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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."
I'll pick up as many as i can carry..
So... What's the deal with Moore's law? It appears that heat density vs. pricing trends are now causing microprocessors to compete with charcoal (very hot, very cheap).
Is this the end? Or is Intel just trying to squeeze every last drop of cost out of a deal with IBM on their silicon-on-insulator patents?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
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.
Because the name pentium came as the successor to the 80486,(ie 5, thus pentium) which was the successor to the 386, 286,186,8086. Thus the 5th generation of the 5th generation chip would have been kind of dumb. I think they should just abandon the pentium name all together, but by this point it has too much name recognition.
due to arrive in 2005
Shouldn't that be Pentium MMV?
The more laptops out there, the more important are power saving CPUs. Pentium-M's are a good step in the right direction after the P4 90nm debacle.
Even in the server market, cutting on power consumption is getting more and more important. If you have a park of 1000+ machines in a data center, power consumption matters.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
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.
je suis parce que j'aime
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
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
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
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.
Looks like the recent AMD press and popularity has forced Intel to rethink its business strategy. Here is my most recent ocrrespondence with Dell Sales Support. You should find it amusing: Problem Description: I am in the market for an AMD machine. I have been browsing your website but can't find an AMD processor-based machine. Do you sell any AMD machines? If not, I will shop elsewhere. Thank You. Dear Valued Customer, Thank you for choosing Dell Online Consumer Customer Care. I apologize for the inconvenience caused with regard to this issue. I have looked through your e-mail and show that currently Dell is not offering AMD machines. I have forwarded your message to management and I assure you they will look into this issue and will work on making improvements based on your feedback. Once again, I apologize and truly regret any frustration this matter may have caused. Thank you for your patience and understanding. They are both greatly appreciated. If you have any further questions or concerns, please visit the following website to contact us. www.DellCustomerCare.com Respectfully, Alexander ~DTC41593 7:00 AM to 3:30 PM CST Mon to Fri Dell's Online Consumer Customer Care
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.
What makes you think that? Why wouldn't you want to put a Pentium-M into a desktop machine?
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
1979 - 86 (186 existed too but was a failure)
1982 - 286
1986 - 386
1989 - 486
1993 thru 2004 - Pentium (meaning 5-something), with a sub-version number
So, like, where's the Hexium, Heptium, Octium?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
After all, you can't go in increasing CPU wattage indefinitely. I can recall the days far past when 30 watts was considered power hungry for a CPU. Sure, you can win a little with more and more rococo CPU cooler designs, but at some point you have to look for still more ways to limit CPU power. The mobile chips do it by varying their clock rates and turning parts of themselves off part of the time. Just think of it as an additional scheme for reducing CPU heat output.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
There is more on The Inq here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15760/ www.theinquirer.net/?article=15768
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15749
http:/
And more coming soon, this story is far from over.
-Charlie
Disclaimer: I write for The Inq, but I did not do these stories.
Now it all makes sense why Intel wants to use model numbers, their newer (faster) cpu's will run at a lower clock rate. Looks like they let marketing run engineering when the produced the P4, and now it's come to resolution.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
Is that pronounced Pentium "emm" or Pentium "One Thousand?"
Signed,
Confused Mac User
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
In the article, they mentioned 2- and 4-core chips coming out in 2005 and 2006. How long will it take the unix and windows operating systems to take full advantage of all the cores? Are they already there? Does software running on these systems need to be specially written and/or compiled in order to take advantage of the multiple cores or will they mostly serve to handle multitasking?
Let's go Hurricanes!!! 2006 Stanley Cup Champions!!!
If Intel is moving to low power multicores chips what will this mean in terms of os licenses that limit the number of cpus which can be used at any one time such as MS? Will the likes of MS relax the licensing terms so that this type of technology will take off or will they use it as an excuse to make more money and kill off demand for multicore cpus? I wonder if Intel has discussed this with MS?
Well, there goes my plan for having a Tejas Longhorn computer...
I always thought naming a processor chip after a deputy minister who is responsible for transport but prefers to drive high-performance cars (Jaguars) for short distances, was the equivalent of putting on metal armour, climbing to a mountain during a thunderstorm, and waving a sword in the air while making disparaging comments about the gods.
Wow. This is amazing. The P6 (PPro, PII, PIII) architecture is coming back to the desktop. This does make pretty good sense. The P6 has high IPC, and by applying some Pentium 4 tricks (Quad-pumped FSB, longer pipeline), this can make for a killer CPU. For more information, check out this Ars Technica Article on the Pentium-M's P6 heritage. The chip doesn't even lie about it - its CPUID reports a P6 family CPU.
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.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
I still have a couple Pentium I with MMX running and without a hitch. How much longer are you talking about?
That was back when Intel x86 chip ran fairly cool. The real question is "how long does a Prescott-level P4 chip last?"
Socket/Super 7 boards.... I recall having an MI, MII and a K6-2 350 in the same board.
Of course that would require both Intel and AMD to sit down and design some Socket1000 board or something. But that gets trickier cuz many of the pin [in Socket478 for instance] are grounds and power. IIRC there are 166 pins dedicated to power management. So the layout of the actual processor would be dictated somewhat by the location of power.
But it would be nice to be able to take out an Intel core and slap in an AMD core in the same motherboard...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"So, like, where's the Hexium, Heptium, Octium?"
I believe the term you are groping for is 'Opteron'.
-Charlie
(Apologies, I couldn't resist such low hanging fruit).
Today's processors let you fry that egg with ease, while simultaneously calculating whether the egg preceeded the chicken, render the resulting proto-fowl in stunning 3D, with time left over to disprove your own existance.
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
Ever wonder about the reason why the fan is sitting there right on top of the processor? Could there be some sort of relationship between the two? I'd wager that if the processor ran cooler, you might be able to dispense with the processor-fan altogether and just use a heat-sink which, being just a solid hunk of metal, makes no noise whatsoever. This could be the next giant leap in Quiet Computing! Imagine a beo...
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
From what I've read the Pentium M is nothing more than a souped up P6 core [slightly longer pipeline, 1MB power optimized cache and SSE/SSE2 iirc].
So really it's the PIII v2.0.
Last I checked though the Athlon XP [and Barton] still whoop the PIII's ass and probably the Pentium M at equal clockrates [let's not forget that 2.2Ghz AMD Bartons exist...].
So my guess is if they do ditch the P4 it won't be directly to the Pentium M but instead a design based off it [but with a higher IPC than the P-M] cuz otherwise they'll get screwed in the processor speed wars and that would look awful stupid.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Desktops have been in trouble for a while. A new CPU comes out with an 8% higher clockspeed, and then it uses 15% more power. Obviously there was a limit to how long that could continue, especially as those diddly performance increases weren't providing tangible benefits (compare an 8% clockspeed increase with switching to a dual core processor, for example). And at the same time the desktop market has been being heavily outpaced by laptops and mobile devices.
Smaller fan sounding less than a big fan is all relative. To move the same amount of air in a given time, the small fan needs a far higher rpm, which increases noise.
"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.
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.
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.
Will this move make the AMD "marketing ratings" irrelevant? They were invented to help make it clear that AMD processors performed as well as their P4 competition, even though the P4s were clocked much higher. The Pentium M, however, is based on the P3 architecture, which has always had performance that is comparable to the AMD chips at a given clock rate.
Will this now force AMD to find a graceful way to drop the marketing ratings, lest they appear to be artificially inflating their processors' performance?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Current breed of Pentium M's are pin-for-pin compatible with Socket 478 Pentium 4's, but appear to use a different type of GTL+ signalling. I guess that Intel will release a Pentium M version for LGA 778 (the new socket).
Finally, Intel realises that some long pipeline design with zero decent hardware rotation (up to Prescott), requiring huge cache and big clockspeed isn't that good.
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.
"... but you can love completely without complete understanding." - Norman Maclean, "A River Runs Through It"
Well I think the reason AMD64 chips aren't catching on as quickly as they could is that the AMD roadmap clearly shows how they're moving to a new socket soon. Why would you buy or invest R&D into a machine that is essentially dead-ended in terms of CPU availability?
I think that once the socket-939 chips come out and the platform 'congeals' into a long-term solution you'll see more of these things selling.
It also doesn't help that there's no version of Windows that takes advantage of 64-bitness yet, or that a HUGE portion of the IT people making purchasing decisions still doesn't trust AMD CPUs.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
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.
These two basic tagets seem to be a good idea;
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Bud...then you're limiting your speed and power right there. AMD systems are quite stable from my experience. Usually, it's when people buy bad equipment to surround their chip that causes them to think the chip is bad. Such as my own recent stablitily problems. After replacing the CPU fan and heatsink, replacing the power supply, and very nearly sinking $300 into a water-cooling system because I thought the chip was over heating, I spent $25 on a memory heatsink. Haven't had a single problem with unstablity since. And believe me...this system holds it's own against the hot and heavy Intel systems that are rated at several hundred Megahertz faster...
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."
It seems to me like Intel just doesn't know what it's doing these days. While AMD does new and innovative things, like the first consumer desktop 64-bit x86 archetecture chip, what's Intel doing? Die shrinks and more absurdly drawn-out pipelines, it seems. If I were in charge of the shop at Intel, I'd set the following priorities:
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.
2. Enable SMP on something faster than Tualatin.
3. Wake up to the fact that Intel can no longer dominate the CPU market on name recognition and MHz rating alone.
All I can say is, at least Intel is opening up the way for more competition. It won't be long before the market share is split 60-40.
dinner: it's what's for beer
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?
Power pins are the least of the problems, bus protocols is the main reason for incompatibility.
AMD have gone with hypertransport and integrated membory controller in the Opteron/Athlon 64.
AFAIK Pentium-M uses a "hub" architecture with a 400MHZ link with the hub also providing the DDR memory controller amongst other things.
The reason Socket7 boards worked with different chips is because they all used the orginal Pentium bus protocol. With Pentium Pro, Intel went with a new GTL bus which was n't licensed to AMD, so AMD went with the Alpha bus with the K7(as there was ex Alpha people working on K7).
Chalk it up as yet another product whose fourth version was bloated and disappointing.
Think DOS 4, Netscape 4, IE 4... any others?
Interesting how Windows skipped version 4...
that say this is a great idea. I'm personally not so sure. They havent got the core beyond 1.7 ghz. Why? This is a P6 core cpu! Thats right, pentium pro, pentium 2, pentium 3, etc. They added some features, new stepping and thats it.
This has also been mentioned, but what I'm saying is, I have NO idea how they will get any kind of clockspeed out of this thing. It's been tooth and nail to try to get it to run where it is even. They can drop the process size to get more speed out of it, but that only takes you so far. You will have to lenghten the pipeline eventually which carries with it all the problems of the P4.
I just honestly cant see them taking the P6 core any further. I'm suprised they can even do what they do with it.
I also doubt they will drop the Pentium 4 core while they still have a lead on the athlons performance wise. P4 is a core they spent a LOT of time and money developing. I doubt they will just drop it.
Also, in the article, they say that intel will be tearing up their roadmaps and they SPECULATE Pentium-M will be the replacement. Might be a modified Pentium 4, or maybe a Pentium4-PentiumM mix.
Just my 2c.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
I don't remember these hypothetical old days!
My first PC was a 386-40. Two years later replaced by a 486-66 (new motherboard needed). Two years later replaced by a 486-120 (new motherboard needed). Next up was a Celeron 166 (new motherboard again), then a K6-233 (new motherboard for EDO ram) and a K6-2 350 after that (new motherboard to support the higher multiplier). I went intel for a little while, dual celeron, and after that a p3. New motherboards for each. Finally, I settled down with a top of the line Athlon thunderbird 1 gig on a top of the line motherboard.
A motherboard which only supports chips up to 1.4 GHz. And whose top-of-the-line clock makes at 200 MHz.
*SIGH*. Each chip upgrade, usually performed at 2 year intervals, has required a new motherboard to take advantage of a higher clock speed or "better" memory or a new graphics system or USB. In fact, i'm beginning to thing that I'd be better served by a PC industry that integrated chips onto motherboards to save costs and improve cooling options. Over and under fans? You got it!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
About 5GHz is the upper limit for processors running on EXPERIMENTAL technology available currently. The Pentium-M performs as well as the P4, but at MUCH lower clock speeds, which also means lower heat.
The long pipelines allow higher clock speeds (shorter paths for current to flow down) at the expense of Instructions Per Clock (for a very rough estimate of the efficiency of a CPU, multiply clock speed * IPC).
I have a P4 machine on every floor in my house Just when I was about to cancel my Natural Gas service, the go and try to Lower the heat output of chips.
It's like a hat for it, right? So it looks stylish. Otherwise the RAM will laugh at it...
Not smaller fans, slower fans. A smaller fan runnign the same RPM as a large fan will move less aire with the same amount of noise, a large fan can move the same amount of air at much smaller RPMs than the small fan, and in doing so generate less noise. My case has 1 120mm fan and 1 92mm fan, it probably pushes the same amount of air as my friends setup which has 4 80mm case fans, but with substantially less noise.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
And where have I been? More like where haven't I been!.. After graduation, I quickly became involved in an international ring of sexual criminologists, culminating in...
Read the rest of this comment
Hardly. That'd only be relevant for part of geek population, or Apple loyalists, because:
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.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
I was trying to avoid getting into things like subthreshold leakage current (to explain why Vdd can't be reduced arbitrarily).
That's what I get for posting ten minutes after I wake up I guess.
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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