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Intel Scraps Plan For 4 Ghz P4 Chip
bizpile writes "It was reported earlier that Intel would be delaying the release of their 4Ghz Pentium 4 chips, but it now appears that they will be cancelling them altogether. The announcement came Thursday and Intel says they are going to rely on approaches besides faster clock speed to improve the performance of chips. Engineers are working to add additional cores to a single chip and improving the efficiency in how the chips interact with the rest of the system. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said, "Those are the sort of things where you get more capability out of a processor by designing specific silicon solutions as opposed to just keep turning the clock faster." In the meantime, Intel is planning on releasing a 3.8 Ghz chip with 2mb of cache."
Mhz do not always = performance!
Good job. Now I might be able to get a decent bus speed.
Wasn't that the entire reason behind AMD's use of the P-ratings? That performance was measured in more than just MHz.
Hell, Intel has spend DECADES convincing the public that MHZ is king and now they are (once again) following AMD's lead.
HA!
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Does anyone really care about clock speed anymore? Yes, I know some applications need all the muscle they can get, such as video manipulation and scientific computing. However, it seems the interest in clock speed has waned considerably since the 1 GHz mark was hit. Basically, unless you are doing high end gaming or one of the aforementioned activities, increasing clock speed does very little for you. Consequently, it seems to me that the inevitable increases don't garner the same excitement they once did--going from 133 to 166 MHz was a big deal. Going from 3.0 to 3.8 GHz isn't nearly as useful, though the percentages are the same.
Sounds like they want to balance a pc like a mac. Bout time.
there is no such thing as common sense. If sense was common, everyone would have it. -unk
> 32bit is sooooo 1998
Until I see 64-bit games, it's also so 2004
It just kills ppl when they see my Pentium Pro box keeping up with XP on a P4, for desktop stuff.
C|N>K
They've been doing this for a long time; basically all this says is that they're attempting to change the focus of their marketting from clock speed to other measures. I predict that consumers won't like it, and they'll go back to cranking up the marketting-clock-speeds ASAP.
Have you read my blog lately?
Well actually, if they do dual core chips, Moore's law will still be true. It's the doubling of *silicon* not the doubling of speed that is the core of Moore's law.
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
I mean come on. We all know their engineers knew that MHz != better cpu. It just took them this long to finally convince their PR department to give up on the multi-billion dollar investment they have made in making "consumers" know that MHz == better cpu.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
No, Intel switched to processor numbers when they realized that we realized that MHz don't tell the full story.
Multi-cores (i.e. parallel processing) is clearly the correct approach. The only fly in the ointment is a few software packages that charge on a per cpu basis, and count each core separately.
Ouch!
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Don't worry, most of us here don't notice and just looks for the CowboyNeal option in polls, drools at autopr0n links, types BSD trolls, and stuff. :-)
...of Microsoft realizing it had missed the boat with the Internet back in the '90s. Let's hope the paraniod play fair.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Intel continued to use the MHz race because the public was on board, and simply because they were able to maintain a demonstrable lead in the race due to their process technology lead. They preserved their enormous market share and high margins by spending decades convincing the public that MHz was the key.
It will be difficult for them to apply as much inertia into another simple metric that the public will understand and by whose measure they will be able to remain the clear leader. They need to come up with another marketing story that pushes yet another metric that is again closely tied to their process superiority. I don't know what this is, but I'm sure they have a new story that we will see when they do their multi-core HT rollout.
AMD did not exactly "win" simply because they gave up the MHz war so soon. Yes, they were the first, but they didn't have much of a choice since they knew they could not scale to 65nm process geometry like Intel could. They had to alter their architecture earlier. Intel did not, and it worked in their favor for more years.
It is obvious from the past that Intel's marketing story will never resemble AMD's. They are not "following AMDs lead" unless by that you mean they were able to scale clock speed for a longer time than AMD was.
They are still managing to squeeze more transistors into less space, remember. It's just that the P4 design took things way too far. This has happened before, most notably with the MIPS R4400.
You also have to remember that the whole thing is probably clocked at least partially asynchronously. The on-die L2 cache doesn't need to operate at 4 GHz.
And modern semiconductor manufacturing *is* nanotechnology.
But, your ending conclusion still holds. Without changes in our understanding of physics and/or sub-atomic structures, we will hit a limit at some point. I, for one, welcome our 65535 processor massively parallel machine desktop overlords.
Gentoo Sucks
Information, of any kind, cannot move faster that 30cm/GHz. THAT is the fundamental limit that human 443781 was referring to (in a round-about imprecise way).
Intel is just admitting what the rest of the processor industry has known for years. AMD stopped playing the Mhz game with their 64 bit chips. IBM, and Sun have had 64 bit chips for years and are already shipping multicore CPUs. Sun has plans for dozens of cores per die. Intel will have to work overtime to catch up with these other companies.
Dothan (the successor to Banias) is currently in many laptops.
This is an intersting development... a P-M mobo for desktops. I personally would love one for a SFF box. But Intel says NO to P-Ms in desktops on a large scale. Wouldnt want to canabalize all those Prescott sales, would we?
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
You're kind of missing the point.
:) ]
What you're not getting here is that it is INTEL that has been behind the clock speed myth. They have spent untold millions (billions??) teaching people that the speed of a computer is best measured by the clock speed of its CPU. For the last decade, that and "Intel Inside" have been their ENTIRE marketing message. The consumers believe that clockspeed matters because Intel is the one that told them so.
Now, for a long time, this has worked really well for them. They pretty much destroyed Cyrix this way, and AMD has been struggling for many years. Cyrix came up with their PR-ratings to try to be competitive, but their chips weren't very good and didn't deliver on their promise, and they sank into obscurity. AMD did the exact same thing with their + ratings, but they were so conservative about them at first that people accepted them. (this gave them some weasel room later, as they have gotten very nearly deceptive with the ratings on some of their CPU lines, particularly the Sempron.) They had to do this because Intel had taught everyone that it was megahertz that counted: AMD couldn't deliver that, just performance. Basically, they got lucky. Had consumers not accepted those ratings as accurate, AMD would probably be gone now. Apple was in the same boat, as well. With a less rabid fan base, they'd be gone too.
Around the time of Rambus, the marketers took over Intel. They realized that the megahertz message was working fabulously well. It appears that they decreed that all future engineering efforts in the Pentium line would be oriented around cranking up the clockspeed. The engineers delivered what they were told to, a chip that could be scaled a very long way, by going to a hyperpipelined approach. I believe their first P4 was clocked somewhere around 1.2ghz, and it was HORRIBLY slow because of the pipelining; a 1ghz P3 absolutely destroyed the P4. In other words, the P4 was a big step BACKWARDS from the P3 in nearly every way.
But then they started to crank the megahertz, expecting to leap way out in front of AMD and, once again, dominate everything. (Nevermind that it wasn't until the P4 hit about 2.4ghz and got an 800mhz bus that it started to actually get good.) RAM speeds in particular had to do a lot of catching up. A hyperpipelined approach suffers terribly from a mispredicted branch. The CPU stalls completely until the pipeline can be refilled, which kills performance. You need the fastest possible RAM to refill the pipeline as quickly as possible. (and this, btw, is why AMD isn't as desperately dependent on fast memory; its pipeline is about half as long as the P4's, and thus it doesn't choke as badly if it guesses wrong about a branch.) [and thanks to Ars Technica for the knowledge to write this last paragraph
So all of a sudden, over the last year or so, Intel suddenly ran into a brick wall. Their entire chip design culture is clockspeed, not performance, and abruptly they can't crank clockspeed anymore. This is a BIG DEAL, because they're going to have to tear apart and rework EVERYTHING internally. This blunder is going to cost them billions, and if AMD keeps executing as well as they have recently, they could lose a great deal of marketshare. They are already losing mindshare, since AMD got to specify the instruction set for 64-bit X86.
Intel is in TROUBLE. The focus of their entire company, their raison d'etre, no longer exists. They forgot they were actually about performance. Many of their existing projects will have to be scrapped, and they'll have to reorient most of the company in very short order, while still maintaining morale.
If anything can save them, it's the Pentium-M, which is an extraordinary piece of technology out of their Israeli branch. In many respects, the M is the direction Intel should have gone five years ago.
Can they make up for this vast blunder? It's a good question, but I wouldn't count them out just yet. If the engineers
Maybe they realized they weren't going to be able to reliably cool the netburst architecture at those speeds so they're going to have to switch to the lower-clocked, possibly multicore Pentium-M arch.
They'd be FORCED to use a numbering scheme because any conspicuous lowering of the MHz would cause Joe Shmoe to say "What the hell?"
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Interesting you would talk about speeding up the rest of the computer because with AMD putting the northbridge memory controller on the CPU itself, the Hypertransport motherboard level data connections, DDR2 system RAM, PCI Express, Serial ATA, and UltraSCSI 320, most of the other components on the computer are also getting quite a bit faster, too. And external connections are getting faster with USB 2.0 and IEEE-1394b becoming increasingly common, too.
Is this the response to what the industry has been saying for many years about the x86 / performance limitations. Couple intels egotistical approach to the market.
This has been seen with the Opterons onchip memory management etc etc. There is always room to grow sideways which results in an upwards growth.
Just buy into the AMD Kool-n-Quiet-aid. A $150 processor that can automatically idle at 1.1V and 800MHz, or manually underclock even more because the multipliers are *guaranteed* unlocked if you want to go down even further.
My processor is idling a couple degrees C above ambient, and the fan is off half the time. And when it is on, the stock fan spins at a leisurely couple hundred RPM.
[P.S. Pentium M processors are retailing for ~$300 now, so I'm not sure a compatible motherboard would be too useful at the moment.]
It's silly for people to think that clock speed doesn't matter, why else would people go through the trouble of overclocking their systems?
Yes, obviously if you increase the clock speed of a particular chip that chip will run faster. Duh. If you push the accelerator of a car further to the floor, the car goes faster. Your point? My Honda still gets better mileage than your Suburban.
You can't use megahertz to compare different chips, such as PPC vs. P4. It's a bullshit metric, and that's why it's worthless.
Intel should just bite the bullet and spend some more R&D on alternative active cooling solutions like liquid.
For fuck's sake, why don't you just go down to the beach and club a seal? Intel should be working on making their chips more energy efficient, not ignoring the massive amounts of waste heat and spending development money on idiot liquid cooled solutions. I mean COME ON. Liquid cooling is for things like GIANT PULSE LASERS and other exotic equipment that must be kept extremely cool. The fact that people are using it on microprocessors means that there is something fundamentally very, VERY wrong.
Liquid cooling isn't cool. Not only is it stupid, it indicates your lack of regard for the environment.
Perhaps doing some work increasing the L1 cache sizes would be beneficial.
This is essentially the only thing you've said that makes sense.