Slashdot Mirror
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?
"The least likely scenario is that the demo used the first silicon samples of the dual-core product planned for release next year. Intel did demo the first silicon for its dual-core Itanium, and AMD had just demonstrated the first silicon for its Opteron processor the week prior to IDF. We believe that if Intel actually had achieved this milestone, it would have trumpeted the news far more loudly and widely; their awesome PR machine would have made sure everyone on the planet was aware of this accomplishment. So we discount this theory completely," Nathan Brookwood writes.
Intel's R&D department routinely has processors way more advanced than its current offerings running at near production stability so I am confused as to why Mr. Brookwood believes something different. Intel rarely trumpets any news "loudly". They are much more likely to wait until they are confident that they can release the product on time (unlike MSFT which likes to do exactly the opposite).
Mr. Brookwood should be moderated -1 Troll. He's likely being paid off by another chip manufacturer to "trumpet this news loudly" and keep the public's attention away from other people's lack of success in the same arena.
This article is pure speculation. Yeah, well I doubt the reporter was at the show... I mean, he *could* just be saying he was there.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
When releasing "cutting edge" technology, sometimes they have to cut corners. What may have been a dual core processor could possibly be nothing more than an overglorified dual processor system in a single chip. Any advantages of a dual core chip (shared cache, faster interprocessor communications) would have been negated by the fact that they had to rely on older, proven technology to hobble together that dual core chip.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
At last week's Developer Forum, Intel demonstrated how its Digital Office vision might enable three workers in different locations to collaborate to solve a complicated problem. One of the workers ("Jason") had to juggle several compute-intensive tasks on his system, but the work flowed easily without the sorts of fits and starts that would plague many contemporary systems.
Ah, a flawless network connection! Proof!
pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Some random idiot questions something, and it's news? By the way, "analyst" _is_ synonymous with "random idiot".
The guy has no data whatsoever to back his crackpot opinion and just likes to hear himself talk and sound knowledgeable.
How ridiculous. I'm hoping Intel's lawyers send this guy a very pointed letter.
What kind of weird conspiracy are these people trying to set up?
WHY would Intel lie about providing a dual-core processor?
WHY would Intel think it better to showcase a dual processor system and call it a dual-core?
WHY does this person think that Intel would be incapable of producing the demo?
Hm... maybe I should RTFA, and have a good laugh.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
Dan Rather has uncovered 8th-generation photocopies of some internal Intel memos confirming that the actual dual-core processor was AWOL during the Devloper Forum.
It is two processors on a single die. It would be like having a dual processor system, but only needing a single socket to support it. Now add in Hyperthreading and it would appear to be a 4-way system. Many people are really excited about this, and it is definately a cool engineering feat.
Analyst Doubts Intel's Dual-Core Demonstration
Insight 64 Asks Whether Intel Has Desktop Dual-Core x86 Chip
by Anton Shilov
09/15/2004 | 01:55 PM
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 64'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.
At last week's Developer Forum, Intel demonstrated how its Digital Office vision might enable three workers in different locations to collaborate to solve a complicated problem. One of the workers ("Jason") had to juggle several compute-intensive tasks on his system, but the work flowed easily without the sorts of fits and starts that would plague many contemporary systems. At the conclusion of the demo, Bill Siu, the General Manager of Intel's Desktop Platforms Group, casually noted that "Jason was using a dual-core system on a 915 [i.e., Grantsdale] platform." When asked about it later during a Q&A session, Siu smiled coyly, and added only that the system used "an engineering prototype" of a dual core processor with "real silicon." This begs the question of what was really inside the box.
Nathan Brookwood, the principal analyst for Insight 64 believes there are three options of what Intel might demonstrate.
"The least likely scenario is that the demo used the first silicon samples of the dual-core product planned for release next year. Intel did demo the first silicon for its dual-core Itanium, and AMD had just demonstrated the first silicon for its Opteron processor the week prior to IDF. We believe that if Intel actually had achieved this milestone, it would have trumpeted the news far more loudly and widely; their awesome PR machine would have made sure everyone on the planet was aware of this accomplishment. So we discount this theory completely," Nathan Brookwood writes.
"It is a bit more likely that Intel crammed two of its current Pentium chips into a single package that could be plugged into the socket of a 915 motherboard. (This is known as a multi-chip package (MCP), and has been used for years in certain applications.) The standard P4 package measures about 30mm on a side, and could conceivably hold many discrete processors that only measure about 11mm on a side. Intel wouldn't do this just for an IDF demo, but the resulting MCP might be useful for evaluating dual-core platforms, especially if the initial dual-core design follows the scheme we outlined above. The system would certainly be consistent with Siu's claims of "dual core," "915," and "real silicon," Mr. Brookwood claims.
"It is even more likely that Intel merely designed a dual-processor motherboard around its 915 chipset. The 915 is normally used only in uniprocessor designs, but there is no reason why engineers inside Intel could not circumvent the restrictions that prevent Intel's customers from using the 915 in DP configurations. Designing a unique motherboard is clearly less expensive and takes less time than creating a multi-chip package, and the resulting system would come close to replicating the performance of the eventual dual-core product. Like the MCP scenario, this system would fit with Siu's claims of "dual core," "915," and "real silicon," Insight's 64 principal analyst concludes, leaving the readers to decide what exactly did Intel showcase.
The analyst notes that typical Intel-based SMP systems, such as those fuelled by Intel Xeon processors, have processor system bus bottleneck, as all the chips have to share one PSB, be it a 400MHz QPB for 4-way systems or 800MHz PSB for 2-way systems. It is believed that dual-core processors will also have to share the same bus, which may limit their performance, even though by the time dual-core desktop chips are available, Intel will also present 1066MHz infrastructure for such microprocessors.
Intel and AMD both showcased
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 a "don't cheat" mentality for precisely this reason - getting caught misrepresenting a demo would seriously damage their credibility. Intel also has a lot of stuff available in-house that is several years away from production. So I don't think an engineer would lie about this, even though Intel marketing does lie every time they claim the latest Pentium will make the Internet much faster...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
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.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
After reading the article I fail to see what difference it makes. So Intel used something "similar" to a dual core to demonstrate how a dual core CPU would perform. What's the big deal? It doesn't seem like it's worth the time to write an article over something like this. I'm sure the "real" dual core processors will show up soon enough. It's not like they're selling whatever is in that computer.
That's a bit harsh. Yes, Intel is going to have stuff in R&D that would make your eyes pop and have you salivating and the thought of being posessed of such technology (a friend, back in 1980, was working on CPUs for the DoD clocked at 100 MHz, while we dinked around with sub 10 MHz stuff) but you would probably find it in such a state that it couldn't be housed in a standard cabinet or the motherboard is fairly jury-rigged to support it, and that says nothing about actually having a compiled O/S to run on the thing and take full advantage of it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
I recall a demo of the Nintendo 64 that had an SGI reality engine system under the table.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Just a single CPU die with two CPUs on it. If the board can support it, it's like plugging two CPUs into one socket.
This is quite easy for AMD because of how bus logic works. The Athlon 64 series use an integrated memory controller, and normally, a second CPU uses the same connection to the system RAM that the first one does. (ie, one Hypertransport connection is shared, by design, between two CPUs.) So a dual-core CPU is trivially easy for them to implement, relatively speaking: they have space and heat issues, but all the architectural design work is done already.
Intel, on the other hand, hasn't designed this way. Instead, for years now, they have been totally focused around more and more clock speed. This has left AMD scrambling, becaus their chip designs get more work done per clock tick, so a 1600mhz AthlonXP will keep up quite nicely with a much higher-clocked P4. But consumers, thanks to Intel mostly, don't understand that, and so AMD came up with their numbering system instead. (they were lucky this worked, because at least one prior attempts at this, by Cyrix, failed utterly.)
Well, the worm is turning. Intel's aproach, that of "more megahertz, dammit!" is very rapidly running out of steam. They have been selling people for years on megahertz, and suddenly they're in the position where they can't increase megahertz easily anymore. This is a BIG deal for them; all those billions spent 'educating' consumers on something that wasn't true is coming back to bite them.
A dual-core Prescott will not be an easy thing, and will require substantial motherboard and chipset changes. And they have a fundamental bandwidth problem; P4s need very high memory bandwidth to really get good. The P4 didn't truly hit its stride until it went to a quad-pumped 200mhz bus... 800mhz effective RAM speed. At that point, the P4 architecture finally sits up and really starts singing. But doing a dual-core chip means that both CPUs have to share bandwidth, so to maintain performance, they'll have to go to a 1600mhz bus. That's not likely in the near future.
AMD is doing the exact same thing, but the A64 design is much less clockspeed- and bandwidth-intensive. It gets more work done per clock tick, doesn't hit the RAM as hard, and runs cooler. So it's a natural for dual-core. Forcing the P4 into that same mold, on the other hand, is a move of desperation by Intel. It won't work very well, but their crank-the-megahertz strategy suddenly isn't working AT ALL.
From what I can see, Intel is in trouble.
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.
is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. Apologies to Asimov.
You even heard of Xeons dude? It's quite easy to predict how the Intel dual core chips will work...
Dual socket Xeons get around their limited memory bandwith by loading up on cache. That's going to be much more difficult to with a dual core design since you're trying to get two cores on the same chip while keeping the die size managable.
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."
The more transisters you put in a processor, the farther the signals have to travel, which reduces clock speed. Using 2 cores on one die improves locality of reference, which lets you use a higher clock speed.
Also, dual processor system (whether on the same die or not) perform better for multi-task applications (with both lightweight (threads) and heavyweight (no shared memory) tasks). UNIX like systems tend to see more benefit from this than VMS or Windows NT/2000/XP based systems, because they tend to have more processes.
Designing a more complex CPU is a harder task than simply joining two pre-existing designs, especially if your design has a built-in memory controller (as the Opteron does).
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.
That was actually typed using a 1974 IBM Correcting Selectric II typewriter on loan from CBS.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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
I used to work at what is now a major telecomm company ( hint: now owned by a French telecomm giant ).
We were at a show once pitching a new router that simply Did Not Work. To make matters worse, the case for our engineering sample was damaged just before the show.
Truth: We got a block of wood. Painted in black. Attached some LED's with wires on it that blinked randomly. Put it inside a rack with a smoked glass door.
"Demoed" the crap out of it for 16 hours over three days. I had new respect for the ability of our sales people to talk bullshit for so long without opening that freaking rack door.
We can all shout and scream about how the netburst architecture doesn't work, but that doesn't make it true. 3.6 ghz p4's are FAST. Yes they run hot. Yes they don't get the same ops/mhz that short pipelines do, but they're doing okay. Intel still sells a butt-load of chips, and thats what they're in the business for.
Incidently, all that "sharing bandwidth" stuff is what the 2 cores on a dual-core opteron will do. It's also what ALL the 2-cpu xeons in the world are doing. Again, not the greatest plan ever, but it works well enough today. The shared bus on a dual-core prescott is no different from the shared bus on a dual-chip xeon today.
Intel is in trouble in that they might go from 93% market share to 85%. Look at the market today. Ultrasparc 4's are slower than Itanium, yet ia64 still isn't making real money. The G5 is a really fast processor, but apple has about 2% of the desktop market. Being the fastest processor THIS MONTH doesn't mean the world is going to come knocking. Being close and having a good marketing campaign is more important.
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'.