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Intel To Redesign PC With "Grantsdale" Chip
MarkRH writes "Over at ExtremeTech, we tracked down some Intel roadmaps that discuss "Grantsdale", Intel's most important chipset in nearly a decade. Grantsdale brings PCI Express to the PC, so get ready to toss out your motherboard, AGP graphics card, and maybe a host of other components, too. Also check out our articles on the "Tejas" microprocessor, Intel's first CPU to forego pins (check out the waffle iron socket!), as well as the real reason Banias saves so much power."
Now you can finally play Doom 3.
It's going to be really interesting, I think, to see what this does for the holiday selling season. Since it's out there now that Grantsdale is going to have such a dramatic effect on PC architecture, what is this going to do for sales of graphics cards? Of sound cards?
It looks like PCI will be supported in some way, but it's almost up to a motherboard manufacturer to come forward and say, "OK, we're only going to support one PCI slot, so figure out what you want to keep, now."
My guess is that Nvidia's NV35 will be released later this year (fall?) on AGP8X, but that it will REALLY run well on PCI Express. So--wait, or buy? An old question, but with far more significance.
so get ready to toss out your motherboard
Since when can you upgrade to a new generation CPU and not have to replace the motherboard?
Jason
ProfQuotes
yeah! grantsdale is a chipset for controlling pci, ram access etc.
wow! let's add this into an apple! then what will we have.
uhhh. G4s at the same speed, using a different chipset.
Did you RTFA?
I don't understand why revamped PC-cards are being pushed for desktop computing. I can understand increasing the bus speed on PCI cards (faster real-time TV encoding... yay!), but why does this need to happen in cards the size of two quarters?
Is the goal to make it so that users with two PCs can carry peripherals from one computer to the other? I would also hope that there will be legacy ports. I'm not planning on buying a new chip for a while, but I really don't feel like having to buy brand new hardware when I do. I'll have to buy a new video card (no AGP port), but they could at least put a few standard PCI ports on the mobo so I could slap in my more expensive expansion cards.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
Arghahghaghaaa
Microsoft is doing a great job boosting the Macintosh. There is no way I will install software with product activation, so when win2k gets too obsolete, I'll have to switch to a mac. Linux still isn't an option on the desktop, I used it for 2 years and switched back to windows. I want to use my computer, not spend half a day configuring for any change.
If you are thinking about making a Portable PC Purchase and are looking for either a performance or "road warrior" system...just wait a bit.
The ones I've been playing with at work just absolutely rock. You can clearly see the difference that 1mb L2 cache makes...and combined with systems that already have decent battery life you won't have to worry about whether or not you'll be able to finish the Braveheart DVD on battery power.
Craenor
I beg to differ. My 10MHz Intel 286 had no pins. It looked like this.
I have a woman and money. Life is good.
I'm all for improving hardware but... Why would this be done other then to foce people to buy new hardware? Is the current PCI spec so bad?
I just see this happening.
Hey. So you want a new sound card? Great! What? You only have regular PCI? I'm sorry we only have it in PCI Express. No worries. We offer this brand new Intel board and chip and ram that will solve your problem. Only $1,200!
What am I missing? I hope I'm missing somthing =/
also... if you're currious about PCI Express, this link seems to be pretty... informative:
http://www.intel.com/technology/pciexpress/
and is anyone else disappointed that the new "Grantsdale" chipset isn't supporting rambus ram!? i know i am :(
And Floppies too!
I'm stoked. I'm going to pull in some serious coin on this deal.
Every socket designer dreams about being chosen to do a major Intel processor. It doesn't get any bigger than this, baby!
Not that I hold this against them or anything; if in the end it increases battery life, that's a Good Thing. I just wish they wouldn't hype up their new processor as being so great, when really there isn't much more improvement over the PIII.
I can't wait until I have no choice but to buy some hardware that's not compatible with anything I might possibly already own. What's even cooler is that I get to do my part and add my obsoleted hardware to our local dump.
P.S.: It would be nice to get the computing companies to do a bit more in the way of reuse. I don't think it's a good idea to use until there's no more, and then just move on to a new resource.
</rant>
PCI Express FAQ here.
Quick summary: Formerly known as 3GIO, Software compatibility. Point-to-point instead of bus. 1 to 32 bits wide @ 2Gbps per bit = 16 GB/sec max (vs. 1-4 GB/sec for regular PCI; this is about AGP16X)
Even more stuff that as someone who uses computers primarily for work, I don't need.
Sure it looks good, yea, I'm all exited about a "new era of computing," but it breaks backwards compatibility with all of my old stuff and I bet it still can't outperform the mainframe I program on now in terms of raw MIPS.
Why did we ever move to PC's from thin clients in the first place? We have consoles for gaming, windows for PC gaming, and *nix for serious work (try doing something else under say Solaris, and posting to slashdot doesn't count.) now. Why all of the redundancy? Aren't we in an economic downturn? The bus speeds and improvements are nice, don't get me wrong... but in a PC? It removes the PCI bottleneck problem, but I don't see where it removes the HDD bottleneck in terms of raw speed.
All in all i'd say it's a nifty gadget.
When we get holographic/full immersion, give me a call. I'd love to see what my brain can output in raw source without needing to actually type.
--I'm just continuing my tradition of posting drunk, pay me no head. Don't post to slashdot under wine.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
Um, considering PCI Express is an industry standard, it probably will be a chipset with PCI Express. Of course AMD has already developed Hypertransport to use in some places where PCI Express would fit also.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
I just hope it ain't the short bus. I hate getting on that friggin' thing, and I don't do well with ramps on a friggin' bus.
TLoM: Nerds + DDR + Rednecks for the win!
Well, their answer to Grantsdale's "whopping" 4GB of memory will be: "uh... your penis is so tiny".
* small that? that's my karma going up in flames *
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
It would be great to have an idea of the cost implications of the new chipset - the fact that you'll need a new motherboard, CPU and graphics card means this setup isn't going to be for the masses right away.
The price to upgrade could easily reach $1200 US for early adopters.
I don't see much of a problem with the PCI slots as the majority of current modern systems have a lot of components onboard already, such as LAN, Sound, Video etc.
I guess the safe bet is they'll include 2xPCI slots which should be enough for most peoples purposes.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
OK...so does that mean those are going to take the place of the PCI slots that will normally be found within a motherboard? PCI will be supported--but how many slots will we have to work with?
Feh. Anybody who's seen intel's roadmap (as I have) knows the Grantsdale chip is just a stepping stone.
Personally, I'm waiting for the Higgenbotham chips in early 2005. After that, the Ranmatheau chips. In earlier 2007, expect amazing performance from the Cleodranvier chipset.
2008 brings us the amazing 10-GHz Hefnestranthellhaller chipset, and 2009 unveils Intel's most impressive chip: the Quackenbush.
But the true surprise comes in 2010, when the world experiences the amazing speed of the Gentrecktagazunt.
Truly wonderous times ahead.
One Fast CPU is always going to have an advantage over multiple slower CPUs. It takes a lot of bookkeeping in the background to assign different tasks to different CPUs. Not to mention programs need to be written multi-threaded to take advantage of another processor.
mnewberg.com
there were pins on the slot1's?
moo.
>>Intel's most important chipset in nearly a decade
>Of course, because this will be the first chipset to fail in the marketplace
>because computers are already fast enough for businesses, and gamers already have
>overkill. The first market failure is always an important landmark.
If anything, I'd like to see an addon vector processor for high speed math. G4
motherboards have them under an Altivec core instruction set. I would also want
the ability to directly program (in chip asm) to do misc functions.
Personally, they can take this waffle-chip and shove it. If anything, I'd want
an architechure where EVERYTHING's on a very high speed, very high bandwidth
quad-plane bus with basic controllable logic. You put drive cards on it,gfx
cards, sound cards, network cards, memory on it, cpu's on it.. anything. It
would be the backbone of the system where anything would go. You could build a
simple scan/bootstrap code to find what devices do what. It could be a simple
hex line of simple "whatis information". To those who say this isnt possible, I
believe the Altair 8800 used this similar architechure. You want a
"beowulf"system, add 1 drive controller, and rest cpu controllers. BAM! You now
have insta-BeoBox. You could also add DIFFERENT CPU architechures with this
system, given they coincide to your bus setup (including the altivec and x86like
one I want).
First of all PCI-express will come in second half of the NEXT year.
Second, PCI-Express x 16 just double AGP8X bandwidth. We can expect same "dramatic" (1-2%) performance increase as we saw with AGP8X and AGP4X. It will take many years until this kind of performance is really needed. Since high-end video cards will have 512MB of very fast (~40GB/s) local memory in H2-2004, 4GB/s bandwidth offered by PCI-Express won't make much difference compared to 2GB/s AGP solution.
PCI-Express add-on cards won't be popular anytime soon. Since:
1) PCI replacement (PCI-Express x 1) offers just 250MB/s of bandwidth, thats isn't a lot more than current 133MB/s offered by PCI.
2) >90% of users won't need any external cards in H2-2004. Currently we have following stuff integrated on the chipset/motherboard:
-two 100Mbps NICs
-Sound with better quality than original Audigy
-Firewire/USB2 etc
In 2004 we will also have:
- NICs will be updated to 1Gbps
- Wireless LAN
- DSL modem
3) In the server market PCI-Express won't be popular since it isn't compatible with PCI. Currently servers use PCI-X (1GB/s) and it will be replaced with PCI-X 2.0 (2GB/s). This is enough bandwidth for many SCSI-raids and Gigabit NICs.
I am. The HT consortium needs to get its act together to offer some viable competition to PCI express in terms of cards and peripherals. HT is free to use while mobo and card makers will have to pay liscencing fees for pci express, driving up component prices and possibly adding to tech market stagnation (assuming the tech market doesnt turn around by h2 04, god forbid).
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
From the article, ..."Granite Peak" initiative, which limits the number of driver revisions to one every six months, making the launch of each new chipset even more significant.
So, what exactly does this mean? If I have a problem with Intel's drivers that, say, prevents my machine from booting (not that THAT has ever happened) I have to wait 6 months for the next revision? I don't understand what driver revision schedules have to do with product release cycles.
Also from the article: "...[people buying] the latest GeForce card near the end of this year, when six months later it won't work [fit] inside a new PC?"
This is a non-issue for most people, I think. Those people who buy new video cards every six months (you know who you are) aren't really going to balk at replacing motherboard, CPU, and video card all at the same time, if it yields a 25% performance improvement (or more). At the other end of the scale are people who upgrade video cards by buying a new Dell (or whatever), for whom this is also not an issue. Those of us in the middle just won't buy a new motherboard/CPU until we can afford to replace the whole shebang anyway. Once we do, we will most likely build a whole new machine.
Anyway, it's not like nVidia and ATI are going to stop making AGP cards; I'm sure that both connections will be supported. If you look around, you can still get PCI versions of most cards on the market (shudder).
Google comes up with this link that says Texas was derived from the Hasinai Indian word "tejas", which means friend.
The article mentions that Intel may do away with the USB ports in the Grantsdale systems, that PCI express may get rid of USB entirely -- but if it does have USB it will have at least 8 ports.
OK, that's pretty weird. But why would they get rid of a popular, reasonably high-performance, and cheap interface like USB? Is Firewire 800 going to take it's place? SATA? Is everything going to be wireless?
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Sure, I need faster speed (Doom III comes to mind; and a whole load of cinema-quality games-imagine Half Life II for example, or Duke Nukem For Ever), but there are some other things that bother me:
1) the PC BIOS!!! for how long should we tolerate the shitty 16-bit PC BIOSes ? I mean, in the days of PCI-X and 800MHz memory buses, the PC's BIOS is still 16-bit and operating systems need to perform wild tricks to boot.
2) the partioning scheme. Only 4 partitions!!!! this is an artifact from the days of the original PC.
Ok, not so important but irritating nevertheless.
No matter how long you wait, the day after you buy/upgrade your PC it will be already obsolete.
We shall not forget that, as any other enterprise, Intel's business is to make MONEY. Cutting edge technology is just a plus...
It's in their best interest to push forward the their latest family of products. This is how Intel works and obsolescence is carefully planed by them.
It's up to us, as consumers, to set the pace and not get swept by the low-tech fears. An upgrade is really only necessary when your PC performance gets in the way of you doing your usual tasks.
Therefore, we must keep in our minds that obsolescence is dictated by our needs, not by theirs.
Sure, one GFX card may not saturate the Bus, but what about more than one?
:)
Imagine having a board with several PCI Express slots - put a Good Graphics Card in, say, each of 3 slots, and multihead your games
Also, if I understand it correctly, PCI Express is an upgrade to / replacement for PCI. Sure, it allows high-bandwidth comm to a Graphics Adapter, but also to SCSI/IDE Controllers, NIC's, Video Capture Hardware etc, etc.
Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
There's an PCI-X to AGP bridge that vendors can take advantage of to offer AGP ports on PCI-Express motherboards, so you'll likely be able to hang on to that new $500 vidcard you just bought (not that you'll be seeing PCIX anytime soon mind you). Your "old" PCI devices should still work as well.
Not being Apple bias, but you have to hand it to Apple Computer's PR/Design/Ad/Graphic Design Departments. They even get press for what they name variations of the operating system. It's not goofy either. Jaguar and all the promotional material has spawned the entire design industry into using animal prints, especially Jaguar.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
As others have said, so what if a new motherboard is needed - they're obsolete about as fast as a CPU chip, anyway. Another post indicates that PCI eXpress is a reasonably open standard.
But the IP/lock-in aspects still bother me. Intel behaved like a spanked puppy for a few years after their Rambus fiasco, but lately they seem to be back at those games, again.
They've taken steps to ensure that Banias/Centrino only sells with their chipset. It's only a logo program, but it probably carries a heavy enough advertising kickback behind it to have the force of law.
The Itanium is *the most proprietary* CPU on the planet, or at least a contender for the crown. No second sources, no cross-licensing on any of the IP.
So in this light, anyone want to bet that Tejas is not tied to Grantsdale?
Assuming it is, the net effects are questionable. It appears that Intel is driving compatibility away from the CPU pins, and out to the motherboard plug interface. I seriously doubt they have the capability to push it any further than that. In the long run, this probably opens the market niche for AMD and Via C3, because it's closing the market for low-cost chipset providers to service Intel CPUs.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Not to mention "the additional pins" - I thought it was pinless.
Vote for global prefs bug
The ultimate in CPU packaging will be RF, that is, one high bandwidth interconnect using a very dense modulation scheme like 1024 QAM. The bus of the motherboard will be Infiniband.
The CPU will look like old style ceramic power triodes, with a built-in bonded heat sink. There will be two low inductance connections for power, and a hard line SMA connector for everything else.
The motherboard that my 750MHz Duron was on would support the AthlonXP with a BIOS upgrade, but I wound up getting a new motherboard so I could have DDR memory and more USB ports.
Actually thinking about it, every time I've upgraded CPUs, I've gotten a new motherboard - even though it wasn't really necessary every time. There's always either something else the new boards support that I "gotta have", or my mother's computer is getting old and she wants my old board.
By the time I start to feel like my XP1600 is slow, I won't want to just buy a 3000 and slap it on this board, even if I can. I'll want a new board with DDR2, Serial ATA, and FireWire. CPU upgradability is overrated, IMHO.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
This "waffle iron" design which lacks pins is old news to the DEC/Compaq/HP Alpha processor team. They have been using this packaging for almost a year now in production systems.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Did I read that right? 250MB/s?
... you get the picture.
PCI spec is 133MB/s, which is hardly a marked improvement. 16-bit ISA, by contrast, was barely 16MB/s.
If I am to believe the theoretical numbers for AGP, then PCI Express as a graphics bus makes even less sense:
AGP 1x = 264MB/s ( 66.6 mHz, 64-bit )
AGP 2x = 528MB/s ( 66.6 mHz rise and fall, 64-bit )
AGP 4x ~ 1GB/s ( 66.6 mHz - 4 strobe, 64-bit )
AGP 8x
What in the hell do we need a PCI replacement for that has zero potential for handling enormous video bandwidth as well as or better than AGP?
What in hell do we need a PCI replacement for that doesn't even utilize the PCI-X or 64-bit, 66MHz PCI already being pushed for servers? Not to mention that fact that any device that can push the bandwidth of PCI is already available in one of the above formats, who wants to build yet another model for PCI Express?
Honestly, if you need to find emerging technologies, just look to the server path. Intel has always been about trickle-down, this move doesn't make any sense.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
It's amazing that CPU's haven't increased performance on a clock for clock basis since 1997. Imagine if modern CPU's really ran 3000 times faster than a 6502.