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Intel Drops Tejas, Xeon To Focus On Dual-Core Chips
PunkerTFC writes "Reuters has an article about Intel dropping the fourth-generation P4 chip (codenamed "Tejas") and the Xeon server processor. Intel says they want to concentrate on their new 'dual-core' technology for desktop and notebook systems. This is essentially putting two processors on one chip, allowing for a doubling of performance with less energy use. The introduction of this technology was not expected for another year and a half. Rival chip maker AMD says they have the capability to produce dual-core chips and will introduce the technology when they "feel there is a market need.""
but might this have something to do with the recently-announced Longhorn specs?
Here's the real impact many of us will be feeling. Software vendors that license by the CPU have already in fair part indicated that they consider "dual core" chips to be two CPU's for licensing purposes.
In other words, people are going to find themselves having to pay higher licensing fees with regular desktop computers as well as servers. Small workgroup servers could be really hard hit by this from some vendors.
I wonder how this will play out with XP Home which only supports one CPU? AMD has the technology so they may well respond in kind when Intel does (dammit lead AMD, lead), which could have a fair impact in weaning the masses of XP Home. I dont think MS will let this go the route of hyperthreading with the "logical processor" support.
Intel, like Microsoft, Dell and Sony, is a favored company.
AMD, like Nokia, Apple and Nintendo, is not.
AMD's strategy (Opteron instead of dual-core?) will therefore be called "a significant risk given the current market reality" while Intel's strategy (dual-core instead of Itanium?) will be called "a savvy decision for the technology giant," even though the media wouldn't know an Opteron or a dual-core CPU if one jumped up on their desk and did the tap number from 42nd street.
All of the general stories will make repeated and redundant references to the effect of Intel's strategy on the "tech-heavy Nasdaq."
This is no different than the Sony vs. Nintendo console competition. The media doesn't like competition. Neither do the markets. (There is only room for three companies in any given market) It's so much easier to be a sycophant when your favored company has 80% of the market.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
That's exactly what they try to avoid. Each core in a multi-core processors is simpler than a single processor of the current generation, but they make it up by putting two or more of them on the same chip. Another way to look at it is that the parallel execution units of a current generation processor are made even more autonomous, and this is made explicit by declaring them to to be separate processor cores.
The point is to use the available transistors on a chip as effictively as possible. For a long time computer architects used the growning number of transistors to enlarge caches and pipelines, add execution units, and add other niceties (e.g. branch prediction, MMX), but the gains have gotten less and less (and were sometimes dubious to begin with).
Multicore processors are only useful if people have enough parallelism in their applications to make it worthwhile. Therefore, it won't help every application, but that's also true for many tricks in existing architectures.
Simply: cost. The CPU core is probably now well under 10% of the silicon area, the remainder being L1 cache and similar support circuitry. Adding a whole extra core adds very little to the total silicon - less than making the core more complex to handle ever deepening pipelines. Whereas adding a second complete chip, in its own package, plus the arbitration logic necessary to make the two chips work together, costs a lot more.
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