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Intel Plans for Dual-Core Prescott CPUs in 2005
scapermoya writes "X-Bit Labs is reporting that Intel is planning to step up their introduction of dual-core processors, with the first chips to hit the market in late 2005. Intel announced this plan at the Technology for Business Today seminar, held in Washington, D.C. Looks like NetBurst is sticking around, despite what we have heard lately about a move toward the 'M' architecture. Supposedly, thanks to HyperThreading, the OS will see 4 installed processors. Snazzy."
The sticker on the bottom of this here laptop says Microsoft Windows XP Professional 1-2 CPUs. Will this mean that Microsoft will have to reconsider their licencing policy for CPUs if people are going to have "four" from one chip? I've never needed to run more than two (through hyperthreading) so if someone could shed some light on what happens if you give a "2-licence" four processors it would be appreciated.
Will Intel actively support Linux on these chips? Or will the specs be "secret" and left to DMCA-baiting reverse engineering?
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
The article doesn't actually say that Prescott will be a very promising architecture to use for a dual core configuration...imagine 200W of heat coming from a single dual-core processor.
Having multiple cores will make the already-present high heat requirements increase, while the processors in laptops get faster and faster, but not necessarily much hotter. The P6 architecture is the way to go, I think.
I've heard that IBM already has ridiculous 8-core POWER5 prototypes. You'd think by late 2005 they'd have knocked out an Altivec-enhanced, dual-core POWER5 derivative for Apple. Though, given their troubles at 90nm on the PPC970, maybe we should be waiting until early to mid 2006 to see that.
Well clearly this demonstrates that Intel really does get the best smoke on the market today. That shit has got to be pricey, because the whole joint is stoned out of their heads.
Let's do some math for them. If we leave our PCs on all day --and that is why we have 24/7 broadband connections isn't it-- that's 5KW/Hrs a day.
At 15cents KW/Hr it now costs seventy five cents a day to have an Intel CPU. That's twenty bucks a month.
But do you get 15cents per KW/Hr lately? Check your bill, you might be closer to twenty cents. A buck a day. Hey, I running the Intel PC costs almost as much as broadband. Perhaps they should include free broadband connections with these things.
I'm oversimplifying for sure, but aren't the heat issues (and other more difficult quantum effects) primarily due to the ever increasing demand for clock speed?
As a layman it kind of makes sense to put 2 lower speed cores on a die rather than one faster one, and get lower power consumption and more importantly less heat production, and let the software deal with utilising it?
Anyone that actually knows about this care to comment?
Exactly.
And -PRESCOTT- cores?
What, do they think we're nutty enough to have a desktop system that needs to dissipate 200+ watts of heat?
Please. I don't think so.
SMT (HyperThreading) provides the OS with two CPUs whose capabilities vary (the first one can do anything, and the second one can do anything the first one is not doing). If you use a classical SMP scheduling algorithm on these virtual CPUs then you are likely to get a performance hit, since it may schedule (for example) two integer intensive threads to one physical CPU, which will generate resource conflicts. If the scheduling algorithm is SMT aware then this problem goes away.
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Intel reportedly said that with the HyperThreading technology enabled operating systems will report availability of four microprocessors into the system when a single dual-core Prescott is installed. Representatives also confirmed that future Prescott products will feature 64-bit capability.
Didn't intel say previously they weren't going to make 64-bit desktop chips?
Did he point out that it's easy for AMD? The K8 architecture has had dual cores built into the design from the start. Apparently they actually chopped one off for the first couple years. I've read that they have them running in simulation with both cores and I'd speculate they've even made sample chips with two. I've been wanting to know if AMD will go dual core at 90nm or wait for 65nm. I suppose it all depends on what Intel does. IMHO AMD needs to start acting like a leader instead of a follower - their 130nm parts are actually competetive with Intels 90nm ones in terms of performance.
As a developer, it's the more difficult programming model that bothers me. I don't have phobia about multithreading - just the opposite, I've done it enough to know that writing correct software is much harder when you have to worry about concurrency.
Besides correctness, there is performance. Writing software to fully utilize two processors is MUCH harder than to fully utilize one. For instance, you might write a multi-cpu aware game by doing the physics in one thread and the graphics in a second thread. But unless those tasks happen to require exactly the same CPU power, you will not achieve full utilization. So you resort to partitioning the functionality in some unnatural way to make it balance.
When I discuss this with my office mate he says: "Great! That will keep us in the job." And I guess he's right. I think there will be a lot of opportunities for new language features (or languages) to exploit all this parallel hardware. And of course a lot of education for software developers. (Not that parallel processing is brand new, but networking wasn't brand new when the Internet hit either - broad acceptance changes things).
So what's the upshot to the consumer? Simple: the whole parallel computer is less than the sum of its parts. If it were easy to make anything faster by throwing more processors at it, multiple processors would have become ubiquitous years ago.
I read this on Ars last night, so i would take it with a grain of salt....
Ars Technica: The PC enthusiast's resource: "Now, your guess is as good as mine, but it sounds like this 'Intel employee,' whom the report identifies as a marketing manager, was talking out the rear, as we say in Beantown. HyperThreading, for what it's worth, might 'take off' in the future but right now what's taking off is the competition. Now, Intel may have some mojo up its sleeve that hasn't made its way through my sources, but I'll be rather surprised to see dual core Prescotts in a year's time unless Intel has managed to patent a dry ice freezer for cooling purposes. The future is quite clearly the Pentium M, unless Intel has solved power leakage problems and not told anyone about it (which is possible, but unlikely). My best guess with the information at hand is that this is Intel marketing speaking, and Intel marketing isn't going to tell you that Prescott doesn't have a future. Designing a dual-core, HT-enabled CPU that won't scale just doesn't make sense, and I can't imagine Intel doing it. "