Intel Delays Dual-Core Processor, Plans New Server Chip

Kajakske writes "Intel said Thursday that it is pushing back the release of its first dual-core processor by a year to 2005 and adding a new microprocessor for servers to its Itanium II lineup. On the other hand, Intel is moving forward in the area of new technologies."

Comments

Not much competition ?

[CountBrass]

Interesting, especially given the lack-luster products produced by Motorola and the relative lack of success of AMD (I use an XP1800+ and think its great, the company just doesn't seem to do too well.) I wonder if this lack of competition is a major factor - Intel doesn't need to keep spending money researching new chips if it's current generation are so far ahead of its competitors.

I also wonder if the economy is a factor compounding that - ok you can research your way into new demand but why bother when you're that far ahead (see above) ?

All I can say is, hurry up IBM and get those new PPC chips out the door (and into my Mac ;-).

Re:Not much competition ?

[kahei]

Intel doesn't need to keep spending money researching new chips if it's current generation are so far ahead of its competitors.

The thing is, this isn't a chip technology race. It's a chip fabrication/distribution/pricing race.

Intel's chips are not technologically superior to AMDs (I know Intel has some major technology assets, but they mostly don't affect the chips in production now). On the other hand, Intel's capital, fabrication capacity, distribution, and market clout are far superior to AMDs. Intel is concentrating on the areas where it has the advantage, which are also the decisive areas.

If only this *was* a technology race. But that's market forces for you.

Re:Not much competition ?

[nehril]

I think they will continue to spend just as much money on research. they just wont *release* new tech unless competition forces them to.

they may have the technology right now that doubles or triples current performance, but why play that card now? keep the tech in reserve, and let it roll out at a "natural" moore's law rate in order to keep the investors happy.

if motorola should happen to shock the world and release a 4 ghz multicore G5 running with 800mhz DDR RAM (we can dream, can't we??), then intel can roll out whatever they have in reserve a bit earlier.

Remember, Intel is run by businessmen, for businessmen. Technology to them is only a means to generate cash.

Re:Not much competition ?

[Kourino]

Remember, Intel is run by businessmen, for businessmen. Technology to them is only a means to generate cash.

Sigh. I suspect that's exactly it. And that's what pisses me off.

Because, as a paying customer, technology to me is a whole hell of a lot more than a way to generate cash. It's a way to do interesting things, and also an end of its own, in a way - exploring the technology is really fun. Anyone remember sitting down with 16/32-bit assemblers and triple-faulting your processor until you got "protected mode" down?

I haven't had that much fun directly with a CPU in years. When I get time to play with my EV56 machine, I'll have some of it again; it'll be my first architecture after IA-32 (I haven't done that much interesting low-level on IA-64 besides performance counters).

And ... waxing philosophical here, so feel free to ignore the rest of this comment. But someone in a different thread recently (don't remember which ... ) commented on the mishandling of the Alpha IP by Compaq, then HP, then its more or less non-use by Intel. And basically said "these people are keeping the market down with their competition, and limiting our future technological growth as a society." I'm not sure how accurate or fair that is (I suspect I'm just getting bitchy now) ... but it's really fscking creepy to think about.

Although really, this is partially because DEC couldn't market the Alpha to save its life. In fact, it didn't.

Re:Not much competition ?

[cp5i6]

Intel is acutally run not by business men so you are very wrong.

Andy Groove and Gordon Moore (two founders of intel) are by far two of the most prominent semiconductor scientists of the 20th century.

Dr. Grove himself has written over 40 technical papers and holds several patents on semiconductor devices and technology. For six years he taught a graduate course in semiconductor device physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

How many people here can say they have taught 6 years in a graduate course at Berkeley?

Craig Barrett the current CEo of intel himself is nothign to scoff at either. He's a fulbright fellow that received his PHD in material science at stanford. He has 40 technical papers dealing with the influence of microstructure on the properties of materials.

So before you knock on Intel about how businessmen is run by businessmen do your homework.

These guys are Far from business men. They are first and foremost incredibly talented scientist who happen to be good at business.

Intel has one of the world's LARGEST cost in terms of research and development along with GE, MS and AMD.

I'm sorry but you are sadly mistaken if you feel that Intel is run by businessmen.

Intel is in trouble

[g4dget]

Hyperthreading and other tinkering isn't going to help Intel. The Itanium is a dud: systems based on it are hugely expensive, have iffy performance, and are not usefully x86 compatible.

If AMD manages to stick to their schedule on the 64bit chips, they are going to have a big winner on their hands: systems that can address more than 4G in a single process and yet are backwards compatible.

Re:Intel is in trouble

[JCholewa]

> Wow - way to make up stuff.
> The Itanium II is certainly not a dud

Agreed. From an engineering standpoint, it's quite a nice chip. I don't agree with some philosophical stuff in the ISA (I'm not that much of a VLIW-for-general-purpose fan, but hey), but the microarchitecture and implementation seems very nice. I do wish that it was easier to implement OOE on IPF, though. :(

> x86 compatibility is worthless ina high end 64-bit machine, somethin AMD doesn't seem to grasp.
> They're marketing a high end technology (consumers and normal business users don't need
> 64-bit technology and won't for a while) to the mainstream market. Morons.

Feh. A big "screw you" on that. AMD isn't catering to the high end server group. They obviously can't just teleport into that market. Their catering to the smaller business that uses Xeon servers. Backwards compatibility with x86 is of the utmost importance in this market. Basically, they're marketing x86 workstations and x86 servers that happen to allow you to enhance performance of some types of programs with simple recompilations. There is a good chance that I might get the lower end version of this product when it comes out, as I use Linux, which may strongly benefit from those extra registers in x86-64, on my home machine. We'll have to see, of course, before I pull out the green.

> And you seem to be ignoring the numbers (remember that 'reality' the rest of us
> live in matters to us, if not to you). AMD is going broke. Intel isn't.

That's a bad measure to use. You don't have any controls in this analysis. There are a lot of reasons why AMD is losing money (poor management a la Hector Ruiz, inability for a relatively small company to handle a very harsh recession, etc..), and there are a lot of reasons why Intel is still doing phenomenally (people buy Intel no matter what, currently excellent execution, they can afford to strongly diversify). Many of these reasons have nothing to do with the technical/engineering side of the equation. IMHO, both AMD and Intel have incredible engineers, and frankly AMD especially warrants respect for being able to ramp technology at *approximately* the same rate as Intel despite having a very, very miniscule fraction of their resources. That is why I was a big AMD fan a couple years ago, at around the time when the company was dominated by the excellent triumverate of Sanders, Raza, Meyer as well as a couple critical folks like Norbert Juffa and Paul Hsieh. At this point in time, AMD was a quantum of a company that somehow managed to produce a piece of engineering that allowed them to, for a brief time, outdo the capabilities of a company fifty times their size. I am somewhat dismayed that AMD turned into a more traditional company over the last two years or so.

-JC

thanks for the explanation

[gripdamage]

The Santa Clara, California-based company is the leading maker of processors, which serve as the brains of computers.

And then there are the customers, who consume these processors like living dead zombies animated by radiation from outer space.

When will they target *ME*?

[pla]

At first, it bummed me out to read this headline, since I would *love* such a toy.

Then, following the link, I realized they only plan this dual core toy for the *Itanium* line, anyway. Bummer. I do like how the article says Intel hasn't sold as many of them as they planned, though... Can we say "DOA"? I thought they had all but abandoned the mega-flop (in the movie sense, not the CPU sense) Itanium.

Anyway, back to my point...

I don't want a CPU with 6MB of cache (the reason they give for pushing back their SMP-on-a-chip). I don't want an Itanium. I don't even want a P4.

I would *run* to the store, however, to buy a quad (since at their current fabs, they could fit four in the same space as a single P4, so why only go dual) P-III somewhere around 1.5Ghz (like the chip they plan to release with 6 or 9MB of cache). Not an inconsiderable amount of CPU power (My current machine has "only" a dual PIII/933, and I have yet to find my "killer app" reason to upgrade).

So, listen up, Intel - the server market may pay more per chip, but we "mere" home users buy a HELL of a lot more of them. So throw us a bone, 'kay?

Because if you don't, AMD will (eventually). ;-)

Re:When will they target *ME*?

[Sycraft-fu]

What is this, AMD cheerleader day or something? Ok, understand that new technology, espically something as big a change as the Itanium takes TIME to develop. The Itainum is NOT for desktops right now, and if you think that's who Intel is targeting, you have a poor understanding of business.

The Itainum 1 was mainly a research chip, a first generation to let people start to develop and test on real hardware. MS took advantage of this and rolled out an IA-64 version of Windows. Intel was hoping for some server sales, but the real goal was getting the new IA-64 system into production silicon.

The Itainum 2 is a much more practical chip. It is something that peopel will probably seriously look at for high end server as it is competitive with 64-bit chips from Sun. You may see it in a few workstation, but probably not many, it's mostly a server chip. Remember, we are taling competiton with big iron here, not desktop system.

Now, as time goes on, the technology will become much more mature and cheap and will eventually filter into desktops. Hopefully, that will happen before we start to hit the 32-bit crunch.

The idea here is not wait until the last second for people to need a 64-bit chip, but to get it to market sooner so you can start working on it.

This, by the way, is not the first tiem Intel has done something like this. The Pentium Pro was blasted when it came out because it's 16-bit performance sucked. Sure it did great for 32-bit but who teh hell used that? Well tehn along came Windows 95 and teh PPro architecture was refined into the PII and it was a great chip since 32-bit was rising rapidly and it smoked at that. The P3 is the third incarnation of the PPro architecture. It's optimised and enhanced (ala SSE) but the same fundimental architecture. The P4 is the first brand new architecture since the P3.

The Itainum is a much larger change than the P4 since it is not only going to 64-bit but a new ISA (EPIC instead of CISC). It needs time and testing before it will be real.

However, Intel is certianly NOT ignoring the home market. The P4 is going to continue to be refined (we are on the 3rd revision of P4s and a 4th is soon comming) and should scale up to around 10ghz. There is plenty of life left in it (and probably subsequent chips based on its architecture). Then, by the time it is getting ready to be replaced, the then current Itanium chip should be ready for prime time.

So quit your bitching. If you don't want a P4, fine, stick with a P3. Why the hell do you care WHAT Intel is doing if you don't want a new chip? When you do decide you want one, get a P4, you ahve no lack of options with them and they scale to rather high speeds already and are not stopping.

My uninformed opinion...

[iNub]

With a P4 killer on the way from IBM, who already has a 90nm/300mm plant in operation, I've been expecting Intel to announce that they have smaller, more efficient processes already in operation. But, what's this? Intel is *behind* IBM in the chip fabbing technology? This might bode well for my next Apple purchase. (Assuming my jobless, broke ass finds a job by the time Apple moves to this new CPU.)

Obviously, I don't keep up with this part of the computer world. Is IBM normally ahead of the game when it comes to new chip processes? It seems to me like Intel, whose main priority is processor manufacture and distribution, would be ahead of IBM, who have diversified to the point that I don't even know what their primary product is.

Re:My uninformed opinion...

[CountBrass]

IBM ($81.19billion FY 2002) is four times the size of Intel ($26.76billion FY 2002) in revenue terms.

Re:G5 race?

[iNub]

The Motorola 85xx chip might be going for use in embedded devices, but I can almost guarantee you that it will *not* be used in a cell phone. A PDA? I doubt it, unless it's compatible with the chips that are already used in PDA's. This chip is more for things like network hardware, cable boxes, cars, and the like. It draws too much power to put it in a cell phone, and it's not quite powerful enough to put in a desktop.

If you're looking for the next generation of PowerPC chips, look to IBM's PPC970.

Is it good for the customer ?

[watzinaneihm]

I think HP and Intel are putting all bets on their child Itanium.
First HP holds back on their alpha line, then Intel does this....
The important question is, Is it good for the consumer by letting others into the market (lesser competition, flatter market etc.) or does it harm him by slowing down technology?

How does hyperthreading differ?

[dmeranda]

How does Intel's Hyperthreading Technology differ from the dual core? I realize the obvious, such as one in in the Pentium line and the other in the Itanium, and the physical differences of packaging.

But how how different will the architecture of a dual-die chip differ from hyperthreading, such as which CPU components will be shared (like cache, instruction decode/scheduler, etc.)?

Also would the Linux kernel's logical processor abstraction used to enable hyperthreading support (see IBM developerWorks Article) also continue to work effectively with a dual-die chip?

Re:How does hyperthreading differ?

[iNub]

A CPU with hyperthreading enabled will never complete a task faster than two of the same CPUs running parallel with hyperthreading disabled.

Well, of course 2 processors will outperform a single one. Processors have a finite pool of resources. The point of HT is not to perform like dual processor, rather to act like them, increasing the performance of a single CPU at a negligible cost.

Buying 2 processors would cost you twice as much as a single processor, even more when you consider the cost of a motherboard and enough memory to make dual processors a worthwhile investment. You would get roughly double (OK, 1.6x) the performance at double the cost.

Buying a single HT-enabled processor, however, would only cost you 10 or 15% more, and you would be seeing a 20-30% performance increase across the board. I think that's a better deal.

Re:How does hyperthreading differ?

[nuintari]

So, can I have both? Buy two hyperthreaded chips and stick em int he same board, and get an even weirder inneficient speed increase. Or would writing a scheduler to handle it be too hard, virtual chips on top of two real chips, I imagine it could appear to look like 4 way smp when in reality its 2 way weird smp. I unno, I want one!

Re:So they're going to do it for real now?

[iNub]

From what I've read, HT doesn't even have a possibility to slow things down. Do you know how multithreading works in an SMP environment?

What HT does is allows this single CPU to pretend to be 2 independent CPUs, effectively splitting it in half (but not necissarily down the middle). The upshot of this is that it can more effectively deal with cache bubbles and all those horrible performance-draining problems Intel chips, with their insanely deep pipelines, are vulnerable to.

Basically, if you only throw a single thread at the processor, only the first virtual processor does the work and the other virtual processor is idle, allowing the entire processing power of the computer to deal with one problem, instead of half of it sitting idle. This is an advantage because HT only requires 5% more transistors, and the net benefit is something like a 20% performance increase. Of course, if you're not doing any work where you actually *use* multithreaded apps, you'll never understand why HT is a big deal.

This post has gone way beyond what I originally intended to say, and instead of rescuing it, I'm just going to kill it now.

in the other news...

[dunkelfalke]

amd opteron smokes the competition in the 4-way sap test:

c't magazine

translation of a short except: even early prototypes of amd opteron can win over all competition in four ways systems - either 32 or 64 bit - at the sap sd benchmark. and that with only 1.6 ghz (planned to launch at 2 ghz)

i think the chart says it all. go amd!

Grr.

[Kourino]

And the vaunted EV8 tech we've been guessing would be infused into later IA-64 products gets pushed farther away into the distance ...

It's good to see at least they're on the road to 65-nm fabrication. But it'd be nice if they breathed some more life into their current architectures. IA-64 docs are interesting reads, but the hardware just isn't terribly impressive in practice yet. (At least, kernel compiles felt like they took forever on my professor's dual IA-64 research boxes compared to ... my P3 866 at home.) And. New Pentiums? Watch, as I leap for joy. Or don't, in fact, leap.

I'd like to see Intel do something New[tm] and Exciting[tm] on the home market. IA-64 is that, I'm guessing they just need to tweak existing setups or something. I love the feeling of having a processor architecture before me to dig into. (That's why I picked up an old EV56 machine for ... hehe ... testing.) But are we non-server folk ever going to see something that's drastically different from the CPU in the computer we got a decade ago?

Does n't it defeat the purpose?

[msgmonkey]

I was under the impression that there was competing "schools of thought" with regards to how extra preformance was to be gained as we start to hit the manufacturing "wall".

On one hand you have the VLIW type guys (or EPIC in intel speak) whereby you increase parallelism at the instruction level.. or the Multicore guys where you increase the number of number instructions executed by having multiple cores running different tasks.

Whilst in principle I've got no problems with merging the two, I get the impression that by going the dual core route Intel are admitting that they wont be-able to get the kind of performance out of EPIC that they where promising.

Just a thought to consider.

Re:So they're going to do it for real now?

[larien]

Bzzt! From what I've read, HT can and does slow down some applications

For a good analysis, read this article over at Ars. In particular, it does point out that the likely cause of slowdowns in some apps is down to cache contention. Near the end, it also says:

With the wrong mix of code, hyper-threading decreases performance, just like it can increase performance with the right mix of code

In short, sometimes it helps, sometimes it hinders.

Finally, you don't need multithreaded apps to take advantage of SMP/HT; if you're running a cpu intensive application on one CPU, the other is free for interactive stuff. You do, however, get much more benefit in a multi-threaded application.

Look at the other fun fact about the Itanium...

[dpilot]

AFAIK, it is *the most proprietary* processor on the market.

When they began the IA64, Intel and HP set up a company to hold the IP related to the new architecture. That company owns the IP, Intel and HP get rights to use it. None of Intel's or HP's cross-licensing agreements apply to any of the IA64 IP.

AFAIK, every other major CPU ends up have some amount of cross-licensing, except the IA-64. They own it lock, stock, and barrel. The only chink in the armor seems to be Intergraph.

...they just wont *release* new tech...

[dpilot]

I wouldn't count this too far. Unless it gets tested in the marketplace, new tech tends to get rather...inbred. Too many generations of "new tech held internally" and you'll find it simply can't be put to market, because it turns out to be irrelevant, or not well adapted to the current situation, or...

Been there, done that.

Intel is NOT pushing back anything

[javatips]

Humm, seems that the editor got it wrong...

From CNet News they are actually going to release it FASTER that the previous schedule.

The double core itanium deadline is now 2005 instead of 2007 and adding a new chip for 2004.

Maybe the confusion arise fromthe fact that "Originally, Montecito, due in 2004, wasn't a dual-core chip, but it was morphed after engineering and manufacturing teams concurred that a dual-processor chip could be mass-manufactured at Intel by 2005."

It would be a good idea to change the headline!

From the article..

[grub]

The Santa Clara, California-based company is the leading maker of processors, which serve as the brains of computers.

Ah, so that's what those things do..