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."

Comments

at Intel

[global_diffusion]

doesn't everyone just breakdance in radiation suits all day?

Intel's approach

[drink85cent]

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

• Improve memory speed
• Make instruction set more efficient (ie make alu more efficient, the intel is no RISC)
• reduce production costs

Re:Intel's approach

[s390]

The reason the Athlon proccesors are so much faster in benchmarks isn't the clock-speed, but the memory bottle-neck. Athlon's run with half the level2 cache yet they still are faster. Why? 233 MHz front-side bus speed.

Bzzzt, wrong! Athlons are faster in terms of useful work done per clock because they have a shorter instruction pipeline. Thus their branch mispredict penalty is lower and they have a higher instruction-throughput-rate (ITR) than Intel chips of equal clock speed. Other factors (exclusive L1/L2 cache, lower memory latency, better die space allocation to ALUs and FPUs) influence AMD's higher performance too, but this is the main one. It's just a better balanced processor design, and it certainly yields higher performance for price.

BTW, current DDR memory speed is 2 x 133 Mhz = 266 Mhz, not 233 Mhz.

Intel Labs

[topside420]

You can get much of this info (and more), plus related info on Intel's labs by visiting the Intel Labs website.

It has some pretty interesting info regarding what goes on around Intel.

Did we really need a /. article on this?

My favorite picture

[4thAce]

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.

Where do I sign up?

[SrlKlr]

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!

PR fluff dressed up as engineering cred

[solferino]

Almost as absurd as the idea of Intel backing out of their IA-64 development in favor of x86-64 is the unfortunate perception that the world's largest desktop microprocessor manufacturer is not driven by engineering but rather by marketing.

th very first sentence in this article states th perception th article is focussed on diminishing

today we'll be showing you the Intel that doesn't care about anything outside of making fast, reliable and powerful circuits.

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