Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call

Filip Van Raemdonck
2003-02-28T08:41:41Z

On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 10:25:23AM -0800, David Lang wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, Daniel Egger wrote:
> > Am Mit, 2003-02-26 um 06.30 schrieb Bernd Eckenfels:
> > >
> > > Hmm.. are there any RISC Cores which run even closely to CISC Speeds?
> >
> > Define Speed: Felt speed, clock speed or measurable speed?
>
> when the RISC chip cores are just over 1GHz and talking about possibly
> hitting 1.8GHz within a year or so the intel chips are pushing 3GHz while
> the AMD chips are pushing 2GHz (true speed, I'll avoid commenting on the
> mistakes that intel made on the P4 that make these chips competitive with
> each other :-)

And they need what kind of cooling to get there? Compare that to a
passively cooled G4.[1]

This is AFAIK not true for every RISC chip, I believe current ultrasparc
and alpha even more so do need significant cooling as well.
But IMO your question is not really relevant to the discussion, as
especially the common CISC examples you are referring to are artificially
pushed to higher clock speeds. Compare those to a passively cooled
transmeta or via chip and it you can ask about clock speeds CISC vs CISC
instead of CISC vs RISC.
Or compare a Transmeta or Via chip with RISC cores and see who wins the
clockspeed race then :-)

Regards,

Filip

[1] Yes, those dual powermacs have a case exhaust fan which draws air over
the CPUs' fin. So has the fastest passively cooled, not clocked down
intel desktop I've ever seen, a 300MHz pII Dell Dimension. (That's
also still the most silent "high-end" intel desktop I've ever seen)

--
"The only stupid question is the unasked one."
-- Martin Schulze