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Intel's New Chips, High Power And Low
sebFlyte writes "Centrino has been one of Intel's major successes of late, and they've just released the replacement, Sonoma. ZDNet has stripped the new chipset, and published a review of the new kit with all the technical details of what this new chipset will do for your laptop."
ZeroOne42 adds a link to Hardware Zone's exhaustive look at Sonoma, "complete with benchmark results between a Sonoma notebook (Fujitsu E8020) and a Centrino one (Gigabyte N512). Looks like Sonoma is closing up the technological gap between desktops and notebooks."
And on the desktop side, foxalopex writes "It seems that Intel's new dual-core CPU chips will have some of the highest wattage ratings ever seen on the X86 CPU market, which, according to Tom, wasn't what they initially said would happen. I guess this isn't too surprising seeing how AMD's been beating them on power usage in the last several revisions of chips."
Intel's latest portable computing platform is here. We lift the lid on the improved CPU, chipset and wireless components, and outline the benefits that mobile professionals are likely to experience.
After many months of delay, Intel's new 'Sonoma' portable processor and chipset combo is ready for inspection. The Centrino platform has been one of the company's notable successes over an otherwise bumpy period, as it has included most functions a notebook computer needs while balancing high performance against battery life. This recipe is followed faithfully in this latest iteration.
Pentium M with 533MHz FSB
Centre stage is taken by a buffed-up version of the processor previously known as Dothan, now in its Pentium M business suit, fabricated in a 90nm architecture and topped off with 2MB of Level 2 cache. Most of the new Pentium Ms have a 533MHz frontside bus (FSB), giving what Intel claims is a 33 percent increase in memory data transfer over the previous chip's 400MHz.
Most of the new Pentium M processors have a 533MHz frontside bus. The flagship Pentium M 770 chip runs at 2.13GHz.
The updated processor range clocks in at speeds of 2.13GHz (Pentium M 770), 2GHz (760), 1.86GHz (750), 1.73GHz (740) and 1.6GHz (730). There are also low voltage (1.5GHz, 758) and ultra low voltage variants (1.2GHz, 753) with 400MHz FSBs, aimed at manufacturers making very slim and light notebooks. Power requirements range from 5 watts for the 753 to 27 for the 770.
The only other addition to the Pentium M architecture is support for the Execute Disable bit, which with operating system support -- provided by Windows XP Service Pack 2, for example -- can prevent buffer overflow virus or trojan attack code from executing on the system stack.
Most of the differences in the updated Centrino platform live in the Alviso chipset, now officially named the Intel Mobile 915 Chipset Family. This includes support for up to 2GB of DDR2 DRAM, which uses a lower voltage than DDR1, has a smaller page size and extra power-down modes. Although the higher speed of DDR2 somewhat negates these low-power features, Intel says that with the 915, DDR2 memory at 533MHz will peak at 60 percent faster than 400MHz DDR RAM, and can save an average of 120mW per stick.The new memory is physically smaller, too.
The new Mobile 915 'Alviso' chipset supports up to 2GB of DDR2 RAM, Serial ATA and PCI Express, plus improved integrated graphics and audio.
The 915 chipset also includes a power-managed Serial ATA disk interface, and PCI Express, which is advertised at being up to twice as fast for I/O and four times as fast for graphics. Expansion cards for this will follow the new ExpressCard format, which is around half the size of the venerable PC Card standard, and which has a somewhat squashed orange rabbit as its logo. Most, if not all, notebooks with ExpressCard launched this year will also have a slot for older formats, and most, if not all, ExpressCard cards this year will duplicate functions already available with PC Card.
Integrated graphics on the 915GM -- the Graphics Media Accelerator 900 -- includes DirectX 9.0 hardware support for 3D games, as well as high-definition, wide aspect ratio and TV standard outputs. Intel claims that the integrated graphics has twice the raw speed of the previous Centrino chipset, the 855GME, and that with two 533MHz DDR2 memory modules the chip can reach a preliminary 3DMark03 performance rating of 1,140. This compares with figures in the 5,000 range for high-specification desktop gaming configurations and is unlikely to excite the hard core, but should be sufficient for games a couple of years old. Most business applications are expected to be unaffected.
Likewise, adoption of the Intel High Definition Audio standard means that the 915 chipset can support multiple independent audio streams -- such as streamed telephony at the same time as surround-sound DVD playback -- in ways that may have consumer applications but are currently underexploited i
Hi speed = short-distances / closely packed circuitry and thing wires
Resistance is proportional to the cross-section of a wire and so thinner wires waste more
Were that I say, pancakes?
This is even worse then it seems. The actual power usage (from intel.com) is at 5mWA/ms, compared with the target of 3mWA. Thats a full 2 milliwatt amps over their target, and much higher then AMD!
It's death by 1000 cuts. Each transistor takes a miniscule amount of power to switch, but transistor numbers and clock frequency just keep on increasing exponentionally.
You end up with oodles of transistors operating in the GHz range so all those tiny switching currents add up to one big whole.
Philip
Signatures are broken
Answer: 100%
From an energy perspective, the CPU only converts electricity into heat; it's not like a light bulb that converts x% of the power into light and y% into heat. Energy can't turn into processed instructions.
Now, if you want to know how power efficient is a processor, you'd have to obtain the MIPS-Watts or FLOPS-Watts ratio, and compare these numbers between CPUs.
The environmental impact of running a 130 Watt processor all day every day? That's like leaving two lights on in your house...[/fake-comment]
But it's not: the processor needs a PSU to feed it and will require the PSU capable of 300+ watts. Call it 500 for safety, and the computer it's attached to will be burning through those coal seams, that natural gas, and that hard-fought oil, uranium, plutonium, etc.
I'm glad someone made mention the impact on the world outside our basements...
If I remember correctly part of this is because Intel's processor is not a real dual core solution. Rather it is two processor produced on the same die with communication interconnects. Its a kludge to keep up with AMD's (true) dual core designs until Intel can get its pants up from around its ankles.
atcurtis:
I think that they may be taking the wrong approach by putting 2 whole processor cores on the same die...
We have SMT (HyperThreading in Intelese) which in my opinion is a pretty decent idea... just a crying shame about how they set about doing it. They sacrificed the silicon used by the original P4's integrated RamBus memory controller and put in the necessary silicon for their HT technology. The idea of getting an extra CPU for 'free' in the current HT processors doesn't work because in a demanding application, most of the execution units will be busy anyways.
No P4 has ever had an integrated memory controller. The original Williamette cores interfaced to RDRAM through the i850 chipset. In fact, there were a number of Williamette machines that had PC-133 memory (slow as Christmas, but they existed). I owned an RDRAM one and I worked on a PC133 memory one at a job site.
Because of this, many old RamBus P4 machines can outperform their newer P4 siblings - mostly because the newer P4 do not have an integrated memory controller and have to go through the IO originally for peripherals. (ok, they are fixing this with the much higher pincount chips than the 1st gen P4 which did not need all that IO due to integrated RDRAM controller)
I've never seen a Williamette outperform any later Pentium4 core and again, P4s haven't had IMCs.
Instead, I believe that they need to design a processor with the original intent to be hyperthreaded (instead of the P4's original intent, to use RDRAM). What this means, is perhaps provide many execution units, maybe 50% more than what a single processor requires, and then make it look like 2 CPUs. Or perhaps double or triple the number of units and make it look like 4 CPUs to the software.
Eventually, if you provide 2x the number of execution units that are "needed", what difference do you have from a dual core processor? Some units would be shared - fetch, decode, memory stages, etc, but you'd be getting close anyway because of the added interconnect logic for more execution units (it's an n-squared problem with the number of execution units for data forwarding and data hazard detection/resolution).
So... What they need for the consumer is a high-pincount device which is truely designed for hyperthreading (ie, has enough execution units available to be able to perform nearly as good as having a whole 2nd CPU)
And for the server market, bring back the integrated RamBus controller, still have plenty of pins so that the server can have perhaps 4 or more RDRAM channels to keep the data flowing fast enough to keep the 4 SMT logical processors occupied. (IIRC, the original P4 has 2 RDRAM 800 channels)
You also have to remember that RDRAM isn't as wide as DDR, for example. It's fairly narrow in the scheme of things. Having two channels can make is wider just like dual channel DDR memory.
And while I am in my Intel rant mood, I'll criticise the Itanic... Surely with the EPIC architecture, all that branch-prediction and other crud they have in the processor is unnecessary... They need to cut away 2/3rds of the silicon, and get people to write compilers which really do work for them. IIRC, the whole point of all that extra cruft is to make it perform ok for brain-dead compilers. Either they get decent compilers out there (perhaps, open-source their Itanic compiler optimiser) or admit that EPIC was "another nice idea, pity it doesn't work in practice".
Branch prediction is hardly "crud". If your CPU is capable of performing dynamic branching (branches based on the results of an operation as opposed to a hard static branch such as BRA (branch always)) and has a penalty with pipeline flushes on branching, then you probably can benefit from branch prediction). Also, EPIC *hardly* performs "OK" with brain-dead compilers. You have to have a decent compiler to get the performance out of it. A brain-dead compiler won't get 25% out of the CPU's max performance
Ok, so since Laptops were first created, their whole idea was to be a way someone could do work remotely or in areas where having a desktop was hard or near imposibe for one reason or another. in 2003 "November 2003 survey of Penn State University undergraduates found that freshmen were more likely to own laptops than upperclassmen. Of 1,838 respondents, 73.7 percent own a desktop, 32.2 percent own a laptop, 9.2 percent own both, and 3.4 percent own neither." http://pittsburgh.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/stori es/2004/08/23/focus1.html
e ID=1513
e gory=31558&item=6736232824&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW
(sorry if i am not suposed to link to auctions, it was the only english page i could find since its a japanese laptop)
"t). Currently, one-quarter of Americans own a laptop or notebook computer (23 percent)" http://www.thegoodsteward.com/article.php3?articl
What does this tell us? it says that laptops are becoming more and more popular, and as they become more and more popular, there is a bigger drive towards creating the "ultimite laptop"
As far as i see it, Apple and IBM are the only good laptop companies. i know thats a dramatic statement, but look at it, any laptop over 6LBS is WAY TOO HEAVY to carry around. Most HP/Compaq laptops are 7 to 9 lbs. Most dells are in that same range.
what the laptop industry needs is a re-working of laptops. Sony has just released the X505 VAIO laptop, this laptop is built in the way all laptops should be built. It weighs a mear 1.73lbs WITH battery in it, and has enough power to run almost anything exept games and video editing.( But trying to play games on a laptop is just stupid anyway, small screen and no mouse or full keypad) http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&cat
The new centrino chips are amazing, to put it simply. If you put a 2ghz Pentium M into a desktop and slap on a liquid cooling system, you can overclock it to be way more powerful then a 3.46EE or even a 3.8ghz P4. The pentium M is just years ahead of its time, and people having figured it out yet! Its kinda like black lotus for all you magic players!
The prices aren't that bad on the low-end Dothans if you put them in, say, DFI's board. They overclock QUITE nicely ;-)
That said, if you don't like the board prices, wait for the DFI 852GME-MGF. Identical to the 855GME-MGF, but with the much cheaper, much more overclockable, and not being phased out 852GME chipset (which is pin-compatible, but not supposed to run with a P-M)
And what drives the consumer price index up? A bunch of little gnomes with pitchforks? Rising gas prices lead to rising shipping prices; check UPS and Fedex rates over the last three years. Rising shipping prices lead to rising produce prices. Rising produce prices lead to rising restaurant, etc. prices. Don't know about you, but the price of a meal out in the SF area, Boston area, and a few others I frequent jumped shortly after gas jumped.
Next time you see a price increase, ask the manager why it went up. Of course, I'm assuming you shop somewhere other than WalMart or other uberchains. Talk to an actual business owner / operator. Learn.
The new chipset is the Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG and has linux drivers:o 2915abg/index.htm
:
0 6408.htm :
http://support.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/pr
From http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/
This project was created by Intel to enable support for the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG and 2915ABG Network Connection miniPCI adapters. This project (IPW2200) is intended to be a community effort as much as is possible given some working constraints (mainly, no HW documentation is available).
From http://support.intel.com/support/notebook/sb/CS-0
Intel® PRO/Wireless 2915ABG Network Connection
A Linux driver is currently under development. A pre-production version of the device driver is available as detailed below.
To be fair to AMD, the 90nm AMD processors are running in a 67W TDP, and are usually measured in the 35W area. AMD will shortly be releasing a 2.2GHz mobile processor, Turion, that will have a 35W TDP (and 1.8GHz and 2.0GHz variants will use 25W) which isn't bad considering AMD integrate a large portion of the northbridge into the K8 as well.
AMD's TDP is max theoretical power consumption (for an entire family of CPUs). Intel's is max application power consumption, which is typically 20-25% lower. i.e., if an Intel processor has a 130W TDP, AMD would list it as being around 160W.
For comparison, the upcoming 2.8 or 3.0 GHz Intel dual core offering will be 130 W as mentioned in the Tom's Hardware news item. It's extremely likely that AMD's 2.2 GHz is even faster than Intel's 3.0 GHz, since a 2.2 GHz Athlon 64 is marked 3500+.
Future:
AMD's new Athlon 64 revision (to be released this month) will bring further power reductions thanks to the new strained silicon technology from IBM. It's conceivable that AMD can push the A64 well past 3.0 GHz with these optimizations, equivalent to 4500+ or more. And this is without breaking any new records in the power consumption arena.
The fact that a 2.2 GHz Athlon 64 can run at 35 watts full load (as shown by the Tom's Hardware chart) promises a good future for AMD.
Intel is dead in the water until they can swallow their pride and really start pushing P-M to the desktop.