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

Where are they going to dump them?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll pick up as many as i can carry..

Re:Where are they going to dump them?

[Rick.C]

I'll pick up as many as i can carry..

Wear an oven mitt... they tend to run HOT!

Good Idea

[derphilipp]

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 (?)

Power consumption is important

[cpghost]

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.

Re:Power consumption is important

[getch();]

The issue of power consumption is rapidly becoming much more significant than even the parent poster realizes.

The general dynamic power (operating power) equation for CMOS circuits has switching frequency as a squared term. Voltage and junction capacitance (think die size here) are also present, but are not squared.

If Intel were to take the P-IV architecture as far as it had planned, an extra few bucks for electricity would be the least of its worries. Without some unforseen advancement, power per unit area would become a (relatively) intractable problem. Even though voltage and die size would probably decrease, the increase in frequency coupled with the reduced area would likely provide a serious problem for cooling. I've read papers that have estimated that air cooling won't be able to dissipate much more heat than it's already required to. Taken far enough, the head produced could just vaporize the silicon (obviously that's not occurring in the near future).

In short: good move, Intel.

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.

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.

Religious Nomenclature?

[Himring]

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....

Re:Religious Nomenclature?

[kmcmartin]

iirc, the Pentium M was designed at Intel's Israeli division, so this makes some sense compared to the old Washington/Oregon naming scheme.

Is this surprising ?

[data1]

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.

About the P-M architecture

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

[w3weasel]

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

That's not a fair comparison... you can hardly even fry an egg on those old processors.
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.

Re:Pentium mm

[mrogers]

Your megahertz may vary?

Re:braniac vs. speed demon

[Yoda's Mum]

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.

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:Intel is so far behind anyway

[LocoBurger]

The Pentium M is based on the same P6 core as the Pentium Pro through the Pentium III.

The really interesting part about this story is that Intel is going from their seventh generation architecture (Pentium 4) back to their sixth generation architecture (Pentium Pro/II/III/M).

We all knew this Pentium 4 thing would go nowhere.. :) except for the millions and millions of dollars it got Intel. Now they're trying to gracefully back out. It seems like a sound technical decision. I say good for them.

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.

Another version 4 failure

[yngv]

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...

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.