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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, 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.
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..
C) Neither. More likely that Nvidia will move to the straight CPU market and compete along side of AMD and Intel. They understand though right now the market is bad for that, and instead make great chipsets for AMD (while being the underdogs, they're also a very good ally to have if they actually do attempt to shift into desktop processors).
ATi on the other hand, while they also make chipsets for Intel and AMD, they are much more concentrated on the Video market, and they really always have been (best 2d quality, bar none since a long time ago).
Intel on the other hand, is starting to shift gears to a more mobile computing based company. They know the future of computers is in having them everywhere we go. Now that computers are finally cheap enough to be everywhere, the next step is to have them WITH us everywhere we go. Intel's been focused on Mobile computing for a long time (StrongARM processors, and the -M series of all the pentiums, including the Pentium M itself). Their switch to having Pentium M on the desktop was really a have-to case, as AMD is really starting to encroach on their midrange server and high end desktop markets. They're simply not stupid enough to continue to sell a chip that nobody wanted in the first place. The Pentium 4 was nothing more than a time saver and a way to develop and test technologies that they would need in the future for their server markets. (Hyperthreading was existant on the OLDEST Pentium 4 hardware, though not enabled since it was still very primative). And as you've noticed, lots of the Pentium 4 technologies have already been ported over into other product lines.
AMD is more and more concentrated on taking the server room from Intel. Once they've done this, they'll trickle home just the same way as Intel processors did in ages ago. And they're willing to sacrifice it all on their gamble that the industry won't shift off of x86 simply because it's too deeply embedded. They're not willing to bet on Microsoft and other software giants NOT creating software for a different platform (since Microsoft is really the end-all, be-all for the software), and instead, they embraced this lockin and extended it. The OS doesn't have to be natively compiled and optimized for their platform, and that gives them a huge advantage over the Itanium iron that they were aiming for. When performance really failed to hit the spec of highly optimized Itanium 2 code, they simply shifted gears and aimed it at Xeon instead. This was smarter because they know if they can get businesses to optimize and recompile, Xeon hardware will have to be left behind.
IBM on the other hand, says "fuck everyone else, we're doing it our own way". Working with Apple they developed a platform and got it some market share quickly. Next step: get it more market share by pushing Linux (which is outside of the control of the corporate giant of Microsoft, although this is being challenged by SCO, who was evidently paid off by Microsoft to launch such attacks and alligations). Not that Linux is any faster than anything written in Windows, but that it's cheaper, open, endlessly flexible and faster to update than anything Microsoft can throw at it. This is a safe bet. They're also aiming for the Itanium giant, and have nailed it pretty well with the Virginia Tech terascale project. Many say this is a win for Apple, when really, it's a win for PPC, which is IBM's baby.
Microsoft is really the key card right now. If they port Windows to PPC, it could royally screw both Intel, and AMD out of business. Luckily, Microsoft would take a lot of flac for doing this because of the companies that are so entrenched in X86 optimized code, that moving over to PPC would cost them millions, and they could simply move to x86 Linux instead of the next version of Windows.
So really, CPU's are becoming a lot like CPU's, but the industry doesn't care, and is in a very intersting position with Microsoft at the head. What I'd love to see is nVidia release a chip on a
"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.
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!
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.
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