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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.
UPDATE: A representative for Intel Corporation told X-bit labs the company had never released any precise details in regards the dual-core strategy. The information published herein should not be considered as based on official statements.
WTF?
Two core dumps for each segmentation fault.
Isn't it a llittle soon to claim to put 4 processors in one chip by 2005, especially sinse last I had heard, one processor was causing a heat concern. Have they fixed this or is this Intel making predictions and setting dates that will only get pushed back anyway?
The stupidity of your average American is just about the same as the average European, we simply show it off better.
''And not a very fast one'' a company exec was quoted saying
This is not my opinion. Actually, it's not even an opinion. And I'm nowhere to be seen near it
Ars is covering this too. Ken Fisher makes it a point to mention that the person who made the claims is in marketing. He also speculates, quite logically, that bringing out dual core Prescotts in '05 would be a feat even for Intel. Worth reading for a more sobering take on the situation.
Have a Happy.
I'm sure they are going to be eSpensive
Blarf.
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.
What happened to the days of the intel dudes dancing around in bunny suits?
I mean, Hot !
Will it come with the Prescott Survival kit ?
I need a Sino-Logic 16. Sogo-7 data-gloves, a GPL stealth module...
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.
Worst. Trol. Evar.
Because intel's always so reticent in giving out the instruction sets and specs for their processors. That'd be a really smart business move, and the #1 way to attract developers.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
I caught a pic of the heatsink for this beast at Computex, so it must be real.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=16426
-Charlie
(for the humor impared, think humor - haha, not humor - I don't get it)
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.
1 processor core technology is causing heat consernes in thin core. The point is as the core gets thinner the power required to stop lekage across a ever thinner insulation layer increses. A couple of jumps thinner and we would have chips that require the power of a houshold iron. Multi-core is a solution to this problem, maybe Intel are not using very thin core technology to reduce heat in there multi-core processors. There was a very interesting article about this in New Scientist but I dont think it was one they put on the web for free ;-(. (sorry I posted this as a reply to someone elses article but am hanging it of the original post as it seems relevent).
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'd take a DUAL dual-core 2.5GHz G5 powermac over a dual single-core 3GHz anytime.
It would probably be less of a technical challenge as well, and would follow the "GHz doesn't matter" philosophy the POWER(tm) manager said a few days ago.
The 90nm process encounters problems at high clock speeds. So, bring on more efficiency at lower clock speeds!
I prefer Ars Technica's Understanding Pipelining and Superscalar Execution...
Besides, I feel HT exploits the fact that the processor is pipelined more than its superscalar nature.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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?
Actually, the big jump in heat for the Prescott cores is from Intel use of only starined silicon in manufacturing. By creating a strained lattice for the silicon, you increase the likelyhood of current leakage (hence more heat). This is why AMD and IBM went with silicon on insulator and added strained silicon later (the SOI process helps to mitigate the leakage in strained silicon).
Here's a simple primer
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Actually I believe you are wrong here. Intel split the reorder-buffer in half, split the physical register file in half, and fetches from each thread every other cycle. If I am not mistaken, the latter point means that each thread gets equal execution resources as once instructions have been fetched and decoded, dispatch and execute don't care which thread an instruction belongs too. Like I said, I think this is the case but am not sure.
From my friends in the architecture community, Intel's SMT implementation is sort of half-assed.
On the other hand, IBM's Power5 also fetches from each thread every other cycle, however it shares a reorder buffer physically (but of course not logically).
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.