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Intel Ships Dual-Core Chips
Torrey Clark writes "Intel seems to be the first to ship a batch of dual core x86 64-bit processors to OEMs.
Intel's first dual-core chip is the Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 840. The new processor runs at 3.2 GHz, backs Intel's Hyper-Threading and is supported by the company's 955X Express chipsets, formerly code-named Glenwood.
Dell also announced that it would be one of the first PC makers to ship Intel's new dual core Pentium Extreme." Reader wyckedone adds "AMD is set to ship their dual core Opteron processor, designed for servers, next week."
If AMD came out with 64-core, 10 GHz processor that comsumed 1 watt tomorrow, and everyone decided to buy it, AMD would NOT be able to supply more than there current market share because they only have one Fab in Germany
Intel has ten fabs and ten times the capaciy.
It's not about who has a better product, it's about ability to supply that keeps Intel monopoly going
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.
In terms of "marketing speak", this is a good opportunity for Sparc and PowerPC chips to catch up to the X86 architecture.
Thanks to Intel's own marketing, most users are used to seeing that Mhz = power, and Apple suffers from the fact that the G5 tops out at 2.5Ghz, while Intel chips cruise along at 3+Ghz. Sun's SPARC architecture suffers from the same illusion, although comparably, both the Sparc and PPC architectures are quite close to X86 in terms of actual horsepower (not so much with Sparc, but Sun's true power is total throughput and reliablity and scalability, not flops).
With Intel "stuck" at around 4Ghz, IBM/Apple could figure out how to ramp up the G5 (or it's successor) to 4+Ghz, and beat Intel at it's own marketing game.
Similarly, this bump in the roadmap for Intel could be the opportunity for other/alternative CPU architectures to gain some marketshare.