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Intel to Dump Pentium 4 in Favor of Pentium M

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the now-30%-lower-electricity-bills dept.

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."

21 of 413 comments (clear)

  1. Good Idea by derphilipp · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This seems like a really smart idea. Dont go an get the Ultra-Gigaherz-Processor but a descend, processor that consumes only a low amount of power -> Longer batterylife for laptops -> Silent PCs -> Longer lifetime of the processor (?)

    --
    Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
  2. No Suprise by paitre · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This really shouldn't be a suprise to -anyone- who's been paying attention to what's been going on.
    Prescott is disturbingly hot, and the next-gen chips had no real hope of being much cooler. At most 10-15%, which wouldn't have gotten near their MHz goals.
    P-M, on the other hand, is a damned good chip in its own right, has better IPC, and is a better CPU, all around, than the P4 line.

    Now, what does this mean for those of us in the enterprise space? Are we -really- going to have to wait until 2006 for a new chip iteration from Intel? If that's the case (and I -really- doubt it), AMD would have a disturbingly large (and long) opening in which to pitch its wares...Intel would definately lose marker share in the server arena at that point.

    So, multi-core P-M chips for the desktop next year-ish. So we're stuck with the hotplate known as Prescott until then. Guess I'll be sticking with AMD for a while yet :)

    1. Re:No Suprise by ionpro · · Score: 4, Interesting
      ...consuming only 70% of the power of the AMD Athlon 64 mobile chip with about as much CPU power.

      Eh? I don't think so. The Athlon 64 mobile chip (at least the 3000+) achieves near performance parity with the desktop chip. Near as I can tell, the IPC of the Athlon and Pentium-M archetectures is nearly the same per clock (and I own one of each). For instance, my 1.3Ghz Pentium-M performs equivilantly in benchmarks to my Athlon 1800+ desktop (which is handicapped by PC133 memory). But the clock speed of the Pentium Ms is far below the clock of the Athlon mobile, and it wasn't designed to ramp in clock speed at all. The Athlon, on the other hand, has shown itself to be quite the clock speed maven, going from a 550Mhz Duron Slot-A to the short-lived Throughbred-B Athlon 2800+ at 2.25Ghz (and the soon-to-be-released Athlon 64 3700+ at 2.4Ghz)

      I agree, though; it will be interesting to see AMD as the overly-hot higher clockspeed contender in this new processor race. AMD has never done particularly well with mobile chips (as witnessed by Intel's 85% market share in the mobile sector); perhaps this will force their hand on that front somewhat.
  3. Religious Nomenclature? by Himring · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Dothan is in due course expected form the basis for 'Jonah', Intel's first two-core Pentium M, due to ship during H2 2005, possibly at 65nm. To date, Jonah has been scheduled to be succeeded by 'Merom' and 'Conroe', two chips based on the same architecture, during H1 2006. While Merom is to be pitched at notebooks, Conroe - crucially - is a desktop chip.

    Dothan: Meaning: two wells. A famous pasture-ground where Joseph found his brethren watching their flocks. Here, at the suggestion of Judah, they sold him to the Ishmaelite merchants (Gen. 37:17). It is mentioned on monuments in B.C. 1600.

    Jonah (We all know who Jonah was and/or you need to back to sunday school....)

    Merom (WebBible Encyclopedia) - christianAnswers.Net. Merom. Meaning: height. a lake in Northern Palestine through which the Jordan flows

    Looks like Intel got some religion....

    --
    "All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
    1. Re:Religious Nomenclature? by the+quick+brown+fox · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And VIA's EPIA processors are all named after Old Testament prophets: Samuel, Ezra, Nehemiah...

  4. Faster Pentium M? by strictnein · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Have they been able to ramp up the speeds for this architecture? None of the articles that I've read even speculate on what speeds these would be introduced at. I know Intel was planning on releasing a 2.0GHz Pentium M in the near future, but what about for desktops?

    Side note: "Whitefield" a new processor in the Xeon line based somewhat aroudn the Pentium M, was created in India.

    --
    Casual Games/Downloads
  5. well... by Hangin10 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We've been on 32bit chips for quite some time..
    Is 32bits enough? Is that why 64bit chips don't
    seem to be catching on? or does the fact that
    AMD and Intel seem to have fairly different
    workings to their interface (AMD's seems fairly
    simple, I haven't looked at Intel's).

    Slightly related,
    It seems both Intel and AMD stopped shipping free
    copies of their Architecture Manuals. :(

  6. Is this surprising ? by data1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It has been known for quite some time that the Pentium-M processors would outperform desktop chips even when clocked at a higher frequency.
    Seems that Intel finally wised up and is exploiting the technology in the Pentium-M Chips to lower its development costs even though that isnt explicitly stated in the article.
    Yes, I did RTFA.

  7. About the P-M architecture by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Ars has an in-depth article on the Pentium-M architecture. A quote from the conclusion:
    The PM takes one of the P4's strengths--its branch prediction capabilities--and improves on it, adding its advantages to the strengths of the P6 architecture. The PM also deepens the P6's pipeline a bit, allowing for better clockspeed scaling, but without making clockspeed the central factor driving performance. In short, the PM looks like what the P4 might have been, had Intel not been so obsessed with the MHz race--it's a kind of alternate past, but one that may provide a glimpse of Intel's future.
  8. Re:Intel is so far behind anyway by CrazyTalk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Don't forget, when the Pentium first came out it was refered to unoffically as the 586, and the PII was refered to in the press as the 686, so even if intel had to change their naming scheme (they couldn't copyright a number like 80586, so they had to pick a name for it) people still thought of those chips under the old terms for quite some time. Now, of course, with the product line so divergent into different sub-classifications, it really doesnt make sense to map to the old numbering scheme.

  9. Cheap laptops by SpinyManiac · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This means the end of desktop CPUs in laptops.

    Decent battery life in a cheap laptop? Nah, they'll cut down on the batteries instead.

    --
    It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
  10. Re:braniac vs. speed demon by Yoda's+Mum · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The long pipeline approach was sustainable for a while, but with their newer processes (like the 90nm process used for the Prescotts) the heat costs of having the longer pipelines have proven too high. Their long pipeline design worked quite well for the Pentium 4's - give them enough cache, and they perform spectacularly, but the even longer pipelines required to keep cranking the clock speeds up, as with Prescott, are starting to be quite detrimental to the design. The Prescott architecture may be able to run at much higher clock speeds than the previous Northwood P4's, but they do so at the cost of requiring an even larger cache, and a much improved branch predictor. Had the improved branch predictor and increased cache simply been implemented on an existing Northwood core, and if Intel manufactured the chip on their 90nm process, it's quite likely that they'd have an even better performing chip than what Prescotts are capable of at higher clock speeds. That's all conjecture though - Intel didn't go that way, they let their marketing people decide on what the Prescott was going to be, and are now paying for it.

  11. Re:Intel is so far behind anyway by Chanc_Gorkon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    80186 was not a failure. I just was not used in PC's. Once upon a time, there was no real difference in the embedded field between the desktop processor and the processor used in say a traffic light. The 80186 was used in lots of embedded solutions. Checkout Wikipedia

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    Gorkman

  12. Scaling dead? Have we hit a clock rate wall? by mc6809e · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The new 90nm Pentium 4's really didn't get much of a clock rate boost, which was a surprise. Reducing feature sizes has usually given us a good bump in clock rate. Remember the original Pentium 4 when it came out? There was a big jump in clock rate. This lastest shrink hasn't provided much. Now we hear that Intel is going to the Pentium-M: a chip with a lower clock-rate. That doesn't mean the chip is a poor performer. In fact, it runs very well. Like the Athlon, it gets much more work done per cycle than the Pentium 4.

    Still, process shrinks in the past have yielded easy speed increases, but not this time around. Intel's move seems to confirm that there might be trouble ahead.

    It looks like the folks at IBM also have concerns:

    "Somewhere between 130-nm and 90-nm the whole system fell apart. Things stopped working and nobody seemed to notice."

  13. Re:hrm by jkabbe · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This should have been visible from a mile away. A month or so ago there was an article (on The Register I think) about Intel abandoning it's Mhz marketing in favor of a simple number system (for example, 5xx series for one processor line, 7xx series for another processor line). It was obvious to me at the time this was because they would be dumping the current P-4 and going with the P-M. Why else would you remove Mhz from the equation?

  14. Re:Intel is so far behind anyway by jkovach · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The 80186 still isn't dead - you can still buy them. I have a 186 single board computer sitting in a box on my desk that I assembled and programmed last year for a microprocessors course. The chips are still sold by DigiKey and the other usual suspects. I have a copy of the 186 datasheet here that actually says "updated June 2002" on it. Old hardware never dies...

  15. Re:End of an era? by dasmegabyte · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'd like to know who the grandparent poster thinks is paying for all this diamond research.

    If I recall, most of it is taking place in small research companies funded by capital from corporations like Intel, who then would have a percentage stake in the technology if and when it comes around.

    There's also plenty of interneal research and doctoral work funded by grants from IBM, Intel, etc.0

    --
    Hey freaks: now you're ju
  16. Re:Intel is floundering by aksansai · · Score: 3, Interesting
    1. Make a 64-bit challenger to Athlon64. If it means butchering the Itanium die and adding a 32-bit co-processor, so be it.

    Intel has already announced that it will also be releasing a variant of the x86-64 technology that was developed by AMD. You can see their announcement here. While technology analysts see that there are indeed differences, it is approached fundamentally in the same manner that AMD used - making compiler development for the "extended" 64-bit Intel processors easier.

    This does not mean Intel is simply give up on the Itanium. They have more than a decade worth of R&D dollars into the processor. I don't believe they will actively pursue integrated the two 64-bit processors under one flag, either, because it would be easier to keep one facility churning out Itaniums and all their other facilities to make modified P4/PM chips with 64-bit extensions.
    2. Enable SMP on something faster than Tualatin.

    This is a matter of market preference. The market prefers a single processor (right now). I remember seeing supporting statistics but I can't find those at the moment. It was better than 90%. R&D is currently focusing on making single processors more efficient (Intel's hyperthreading is a good example). All these improvements will eventually trickle down to the small SMP sector Intel supports.

    Also, Intel wishes to keep its Xeon and Xeon MP line strong. To do so would be to limit the offerings of SMP capable chips and chipsets to focus the multiprocessor market for higher profitability.
    3. Wake up to the fact that Intel can no longer dominate the CPU market on name recognition and MHz rating alone.

    Intel is beginning to realize this, but this does not change the fact that there are many people that will still choose Intel over AMD just based on name alone. I run into these types on a regular basis.
    --
    Ayup
  17. Pentium M "Not Invented Here" Held It Back by CritterNYC · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Actually, the reason it took THIS friggin long to come to this decision was the resistance on the part of Intel in the US to fully accept the design of this chip by Intel in Israel. Apparently, there was quite a bit of "not invented here" mindset on the part of the US Intel folks, even though it was still Intel that created the Pentium M... just in Israel.

    I can't find any info regarding this online at the moment, but I did get this information from a reliable source. Anyone else read this?

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  18. Re:Intel is so far behind anyway by Detritus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    See here, it was one of the few PCs that used the 80186.

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    Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
  19. Re:End of an era? by timeOday · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I can't believe this, to me it seems like a big deal. The Pentium-M is a modded Pentium-3. If this is true, Intel is abandoning the whole direction they took with the P4 = MHz at all cost. Also IIRC the Pentium-M was designed in Israel, and was their first-ever chip delivered on time, so this isn't a great development for US computer engineering.

    I don't think we can count on quiet, low-power desktops though. I bet Intel will just ramp up the Pentium-M until it's a hot as the P4 (but by then it will be faster than todays P4 due to higher IPC).