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Analyst Doubts Intel's Dual-Core Demo
bakeacake writes "At Xbitlabs they have a article on the possibility that Intel's Dual core Preview at the IDF was not real. Would Intel sink this low?
"An analyst expressed doubts about demonstration of a 'real' dual-core microprocessor during an Intel's recent demonstration at Intel Developer Forum Fall 2004 in San Francisco, California. Insight's Nathan Brookwood believes that Intel was most likely to showcase a dual-processor system instead of a dual-core processor-based system during the show.""
What Intel and Vaporware? Never! They have to compete with the likes of IBM:
In other news: IBM is preparing a dual-core version of its 90nm PowerPC 970FX processor - aka the G5. Codenamed Antares, the chip will be delivered - likely in sample form - to Apple later this summer.
News article here
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
So... why don't they just do that?
I was at a Microsoft OEM System Builder conference for the release of Windows XP and Intel just happened to be showing off the Pentium 4. They did a video encoding benchmark, the pentium 4 2ghz vs the Pentium III 1ghz. They had *1* stopwatch, started the Pentium 4 and then 15 seconds later started the Pentium III. Then when the Pentium 4 only made out twice as fast as the Pentium III, they started saying how great it was that it was 2x the performance. They never accounted for the 15 second head start that the Pentium 4 had... meaning it wasn't even twice as fast.
Regardless of whether the P4 is good or not, that was a pretty crappy thing to do and when about 20% of the crowd commented on it, the Intel guys merely say "that didn't happen".
AMD did a dual core demo the week before. They opened the boxes, passed around sample chips, showed enlargements of the cores, etc.
Intel did their demo with a closed box, presumably in response to AMD. Only when asked if it was really dual core did they say it contained "real silicon".
I'd say that there was some vapor in that closed box, too.
Intel has been caught off guard. They definitely have a lot of products in the R&D pipeline, but they spent so many years focusing on the Itanium future that they're really starting to hurt from the fact that nobody wants Itaniums.
Fortunately, even Intel's second-string is big and fast enough to keep pace with the rest of the industry, but things like this show that they really are having to make a huge effort to do so. I'm sure the dual-core demo was genuine, but as with so many demos of this type, it must have been very carefully scripted to avoid an embarassing crash.
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i just read on thg their review of the idf held recently, and those intel fan boys didn't even say anything about why the chip wasn't physically displayed ... there is even a funny picture of a staffer hauling the case out of the presentation right away (
here )
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
However, there was a desktop "engineering prototype" that was kind of quiet. No picture was shown. It sounds like they made a multichip module from 2 die to test things. If they had a dual-core Xeon, they would have said so clearly and not just mentioned after a demo that the machine was using an engineering prototype dual-core.
Remember, Intel has a second P4 compatable CPU. The Pentium-M is much closer to AMD in instructions per clock (e.g. a Pentium-M at 1.5GHz performs close to a P4 at 2.5GHz). And it uses less power to accompolish this feat. Perhaps Intel will use their more efficient processor for dual core applications.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Because Intel had to revamp roadmap, and has no product.
Their Pentium4 with NetBurst Architecture has smashed into a brick wall.
Their IA-64, meant to destroy the Clones, never caught on very well, and any plans to penetrate the lower-end (but not low-end) have been cut off at the knees by X86-64.
The Pentium-M is a success, but was apparently meant to be a niche product. Suddenly it's being called on to become mainstream, and they're not ready for that.
They've got to show something to make them worthy of the future. They've reacted and revamped their roadmap, but their hand TODAY is rather weak. They've got to show that they're executing their new roadmap, and will deliver what customers want/need.
I suspect that to uncover the truth, you have to find out *exactly* what Intel said at the demo, and offered for publication. Then you have to analyze that for what they *didn't* say. I suspect that Intel didn't lie, but I also suspect that they were careful to omit some details. Neither of those can be gleaned from the article.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Google the authors name, the very first result is a link to AMD's website becasue Nathan Brookwood gave a keynote speech for AMD.
8 23 _8721%5E7827,00.html
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Weblets/0,,7832_8366_7
The Pentium-M is an incredibly good design, probably the single best piece of technology out of Intel since the original Pentium. And their numbering schemes would lend some plausibility to that; Pentium-Ms are 700-series, and P4s are 400-series. Bigger is obviously better. :-)
It's weird that you can't find Pentium-M motherboards. I looked a whole bunch, not too long ago... I wanted to set up a nearly silent PC in the front room, and figured a Pentium-M was the perfect choice. I only found one, and it was like $450, and impossible to order in singles. It's weird that so few manufacturers make motherboards for this chip... it's exceptionally powerful, and would be just about the best choice for a silent PC I can imagine. The Via Edens are good, but the Pentium-M is far more powerful and only dissipates a little bit more heat.
Definitely a good choice for a multicore CPU, but the marketroids have been in charge of Intel for a long time, and I'm not sure how the Pentium-M, as good as it is, fits into their 'message'.
FYI, the system in question here was the deskside SGI Onyx. EGM, that stupid asshat magazine with the very biased attitudes, was proud to have discovered this little tidbit at the CES.
;-)
What they didn't perhaps realize is the Onyx was also the official N64 emulator platform. SGI had N64 microcode running on it.
Now, I wasn't there so I don't know if the demos in question were actually running with this emulator. However, even if they weren't, is an Onyx really that farfetched?
In SGI's entire product line, what else at the time had the texture performance even close to what N64 ended up having? None of SGI's desktop family even had hardware texturing at the time; Indigo2 Extreme is a joke.
Where the Onyx shows its strengths above and beyond N64 are in:
1. triangle performance
2. 48-bit color (RealityEngine2)
3. hardware convolution
4. possibly more than one CPU
Where N64 shows its strengths above Onyx
1. programmable T&L. Think "vertex shader" years before there even was such a thing.
2. sound. Onyx, by default, had no sound unless you got a 3rd party board. Here again, N64's was very programmable, too.
Onyx is still nicer than N64, but N64 sure has alot more games regardless.