Good morning. I’d like to take the time to wish those of you in the US a happy belated Independence Day, and those in Canada a happy Canada Day, July 1st, as well. They are two truly great countries in which to live, and as Sander discussed in his column yesterday, perhaps we should all take a moment to realize just how lucky we are.
On that same note, there were, along with the vast majority of sensible festivities, a few parties that got out of hand over the long weekend, a couple of which lead to rioting that required subduing by police. I find that sort of behavior arrogant, disrespectful, and to be blunt, down right stupid. Everyone here is truly lucky to be where we are, and to celebrate your country and what it stands for by breaking its laws and destroying a small part of it is unbelievably disrespectful. It amounts to little more than behaving as a spoiled child. I ask you all, please, next time you find yourself at a party, make sure you know where the line between fun and stupidity lies, and do not cross it. I realize the vast majority of you are very responsible, and would likely never even approach that line in the first place. But a few of you aren’t. And even a few is too many.
On a more upbeat note, we have a few boards coming in from Abit over the next couple weeks. I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you which ones, but rest assured we’ll get to them as soon as possible. With any luck, I should have one such board reviewed myself and ready for your viewing pleasure sometime next week.
Many of you have undoubtedly read some of the many Pentium 4 1.8 GHz reviews that are now available. Interestingly, if you carefully extrapolate many of the performance numbers, it becomes obvious that the Pentium 4 seems to be scaling much better with speed than the Thunderbird Athlon. Certainly not to a degree where the Pentium 4 will outperform an Athlon clock-for-clock any time soon, however it’s clear that as speeds are increasing, the balance seems to be shifting in favor of the Pentium 4. That, however, excludes Palomino. There really isn’t enough data available to extrapolate Palomino’s performance at, say, 1.8 GHz, with any real accuracy, however I would expect it would scale better than the Athlon due to its hardware prefetch enhancements. A 333 MHz FSB would certainly help performance handily as well. In any event, the decrease in scaling along with heat issues make it clear that the Thunderbird core will likely outlive its usefulness by 1.5 GHz, paving the way for a healthy battle between Palomino and Northwood. If you have any thoughts about this, by all means, start a discussion thread, and let us know.
