Slashdot Mirror
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, does this suffer the same problems as current chips do wrt dual processors? Or quad processors?
What's the penalties of this technology? Does anyone know?
Sounds too good to be true for a dual core cpu to act as a single core proc.
AMD seems very calm about this. If I was in AMD's position, I would be in pretty scared. I mean, Intel is a year a head of schedule.
Personally, I'm just happy that soon enough I'll be able to buy a duel core chip.
Help Fight SPAM today!
So, who will merge with who...
... and AMD & ATI merge?
... and AMD & Nvidia merge?
Multiple Cores, Multiple Pixel Pipelines, ->
Intel & Nvidia merge
or
Intel & ATI merge
As being the recommended chip for running Microsoft Longhorn Version of Windows. Wonder if this has anything to do with Intel's decision.
I've got to admit I didn't read the article. However what makes AMD think there's a market need for 64 bit processors (especially without the mass market operating system) but no current market to warrent an AMD dual-core processor? Does improved performance and lower power consumption not mean anything to AMD (to quote some buzz-words)? Not to troll, but I think someone's falling further behind.
... trying to get themselves ready for Longhorn too?
Free Firefox news reader.
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.
Is this a parallel implementation then? In that case performance is only doubled for processes that can be performed in parallel.
I think this is more related to moving to the PM from the P4 architecture as the M series is more scaleable - taing P4 any further requires a lot more power and generates a lot more heat..
Makes me wonder if you would need a current "Server" Microsoft OS to use the full potential of the chip. They currently only support 2 "CPUs". Meaning 1 HT or 2 standard CPUs. 1 dual-core/HT CPU would be "4" theoretical CPUs, wouldn't it?
Exactly. Intel is so deeply in bed with MS, that they really have no choice. Unfortunately for Intel, they will discover that MS marketing won't result in the sales volume they expect because the consumer isn't as dumb as they appear.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
It's not only about scaleability. Processors are fast enough; this is evident by companies simply masking the processor's actually speed spec (note: not performance spec). No, the next war will be one of innovation, simply because the market's really tired of the same old thing, just faster. AMD's extension of x86 is the perfect example of this. Even though it's performance is on par with (and maybe a little faster, but not enough to matter, a couple percent, 10 at most) the other chips in it's class (really high end P4's), AMD's selling lots of these chips. The reason's simply that it's something new. Same reason the iPod mini's are doing well, same reason the G5 Macs are doing a lot better than the G4's ever did. The key word is innovation.
Moving a speedstep chip to a desktop is a huge sign of innovation, and of environmental conciousness (if they decide to leave all of the speedstep stuff enabled, which I fear they won't, since they didn't on the Pentium M-based Celeron M's). Having extremly low power desktops will make desktops smaller, which will free up room for a) more computers, b) deeper integration of computers (like the minipcs being used as Tivo's, car installations, etc etc), and c) profit!
It's all around a good decision, and a very predictable one.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
It's not clear to me that a dual core processor would take less power than a single core processor. Sure a dual-core processor _will_ take less power than two single-core processors on a board. So I suppose at a system-level a single core processor will take less power than a dual processor system, but the power problems we're seeing now are primarily at the chip-level.
BTW: As someone who 'knows' people that work at Intel, this decision was a pretty huge one on the 'Richter scale'. 1000s of people found out in the last couple of weeks that they were being redeployed to different projects (or making major changs on current projects). This decision is having a huge effect inside of Intel. I suspect that this kind of shake up means that the higher ups at Intel were very afraid that AMD is making major inroads and they finally realized that they couldn't keep going in the direction they were headed in without disasterous effects on marketshare.
You can't keep adding transistors to the same core, extending the pipeline, and adding more cache forever. That is what isn't justifiable. Also, reinventing design is a huge cost and some risk (x86 still sticks).
The reason multi-CPU system sales are not high is because multi-CPU systems are high in price and much lower in supply than single-CPU alternatives. You don't see a lot of older chips in multi-CPU configurations for sale do you? Among other reasons, it's because chip makers would prefer you buy the newer processor, the one they just spent a lot of money on. The chipmaker encourages the new, not the old, so dual processor systems of new processors are always expensive. And when the price does drop, the systems are in much lower supply because they are older chips. So the price always floats high.
So prices are high on these systems, they're marketed as servers, and people don't associate them with their desktop. So naturally, if you don't target the avg. computer consumer and you make the entry price very high, you're not going to have big (volume) sales.
But, if Intel focuses developement on dual processor, they will seek to both target the market's masses and price very competitively. This can be done.
Apple started this trend by bringing down a high-end dual processor system with the G5. $3000 was a great price for what you got. Intel took notice and the Intel engineers surely understand the benefits to a parallel environment. There are lots of userland optimizations that can be made for SMP.
My Dual G5's heat sinks are large, but pretty light.
They are rectangular boxes about 3"x3" square section, 5" long made of 1mm thick aluminium with lots of fins making an unobstructed tunnel for air flow.
With a fan in front and behind each of these heat sinks, my G5 stays cool and quiet.
The loudest fan in this box is the one up by the hard drives.
The PPC970s in this box draw 51 watts each. The ones in the G5 Xserve draw 24 watts each.
With careful design, the noise can be kept to a minimum. Sure, the heat sink could be made smaller on the G5, but then you'd possibly have to increase fan rpm to account for the loss in surface area available for heat exchange.
As for who do you know with dual CPUs? Aside from me and my other Mac friends, no one on the PC side. Apple and other Mac developers have spent more time working on dual CPU optimised apps through necessity - it was the best way to squeeze more performance out of the G4. I am pleased that they are carrying this trend into the G5 line, even though the PPC970 is a pretty decent performer on its own.
That is still true for P4 Xeons, where upto 4 cpus share the same bus and north bridge.
This sig space tolet, reasonable rate.
Thanks to AMD and their recent successes in the market, Intel it seems is finally focussing on their core business - manufacturing successively faster processors, not inventing new marketing schemes. Before this announcement I could only imagine chips like these being reserved for high-end xeons.
Competition is always a good thing.
I'm sure MS already had inside information on this switch, long before we knew. Intel plans to have these out one or two years before Longhorn, so MS guessed that the optimal Longhorn PC would be built with them. Considering it's been a few years and AMD64 is just now starting to be put in mainstream computers, it sounds like a good estimate.
The one thing that irks me about this- AMD saying they would have dual-core cpus out when they feel the market is there. Intel said the same thing about 64bit and now they are playing catch-up, shouldn't AMD have learned from this?
Maybe they already have something close to being done and want to surprise Intel.
It seems like they could "disable" one of the cores and call it a Celeron. However, I don't know if consumers will accept processors with "half" the performance of their mainstream counterparts. On the other hand, a single-core Pentium-M (an impressive, but expensive, performer today) would seem like a good deal for a "budget" processor one or two years from now.
I don't think Intel will just "disable" half the cache like they've been doing since the Celeron 300A (and keep both cores). I think this is unlikely because a dual-core Pentium-M with 1MB of L2 cache (remember, Dothan will have 2MB L2 cache) would be too darn good for a "budget" processor and would cannibalize sales of their mainstream and high-end processors.
However Intel decides to make the new Celerons, it looks like we will have much better low-cost options from Intel than the pathetic Pentium-4 based Celerons with 128MB L2 cache and 400MHz front side bus.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
As I understand it, the cpu core is quite a small part of the silicon area of a modern processor chip. Which is, of course, the logic behind this development. But then, why stop at two? Well, maybe Intel have simulated and found that, in the current state of the art, two is optimal. But if cache gets larger and busses get faster, two may cease to be optimal. Which will lead to competition by number of cpus, not GHz.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I do this thing all the time, but I never write it down in the form I did today... fun exercize really and it seems that everyone else enjoyed it. Maybe I should do it more often...
Computers took a depressing turn from what I thought they'd be though. It seems as with everything that companies like Intel, AMD, IBM and Sun all turned their backs to innovation and instead went headlong for scaling. But then again, this was actually the paradigm of the time: taking something and making the most use of it as possible (Linux's birth and extension, Microsoft's use of DOS, for computer world examples). More or less the economy of today is geared toward disposable goods because of the saturation of product. Dell boomed as big as they did because they simplified choice, they prodived the durability that Intel's known for, and priced their product as competitively as possible.
We're just now starting to see innovation again I believe, which is good because the durability of a product isn't as important to people now, but the economy of it is. Today, Dell makes machines that fail pretty quickly (the Dell lab at our school has been replacing Hard Disks, Floppy Drives and Motherboards to the point that it's cheaper now to buy a whole new computer than it is to fix an old one), but they're cheap to buy and cheap to operate. This reflects what people want now, verses the durability they used to seek. Markets like today's are geared toward innovation, and markets like that of the late 1990's is geared more to the tweak and ship approach.
But then again, I'm still young and back when the real innovation was being done, I could do nothing more than read about it in magazines and think on how neat the different ideas were. Sad to say I'm only 18 and didn't have the firm understanding of most of the mechanics of Computer Science and how it relates to business as I do today. Hope that answers your question.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
How many people remember this AMD Dual Core K8 Architecture slide? AMD has been planning this for a long time.
They introduced the k8 on a .13micron process and it was 192mm with 1024k L2 cache. Moving to .09micron it will shrink to 114mm and a dual core version, with 1024k L2 per core, may come in at ~215mm, not much bigger than the current Athlon64!
AMD will claim the market is ready for dual core processors when they move to .09microns sometime next year. We've all read this quote from AMD chairman and CEO (Hector Ruiz), right: "One of the most powerful things next year is going to be our dual-core product. To me, that's going to really shock the hell out of everyone, because it's going to be hardware-compatible, infrastructure-compatible, pin-compatible. I mean, people that have a 2-P system can slap in a dual-core product and end up with a 4-P system for the price of a 2-P. That's been the biggest drawback, everyone tells me. What keeps them from going from a 2-P to a 4-P system? It's price."
Paul DeMone had a great article about the 64bit processors we'll see in 2005 and the k8 is looking pretty good!
... you'll do well when you do your stream of consciousness writing, it's easy to follow and to the point. Keep it up. And yes, you need all the data bits for forecasting, and the ability to separate data from opinion to do it accurately. My advice is specialise in a market segment without losing trace of over-all macro trends, this would be economic trends globally, currency trends, energy trends, following the politics of the major players around the world, etc. then apply that broad set of data-bits to the specialised forecast you need.
Hmm, example. Say I many years ago was sounding the alarm on the *way* we were trading with china. it was because of WHAT they bought from us, compared to what we bought from them. Looking at that, you could see it was a worse deal than the raw numbers, even taking into consideration the now over hundred billion a year deficit we are running with them, which is a form of direct foreign aid, because they use that deficit to purchase our future debt.
anyway, I digress. China has been buying factories, machine tools, and snagging data, R&D, getting information on the incredible cheap, allowing them to use that trade imbalance as a form of force mulitplier for their economy. They bought tools that make tools that make the ultimate stuff. it has given them a 4 to 1 advantage in raw costs from the hardware side, couipled with a 20 to 1 (initially) labor advantage. that's why they are kicking butt, and will be thw worlds dominant economy within ten years or so. I wrote on that about 3 years after nixon and kissinger decided to open up china (bad idea at the time, IMO, we didn't insist on quid pro quos, it was lamer).
Anyway, that's what has happened, just by looking past raw numbers to the actual "stuff" the numbers represented, you could get a much better forecast than the TV and rag pundits, well, they are mostly shills too but that's beside the point. there wasmore to it, especially some high level blackmailing going on during the past two administrations, but that was the important reason, and it was done on-purpose for the purpose of some extreme high level skimming, which we can see happened and now is the accepted norm. When we adopted a one china policy, it was in effect a defacto national anti protectionist policy which if you follow a lexicological extrapolation means it was a "pro" the other guys, in that case china, now it's extended all over, with very little thought given to what was really needed, a full replacement economy, which was never possible in the first place, given a default a nation our size can't be one industry, we needed to always be vertically integrated and widely diversified.
They screwed the pooch on that one, sad to say...
Spooky stuff really, because now, if you look at global oil supply mixed into this, strip the numbers towards the middle (throw out the phony highs and lows) to avoid the stock manipulation pseudo prices, we are in *some hurt* coming up, almost exactly the time china's (and the rest of the now industrialising second world's) demands for oil will quadruple by the calendar and some rational projections. That's by the end of this decade, or close enough to not matter for this purpose. Gonna get fugly then.
And the only way we in the US can stay competitive from now to then is by vastly diluting our money supply,by increasing the supply of less and less valuable digits into circulation, which is a no-win eventuality. It's a lock there.
How this will aplly to the niche of computer tech will mean, really cheaper hardware, but offset by devaluation of what our money represents, so that offsets and balances (+ ~ - ) , so we'll see a leveling soon, within a couple of years I think.
OS and softwares in general will drop drastically in real and perceived worth, to follow your example of throw-away on the hardware side, outside of very specialised niche markets. I agree on that. With 10 million (or more) programmers hitting the market within a couple of years all over, softwares
According to Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, Intel is supposed to officially announce today that they're not going to bother with the Tejas generation of PIVs/Xeons.
This ought not come as too much of a surprise to those of you who read this last March, and we openly wondered whether Tejas was going to see the light of day a little while back .
Yes, this a major announcement that will effectively knock Intel out of the box in the cutting-edge overclocking world for at least something close to eighteen months. This essentially leaves us with whatever AMD chooses to offer.
Nonetheless, the biggest aspect to this story is not the "what," but the "why."
A few days ago, the chief technology officer at IBM, Bernie Meyerson, told an industry forum that the traditional and expected increase in speed just from shrinking the manufacturing process is dead .
To quote:
"Somewhere between 130-nm and 90-nm the whole system fell apart. Things stopped working and nobody seemed to notice. . . . Scaling is already dead but nobody noticed it had stopped breathing and its lips had turned blue."
(This comes from the company that AMD paid $46 million dollars to help build 90nm chips, BTW. It also comes from the company that was supposed to have 3GHz 90nm PowerPC chips ready for Apple in a couple months, but is now talking about eventually getting to 2.5GHz.)
Meyerson said the biggest reason for the problem is power leakage, the same as what Intel has been saying. He also pointed out that the problem with power leakage is "nonlinear."
That's a fancy term for saying "it doesn't get slowly worse; you get past a certain point, and everything suddenly falls apart on you."
It's Not Quite Over
Mr. Meyerson is not saying "it's all over." What he is saying is that the era of easy, big gains from each new generation of processors is over. As he put it, "60 to 70 percent of the benefit of each new generation of manufacturing would have to come from innovation."
By that he means technologies like SOI and strained silicon, though he implied that these were not long-term fixes to the problem.
What is clear is that future technological advances are going to be a lot harder to do, cost a good deal more, and being a lot harder to work with than has been the case in the past. The old way of doing things is broken, and there's no mature alternative around at the moment.
Perhaps one will eventually show up, but the magic bag is empty at the moment, and it will probably take years to come up with some major new tricks.
In the meantime, progress will slow down.
Playing Noah's Ark
In all likelihood, Intel's short-term answer to this problem is to stop revving and start adding. Processors, that is. The son of Pentium-M which will become Intel's next generation will almost certainly be a two-headed beast. In short, a 6GHz processor won't be a 6GHz processor; it will be two 3s.
AMD plans to do exactly the same (which ought to tell you that SOI, good as it is, is no long-term fix to this problem).
This is hardly something either party would willingly want to do rather than increase speed, simply because the vast majority of current programming does not (or even cannot) work better with two-headed action.
It's certainly not something Microsoft want to deal with on the OS side, and probably is a big reason why Longhorn keeps getting pushed back, much less the armies of non-MS programmers out there.
It's going to happen because the hardware people don't have a choice in the matter.
I follow the SDK and GDN principles.. Spelling Dont Kount, Grammer Dont Neither
Intel is clearly now pursuing a mult-core roadmap de-emphasizing clock speed. Note that Intel is pursuing that same strategy that Sun is following. I bet that IBM is also exploring the same strategy although IBM has made no formal announcements.
We should expect that Intel has been studying the Hydra chip developed by Professor Olokuton at Stanford University. That chip is the basis of the future generation of chips at Sun.
Given Intel's reputation with adhering to deadlines and working employees to death to meet those deadlines, who -- Sun or Intel -- is most likely to develop the highest performance multi-core chips? Yep. Intel.
Yep. Sun is dead meat. Sun's managements is betting that Rock and Niagara, the key multi-core chips, will save the company. In reality, the new Intel chips will make mince-meat of both Rock and Niagara, and we will see a solar eclipse of Sun -- the epitome of the dead man walking.
I don't think Sun will die. The new UltraSparc V when it comes out will be 30 times faster than the current UltraSparc III. I think that would grind the new Intel processors.