree view of a city block.
Pak Didik from Intel told the audience that no less than 11 cameras fed the video images to the PC, and it really required the 350 MHz power to stitch them together in real time.
Acer, Dell, GTC, HP, Mugen, Siemens Nixdorf and Zyrex also showcased their PCs that ran on the Pentium II 350 MHz. Acer even had their first Pentium II-based notebook on display.
Intel also has good news for those of us who simply want to get our jobs done. Their Celeron processor is finally here, and it promises a 266 MHz machine for about US$1,200. Intel calls such a machine the "Basic PC".
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Apart from those with money to burn, those who would buy the Pentium II 400 MHz processor, under the brand name of Xeon, are clearly people whose job requires a workstation power.
They may include professionals involved in multimedia content creation, engineering design, GIS imaging and other processor- intensive jobs.
The performance gap between high-end workstation using RISC processors from Sun Microsystems and Digital and high-end workstation based on Intel processors has narrowed progressively since the introduction of the early generations of Pentium II.
Applications have also been transported from the expensive UNIX workstations to Intel-based workstations. This has brought the really powerful workstation closer to the masses.
The high-end processors can also be the right choice if you need an enterprise server, although you may want to wait for the 64-bit Merced processor for really high-end servers.
If you want the so-called "performance" PC -- a machine that is powerful enough to run 3-D graphics and animation found in a growing number of today's edutainment software packages -- Pentium II Processors with speeds of 266 MHz to 300 MHz would be sufficient.
However, for corporations and home business owners who just need, say, a Mazda Vantrend, the Celeron would fit their need nicely. Celeron is a brand name, just like Pentium.
The Celeron processor is actually a 266 MHz Pentium II processor without its Level 2 cache.
People in the industry usually compare this cache with your refrigerator. You could imagine how miserable life would be if that box broke down. I guess the high clock speed of Celeron would compensate for the missing fridge, and because it is based on the Pentium II it also incorporates the MMX Technology.
Coworkers
What do you have to keep in mind when choosing or assembling a system with these processors? To enable the processor to work most efficiently, you also need to hire the right "coworkers".
If you choose the Pentium II 400 processors, for example, you will need a motherboard that offers a 100 MHz bus speed. This is a new spec; older motherboards usually run at 66 MHz at the max.
The new motherboard from Siemens Nixdorf, the D1064, for instance, has a bus that can be set to both 66 MHz and 100 MHz. The 50 percent speed increase means a wider toll-road for data traveling from processor and the other components of the system.
The other coworker for the Pentium II 350 MHz or 400 MHz processor is the 440BX chipset that supports Accelerated Graphics Ports (AGP) -- the new graphic bus that offers faster data transfer from the system to the display sub-system. The new chipset also allows you to equip your PC with up to one gig of RAM, which is not too exorbitant for an application server.
The Celeron processor should be used with motherboards that have Intel 440EX chipset. This new one also supports AGP and will allow you to add up to 256 MB of RAM.
Keep in mind that a computer system is just like any work organization; best results cannot be expected if you have only one or two star performers and a bunch of mediocre coworkers.