Intel to Dump Pentium 4 in Favor of Pentium M

Opinion writes "According to The Register, Intel is to dump its Pentium 4 plans in favour of the new Pentium M architecture. The scrapped Tejas and Jayhawk processors represented Intel's next-gen 90nm P4 CPUs, due to arrive in 2005."

Comments

Change of ideas

[SavedLinuXgeeK]

As stated in a previous article, I think, Intel has been running the PIV name for a long, long time,(in computer years), and now with AMD64 coming out, people will see the PIV as old, and the AMD as new, even if things are comparable. Consumers are extremely superficial (Speaking from sales experience). I think this may just help Intel get some more umph into their line, before 64-bit hits critical mass.

Re:Religious Nomenclature?

[CodeMonkey4Hire]

Most of the products that come out of Chandler, AZ are named after Arizona geologic features. Their codenames are chosen so that there is no possible infringement. Since it is not possible to trademark geological features (or Biblical/historical features), they are safe bets. As the previous poster noted, there is some work going on at their [relatively] new site in Isreal.

Re:hrm

[twbecker]

It's the fan in my pc that's loud not the processor. even small fans make noise.

Uhh, yeah. And the reason you NEED that big fan is because of all the heat that CPU is generating. Smaller fans = less noise.

I still have a couple Pentium I with MMX running and without a hitch. How much longer are you talking about?

And what kind of temps do they run at? Much cooler than a 3.2Ghz Prescott, I can promise you.

Not to sound like an Apple zealot (I'm far from it), but it seems like you've bought into the "Mhz myth" hook, line and sinker. Lower power and lower speeds does not need to equal lower performance.

Re:hrm

[mobiux]

"but it seems like you've bought into the "Mhz myth" hook, line and sinker"

I think that this is going to be a HUGE problem for intel. For years this has been the major marketing tool they've used. So now, they are just going to say, "Um, oh yeah, all that stuff we told you, about mhz, ghz, and stuff, that doesn't really apply to us anymore."

AMD and Apple really should take advantage of this and do a little "we were right all along" ad.

Re:Power consumption is important

[ballpoint]

Not only for laptops or server rooms. My power consumption at home has increased by 25% in three years due to increasing computer use by kids & wife.

I'd like to install still more always-on equipment like webcams, video servers and such. But, with energy prices that will probably triple over the next 10 years, I'm not going to be able to afford these increases much longer.

Re:End of an era?

[Paladin128]

It's an unexpected turn that makes a LOT of sense. If you read the article, the real catalyst for this change is the decision to go with 2 or more cores on one die that share the same L2 cache. The P4 is a poor architecture to do this with. Yes, nothing can really beat it at simple integer math, but it's got lots of problems:

1) The core is fscking big!
2) high frequency == draws lots of juice == runs way too hot
3) 20 stage pipeline (or like 30 in case of Prescott) makes penalties way too high on a branch mis-prediction, and requires more cache to minimize the impact.

The Pentium M architecture has a relatively high IPC, and lack of int throughput that is lost from lower overall clockspeed can be overcome by paralellism that multicore will bring. It also is rather efficient as far as power goes, and a much smaller core overall.

Re:hrm

[devaldez]

Gotta love revisionist history...AMD was the king of MHz marketing back in the day...oh yeah, don't worry that we're AMD cuz our K6 is clocked at the same speed, so we're just as fast...except that it didn't work that way for them, either.

Feel free to hate marketing (I'm in marketing and I hate it), but keep the right sense of perspective and history or you simply lose credibility. If you want to hate a company, simply hate them, don't seek ways to justify the hate.

Re:where does that leave performance freaks like m

[Gannoc]

No AMD suggestions please. I've never found them to be as stable as Intel CPUs .

I have an Intel machine myself, but have had AMDs in the past. The reason people think that AMD chips are unstable is that many people buy AMD processors when they're trying to get a cheap computer, and also use cheap memory, cheap motherboards, etc.

Get an AMD with a good motherboard, and it is as stable as an Intel.

Increasing number of cores...

[Spoing]

Here's a guess about what Intel is up to. From the brief article -- and keeping in mind this is The Register -- it looks like Intel is going for two targets;

1. Smaller; faster with lower power.
2. Multiple logical and physical cores; multi-threaded apps/OS will do well.

These two basic tagets seem to be a good idea;

1. Processing speed is really damn good now for single tasks.
2. More tasks are becoming standard, so having the 'extras' run without delay on a seperate core makes the system seem more snappy.
3. Some tasks can be CPU intensive and benifit from the extra cores; a reason to upgrade for Intel customers.
4. Speed per-core will increase, though the raw speed in MHZ is costly (in power and because it costs more to make the fab plants) so the fewer fab changes the better or being able to spread the operating life out for more years would be good.
5. With the speed and core # increase, lower-end devices become practical; disable the cores not needed just like other parts were disabled in the past (FPU, cache, ...).
6. Power savings; some cores can be throttled down when hybernating without taking down the whole processor.
7. Multi-processing; if you need the extra umph, plugging another set of cores in might be an easy upgrade or for use in a cluster. (Though CPU speed is not typically the main issue even for many complex problems.)

Re:End of an era?

[anderm7]

Yeah, I agree. I this is a great move. I'm an EE in Microelctronics, and I had been very dissapointed in Intel's tricks to get MHz up. For instance, those overly long pipelines. I'm glad they finally decided to come around and realized that both MHz and CPI(cycles per instruction) matter.

To first order, a chip is only limited by the setup & hold time of a latch, but that may not be a very good chip. It may run at 50 GHz, but its not going to do much more than heat up your case.

Re:hrm

[Doomdark]

AMD and Apple really should take advantage of this and do a little "we were right all along" ad.

Hardly. That'd only be relevant for part of geek population, or Apple loyalists, because:

• General populations attention span (half a Friends episode or so) prevents them from even remembering Intel's earlier claims
• People never heard anyone claiming Mhz thing was a myth (it was only used by non-Intel companies, minor players for many computer illiterates); for them "Intel inside" and "this goes to eleven" sales speeches were all the "facts" needed.
• Intel wouldn't have to explain lower clock frequencies, just wait few months for new designs to catch up. It's not like they stopped speeding up frequencies, just that M design _currently_ uses lower than what 4 series was currently designed to use

Any decent marketing department should be able to fairly easily sell change like this. If they anticipated significant trouble, this decision wasn't announced at this point, rest assured. It's not like design decisions for longer-running production lines didn't radically change fairly often. That's their job, to explain and spin it appropriately. And in this case there's enough positive spin to go around. Just imply these are the "wireless chips" (idiotic term, for sure, but only for people who spend few seconds to think about it), and extend from there.