Intel unveils new class of Pentium 4s

In the latest Pentium 4s, cache is king.

Intel introduced a line of Pentium 4 desktop chips Sunday that contain 2MB of secondary cache, twice as much as current Pentium 4s, as well as technology from its notebook line that's designed to cut power consumption. Larger caches, a pool of memory located on the processor, generally improve performance.

The four chips included in the new 600 series of Pentium 4s range in speeds from 3GHz to 3.6GHz, and all of them feature an 800MHz bus. The top-of-the-line 660 Pentium 4 sells for $605 in quantities of 1,000, while the 630 sells for $224.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker also unveiled another member of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor family, which runs at 3.73GHz and contains a 1.066GHz bus. These chips are used inside computers for gamers and serious hobbyists.

The new chips in some ways can be seen as some of the last of their kind. Starting in the second quarter, Intel will begin to sell dual-core processors. These chips won't run as fast as single-core chips (or at least won't continue to maintain the pace of the current speed increases) but they will contain two separate "brains," thereby improving overall performance.

Rival Advanced Micro Devices has said it will come out with dual-core chips in the summer and deliver a new family of energy-efficient notebook chips called Turion.

[Stating]

It's New. It's Improved. Whiter Whites. Brighter Brites.

The personal computer industry has had one and only one mantra. Faster CPU speed. Having exhausted that, they are now fixating on a larger CPU cache until Microsoft ships XP 64, at which time the new mantra becomes 64 bit processing.

So, you go out and buy an $800+ computer, maybe add some extra RAM like the sales person tells you, take it home, plug it in, expect blazing fast performance, but it seems kind of slow. And the hard drive just keeps grinding away like crazy.
Do you know that for less money you can boost your overall computer performance by 50-100% or more? How?

1) Pay attention to the disk I/O subsystem
2) Tune the XP operating system to make intelligent use of system resources
3) Do basic system maintenance regularly

I recently bought a Compaq Presario on sale for under $400. It ran OK out of the box, but was not what I would call fast. The first thing I did was replace the slow 7500 RPM IDE drive with a 15,000 RPM SCSI and Adaptec controller card. That boosted the overal performance of the computer tremendously. Next, I added an extra 512 meg of RAM (on sale at Fry's). But even after adding additional RAM the computer still seemed a little sluggish. And annoyingly, it kept accessing the hard drive for no apparent reason. So I looked under the hood using Windows Task Manager, to see what was going on. A couple of processes, like explorer.exe were page faulting like crazy. I knew that with 768 meg of RAM and no applications running there shouldn't be any page faulting at all. What to do?

I did some XP tech research and found a couple of registry keys that override the default paging behavior. I adjusted the keys to reduce faulting to disk, and use some of that 3/4 gig of RAM I have. Wow, what a difference! Page faulting was reduced tremendously, XP hardly hits the hard drive unless I am running an application program, and everything is speedy like it should be.

The system mods I made to my middle-of-the-road Compaq brought it up to a "gamer level" PC. Should I have had to do this myself? No. The computer manufacturers -- Compaq, HP, Dell, take your pick, should have spent an extra $150 to put in faster disk drives and tweaked XP to optimize resources. Instead, they just sell you on a faster CPU. But that only goes so far.

What are your options to get more bang for your computer buck? Relatively few. 1) Spend a lot of money on a high-end gamer computer that has at least a 10,000 RPM drive. 2) Hire a technology consultant to advise you and help you purchase a new computer and maybe do some big payoff hardware upgrades. 3) Read, study, and try to do it yourself. Good luck!

Keith
www.techcando.com