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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?
FIRST POST
doi you think this has anything to do with the fact that MS is shipping a database(traditionally considered able to leverage hyperthreading very well) on their desktop? HMMMM!
But multi-cpu system sales figures do not justify abandoning the single-cpu market in any way. This is a serious mistake or an admission that they just cant keep up with AMD anymore.
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.
This has been discussed before.
Karma: Meh (Mostly from meh.)
FP FP Written Written from from my my new new dual dual core core chip chip from from Intel Intel. Still Still some some bugs bugs to to work work out out.
sold more chips than Intel during a two week period (52% to 47%). I wonder if Intel is finally feeling the heat from AMD? Maybe Dell (who only sells Intel) is pushing on them too.
There is a rage in me to defy the order of the stars, despite their pretty patterns.
Well weekends are for dupes it seems
I mean this was interesting a couple days ago, but now it is old news...
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
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.
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As being the recommended chip for running Microsoft Longhorn Version of Windows. Wonder if this has anything to do with Intel's decision.
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.
This seems to be the new trend,
AMD will have dual core opterons next year:
How many people do you know with dual procs. anywho? the only one I know is a mac friend. What kind of heat sink are we going to need for dualies? Its gotta weigh in round 5lbs. And have the noise output of a harley
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... trying to get themselves ready for Longhorn too?
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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 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..
"Sir, maybe we should introduce our dual core chip now!"
"No... that's just what they'll be expecting us to do..."
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
...will sell for the low-end and be called Halferon.
Hyperthreading and dual core are very different things. A dual core processor is basically two processors put onto one die. There are twice the number of execution engines, just like two separate cores, but on the same chip. This means it's easier and cheaper to make and install than two separate processors, and it has approximately equal performance.
Hyperthreading takes one physical processor and makes it appear to be two logical processors. There's still only one core and one execution engine. It appears to be two processors, but a 3.2GHz Pentium with HT will have nowhere near the performance of 2 3.2GHz Pentiums without HT.
Transistors are getting smaller and the chipmakers can fit more and more onto a chip.. However, it is much cheaper (less design time) to simply run two cores with some "glue" hardware than to design a new core that is 8-way superscalar instead of 4 (for example).
One way to look at dual-core is to view it as a dual-processor (MP) system with a very low communications cost, since both cores are on the same die. The disadvantage is similar; since the two units are not perfectly synchronized, such a system runs best with multithreaded code. A single-core CPU with the same number of transistors will run faster, while the dual-core is not quite "double the speed" of one of its cores.
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.
They don't need market penetration now.. the AMD64 runs 32bit stuff faster too.
Plus AMD is running away with the market here in the UK - cheap end... cheapest AMD UKP22, cheapest Intel UKP72. AMD64 UKP138. Nearest equiv. Intel (P4EE 3.2) UKP559.
Haven't seen a new intel box in a while in these parts, except for laptops (Dell insist on using P4s for some reason).
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?
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
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The current IBM POWER4 and upcoming POWER5 chips are both dual-core chips. Here is a nice presentation(PDF format) about the POWER5; you can see in the die photos where there are two cores. There have also been rumors of a dual-core PowerPC based on it, but nothing concrete yet.
Broadcom (which bought SiByte) markets a dual-core, 1GHz 64-bit MIPS chip called the BCM1250 which has a lot of integrated networking goodies.
Finally, it bears pointing out that on the other side of Intel's severed corpus callosum, they're also working on a dual-core chip.
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.
I mean, Intel is a year a head of schedule.
The author incorrectly states that Intel's dual core CPU is "more than a year ahead of schedule". Six months ago during the Intel fall analyst meeting Intel claimed (slide #40) dual core for the home computers would arrive in 2005.
This is a rather interesting bit of information from the article: "This strategy was not expected for at least a year-and-a-half, said Dean McCarron, the head of Mercury Research."
Well, how is this news? Intel is claiming that they will go dual core by the end of 2005. A year and a half from now is...2005, just like the Intel presentation from six months ago said.
teja vu.
It was just posted with the dual core chip, so it got posted twice.
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.
contrary to slashdot ignorance and FUD, the OS doesn't spend most of its time running the CPU.
Most of what the OS does is IO, which idles the chip while waiting for the IO to complete. Tthis is why all operating systems switch to the next task while waiting on IO. If your CPU is running at less than 100% usage its because every program is waiting for IO for most of the time.
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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.
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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
Depends on how far you want to go back. If you go all the way back to the day of the original Pentium Processor, then yes. But if you go forward to look at the Pentium Pro to the Pentium 2's and the first Xeon's, then you'll see this "passing back" that I'm talking about. Most of their Xeon improvements are actually put into the Pentium !!!, and the Pentium !!! Xeon tested a lot of things out that they used later when they moved to Flip Chip packaging. AMD had the same vision of Intel, make cheap chips, but they started a little late and mostly played catch up. They were never too keen on innovation (I give them 3d Now! and it's extensions, but this only came after MMX, and never got as popular like SSE and MMX did (yes, I do remember when they declared MMX as dead technology). AMD's in the same position as Intel was in around 1996 *which for me, was ages ago, almost 10 years..*. They created their form of the Pentium Pro (P6), the 64-bit x86-64 archetecture. Right now though, x86-64 is too expensive to take home, but is great for midrange servers. See what I mean?
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Hyperthreading (or simultaneous multithreading - SMT) creates the ability to run 2 virtual threads on a single chip. This can be as simple as running an 'integer' and a 'floating point' thread, as the SIMD/FPU are really still separate units anyways. In a more complicated form, it means multiple threads are split across different pipes/units/stages - making more use of the processor if you like.
Dual Cores are 2 actualy processor 'cores' on the one chip. That's 2 LSU's, 2 FPU', 2 IFU's, etc plus as much L2 cache you can shove on to feed 'em.
It is like having 2 real proc's....it's just more efficient to make dual core chips than 2 separate ones. Ofcourse you still need an OS that is good at handling multiple processors - which windows isn't really (compared to OSX for example). Speaking of Apple - IBM have been making dual core chips for some time now. The POWER4 was dual core, and the POWER5 is dual core and multithreading! Lots of Apple rumor sites are saying that the next Mac chip (G6?) will be IBM's 980 - supposedly based on the POWER5, ie dual cores etc etc.
Here's a link to an IBM presentation with a bit of info on SMT & dual cores (pdf, sorry).
... 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.
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