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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.
Intel employee: "Shall I try migrating Pentium M to the desktop?"
Intel boss: "Fork off!"
</shame>
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...
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
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.
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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.
The Inquirer article concerned the 1st Gen P4 Xeons with 1MB L3 vs P3 Xeons with 2MB L2. The article is 2 years old.
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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.