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Intel Announces New, Slower, Chip
kshkval writes "According to Business Week, Intel is marketing the Centrino, a 1.6 Ghz chip that is slower than previous laptop processors from Intel, but does more. Hey, isn't that what Apple and AMD have gotten so much guff about? The worm turns..."
A better built, more efficient chip .. I like it. Though since its winter, I'll stick with my AMD chips to keep me warm.
we don't?!?!
Blarf.
The logo, featuring a striking magenta color and a completely new shape, suggests flight, mobility, and forward movement.
Sold!
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
Perhaps now we will see a new wave of marketing, measuring and such from Intel, although I doubt it.
/.ers with their honesty.
They have made a tremendous amount of money due to the ignorance of "moms and dads" who assume that bigger numbers mean faster computer.
They are more typically going to say "yea, but this is for laptops only, they are different" and still focus the race on ghz. I mean, you can't blame them. their job is to make money for their shareholders, not impress
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Is it me or is that logo a two-colored sideways ass? Awful.
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
Moore's Law doesn't stand a chance!
The Centrino is not a single processor but a "mobile technology" including microprocessor, wireless networking, etc.
Processor is a misnomer.
Cool, what will we get in 40 years? Do we get the ENIAC back? Now _that_ is what I call a computer. Woohoo!
just in time for Valentines day
because nothing says 'you're hot!' like a new processor...
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
They were going to use experimental "Centium" chips, but they smashed them all together accidentally. The results were virtual processors, dubbed "centrinos" by physicists. Make absolutely sure you don't place your centrinos by anticentrinos. Also, the chips have a small mass, and count as dark matter.
So now Intel is removing a laptop user's ability to easily upgrade his/her wireless capability...say from 802.11b to .11g?
I wonder how easy it will be for PC Cards, etc to override the CPU's wireless functionality....
The bottom line is "Do you want to exchange performance for battery life?" and "Do you not want to have to purchase a wireless card (sd/pcmcia)?" For some, that may be appealing, however, not a big enough reason for thoes of us who would hopefully know better. I for one enjoy a snappy machine.
Looking at the press release, Intel outlined three priorities:
o extended battery life
o thinner and lighter form factors
o outstanding mobile performance
This is a chip to compete on the Transmeta level, if you will. The message is "If you want better battery life and acceptable performance, buy this."
The megahertz myth is irrelevant here.
Don't let your Centrinos collide with Anti-Centrinos, or you'll get a huge explosion that will rain Pentinos, Athlinos, and other junk.
Before, the chant was "High MHz good! Higher MHz better! GHz is the best!" Now, since the general public is no longer susceptible to the pimply-faced kid at CompUSA who convinces ma & paw that a 2.4GHz is indeed 17% faster than a 2.0GHz, Intel needs to shift gears and change their tune.
The really sad part about the entire remarketing campaign is that they will get away with it. The general public has a very short memory for these kinds of stunts -- just look at how well Microsoft is doing after countless screwings over of the populace. Windows ME anyone?
The thing to remember is that with enough marketing funds, you can indeed have success even selling snow to eskimos.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
The new Intel Centrino mobile technology brand name will be represented by a new logo carrying the famous Intel Inside® mark. The logo, featuring a striking magenta color and a completely new shape, suggests flight, mobility, and forward movement.
Yeah, either that, or "disposable feminine product"
There go my bragging rights...
Intel discovers that size isn't everything...
will work for Karma
A couple years ago I went to an intel sales seminar for retail salespeople (amazing how you can dummy a paystub with photoshop, and a scanner) and halfway through the presentation the trainer threw out "Who knows what iComp is?"
The entire room lost it when I yelled back "A cheesy marketing ploy!"
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
First of all, some PowerPCs have AltiVec, which is more-or-less MMX. In any case if you discount MMX-accelerated memcpy applications don't use MMX anyway. We'd probably be better off with a DMA engine (or maybe a DSP). Secondly, the quote is referring to the fact that PowerPCs get more computation done per clock-cycle than x86 (particularly Intel) CPUs. So you should be measuring $/MIPS or somesuch (Intel (or rather AMD) probably still wins though).
There are a lot of interesting trade-offs in processor design and lately Intel has been optimizing for cycle time rather than performance. Long term this is bound to fail in market segments that actually care about performance but what Intel knows (and what most of the world is just beginning to figure out) is that the vast majority of the PC market is no longer performance oriented. With modern graphics cards even cutting edge games aren't the CPU suckers they once were.
What a load of fluff. Is there even anything new here? A slower chip which uses less power - shocking! Bundled technology that's already being bundled by every single vendor - wow! I can't even tell from either link whether there is one single thing that's new about the chip other than its slowed core - the retained bandwidth could just be because the FSB is still the same speed.
Beyond that, who writes these ridiculous press releases? "Intel Corporation said today" - yeah, to ITSELF. "CES Virtual Press Kit" really is descriptive of the press these days.
The Business Week writer tries, but can't help the fact that it's a non-story. "Intel's carrot is a new logo" - huh? In what possible way is this a carrot? You could at least argue that the existing Intel logo is recognised, though widely mocked. What possible benefit is there in the new one to a vendor? Another damn sticker on every device? And for this they have to buy a bundle of three things they otherwise could have sourced separately.
It all seems a pathetic smokescreen way of saying "our competitors were right all along - everything we've said against them was bullshit". Also "we're having trouble moving some of this stuff, so you can't buy this less-useless CPU without it - oops well that would be monopolistic, so you CAN buy it separately, you just can't have the logo! By the way, AMD sucks!".
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
* Intel® Pentium® M Processor
* Intel® 855 chipset family
* Intel® PRO/Wireless network connection
Further explaining:
Ok, someone OBVIOUSLY is spending entirely too much time downloading pr0n.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Intel will announce "Centrino with Wings, for those heavy flow days."
Trolling is a art,
AMD said several months ago they are getting out of the megahertz race and focusing on application of technology, meaning doing more with the die space instead of doing faster. Intel is now taking back leadership by...being sure to have a slower chip than AMD that does still MORE with the die space.
The speed race is over. You will continue to hear about who has the fastest, but it will be more "gee whiz" stuff than "I need that" because you just won't need it. Before long you won't be able to even FIND a retail desktop computer that runs over 2Ghz, and when you open the hood it will have ONE chip in it, right in the center of the logic board. In the end probably everything sold as a desktop system will have power consumption below that of today's laptop computers, power supplies the size of a deck of cards, no fan, 1.8 inch HDD, wireless input on all I/O (including the monitor) and the whole thing will fit in a pocket and run for an hour on a built-in backup UPS battery, thus finally bluring the distinction between what is a portable computer and what is not.
Think iPod on steroids, and yes you will use your "portable desktop Pee Cee" to listen to MP3s most of the time, using a wireless headset.
That's just the way it is going folk, because with all the price pressure that is where the profit will be. Besides, all that sounds tre kewl to me!
Give it...what? Two years? Now that the race has turned to "less is more" it might not even take that long. And to the winner go the spoils.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
stunning. If AMD had released something that performs as well as their top end desktop processor but at half the clock speed, would it have been billed here as a "slower" processor? I don't think so.
What the hell are you talking about "Genius"?
Nearly everything you said is wrong or mis-informed.
MMX? Ya mean SSE/iSSE? Well it's AltiVec in PPC and it produces higher Blast numbers than Intel's.
Cost to clock cycle? PPC do more instructions pcc. How is this more $?
Embedded? Go open up a Mac and look. The CPUs are not embedded.
Servers? Have you looked at Xserve?
Christ on a moped! I used to work for Intel and I can't even defend anything you've said.
- I am made of meat.
lol, excellent commercial, it would be banned from american air waves, but then again, galileo was excommunicated, so genuis is never appreciated.
on a non-related note, the game on your journal rules - but it might be time for you to stop dling pr0n... just a thought.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
Just in case anyone was confused by the name, this is the processor that was codenamed Banias. Depending on when this product is publicly available, this could be the final straw for transmeta. Transmeta's Astro looks like a great product, but if the stronger Intel has the first mover advantage, Transmeta may be SOL.
...but I can't be the only girl who'd rather get hardware than flowers or chocolate.
Can I?
If you had the newer, slower chip, you wouldn't have gotten the first post. Because, as we all know, Intel chips make the Internet go faster.
The "Centrino" which was previously known by the codename "Banias" is the first ever CPU Intel has designed specifically for mobile computing.
It's the combination of the a mutant P3 with the quad-pumped P4 bus, SSE2, lots of power-saving tricks, and an assload of L2 cache (1MB!).
From the limited previews I have seen of it, these things are quite nice, especially with Intel combining the new CPU with mainboard built-in wireless networking adapter. They perform well, and do consume significantly less power than any other mobile chip (excluding the Transmeta CPU, as I have come to the conclusion that they never really existed outside of Japan. Have you seen one in North America?).
"Centrino" is now officially branded Pentium-M...a rather obvious naming strategy IMHO, but a good one. Look out next year, once Intel has its 90nm fabrication process up and running, we should see "Dothan" code-named CPUs...with 2MB L2 cache...mmm
Btw, this news story is old, Slashdot admins, pick up the slack!
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
It's the particle released when you smash together two Apple Centris Macs. Because there aren't many Centrises available anymore, they couldn't use as many Centrinos per chip as they wanted, so they had to drop the speed back down to 1.6GHz.
I can't tell if the Centrino logo looks like a pink triangle or a broken heart.
There is a huge market for slower chips. Slower == less power. Less power is great for mobile computing where the foremost concern is battery life. The XScale is a good example of where slower is better. Why don't they just shrink 400mhz Pentiums and cram them into pocket pc's? Because the XScale uses a tiny fraction of the power that any Pentium uses.
Don't forget also that cooling is becoming a limiting factor in CPU design. Not everybody wants their computer to sound like a jet turbine or have water running through it. As "embedded" CPUs like the ARM and XScale get faster, you may start to see them in more traditionally "desktop" applications. Electricity is expensive and low power computers can save money.
And I still don't understand why everyone equates CLOCK RATE with SPEED. Do people think high frequency EM waves travel faster than slower ones, or something? There are have been MANY examples over the last 10 years of CPUs that get more done at a lower clock rate.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
I knew Moore's Law would break eventurally, I guess I always hoped it would be by releasing a faster chip and not a slower one :P
-Jason
I bet the new chip running at 1.6 GHz, will be marketed as Centrino 2000+.
The Centrino Brand is a combination of three main things.
- The new Banias processor
- The Montara 852/855 Chipset
- Integrated 802.11b
This means that mobile computer makers can make new lighter, faster, cheaper, and colder laptops.Centrino computers are designed for Mobile features, which doesn't always neccesarily mean speed. Banias runs colder than comparable processors from Intel, it has a host of new features to support all the crazy things laptops want to do (Better power management, bus control, hotkey support, more feature rich graphics etc...)
Intel is trying to jump on the new Mobile computing pattern. There is less and less of a focus on the absolute fastest processor and more of a focus on different ways (espeically easier ways) of using your computer. I mean who really uses all of their cpu cycles on a 3Ghz P4 with HT anyway (some people but not most)?
When wireless really picks up and people have reliable, quick, super lightweight laptops that can easily fit in a backpack or briefcase sales might pickup like Intel hopes.
...they're trying to be more like Apple! What a GENIUS plan!
No, seriously...where is this going to get them? They've been flaunting the MHz myth like mad for at least 5 years now. Is the fact that the processor is "more efficient" going to get those who make purchasing decisions based solely upon processor "speed" (in MHz) to buy this new chip?
Somehow, I think this will ultimately lead to the downfall of the MHz myth. With CISC and RISC being so neck-and-neck (at different MHz though) in terms of relative speed, there will be a "revolution" of sorts. Bare with me here...
This revolution I speak of is simply that of measuring the actual real-world processor speed -- not just clock speed. People will soon realize that the MHz measurement isn't all it's talked-up to be. Apple, IBM, and Motorola have known this since 1994 with the introduction of the RISC-based PowerPC processor architecture. No wonder Intel (in all of it's wisdom) is finally catching up.
The future brings savvier PC purchasers who see MHz as just that -- clock speed. It will be interesting to see what happens if this trend continues...
$DEITY bless $NATION
Intel's big problem is the binary compatibility they've stuck with since the 80x86 (more or less). Binary compatibility was important because so much programming was necessary at the assembler level that changing the chipset was prohibitive. This has kept a bad chipset in commission long, long after it should have died.
But then, if you can successfully market clock speed as the sole measure of performance, why bother offering something better?
It seems that now, Intel is attempting to drive into Apple's and others main selling point, that is a slower, more efficient computer. So why can't Apple do the opposite?
.85 for Intel's hyperthreading.
Take their new powermac line, the one with the dual 1.43 Ghz processors, and up the numbers in comparison with Intel's chips
Figuring a 20:7 ratio for operations per cycle between Intel and Apple, that comes out to about 2.85. Knock off
(1.43*2=[2.86])
Multiply that by about 1.5 due to the dual processors
(2.86*1.5=[4.29])
Hey Presto, if Apple advertised like that i'm pretty sure that they could sell more units, comprable to intel.
Isn't this what women want? A lover who is slower, but does more ....
-kgj
When are we going to get that blasted 'turbo' button back? You know - the one that reduces processor speed so we can play Space War at sane speeds.
Oh... wait...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Actually i believe a Pentium-4 decays naturally into an Athlon, a Duron, and an anti-centrino.
Jeremy
All I've heard over the last several years is that WiFi is inherently insecure, even with 128-bit encryption. From all of this it seems trivial to conclude that 802.11 wireless technology is inappropriate for secure networking.
And yet, Intel is rolling out notebooks which are, by default, insecure at the core of it's Architecture.
It seems very clear that there is really no interest by the Industries of America to support Computer Security in any inherently secure system. They will sell us crappy hardware that can't be made secure and then attempt to sell us extensive and expensive quantities of software to ensure that our inherently insecure computers pretend to be secure on the surface.
I would have hoped that someone in the industry would have not only figured it out, but embraced the idea of making something secure by design besides the *BSD's and Linux. But it seems that this concept is still the exclusive property of the Open Source movement and is not yet embraced by Corporate America.
When will the Open Source people start making, or specing out, their own hardware?
I cant believe some freak idiot modded your post informative. AltiVec IS NOT MMX. MMX was some stupid extra instructions that resulted in some performance gains for some apps. AltiVec is an incredible advanced vector prossessing unit that doubles or even triples the chip speed.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
There is no new pipelining. There are no new instructions. The CPU is tightly coupled with a video chip, but that's usually not a productivity bottleneck. The CPU is also tightly coupled with a WiFi chip, but that's usually not a productivity bottleneck either. So I guess I'm missing the point. Are we talking ANY performance/productivity gains or simply battery life improvements?
I would really like to see this aggressive power management available for non-laptop boards.
I currently use a VIA C3 running at 800MHz for my Linux server doing a bunch of tasks ( firewall, VPN, WWW, SMTP, FTP, NTP, Samba, NFS, MySQL/PHP, Answering Machine, etc.). The C3 is about as fast as a Celeron 500MHz. But, it uses very little power and runs cool enough to use only a passive heat sink. With a quiet Seagate Barracuda hard drive, and a quiet power supply fan, the system is nearly silent - which is great in my small apartment.
I would like to be able to use a processor that idled down 90% of the time when it was doing very little. For those few tasks that need CPU horsepower, it could go up to it's 1.6GHz potential, and turn on cooling fans if needed.
Power / Heat / Noise savings apply to the desktop too!
"I was very disappointed when Intel bought ARM"
Intel did not buy ARM. Intel obtained DECs StrongARM unit to settle a lawsuit. ARM is an independant company that makes chip designs. ARM based chips are made by many different companies. StrongARM is a particular ARM based chip made by Digital/Intel.
"Only they never got there, so the StrongARM has basically been stagnant"
StrongARM is not stagnant, it simply received a new marketing name for the latest version. They call them XScales now, and they are very popular in networking equipement and PDAs. I've got a 400Mhz Xscale based Sharp Zaurus SL-C700 in front of me right now and it doesn't feel stagnent at all.
Let's consider the market for lighter laptops in general.
Most users will use these smaller form factor laptops with programs like Microsoft Office and for lighter-duty Internet access. The thing is that with this market in mind it's not neccessary to run the fastest CPU available, since business applications and Internet access doesn't require the latest and fastest computer hardware out there. A 1.6 GHz CPU laptop with Centrino technology with 512 MB of system RAM running even Windows XP Professional is far more than fast enough for the general smaller form factor laptop user.
With Centrino technology, laptop manufacturers can build extremely light (yet fully functional) laptops that are pretty much guaranteed to run with most software out there, yet have quite long battery life. Centrino technology is going to be bad news for Transmeta, that's to be sure.
If my application doesn't use more than 60% of the power of one of the low power chips yet has a requirement of long battery life, I'm idiotic to use an Intel anything! Off-loading mpeg decoding or other processor intensive tasks to a task specific chip and reduce cpu load and cpu requirements.
Kinda like using a sledgehammer to pound in a finishing nail. Both will do the job but which one is less likely to cause unwanted side effects? (ie smashed fingers)
I can just see the next generation of game requirements. :D
OS: No later than 3.1 windows
Internet Connection Speed: 2400 bps or lower
CPU: 486 or lower
etc.
Brilliant move. Now we know what they are gonna do with all that surplus outdated hardware
I haven't been eating any 'Apples' lately. Would that be called a "Malnutrino?" But seriously folks, the RIAA has teamed up with a famous actor to release the byte-sized 'Alpacino' processor. "Say hello to my little friend!"
Do you understand the concept of hyperbole? It was precisely because of Motorola's focus on the embedded market that I called the G4 an embedded processor. Note that I called Banias an embedded processor as well, which it clearly is not.
Next, the 2 and 3 GHz marks are not useless. The thing PowerPC people don't understand is that Performance = ClockRate * Efficiency. Note that both are linear factors. Raising the effifiency does not improve the overall performance any more than raising clock rate. However, raising ClockRate is a lot easier than raising efficiency, because most code (outside of a few problem domains) does not lend itself to extensive parallization. Intel, with the P4 architecture, made an engineering decision to emphasise clock rate over efficiency. As the benchmarks clearly show, Intel achieved their goal of having absolutely incredible performance, to the point where a P4 provides more than 70% the floating point performance of a Power4 in CPU-bound benchmarks. PowerPC-heads can wave their arms and shout "efficiency" as much as they want, all that matters is the end result performance.
Lastly, the G4 is a sucky chip. Its clock rates are lower than its x86 competitors. It's IPC is lower than chips like the Alpha or POWER. It's overall performance isn't very good. In an age when x86 chips (which were famous for bad I/O) have 4.2GB/sec-6.4GB/sec of memory bandwidth, the G4 is stuck in the '90s, with only 1.3GB/sec of memory bandwidth. On top of all that, the desktop version is expensive, and the high clock rate models are only available in an Apple. The G4 is great for a number of uses. XServe, for example, is a good use of the G4 because of its good heat dissapation characteristics. So is the Apple laptop line. But as a general purpose desktop CPU, it blows chunks.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Your 3D graphics card has a vector processor on it. That's why it can perform the 3D to 2D transformations, lighting calculations etc. orders of magnitude faster that the main CPU in your computer at a much lower clock frequency. SIMD instructions on the main CPU go some way towards vector processing (3DNow!, SSE, AltiVec).
Stick Men