ModernFW Was An Exciting Announcement This Week That Went Largely Unnoticed

[ms178]

Not so much. AthlonXP that followed it was about as fast (usually faster, but not always, a few workload types worked better on intel) as Intel's best. An Athlon XP 3200+ performed about the same as a [email protected], but ran at ~1GHz less. Drew much lees power and was cheaper, too. And the cherry on top was that with a good mobo, you could get the much cheaper AthlonXP 2500+ and you were pretty much guaranteed an overclock to 3200+ levels, effectively getting the performance of Intel's fastest CPU. In turn, [email protected] could be overclocked to 3.2GHz, but the thing was still more expensive and hot as hell.

Long story short, not so much faster in absolute terms, but leagues better in IPC.

Well, even the K7 Athlon's (Slot A) provided better value / performance in many games than the Pentium III: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfecL6lAq88

[TheBlackCat]

It probably didn't attract much attention because every attempt at this so far has gone pretty much nowhere. Great if they actually succeeded, but I won't hold my breath.

[Brisse]

What? Athlon was fast?

I had a Pentium 4 once. Top of the line from Intel at the time, yet AMD's Athlon's beat the Pentium 4 in performance and efficiency. Pentium 4 was an infamous power hog, sort of like AMD's later Bulldozer and Piledriver CPU's

It wasn't until Intel released the "Core" series that they turned the tables.

[bug77]

What? Athlon was fast?

Not so much. AthlonXP that followed it was about as fast (usually faster, but not always, a few workload types worked better on intel) as Intel's best. An Athlon XP 3200+ performed about the same as a [email protected], but ran at ~1GHz less. Drew much lees power and was cheaper, too. And the cherry on top was that with a good mobo, you could get the much cheaper AthlonXP 2500+ and you were pretty much guaranteed an overclock to 3200+ levels, effectively getting the performance of Intel's fastest CPU. In turn, [email protected] could be overclocked to 3.2GHz, but the thing was still more expensive and hot as hell.

Long story short, not so much faster in absolute terms, but leagues better in IPC.

Is this project really needed? Wouldn't they be better off with contributing to coreboot and using it as a new basis for firmware? I understand investing into some experimental stuff to look for potential improvements, but considering how versatile and flexible coreboot can be, I don't understand why Intel wouldn't build on top of it to create a successor to UEFI. If they could accomplish something similar to rpi's firmware which can be configuring with a single text file, I'd be blown away (although I prefer booting straight into GNU GRUB).

[ms178]

What? Athlon was fast?

As far as I remember it beat the Pentium III and IV in workloads I cared back then and provided by far the better value.

[r1348]

What? Athlon was fast?

It blew away its Pentium 4 competitors.
Intel got the upper hand only through illicit marketing practices.

[ms178]

I agree, over the last 10 years PC computing got rather boring as Intel optimized for their profits first (killing mainstream overcklocking along the way) and AMD had to catch up (same in graphics with Nvidia). But I hope we will see far more innovation during the next two years beginnig with Zen 2 at Computex this month. Some leaks suggest that they could take the performance lead again as in the Athlon days.

[uid313]

Indeed, this is very exciting news! Albeit not as shiny as a new CPU or GPU.

On the other hand, there are still a lot of questions unanswered about this initiative. The project description sounds like ModernFW is an experiment rather than in use anytime soon. Even 2020 sounds to be a very ambitious goal. Is this target still up-to-date or postponed as other CPU products from them though? Another question would be why haven't they joined the other efforts directly to collaborate from the start with the TianoCore, Coreboot and Linuxboot communities? Or do they? ModernFW looks like it is their own fork of these projects.

This is way more interesting than a new CPU.
I am tired of new CPUs, same old boring stuff, Skylake, Skylake Refresh, Kaby Lake, Kaby Lake Refresh, Coffee Lake, Whisky Lake, etc it's all the same, its just a good old Skylake with a new name on it. Each new Intel CPU are built on the same old architectures, and is like 2-5% faster than the previous generation at best. Also, its like Swiss cheese, its full of holes!

[ms178]

Indeed, this is very exciting news! Albeit not as shiny as a new CPU or GPU.

On the other hand, there are still a lot of questions unanswered about this initiative. The project description sounds like ModernFW is an experiment rather than in use anytime soon. Even 2020 sounds to be a very ambitious goal. Is this target still up-to-date or postponed as other CPU products from them though? Another question would be why haven't they joined the other efforts directly to collaborate from the start with the TianoCore, Coreboot and Linuxboot communities? Or do they? ModernFW looks like it is their own fork of these projects.