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Intel and AMD's 2005 Plans Revealed
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.