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Inside Intel
z71offroad writes: "There is a really interesting article at Anandtech right now showing what goes on inside Intel Labs. Although it doesnt break any NDAs, it is still a facinating look at what goes on inside the chip giant's labs."
I would like to have something like this in my house just to scare people who come over. Its almost my dream.
Are you telling me that you don't see the connection between government and laughing at people? - Interviewer
I was all excited about this "insider's look" into the "behind-the-scenes" happenings in the silicone industry, but it looks like this is really just some company that makes computers or something. Man...
:(
Not even a single supermodel or anything!
Has anyone seen the Linux inside stickers?
or the Satan inside ones?
even "Designed for Windows ME"?
No, it's synonymous with silicom.999999999999
doesn't everyone just breakdance in radiation suits all day?
I think Intel does need to jump off it's approach to sales by clock speed.
Maybe instead of constantly worrying about clock speeds they spend more research into being able to add larger amounts of cache or try to achieve one clock cycle access to main memory
Yes chips will most likely continue to follow moore's law but computers are not much faster now than 2 years ago
what their worries should be
It has some pretty interesting info regarding what goes on around Intel.
Did we really need a /. article on this?
Initially there were two other focus areas for the R&D team,
but that was before they decided to get rid of the dancing guys
in the shiny bunny outfits.
1)Performance
2)Power
3)Integrity
4)Functionality
5)Tools and Methods
6)Originality
7)Choreography
Basically, Itanium was designed to address the "efficiency" issue, as well as enabling faster turnaround on new designs with a simpler core.
We all know how that turned out, don't we? Fundamentally, Intel is trapped by their own success. They haven't successfully introduced a really new architecture since the i860/i960, and that was YEARS ago.
People don't want "efficient" ot "elegant" processors. They want MegaHertz.
-Mark
is they didn't upgrade the Blue Men at the same time as the Pentium.
is the picture of the 10 GHz ALU test screen here. I just like the way they have the Windows Calculator next to the test screen, in order to check whether 2147483646 + 1 really is equal to 2147483647.
Inventor of the LOLbalrog meme.
~~~
The types of tests run in the CV labs range from network tests to playing games (which seemed to gather the majority of the CV engineers).
All I gots to say is how do I become a CV Engineer. Getting payed to "test" the stability of chips during games.
Uhh, no I dont think 20 hours of straight counter-strike is rigorous enough, we should do at least 20 more, for quality purpouses.
No, seriously I need a job!
th very first sentence in this article states th perception th article is focussed on diminishing
really? - as a for-profit company, perhaps their shareholders might be interested in them making maximum profit as well?
and who is this 'we' - only a single authour is mentioned at th top of th article - or perhaps his name has simply been appended to a pre-prepared puff piece?another example of rhetorical writing pulled from th first few paragraphs
very talented engineers [who] are focused on pushing the limits of technology
ok - there may be real information contained in this article - but frankly there were enough warning signals in th first few paragraphs to tell me my time was better spent elsewhere
All my buddies that work in Intel Engineering say is that the Marketing guys push the dates, scream for clockspeed and fudge the press press releases.
Theres nothing interesting in this post, just a view from Portland about what I hear coming out of Jones Farm and Ronler Acres.
Actually, the most revolutionary thing at Intel is the strides they are taking in the field of fab design.
Anandtech isn't trying to artificially inflate the advertisement display count by separating paragraphs of articles into multiple pages, are they?
Yeah? Well, I work for Intel, and I like it here, too. Not in IAL, but I do work at Intel.
All the Pentium 4 ALUs are double pumped, that means a Pentium 4 running at 2.2 Ghz's ALU is running at 4.4Ghz.
And you are still wondering why Pentium 4 is still slower than the Athlon (or awfully close)
Imagine what would happen if the ALU is only running at the same speed as the CPU.
Personally, Intel is losing little ground at a time right now, but remember, Intel can afford to make a couple of mistakes but AMD can't even afford to make on. One mistake will push AMD back to the bottom, again.
kawai
Intel chips, while more commonplace in store-bought computers, still do not measure up to the performance and reliability of AMD. I started long ago with an Intel Celeron 300 slot chipset (hey, I was new to this computer thing; please be gentle!). Later, when I wised up, I built a whole new system around a Duron 750 Socket A. Much better. Even when I ran comparisons on my Duron 750 to faster Intel 3 chips the results were very similar: The Duron outperformed the Intel in just about every aspect! Not only that, but when you consider what clock speed one gets for their dollar, the AMD series has always been faster for cheaper. Reliability is also a factor that goes against Intel. I have heard many horror stories of chips that had great heatsinks and excellent fans, but they still overheated with no overclocking involved. My co-worker, however, runs an awe-inspiring water-cooling system that has leaked many times (poor guy is great at computers, lousy at plumbing) but despite water sitting literally on the chip, the AMD Athlon he was running showed no signs of damage. But, to be fair, I can't just compare prices and reliability. Intel and AMD chips have many, many differences to set them apart. The whole deal breaks down to this, though: When I wanted to upgrade recently to the Athlon XP, I didn't have to go out and buy a new motherboard, different memory, and a special power supply. Actually, all I needed was the chip. Until Intel can effectively compete with AMD's performance, reliability, and cost, I will never, ever own another Intel board again.
"This food is problematic."
If you look at this picture:n si de/apparatus.jpg
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/intel/i
Does anyone else see the HP Deskjet 500 printer cartridge case sitting next to the stereo microscope?
I find that odd, just leaving your junk laying around like that in a controlled environment.
As someone who works at Intel supporting the fab, it is absolutely amazing! The marketing folks may spout all day long, but the technology developing inside the clean rooms is great! Of course they are getting close to hosting an open house for the locals (yes - more PR!) to educate them about the chip making process. Seems like us technically inclined folks can't take 2 steps without bumping into a marketing guy!
Who cares if Intel (or anyone else) makes chip n+1 perform better than chip n through clock cycle speedups, fiddling with cache arrangements, implementing faster-than-light wiring systems on the die :-) . . . whatever. As long as it works faster and cheaper than last year's, what does it matter beyond idle curiosity?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
For the love of God, mod parent SIDEWAYS!
You just got to love all those wires for the wireless network =)
you're now another troll that I have to download messages from and waste my bandwith with
Dude, if that's the problem, just mark this guy as a foe of you and set your prefs to subtract points from the foes...
You are so fucking right. ...
I burned my Athlon 1.0 when onboard fan connector died
Well, I still run Athlon , this time 1.1 for even with its flaws it is still cheaper than Intel.
Maybe instead of constantly worrying about clock speeds they spend more research into being able to add larger amounts of cache or try to achieve one clock cycle access to main memory
I'm afraid that both of these (especially the last one) sound like the infamous "let's just find a way to factor huge numbers" quote. That is - yes, it would be wonderful to be able to do this, but there are good reasons for believing that it's very difficult (not that people haven't tried).
For caches, the problem is that larger caches are slower and more power-hungry. To compensate, you use a multilevel cache architecture, but you still have some penalties. A modern foundry could put as much cache as it wanted on to a chip (look at HP's most recent chip for an example) - but because of architectural tradeoffs, this isn't always a good idea.
For memory, if you can find a way to get single-clock access latencies reliably without a 10x slower clock, sell it to $favourite_company and retire on the proceeds. This isn't likely to happen for _two_ reasons. Firstly, modern memory is optimized for density at the expense of speed (this is why we use DRAM and not SRAM for system memory). Secondly, because of the trace lengths, capacitance (and inductance!), and crosstalk and noise issues, it's one _hell_ of a lot harder to send data at low latency _or_ low bandwidth across a motherboard than just within a chip.
There are ways of pushing the boundaries on all of these things, but while we're doing that, processor speeds are still getting faster, putting tougher requirements on the memory and negating most of the relative gain.
In summary, there's a good reason that Intel (along with everyone else) is pursuing more conventional enhancements while background research into memory and caches is going on.
The 10GHz ALU shown was run at room temperature, and was not actually a Pentium 4 ALU at all. While it is true the Pentium 4's ALUs are double pumped, that's because they're actually 16-bit (16 x 2 = 32-bit, thus double pumped).
;)
The 10GHz ALU was a very limited ALU, not part of any modern processor.
Intel is losing little ground at a time right now
Actually, in Q4 2001 Intel gained market share and AMD lost some. But overall in 2001, AMD did gain market share, that's true.
I still think it's because Intel wants to point to AMD and say "See? Competition!".
Intel could easily release faster CPUs right now to totally crush the Athlon, but it doesn't make sense to do so.
I think Intel does need to jump off it's approach to sales by clock speed.
;)
They don't work on that assumption. Do you see the Itanium working at 100GHz?
The reason the Pentium 4 has a longer pipeline is because you need a longer pipeline for SMT to work properly with x86 processors. That, and the chip was designed for multimedia, where most of the time the long pipeline is far more beneficial than a deteriment to performance.
I don't care how many GHz it is, I don't care what its IPC is, what I care about is what the GHz * IPC is.
Maybe instead of constantly worrying about clock speeds they spend more research into being able to add larger amounts of cache or try to achieve one clock cycle access to main memory
They already have the technology to add larger amounts of cache. It's just not economical to do so, simply because of all the transistors it takes...
Improve memory speed
Last time I checked, Intel didn't design system memory.
Although it does (by far) have the most bandwidth available to the CPU out of any consumer CPU out there.
Make instruction set more efficient (ie make alu more efficient, the intel is no RISC)
You mean like ditching x86 and designing IA-64?
reduce production costs
Sure, Intel will magically wave a wand and make their production costs drop like a rock. Doesn't work like that.
Mostly the article seemed to run like the following, well we met some real cool guys in a lab in oregon who research all the new stuff, then we followed all the production to the guy's who QC the design at some other lab somewhere. While trying not to break a NDA
I thought this was a bit like going to Nike and just interviewing the guy who made the prototype for the new gel heel. Or Ford and interviewing the guy who made the new concept Focus while ignoring everyone from Detroit
Not that am trying to troll, I just wanted some interviews with the average workers at their Indonesian fab plant, maybe finding out how what kewl shit they suppy to their employees. I heard that one plant had a fully working video parlor for instance, and that intel had helped to setup schools in the local area (although this is prob marketing BS). Also, rumour has it that people who work there are all closet overclocking freak's since the price of the chips themselves are so low.
I also thought that it might be interesting to see the who hugh some of these factories have become, that in some cases they are as large as small cities, with entire regions depending on there income.
Throw, in some interesting facts like, most of the chinese in indonesia are not normal chinese but rather Hacka, or chinese gypsies who moved to the country due to persecution on the mainland.
Things like that, together with reports from the labs, would have made a much more interesting article IMHO.
Pianist : Some jerk whos taught themselves how to type in rhythm
Part 2 please. Make it quick, I need to learn "Funny".
KTHXBYE
My point was that they need to focus more on researching those fields rather than on clock speed.
Think about what you said. More conventional enhancments from what you said = faster clock speed. Well think about the biggest bottleneck with the computer. Computers today are not limited by clock speed at all. Its memory bottlenecking. Yes there are some improvements in memory but if there werent any, your processor is just going to get to the idle state much faster and sit there much longer.
The idea is about allocation of research resources. IF they spend more money on caching technologies and main memory speed, it will most likely yield a more efficient processor instead of executing so many useless no-ops remaining idle til memory finds its way into the cache. Each level you go up from the registers in teh memory hiearchy access time increases about 10 fold each level, even more as u get to secondary storage.
Whats the use of a processor that zips along with the few instructions it has in cache only to wait wasting time doing nothing. The processor is constantly waiting for the slow as hell IDE hard disks which are just as fast as they were several years ago, main memory, and its own cache.
Now, im not talking about making lead into gold, im just saying its almost obvious if you want technologically superior chips, you need to invest in the obvious bottleneck, not what the marketing department says is most effective.
Really? Corporate policy actually doesn't permit wireless access. Which building is fully "wired" for wireless? Not any of the ones I've been to.
You mean CTG? ;) Yeah I work in the labs here, and I love it. And the marketing guys DO NOT dictate any of our dates. Unless our lab is wierd and different from the other labs at intel, we like to keep our marketing guys on a leash. I think just the product groups have the marketing driven dates. The labs don't... At least not ours.
What's the big deal?
I'm having a chip FIBed right now.
It's standard practice in the chip design industry. I can give you the names of a bunch of places here in the valley where you can walk in and get your chip de-capped and FIBed within a 4 hours.
Hmmm...doesn't seem to be many +5's (zero at time of writing)
Looks like those Pentiums aren't working too hard tonight!
"The scientist describes what is; The engineer creates what never was." - Theodore von Karman
The point of this article is to show what many people have not seen, the inside of Intel. In the spirit of that I see nothing wrong with it.
"another example of rhetorical writing pulled from th first few paragraphs
very talented engineers [who] are focused on pushing the limits of technology"
And while it may be teeny bit fluffy per your above quote, Anand is certainly not going to write how the Intel engineers are know-nothing smelly idiots. Christ they have a relationship with them and just maybe might need that P4 3GHz when it comes out. And no I don't think this makes Anand a non-credible source for cpu/hardware reviews. If you read any of them you know they often praise AMD.
Geez lighten up.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A modern foundry could put as much cache as it wanted on to a chip (look at HP's most recent chip for an example) - but because of architectural tradeoffs, this isn't always a good idea.
Oh, I don't know about that. The PA-8700 has 2.25 MB of L2 cache, which is okay I suppose. The MIPS R14000 processors in the SGI Origin 3000 series have 8 MB of L2 cache per CPU, and they do pretty well, to put it mildly. I think your assertion that large secondary caches aren't always a good idea sounds a little weak.
Intel doesn't care about efficiency, megahertz, or pretty much anything except... megabucks.
fnord.
I'm sorry but I have to flame this article:
:-) and voila!!! The best part is that someone buys it.
-nothing new: higher voltages == higher speed. I don't only know why, but OC'ers do it all the time.
-multiprocessor: I think intel is one of the last uC makers which actually makes mono-processor chips. SoC's are coming and new stuff too...
-Two chips, a slow one and a fast... How un-original. This is just another way of saying that your process-control is not good enough. You make two identical chips, test them for speed, one isn't good enough (so you turn down the voltage
Thats all for now.
Let's not forget to take a complete look inside intel..., not just at there technology.
FaceIntel.com
Nice company.... NOT!
M0571y H@rml355.
"There is a strong focus on networking and more specifically wireless
networking at Intel. Intel's campus alone is entirely wired for wireless
internet access for their employees."
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
That was interesting, but is reads like a really long advertisement for Intel.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
I'm quite dissapointed i must say. When I saw "what goes on inside the labs" I was hoping for some intel gossip. E.g. people have orgies in their bunny suits, people playing baseball with the silicon wafers. But all the article is about is chip production.
DAMN! I got my hopes up too soon...
" They haven't successfully introduced a really new architecture since the i860/i960, and that was YEARS ago. "
The i860 and i960 were very different architectures, the i860 was a fp number cruncher and the i960 was an early superscalar-ish architecture (co-developed, iirc, with Siemens, or someone else beginning with S, anyway).
The i960 was a beauty to write code for. i860 wasn't.
What would Lemmy do?
Just like the wonderfully useful, simple and elegant IA-64 ISA proves.
Wait a minute...
Most psychopaths are, in fact, sexually deviant - often homosexual. Furthermore, most filthy paedophiles are faggots as well.
This pretty much destroys your silly arguments.
Pharmacists are assholes!
N. Bush
_______
http://www.counterpunch.org/mccarthynoelle.html
The way into Intel is through the Green Badge (Contractor with good pay but no bennies) eventuly go blue (Intel Employee) and get your pay cut in half but pick up some killer bennies)..
I worked in Intel's Dupont, WA CV labs.
Sign up for a 1 year contract through CDI (Do a search on Monster for CDI and check the job listings with Intel lab locations)
Quite honestly the job can get quite boring.. Yes sure there is fun stuff like fiddling with tearabyte san systems, "testing" DVD's by watching movies on 37" monitors and Itanium boxes with 64 GIGS of memory but by the time you have loaded Whistler so many times you can recite the CD-Key from memory it gets a bit boring.
Imagine this as a work day.. Your boss hands you a case of hard drives and a stack of SCSI cards.. Your job.. load up 5 drives each in 3-4 Itanium workstations, load Whistler on each one.. run a list of tests.. load Linux on em.. run more tests.. repeat untill you have tested the whole case of drives.. repeat the entire process with 3-4 brands or SCSI cards.. then go get the RAID cards.. repeat again.. Next week you get a new case of drives..
Guess what.. same thing all over again. Sometime in the middle wander down to the other side of the lab and chat with they guys hackin linux kernels to run on the new Mckinleys.
Still I learned a ton and got to play with next years toys last year.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
Oh, I don't know about that. The PA-8700 has 2.25 MB of L2 cache, which is okay I suppose. The MIPS R14000 processors in the SGI Origin 3000 series have 8 MB of L2 cache per CPU, and they do pretty well, to put it mildly.
Large amounts of cache benefit niche applications. You see huge caches on server chips because a) they happen to run this kind of niche load, and b) servers are optimized for performance above all else, which means a performance gain of a few percent is worth the cost of adding more cache (while a consumer would balk at paying twice as much).
Cache benefits servers that are running many, many tasks at once - a context switch won't necessarily end up purging the cache if it's big enough. Consumer machines don't usually have this kind of load (or we'd all be running dual-processor machines).
Some scientific applications will benefit, but only some of them. The rest either have access patterns that don't lend themselves to cacheing, or use blocking techniques to increase locality enough that even a smaller cache will be adequate (incremental return becomes low beyond a certain point).
For the vast majority of applications, we're already well into the realm of diminishing returns. Simple proof of this: We've had 256k and 512k caches on consumer chips for quite a while. Linewidth is fine enough that we have the ability to put much more cache on without taking a yield penalty. If doubling the cache size was a sure-fire performance boost for consumer chips, both Intel and AMD would have done it already.
My point was that they need to focus more on researching those fields rather than on clock speed.
[...]
Now, im not talking about making lead into gold, im just saying its almost obvious if you want technologically superior chips, you need to invest in the obvious bottleneck, not what the marketing department says is most effective.
And my point is that Intel will market what they expect to be able to put on the shelves next year. *That's* why you hear about their other processor tweaks.
Of *course* Intel is spending money on improving their memory subsystems! But you don't hear about it, because they haven't made any breakthroughs yet (RamBus was the last proposed improvement they invested in, and that failed spectacularly).
It is also in Intel's interest to invest in improvements that are likely to bear fruit quickly. Improving the memory subsystem isn't the only way to improve processor performance, so they're investigating other methods as well.