So, in said program, in 250 instructions, about 100 of them will be branch instructions. This is a bit heavier than you’d probably see in day to day programs, but it serves to demonstrate the point. Checking a program I think to have relatively heavy branching (a parser) I find approximately 40% of the opcodes are branch instructions.
Now, of course your milage on this will vary depending on how many branch instructions are in the code you are executing. Think about it this way, let’s assume that 17 cycles are wasted per misprediction. The way the numbers work out, you can deduct the percentage of branch instructions in programs you’re executing from the Pentium 4’s raw speed, and that will give you its effective speed. This puts the Pentium 4’s branch predictor at about 94% accuracy. I’m unable to find any difinitive statistics on the Pentium 4’s branch prediction accuracy (even in the whitepaper) Intel claims it to be 30% more accurate than the Pentium III, which had a branch prediction accuracy of 90%. Think about this, a single mispredicted instruction in the Pentium 4 results in a minimum of 17 wasted cycles (thanks to its ungodly 20-stage pipeline) AS LONG as you have compiled your apps with SSE2, the P4 flies and has absolutely no match.
I do not account the Pentium4 as an inferior processor. “I call this native security processing,” said Glaskowsky. Microsoft was strongly opposed to the effort and cajoled other developers not to support it. Glaskowsky compared the effort to Native Signal Processing, a chip technology that Intel tried to popularize in the early ’90s. “Intel needs to work with these things with Microsoft from the beginning.” “Just like Microsoft eventually integrated signal processing into Windows, they will eventually integrate security processing, and they will do it on their own time,” said Peter Glaskowsky, editor in chief of the Microprocessor Report, an industry newsletter. LaGrande will make its initial appearance in Prescott, Intel’s next generation of desktop chips, coming in the second half of this year.Īlthough LaGrande sounds useful, Intel could have a difficult time getting support for it, especially from Microsoft. Otellini said users will be able to turn LaGrande off. It is possible to use it in conjunction with digital rights management programs, such as Microsoft’s Palladium, to prevent piracy, which in turn could help promote legal entertainment downloads. The technology, though, will have other functions. But once it’s back on a hard drive, it reverts to its original form, making it valuable if it can be stolen.Ĭonceptually, LaGrande is similar to IBM’s RapidRestore, a feature on IBM notebooks that lets users store applications and data behind a secure partition on the hard drive.
Currently, data that gets sent to commerce sites is encrypted while traveling between a PC and a server.
LaGrande places a secure wrapper around selected hard-drive data, as well as around the keyboard, the display and the interconeects inside the computer, said an Intel representative. “Protecting users’ data, protecting users’ identity, protecting transactions are all on the list of things we want to do.” “This will minimize the ability of people to steal your credit card number or break into your hard drive to snoop,” Otellini said. In the second half of 2003, Intel will introduce LaGrande, a security technology that prevents hackers or viruses from obtaining or corrupting data in a PC. He was able to rev the chip to 4.7GHz before the machine konked out and offered up a blue screen. but right now, what does this sort of thing get me? I guess the ability to store all of the MS security patches.)įor speed freaks, Otellini also demonstrated a 4.5GHz Pentium 4 processor onstage.
*Right now*, what does a user need 160GB on their desktop for? In 5 years, perhaps everybody will want full motion video. Put in faster and hotter CPUS, drive up power consumption and heat generation and cooling requirements, and how does it really help the average user? Everybody else wants a reasonably cheap, reliable computer that does every day things. It seems like there is a push for “the fastest”, but that accounts to probably 0.5% of their sales. For 99% of the users whose most complex game is The Sims, what is this for? I play the occasional game, but those are fine. You could drop a wok on them and stir fry a good meal, but who needs that for day to day work? The main resource I use on my machine is memory, but even with databases running, browsers running, code editing, mp3’s playing. I mean, I think these super fast processors are great.