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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."
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?
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 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."
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.