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Glimpses of the Future from the Intel Developer Forum
km790816 writes: "Lots of cool stuff on CNet about the Intel Developer Forum, including the next version of the P4, followed by 3GIO on the desktop (1st version 0.5 gigabytes per second of data-transfer capacity but bumps up to 1, 2, 4 and 8 gigabytes per second with the use of more wires.), and Intel's work to embed wireless in silicon. Quote from the CTO: 'We could get it to the point where radios are built into every product we make, giving every device seamless, roaming connectivity. You will see orders of magnitude of cost (decreases) through integration into silicon.'"
The big question, though:
"DDR or RAMBUS or ????"
Seriously... with Intel recently dumping RAMBUS (see slashdot article a few days ago) what would these new P4s use? I would imagine that this "hyper-threading" along with higher-than-ever clock speeds would make the memory bandwidth even more of an issue than it already is.
Will they go back to using RAMBUS?
Will they continue to choke the P4 with DDR?
Or...do they have something totally different in mind without telling us?
-kwishot
It would be really interesting to see how AMD is able to compete with Intel with the 'departure' from the common standard. Of course the new AMD chip ClawHammer, will be able to support current x86 instructions, but it won't really help you much to run it that way.
;-O
Hopefully AMD will really work on a compiler that take advantage of the new chip's strength. Maybe hire those SGI engineers?
I just hope we will still have a choice in the processor market a few years from now.
geek page at KY speaks
I'm wondering what radio spectrum they are going to use to accomplish this. Its a finite resource. If 3G ever gets going every bit of spectum left except the ISM bands is going to be used up. And I have a hard time imagining that products are going to work in a city where there are 10000 other people sharing the band at the same time. Marketing clashes with reality on this one.
One thing I am waiting for with wireless is some decent security functionality. What with the farce that is 802.11 and the proliferation of 'secure' data within companies I work with, wireless has become one of the major security threats.
The number of people I have found using RF keyboards/mice on computers in 'secure' areas, and not even believing that these can be snooped (which is quite trivial), then insisting that we have a 802.11 hub for their flashy new laptop, simply because it has that functionality built in.
I would love to see a standard developed for a plugable security model on top of these transports, so a 'suitable' level of protection can be installed for the situation.
- It's an ultra-low-power x86 chip line.
- It's due in 2003.
- It's not based on the P-4 core, but is a fresh design, possibly related to the P6 core. (Boy, that's a bad pair of abbreviations, but you know what I mean.)
- It probably has a completely redesigned instruction decoder; I found some mention of combining instructions into common bundles.
- It's capable of turning off unused portions of the chip to save power.
- It's intended for laptops and blades (of course).
- It's being designed in Israel.
That's a slim set of factoids; anyone have any more? Or any corrections?In the UK it means only one thing, and that is John Prescott the deputy prime minister (roughly the equivalent of Dick Cheyney). By the admitidly low standard of politicians he is quite a character. He single handedly made the last general election interesting by punching a voter who was stupid enough to throw an egg at him (when choosing your egg target, don't choose one who used to earn spare cash by bare knuckle boxing!).
I can't decide if the phrase "Prescott PC" would be good for sales or not. I guess it might suggest a machine with a bit of punch!
Well I found the background for the codename 'Banias' which ties into the mention that it's being developed in Israel. But I couldn't find a damn thing about the codename 'Prescott'. Anyone? Could it be really referring to the British deputy prime minister?
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2085308,00. html ...
Banias, formerly Caesarea Philippi, is the Arabic name for the Hellenistic city of Paneas whose name derives from Pan, the Greek god of herds and shepherds. His cult was observed in a large cave at the foot of Mount Hermon, where a source of the River Jordan emerges.
Pepperdine University has conducted digs in the area that have unearthed parts of a palace from Herod Agrippa II. Modern-day Banias is located in Israel, where the Intel design team for the new chip is based. The company typically codenames its chips after geographical features.
First things first -- the Apple chips are *NOT* RISC. Reduced Instruction Set Computing means that you have a processor with vary few instructions, and you let the compiler and ASM coder do the work. This leads to larger code and simpler, cooler running processors. The Apple CPU has a huge number of instructions, but most of those are designed to finish in one clock cycle. This makes that processor a SISC(Simple Intruction Set Computing) processor. Any RISC vs. CISC arguement is (and should be) lost in the light that both are merely models, and implementation is rarely, if ever pure.
As for your assertion that the quality of Apple computers, the speed of the G5, and the quality of MacOS 10 somehow mean that they will thrive in the marketplace, you are both ignorant and naieve. Welcome to the MS dominated marketplace. Innovation, and the idea that quality breeds sales, died years ago, along with such quality OSs as BeOS, OS/2 Warp, DR-DOS, CP/M, and even earlier incarnations of MacOS. This industry has proven that the one dominant product, once entrenched, will remain the dominant product, no matter how innovative, high quality, or impressive the competition, no matter how shoddy the dominant product. In this case, I see the rise of Linux as a sign of the destructive force of MS. It takes an OS whose structure is as cancerous as a starfish, where you can cut off an arm, and that arm will grow into a whole new creature, whose economic model is as painful, where companies literally give away their products *and* the blueprints to those products, and whose longevity has already been proven, where Linux has been in development far longer than Windows 9x(I believe it was first released in '91, and I used a UMSDOS version of slackware in '95, and X was well on it's way by then) to even exist on the same platform, let alone thrive. Apple is a special case -- they were able to get a large portion of their user-base a long time ago, when Apple was popular. Many users stick with apple because it is indeed a superior platform for many applications, but new users are few and far between.
Basically, you sound like I did about a year ago, but I was talking excitedly about BeOS R5 for the x86 platform. Be was a reality check -- no single company can compete in this marketplace. A painful lesson, but very true. Learn this quickly, and you may not be as hurt when the next Apple flops commercially, like every non-MS operating product before it.
It's been a long time.