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.""

Comments

Re:CPU's becoming more like GPU's.

[ciroknight]

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