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Dual Core Intel Processors Sooner Than Expected
Hack Jandy writes "AnandTech reports that Intel's Smithfield processors are going to get here sooner than they originally predicted; most likely within the next few months. Apparently, the Intel roadmaps reveal that the launch dates for next generation desktop chipsets, 2MB L2 Prescotts and Dual Core Smithfield processors (operating at 3.2GHz per core) are almost upon us - way ahead of the original Q4'05 roadmap estimates. Hopefully, that means Intel will actually start shipping the new technology instead of waiting four months after the announcement for retail products."
At the rate that power consumption and heat dissipation are increasing on these chips, I consider Pentium-Ms to be the only processor worth using.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
This means I can shut my furnace off this winter, instead of waiting until the end of 05.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
As I see it, the smart step to take would be to start with consumer-level 64-bit chips, make them as fast as they can be, and then move on to dual-core. The only way dual-core could be better at this point is if it is given to the server market, where 64-bit Intel processors already exist.
I ran dual P3s for a while last year. While I loved the responsiveness of the system, I hated the lack of programs avalible to take advantage of SMP.
How is this year going to be different?
Even if you *could* get SMP aware versions of your software, would it be worth it? Lots of problems are harder to solve when you add SMP to the mix.
Gamers will be put off by the fact that games can't take advantage of SMP.
Home users will be put off by the fact that their $500 Dell surfs the world-wide e-mail just fine.
Buisness user may take advantage of this in servers, but there's only so much cooling and power you can provide to a 1-U server.
So, how is dual core going to ever be anything bigger than Itanium, Xeon, or any of the other technologies that fail to meet customer expectations?
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I find it interesting that Intel has code named these chips using the same name as one of the world's largest pork processors, Smithfield Foods.
I expect that these chips will be large power hungry pigs.
Has anyone stopped to look at modern software while thinking about Dual-Core?
Both Intel and AMD have decided upon dual-core as the future of desktop computing. There will be no more massive Mhz increases... instead the focus is now on parallel computing.... But, seriously, how many CPU intensive applications outside of the server arena take advantage of SMP?
As someone who has ran dual-cpu workstations for years, I can personally attest to the fact that 99% of CPU heavy tasks do not make use of SMP.
Think about it... That copy of Doom3 or Half-Life 2 that you just bought, that runs like shit on even top-of-the-line hardware, isn't going to run any better on Dual-Core, because these games are not designed to run multiple threads simultaneously. Neither do most archival programs (WinAce, WinRar, WinZip, SevenZip, etc etc). Nor do many of your encoding tools (though FlaskMPEG and GoGo-No-Coda are noteworthy exceptions).
As a geek, I can attest that the *nix arena isn't much better. Just because the source is open and available does NOT mean that the author(s) ever considered coding CPU intensive tasks for multiple processors. And "porting" tasks from single threaded to multiple threads is NOT a simple task. This is one of the reasons that there are Computer Science degrees -- writing good SMP code isn't something you learn at technical schools (or even half the full Universities out there).
Don't get me wrong... as someone who has ran SMP boxes for the past 10 years, I'm really excited about Dual-Core. But don't expect it to be worth a whole lot for the immediate future... as no one outside the server arena really codes for SMP.
/dev/random
Today's CPUs are, in the final analysis, little different than the 386 launched in 1985. Notable exceptions are in details like feature size and operating frequency. Other significant differences are in the pipelining logic, crufted on instruction sets (mmx anyone?) that are rarely called into action, cache and pinouts.
.09 micron process... consider that the 386 had 275,000 transistors- compared to the P4s 42 million. You could fit around 150 386s in the space (on the die) of a single P4.
Now, take a step back and imagine what a classic 386 would look like on a
Now, of course there are many advances to consider over the 386, but fundamentally, that processor logic is capable of handling 99% of 32 bit computing tasks. They may have done so slowly, but there you are.
My thinking is, they could use some of this old logic, buff it up a little to accomodate some modern techniques and carve it all into a single die. Imagine a CPU with 64 simple processors, 4Mb of cache and some controlling logic running at 3-5 Ghz. All this in the space of and at the (manufacturing) cost of a single P4.
This chip could be used in clusters like nobody's business. An array of 128 of these processors could simultaneously handle 8,192 active threads.
What use would it be? Off the top of my head, this would be perfect for real-time monitoring, transaction processing, switching and so forth. There would also be serious advantages in the desktop space as compilers and kernels were built to adapt to the new distribution of resources. Image processing could be handled using the same techniques as SLI cards use to split the tasks up over two or more video cards, and any other large body of data could be simlarly broken up. Compilers would be designed to break a program up not into a paltry 2 or 3 threads, but into dozens. Speed and responsiveness would skyrocket, while fab costs and board speeds remained stable.
This might be the logical outcome of the current drift towards multiple CPUs per die, and it could also unite and surpass the schools of CISC vs RISC, as strategies from both would benefit the endeavor.
>Im a software developer and REALLY hate the movement towards dual-cores.
Tough. Chip makers are up against a technology barrier right now, and clock speed increases in the CPU don't make RAM or disk or interconnect faster anyway. How about just putting a 4MB cache on-die? That wouldn't require a massive clock speed increase but it would speed things up. I'm not an EE but I'm just pointing out that there are many, many things that have been left in the dust by Moore's law that could catch up and make quite a difference. Does your computer have 4+GB of DDR memory? ATA-133 drives with 8MB cache? PCI-X? A 64-bit CPU and an OS that knows how to use it fully? In what other ways are CPUs waiting on everything else, that could be improved to make things run faster overall?
Learn to parallelize your code where possible. Optimize your existing code. Software optimizations yield stunning improvements compared to incremental clock speed bumps anyway, and (unlike hardware) affect every installation of your app.
>Its a bad move IMO on AMDs and Intels part
OK genius, what's the alternative? No improvements in processors for years, until somebody makes a breakthrough that enables 4+ GHz processors? What happens when they hit the next roadblock?
Hardware has been so far ahead of software for so long that we've become accustomed to solving bloat with "just buy a new computer". It wouldn't kill us to spend a little time profiling code. The economics have been (in many cases) such that it just made more sense to throw money at new hardware. If that no longer makes sense, throw money at software optimizations for a little while. It doesn't exclusively mean that we have to force every algorithm to operate in parallel. It could be as simple as releasing fat binaries of apps that are compiled to target recent CPUs (no more shipping 386-optimized code to every customer), or *gasp* writing more efficient code in the first place.