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Intel "East Fork" Technology Migration
Hack Jandy writes "When Intel's Centrino platform first unveiled, industry experts were surprised to see such great performance of the Pentium M, based off Intel's P6 (Pentium III) architecture. According to sources in the industry, Intel has officially adopted the approach to migrating Pentium M to the desktop (hence, "East Fork") to offset some of its Pentium 4 processor sales. Cheaper, slower, cooler, but higher performing processors are on the way to an Intel desktop near you!"
"So perhaps this Pentium 4 architecture with its ridiculously deep pipeline wasn't such a great idea after all?"
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The cooler they can keep a well-performing CPU, the less noise they need coming out of the box. Let's count this one as a victory for using PCs for PVR/Jukebox-style uses.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Intel employee: "Shall I try migrating Pentium M to the desktop?"
Intel boss: "Fork off!"
</shame>
Gonna be great to use this platform for servers..
a sp?id=dot handesktop&page=1
Low power usage...
Great performance..
Low heat emission (easy to make passive cooled..)
GamePC made a test not long ago, and it performed on par with p4EE and amds FX5x...
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.
The Pentium-M was a seperate processor design (from the Israeli Intel team).
:p
It was more power efficient, and higher performing than the existing P4 line.
The processor was originally designed for Mobile applications but they've upped the clock speeds and retooled it a bit to bring them to the desktop.
They're faster and better engineered so everyone is a winner
slower, cooler, but higher performing processors
.Slower, higher performance. Only from Intel.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topN ews&storyID=6786951
Since it's from Reuters anyhow... old news too (11th Nov).
No Norm, those are your safety glasses; I'll wear my own thanks...
Not really surprising, as the PIII has been faster than the PIV for awhile. Curiously at the same time, people were also noticing that NT4 was faster than 2000 at server tasks, yet most who reported such at the time were gagged by the no-publishing-benchmarks EULA fine print...
some sensible dual core damage control...
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
Because the Pentium-M does more per clock cycle than a destktop Pentium 4 this means that a 2.0 GHz Pentium-M is effectively as fast as a desktop Pentium 4 running at 3,2 GHz, and at the same time, it runs cooler and uses less power than the desktop processor.
So yep, they respond very quickly to customer needs and wants.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
In what way is the Pentium M "dumbed down?" Quite frankly, I'm firmly of the opinion that it's the best processor that Intel has produced to date, and I'm not alone in that view point.
The Pentium M is based on the old P6 core, with things like SSE added it to bring it up to current standards, and power saving circuitry of its own added in to suit the mobile role. The one major complaint about the chip is the fact that it's somewhat bottlenecked by a 400MHz FSB, but there's speculation that that's partly related to it currently being a mobile part. Even so, a relatively low clocked Pentium M compares very favorably to a much higher clocked P4.
Basically, the Pentium M is a move back to a P3 type design philosophy, away from the 30-stage pipeline madness Intel's gotten themselves into with Prescott. I fail to see how going with a more intelligent design is going with a dumbed down processor.
It seems the company is trying to go in a significantly different direction to retain its market dominance.
:0 411 151128.asp?S=Career%20Moves&A=MOV&O=FRGN
4 /intel_kill s_4gh/
s /display/2004 1111133206.html
1) New Non Engineer CEO
http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/business/2004/
2) GHz No longer a big deal after marketing it for so many years as the only major thing you need to know about the performance of a computer.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/1
3) Shift to Better if not necessarily newer technology - see article above: oh who am I kidding....
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/chipset
Type Intel(Rating CPU_Rating, Type CPU_Type):
//What!!! our CPUs are ALWAYS good
// Wait ages to BUILD it
CPU_Rating == GOOD
IF (CPU_Rating == GOOD && CPU_Type = P4)
{
CPU_Type = P4HT
WAIT ages
}
IF (CPU_Rating == GOOD && CPU_Type = P4HT)
{
CPU_Type = P4EE
WAIT ages
}
IF (CPU_Rating == AMD_ARE_KICKING_OUR_ASSES && CPU_Type = P4EE)
{
CPU_Type = PentiumM
WAIT ages
}
RETURN CPU_Type
indeed, when williamette came out, i (among most people) think it's the biggest joke ever (I think those initial 1.4ghz parts are slower than PIII @ 1Ghz)
And from an overclocker's prespective, "desktoplization" of Pentium M means that you can way more headrooms to play with. As it stands, I think Pentium M @ 2.8ghz outperforms everything out there right now (including FX-55).
kawai
After reading for a while yesterday (after checking yesterday's k=note about the latest intel processor). I found that VIA (who bought Cyrix, I think the best processor at the 4x86 era, after National semiconductors almost broke it) has been working on it for a while. Perhaps the increase on "speed" (power consumption) was the strategy to take AMD and Cyrix out of the market? Now they want to come back because their processors are that inefficient?
Unfortunately, it seems like VIA is not focused on the PC market. Why? If anyone has some "fair" benchmarks, etc about this processors, it would be nice to read the results.
I got a notebook machine with a desktop processor, and now I can get a desktop machine with a notebook procsesor. Superkeen.
Imagine AMD's speed with AMD's architectural benefits. Wait....
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I noticed that every x86 CPU architecture in the past decade climbed 4-5 times in MHz from inception to the "end of the line" model: 486 - 25..100(???, 133 is AMD's version and those started higher than 25), Pentium - 50..200, Pentium4 - 1200..3600 now and still has a tad in reserve as shown by extreme overclockers; similarly for AMD, K6 - 166..550; Athlon - 500..2.x(?). And now Pentium2/3 - started at 233 and climbed until around 1300, which is higher than 4/5x. But maybe there's been some really notable arch changes since P2? What're your thoughts?
This is really about Intel finally coming to terms with the fact that nobody wants to buy Itanium chips. That's where Intel was headed, and Intel assumed that everyone would follow along. Unfortunately, Itanium's future depended on technology advancements that never happened, and a rate of adoption that nobody was willing to pursue.
This is why Xeon became an architectural dead end: Intel wasn't willing to move the technology forward, because Xeon was supposed to be superseded by Itanium.
Did you know that "Pentium M" is actually based on the same technology they originally called Pentium Pro? It's true. It was a good design. It didn't do all that well initially because its 16-bit performance was abysmal, and people were still running a lot of 16-bit software at the time. Now that everything is 32-bit, Pentium Pro (now Pentium M) is just fine. The fact that it gets used in laptops is a testament to its ratio of performance to power consumption.
Intel would be wise to move forward with this. They ought to ditch Xeon entirely, and perhaps even graft the AMD64 instruction set onto this chip.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I'm with the other person in saying it isn't "dumbed down". Mobile chips are sometimes fabricated differently, and also designed differently so they have a greater power scale-down capabilities that it can shut off unnecessary bits of the chip.
A 2.0GHz Pentium M Dothan can reasonably hold its own against an AMD 3000+ or a P4 3.0GHz.
The probelm for Intel is this: By the time they get this chip to market, or certainly not long after, Microsoft will actually ship Windows XP 64.
While the Pentium M may be able to close the gap to the Athlon 64 when running in 32 bit mode, possibly even beat the AMD chip if Intel are successful in increasing the M's clock speed, the Athlon is just waiting to really stretch it's legs. In some situations moving to 64 bits will not improve performance, and could possibly even hamper it, but for the majority of desktop applications and games with optimised code the 64 bit version with the extra registers will trounce the 32 bit chips.
slower ... but higher performing?
oxymoron?
[my attempt at being funny]
http://dont.spam.me.anymore.com
> Quite frankly, I'm firmly of the opinion that it's the best processor that Intel has produced to date, and I'm not alone in that view point.
"best" is a bit strong: it depends of the usage.
For SpecInt/Power ratio, I agree but for raw FP calculations, I think that the PentiumM is inferior to the P4 (the Itanium2 is even better but not in the same price range).
If I remember correctly, the Pentium M CPU's are fast thanks to the very large on-die CPU cache (L1 and L2) found on the CPU itself.
I think what we might see pretty soon are a new generation of desktop Pentium CPU's that will combine the hardware design of the Pentium M with some of the features of the Prescott-core CPU's; these new CPU's won't need the oversized cooling fans that the Prescott-core CPU's need now.
The Inquirer article concerned the 1st Gen P4 Xeons with 1MB L3 vs P3 Xeons with 2MB L2. The article is 2 years old.
As chief information minister for Intel Corporation, let me assure you we will destroy the AMD infidels! The Opteron is like a snake which is going to be cut into pieces. The force that was in the airport.. this force is destroyed. Let the AMD bastards bask in their illusion, we have given them a sour taste. We have them surrounded.
Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
heh, Intel finally got it's head out of it's rear end in my opinion and saw the virtues of the P-3 cores. The Tulatin benches that were out there when AMD was hammering Intel on the P-4 were incredible, beating out the AMD chips of the same clock speed and violating P-4s with a clock %25 higher. Intel chose marketing though, a 3.8 ghz chip is a victory to them I guess. The P-4 was *not* a popular chip originally, even though that was partly due to the whole rambus debocal. I'll believe that when I see it though, I don't think Intel would do it if only for the reason it's not as marketable.
Don't call my crazy, that's what they called me back in the home!
If they ever team up to be some processor monopoly the prices will fly thru the roof.
I went through an upgrade about 2 months ago. Looked around to see whether I could get a Pentium-M motherboard and CPU (in Perth, Western Australia - hah.)
I liked the idea of throttling the CPU back when it wasn't busy. We get daytime temps of 100+ degrees (40 deg centigrade) fairly regularly in summer, keeping a hot CPU cool isn't fun.
Before I wasted too much time looking, I read about the Athlon64 3400+ and that was that. Mind you, cool 'n' quiet locked up hard on my Gigabyte K8NSNXP bios revisions F5 and F6. (Whether I was running Win Xp or Linux) Rev. F7 came out about 3 weeks after I got the board, and it's been rock solid at 1ghz to 2.4 ghz ever s--
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Not sure about the rest of the chip set, but a friend bought a computer at Best Buy with a Celeron M yesterday. So they are already selling Celeron M's.
I can understand why they're keen to experiment with different architectures, but I think such ideas are often panic measures.
Intel knowing that it's 64-bit offering is a lame duck and seeing AMD's opteron cleaning up in many areas is panicing and hoping to produce something radically better.
It was the worry that 32-bit CPUs were going to deliver that gave birth to the whole transputer concept (in the UK of all places).
Have a good read about the concept, it's not too disimilar to what is being proposed today (except the cores are more advanced).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
I have been waiting for this. Pentium M == more "bang" per megahertz. The P4 architecture was a hot, sweaty botch. In essence, they are going "backward" (to the still extensible PIII architecture) to move forward.
People have been using VIA EPIA because they want little, cool, quiet computers. Now it looks like little, cool, quiet computers will finally get a REAL processor.
And yes! It runs Linux! ^_^
PS: I'd welcome AMD trying a similar tack to make a cooler chip that requires less active cooling. I'm not an Intel fangirl. I'm a fan of computers that work.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Let's be precise here folks. Slower clock rate. I got the wrong impression the first time I read this, and likely others did too.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Excuse me. Certainly we're not referring to 802.11g wireless networking here, are we?
It's statements like that one that make me doubt the entire article. Just who are these guys anyway?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Cringely had an article a while back that mentioned Google liking to use Pentium IIIs in their data center. Yes the Pentium 4s were faster, but if you looked at your datacenter as a whole system, including power, cooling, and space requirements, they were better off with 'old' Pentium IIIs. At the time, I think Google was worried they wouldn't be able to source new machines with P-IIIs, looks like Intel is following them this time. Intel seems to be following a lot lately, the megahertz at any cost mantra sure faded fast.
Low-power embedded Alpha chips exist, they're called StrongArm. These StrongArm chips are the results a collaboration between Arm and DEC's Alpha team, and the sons of StrongArm are called XScale. Intel bought the StrongArm stuff from DEC; Arm kept hold of their part of the work.
I don't think so.
Intel has basically been hanging itself with the awful lot of rope their own marketting gave them. The "MHz is everything" marketting was an easy thing to push, since most people actually _want_ one number that tells them everything about a CPU.
(True story: I actually spent some time arguing with a marketroid about it, and gave up. He was arguing that it must be Anantech's and everyone else's benchmarks that are at fault, because CPU A is in some apps 50% faster than CPU B, in some apps equal, and in some apps actually a little slower. "It can't be! If CPU A is X% faster than CPU B, it must be X% faster in everything!" Any explanations about differences in CPU architecture and such, went right above his head.)
So it was easy for Intel to push the MHz as the one true speed indicator. And for a while all they had to do was keep putting out CPUs with more and more MHz.
Except after a while it became a trap. Any new design _had_ to be higher MHz, or have Intel's own marketting working against it. All those many millions that went into telling people "buy a higher clocked CPU", now would basically tell them "don't buy the newest Intel CPU chip", if Intel made one with less MHz.
And now Intel finally _has_ to find a way out of the hole it dug itself into.
As for Cyrix (now VIA), it was never really a problem for Intel. Cyrix just fell behind performance-wise on its own. The last proper Cyrix versions were already falling beind in integer performance too, but it was their floating point performance that was abysmal. So what killed Cyrix was not as much Intel, as games going 3D: now everyone had benchmarks everywhere, clearly showing the Cyrix as barely crawling.
And Via's versions fell behind even more. They aren't just slower in MHz, they're also slower _per_ MHz. Other than being low power, they just suck.
And it's not that VIA really _wants_ to be the poor-man's niche, for Chinese families who can't afford an Intel or AMD. People find such niches to survive, but noone really wants to _stay_ in such a niche. Noone actually wants to sell their top CPU at $30 or less, instead of, say, the $600+ that an Athlon 64 FX sells for.
So if VIA could break out of that unprofitable niche, believe me, they would. The problem is simply that they can't.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Interesting read from eWeek, talking about CPU power consumption and California energy woes (which server farms helped contribute to).
All along, Intel has been producing chips that are cutting edge in terms of processor clock -- the higher clock speeds they can get out of their lines, the better -- which has entailed, at times, some hoary measures to keep power consumption (barely) in control.
But most people don't need a 2.8 GHz processor that dissipates 100 W. My laptop and one of my desktops are 700 MHz machines, and while not the latest zippiest out there, are perfectly adequate for my needs, and I imagine most peoples'. Not all, but most. But these machines have old processors which were designed whith the best then-available technology which means they have fans, dissipate a ton of power, etc. Why doesn't Intel take all of the new technology and develop a somewhat slower, but much lower power processor line by applying it to the older architectures? Via has tried to go along this path with the C3, but that architecture is too improverished for much more than embedded or applicance use. The Pentium M is a good step in the right direction, but why not push harder?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Basically, the Pentium M is a move back to a P3 type design philosophy, away from the 30-stage pipeline madness Intel's gotten themselves into with Prescott. I fail to see how going with a more intelligent design is going with a dumbed down processor.
I agree with you whole-heartedly. Although the only thing I'd add to what you've said is that they're going back to a chip design that they didn't actually design! If anyone recalls, the Pentium was basically ripped off from DEC. Sure, adding SSE and other "add-ons" was a way of extending the life of the base design until Intel could design its own chip from scratch: the Pentium IV.
Figures they'd go back to a design that was more efficient clock-for-clock than what they could come up with on their own.
And before anyone reads too much AMD kudos in this, AMD bought DEC engineers for chip design and traded flash tech for copper fabrication tech from Motorola to help them leapfrog from K6 (Intel-clone) to the K7.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
Much of these speed increases are mostly a result of shrinking die sizes. Most archetectural changes revolved around the introduction of new instructions (SSE). A lot of work was also done to improve the effeciency of the PIII for the coppermine release (which saw a signficant speed increase). The PIV project, which worked in parellel and was doing a much more radical redesign, wasn't able to benefit from this work. The archetecture became different enough that new and much more thorough R&D would have to go into improving PIV effeciency. Unfortunately, the PIV design is one of brute force and these types of design improvements have limited returns for such designs.
.25 micron core. With efficiency improvents and a drop to .18 micron, the Coppermine was able to achieve excellent results with a max speed in the 1-1.13 ghz range (although 1.13 required nice cooling). Finally, the Tualatin didn't offer many changes other than moving the die size down to .13 and adding some improved heat dissapation technology. These babies got up to 1.4 ghz off the shelf and could clock up to 1.6 ghz in practice.
.13 micron die. For these reasons, many view the PIII coppermine/tualatin as one of the best made/designed CPUs of all time. Shrink them down to .9 micron and they would beat the crap out of PIV!
Just focussing on the PIII: the first to be introduced was the Katmai, which had a
The reason for the 1.6ghz ceiling? No it wasn't the CPU! Memory bandwidth was the reason these things couldn't go past 1.6. A PIII running at 1.6 ghz can effectively compete with 2.4-3.0 ghz PIVs!! If you could couple it with some high speed RAM, these things could have easily soared past 2.0ghz while remaining on a
Alas, the Pentium M is a PIII with MORE efficiency improvements. The capabilities of this design have to be WAY beyond the PIV. It's a discredit to Intel's leadership that they aren't marketing their best product!
You obviously have no clue on what the P-M really is except for Intels marketing papers... ;-)
Seriously the P-M has been the best x86 design by intel the last 10 years.
The reason why they were selling it in mobile only computers is, that it would have made the P4 look bad, due to the MHz race.
This will be a bomb. Imagine - tiny cube like PCs which only turn their processor fans on when they need to. I have Pentium M processor in my laptop and I haven't run any benchmarks, but it _feels_ faster than my P4 desktop.
Now the only issue is, it's not 64 bit compatible. Intel, hook up 64 bit instruction set and memory controller to it, will ya?
I thought they stripped out the MP related logic (MP cache coherency protocols at least) in the pentium-M, so that does sorta count as dumbed down (for server apps anyway).
Maybe they'll glue on some of the new hublink like memory controller stuff and it will look completely like an AMD64 from an MP point of view.
I actually read the article, and it makes no mention of Intel adapting the Pentium M for the desktop. Instead, it describes a marketing label for a desktop processor/chipset/network combo similar to the Centrino label for certain laptop processor/chipset/network combos.
This comment seems to suggest that the processor will be something else entirely:
"East Fork will include a newly designed Intel microprocessor with two processing cores, a supporting chip set, and a Wi-Fi wireless radio. The package will be designed for "digital home" PCs, which shuttle music and movies around the home and can store TV shows digitally,"
However, this does sound like the platform will target the same applications that VIA's Mini-ITX systems are widely used for. Therefore, it would make sense that the "newly designed Intel microprocessor" will be based on or similar to the Pentium M, but I wouldn't say that this is an announcement of a desktop Pentium M.
$ make work
make: *** No rule to make target `work'. Stop.
Thank god. I was getting awfully tired of chasing new P4s around the building. It'll be nice to have a slower processor, that I have a better chance of catching.... and with higher performance, too!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Yonah is going to be dual core from the start and has already taped out, IIRC. I don't think Banias or Dothan cores can do SMP though.
Yep... cooler than intels and amds, and far more capable chips.
Funny... I've seen a number of posts of Mac dual G5 2.5GHz owners stating that their CPUs (even with the water cooling) run at 80C under load. Typical Intel and AMD parts with just standard HSF run less than 65C under load (and most of the time less than that -- 60C down to around 50C under load with good HSF and thermal paste).
As far as capable, there are numbers of posts of benchmarks on Ars Technica that show A64s being as fast as G5s, clock for clock, at most things. Because video drivers on the PC platforms are usually better than Macs currently, PCs typically eat G5s even with 6800Us. In fact, my Athlon 64 3000+ (S754) with a BFGTech 6800oc is faster than the Dual G5 2.5GHz with a 6800U at some things.
NT4 could be run off of a FAT partition wher server 2000 would only use NTFS. Most of those 'benchmark' articles failed to mention what disk format was used for the tests.
love is just extroverted narcissism
If you can do more work per clock cycle, you can be both slower and higher performing. That's what the article is about, Intel is backing away from it's failed marketing push equating MHz with processing power.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
If anyone recalls, the Pentium was basically ripped off from DEC.
No.... it was a patent suit.
DEC alleged that Intel had infringed 10 DEC patents with some design features of (mostly) the Pentium*Pro*. Intel disagreed. The two sides eventually came to a settlement, which involved DEC essentially selling all its semiconductor interests to Intel.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.