Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Intel and AMD's 2005 Plans Revealed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the smaller-faster-cooler-or-maybe-not dept.

Takemedown writes "There's a good article on CTZ that talks about Intel and AMD's plans. Intel, continuing on their 18-month chipset refresh rate, will introduce their Glenwood and Lakeport chipsets for the Smithfield dual core desktop microprocessor in 2005. The chipsets will support SATA II, Matrix RAID and a higher system bus speed for the new Pentium 4 name holder. As far as Intel's dual core strategies are concerned, they will most likely bring their dual core additions by the very end of Q2 or Q3 this year, so for those waiting for these next generation chips are better off with a due upgrade. Secondly, if you are hoping for a noticeable performance gain in regular computing tasks are in for a disappointment. Dual core microprocessors are for those who like to do multitasking or work on multithreaded applications. For example, if you are gaming and burning a DVD at the same time, dual core chips will come in handy and will definitely give a smooth computing experience."

7 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Bad example? by RovingSlug · · Score: 5, Informative
    For example, if you are gaming and burning a DVD at the same time, dual core chips will come in handy and will definitely give a smooth computing experience.

    Burning a DVD is IO-bound given all the traffic on the PCI bus from the harddrive and to the DVD. Burning a DVD is not CPU-bound, so it doesn't seem like a dual core CPU would actually help that situation.

  2. Intel's dual-core lie by twfry · · Score: 4, Informative
    Intel likes to say they are going to have dual-core processors for both the desktop and server segments in 2005, but this is very misleading. They are only planning dual-core Intaniums for 2005 and use this to say they have the server segment covered.

    The reality is most of the server market is their Xeon line and the dual-core Xeons are currently planned for 2006 and maybe even later.

    1. Re:Intel's dual-core lie by mapmaker · · Score: 5, Informative
      Absolutely true. And the lie goes even farther than that:

      Thier initial desktop "dual core" processor is really a dual processor kludge. It's just two Prescott P4s side by side with a bit of extra wiring between them. They are essentially going to make half as many wafer cuts and call the resulting double-wide processors "dual core".

      AMD really has got Intel by the short hairs lately. First AMD released x86-64 and Intel had to clumsily pkay catch-up, now AMD will be releasing dual core processors and Intel is again clumsily trying not to be left in the dust.

  3. Re:Please... by Thagg · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's exactly the same as SMP, except for two things:

    1) Far less 'glue' circuitry is required on the motherboard. This allows cheaper multi-processor systems.

    2) Potentially, communication between the processors could be faster.

    Mostly, though, the advantage will be social -- if a large fraction of systems have multiple processors, as they will soon, then more and more applications will be written to take advantage of them.

    Thad Beier

    --
    I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
  4. Re:Dual Core almost = dual processor? by 787style · · Score: 4, Informative

    Dual core shares a memory controller, whereas dual processors have seperate memory controllers. AMD's Athlon 64 and Opterons have memory controllers on die, and were originally designed to be dual core. What this means is now two cores on die with one memory controller, communicating through a crossbar (think SGI) architechture. On a side not, imagine where AMD would be if they scrapped 64-bit from the start and released the Athlon 64/Opteron as a dual core from the get go.

  5. Re:A Plea by sallgeud · · Score: 5, Informative

    AMD is using a technology patented by IBM called SOI (Silicon on Insulator)... IBM is very unwilling to allow Intel to use this technology to solve their heat problems....

    Tom's Hardware has some good information about thermal loss. Notice that an idle AMD Winchester (SOI Athlon 64) loses only 3.2 watts, while the more recent P4 chips are losing > 34 at idle.

    This number changes at load to 30 watts for the Winchester and 100+ watts for the P4.

    Looking back and comparing it to a P2-450 I once owned... the Winchester numbers are close.... and that machine had no fan (just a very large heatsink).

    I'm not sure you could have a fully-loaded Winchester without at least some type of active cooling... but certainly the CFM required across a good heatsink would allow you for an almost silent fan.

  6. Re:Please... by GileadGreene · · Score: 4, Informative
    Still wondering if these cores will support something that many supercomputing chips have for a long time. That is the ability for both cores to run the exact same instructions, thus eliminating overhead in error checks as the error check is the comparison between the two cores.

    This can be achieved on a commodity single-core processor using pure software techniques. The technique is known as Error-Detection through Duplicated Instructions (EDDI), and is implemented as a compilation step between assmbly code generation and object file generation. Stanford has done a bunch of work on this at their Center for Reliable Computing. I don't have any links readily available, but I'm sure that if you Google on EDDI and the ARGOS project you'll find some good info.

    Note that IIRC experiments at Stanford showed that when using EDDI on a modern super-scalar processor the EDDI instructions can take advantage of unused portions of the pipeline, resulting in a significant reduction in overhead. You might still experience a slight performance hit, but on the other hand you don't need to add a whole new processor or core.