Intel's First 4.0 GHz Pentium: Pentium Gold G5620 Listed At Retail
A number of European retailers have started listing new Celeron and the Pentium Gold-branded processors, which indicates that the world's largest CPU supplier is about to formally announce the products. Topping the list of new processors is the Pentium G5620, which happens to be Intel's first Pentium-branded CPU clocked at 4 GHz.
[...] According to Germany-based ISO Datentechnik and Finland-based Futureport online stores, the new CPUs from Intel will be available starting from early March. But since that information does not come directly from Intel, it may not be completely accurate.
Intel originally planned to release its Pentium 4 processors based on the NetBurst microarchitecture and clocked at 4 GHz sometime in the middle of the previous decade. At some point, Intel stopped development of its Tejas generation of NetBurst processors cancelling all the products in the lineup, then the company cancelled release of Pentium 4 4.0 GHz CPUs featuring the Prescott, and the Prescott 2M designs due in 2005 – 2006. Later on the company released numerous Core-branded processors clocked at 4.0 GHz and higher, but frequencies of Pentiums topped at 3.8 GHz.
A hollow achievement, but interesting nonetheless.
Also at Tom's Hardware.
See also: Et Tu, Pentiums? GPU-Disabled Pentium Gold G5600F Appears
(Score: 5, Funny) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday February 20 2019, @05:31PM (4 children)
After the Pentium 4, it should have been Pentium Pentium?
Hickory, dickory, dock.
Intel ran up the clock.
The clock struck zen,
The mouse locked up,
Hickory dNO CARRIER
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @06:50PM (1 child)
I remember overclocking a Pentium 200 to 300, and having to put ice blocks next to the air inlets. This was when SETI at home started, I was top 100 for awhile.
(Score: 2) by Acabatag on Thursday February 21 2019, @01:19AM
I remember having the clock multiplier set wrong for the ISA clock on my '286 motherboard. Basically it meant that the ISA cards were running at 12 Mhz instead of the proper 8 MHz. It happened to work with the cards that I had installed in my system at the time, and it did make a big difference performance wise. I didn't discover my error until a card I installed wouldn't work.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Wednesday February 20 2019, @06:51PM (1 child)
Pentium V Alpha Turbo Prime Edge, with Extra Electrolytes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 21 2019, @04:29AM
Does Pentium Gold refer to the price?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday February 20 2019, @06:52PM (7 children)
Serious question - did anyone else think pentium and celery were no longer a thing after the pentium 4 - when the core stuff came out? I must admit, I don't follow this shit and just use what the company laptop has. That says E5, so I guess it's a xeon - wtf is there a xeon in a laptop.. Anywise it seems shitty to expensive is celery, pentium, i3, i5, i7, i9, then xeon. I understand how an i3 is good since they can resell an i5 with a bad core. I understand how an i5 is good, since they can resell an i7 with broken hyperthreading. an i9 seems to be just an i7 with more cores, and xeon is for servers and apparently my weird laptop.
so the pentium seems to just be an i5 with broken hyperthreading as well. and a celeron is a pentium with almost no sram. So it looks to me like what intel is doing is trying to make a bunch of I7 processors, then tiers down the ones which don't pass qa so they can still sell them. Anyone know if this is the case, or are these products actually being made on purpose? If so, damn that's a lot of different CPUs.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Wednesday February 20 2019, @07:01PM
Intel loves to segment.
Mostly, it's just binning and fused features, but they also do have multiple die designs to get better yields or lower static power. Any reference on the number of actual dies vs product line would be nice
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Wednesday February 20 2019, @07:36PM (4 children)
I can answer your first question. I completely stopped paying attention to Pentium and Celeron (celery, heh) for years. But one of my kids decided to spend all of his money on a gaming PC, and figured out a $90 Pentium + decent graphics card > Core i-Something + lesser graphics card. That was two years ago, and he hasn't regretted the decision. To be fair, this is right after hyper-threaded Pentiums launched. He the 6th generation "Core" processors and earlier only had 2 core/2 thread Pentiums and that would be a problem with newer games. But he's got 2/4 and it's plenty.
For your second question about whether Intel makes a ton of parts or everything is either an i7 or a partially broken i7, I just don't know.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday February 20 2019, @08:49PM
I saw that a long time ago. 350 MHz Pentium II with 1st generation GEForce was way better than a 1 GHz Pentium III with the Intel graphics. Even when it was new, Intel graphics from those days had a bad reputation. Barely able to run a GUI, it was so slow.
Out of morbid curiosity, I checked some benchmarks. These days, low end graphics scores around 500. That 20 year old graphics card scores about a 20, and the Intel embedded garbage scores a 1, LOL. To be fair, Intel finally upped their embedded graphics game when they rolled out their HD Graphics stuff starting about a decade ago. Today, their very bottom end is a little too cut down, but one step above that is adequate for gaming. And watch out for cooling issues. Got to have good cooling if you're going to game on Intel graphics, and some systems, such as those Intel NUCs, aren't quite up to the job.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday February 20 2019, @09:42PM (2 children)
I can only assume that i3,i5,i7 branding is to intentionally confuse buyers. A new i5 is going to perform a year or two old i7 most of the time. But Intel still wants to make money on old stock, so they are branded so confusingly that consumers don't know what they are buying.
And don't get me started on "lakes". My best guess is to get the cheapest processor with the newest "lake" you can find.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Friday February 22 2019, @03:31PM
A Loiosh reference! That's awesome.
It's nitpicking, but I think Intel is consistent with Pentium provided you're considering heavily multithreaded workloads like video editing. An i5 from 2019 won't beat an i7 from 2017 or maybe even from 2015 for that. The thing Intel doesn't call much attention to is that most of consumer computing, even a very good chunk of games, is not heavily multithreaded. And single-threaded advancements between generations are usually pretty modest. They exist, but the seat of the pants, user-detectible difference between an i5 from 2014 and one from today in Chrome or Firefox is probably really close to zero. So an awful lot of people are buying i7s and i5s when they would be fine with i3s and Pentiums.
I buy big batches of used DVDs and Blu Rays, rip them, and then reencode them to high quality H.265 so they take up less space on disk and less bandwidth when streaming through the house. For that my 6 Core/12 Thread Ryzen 5 is good. But like I said my kid is happy gaming with his Pentium 2 core/4 thread and when I upgrade my second desktop I'll probably go for something like that or maybe a next generation Ryzen 3.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Friday February 22 2019, @11:56PM
I'd say the branding is their attempt to make it easier for non-technical buyers. An i7 is better than an i5, which is better than Pentium, and so on. Generally that's true, but what's endlessly confusing for techies is there is no clear differentiation between what makes a i7, i5, etc., and there's plenty of examples of higher tiered processors lacking features that lower tiered processors have, features added and cut for purely market differentiation reasons, and so on.
I do have to disagree with your performance assessment though. I have an i7 3770K*, and in terms of performance it's faster than just about any i5 until the latest 8th generation chips. And that's really only because you can get 6 core i5's now, whereas my i7 has to make do with only 4. Things may be different over in the mobile world I suppose, since there's a bunch of dual-core i7's over there.
* Yes it's unlocked but I'm talking stock speed here since I don't overclock it, because really there's no reason anymore...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday February 20 2019, @07:48PM
That's pretty accurate, but things are likely to change a bit in the next few years.
AMD Previews Zen 2 Epyc CPUs with up to 64 Cores, New "Chiplet" Design [soylentnews.org]
Intel Announces "Sunny Cove", Gen11 Graphics, Discrete Graphics Brand Name, 3D Packaging, and More [soylentnews.org]
Both AMD and Intel are moving to multi-chip module [wikipedia.org] designs that connect a bunch of chips together, for example the 8-core "chiplets" that will be used in AMD's "7nm" Epyc, Ryzen, and Threadripper.
A 64-core Epyc will use 8 good chiplets. A 12-core Ryzen could use 2 chiplets, each with 2 bad cores.
Intel is going a little further by looking at mixing chips from different process nodes, such as 14nm+++++++++++ and 10nm. They are also trying to copy ARM's big.LITTLE concept by mixing "Core" and "Atom" CPU cores.
So you can imagine that this flexibility will allow Intel to make things really confusing. Pretty soon they could sell a CPU with one low-power "10nm" core and four regular "14nm+++∞" cores.
Some people are treating hyperthreading as a security risk, so maybe it doesn't matter if it comes disabled for market segmentation.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @06:54PM
the last pentium 4 extreme edition was ~3.9 ghz. i guess all those bugs took up precious r&d resources in the interim.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Wednesday February 20 2019, @08:07PM (2 children)
Are they vulnerable to Spectre/Meltdown?
I was just wondering whether it's just a rehash of decade-old processors, or something genuinely faster despite having a properly secured cache.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday February 20 2019, @08:11PM (1 child)
Spectre is Here to Stay: An Analysis of Side-Channels and Speculative Execution [soylentnews.org]
networked computing = insecure computing
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RamiK on Wednesday February 20 2019, @10:20PM
Technically they can stick an in-order core running the kernel along with dozens of OOO cores of varying power profiles running system and user threads in appropriate ring isolation. i.e. you'd have a network driver and a file-system service sharing a low-power core, and a user's mail client waiting in its own low-power core, never to share the same cores (physically separated) or memory access (handled by the microkernel running in the in-order chip).
But that's years away.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by epitaxial on Thursday February 21 2019, @12:02AM
IBM was selling 5.5Ghz processors in their mainframes back in 2012. What is Intel's problem?