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because any faster, the heatsinks will start melting... 

With the imminent release of the PPC970 Intel has finally realised they have met their match and are throwing in the towel. Congrats Apple, y'all win!!

Or it could be that they are sinking a big ol' butt-load of R&D into the Itanium line right now. Why put time and money into a processor they plan to phase out soon? I expect the P3 to be EOLed pretty fast when Itanium goes mainstream and the P4 can't have much life left in it either.

Good I am glad to see them slow down.  Computer processor speed increases has been the biggest marketing scam in years.  I swear that computers have gotten slower in the past 5 years, when I compare the overall speed of AutoCad, Work Perfect, Excel and various other environmental models that I use at work.  The computers just seem slower than they did 5 years ago, although we are still using them for the same type of tasks - civil engineering design functions.  Guess what, 5 years ago, we still managed to get plans and specs out just fine with AutoCad12 and wordperfect 7.  Now, 5 years later, the computers are slower, but the programs have 2-3 times the functionality, and we still get plans and specs out just fine, albeit a little more slowly, since we have to f**k with the computers so much now to get them to work right.

Or it could be that they are sinking a big ol' butt-load of R&D into the Itanium line right now. Why put time and money into a processor they plan to phase out soon? I expect the P3 to be EOLed pretty fast when Itanium goes mainstream and the P4 can't have much life left in it either.

Theres one problem here. The Itanium will never be a desktop chip. it cant be, as designed, unless they throw in something WAY in the future. It is not designed for, nor is it viable for the consumer desktop. They dont even have full rights to the design of the itanium. or any other 64 bit chip they are working with (or maybe they do the itanium, but nothing else 64 bit...i forget). Those patents are held by another company not interested in selling, leasing, renting, or otherwise letting INTEL use them anymore. Why? Cause Intel tried the "im a huge company youll do what i darn well please" routine and got burned in court. They owe millions upon millions to this other company. That and Intel has publicly stated they plan to stay with the pentium as long as they can, and arent terribly interested in 64 bit desktops.

jax, I think this is the 2nd time i have totally agreed with you.

i think if you look at thier stock at yahoo.com, and look in the old news for "lawsuit" or "court" youll find it...

Here is some info on the Intergraph / Intel lawsuit

http://www.intergraph.com/press02/intel10-10.asp

-=Jax=-

When Intel hit 1 and 2 GHZ it seemed like they were going up 200MHZ every 2 months.But since they hit 3GHZ they seem to have slowed quite a bit.

Intel doesn't care.  They think they are miles ahead of Moto/IBM in the processing speed department.

Until Motos come out that hit 3 ghz. Intel's not going to sweat it.

Also, the 3 ghz Intel-based computer prices are plummeting.

and we still get plans and specs out just fine, albeit a little more slowly, since we have to f**k with the computers so much now to get them to work right.

I was thinking about how maybe it does make sense to break different jobs into different categories, with different equipment. I'd like it if one computer could handle everything but it just seems like the computers are becoming more convoluted and buggy and stupid from trying to do everything. Buh.

Madsculptor wrote:

It used to take them 6 mos. to go from 166 to 180MHz. People were pooping their pants "oooohh boy its gonna break 200MHz, can you believe it, oooohhh boy"

That's because at that point Intel realized that all people were doing was pooping their pants over the clock speed.

So they decided that through marketing they could increase the clock speed massively without actually increasing the processor's power or efficiency much. Remember, back then a 200 MHz Motorola was about as powerful as 200MHz Intel; now we have the huge gap in speed. But motorola's processors (or the 970 at least) are almost equal in power.

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