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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!"
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.
I don't think that you are seeing the whole story. Basically, Intel has been holding out for IBM's silicon-on-insulator technology because it reduces power requirements a good deal. Unfortunately for Intel, IBM is pretty sneaky when it comes to licensing and often prefer to swap technology rather than accept cash. I'd imagine that IBM is holding out for an x86 cross-license agreement while Intel does not want to give that up.
What you've seen in the past couple years is a game of chess. With each move, the other hopes that they have positioned themselves to better reach a licensing deal. Intel's move to non-clock processor ratings was a big move in this game.
From what I've seen at Intel's developer forums, they're working on some radically different architecture. Something that isn't von Neumann at all. They're calling it "massively parallel" but the industry seems to think that this means multiple cores on one chip. I think that it means thousands or millions of "processing elements" on one chip (think really small processing elements). Their claim is that they'll be able to apply this architecture to everything from mobile to high-end servers simply by adding or subtracting elements as power constraints allow.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
It seems the company is trying to go in a significantly different direction to retain its market dominance.
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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
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?
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