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Clawhammer to be 1/2 size of P4
selectspec writes "According to this news, AMD's 64bit ClawHammer will be roughly the same size as the Athlon, making it about 1/2 size of Intel's P4." Lookit them there transistors. They're so tiny.
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Intel is pushing a very anemic P4, which can't keep up with an Athlon running a clock speed approx. 25% slower (at least on anything approaching real-world computer usage). On top of that they're getting ready to bet the company on the IA-64 architecture which is going to have more compatibility and conversion issues than you can count, even while it's competing with AMD's more nimble and better performing hammer series.
This horse race is just starting to get interesting...
Nobody is going to make the mistake Apple made when they went to PowerPC and had most apps (and for years, most of the OS) running in software emulation.
That wasn't a mistake; in fact I challenge you to name a more flawless example of a major technology transition. 99.99999% of the old m68k apps ran just fine on a powerpc, even better as the speed of the chips increaed. Neither did the legacy code noticably slow down most operations, that came from the lack of protected memory.
They're comparing sizes of an in-production chip made on a .18 micron process to one that WILL be made on a .13 micron process. A P4 on the .13 process is approximately the same size as the Clawhammer.
Sigh...
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To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.
I quote from the arcticle:
"Intel's forthcoming 0.13-micron Pentium 4 chip, code-named Northwood, is expected to be about 116 millimeters square, much smaller than current 0.18-micron chips' 217 millimeters square."
It's a perfectly fair comparison: Pentium 4 is 116 mm square on 0.13 technology, Clawhammer is 105 mm square.
Sure the difference isn't that great, but it's the simple fact that the P4 is a 7th generation, 32-bit only chip, while Clawhammer is 8th generation, with 32- and 64-bit capability. And it's STILL smaller.
If I had points, I'd mod this way up...
/ soi/">
/ &l t;/A>
From < A HREF="http://www.chips.ibm.com/bluelogic/showcase
http://www.chips.ibm.com/bluelogic/showcase/soi
"SOI technology improves performance over bulk CMOS technology by 25 to 35%, equivalent to two years of bulk CMOS advances. SOI technology also brings power use advantages of 1.7 to 3 times. IBM is currently working with many circuit designers and product groups that are designing with SOI technology. The company expects SOI to eventually replace bulk CMOS as the most commonly used substrate for advanced CMOS in mainstream microprocessors and other emerging wireless electronic devices requiring low power."
A power use adantage of 1.7 to 3 times... that's pretty nice. There's a good pdf on that site (linked from the page above). Read it.
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Ok ok, it's nice that it'll be smaller. What I want to know is what kind of heat is this generating? Sure the chip is half the size. But if the heatsink/fan? I mean the fact that a Pentium 4 requires a frickin heatsink that has to be attach to the case else it would rip the chip out is pretty damn silly. As has been mentioned before it's ultimately not the Mhz / Ghz that counts for raw performance. While I understand AMD and Intel's constant push for higher Mhz I think people need to be aware (by people I mean Joe Consumer) that there are other issues that are becoming much more important than the cpu. Graphics card... Hard drive speed / interface.
:-)
Pretty damn small chip though
S.t.e.v.e.
Now come on. By insulating the transistors from the rest of the silicon, you're dissipating less power. That's the whole point of SOI. I suppose we could petition the chip manufaturers to use germanium semiconductors, but you're more likely to lose the CPU without a good heatsink. Granted, it'll have more transistors, but they'll be smaller and dissipate less power because of the size. I think AMD might surprise us with this one. I didn't find anything about the actual power savings from SOI or moving to a smaller transistor, but I'd be willing to bet it'll dissipate the same amount of power as the current Athlon. I'd have to belive they're looking into this heavily; it's a big issue nowadays.
Speaking of Pintos, did you know that when Ford originally introduced the Pinto into Brazil, it sold *very* poorly. They couldn't figure out why until someone in the know explained it to them.
Pinto is Portugese slang for small male genitals. No joke.
Ford changed the name, and sales picked up substantially.
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What happens when a very powerful computer can be small (concealable)?
Well, you might not see that concealed 10Gig processor the size of a nail clipping. On the other hand, it might be a wee bit tougher hiding that car battery with the 1200 cranking amps to keep it going. What's worse, trying to get that darn liquid nitrogen tank hidden away.
You don't need super hi-tech to play big brother anyway. We have the income tax to monitor every penny you make. We have a phone system that congress okay'd nearly unlimited tapping abilities on. Low tech servers running at ISP's monitoring traffic for the FBI. Egads, we even have folks begging to have chips installed into our TV's to monitor "incorrect" programs for our children.
If you're going to be paranoid, at least do so concerning to those things that really are a danger to privacy. A faster/smaller chip isn't the concern. It's them bigger/slower governments that individuals need to be wary of.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Did someone hit them with a stupid stick?
If the ClawHammer is even a little bit cooler than the Thunderbird (like 15% more awsome), it'll just beat the pants off the P4.
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In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
That Clawhammer will be smaller than a P4 sounds nice, but not all that relevant to me in the near future (trying to be more trailing edge than bleeding edge in the interest of my wallet of late;)).
What does interest me is the idea that the equivalent to today's highest-end-and-beyond chips will be be smaller packages. OK, ok, that's an obvious point given the March of Progress thus far, right? But when it comes to *lower* powered devices, this is particularly cool, because they're going to be even smaller.
Remember, the power in an iPaq handheld would have been the Computer Buyer's Holy Grail not long ago, and it's only in comparison with the amazingly powerful processors available lo even at WalMart that it appears wimpy. Not long from now, you will be able to buy a computer over the salesperson's objection that "b-b-b-b-but that's only the power equivalent of a Pentium 4 at 3 Ghz! You'll never get Office 2004 to run on *that*!"
Really, though I like the convenience of the various plug-in buses of desktop PCs, I really wish my PC case could be more the size of a laptop, and getting processors, motherboards, etc smaller would be a nice step toward (at least household) ubiquity.
simon
"Hey Carlito, r'membah me? Benny Blanco from the Bronx!"
Here's the comment from a Inquest white paper:
It's still on the ArsTechnica home page.
>They include AMD's plans to ship a 1.4GHz Athlon chip this quarter
Well, that chip is already available at the local computer store.(on the bottom of the page) 660 DM are about $300.
Jan
When scrolling quickly by, I though the subject of this article was a "clamwhammer". Boy, was that weird.
How many clams could a clamwhammer wham
if a clamwhammer could wham clams?
The technology in the new chip is not as new as everybody is pretending it is. Yes, everybody likes to think that small size means tunneling and violates some law of quantum mechanics they heard somewhere. It's all crap, I say. Tunneling effects won't be important until you reach barrier widths of around 50 Angstroms. The uncertainty principle is much stranger than you think, and they are currently working on a single electron transistor (strange, but true, and does not violate any quantum mechanics).
First, the small feature size quoted in the article has been researched for years. The main problem was the RC time delay. By cramming the devices so close together, the capacitance of the interconnects increased (remember, C~1/d). Since Al is usually used as an interconnect material (it plays nice with Si), there is a very high resistance (Al has 5x the resistivity of Cu) in traditional chips. That's why they started researching other materials, especially copper. Look up the dual damascene process for copper metalization, you will see the challenges involved. It's just exciting to see the small feature size finally released commercially. It means the technology is finally out of the research stage.
In crystal growth, it was nice to hear some discussion of the 12-inch "John Holmes" wafer.
Intel is now moving forward with the "Chips that can slice, maim, and render our competition's chips senseless" Naming Scheme. In keeping with that, here's the next few chips they plan to release:
Q3 '01: Hacksaw
Q1 '02: Whirling Razor
Q3 '02: Electron Accelerator with Mass de-Magnetizing eXtensions (MMX)
Q4 '02: Lightning Fast Invisble Microchip of Flaming Destruction
Q2 '03: Small Little Bunny Chip with Deceptively Sharp Pointy Teeth
They should compare AMD's 64-bit processor to Intel's 64-bit processor!
How big IS the Pentium 4 anyways? My claw hammer is about 10 inches long, to give me plenty of leverage when hammering nails. It also weighs in at right around a pound. Does this mean the Pentium 4 is about 20" across?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The Apple switch to PowerPC was one of the smartest and best examples of shaping up that has been done. Granted, there was a lot of software in emulation, but after a couple turns of the crank, that loss was more than gained back in raw speed.
Kind of like the FX!32 emulator for NT on Alpha. At the time it was out (and still supported), the emulated apps on the Alpha massively outperformed the same code running natively on the newest Intel hardware (PPro and early P-IIs).
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
So the PPC and the 68k were incompatable. Apple realized that they had to move onward and upward and the old 68k's weren't going to cut it, no way, no how. The PPC was what they needed, with the caveat that it was a totally different architecture. But the damned thing ran so much FASTER than the 68k that the second generation of PPC (603) was running 68k software *FASTER* than even the fastest Quadra could handle.
In this fashion, Apple was able to get a next generation processor to market, and maintain compatability with existing (and now horribly outdated) hardware.
HOW is that a *MISTAKE* ?
At this rate, I'm never going to be able to meet my old goal of using my CPU as a stove, or even a hot plate. I had high hopes for 3dfx, or possibly even nVidia... And I guess there's always intel.
I get hungry at work, damn it.
-Puk
Intel's "Inanium", as it's called in Silicon Valley, is a wierd and painful machine. If you liked programming the Sony PS2, you'll love the Itanium. Nobody likes VILW machines; it's what you do when you can't make a more friendly architecture work fast enough.
Intel's marketing operation, though, is getting design wins for the Inanium, even though that architecture needs a near-omniscient compiler to get good performance. Despite the drawbacks of the Itanium, it's going to get considerable market share.
Both machines still run old x86 code. Nobody is going to make the mistake Apple made when they went to PowerPC and had most apps (and for years, most of the OS) running in software emulation.
No, Intel just fucked up. Purely human error in designing the lookup tables for floating point division.
Uhhh... yeah. Last I checked AMD made some pretty damn good parts and always has. AMD's chips haven't always been performance leaders, but to my knowledge they haven't had quite the cavalcade of errors intel has (F00F anyone?).
Oh, and the part where you're rabbiting on about quantum tunneling, well, this is not a significant factor on the scale of a cpu. When the walls are the width of an electron, maybe... Even if an electron or two was heading south of the border, components are not triggered by one electron yet. Maybe in 50 years this will be a problem.
Mod me down for being harsh if you want, I'll still be right and I've got karma to burn.
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Sorry myamid, but you're the one who screwed up this time. :)
The Register: At the high end, ClawHammer will be AMD's first implementation of its 8th generation architecture. ClawHammer will feature the x86-64 technology aimed at rivalling Intel's IA-64 McKinley. Sampling in Q4 2001, ClawHammer will be SMP capable and go into production at the beginning of 2002.
Silicon Strategies: AMD also looks forward to bringing the 64-bit microprocessor generation to the desktop. A previously undisclosed version of AMD's 64-bit Hammer chip, Clawhammer, will begin sampling at the end of 2001 for desktops and server appliances and enter production in the first quarter of 2002. Sledgehammer, a 4- and 8-way capable part for servers, will sample in the first quarter of 2002 and ship a quarter later.
I'd link to more, but it's all reprintings of the same press release, more or less.
I disagree. Consider that a 64 bit chip is smaller than a 32 bit chip. That REALLY drives it home...
/.ers only have a karma of 49...
REAL
SIG: HUP
There seem to be alot of comments here about heat and power consumption. This article isn't about heat or power; it's much more about cost. A smaller chip means more chips can be fit onto the same wafer and thereby bring down the cost of each chip.
Whether the consumer sees any real savings isn't certain. AMD could choose to take a higher profit margin on each chip and pass nothing on to us. Also, a smaller process invariably means more chips come out as duds (cosmic rays and whatnot).
But, a smaller chip isn't really meant to be a feature of a of a microprocessor, except in as much as it effects price. I think this was more of an announcement intended for the corporate/investment folks, not so much us.
-nostradorkmus
It's interesting to note that AMD is still about 3/4 of a release cycle ahead of Intel with regard to adoption of 0.13-micron manufacturing process. This is presumable a result of the relitive age of each companies manufacturing plants and the cost to retrofit rather than build new plants.
-- CTH
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