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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."
I want to see dual-core Pentium-Ms.
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.
If AMD is shipping in about a week, then one wonders if it's worth paying the Intel price for dual core chips when you can just wait a week and get twice as much for the same price ...
Mind you, it depends on the heat specs.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I thought that AMD is slated to ship their dual core chip first? Is this Intel rushing something to maket?
Agile Artisans
Just last week we were all ment to assume that Dell (oops, I mean Intel) wasn't ready to ship dual core until Q1 of next year...
Now all of a sudden -- out of nowhere -- they launch a surprise attack and shipped the cores early, even before AMD's announced launch date. Sounds like some VERY hefty competition for AMD. They had been claiming all along that they would be the first with dual cores an it was even used as an "excuse" for Dell to talk about starting to sell AMD chips specifically because of this feature.
AMD had better look out! Their stock price will probably take a plunge due to this surprise announcement.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
There's a bunch of interesting information about AMD's dual core offerings over at AnandTech. Very insightful read.
From the article. "If dual core Opterons do indeed have two memory controllers, the pincount of dual core Opterons will go up significantly - it will also make them incompatible with current sockets. AMD is all about maintaining socket compatibility so it is quite possible that they could only leave half of the memory controllers enabled, in order to offer Socket-940 dual core Opterons. AMD isn't being very specific in terms of implementation details, but these are just some of the options."
about manufacturers charging per-core licenses for their software. For more info, read this.
..a toast!
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The P-PEE?
Maybe I should invest in the heatsink business. I see a huge future in it thanks to Intel and AMD's dual core plans...
While the idea of dual core cpus is really cool, and will take over shortly due in part to the fact that we need something to do with all those extra transistors, I wonder why the focus of the industry is on chip multi-processors (CMP).
.
While CMP processors can give us rougly the same performance of a standard SMP system (somewhat faster due to interprocessor communication and shared memory, but also slower due to a larger memory bottleneck) I don't think that a CMP system would compete with a simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) solution.
While Intel's response to SMT (hyperthreading) has some benifits the performance of it is rather lackluster. The reason has more to do with their particular implementation. If you've read about the initial observations on SMT an 8-way SMT processor was shown to outperform a 4-way CMP processor. Now, I must note that the 8-way smt processor had more functional units then the cores in the 4-way CMP processor, but the overall area of the 8-way SMT processor would be much much smaller (far less structures need to be duplicated for SMT as opposed to CMP). For more information on this check out some of the papers at http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/smt/
What I don't understand is the insistance of the industry to use CMP first. From everything I've read, an 8-way SMT processor should take up less die space then a two way CMP processor. Even assuming that the 8 way processor contains more functional units. It kind of makes sense that a CMP processor is faster when there aren't enough threads to fully utilize a SMT processor (say only 2 or 3 threads that want full cpu usage). I guess SMT is a big chance in the model of programming and application development (I'm currently running research on the subject which is why I'm so interested in it). Is the reason to embrace CMPs simply because there's less new technology to add (they "just" have to interconnect two cores as opposed to adding the extra logic for SMT).
Does anyone else have any other opinions regarding this matter, or any idea why no one seems to be fully embracing SMT's potential?
Yes, but my question is "Will it be AMD-compatible?" ^_^
Sun, HP and IBM have allready got machines ready, just waiting for launch.
p teron_dualcore/
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2005/04/08/amd_o
"If everybody is thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking" - Gen. George S. Patton
I see lots of conversation comparing this generation of processor to space heaters, wisecracks about Longhorn minimum systems (that actual article was about the predicted "average", not minimum). Not much about actual multi-cores. They're an interesting direction to go.
The current direction of single core CPUs is basically running into the most they can do with XUs, MPUs, caches, etc. Sure, you can decrease the pipeline depth below the 18FO4 that the PentiumIV supposedly has, and that can help you with serial data paths, and that makes simple XUs, MPUs, etc. faster, but the branch mispredict is still horrendous -- perhaps too high for a general purpose processor found in our PCs. The more complicated logic is possible to do, but there's only so much you can do with the data and sub-Angstrom logic.
Beyond the geek factor, multiple cores on a single die attack the same problems as putting SMP did in the first place (plus a few race conditions that otherwise may have been very rare), allowing much less manpower to design a processor that is still much faster in the end. A single threaded application will seem slower, and that will place more burden on the developers to see the light of multiple threads. Instead of allowing an XU to munge through and deal with a single thread at a time, which may be a misuse of incredible resource (like a thread that said "go to grocery store" and the XU was a race car), multiple die have correspondingly multiple XUs each with their own resources, so hard tasks can be spread across multiple cores, or simple ones can get executed in parallel with others (like a thread can take a Kia to the grocery store while another Kia goes to the Post Office). Of course, problems that cannot be divided into multiple threads do not see the advantage of multiple cores, but other tasks remain responsive without requiring a monster task to context switch.
I've read about multiple cores that share a single L2 outperforming multiple cores with dedicated L2s in specific tasks, basically one core essentially acts like a pre-fetch core under a workload and the second core can reap the benefits.
Here are the nuts and bolts of the monopoly: The actual design doesn't matter too much, it is the manufacturing capability that keeps Intel ahead If AMD came out with 64-core, 10 GHz processor that comsumed 1 watt tomorrow, and everyone decided to buy it, AMD would 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 choice, it about ability to supply that keeps Intel monopoly going
I would rather have faster processors than multiple cores, as it is not enough is multi-threaded. Even the highest end 3D apps, their render engines are SMP capable, but all geometry translation/deformation is not. That would be one core right? Unless multiple cores could show up as one single core/proc in the OS..
I tried to look through the article, but couldn't find it... does this mean that you will have 4 "virtual cores" on one single chip now?
Yes, but only for the Pentium Extreme Edition. The Pentium D, which should come out soon, won't have HyperThreading enabled.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
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.
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Intel is leading in chip sales because their processors are Extreme
I would like to see a more multi-threaded approach to game programming in general, and not all the benefits would necessarily be about performance.
One thing that has bugged me a long time about a lot of games (this has particular relevence to multi-player games, but also single player games to some extent) is the 'game loading' screen. Or rather, the fact that during the 'loading' screen I lose all control of, and ability to interact, with the program.
It has always seemed to me, that it should be possible, with a sufficiently clever multi-threaded approach, to create a game engine where I could, for example, keep chatting with other players while the level/zone/map that I'm transitioning to is being loaded.
Or maybe I really want to just abort the level load and quit the game, because something important in Real Life has just started occuring and I want to just kill the game and move on. With most games, you have to wait until it is done loading before you can then quit out of the game.
In other words, even ignoring performance benefits for a moment, if a game engine is correctly multi-threaded, I could continue to have 'command and control', and chat, functionality while the game engine, in another thread, is loading models and textures.
As already mentioned games already do make use of the GPU and the CPU so we're fairly used to some mutliprocessor concerns.
To say that most PC games are GPU bound however is a mistake - most games I've come across (and worked on as a games core technology/graphics programmer) are CPU bound - often in the rendering pipeline trying to feed that GPU.
Anyhow games are already becoming dual-core aware. Most if not all multiplayer games make use of threads for there network code - go dual core (or hyperthreading) and you get a performance win. Again most sound systems are multi threaded often with a streaming/decompression thread, again a win on multi core. These days streaming of all manner of data is becoming more important (our game worlds are getting huge) and so again we will be (are) making use of dual core there too.
I personally have spent a fair amount of time performance enhancing our last couple of games (mostly for HT but the same applies to true dual core) to make sure we get the best win we can. For example on dual core machines our games do procedural texture effects on the second core that you just don't get on a single core machine and still get a 20% odd win over single core. I'm sure most software houses take this as seriously as us and do the same. It's very prudent for us to do so - the writings been on the wall about multi processors being the future of top end performance for a while now.
At the end of the day though us games developers have little choice but to embrace multi core architectures and get the best performance we can. We always build software that pushes the hardware to the full extent of it's known limits because that's the nature of the competition.
Just think what the next generation of consoles is going to do for the games programmers general knowledge of concurrent programming techniques. If we're not using all of the cores on our next gen XBox or PS3 then our competition will be and our games will suck in comparison.
You can also put 4 dual core processors in a normal 4 socket motherboard to make a 8-way computer. AMD has tons of information on this stuffhttp://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPre ssRoom/0,,51_104_543~94936,00.html
mnewberg.com
Okay, sorry about the dumb ass question here, but I can't seem to find an answer:
Are AMD's and/or Intel's processors supposed to work in existing motherboards (err at least with SOME benefit...) or does upgrading to a dual core machine mean getting a new mobo?
"Derp de derp."
It's cheaper. Everything boils down to that.
We can barely code for two processors let alone beasts like the TMS320C62. Ignoring this for a second, what kind of memory are you proposing to feed all of these processors?
There are places where we have 'surpassed' von Neumann architecture. Surprise surprise its surpassed for things such as imaging applications. FPGA and ASICs beat Pentiums/Athlons in imaging applications hands down. For much less cost at that.
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.
And the price goes up. This is simple economics. If this were the case, AMD would be able to knock the price up an arm and a leg. In time (supposing Intel could not match it), AMD can build more fabs using the newly generated income, while still making chips. I would imagine that if the demand was there, AMD would take the risk and build more plants right away. It is as simple as that. The Intel monopoly would only be able to last so long.
JM
I cannot recall ever hearing Intel sound so desperate. First they ship pre-release samples to a handful of friendly reviewers and then they announce that they have 'shipped' the product, apparently to beat AMD's planned announcement on April 21 but the sum total of the evidence for the alleged 'shipment' seems to be a claim that they have shipped the product to Intel-friendly Dell. No one seems to actually have it to sell anywhere and even Dell just says they will be shipping 'soon.' In better days, Intel used to send a new product around to reviewers under NDA a few days before an actual release. The NDA would expire on the day of the product announcement and then you would actually be able to buy it at the time it was 'released.' How times have changed for Intel...and for AMD.
Before everyone gets excited about Intel's dual core - you should review some of the benchmarks at tomshardware or anandtech. The speed improvements are not that great. In fact performance in a gaming environment is not as good as their high end single core chips.
Intel is currently pandering to the gamer/workstation market. Given the Dell XPS announcement - clearly a target is the gamer. Is it really though? Would any self respecting gamer buy a Dell as their "l33t boXor"? Would they not already know that the nVidia + ATI + AMD64 platform represents the pinnacle of performance in the gamer world? Probably. I'm not sure that dell is going to see the boost to their XPS line that they'd like from the addition of this chip. Intel does get points for getting their earlier but it's not nearly the lead that AMD took a year ago with the deployment of the AMD64 3X00+ desktop processors. The bottom line however is that if you are planning to buy a new machine and actually do a little research you'll find that the Intel chips are not as fast dual core or not - as the AMD chips.
As far as workstation performance goes - the chip seems to hold it's own with some decent performance gains. The real issue with this chip and the architecture as a whole is memory bandwidth. For truly intensive processing tasks, video, audio, data processing, computationally intensive tasks, a fast memory bus makes a world of difference. Intel doesn't seem to have the architecture to support these types of task as well as it should. However, this may be the only area that AMD doesn't have covered well primarily due to the cost of their dual core offering. If you are looking for a workstation that can be programmed to handle multiple threads the Intel offering might be for you.
And then there is AMD - totally ignoring the desktop market. Instead they are going after the high end server market. Why? Itanic is dead - and there is a need, and a void for high density, but "cheap" machines. The dual core AMD provides high performance, low heat and competitive performance especially in situations where high memory bandwidth is needed. It also scales 2x further than the competing Xeon servers (The 8XX series could be called the 16XX series). Since the launch of the Opteron two years ago AMD has established the proper channels to deliver these chips to customers. Sun and HP both offer servers with these chips and will also be offering the dual core chips as well.
Pricing - which I think is most telling. AMD's products are priced at the high-end. They are the leader in 64 bit computing (Intels 64-bit approach is architecturally inferior). They will provide organizations who need this technology an upgrade path to the 64-bit world if they are not already in it. AMD chips scale better than the competing Intel technologies. Thus AMD will continue to consolidate their lead in the high end server market. Also, AMD appears confident that their customers will pay for their high end CPUs. In the workstation/gamer market Intel is trying to stoke adoption through lower prices. In some ways this is a contradiction - low priced chip in a high end segment. I'd argue it's the wrong strategy for stemming their loss of market share to AMD. Why go with an Intel dual core when you can get a dual Opteron? They are faster after all.
Though it comes down to the fact that Intel and AMD are after different things. The Opteron platform is a high-end platform. It's clear that AMD is making it a priority. A sound strategy, as Intel's blunder with the Itanium is still continuing to cause a slip in market share. Second is the AMD64 platform which offers great performance at a reasonable price. No doubt, when dual core hits the AMD64 their will be a bit of a premium to pay - it is a sound architecture which is just starting to hit it's stride. Conversely, Intel is trying to stem the bleeding on their desktop lines - clearly they see the high end gaming and workstation segment suffering. How desperate does a company need to be to tack on "Extreme Edition"
The Xeon parts to come are SIP, but it looks like the EE is a single die. Though, with no on-chip interconnect, it seems a distinction without a difference. EETimes.com - Potholes seen in latest Intel road map
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According to The Inqurier here Intel's new EE model was scheduled for next month until shortly after it was leaked AMD was releasing dual Opterons this month in NY.
The Intel chip is in my opinion a proof of concept and will have the availability of the original P4EEs. Its also a pointless model, games aren't multi-threaded. AMD however is releasing a CPU aimed at the major multi-threaded market, high-end workstations and servers.
Read the two part review of Intel's new dual core chip at www.anandtech.com. Maybe you'll put away your typical slashdot pessimism away.
... but Everyone runs a few programs at once.
... but the testers could easily flip back and forth between many different programs, each doing hard tasks, without the computer stalling or the programs going totally non-responsive, and overall more being accomplished in the same time.
... Constantly having to flip back and forth, fire up one, close another, grab a coffee while I wait.
Yes, very few programs are ready for multithreading now
They did a great multi-tasking test to compare the usability of the new dual core chip at 3.2ghz versus intel's 3.73ghz single core chip. And pointed out that Windows XP is in fact multithreaded and can benefit well on its own from a dual core chip.
Of course the single threaded programs ran about the same as usual
The 'real-world' usage tests showed a huge benefit to having dual core, with much smoother operations, far better than hyperthreading alone.
Poor non-HT AMD user's like myself dream of being able to multitask that much without waiting forever when switching between active programs.
I have no doubt that I literally could save an hour or two per day of wasted time at my job if I had a dual core processor. Two large autocad files, an ArcGIS dataset, text editors and more
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Dell "said it would begin shipping its Dimension brand of PCs with the new chips relatively soon with prices starting at around $3,000."
So why would you pay 3000 bucks for two throttled CPUs on one die, if you could get a dual PROCESSOR system for the same price? I mean, the second heat sink is not going to raise the price of the system to another level... and you can go with proven technology.
Actually, I would only consider a dual AMD64 system worthwile. With NUMA support improving in Linux, this should be a lot faster than 2 P4 cores competing for the same memory, already suffering from high latency.